# Auckland Castle

castle in the town of Bishop Auckland in County Durham, England, UK

Bishop Auckland, United Kingdom

Palace · Fortification. 1183 CE

## Story

• Auckland Castle, also called Auckland Palace, was a home of the bishops of Durham from about 1183 and their only official residence from 1832 until 2012.
• Hugh de Puiset began the house, and the great hall of about 1190 survives as the chapel of St Peter.
• Antony Bek added a great chapel around 1300 that was later blown up; Arthur Haselrig started a new house on the site, and John Cosin demolished it after 1660 and made the old hall the chapel.
• Twelve paintings of Jacob and his sons by Francisco de Zurbarán hang in the Long Dining Room, with a copy of Benjamin by Arthur Pond in place of the canvas at Grimsthorpe.
• Excavation has found Bek's chapel and, in 2024, the walls of Haselrig's unfinished house, together with a gold flower, a knife, stained glass, coins, and a jet die.

## Visiting

The palace is open from 10:30am to 4:00pm on Wednesday to Sunday and on Bank Holiday Mondays, and last entry is at 3:30pm. Admission is by ticket, and an adult day ticket costs £20, covering the palace, the Faith Museum, and the gardens. A child ticket costs £5 for a visitor under 16, entry is free for a child of 4 or under, and a personal carer is admitted free. Once purchased, tickets are non-refundable, though the date or entry time of an admission ticket can be changed until 9:00am on the day of the original booking when the preferred time is still open.
Rucksacks are not allowed on the back and must be worn on the front.

## History

Auckland Castle, also called Auckland Palace, stands at Bishop Auckland between the River Gaunless and the River Wear. The bishops of Durham lived here from about 1183, and from 1832 until the sale of 2012 it was their only official residence. They were prince-bishops of the County Palatine of Durham, with courts, a mint, and the right to raise men, and Auckland was the hunting house they preferred to the fortress in the city.

Hugh de Puiset, bishop from 1153 to 1195, probably began the house. His great hall of about 1190 survives as the chapel of St Peter, completed in the first half of the thirteenth century. Antony Bek, bishop from 1284 to 1311, enlarged the palace and built a two-storey chapel around 1300, later said to have cost £148. That chapel was blown up in the seventeenth century, and its foundations were found again, a discovery placed in 2018 and announced in February 2020.

Bishop Booth founded a college for a dean and nine canons beside the wall in the fifteenth century. Thomas Ruthall built a great chamber here, and around 1530 a south dining room was added for him and for Cuthbert Tunstall, whose long gallery is the Scotland Wing. Tunstall held the palatinate under Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I, with two deprivations, and he dated letters from Awcland in the 1530s. In 1603 Tobias Matthew invited Anne of Denmark, with Prince Henry and Princess Elizabeth, to stay on the journey south from Scotland.

After the First English Civil War the castle was sold. Arthur Haselrig bought it in 1646, a sale also dated to 1647, destroyed Bek's chapel with gunpowder, and began a new house. Excavation in 2024 found that house nearly finished and never lived in, with chapel stone reused in its walls. The Stuart Restoration returned the property to the bishop.

John Cosin demolished Haselrig's building and, from 1661 to 1665, turned Puiset's hall into the chapel, with woodwork that joins Gothic and Baroque forms.

Richard Trevor, bishop from 1752 to 1771, bought twelve portraits of Jacob and his sons by Francisco de Zurbarán and hung them in the Long Dining Room. The canvas of Benjamin stayed at Grimsthorpe, so in 1756 Arthur Pond painted a copy. Trevor also raised the Gothick gatehouse of 1760. Shute Barrington, bishop from 1791 to 1826, employed James Wyatt to make a processional route and a throne room for a bishop who still held powers close to a king's.

William van Mildert, the last palatine bishop, gave Durham Castle to the new university, and Auckland became the bishops' sole residence, a change dated both to 1832 and to 1836, when the remaining palatine rights returned to the crown. The house stayed private until Jonathan Ruffer's gifts kept the paintings and the building together. The trust bought them in 2012, reopened the state rooms on 2 November 2019, and opened the Faith Museum in October 2023. The seventeenth-century walled gardens reopened in May 2024.

The north terrace has produced kitchen rubbish of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries and a gold flower of about 1350 to 1500, with a gold and silver knife, an arrowhead, stained glass, coins, and a jet die. Nikolaus Pevsner is the name attached to the judgment that the chapel is one of the finest rooms in North East England. The bishop's offices are still in the building.

## Photographs

- [en:Auckland Castle — Pit-yacker](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cf/Auckland_Castle_8.jpg)
- [A crop of my previous version File:Auckland_Castle_8.jpg of this picture making it suitable for infobox — Pit-yacker](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6b/Auckland_Castle_Crop.jpg)
- [en:Auckland Castle West Tower. — Pit-yacker](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bf/Auckland_Castle_036.jpg)
- [Private wing of Auckland Castle, Bishop Auckland — pit-yacker from UK](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bb/Auckland_Castle-Scotland_Wing.jpg)
- [11 Market Place, Bishop Auckland. Forms area around gatehouse to en:Auckland Castle. — Pit-yacker](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/95/Auckland_Castle_-_11_Market_Place.jpg)
- [17 and 18 Market Place. Form a set of houses that surround en:Auckland Castle gate-house — Pit-yacker](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/89/Auckland_Castle_17_-18_Market_Place.jpg)
- [Westcott Lodge. Part of en:Auckland Castle. The building is presently used as offices by the Durham Diocese — Pit-yacker](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/31/Auckland_Castle_-_Westcott_Lodge.jpg)
- [Bishop Auckland Castle. Taken from near Jock's Bridge — John Phillips](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0f/Bishop_Auckland_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_10467.jpg)
- [Auckland Castle. — Ken Crosby](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/44/Auckland_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_138908.jpg)
- [Auckland Castle — Riversiderouge](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/28/Bishop_Auckland_banner_Auckland_Castle.jpg)

