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The setting for magnificence was the royal palaces. These were often built on a large scale and deliberately designed or refurbished with a view to emphasising the majesty and power of the sovereign, since any house where the King took up residence became, for the duration of his visit, the seat of government. The royal palaces also provided a suitable backdrop for court ceremonials and space for entertaining and lodging large numbers of people. 1
Henry VIII was to own more houses than any other English monarch. Most were in London and the Home Counties, while the most important palaces were situated on the banks of the River Thames, so as to facilitate easy access by barge to London and Westminster. Many of the other houses were located near the royal parks or chases.
Unfortunately, little remains today to testify to the sheer splendour of these Tudor palaces. The most extensive remains are at Hampton Court, where some of Henry VIII’s state rooms and service quarters remain, but even these have been remodelled over the centuries. During the last few years, however, detailed archaeological surveys of some of the palaces have been made, along with several comprehensive studies of the King’s building accounts, with the result that far more is known than hitherto about these vanished residences.
In the sixteenth century, there were two kinds of royal house: the greater houses, which were the most magnificent and where “hall was kept,” meaning that the whole court could be accommodated, and its servants fed in the great hall; and the lesser houses, with smaller capacity, which were often used as progress houses or hunting lodges. Sometimes the King would set up court in one of the greater houses and then retreat with a few companions and servants to a nearby lesser house in search of privacy.
From his predecessors, Henry inherited seven greater houses: Westminster Palace, the Tower of London, Greenwich Palace, Richmond Palace, Eltham Palace, Woodstock Palace, and Windsor Castle.
He also inherited seventeen lesser houses. The only one in London was Baynard’s Castle. In Oxfordshire, there were four houses: two hunting lodges, Beckley Manor, at Otmoor, and Langley Manor, Shipton-under-Wychwood, once owned by Warwick the Kingmaker, which Henry VII had rebuilt and often visited;2 Minster Lovell Hall, confiscated from the Lovell family in 1485, but never used by Henry VIII;3 and Ewelme, which had been the property of the de la Pole dukes of Suffolk prior to the last duke’s attainder. In Surrey were Woking Palace and the manors of Wimbledon 4 and Byfleet, the latter once part of the duchy of Cornwall. Collyweston, Northamptonshire, had been a favourite residence of Margaret Beaufort, while Ditton, Buckinghamshire, was to become a nursery palace for Henry’s daughter Mary. In Windsor Great Park was Windsor Manor,5 and in Windsor Forest was Easthampstead Park, a house favoured by Katherine of Aragon and often used by Henry VIII as a hunting lodge.6 Hanworth in Middlesex was later greatly embellished and assigned in turn to Anne Boleyn and Katherine Parr. In Essex, on the border of Epping Forest, was a small hunting lodge at Wanstead, which Henry renovated before 1515;7 and not far away was Havering, a dower house of the queens of England, now assigned to Queen Katherine. The King’s House at Lyndhurst, Hampshire, was not used by any of the Tudor monarchs, but designated the headquarters of the Warden of the New Forest. Lastly, Tickenhill Manor at Bewdley, Worcestershire, was where Prince Arthur and Katherine of Aragon had spent much of their short married life.
Henry VIII’s inheritance also included fourteen mediaeval castles. Berkhamsted Castle in Buckinghamshire had not been used since the death of Henry’s great-grandmother, Cecily Neville, Duchess of York, in 1495, and was falling into ruin.8 Rochester Castle in Kent dated from Norman times, but when the King stayed in the city en route for Dover, he preferred to stay at nearby Rochester Priory. Also in Kent was Leeds Castle, another dower house of the queens of England, and Dover Castle, fortified and refurbished by Edward IV, and boasting luxurious royal apartments decorated with painted royal leopards and fleursde-lys; Henry VIII stayed there several times. Higham Ferrers Castle, Northamptonshire, had been owned by the dukes of Lancaster, but Henry VIII pulled it down in 1533 and used its stones to embellish Kimbolton, whither Katherine of Aragon had been banished. Also in Northamptonshire was Fotheringhay Castle, a former stronghold of the House of York, but now decaying. At Hertford was a Norman castle which Henry VIII would renovate as a residence for his children, believing that the air there was healthy—something the King was very fussy about.9 Warwick Castle, built in the thirteenth century, was—and still is—a massive fortress;10 Henry never stayed there, but he had the fortifications strengthened. Four miles to the north was Kenilworth Castle, extensively rebuilt by John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, in the fourteenth century; Henry V had built a “pretty banqueting house of timber” in a moated garden; 11 Henry VIII demolished it, replacing it with a timber “pleasaunce” in the base court.12 Nothing remains of this today. Ludgershall Castle in Wiltshire dated from the twelfth century, but the King maintained only a small hunting lodge there. The towering fortress of Ludlow in Shropshire served as the administrative centre for the government of Wales; Prince Arthur had died there in 1502. Likewise, fourteenth-century Sheriff Hutton Castle in Yorkshire was the administrative centre for the North of England. 13 Also in Yorkshire was Pontefract Castle, dating from the twelfth century, where Richard II had been murdered in 1400.14 Much of Sudeley Castle, Gloucestershire, dated from the fifteenth century, when it had been embellished by Richard III.15Henry VIII showed little interest in most of these castles; they were old-fashioned, inconvenient, and largely redundant. He preferred his newer, unfortified residences with their emphasis on comfort and style.
