Henry continued to prize Eltham as a young man, extending and remodelling the palace during 1519—22. It was at Eltham that Cardinal Thomas Wolsey formulated a famous set of rules to regulate the royal household and court in 1526: the Eltham Ordinances. But Henry VIII was the last monarch to spend any considerable time at the palace, drawn back, no doubt, to his place of childhood abandon.
It is particularly regrettable then, that after the early sixteenth century, the palace was allowed to fall into decay. By the seventeenth century, parts of the palace had collapsed. During the eighteenth century, the ruined palace became a farm, and the Great Hall was used as a barn. Today, only the ragstone Great Hall, three fifteenth-century gables and the foundations of the royal apartments remain from the grand palace of Henry’s boyhood. Eltham may be famous now as a quintessentially art deco house but, with a little imagination, we can picture the place as the formative boyhood home of England’s most notorious monarch.
‘Upon each side of this goodly court … there are galleries with many windows full lightsome and commodious.’
All that remains of Henry VII’s great palace at Richmond is the red-brick palace gatehouse on Richmond Green (now in a road called The Wardrobe, testament to the buildings that once stood there) and the outer courtyard, now known as Old Palace Yard. As you look around you’ll see several signs marking the area where the palace once stood. Much of it was torn down during Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth and, in the eighteenth century, new buildings such as Trumpeter’s House were constructed out of the surviving Tudor materials. Yet, it is possible to get a sense of what this grand palace must have been like and see a glimpse of the character of the King whose coat of arms — the red dragon of Wales and the greyhound of Richmond — is still above the gate.
Henry VII became King at the Battle of Bosworth [see BOSWORTH] in 1485 at the age of just twenty-eight. He is chiefly remembered, when he is remembered at all, for his miserly avarice, secretive nature and sombre court, but these are qualities that should be more fairly associated with him only in the last few years of his life when, suffering from a recurrent illness, he grieved the loss of his wife, his firstborn son and many of his infant children, and feared greatly for the succession. Founding a dynasty is not without its anxieties.
Consider his position in 1485: having grown up in Wales, he had only once briefly been to England; he had no experience of governing, or training as a prince; he had spent fourteen years as a captive in exile in Brittany; and he had neither wealth nor land. Yet, this usurper rallied people around him and, once King, made prudent and effective decisions to consolidate his rule. He must have been a natural leader: confident, capable and charismatic enough to inspire support, and clever enough to maintain it. Sixteenth-century historian Polydore Vergil tells us that his ‘mind was brave and resolute’, that he was gracious and kind, and generous in hospitality, but severe with those who failed him. His appearance helped, as he was above average height (a Tudor trait), slender but strong and was ‘remarkably attractive’ with a cheerful face and small, blue eyes, though his teeth were ‘few, poor and blackish’.
One of his wise decisions was to marry Elizabeth of York, Edward IV’s eldest daughter, four months after Bosworth: in one stroke he finally managed to unite the warring houses of York and Lancaster. Eight months after their wedding, Elizabeth gave birth to the first of their eight children: Prince Arthur, born 19 September 1486.
But a king needs an heir and a spare, and Henry still faced threats to his throne. He established a 200-strong armed bodyguard for himself (the forerunners to the Yeomen of the Guard), as he was acutely aware that his claim to the throne was weaker than that of the Yorkist pretenders who would emerge during his reign.
The first was Lambert Simnel, who claimed to be Edward, Earl of Warwick, the son of Edward IV’s brother George, Duke of Clarence. Simnel was supported by John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, and was crowned King of England in Dublin in May 1487, before landing on the Cumbrian coast with 2,000 Dutch mercenaries in June. But, when it came to battle at Stoke, Simnel’s army was squarely defeated. What was more, Henry could demonstrate that he had the real Warwick in the Tower of London!
Another pretender to the throne, on the other hand, was not so easily dispatched. The curious case of Perkin Warbeck is shrouded in mystery to this day, and we will probably never know for sure whether he was in fact Richard, Duke of York — or Richard IV — the younger brother of Edward V, one of the ‘Princes in the Tower’ who had miraculously escaped, or simply a rank imposter. Certainly, it is true that Warbeck managed to convince Charles VIII, King of France; Margaret of York, who welcomed him as her nephew; Isabella of Spain; and Maximilian, the new Holy Roman Emperor, that he was the rightful king of England.