## Sources

- [Cuthbert Tunstall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuthbert_Tunstall) — Wikipedia
- [Auckland Castle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auckland_Castle) — Wikipedia
- [Hugh de Puiset](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_de_Puiset) — Wikipedia
- [Antony Bek (bishop of Durham)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antony_Bek_(bishop_of_Durham)) — Wikipedia
- [John Cosin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cosin) — Wikipedia
- [Arthur Haselrig](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Haselrig) — Wikipedia
- [Francisco de Zurbarán](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_de_Zurbar%C3%A1n) — Wikipedia
- [Jacob and His Twelve Sons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_and_His_Twelve_Sons) — Wikipedia
- [Arthur Pond](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Pond) — Wikipedia
- [James Wyatt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Wyatt) — Wikipedia
- [Richard Trevor (bishop)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Trevor_(bishop)) — Wikipedia
- [Shute Barrington](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shute_Barrington) — Wikipedia
- [William Van Mildert](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Van_Mildert) — Wikipedia
- [County Palatine of Durham](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/County_Palatine_of_Durham) — Wikipedia
- [Bishop of Durham](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bishop_of_Durham) — Wikipedia
- [Nikolaus Pevsner](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolaus_Pevsner) — Wikipedia
- [Benjamin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin) — Wikipedia
- [Tobias Matthew](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobias_Matthew) — Wikipedia
- [Manor, Castle and Palace](https://aucklandproject.org/discover/manor-castle-and-palace/) — The Auckland Project
- [Auckland Palace](https://aucklandproject.org/attraction/auckland-palace/) — The Auckland Project
- [Auckland Castle archaeology](https://aucklandproject.org/discover/auckland-castle-archaeology/) — The Auckland Project
- [Auckland Castle research project](https://www.durham.ac.uk/departments/academic/archaeology/research/archaeology-research-projects/auckland-castle/) — Durham University
- [Archaeologists unearth a lost house at Auckland Castle](https://www.durham.ac.uk/departments/academic/archaeology/archaeology-news/auckland-castle-dig/) — Durham University
- [Auckland Castle list entry](https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1196444) — Historic England
- [Auckland Palace and gardens tickets](https://tickets.aucklandproject.org/event-tickets/50759?catID=38790) — The Auckland Project
- [Ticket questions](https://tickets.aucklandproject.org/faqs) — The Auckland Project
- [Visit us](https://aucklandproject.org/visit-us/) — The Auckland Project
- [Auckland Castle 8.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Auckland_Castle_8.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Auckland Castle Crop.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Auckland_Castle_Crop.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Auckland Castle 036.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Auckland_Castle_036.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Auckland Castle-Scotland Wing.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Auckland_Castle-Scotland_Wing.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Auckland Castle - 11 Market Place.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Auckland_Castle_-_11_Market_Place.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Auckland Castle 17 -18 Market Place.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Auckland_Castle_17_-18_Market_Place.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Auckland Castle - Westcott Lodge.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Auckland_Castle_-_Westcott_Lodge.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Bishop Auckland Castle - geograph.org.uk - 10467.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bishop_Auckland_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_10467.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Auckland Castle - geograph.org.uk - 138908.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Auckland_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_138908.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Bishop Auckland banner Auckland Castle.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bishop_Auckland_banner_Auckland_Castle.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons

## Detailed history

Auckland Castle, also called Auckland Palace, stands at Bishop Auckland in County Durham on flat ground between the River Gaunless and the River Wear, just south of their meeting. The town lies against the castle on the west. On the other three sides the land drops steeply to the rivers. The bishops of Durham kept a house here from about 1183. It was their principal residence from 1832 until 2012, when the castle and its contents were sold to the Auckland Castle Trust. The state rooms are now open to visitors, and the bishop's offices remain in the building.

The names of the place follow that long use. An Anglo-Saxon settlement nearby was called Alclit. Under the Normans the name shifted toward Aukland, and the bishop's estate was the manor of Auckland. In the Middle Ages the house was the bishop's manor, and Auckland Castle became the usual name, though many people simply said Auckland. Letters of Cuthbert Tunstall from the 1530s are addressed from Awcland. Once the fortifications had gone, seventeenth-century writers used other titles, including the Bishop's Palace at Auckland and Bishop Auckland Palace. A sale description of 1647 called it a very stately manor house, called the castle or palace of the late Bishop of Durham, situate in Bishop Auckland. The word palace was in use by 1819. In 1852 thieves entered Auckland Palace at night while the household was in bed. In 1855 thousands of people attended a floral fete in the grounds. In 2024 the trust that cares for the building adopted Auckland Palace as its principal name. The historic name Auckland Castle remains the one long attached to the bishop's house. The battlements a visitor sees now are ornamental. Most of the medieval fortress was removed or hidden inside later work. The shift from a building meant to astonish, intimidate, and defend into a building meant for entertainment followed the decline of the prince bishops, and it was already advanced by that sale of 1647.

