The Royal Palaces of Tudor England: Architecture and Court Life, 1460–1547
Hampton Court: A Social and Architectural History
Whitehall Palace: An Architectural History of the Royal Apartments 1240–1698
Somerset House: The Palace of England’s Queens 1551–1692
Men from the Ministry: How Britain Saved Its Heritage
The Building of England: How the History of England Has Shaped Our Buildings
TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS
61–63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA
www.penguin.co.uk
Transworld is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Bantam Press
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Simon Thurley 2017
Cover design by Sarah Whittaker/TW
Cover images: Tudor Rose © Shutterstock
Greenwich Palace © iStock
Holbein Gate and King Street Gate © Hulton Archive/Getty
Henry the Eighth’s palace at Nonsuch © Bettmann/Getty
Other images courtesy of Simon Thurley
Simon Thurley has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781473510807
ISBN 9780593074947
Maps and plans redrawn by Liane Payne.
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
For my mother, who gave me my love of history
IN 1972, ON a family holiday in Brittany, I was taken to see the Château of Largoët deep in the woods of Elven near Vannes. Although it is now an ivy-covered ruin, the colossal soaring tower that still stands shows that it was once a powerful place. I didn’t know it at the time, but between 1474 and 1476 the five-storey Tour d’Elven was home to the Earl of Richmond, the future king Henry VII of England. Henry, confined in a stone chamber on the fifth floor, was the ‘guest’ of Francis II, Duke of Brittany. The seventeen-year-old Henry’s rather tenuous claims to the English throne through his mother and, less so, through his father, led to an attempt in 1483 to put him on the throne and, as a result, he became a magnet for disaffected Lancastrians and a target of intense hostility for the ruthless usurper King Richard III.
The Tour d’Elven shows just how unpromising Henry Richmond’s situation was in 1476. Spartan, secure and impossibly remote from London, it epitomized his isolation and political irrelevance. Few at the time, including Henry himself, could have predicted that this penniless young aristocrat would successfully bring to an end the Wars of the Roses, the dynastic squabbles that had dominated fifteenth-century England. But by the time of his death in 1509, when he handed the throne on to his teenage son, this is exactly what he had achieved.
When Henry VII won the throne in 1485 the English monarchy was 500 years old. As king, he inherited both a well-developed system of government and an extensive network of residences. These ranged from mighty castles such as Pontefract, Kenilworth and Dover to elegant riverside retreats such as Sheen and Greenwich. Royal houses differed from those of the aristocracy because it was from them that the king ruled. They were much like 10 Downing Street today, in that executive power was exercised in a domestic context, the private and political completely and inextricably mixed.
What was different from today was the all-pervading importance of etiquette, and not in the trivial sense of forbidding elbows on the table. By the Tudor period royal etiquette was a complex and subtle series of written rules and regulations governing the way people at the heart of power did things. This protocol affected the way royal buildings were designed and the way they were lived in. As a result, royal residences were a special type of building uniquely providing the setting for ceremonial and power.
Over the centuries royal buildings have been appreciated and admired in different ways: most often as supreme examples of this architectural style or that; but more recently people have begun to be interested in what royal buildings can tell us about monarchs’ lives. In 1984 I became fascinated by this interaction between power, protocol and architecture, by the way that royal buildings contained evidence which, if it could be unravelled, would reveal a great deal about the way kings and queens lived and governed.
The problem was that most Tudor royal houses were gone. A bit of Tudor Hampton Court survived and some of St James’s Palace; many royal castles still remained, ruined, but few of the parts where monarchs lived were still standing. So understanding royal houses first required a reconstruction of how they once were. In trying to do this there were two important tools: the first was archaeology, because many royal houses have been excavated over the years; the second was the financial accounts prepared for the building maintenance and furnishing as well as the occasional surviving plan or drawing. Using these tools I found that it was possible, in many instances, to draw accurate plans of what Tudor royal houses were once like.
Over the last thirty years I have had the chance to work on the archaeology of at least a dozen Tudor royal houses and have hunted down the documents that make sense of the jumble of brick walls and fragments of stone. For others, where everything has gone, or where digging has yet to happen, some good guesses can still be made based on the English obsession for bureaucracy. As a result, we now have a huge body of information on how Tudor royal houses looked and what went on inside them. But most of my work, and the work of others, has been published in obscure academic journals or in expensive monographs too heavy to hold in one hand; more importantly, nobody has put it all together and asked what does it mean, what does it tell us about our most famous reigning dynasty?