This foreign support created great instability for the new Tudor King, and it was a threat that rumbled on and on. Henry decided to act ruthlessly. In early 1495, he arrested and beheaded those he suspected of plotting Warbeck’s usurpation, including Sir William Stanley, his step-uncle who had courageously defected from Yorkist ranks in order to help him at Bosworth.
The destruction of local support meant that when Warbeck finally landed at Deal, Kent, in July 1495, his troops were quickly obliterated. And when — despite having the support of the Irish Earl of Desmond and James IV of Scotland — Warbeck’s second attempt to invade at Land’s End in 1497 with 8,000 men was met by the full force of Henry’s army, James IV saw the error of his ways. Warbeck’s troops were crushed, and he was finally executed in November 1499.
These had been troubling times and coupled with a Cornish insurrection (defeated in battle on Blackheath) and one final pretender, Ralph Wilford, the majority of Henry VII’s reign was marked by uncertainty and constant danger.
Henry cleverly used the marriages of his children to strengthen the new dynasty: Prince Arthur was betrothed to Katherine of Aragon in 1497 and they were married with great pomp in 1501. Subsequently, Princess Margaret married James IV of Scotland in August 1503. Nevertheless, despite the elimination of claimants to his throne, after 1500 the succession became more precarious: Henry’s third son died as an infant in June, and two years later his eldest son, Arthur, followed, leaving only Prince Henry as a male heir. Henry and Elizabeth comforted themselves with the prospect of more children: a daughter was born ten months after Arthur’s death, but both the baby and her mother died just days after the birth. Henry was plunged into years of grief and anxiety, during which he searched unsuccessfully for a new wife (even considering Katherine of Aragon’s sister, the unpromising-sounding Joanna the Mad), while his health steadily declined.
Richmond Palace, however, was a product of the rare period of his reign when Henry was most secure and contented. There had been a royal manor at Sheen since the twelfth century: Edward III had built a palace there, and died in it in 1377; Henry V had rebuilt it in 1413—1422, but the palace had burned down during Christmas 1497. This is when Henry VII decided to rebuild it, naming it after the title he held before he became King: Earl of Richmond.
Henry retained the shell of Henry V’s stone moated keep and added red-brick lodgings that went to three storeys high, with an enchanting series of four-storey turrets topped with gilded domes and pinnacles. Inside, the rooms were richly decorated with tapestries, painted ceilings and walls decked with gold roses and portcullises. Henry added, naturally, a Great Hall, chapel, fountains and a large outer courtyard. A visitor in 1501 noted that ‘upon each side of this goodly court … there are galleries with many windows full lightsome and commodious’. Such extravagant use of glass was rare — and expensive. Set in a deer park and surrounded by ‘most fair and pleasant’ gardens, Richmond cost Henry £20,000 (around £6 million today). Some of the oaks in the present-day Richmond Park are old enough to have been seen by Henry VII, and he might even have hunted some of the ancestors of the deer that still roam here.
The palace was a way of signalling Henry’s magnificence and invulnerability. Like his constant w
arfare against pretenders, it depended on his creative brilliance in finding new ways to extract revenue from his subjects: such brilliance that, by the end of his reign, many felt him to be, in fact, greedy and rapacious. It was not for nothing that Lord Mountjoy wrote on Henry VIII’s accession, ‘Avarice is expelled from the country.’ How wrong Mountjoy’s proclamation would prove to be by the time Henry VIII was finished with the throne!
Henry VII died late at night on Saturday 21 April 1509 at Richmond Palace. It was also at Richmond that his granddaughter, Elizabeth I, died in 1603. But while Elizabeth is remembered, Henry VII, like Richmond Palace itself, was quickly forgotten. This incomplete monument reminds us of the Tudor we have neglected: Henry VII, the first monarch of the dynasty.
‘Hampton Court is a Royal Palace, magnificently built with brick … consisting of noble edifices in very beautiful work.’