The palace exists because the bishops of Durham were temporal rulers as well as churchmen. The County Palatine of Durham grew from the lands of St Cuthbert between the Tyne and the Tees. In 684 King Ecgfrith of Northumbria gave a large territory to Cuthbert when Cuthbert became bishop of Lindisfarne. After the Viking breakup of Northumbria, the community of St Cuthbert held wide estates between the rivers, outside the ordinary tax lists of the later English kings. The region was omitted from the Domesday Book. Ordinary shire government did not cross the Tees until the reign of Henry II. By the late thirteenth century Durham was recognised as a county palatine. From 1075 the bishop is described as a prince-bishop, with the right to raise an army, mint coins, and levy taxes, so long as he stayed loyal to the king and watched the northern frontier. A report of 1788 added that the bishops appointed judges and barons and could grant pardons. Their arms still combine a coronet with a mitre and a crossed crozier and sword. The palatine courts copied the king's. From the sixteenth century the rights were reduced, and they were abolished in 1836. The Chancery of the County Palatine of Durham and Sadberge, the last palatine court, survived until 1972. Durham Castle, begun in 1072 on the peninsula in the city, was the bishops' chief fortress. Auckland, about twelve miles to the southwest and next to a hunting park, became a house where they preferred to live, work, and receive guests. Unlike most English bishops, they judged in their own courts and could call out men for war. That is the political world in which a country residence at Auckland was worth building. The liberty carried another name, Haliwerfolc, taken to mean the district of the holy saint's folk, and Cuthbert's reputation was of a saint who guarded that land fiercely. The wider patrimony grew under Bishop Ecgred, who brought in large tracts to the south-east and the south-west. At its fullest the palatinate covered the county of Durham except the south of Teesdale, and the country south of the Tyne that later lay in Tyne and Wear, and it kept detached lands at Lindisfarne, Bedlington, Norham, and Crayke. Auckland was not the city fortress. It was a hunting house inside the same jurisdiction, supported by the same courts, the same mint, and the same right to call men to arms.

Hugh de Puiset is the bishop with whom the standing house begins. He was born about 1125. He was a nephew of King Stephen and of Henry of Blois, and through his grandmother Adela, a daughter of William the Conqueror, he was that king's great-grandson. His father's family held the lordship of Puiset in northern France. Before 1139 Henry of Blois obtained for him an archdeaconry in the see of Winchester. Around 1143 Hugh became archdeacon and treasurer of York, and he was drawn into the dispute over the archbishopric. On 22 January 1153 the monks of Durham elected him bishop against the will of Henry Murdac, archbishop of York, who excommunicated the chapter. Murdac refused to confirm the election. Hugh went to Rome, and Pope Anastasius IV consecrated him on 20 December 1153. He was enthroned at Durham on 2 May 1154. At his election he was still under the canonical age of twenty-eight. King Stephen granted him the mineral rights in Weardale. Lead was mined there, and silver drawn from the ore probably supplied a bishop's mint. Hugh did not join the open quarrel between Henry II and Thomas Becket. Henry II nevertheless suspected him in 1173, when Henry the Young King rebelled. Hugh does not appear to have fought in that rising. In the spring of 1174, when William the Lion of Scotland invaded northern England, Hugh was slow to resist, made truces that allowed Scottish troops to cross church land if they did no damage, and watched his nephew, Hugh IV de Puiset, bring an armed force to Hartlepool. Henry II read this as aid to the rebels. Under Richard I, Hugh bought the office of sheriff of Northumberland and shared the justiciarship of England. As a builder he was known for a stone bridge in the city of Durham and for the Galilee Chapel of the cathedral, and he held an inquest into the precise holdings of the bishopric. He patronised the chronicler Roger of Hoveden. He died on 3 March 1195.

The castle at Auckland was probably begun by Hugh de Puiset and completed in the first half of the thirteenth century. The oldest part still standing is the chapel of St Peter, which began as his great hall around 1190. The arcades and capitals are unusually rich. One account places the completion of that hall in 1249. Nikolaus Pevsner, the architectural historian whose county-by-county survey of English buildings includes the volume on County Durham, is the name joined to the judgment that this chapel is one of the finest rooms in North East England. The hall was later remodelled, and in the seventeenth century it was turned into the chapel that visitors enter now.

Antony Bek, also written Beck, gave the palace its next medieval shape. He was born about 1245, a younger son of the knight Walter Bek of Eresby in Lincolnshire, and he studied at Oxford from 1267 to 1270. In 1270 he went on crusade with the Lord Edward, later Edward I, and he rose in the prince's household. He was archdeacon of Durham by 1275. Edward secured his election as bishop of Durham on 9 July 1283. Bek was consecrated on 9 January 1284 and enthroned in Durham Cathedral on 25 December 1285. At the consecration he had the remains of St William of York moved to a new shrine in York Minster. Edward also sent him to Aragon to negotiate a marriage between the king's daughter Eleanor and Alfonso, the heir of that kingdom. After Alexander III of Scotland died in 1286, Edward used Bek in the affairs of Alexander's heir, Margaret of Norway. Margaret died, and Bek took part in the hearings that ended in November 1292 when Edward chose John Balliol. Bek helped to enthrone Balliol at Scone. In 1293 the archbishop of York excommunicated him because king's officers had arrested two clerks while Bek was in Scotland. Bek's party answered that he had been acting as earl palatine, not only as bishop, so the sentence was an insult to the crown. The archbishop gave way and was fined. In 1294 Edward sent Bek to Adolf of Nassau, the German king, to seek allies against Philip IV of France. Bek received the surrender of John Balliol at Brechin in 1296. In the Falkirk campaign of 1298 a force under him took Dirleton Castle, and he led a division of the English army at the Battle of Falkirk itself. He then spent years in dispute with Richard de Hoton, prior of Durham, and with the cathedral chapter. He deposed and excommunicated the prior and shut the cathedral and the priory. In 1306 he became patriarch of Jerusalem, and on that title he was the senior churchman in England. He conducted the funeral of Edward I at Westminster Abbey on 27 October 1307. Edward II restored the lands that Bek had lost. In 1308 Bek was named the chief investigator of the Templars in England. In 1309 he was at last received at Durham Priory, and the new prior said that the chapter would bring no further cases against him out of the old quarrel. He died at Eltham Palace on 3 March 1311 and was buried in Durham Cathedral on 3 May. His household was put at 140 knights, and his personal estate was valued at 6,000 marks. Attempts to have him canonised failed. He built at Auckland Castle, and he also built the great hall of Durham Castle.