This book, for the first time, tells the story of the Tudors through what they built and where they lived. It is not just a catalogue of who built what, although it does do that; more importantly, it sets out to show that, as Tudor royal life changed so did the buildings that they inhabited. So, if you can work out the way that the buildings developed, you can, by deduction, tell the story of the Tudor monarchy from the inside.
My starting point is at the oldest royal house we still have standing, one founded by William the Conqueror, and a place I knew well for eight years as its curator: the Tower of London.
THE TOWER OF London is of London but not in it. It actually sits outside the square mile and always has done. This is because, in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest, it was built to overawe and subdue Londoners, to terrify England’s richest and most populous town through its size and its might. It was always a fortress, a place where monarchs kept their military hardware and to which they retreated at times of great trouble or moment; but until the reign of Elizabeth I it was also a residence, with fine rooms with sophisticated decoration and luxurious facilities overlooking the river. As time went on, many other functions were attracted there: it became the headquarters of the Mint, of the Royal Observatory, of the Ordnance Survey – and of course for long periods it was used as a prison and a place of execution.
For eight years in the 1980s and 1990s I was the curator of the Tower and often experienced its cold walls out of hours. Somehow these hard stone faces seemed to have absorbed the essence of the events they had encircled and they radiated back to me both the misery and the magnificence of England’s past. There are many places in the Tower where that history is so thick that it takes little imagination to be transported back into it. Most powerful of all is the basement of the White Tower, the oldest part of the castle, where you can still visit the rooms once known as the Black Hall and the Black Chamber.
Utterly secure and lit only by the narrowest of slits, these were once part of the King’s Wardrobe – his repository of valuable chattels. They led to a third room, a small barrel-vaulted chamber with an apse at its east end and walls almost 15 feet thick. It was entered through a narrow opening barred by a door of massive thickness and with many locks. Without a lantern you could see nothing more than the bulky outlines of the enormous iron-bound chests that lined the walls. This room, sunk beneath the Chapel of St John above, contained the king’s most valued possessions. First amongst these were the crown, sword, sceptre, ritual comb, spoon and chalice, plus a collection of vestments, that made up the coronation regalia of the English monarchy. By legend many had belonged to Edward the Confessor, who reigned 1042–66, but in reality, apart from the crown itself, most were made subsequently. So valuable were these sacred relics, entombed in the depths of the kingdom’s safest chamber, that they rarely saw the light of day.
Kings needed to wear crowns as a symbol of their majesty and so, as well as the regalia, each monarch had his personal crown, which could be brought out and used at great religious feasts and on other state occasions. These were generally kept not at the Tower, but at the Palace of Westminster – in the Middle Ages the king’s principal residence – in a specially constructed safe-house known as the Jewel Tower.
This structure, one of the last surviving fragments of the once great palace, stands just to the west of the House of Lords near a patch of grass used today by television commentators for political interviews. The ground floor is a room of great architectural pretension, covered with a many-ribbed vault with carved bosses. This was the office of the ‘keeper of the jewels and gold and silver vessels’, who controlled access to the narrow stair that led to the two upper floors. The entrance to the second-floor room is through one of the original two massive iron-studded oak doors, behind which the king’s jewels were secured under heavy lock and key.1
It was from the Jewel Tower that, on 12 May 1485, the Yorkist King Richard III took his crown and a large amount of treasure as he left to direct the nation’s defences against Henry, Earl of Richmond, who was known to be preparing an invasion from France. Richard’s heavy baggage train made its way to Windsor, Berkhamsted Castle in Hertfordshire and then, via Nottingham Castle, to Leicester, where chests of coin, plate and the all-important crown were secured.2
Theatre is a fundamental ingredient of monarchy and Richard must have known that, win or lose, there would be a moment when wearing his crown would be essential. And indeed that moment came. In the heat of the Battle of Bosworth on 22 August, with his army deserting him, Richard called for his crown from its travelling chest. His helmet was designed so it could take the crown securely and, with the gold band glinting in the sun, Richard rose up amongst his troops and rode, with his elite knights, directly towards Henry. Richard would probably have been the victor had not Sir William Stanley, who had thus far committed to neither cause, joined on Henry’s side with 3,000 men. Richard’s inner circle were pushed sideways into a marsh, where the king was cut down and killed in the mud. His helm was retrieved and the crown placed on the head of the man who was now King Henry VII.3
Bosworth had been the closest-fought battle imaginable. But the transfer of the royal diadem from one man to another on a blood-soaked field was seen not only as the victory of might, but as the enactment of the will of God. As Henry gave thanks to his maker, so all the rights, powers and privileges of kingship passed to him, and with them the duties and responsibilities of the monarch before God.
