> Brief History
 
THE 16th CENTURY:
It seems that there have been as many six tennis courts at Petworth House, the earliest dating from 1588. There is an entry in the household accounts for £4 2s 2d for plastering and paving tennis courts. This record of more than four hundred years as a site for tennis is only exceeded at the royal palaces of Hampton Court and Falkland. Some historians have suggested that Henry Vlll, himself a great tennis fanatic, may have built courts at Petworth even earlier. As the 6th Earl of Northumberland had no direct heir and as many of his family were implicated in Catholic plots, in 1537 he left his lands to the king, probably in en effort to keep in favour with him. However in 1557, Queen Mary returned Petworth to the Percy family.

THE 17th CENTURY:
The interest of the Percy family in tennis was maintained. The ninth Earl spent the years 1605 to 1621 in the Tower of London, under suspicion of complicity in the Gunpowder Plot, but during his period of incarceration, he made plans for substantial building work to be done on his release. He owned both Syon House in Isleworth and Petworth House, and his plans included a Tennis court at Syon House. However a condition of his release from the Tower was that he must not venture more than thirty miles from Petworth House, so the Syon House court was never built.

His Clerk of Works drew up what became known as the “Petworth List” in 1615. It contained the names and dimensions of fourteen courts in London, presumably to use as models for his own courts. On display in a cabinet at the court is a contemporary copy of the list and a map showing the location of the fourteen courts.

Records show that the third Petworth court was built in the “Cichen Yarde” (old spelling for “Kitchen Garden”), and it was probably thatched. In 1654, Nicholas Paige was paid for “layeing on eight loads of straw on the Tennis Court att 5.0s”. The dimensions of this court as noted in “The Percies of Petworth 1574-1632” are difficult to reconcile. The main wall was said to be 94ft long, the gallery wall 97ft, and the penthouse 101ft.

It had been thought that James Duke of York (later James ll) had played on the Petworth court, but in the Petworth House archives, there are eleven pages of expenses related to play on the court at St. James’s Palace in London, a court built in 1617. The tenth Earl of Northumberland had charge of the three youngest children of Charles l during the course of the Civil War while they were confined to London.

THE 18th CENTURY:
The court was demolished in 1695; the next court was built in 1700 by the sixth Duke of Somerset, who rebuilt much of the present Petworth House. This court was sited somewhere in the Carpenters’ Yard, now known as the Estate Yard, where the present court stands, though probably not on the same site. Presumably the roof on this court was found to be too low for play, as towards the end of 1791, items of expenditure are noted as sashes and frames “a story higher” and “Raising the Tennis Court House”, as well as “getting out and carrying up a stairs at ye Tennis Court”.

This Tennis Court served as the Petworth courthouse in 1795, but even after all this building and later expansion on the court, in February 1797 it was torn down stone by stone and moved to a new site at the north end of the house. In the process a rare omission was corrected. The 1700 court had no door galleries, but in this new court (the fifth) a door was installed and payment of 1s 6d was made to “Willm. Nightingale for turning two columns for the tennis court”.