At Auckland, Bek added a range in the later thirteenth century and a chapel of about 1300. The chapel was of two storeys. It has been described as one of the largest in Europe, and its cost has been given as £148. Puiset's hall was remodelled around 1300 for Bek. Bek's own chapel does not survive as a standing building. In the middle of the seventeenth century it was blown up with gunpowder. Archaeologists found the foundations again in the castle grounds. One account places that discovery in 2018, and another places the public announcement in February 2020. Finds from the work were exhibited at the castle from 4 March to 6 September 2020.

Later medieval bishops added a college and chambers rather than a new circuit of walls. In the fifteenth century Bishop Booth established a college for a dean and nine canons immediately west of the enclosing wall. Ranges of that college remain beside the market place. They later served the prebends and afterwards were used as carriage houses. Lawrence Booth, installed as bishop of Durham on 25 September 1457, is the fifteenth-century bishop of that surname. He came from a Lancastrian family, submitted to Edward IV, lost the palatinate for a time, and received it back in 1464. He was translated to York in 1476. The castle's own account names Bishop Booth as the founder of the college and does not give him a Christian name, so the college is tied to the bishop of that surname rather than to a second, undocumented man.

Thomas Ruthall was appointed bishop of Durham in 1509. Henry VII had chosen him, and Henry VIII confirmed the choice and kept him as secretary. Ruthall repaired the bridge at Newcastle and built a great chamber at Bishop Auckland. He died on 4 February 1523 at Durham Place in London and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Around 1530 a south dining room was added for Ruthall and for the next bishop. Their carved arms still mark that front.

Cuthbert Tunstall was the next bishop, and the Scotland Wing is probably his long gallery. He was born in 1474 at Hackforth near Bedale, an illegitimate son of Sir Thomas Tunstall of Thurland Castle in Lancashire. His half-brother, Sir Brian Tunstall, called the stainless knight, was killed at Flodden in 1513. Thomas More, a friend from their school days, wrote of him with praise at the opening of Utopia. In Brussels, Tunstall became a friend of Peter Gilles and stood godfather to Gilles's daughter. He spent time at Balliol College, Oxford, and at King's Hall, Cambridge, without a degree from either, and in 1505 he took doctorates of civil and canon law at Padua. William Warham made him chancellor of Canterbury in 1511. In 1515 he travelled to Flanders with Thomas More, met Erasmus, and later helped to correct Erasmus's New Testament. He was Master of the Rolls in 1516, bishop of London in 1522, and Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal in 1523. In 1522 he published a book of mathematics, the first printed in England. He met William Tyndale in 1523 and refused patronage for an English Bible. In October 1526 he presided over the buying up and burning of the first edition of Tyndale's New Testament at Paul's Cross. He negotiated with the Emperor Charles V after the Battle of Pavia in 1525 and helped to arrange the Peace of Cambrai in 1529. On 22 February 1530, again by papal provision, he succeeded Cardinal Wolsey as bishop of Durham and took up the quasi-regal authority of the palatinate. In 1537 he became president of the Council of the North. He was often away negotiating with the Scots, but he sat in parliament and in 1539 joined the debate on the Bill of Six Articles. His letters of the 1530s come from Awcland. The long gallery attributed to him was later a granary, was divided into rooms in the middle of the eighteenth century, and now forms part of the Faith Museum. Under Edward VI he was tried on 4 and 5 October 1552 and deprived. Parliament dissolved the bishopric in March 1553. Mary I restored it by a further act in April 1554, and Tunstall returned. Under Elizabeth I he refused the oath of supremacy and would not take part in the consecration of Matthew Parker as archbishop of Canterbury. He was deprived again in September 1559, held in comfort at Lambeth Palace, and died there within a few weeks, on 18 November 1559, aged 85. He was buried at St Mary-at-Lambeth. He is remembered for a severe moderation, described as invincible or burning, on the lines of Erasmus. He served, with interruptions, under Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I.

In 1603, after the Union of the Crowns, Tobias Matthew invited Anne of Denmark, Prince Henry, and Princess Elizabeth to stay at Auckland while they travelled from Scotland to London. Matthew had been bishop of Durham since 1595, having risen under Elizabeth I from dean of Durham to that see, and James VI and I sent courtiers north with an order that the bishop meet the queen. Anne had been born in 1574, a daughter of Frederick II of Denmark, and she was bringing her children south to join the king. Matthew became archbishop of York in 1606. The castle history records the invitation. It does not, by itself, fix how long the queen remained in the house.