The same crown that had left Leicester on King Richard’s head now returned to that city worn by King Henry. Leicester was the location of a great Lancastrian shrine, the College of the Annunciation in the Newarke, founded in 1330 by Henry, Earl of Lancaster as an act of piety and transformed in the 1350s under his son, also Henry, into a splendid family mausoleum. In the collegiate church the kin of the Lancastrian kings Henry IV and V were buried and to it had flowed bounty from the royal coffers. It might have been a relatively small building, but it was very lavish and Henry’s arrival at his ancestral vaults as the inheritor of the Lancastrian royal mantle was symbolic, if coincidental.4
Time, though, was precious. Henry needed to make his way to London, and soon. The City had been thrown into a state of anxiety by news of his victory and the Lord Mayor had imposed a curfew while preparations were made for the reception of the new king. Henry needed to consolidate his rule and show himself to the people of his capital. When he made his entry on 3 September, the streets were packed with citizens fighting to get a glimpse of their twenty-eight-year-old king. This was a man many had never heard of, let alone seen, and so he was an object of extreme curiosity. As he rode through the City Henry revealed himself as a tall, lean but strong man with dark, shoulder-length hair; he had blue eyes, and anyone close enough could see that while one wandered the other fixed its gaze on you.
The City of London was central to the successful exercise of kingship. As well as being the source of victuals, luxury goods, manpower and finance for the court, it was also the theatre of royal power and everyone expected showy pageantry. At its centre was old St Paul’s. More than a place of worship, it was the royal arena of the nation, the place where monarchs made public their triumphs in the sight of God and, more importantly, in front of the people. On this day Henry’s cavalcade made straight for the cathedral and, in front of the altar, he laid his three standards from Bosworth – great flags depicting the Cross of St George, the Dragon of Wales and the Dun Cow of Warwick, this last a symbol of the king’s descent from the Lancastrian line.
It might have been expected that from St Paul’s Henry would have made his way to the Tower of London. This, after all, was the great royal fortress bursting with arms, armour and supplies of gunpowder, and there the regalia was waiting to be claimed by the new king. From there Henry could have commanded his new capital, but for most Londoners in 1485 the Tower was tarnished by some of the most grisly and despicable events of the fifteenth-century struggle for the English Crown that we know as the Wars of the Roses. In here Henry VI had been murdered in 1471, as had been the sons of Edward IV, the Princes in the Tower, twelve years later. So Henry adopted an alternative strategy and remained at St Paul’s.
While the Tower of London sat low by the river to the east of the City, old St Paul’s was a hilltop citadel. Sited on Ludgate Hill, one of the two highest points in the City, it was completely enclosed by a high wall and entered through one of four stout gates. The precinct formed a city within a city (see map), with a population of 300 or more and, at its heart, the largest and most comfortable house in London – the house of the Bishop of London. This stood at the west end of the nave occupying most of the precinct’s north-west corner, and was linked, by a private door, to the north aisle of the cathedral.5
To stay here was a calculated choice: not only was it the best house in town, it was in the heart of the City, well protected but accessible to everyone, and basking in the daily endorsement of the Church. It was here that Henry VI, in moments of extreme crisis, had stayed to show himself to his people, and it was here that Henry VII now threw his first party, distributing largesse to all and publicly celebrating his God-given victory. After a few days, probably exhausted by his exertions, the king moved from the bishop’s house and established himself nearby at Baynard’s Castle, which had been prepared for him.
Medieval London – which was still crammed into a square mile enclosed by walls – was a city of precincts. Packed in amongst the tall, timber-framed houses of the citizens and merchants were the walled enclaves of over twenty monastic institutions. These were like mini cathedral closes, approached via gatehouses on the street and protected by tall walls on all sides. And just as the Church had enclaves in the City, so did the Crown – two of them. One was the Tower of London, perched just outside the City’s eastern administrative boundary, while in the west was another that included Baynard’s Castle, a large riverside mansion built by Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester in the late 1430s. From the street all that could be seen of this was a massive wall with a gatehouse at one end, but inside was a spacious courtyard and fine rooms overlooking the river. This was a place rich in symbolism for Henry, because in March 1453 the house had been granted to his father, Edmund Tudor, who was Henry VI’s half-brother.6
The grant of Baynard’s Castle can be said to have marked the founding of the Tudor dynasty, for that year Henry VI had ennobled his two half-brothers, Jasper as Earl of Pembroke and Edmund as Earl of Richmond. At an investiture at Greenwich they became the premier earls of England, a turn of events that nobody had expected. At the time the two brothers were virtually penniless and entirely dependent on the generosity of the king. This turned out to be very great – vast lands in Pembrokeshire came the way of Jasper, while the huge and valuable estates of Richmond in Yorkshire were given to Edmund. In London, Edmund was granted the fine residence at Baynard’s Castle to enable him to sustain his position at court.7
That position did not last long. In 1455, Henry VI was forced by parliament to withdraw most of the grants he had made since becoming king, so Baynard’s Castle was taken away from Edmund and soon became the property of Richard, Duke of York. From this moment the house became the unofficial London headquarters of the Yorkists – the place where the crown was offered to two of the Duke of York’s sons: in 1461 to Edward IV and then, in 1483, to Richard III.
