Sudeley Castle wedding map print

Ralph Boteler, Lord High Treasurer, began the present castle in 1443 and was forced to sell it to the Crown in 1469. In 1548 Thomas Seymour brought his wife, Catherine Parr, here. She died at Sudeley on 5 September, days after giving birth, and was buried in St Mary's Church on the estate, where Victorian restorers gave her a new tomb in 1863.

Elizabeth I stayed three times, and in 1592 the Brydges family entertained her with three days of banquets and plays that reputedly almost bankrupted them. Parliament ordered the castle slighted in 1649, and it lay ruined until the Dent brothers bought it in 1837. Emma Dent began the Queens' Garden in 1859, and its yew hedges date from about 1860.

On the artwork St Mary's sits beside the castle, with the ruined tithe barn just to the north and the gardens wrapped around them. Only the southern edge of Winchcombe and a stretch of the River Isbourne reach the top left corner of the map; the centre of the town, and St Peter's Church with its grotesques, lie just beyond. The Cotswold Way crosses the estate on its 102 mile route.