The First English Civil War, fought in England and Wales from 1642 to 1646, broke the bishops' hold on Auckland for a generation. It belonged to the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, which ran from 1639 to 1653 and included the Bishops' Wars, the Irish Confederate Wars, a second civil war in 1648, and the wars in Ireland and Scotland that followed the king's death. About 15 to 20 percent of adult men in England and Wales served in arms at some point between 1639 and 1653, and about 4 percent of the whole population died of causes tied to the war. The argument over parliament and religion had been open since James VI and I inherited the English crown in 1603. Charles I ruled without parliament from 1629, then recalled it in 1640 because he needed money after defeat by the Scottish Covenanters. At the end of the first civil war the Church of England was disestablished, and Auckland Castle was sold. One account dates the sale to 1646. Another dates a Commonwealth sale to 1647, when the house was already being called a stately manor or palace. The episcopal office itself was suppressed until the return of the king.

The purchaser was Sir Arthur Haselrig, born in 1601, the eldest son of Sir Thomas Hesilrige of Noseley Hall in Leicestershire. He married first Frances Elmes, of Lilford Hall in Northamptonshire, and by her had two sons and two daughters. He married second Dorothy Greville, sister of Robert Greville, Lord Brooke, and by her had three sons and five daughters. He sat for Leicestershire in the Short Parliament of April 1640 and in the Long Parliament that autumn. He was deep in the attainder of the Earl of Strafford, in the Root and Branch Bill, and in the Militia Bill. He was one of the Five Members. On 3 January 1642 Charles I entered the Commons to arrest him, together with John Hampden, Denzil Holles, John Pym, and William Strode. They had been warned, and the king found their places empty. Haselrig raised a troop of horse for the Earl of Essex and fought at the Battle of Edgehill. Under William Waller in the west he led cuirassiers known as the London lobsters. At Lansdowne on 5 July 1643 his men broke the pikemen of Sir Beville Grenville. At Roundway Down on 13 July they met a royalist charge halted, then fell back in disorder, and the parliamentarian army lost the field. Haselrig was shot three times, and the bullets were said to have glanced off his armour. Richard Atkyns fired a pistol into his helmet at close range, struck him with a sword, and brought him down only by killing the unarmoured horse. Charles I, hearing the story, remarked that if Haselrig had been as well victualled as he was fortified he might have stood a siege. At Cheriton, Haselrig's men routed the cavalry of Sir Henry Bard. After the Self-denying Ordinance he gave up his commission and led the Independent interest in parliament. On 30 December 1647 he was appointed governor of Newcastle upon Tyne. He held the town, defeated royalists on 2 July 1648, and recovered Tynemouth. In 1650 he went with Oliver Cromwell into Scotland. Between 1647 and 1650 he and his son bought a large estate in the north-east, including the manors of Bishop Auckland, Middleham, Easingwoodborough, and Wolsingham, for more than £22,500. He approved the execution of Charles I in January 1649 but refused to be a judge at the trial. He later opposed the Protectorate that Cromwell established in 1653. In 1660 he tried to prevent the return of Charles II. He was arrested, imprisoned in the Tower of London, and died there on 7 January 1661.

At Auckland he bought the castle in 1646 and set out to replace the bishop's house with a new country house of his own. He used gunpowder on the chapel of about 1300. John Cosin, who recovered the house after Haselrig was sent to the Tower, wrote that the castle had been almost utterly destroyed with gunpowder by Haselrig. Excavation in the summer of 2024, used as a field school for first-year students, recovered the plan of that house. Thick walls of neat ashlar contained pieces of carved stone from the medieval chapel in their rubble cores, so the walls post-date the destruction of the chapel. Their line against cobbled drains, compared with a painting of about 1680 to 1700, identifies them as Haselrig's. Objects suited to labourers and tradesmen, rather than to a household in residence, led the excavators to conclude that the house was nearly complete and was never lived in. Chris Gerrard, the academic lead of the dig, said that this absence was unexpected and that it sharpened the timetable of building and demolition between Haselrig and the bishop who followed. On the north terrace, rubbish from the kitchens had been thrown into a former garden from the fifteenth century into the seventeenth. The same work produced a small gold flower, likely an ornament for a leather strap and dated about 1350 to 1500, a knife of gold and silver, an arrowhead, stained glass, several coins, and a jet die. A final season of excavation was set for June 2025.

