The most compelling evidence can be found in drawings in the Sir John Soane's Museum that seems to prove that the Hall was designed by the influential Elizabethan architect John Thorpe in the early 1590s.
Sir Thomas Heneage received the estate of Copthall on 13 August 1564 from Queen Elizabeth I, where he subsequently built an elaborate mansion from the designs of John Thorpe.
Little is known of his life, and his work is dubiously inferred, rather than accurately known, from a folio of drawings in the Sir John Soane's Museum, to which Horace Walpole called attention, in 1780, in his Anecdotes of Painting; but how far these were his own is uncertain.
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H .M. Colvin, A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, 1600–1840 (1997) ISBN 0-300-07207-4
He saw through the press John Thorpe's Registrum Roffense, which was published in 1769 by the compiler's son.
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John Thorpe, Henry Tresham, James Durno and Thomas Jenkins, commissioned paintings of archaeological sites in Naples and Sicily from Xavier della Gatta, Tito Lusieri, Henry Tresham and Louis Ducros, and bought sculptures from the young Canova.