Of the Baynard’s Castle occupied by Henry VII in those early days we know little, but we do know that it was part of a wider royal enclave in that part of the City. Immediately to its north was an aristocratic mansion converted in the 1360s to form the headquarters of the Great Wardrobe. This was quite different from the King’s Wardrobe, already mentioned, that stored goods in the White Tower. The Great Wardrobe was the supply department of the royal household; here everything, other than food, that a monarch could ever need was either purchased or made. It was deliberately near Cheapside, the main shopping street of the capital; here Great Wardrobe staff could easily purchase luxury goods, especially huge orders of textiles for royal clothes, the liveries of the household, bedding, table linen and furnishings, including tapestries. Outdoor equipment – such as horse trappings, dog collars and tents – was also bought and stored here.8
To the west of the Great Wardrobe, and connected to it by a long narrow gallery, was the London Blackfriars, one of the largest monasteries in the City. It had long enjoyed royal patronage and the chancel of the monastery church was full of the tombs of English royalty – including the heart of Edward II. The friary was frequently used by the royal family, parliament met there, high-status guests were lodged in its residential buildings and court events were staged in its great hall; I shall be mentioning it many times in this history.9
It was in this environment, then, on the edge of the City, close to a royal church and to the Great Wardrobe, that Henry first began to attend to the business of rule.
Up to this point Henry’s first-hand experience of kingship had been extremely limited. His father had died in his mid-twenties with Henry still in his mother’s womb and Henry became a ward of the Crown, the fate of young aristocrats who were minors when their fathers died. He lived deep in the English and Welsh provinces, mostly in south Wales, and his only exposure to the English court had been on a single trip to London as a thirteen-year-old in 1470. That year Henry’s mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, saw an opportunity to renegotiate the terms of her son’s wardship and decided to petition King Henry VI directly.
This was an unstable and anxious time in the capital and Henry VI’s court was fragile and precarious, presided over by a bewildered king. When, in 1421, he had come to the throne, only eight months old, he was the youngest monarch ever. Unfortunately he never became equal to the huge challenges he faced, and his naivety was compounded in 1453 by the onset of catatonic schizophrenia, which left him periodically incapable of governing. In 1459 civil war broke out and two years later Henry was deposed and Edward of York, a grandson of King Edward III, was declared king in his stead. Edward IV, as he became, was himself unseated and exiled in 1470 and, for a brief year, Henry VI returned to the throne. It was this moment of Lancastrian glory that Lady Margaret Beaufort seized to improve the prospects of her son.
The young Henry’s uncle, Jasper, brought him to London, where he joined his mother at her house in the City. On the morning of 27 October Henry was rowed to Westminster, where, for the first time, he entered the gates of an English royal palace; a few minutes later he was in the presence of King Henry VI.10 We do not know for how long Lady Margaret and Henry saw the king, or exactly where in the Palace of Westminster the meeting took place, or indeed what the outcome was, but this fleeting experience, and the dinner he had afterwards with the king’s chamberlain, Sir Richard Tunstall, was the sum total of Henry Tudor’s experience of the English court and, indeed, of London before he himself became king.
This atypical experience of monarchy was not his only one. In 1484, at the end of his fourteen-year exile, and in preparation for his assault on Richard III’s England, Henry had fled, with his small group of close supporters, from Brittany to France. The French king was the fourteen-year-old Charles VIII. He took Henry to Paris, where he and his companions were Charles’s guests for around a month in February 1485. In early March he moved with the French court first to Evreux and then to Rouen before sailing for England on 1 August. During his time with the court Henry certainly visited the Louvre, Charles’s principal residence in the centre of Paris, and he witnessed a number of royal events, including the French king’s formal entry into Rouen.11 It is likely that this brief time at the court of France, witnessing its operation and setting, made a greater and more lasting impression on him than the fleeting glimpse of Westminster Palace he had had as a young teenager.