The return of the monarchy undid Haselrig's house. On 4 April 1660 Charles II issued the Declaration of Breda. On 8 May the Convention Parliament proclaimed that he had been lawful king since his father's execution on 30 January 1649. Charles left The Hague on 23 May, landed at Dover on 25 May, and entered London on 29 May 1660, his thirtieth birthday. He was crowned at Westminster Abbey on 23 April 1661. John Cosin was the bishop who rebuilt Auckland. He was born at Norwich on 30 November 1594, taught at Norwich School and at Caius College, Cambridge, and became domestic chaplain to Richard Neile, then bishop of Durham. He was a prebendary of Durham from December 1624 and archdeacon of the East Riding from September 1625 until 1660. In 1627 he published A Collection of Private Devotions, a manual said to have been prepared by order of Charles I for the maids of honour of Henrietta Maria. That book, his ceremonial in the cathedral, and his friendship with William Laud brought Puritan attack, including criticism from William Prynne and Henry Burton. In 1628 he took part in the prosecution of a fellow prebendary, Peter Smart, for a sermon against high-church practice, and Smart was deprived. Cosin became master of Peterhouse on 8 February 1635 and vice-chancellor of Cambridge in 1640, and that October he was made dean of Peterborough. Smart petitioned the Long Parliament. Early in 1641 Cosin was sequestered from his benefices. Articles of impeachment were brought, and he was released on bail. On 13 March 1643 he was removed from Peterhouse for sending the college plate to the king. He crossed to France, preached in Paris, and served as chaplain among the exiled royal household. At the Restoration he was put back at Peterhouse on 3 August 1660 and soon afterwards raised to Durham. He was elected to the see on 5 November 1660, the election was confirmed on 22 November, he was consecrated on 2 December, and he was enthroned on 8 December. He resigned the mastership of Peterhouse on 18 October 1660. He found Auckland empty and the chapel ruined. He pulled down Haselrig's new house, repaired the great hall, and between 1661 and 1665 converted that hall into the chapel of St Peter, because the older chapel was gone. The outside was heavily recast in his blend of Gothic and Baroque, and the clerestory was replaced. He commissioned the pulpit, the stalls, and the screen. The same County Durham manner, Gothic forms joined to Jacobean ones, can be seen in the font cover of Durham Cathedral and in the woodwork at Sedgefield. The woodwork he gave to St Brandon at Brancepeth was later destroyed by fire. At the convocation of 1661 he worked to bring the prayers and rubrics of the Book of Common Prayer closer to older liturgies, and the book imposed by the Act of Uniformity 1662 reflects that labour. He administered the diocese for eleven years and spent a large part of his income on the church, on schools, and on charity. He died in London in 1672. He had married Frances, daughter of Marmaduke Blakiston, at St Margaret's in Durham on 15 August 1626. She died on 25 March 1642. He was a strict high churchman and a firm opponent of Roman Catholicism. In exile he had been on friendly terms with French Protestants.

The Georgian palace is the work of Richard Trevor, John Egerton, Shute Barrington, and their architects. Trevor was born at Peckham on 30 September 1707, the youngest surviving son of Thomas Trevor, first Baron Trevor. He was a fellow of All Souls, bishop of St Davids from 1744, and bishop of Durham from his election on 9 November 1752 until his death on 9 June 1771. Horace Walpole's circle nicknamed him St Durham because of a reputation for saintliness. He left £3,450 to charities and to the poor of the places where he had lived. He had supported the Jewish Naturalisation Act 1753, and that commitment is the reason given for his purchase of a set of Spanish paintings. In 1756 he obtained twelve canvases from the series of Jacob and his twelve sons by Francisco de Zurbarán. The heirs of James Mendez are also recorded as selling him those twelve in 1757. He could not buy the thirteenth picture, Benjamin. It was sold separately to the Duke of Ancaster and remains at Grimsthorpe Castle in Lincolnshire. In 1756 Trevor commissioned Arthur Pond to paint a substitute Benjamin. Pond's copy and the twelve originals hang together in the Long Dining Room, which Trevor altered so that the series would fit.

Francisco de Zurbarán was baptised on 7 November 1598 at Fuente de Cantos in Extremadura and died on 27 August 1664. His parents were Luis de Zurbarán, a haberdasher, and Isabel Márquez. He married María Paet in 1617. She died in 1624 after the birth of their third child. In 1625 he married Beatriz de Morales, a wealthy widow, who died in May 1639. On 7 February 1644 he married again, Leonor de Torder, also a widow of means. His son Juan de Zurbarán became a painter. The Jacob portraits belong to the years after 1640, when that third marriage and the export trade to the Americas were both part of his working life. In 1614 he was sent to Seville for three years in the workshop of Pedro Díaz de Villanueva. On 17 January 1626 he contracted with the Dominican house of San Pablo el Real to paint twenty-one pictures in eight months, a commission that established him. In 1628 the Mercedarians of Seville ordered twenty-two paintings for their cloister. In 1629 the city asked him to settle there. Around 1630 he was appointed painter to Philip IV. There is a story that the king laid a hand on his shoulder and called him painter to the king and king of painters. After 1640 his hard style lost ground to the softer religious painting of Murillo. From the late 1630s his workshop exported large numbers of pictures to South America. He moved to Madrid in 1658, late in life, and renewed contact with Velázquez. A popular story has him dying poor, but his estate at death was worth about 20,000 reales. He was known for severe compositions, strong contrasts of light and dark, and white monastic habits. He painted figures from the life and used a lay figure when he studied drapery, work in which he was especially skilled. White cloth was a particular gift, and the white habits of Carthusian monks return throughout his pictures. The Jacob series is thirteen life-size portraits painted between 1641 and 1658. Painters of that century more often set Jacob and his sons inside a narrative scene than in a row of portraits. Two grounds are offered for thinking the set was destined for Spanish America. Zurbarán was already an exporter to the New World, and there was a Spanish notion that the native peoples of the Americas descended from the ten lost tribes of Israel. A fairly close replica belongs to the Franciscan third order in Lima. It is not known how the English canvases left the studio in Seville. One suggestion is that they were taken at sea while on the way to a Spanish colony. They are first recorded in England in 1722, in the estate of William Chapman, and they later belonged to James Mendez, a London banker and a Jewish merchant of Portuguese descent. Trevor hung the twelve he could buy as a public sign of support for Jewish naturalisation. The Act was quickly repealed. The pictures stayed in the Long Dining Room. While the castle was closed for restoration, the series, including the Grimsthorpe canvas of Benjamin, went to the Americas. The paintings were at the Meadows Museum in Dallas from 17 September 2017 until 7 January 2018, at the Frick Collection in New York from 31 January until 22 April 2018, and later in 2018 at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. The pictures crossed the Atlantic for the first time in 2016. As of 2026 some of the canvases are away from their usual room for conservation or on loan. Joseph and Asher were conserved in London for a display that year, the first large exhibition devoted to Zurbarán alone to be held in Britain. Some of the paintings had already been shown in London in 1994. Queen Sofía of Spain opened the 2026 exhibition in May, and it was expected to go on to Paris and Chicago. A film about the effect of the earlier tour, through America and Jerusalem, was directed by Arantxa Aguirre.