Henry also owned the remains of the old palace of the Plantagenets at Clarendon, Wiltshire, which was never used by any of the Tudors and was in ruins by the reign of Elizabeth. Another mediaeval palace was that of the Black Prince at Kennington, two miles south of London Bridge. Katherine of Aragon had stayed there briefly in 1501, but the palace was demolished in 1531, and its stones used to build Whitehall. Finally, there were the ruins of the Savoy Palace on the Strand, once a fabulous residence owned by John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, but burned down by the mob in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and never rebuilt. Henry VII had left funds for the building of a hospital on the site, but his plans were never carried out. The Savoy Chapel, like Westminster Abbey a royal peculiar, was completed in 1517 (it has since been rebuilt).
Henry VIII was “a perfect builder of pleasant palaces,” 16 “the only phoenix of his time for fine and curious masonry.” 17 Such palaces “as he erected (for he was nothing inferior in this trade to Hadrian the Emperor and Justinian the Lawgiver), wrote sixteenth-century topographer William Harrison, “excel all the rest that he found standing in this realm; they are a perpetual precedent unto those that come after. Certes, masonry did never better flourish in England than in his time.” 18
Henry was very interested in architecture and open to new ideas. There were no architects as such in those days, and most property owners designed their own houses with help from surveyors, master masons, and “masters of the works.”19 Henry appointed an Italian, John of Padua, to be deviser of his buildings at a wage of 2s a day, but it is clear that John was just one of many experts who had a hand in designing the palaces. Several other master craftsmen were employed by the King; they were provided with drawing offices at all the main royal building sites, notably Greenwich, Whitehall, and Hampton Court.20 Henry could draw up his own very competent building plans. He kept such plans and drawing instruments—scissors, compasses, drawing irons, and a steel pen—in his closet at Greenwich,21 and he would often ask for plans or reports while a house was being built.22 Sometimes Henry would visit a site to inspect work in progress, and he was active in managing the workforce. Any workman, be he carpenter, mason, plumber, or labourer, could be impressed to work for the King at any time, even if he was engaged upon another project.
The King was a demanding employer. He was impatient to see his houses finished, and he often insisted that the men worked through the night by candlelight in order to keep to the punishing schedule he set. He had canvas tents erected over the scaffolding so that work could continue during bad weather.23 Once, at midnight, he provided beer, bread, and cheese to labourers standing deep in mud, digging foundations in wet weather. 24
During the second half of his reign Henry was to embark on an extravagant programme of building and acquiring property: some of his houses came via Acts of Attainder (which confiscated a traitor’s property), exchange, or the Dissolution of the Monasteries, while most he purchased. When he died he owned more than seventy residences, on which he had spent over £170,000 (£51 million).25 A huge share of this money had paid for repairs and maintenance.26
Henry’s houses were built essentially in the English late Perpendicular style with Burgundian-influenced embellishments, such as the use of brick or terracotta. Before long, the impact of the Italian Renaissance would manifest itself in “antique” ornamental motifs. The chief distinguishing features of the Tudor palace were the multi-storeyed gatehouse with crenellated turrets, bay windows with stone mullions, and tall chimney pots. Most were constructed on a courtyard, or multi-court, plan, like the Burgundian palaces. Glass was still mainly to be seen in well-to-do homes and churches: the proliferation of windows with decorated and stained glass in the King’s houses proclaimed his wealth and exalted status.
Every palace was lavishly adorned with the royal arms, heraldic badges, initials, mottos, and other emblems in stone, terracotta, glass, and paint, in the manner of the period: on the exterior, these were to be seen above doorways, on walls and weather-vanes, and in windows. This was the great age of decorated glass; hardly any survives from Henry’s palaces, but the evidence suggests that figural glass was restricted to the chapels and heraldic glass was used for the other rooms.