In 1485, now king and installed at Baynard’s Castle with virtually no knowledge or understanding of the workings of the English court, Henry had to take his first decisions. Hundreds of grants were made rewarding friends, supporters and kin, while writs were issued to call parliament. For parliament to meet he had to be crowned, so a date was set – Sunday, 30 October. Planning, however, was as far as Henry got before he was forced to leave London in a hurry. In the wake of his triumphant arrival had come a trail of vagabonds, mercenaries and hangers-on. Some of them carried the dreaded sweating sickness and soon London was in the grip of a terrible epidemic. Henry boarded his barge and travelled upriver, moving first to Guildford in Surrey then on to Sheen, modern-day Richmond upon Thames.12
Henry’s arrival at Sheen, a place he had never been, was, again, laden with symbolism, for it was here that his predecessor Henry V had built a magnificent new house as the spiritual and dynastic home of the Lancastrians.
In the second half of the fourteenth century, Edward III expanded the Norman manor house of Sheen (or Shene), which had been used by both Edward I and Edward II, and made it into a royal residence that became a favourite retreat. The place was equally favoured by his successor, Richard II, but he hysterically razed it to the ground after his wife, Anne of Bohemia, died of plague there in 1394. Thus, when Henry V decided to build a riverside retreat at Sheen in 1414 he was making a clean start. Or almost. Edward III’s manor had sat within a moat and Henry V decided to build part of his new residence inside the moat too, around 100 feet from the river’s edge. This new enterprise was designed to be a home for the Lancastrian dynasty in the hour of its triumph – a ‘great work’, for the idea was to build a house around which would cluster three religious foundations dedicated to the king, his family and the nation. This was the most ambitious monastic foundation ever attempted by an English king, one that would put the monarchy at the heart of the spiritual life of the nation.13
On the south bank of the river, to the north of the new house, was to be a Carthusian charterhouse of thirty monks; opposite it on the north bank at Isleworth, and named Syon (or Zion), was to be a Bridgettine monastery designed for up to eighty-five monks and nuns; and a third monastery of Celestines was projected but never begun.14 These were to be powerhouses of prayer for the king and his family, past, present and future, rather like the College of the Annunciation in the Newarke in Leicester which he had also paid to complete. These foundations enveloped his new residence so that their bells could be heard from the royal house as they tolled the liturgical hours.
There were two parts to the manor of Sheen: a large, mainly timber-framed house with a great hall, a chapel and rooms for the king and queen. Near to this, but surrounded by its own moat, was what we would today call a castle. Measuring only around 140 × 123 feet, it was built of stone and had a small courtyard at its centre. An image of it, drawn much later, shows it in the reign of Elizabeth after domes had been added to the tops of the towers (see plate section). With these removed it can be seen for what it was – a pocket pleasure-castle, the perfect retreat for a warrior king, where he could withdraw from the main residence and be with his closest family and companions. But Henry V did not live to enjoy it: he died suddenly in 1422 and it was completed, in fits and starts, under his son, Henry VI.15
Masons at the courts of Henry V and VI were an international bunch; many had worked in France and some had seen the Louvre, as Henry V himself had. In the 1360s King Charles V of France had encrusted the royal lodgings there with turrets and towers and in the inner courtyard was the great circular drum tower, a separate residence soaring above all, crowned with a steep conical roof. Here again was a pocket palace, a small castle in its own moat, just as Sheen was to become (see plate section). Closer to home (though not much) was another example of a separate stone-built lodging tower – this was Warkworth Castle in Northumberland, where a separate tower of great elaboration was built for the Earl of Northumberland some time in the 1380s. This was not much smaller than the tower at Sheen, and as ingeniously planned.16
In the autumn of 1485 Henry VII spent four days at Sheen, and it is likely that he was joined there by his mother. For Lady Margaret Beaufort, her son’s victory at Bosworth and his arrival in London was the triumphant culmination of twenty years of plotting, and their reunion, after fifteen years of separation, must have been emotional. Apart from the coronation, the most pressing topic of conversation was no doubt Henry’s marriage, which his mother had promoted behind the scenes while he was in exile. His bride was to be Elizabeth, the eldest child of Edward IV and his queen, Elizabeth Woodville. This was a dynastic alliance, not a love match; the idea of the marriage was to bring together the blood lines of York and Lancaster, so ending their longstanding rivalry for the throne. Henry had never met Elizabeth and the priority was now to bring her to London and prepare her for marriage.