Benjamin, the subject of the portrait Trevor could not buy, is in biblical narrative the younger son of Jacob and Rachel, and Jacob's twelfth and youngest son, born in Canaan after Rachel's other son, Joseph. Rachel died at his birth. Jacob is said to have set aside the name Benoni, understood as son of my pain, and to have called him Benjamin. Medieval and later commentators have explained that name as son of the south, or son of the right hand, because he was born in Canaan while his brothers were born in Aram, and also as a son of Jacob's old age. In the Joseph narrative, when the brothers do not yet know the Egyptian lord, a silver cup is hidden in Benjamin's sack. Joseph demands Benjamin as a slave. Judah offers himself instead, because the loss of Benjamin would break Jacob's heart, and Joseph then reveals himself. The canvas at Auckland is Pond's copy, not Zurbarán's original. Arthur Pond was born about 1705, trained in London, and spent time in Rome with the sculptor Roubiliac. From 1727 to about 1734 he lived in the Great Piazza at Covent Garden. He painted portraits, among them Alexander Pope, William Duke of Cumberland, and Peg Woffington, and he etched and engraved in imitation of Rembrandt, Raphael, and other masters. In 1734 and 1735 he published a set of plates called Imitations of the Italian Masters. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1752 and died in Great Queen Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields, on 9 September 1758. The Benjamin for Trevor was among his last works. His drawings were sold the next year for more than £1,400. Trevor's building at the same period includes the entrance gateway and clock tower of 1760, designed by Thomas Robinson in a Gothick style, and a deer shelter of about 1760. A bridge of Trevor's over the Gaunless is dated 1757.

John Egerton followed at Durham and held the see until he died on 18 June 1787. He was the son of Henry Egerton, bishop of Hereford, and he had been bishop of Bangor and then of Lichfield and Coventry. He declined the primacy of Ireland before accepting Durham. There he was credited with calming election quarrels in the county and disputes in the city, and in 1780 he granted the city a new charter. He improved the episcopal palaces and gave money to religious and educational bodies. As a younger man at Ross-on-Wye he had taken guests down the River Wye in a boat built for the purpose, and he was later called a father of that journey. Alterations at Auckland dated 1767 to 1772 belong to the years of Trevor and Egerton and have been associated, cautiously, with the architect John Carr. Lodge Farm in the park, with its stables and barns, was built in 1779 for Egerton.

Shute Barrington was elected bishop of Durham on 25 June 1791 and died on 25 March 1826. He was born on 26 May 1734 at Beckett Hall, Shrivenham, a son of the first Viscount Barrington. On 2 February 1761 he married Lady Diana Beauclerk, daughter of the Duke of St Albans. She died in childbirth on 28 March 1766, and the child was stillborn. On 20 June 1770 he married Jane Guise. They had no children. A marble monument to him in Durham Cathedral was carved by Francis Chantrey. He had been bishop of Llandaff from 1769 and bishop of Salisbury from 1782, and as bishop of Salisbury he was chancellor of the Order of the Garter. Auckland Castle was his favoured residence. He used James Wyatt for the Georgian Gothic interiors. Bishop Barrington Academy in the town preserves his interest in schooling, and the diocese marked fifty years of his episcopate with the Clergy Jubilee School in Newcastle. He was described as a vigorous Protestant, willing to grant Roman Catholics every degree of toleration short of political power and establishment. James Wyatt was born on 3 August 1746 at Weeford, near Lichfield. From 1762 to 1768 he was in Italy. In Rome he measured the dome of St Peter's, lying on a ladder slung across the void. His design for the Pantheon in Oxford Street, opened in 1772, made him famous at twenty-six. Horace Walpole called that hall the most beautiful edifice in England. When a rumour spread that Wyatt might leave England to work for Catherine II of Russia, a group of noblemen was said to have offered him £1,200 a year to remain. Wyatt became a rival of Robert Adam in classical and Gothic work, president of the Royal Academy from 1805 to 1806, and Surveyor General of the King's Works in 1796 after the death of William Chambers. His Gothic houses, Fonthill Abbey among them, were landmarks of the Gothic revival even where the detail was unscholarly. He also restored cathedrals, including Durham Cathedral in 1795 and 1796, and John Carter attacked that restoration so persistently that in 1796 Wyatt failed to be elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. At Auckland, about 1795, his works were a Gothic screen, an inner gateway, a processional route, the chapel, and the throne room. The castellated screen wall between the terrace and the castle was built for Barrington in 1795. Wyatt divided a long chamber of Cosin's time, whose broad floorboards are still in place, into an ante-room and a throne room. The throne room has a shallow stucco canopy over the throne and a Gothick chimney piece. An imperial stair stands at the west end of the room formerly called the Gentlemen's Hall, with paired Gothick balusters. The state rooms were the apartment of a prince-bishop who, into the nineteenth century, still held powers close to those of a king. A private oratory reuses sixteenth-century panelling painted with heraldic devices of European monarchs and of English counties. The dining room known as the King Charles Room keeps mid-eighteenth-century rococo plaster of the Italian York school, with a sunburst, and a chimney piece of coloured marble. Wyatt died on 4 September 1813.