These motifs recurred in interior decoration also, and appeared on jewellery, plate, furniture, fabrics, and servants’ liveries. Heraldry was an international code, fully understood by the upper classes—Henry VIII was an expert in this field. In an age when many people could not read, such powerful symbolism proclaimed triumphantly to the world the identity of the owner of a house; in the case of the King, it served as architectural propaganda emphasising his ancient lineage and reinforcing the royal image and authority in the minds of his subjects. During this period, it became fashionable for the upper classes to proclaim their loyalty to the monarch by decorating their own houses with the royal arms and emblems, often in anticipation or commemoration of a royal visit. However, given Henry VIII’s frequent marriages, these decorations often had to be changed.
The masons who built the Tudor palaces were Englishmen, but many of the craftsmen who adorned them were Flemings, or Doche (Dutch), as they were known, who usually worked as glaziers, and Italians, who were responsible chiefly for sculptural decoration. Foreign craftsmen were greatly resented; they were not allowed to join the English craft guilds, and three acts were passed in Henry’s reign limiting their activities. Members of the royal House were specifically exempted from observing these restrictions; therefore the King was free to employ whom he liked.
The royal palaces were built to a set plan that changed during the course of Henry VIII’s reign in order to meet the King’s increasing desire for privacy and his conviction that familiarity bred contempt. Until the fourteenth century, kings had lived, eaten, and slept in the great hall and chamber; life had been communal, with little concept of privacy. Throughout the fifteenth century, however, these arrangements had gradually changed, as had the design of royal palaces in order to accommodate the changes, and it was now the custom for the King to act out his public role in a series of increasingly elaborate state rooms yet be able to retreat into smaller, more intimate rooms to eat and sleep or enjoy some privacy in the company of his wife or his favoured gentlemen. Even here, however, he was never alone, and his most intimate functions were attended to by his gentlemen. For other courtiers, and to a greater extent household servants, privacy was an elusive luxury or was nonexistent.
The King and Queen had separate sets of apartments, often a mirror image of each other; these were known as the King’s Side and the Queen’s Side. Each included a presence (or audience) chamber, a privy chamber, a bedchamber, and usually further private chambers. Early in the reign, following the Burgundian precedent copied by Edward IV and Henry VII, these lodgings were stacked one above the other in a central donjon. The King’s apartments were often built on the south side of the palace, which enjoyed more sunshine.
The King’s state apartments consisted of a sequence of three rooms: two outward chambers—the great watching chamber, or guard room, and the presence chamber—and one inward chamber, the privy chamber. The outward chambers were public, the inner private. To begin with, these state rooms were accessed from the great hall or approached by a processional or ceremonial stair, and entry to them depended on how much in favour a courtier was with the King. Only the most favoured courtiers ever got as far as the privy chamber.
The great hall, although built to impress and sometimes used for large-scale entertainments, served first and foremost as a dining room for the household servants, who ate at trestle tables which were taken down after use. Only during the early years of his reign did the King feast here, at the great festivals of the year. By Tudor times, thanks to the increasing desire of monarchs and nobles for privacy, the great hall was declining rapidly in importance; Henry VIII’s magnificent hall at Hampton Court was the last one built in England.
The great watching chamber often led off the great hall. In this room, hung with tapestries and furnished with buffets laden with gold plate, the Yeomen of the Guard stood on duty. Any courtier or servant was allowed to frequent this room, which also functioned as a venue for court entertainments or ceremonies; a dining room for the nobility, councillors, ambassadors, and chief officers of the household,27 and an antechamber for those awaiting an audience with the monarch. There was often a pages’ chamber attached to the great watching chamber, where courtiers could put on robes of estate before proceeding to the presence chamber to be ennobled by the King. At night, pages and Esquires of the Chamber slept on the floor of the watching chamber on straw pallets.
A door led from the great watching chamber into the presence chamber, or what we would now call the throne room. It was dominated by a great chair of estate on a dais, surmounted by a rich canopy of estate, which faced the door; no one, “of whatsoever degree,” might “come nigh the King’s chair nor stand under the cloth of estate.”28 This was the room where the sovereign held court, received ambassadors, and dined in state. When he was not present, courtiers might frequent the room, but they had to doff their caps and bow to the empty throne as they passed. The presence chamber was often the most richly furnished and decorated room in the palace, and certainly the most formal and ceremonial of the state rooms. As Henry’s reign progressed, more and more people were permitted access to it, and it consequently declined in importance. As a result, its functions would in time shift to the privy chamber.
