Sudeley Castle is a Grade I listed castle in the parish of Sudeley, in the Cotswolds, near to the medieval market town of Winchcombe, Gloucestershire, England. The castle has 10 notable gardens covering some 15 acres within a 1,200-acre estate nestled within the Cotswold hills. Building of the castle began in 1443 for Ralph Boteler; the Lord High Treasurer of England, on the site of a previous 12th-century fortified manor house. It was later seized by the crown and became the property of King Edward IV and King Richard III, who built its famous banqueting hall. King Henry VIII and his then wife Anne Boleyn visited the castle in 1535; and it later became the home and final resting place of his sixth wife, Catherine Parr who remarried after the king's death. Parr is buried in the castle's church, making Sudeley the only privately owned castle in the world to have a Queen of England buried in its grounds. Sudeley soon became the home of the Chandos family, and the castle was visited on three occasions by Queen Elizabeth I, who held a three-day party there to celebrate the defeat of the Spanish Armada. During the First English Civil War the castle was used as a military base, by King Charles I and Prince Rupert, and it was later besieged and slighted by parliament, remaining largely in ruins for the following few centuries until its purchase in 1837 by the Dent family, who restored the castle and turned it into a family home. History 11th century Although the origins of Sudeley are lost to time, its name, a corruption of its Anglo-Saxon name Sudeleagh, meaning ‘south lying pasture or clearing in forest' gives us an idea of what it was like. Sudeley most likely owes its early rise as a royal estate to its close proximity to Winchcombe, which, during the reign of King Offa, was the capital of the Kingdom of Mercia. Under royal patronage, Winchcombe prospered, becoming a walled town with its own monastery, where a king and a saint are now buried. By the turn of the 11th century, Sudeley had grown into a manor house set in a Royal deer park, given as an extravagant gift from King Æthelred the Unready to his daughter Goda on her wedding day. Despite William the Conqueror's policy of depriving Saxon nobles of their estates after the Norman Conquest of