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The Strickland family held Sizergh Castle from the fourteenth century onward — a Strickland fought at Agincourt — but the chapter of their history that leaves the deepest mark on the house today is a much narrower one: three generations of loyalty to a losing cause.
Walter Strickland fought for Charles I during the English Civil War, at real risk to his family's estates and standing. That loyalty didn't end with the Restoration. When James II was deposed in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Walter's son chose to follow the exiled king rather than accommodate himself to the new Protestant settlement — spending years abroad with James's court in France rather than making the easier, safer choice available to him at home.
The consequences arrived a generation later. After the Jacobite rising of 1715 — an attempt to restore the exiled Stuart line by force — the Strickland family briefly lost their Westmorland estates as a direct penalty for their continued Jacobite sympathies. It's a rare thing to be able to trace three successive generations of a family choosing political risk over safety, and rarer still for the house that risk was fought over to still be standing, let alone still in the same family's hands centuries later.
It's worth sitting with what this choice cost, generation after generation. Backing the Stuarts after 1688 wasn't nostalgia — it meant exile, confiscation, and the very real possibility of losing everything. The Stricklands chose it three times in a row. That the estates were eventually restored, and that Sizergh remains associated with the same family today, is as much a story about patience and eventual accommodation as it is about defiance.
Sizergh’s Jacobite history can be woven into a bespoke Civil War and Jacobite themed day.