It was decided that Lady Margaret should be granted Coldharbour, Elizabeth Woodville’s former residence in the City. This was another great riverside mansion, not far from Baynard’s Castle and, like it, originally the home of a super-rich merchant. It could be approached from the street through a great gatehouse, or by barge via a landing stage on the riverfront. A chapel and a great hall overlooked the Thames and above there was a great chamber; near this was a chamber for Elizabeth of York and a wardrobe below for her possessions.17
Henry’s mother was a guiding light in those early years and was given semi-regal status. At many royal houses she had rooms adjacent to those of the king. But soon Henry was also to enjoy confidence in his wife. Elizabeth of York had been born at the Palace of Westminster and was daughter, sister, niece and wife to four successive monarchs – Edward IV, Edward V, Richard III and Henry VII. Both Henry’s mother and his wife thus had the courtly experience he lacked and brought into his circle some of Edward IV’s former courtiers.
In early October 1485, a month after his arrival in the capital, Henry finally made his entry into Westminster Palace. This had been one of the most important royal houses since Saxon times, but had been transformed into England’s principal royal residence during the reign of Henry III. It was he who had decided, in 1245, to rebuild Westminster Abbey and establish the cult of the royal saint Edward the Confessor there. His reconstruction of Westminster Palace at the same time as the abbey transformed it into the premier house of the realm. Indeed it was the only royal house ever described at that time as a palace – Palatium regium. The term derived from the residence of the Roman emperors on the Palatine Hill in Rome and, as ‘palace’ meant principal residence, there could be only one of them. All the king’s other residences were known as houses, castles or, more usually, manors. In this book I shall follow the contemporary usage and not indiscriminately call all royal residences ‘palaces’.18
Westminster was a place of great antiquity and magnificence, and it was another enclave. A wall with gatehouses and bell towers completely enclosed what was, in effect, a gravel island next to the Thames. On this stood Westminster Abbey with all its ancillary buildings and, in an inner enclosure, the royal palace.
Westminster Palace was entered from King Street, modern Whitehall, through a great gatehouse that led into an outer court. Here, facing visitors, was the north front of Westminster Hall – an elevation that appeared as if it were the front of a cathedral, but in reality faced up the end of a colossal great hall built by William Rufus from 1097 and re-roofed in 1393–1401. This was the ceremonial hub of the kingdom, where great public events took place. It was here that Henry VII, like his predecessors, was to celebrate his coronation feast at a huge marble table set on a dais beneath giant carved and gilded oak angels that represented the heavens above his head.
Adjoining Westminster Hall to the south was a suite of smaller rooms, including the White Hall, which served as the everyday audience hall, and, at right angles to this, the king’s chamber, richly painted and gilded with murals and known as the Painted Chamber, which contained his bed in a curtained enclosure. Beyond this were the king’s chapel and the queen’s chamber and chapel. Under King Henry III this was the sum total of the accommodation, but in the early fourteenth century his grandson King Edward II added a third room, the Green Chamber, a new bedroom that looked over the river.19 This southern part of the palace, further extended by both Edward III and Edward IV, became the zone in which the royal family lived. Next to it was the privy palace, privy just meaning private. This contained a maze of smaller rooms for the king and queen, for which we have no evidence. The privy rooms looked out on to a garden and, in a tower at the south-west corner of this, as we have already seen, the king kept his jewels.
Henry’s entrance to Westminster was a big moment, and not one to be thrown away. While he had been in the City of London and at Sheen, various branches of the royal household had been busy preparing the palace for him and setting up a ceremonial entry. There is no record of this momentous event, but a herald recorded his entry into the palace the following year and makes it clear that this was more or less a re-run of what had happened in 1485. Henry left Sheen for Westminster by barge and was met at Putney by the Lord Mayor, aldermen and all the livery companies aboard their barges. They escorted him to the palace landing stage, where they disembarked and, dressed in their robes and furs, lined his route through the palace precincts. The king was then greeted by the priests of the royal College of St Stephen, part of the royal palace, who escorted him in procession to his rooms.20
For Henry VII, who as we have seen had only ever been there for a couple of hours as a teenager, this was a lot to take in. But he was accompanied by expert guides – his mother and his wife-to-be, who not only showed him round the palace room by room but became his tutors in the all-important issues of court etiquette. Henry very quickly had to learn how to make his royal residences work for him and this meant understanding the arcane workings of the English court.21
There is an important difference between a household and a court. The household was the organization that made possible the monarch’s existence, containing everything he needed for everyday life and for the normal business of ruling. The court is a more amorphous concept, because it had no static membership but contained the people who were, at that time, welcomed by the king as part of his daily round of life. They might be his friends, they were certainly his supporters and they were part of the setting of kingship – ornaments to the king’s power. So there was a sense of spectacle to the court, while the household was the machinery that made that spectacle possible.