William van Mildert was the last bishop to rule the county palatine. He was born on 6 November 1765, the son of Cornelius van Mildert, a gin distiller whose family had come from Amsterdam, and he held Durham from 1826 until his death on 21 February 1836. He had been Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford and bishop of Llandaff, where he chose to live in the diocese rather than treat it as an absentee post. Much of the bishop's secular power had already been taken. The Great Reform Act 1832 removed most of it, though the bishop kept a seat in the House of Lords, and the Municipal Corporations Act 1835 put the government of the town of Durham into elected hands. After Van Mildert died, the Durham (County Palatine) Act 1836 returned what remained of the palatine jurisdiction to the crown. He was one of the founders of the University of Durham. He gave Durham Castle to the university, and it became the home of University College, which moved in during 1837 after the next bishop, Edward Maltby, had completed repairs. He also gave buildings on Palace Green, between the castle and the cathedral. Auckland therefore became the bishop's only residence. One account dates that change to 1832, the year Durham Castle was given away. Another says that by 1836 Auckland was the sole seat, and that it was formally still called Auckland Castle. The bishop signs Dunelm, from the Latin name of the city. Together with the bishop of Bath and Wells, the bishop of Durham escorts the sovereign at a coronation. A trace of the old temporal office remains in the coronet on the arms.

For the rest of the nineteenth century and through the twentieth, the house was a private palace. Prints and postcards called it the Palace at Bishop Auckland as often as they called it the castle. A bed of the fifteenth century, once owned by Henry VII, was put on display in 2013. Lewis Carroll used the castle as the setting of his story A Legend of Scotland. In 2006 two episodes of a televised antiques programme were recorded in the rooms. The deer park covers about 800 acres and keeps fish ponds and woodland paths from the bishops' hunting landscape. An ice house probably of the late eighteenth century, a well head and a cistern belonging to an eighteenth-century water supply, and footbridges over the Coundon Burn lie in that park. Jock's Bridge, of 1819, forms part of the park boundary. The west mural tower and the west walls include masonry of the fourteenth century, the first wall being of that date. Castle Lodge is of the seventeenth century. Six pillars near the west wall may be the remains of a seventeenth-century hay shed.

In 2001 the Church Commissioners voted to sell the Zurbarán paintings. That decision was later revoked. On 31 March 2011 a gift of £15 million from Jonathan Ruffer halted the dispersal, and arrangements made that September placed the paintings and the castle with the Auckland Castle Trust, so that pictures which for centuries had been seen only by guests, or by arrangement with the bishop's staff, could be shown to the public. Reporting in 2019 stated that in 2012 Ruffer purchased the castle and its contents, the paintings included. Ruffer, a fund manager who had said he wished to revive County Durham by philanthropy, gave £1 million to the Durham Foundation in 2012, £15 million in 2013 to preserve the castle and the series that had hung in the dining room since the 1750s, and £18 million in 2013 toward restoring the palace and creating a museum of faith in Britain. He chairs the trust. Most of the palace was opened to visitors. The Scotland Wing continued to house the bishop's offices. A restoration costing many millions, supported in part by a national lottery grant, brought the castle back to public opening on 2 November 2019. By then a tower 115 feet high, about 35 metres, stood as a visitor centre, with a lift, a staircase, and balconies looking onto the castle. Fourteen rooms had been restored from contemporary accounts and from personal memory, each taking one former bishop as its subject. The original wall colours, furniture, and textiles were recreated. The Faith Museum, still under construction at the reopening, opened in October 2023. Niall McLaughlin Architects designed it. It treats 6,000 years of religious history in Britain, from the Neolithic to the year 2000, and it occupies the Scotland Wing together with a new stone building intended to recall the shape of medieval tithe barns. The trust described that museum as the largest addition on the site in 250 years. In May 2024 the walled gardens of the seventeenth century reopened, with a new glasshouse and a faith garden. At that time the Great Garden was expected to open in 2025.

Other pieces of the same project opened in the town rather than inside the palace: a mining art gallery in a former bank, opened in 2017, and an open-air performance with a cast of about 1,000. Ruffer's collection of Spanish pictures, including works by El Greco, Murillo, and Juan Bautista Maíno, is shown in a gallery in Bishop Auckland. Those are neighbours of the castle, not rooms of it.

The bishop's offices are still in the house, so the palace has not become only a museum. One account of the castle as a working seat names Paul Butler as the bishop whose offices are there. The succession of bishops of Durham names Richard Simpson, formerly archdeacon of Auckland, as bishop since 29 April 2026. The two accounts do not name the same man, and both are recorded here without a choice between them. The castle, the chapel of St Peter, the west walls, the entrance gateway, the screen wall, the deer shelter, and the lodge are the principal protected structures, held at the highest grade of listing. The castle and the chapel were designated on 21 April 1952. The park was designated on 7 October 1986. The rooms themselves carry the history: Puiset's hall, Bek's lost chapel under the lawn, Tunstall's gallery, Cosin's woodwork, Trevor's paintings of Jacob and his sons with Pond's Benjamin, and Wyatt's throne room for the last decades of palatine splendour.

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