Paul Hentzner, visiting German tourist, 1598
Hampton Court Palace is arguably the finest remaining Tudor palace; it was certainly one of Henry VIII’s favourites. In the sixteenth century, this Tudor palace was even more magnificent, but William III and Mary II demolished some of the Tudor buildings in the late seventeenth century, replacing them with their baroque palace, meaning that today Hampton Court is a palace of two halves.
The first sight of the Tudor palace is of the Great Gatehouse, built by Cardinal Thomas Wolsey — Lord Chancellor of England, papal legate and Henry VIII’s right-hand man — in 1522, and lowered in 1772 from its original five storeys. The Gatehouse bears two terracotta roundels featuring busts of Roman emperors (there are another nine in the palace) that were commissioned by Wolsey from Florentine sculptor Giovanni da Maiano to symbolise Henry’s good rule. Unfortunately, Wolsey unwittingly chose two of Rome’s worst tyrants, Nero and Tiberius, as his exemplars!
Externally, early Tudor houses often give the impression of being fortified and defensible. You will usually see crenulations, battlements, turrets and gatehouse towers. For the most part, however, these were decorative features, rather than offering any real hope of defence.
Hampton Court is a good example: crenulated like a castle, it is nevertheless utterly indefensible, and was from the very beginning intended to be a palace of pleasure, where Wolsey and Henry VIII could entertain foreign ambassadors, feast, hunt and joust. The first courtyard, Base Court, built by Wolsey, testifies to this role: it is surrounded by forty apartments, which, with their two rooms, private garderobe (or lavatory) and fireplace, would have been the height of luxury for visiting guests. The wine fountain you can see in this courtyard is a recent installation on the site of an original fountain or conduit, and is modelled on the fountain in the Field of Cloth of Gold painting in the permanent ‘Young Henry VIII’ exhibition [see also LEEDS CASTLE]. Wolsey also built Clock Court, now named after the wonderful astronomical clock made for Henry VIII in 1540 by Nicholas Oursian, Deviser of the King’s Horologies (or ‘clockmaker’), that you can see on Anne Boleyn’s gatehouse. As well as showing the time and date, it displays the phases of the moon and the times of the tides, and features the sun orbiting the earth. (Just three years after it was made, Copernicus would discover that it was, conversely, the earth that orbited the sun.)
Although Wolsey had always referred to Hampton Court as Henry’s palace, and had built suites for both the King and Queen, Henry properly acquired the palace when Wolsey fell from grace in 1529. He spent £60,000 extending it over ten years: roughly equivalent to £19 million today. Among his additions were tennis courts, bowling alleys, a tiltyard (for jousting), the extraordinary Great Kitchens and his magnificent Great Hall with its spectacular hammer-beam ceiling. Of these, only the Great Kitchens and Great Hall survive today (although you can see some remaining towers from the tiltyard in the grounds, one of them emerging from the eponymously named Tiltyard Café).
The Great Hall was used for feasts, masques and revels, and twice-daily meals when the court was in residence. On the most lavish occasions, it would have been hung with the priceless tapestries that adorn it today. These Abraham Tapestries that Henry had woven in the Brussels workshop of Willem de Kempaneer at vast expense in the early 1540s, signify that, like Abraham, Henry saw himself a patriarch, making a new covenant with God and being granted, in return, a son and heir late in life. If you look closely at the tapestries on the Walls of Hampton Court’s Great Hall, now tarnished by age, you can still see they are woven with threads of real gold and silver and would have glittered dazzlingly in candlelight.
Although the Great Hall was built for Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, Anne was not alive to see it when it was finished in 1536. Indeed, the workmen had to quickly knock out the carvings of her heraldic beast, the falcon, and replace them with the panther of Henry’s new Queen, Jane Seymour; but they missed a couple, which can still be seen high in the rafters today.