A crucial component of a court is courtliness, a code of manners and behaviour to which its members subscribe. The early medieval kings simply didn’t have this; their closest attendants were usually tough soldiers geared to military action. The court of King Edward I, who reigned from 1239 to 1307, for example, was a business-like household, full of military men and administrators. Those who had the greatest status were his fifty household knights – the royal bodyguard, in effect a sort of elite standing army. Their friendship and loyalty had been forged in blood and battle and they set the militaristic tone of the king’s entourage. Everyone below them, from pages and grooms to cooks and tailors, had a military role to play when the household was at war. The camaraderie and bonhomie of the soldier brought an informality of tone in which the king and his subjects mixed freely during everyday exchanges and even on special occasions.22 During the fourteenth century, such royal war bands gradually became more interested in the arts – in tapestry, painting, poetry, sculpture and music. Macho aversion to such things gradually gave way to an appreciation of artistic accomplishment. At the same time, more women were admitted into the everyday mix of people surrounding the monarch.
Although some of these things can be discerned in England as early, perhaps, as the reign of Henry III (1216–39), all of them become a marked feature in the time of Richard II (1377–99). In fact, a royal court in a sense recognizable to us today begins to exist in England from his reign.23 Richard’s was a court that expressed an interest in culture, that comprised women to a much greater degree than previously, that could portray itself magnificently and that had a sense of hierarchy expressed in degrees of status and deference. Richard loved to wear his crown, presiding imperiously, and enthroned, over banquets, religious feasts and audiences. He was preoccupied by ceremony and his court festivities became more formalized and ceremonious. He loved expensive clothes, priceless personal jewellery, rich food and enjoyed having himself portrayed by painters.24
Richard II’s household was not alone in becoming less militaristic and more ceremonious in character. Royal households across Europe were growing more formalized, partly, perhaps, in reaction to waves of violent unrest across the continent. The most notable English expression of this was the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, which perhaps caused a stiffening in Richard’s determination to appear majestic. Richard’s upbringing and character were important too, as was his interest in the court of France and later his sense of rivalry with it.25 There were significant architectural implications in this shift from a household to a court and the foundations for this were in fact laid under Richard’s predecessor, his grandfather Edward III (1327–77).
Under Edward III some major architectural changes began to be introduced at Westminster. For his predecessors it had been enough to live in the White Hall, the Painted Chamber and the Green Chamber – the three great rooms of the palace. But Edward decided that he wanted more space for himself, his family and his closest companions. So on to the Green Chamber he added a two-storey block comprising two rooms – the White Chamber and an inner chamber – and these led, at their far end, to another building containing a private chapel. These rooms overlooked the river and had no windows on the landward side; this was because, unlike earlier royal rooms, which led into each other, these had a gallery at their rear so that they could be serviced and accessed discreetly when necessary. These were buildings for comfort and pleasure. The richly hung rooms had their own integral garderobes (WCs), while beneath the White Chamber was the royal bathroom and below the inner chamber the king’s wardrobe.
At Westminster, Edward III was adding to a pre-existing building; at Windsor, where some of his work actually survives, he started anew. Edward was born at Windsor Castle in 1312 but, as a young king, showed little interest in the place. In 1344, however, in an attempt to drum up knightly recruits for war against France, he decided to hold a great tournament there. After three days of combat the king and his team emerged as the victors and, in celebration, Edward announced that he would be founding an order of chivalry based on King Arthur and his knights of the round table. The order, he decided, would have its own circular building, 200 feet in diameter, which would contain a round table: not a disc, but a ring which the knights sat at facing inwards.26
The king lost interest in this extraordinary (and short-lived) structure, but the idea of a chivalric order based at Windsor lived on and, at another tournament in 1348, Edward founded the Order of the Garter. The order was to be supported, at Windsor, by a new college of priests attached to the existing chapel in the lower ward; at the same time a similar college was founded at Westminster Palace – the College of St Stephen.
Edward’s extraordinary military success in France, and in particular his capture of King John II, transformed his financial situation; the French king’s ransom alone, paid over a period of years, was worth more than £250,000. This wealth changed Edward’s ambitions for Windsor. From 1350 to 1368 he rebuilt much of the castle at a cost of £51,000. The most important part of this was the £44,000 he spent between 1357 and 1368 on building himself the largest and most magnificent residence yet constructed by any English monarch.
Edward swept away the timber buildings of his predecessors and embarked on constructing a heroic structure designed and executed in a single campaign. It had no precedent in English or French architecture in size, formality or plan. The building relied on proportion to impress: this wasn’t a fancy building; its impressiveness lay in its restraint and austerity – characteristics suitable for a great military hero.
