White Ladies

Henry the Eighth suppressed a very rich abbey in Hampshire. However, when his men arrived, the Abbey plate (gold chalices, platters, flagons etc) was not to be found so the King's men burned the abbey to the ground and hanged the Abbess from an oak. Five years later, some time in the 1540s, White Ladies was built on the site and was given an oak front door which was still in place in the early twentieth century at which time a dowser discovered that the Abbey plate had been buried in the large wine cellars which were still in use.

The Pleydells owned White Ladies from an early date, possibly from the beginning, because:

in 1652, Nicholas Pleydell was succeeded by his only child, William.
-copied from here.

In 1663, a sun-dial bearing the year date and the initials, W.P., was erected in the garden of the old dower-house, which passed out of the hands of the family in the early nineteenth century.

In 1937, Berry Pleydell and his family became unable to maintain White Ladies and handed it over to the nation to be used as an official retreat for the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. An era ended.