There are, in fact, visual cues and lingering memories of all Henry’s wives in the palace. Look out for the pomegranate of Katherine of Aragon above the buttery door and the leather mâché badges on the ceiling of the Great Watching Chamber (completed in 1537), some of which feature Jane Seymour’s badge of a crowned phoenix rising from a castle between two rose bushes. Further down the Processional Gallery, Henry VIII’s Council Chamber (possibly one of two) was where a treaty of marriage between Henry VIII and Anne of Cleves was signed in 1539, and it was in the Royal Pew, or Holyday Closet, of the Chapel Royal that Henry reportedly found a letter left for him by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, detailing the infidelities of his fifth wife, Katherine Howard — the day after the kingdom had given thanks in prayer for his happy marriage [see PONTEFRACT CASTLE]. Since her subsequent beheading, visitors have reported seeing Katherine’s ghost running screaming up and down the ‘Haunted Gallery’, attempting to plead with Henry for her life. There are also happier memories here: Henry married his last wife, Kateryn Parr on 12 July 1543 in the Queen’s Privy Closet at Hampton Court, before a select audience of only nineteen people.
The central story of Hampton Court, as the commissioning of the Abraham Tapestries reveals, is that this was the birthplace of Henry’s only legitimate son and heir, Edward, later King Edward VI. After an excruciating labour of two days and three nights, Jane gave birth to Edward on 12 October 1537. These glad tidings were long awaited, and one letter to Henry VIII expressed the mood of the kingdom when it congratulated him on ‘the most joyful news that has come to England these many years of the birth of a prince’. Prince Edward’s christening in the Chapel at Hampton Court on 15 October was an ostentatious and impressive affair. Under its gorgeous blue and gold-starred ceiling, with its baby-faced gilt cherubs, the great and good of Tudor England assembled for a ceremony that lasted for hours.
The apartments that were built for the new young prince are still standing, and you can see them on the left of Chapel Court. The Royal Collection paintings at Hampton Court also evoke this heritage. In the Processional Gallery, you can see a seventeenth-century copy of the Whitehall Mural by Remigius van Leemput [see THE WALKER ART GALLERY] that recreates, in miniature, a painting that was almost certainly finished when Jane was pregnant with Edward. A full-length portrait of the boy-king, nearby, mimics his father’s famous stance in the mural. Finally, The Family of Henry VIII painting of 1545 outside the Chapel Royal depicts Henry VIII at the proud centre of his family, between the young Edward, his favourite wife, Jane Seymour, and Princesses Mary and Elizabeth. (The other two figures are almost certainly Henry’s court fool, Will Somer, and a female fool called Jane.)
The only trouble is that this last picture is fictional. Jane Seymour did not live until 1545; in fact, she never left the childbed where she had so victoriously given Henry his much desired son. Just two weeks after Edward’s birth, she died of puerperal sepsis, or childbed fever. Her heart and innards are buried in the chapel, while the procession to her funeral at St George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle started from Hampton Court. The joys and griefs of Henry VIII echo off the walls of this, his most incre
dible surviving palace.
AN HEIR AND A SPARE
Henry VIII’s life was dogged and determined by his hope of having sons. He, and most people of his time, believed that one of his most important tasks as King was to provide at least one adult male heir to succeed him peacefully when he died.
This was not misogyny on Henry’s part; rather, there was no precedent of female rule: England had never had a crowned queen regnant (a ruling queen, as opposed to a queen consort). In the twelfth century, Matilda, the daughter of Henry I, had succeeded to the throne and was immediately challenged by her cousin, Stephen of Blois. Their struggle for the throne led to civil war in England, and Matilda was never crowned. Henry VIII feared that if one of his daughters succeeded him, it would prompt civil war or, worse, she would marry a foreign prince and bring England under the rule of a foreign power (as indeed did occur when Mary I married Philip II of Spain). For this reason, in sixteenth-century France, under the ‘Salic law’, women were not able to succeed to the throne.
So Henry needed a son. He also needed that son to be at least fifteen years old by the time of his death. Children could not rule alone and, instead, would be governed by a regent or group of councillors. This was never ideal — as the example of Richard III and the ‘Princes in the Tower’ had shown, regents were not always to be trusted, and if there were many councillors, their tussle for power over a young king might also endanger the peace and security of the country.
Journey Through Tudor England Page 5