"Tres testimonivm dant": The Sacred Rhetoric in the Architectural Testament of Sir Thomas Tresham's Three Lodges, c. 1593–1605

Extant sketches (Eayre and Tillemans “Drawings of Northamptonshire”, British Library Add. MS. 36371) from the 1730’s document what has continued into modern day to be a general fascination with the particular Catholic Trinitarian symbolism of Sir Thomas Tresham’s “Triangular Lodge” (Rushton, Northamptonshire, England) -- what architectural historians consider to be peculiarly esoteric among already highly emblematic, even mystifying, Elizabethan buildings. Similarly overt, if architecturally less eccentric, evidence of Tresham’s theological emphasis on the Sacraments resides in the symbolism of the Passion built into another of Tresham’s lodges, Lyveden New Bield (Oundle, Northamptonshire). More recently, scholarship on Tresham as an Elizabethan Catholic recusant (one insistent on practicing Catholicism openly in spite of proscriptions against such practice, therefore subjecting oneself to fines and imprisonment) has flourished as more of his difficult hand has yielded to reading and interpretation, resulting in works which acknowledge still further the intentional and intellectual dissimulation integrated into Tresham’s architecture. In fact, Tresham built not two, but three, lodges – by his own description, Lyveden New Bield, the Warrener’s Lodge (called after his lifetime “The Triangular Lodge”), and the Hawkfield Lodge at Rushton, each designated according to either location, or use, or both. Until my reconstruction from building accounts of the Hawkfield Lodge, however, it had been relegated to the occasional footnote or afterthought, never considered as potentially part of a larger building program with interrelated, integrated theological intention. My model of the hexagonally shaped Hawkfield Lodge, however, suggests precisely that Tresham’s architectural exegesis of Trinitarian theology in the form of the Warrener’s Lodge, and that of Eucharistic theology in form of the New Bield, are meant to work together with related theology in the Hawkfield Lodge to signify the mysteries Tresham understood of his own Catholic faith. By visualizing the symbolism embodied not just in the footprint and design, but also in the reflected ceiling plan of the Hawkfield Lodge, one sees clearly a rhetorical statement emerging through the three lodges as one entity, arguing strongly for Tresham’s architecture as testament to the ultimately ineffable inscrutability of God.