The main façade was nearly 390 feet long and incorporated two gatehouses, one leading to the kitchens, the other to the king’s lodgings. These were dominated by a colossal great hall and a chapel nearly as large. They were approached by a long, wide, stone stair, large enough to ride a horse up.
As at Westminster, the great hall was a ceremonial space and the king’s own rooms were located at a little distance from it. The layout of his Windsor lodgings was directly copied from Westminster. Arranged in an ‘L’ shape, at their core was the Great Chamber, about the same size as the Painted Chamber at Westminster, off which was a private tower containing some smaller rooms for the king’s pleasure. Then came an audience chamber, later known as the presence chamber (where you were ushered into the sovereign’s presence). On the north front, partially within a large canted tower, was the king’s bedchamber looking out over the spectacular landscape of the Thames valley to Eton and beyond. Beyond the bedchamber was a private chapel with a closet in it where the king could hear Mass, a lesser bedchamber and a study. Meanwhile, preceding the Great Chamber was a sort of antechamber, presumably for people to wait in. We know that Edward’s queen, Philippa of Hainault, had a suite of rooms here too. Her outer chamber was called her Dancing Room, the next room was covered in mirrors and, like the king’s, her bedchamber had a little chapel next to it.27
Edward III’s Windsor was an extraordinary building, entirely new in its architectural ambition, in its sophistication of planning and in the way the great rooms of state were juxtaposed with spaces for the leisured enjoyment of the monarch. It was built to respond to the changing requirements of Edward’s lifestyle.
In the fourteenth century the restless, peripatetic lives of English monarchs began to settle into a more sedate pattern. The royal household grew in size from perhaps only 150 to over 500 followers and this larger, more cumbersome organism moved less frequently between houses. Meanwhile, some of the routine administration that had always been executed from wherever the king happened to be staying was settled in Westminster, which, by 1350, had become the administrative headquarters of the realm. As Edward retired from the battlefield he grew more sedate and liked to spend time closeted away privately with his friends and family.28
These changes in royal behaviour underlay the architectural changes at both Westminster and Windsor. A larger household needed bigger houses, with more accommodation and larger kitchens. The king’s desire for more leisure meant increased private space, including a private bedroom and bathroom. These are the key features of Edward III’s and Richard II’s building works at Westminster, Windsor and elsewhere.
In the century following Richard II’s death, the size, splendour and influence of the English court waxed and waned depending on the character and preferences of the sovereign, his resources and circumstances.29 Edward IV set great store by the maintenance of a magnificent court, and visitors remarked upon the richness of the trappings of his houses and the formality and ceremoniousness of his courtiers.30 These were the expectations that Henry VII inherited, and those that he set out to fulfil. For Henry immediately laid great stress on the magnificence and formality of his court, on the lavish dispersal of hospitality and of court spectacle and ceremony. What we do not know is whether this was an instinctive reaction as a ruler; whether it was a consequence of his long, penniless exile; or whether his wife and mother schooled him in the arts of courtly magnificence. In reality, it was probably a blend of all three.
FOR A MAN who had been a virtual prisoner for his first twenty-eight years, Westminster and Windsor must have been bewildering in scale and blinding in magnificence. These were amongst the largest royal houses in northern Europe, and arranged quite unlike those of the French king that Henry had briefly experienced before Bosworth. There the king’s and queen’s rooms were stacked up in great towers, not spread out in a parade as in England. Access to the king of France was free and easy for all; in England, a more controlled and exclusive system operated. To gain access to the magnificent enfilade of state chambers you had to pass the scrutiny of the royal guards, who excluded people who were unknown or not important enough.1
Richard III never thought that he would lose his crown to the upstart Henry Tudor and, as he left Westminster and Windsor to dispose of this rebel, he had every reason to expect he would return victorious. So when Henry entered London the two great ancestral piles, which were now his, were still furnished with the personal possessions of Richard III. Though these great residences were, by the 1480s, a century old and, externally, may have looked old-fashioned, internally they contained furnishings collected by the Yorkist kings in the latest international taste.
Although perched on the northern periphery of Europe, England was no cultural backwater. From its eastern seaboard a network of trading relationships stretched across the North Sea to northern Europe and the Baltic. The Low Countries were a lot closer and more accessible to London than many parts of northern and western England, and huge quantities of imported goods flowed into the capital’s port. Hundreds of Flemings and other lowlanders came to work in London in the late fifteenth century. As the craft guilds had created a system of closed shops within the City itself, they settled on the periphery, in Westminster and Southwark, out of range of the City’s trade monopoly.2
3