Barn Elms replaced the earlier one occupied by Sir Francis Walsingham, "Elizabeth's Spymaster". Queen Elizabeth I would visit Barn Elms to see her Spymaster. Barn Elms features in English literary history from the time the royalist poet Abraham Cowley moved to the house belonging to John Cartwright in 1663. In the 1660s Barn Elms became a fashionable destination for boating picnics. Samuel Pepys, who arranged many a Sunday afternoon or moonlit evening boating party to Barn Elms himself, recorded that on 26 May 1667: "I walked the length of the Elmes, and with great pleasure saw some gallant ladies and people come
Walsingham Priory shrine dismantled, and the priory destroyed, its site was sold by order of Henry VIII to one Thomas Sidney for 90 pounds, and a private mansion was subsequently erected on the spot. The Elizabethan ballad, "A Lament for Walsingham," expresses something of what the faithful felt at the loss of their glorious shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham. On the other hand, the ballad literature suggests that some pilgrims sought non-religious encounters: Ophelia in "Hamlet" quotes from lyrics about Walsingham in which a woman asks about her pilgrim lover. Walsingham Priory Walsingham Priory was a monastery of Augustinian Canons regular