Summary
No evidence appears to survive to indicate the original appearance of the home of the Onslows – a family now represented by the Earl of Onslow of Clandon Park, Surrey – who established their seat at Onslow, to the west of Shrewsbury, in the middle ages. Their descendants remained at the Shropshire manor through into the seventeenth century. One of their number, Richard Onslow, was Speaker of the House of Commons and was buried, in 1571, in his parish church of St Chad’s, Shrewsbury. On the fall of that church, in 1788, his handsome monument was removed to Shrewsbury Abbey where it still remains.
In 1617 the Onslow estate was sold to Thomas Harries of Shrewsbury, and he also purchased the Onslow property at Boreatton (q.v.). The Harries family were Royalists at the time of the Civil War and, perhaps unsurprisingly, they sold the estate on in 1658 to Thomas Harpur.
Harpur’s heiress married John Fownes, a barrister of Stoke Prior in Worcestershire, in the late seventeenth century, but the Fownes ownership was also to be short and, in 1763, they sold Onslow for 10,000 guineas to Richard Morhall (1714–1773), a London mercer, who had Shropshire roots. Morhall’s wife, Mary (d. 1765), was commemorated by a monument in St Mary’s Church, Shrewsbury, by the Shrewsbury architect and designer Thomas Farnolls Pritchard. Both this and a chimneypiece, which still survives in the dining room of the present house at Onslow, suggest that Pritchard had a hand in working for Morhall at Onslow.
Correspondence of May 1765 in the Eyton papers mentions a fire at Onslow which, afterwards, required substantial restructuring. Richard Morhall’s brotherin- law, John Ambler of Ford House (q.v.) appears to have been overseeing the acquisition of materials for the work, including brick making and selecting timber from Onslow’s woods in Morhall’s absence in London. That a new wing – if not house – was envisaged is suggested by Ambler’s wish that Morhall was at Onslow ‘to fix the spot’.
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- The Country Houses of Shropshire , pp. 476 - 481Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2021