The privy chamber, the King’s inner sanctum, was separated by a short passage from the presence chamber. Here he conducted his private life, usually took his meals, worked on state business, or relaxed. Access to this room and those behind it was strictly controlled: only the members of the Privy Chamber department and the King’s councillors had right of entry. Others had to wait for an invitation.
The privy chamber was usually a medium-sized room lavishly furnished with vivid tapestries, floor carpets, and a chair of estate. In the privy chamber at Greenwich there was also “a breakfast table of walnut tree, a round table covered with black velvet, a square table, a cupboard of wainscot, three joined forms with three stools, a table and a pair of trestles, a clock, a painted table,29 a standing glass of steel, a branch of flowers wrought upon wire, three comb cases of bone, four little coffers for jewels, a chair of joined work, one pair of regals30 with a case, one pair of tables of bone and wood31 in a case of leather, a pair of gridirons, a fire shovel and a fire fork.”32
The Privy Chamber was one of the two power centres of the court (the other being the Privy Council). Its staff were the King’s intimates; they were his chosen companions and performed every personal service for him, so they were therefore in a strong position to influence political affairs and act as Henry’s chief advisers.
Beyond the privy chamber was usually a small complex of inner chambers or privy lodgings which varied in size and number, depending on the dimensions of the palace. Often lined with timber linenfold panelling, and therefore somewhat dark, they included at least one bedchamber, a garderobe, a “withdrawing room,” a raying or robing chamber, a closet or oratory, and perhaps a study, library, or bathroom. These rooms later became known as the secret lodgings,33 and they were usually linked by a privy stair or gallery to the Queen’s apartments. The only courtier officially allowed entry to the privy lodgings was the Groom of the Stool, who was head of the Privy Chamber department.
Henry VIII’s formal bedchamber contained his massive bed of estate, but he normally slept in a second bedchamber beyond it. At Greenwich and Hampton Court he had a third bedchamber, on the Queen’s Side. Each of his bedchambers had a garderobe leading off it, and some also had a study next door. Comparatively little is known about Henry’s bedchambers because of the high degree of privacy he achieved.
Most privy lodgings had at least one closet. Closets were either used for storage or business or they were fitted out as oratories, where the King could perform his private devotions; at Hampton Court such a closet had a painted altarpiece,34 while the King’s “privy closet” there was used as a study and furnished with “cupboards, tables, boxes, chests and a clock.”35 In other closets, curios and objets d’art were displayed in glass cabinets. At Greenwich, one closet had coffers and chests crammed with such items.36Closets might also serve as libraries in the lesser houses.
Henry took a keen interest in planning the gardens around his palaces and stocking them with rare and beautiful plants.37 There were fewer varieties of flowers in England then; roses were naturally a particular favourite, and the damask rose is said to have been introduced into the country by Thomas Linacre, Henry’s physician.38 Among other flowers to be found were lilies, violets, primroses, gilliflowers, columbines, lavender, and daffodils, as well as a large variety of herbs, which were used in cooking and for medicines.
None of the Tudor royal gardens survive, but we know they were formal in design and initially mediaeval in style. The King’s privy gardens were usually accessible from his privy lodgings by a private stair, and they were screened by high walls and locked to all but members of the Privy Chamber. 39
Some gardens had lawns, others symmetrically placed flowerbeds edged with low railings or trellises and divided by a network of paths. Situated at intervals were striped poles bearing sculptures of the King’s heraldic animals (“the King’s Beasts”); there might be a sundial40 or trees shaped by topiary. Such a garden may be seen in the background of the portrait of Henry VIII and his family that is now at Hampton Court; the setting is Whitehall Palace. One feature of the period was the knot garden, with square beds edged with tiles, bricks, or box; the beds contained shrubs and flowers shaped into geometrical, interwoven patterns or “knots.” Henry VII had built such a garden at Richmond with “royal knots, alleyed and herbed,”41 and thus set a fashion.
Henry VIII built banqueting houses in many of his gardens, as well as fountains, and arbours of brick, stone, branches, or trellis, set against the wall. During Henry’s reign, French Renaissance influence began to manifest itself in the royal gardens, since the King had imported most of his gardeners from France. Soon, Renaissance features such as statues, columns, spheres, and urns would be introduced;42 Renaissance gardens were designed to please the senses and tease the intellect, so many decorative features had symbolic meanings. One of Henry’s chief pleasures was to walk in his gardens, and in the summer he often transacted business there with favoured ministers.
Many of Henry’s palaces were sketched by Anthony van Wyngaerde in the 1540s and 1550s; some were later the subjects of paintings by various artists. Although some are now known to be not entirely accurate, the pictures contain a wealth of detail and provide a unique visual record of these long-vanished buildings.