Nonetheless, Buckingham’s summons to court from Thornbury in April 1521, and arrest as he approached London, came suddenly and without warning. According to his indictment, he was accused of high treason for having ‘traitorously … conspired and imagined … to shorten the life of our sovereign Lord King’. The charges against him included listening to predictions (a dangerous hobby in Tudor times) by the Carthusian monk Nicholas Hopkins that the King would have no male heir, and that Buckingham would succeed him. Buckingham had also told his son-in-law, Ralph, Earl of Westmorland, that if anything but good should happen to the King, he was next in the line of succession, and these comments were repeated to the Lord High Steward’s court by three of his servants, who crucially appeared as witnesses against him. On the other hand, Buckingham was merely voicing a common sentiment; the Venetian ambassador, Sebastian Giustinian, had written in September 1519 that the Duke was ‘very popular’ and ‘were the King to die without heirs male, he might easily obtain the Crown’. By the early 1520s, however, Katherine of Aragon’s failure to produce a male heir made this a very sensitive point, and case law, if not statute, recognised imagining the King’s death in words as treason. These musings by an over-mighty subject who vaunted his royal blood were enough to assure his early death. As the chronicler Edward Hall remarked: ‘Alas the while that ever ambition should be the loss of so noble a man.’
Buckingham was executed on Tower Hill on 17 May 1521. In 1523, his lands were confiscated by the Crown and Thornbury became a royal demesne. As well as Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, the future Queen Mary I stayed here briefly as a child.
Building at Thornbury ceased after Buckingham’s execution. The contrast between the magnificent completed apartments at Thornbury, and the abandoned and unfinished north range, speaks poignantly of a glittering life cut short.
Today, Thornbury is reborn as an upmarket boutique hotel where you can stay in the sumptuous bedchamber where Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn stayed for ten days in 1535, in a room with arrow loops in the stone walls (for the full castle experience), or in a bedroom in which you have to tilt a cross to enter the bathroom.
CLOTHING IN TUDOR ENGLAND
Who could wear what was strictly regulated in Tudor society. Under Henry VIII, four Acts of Parliament introduced laws, known as sumptuary legislation, to define the dress of each rank of society. Only people of a certain status could wear certain types of cloth: only the King and his family could wear purple cloth of gold or purple silk; only an earl could wear sable fur; only a Knight of the Garter or above could wear a gown of crimson or blue velvet; and no one under the rank of gentleman — except graduates, yeomen, grooms and pages of the King’s and Queen’s households, and those with land to the value of £100 a year (about £40,000 today) — could wear velvet doublets or satin or damask gowns or coats. Clothes were meant to represent the natural social hierarchy.
Men’s clothes
The basic male outfit in Henry VIII’s day was a gown, doublet and hose. The gown was a loose-fitting garment, which hung to between mid-thigh and knee, with sleeves and a large collar that folded back over the shoulders. A voluminous gown exaggerated the shoulders to make a man look big, muscular and powerful, and would be made of the most expensive material an individual was allowed and could afford.
Underneath the gown was the doublet, which fitted to the upper body, fastened at the front with buttons and often had skirts. The finest doublets were made of velvet or satin, and could be richly decorated with gold cords, or slashed to show a layer of silk peeping through the slashes.
Below the doublet, a man wore breeches or upper stocks, which covered the waist to the thigh, and gathered at the knee. These again were often slashed to show off a silk lining. The codpiece was a separate item that laced to the hose and doublet. In the early Tudor period, it became so heavily padded that it appeared grotesquely inflated, and was a powerful symbol of virility. Men’s legs were shown off in clinging nether stocks or hose of silk, wool or taffeta, held up with garters.
These fashions and fine fabrics were for the elite, but ordinary men also wore a more simple version of this dress. Those lower down the social scale wore homespun coarse woollen cloth, and might exchange the doublet for a loose-fitting tunic or leather jerkin (short jacket). But every man, regardless of status, would wear a linen shift beneath his outer clothes. This layer, in contact with the skin, was the garment that was most often washed. Rich men had the collar and cuffs decorated with embroidery, known as blackwork. All men, too, wore a cap or bonnet of some sort.
Fashion evolved at Elizabeth I’s court. Men’s gowns got shorter, and the codpiece became outmoded. The male doublet was now padded at the stomach, and a short flared cloak or cape replaced the gown. Clothing became more elaborately decorated with embroidery, lace, slashing, braiding or pinking. Elizabeth loved her courtiers to dress finely, but compared to the masculinity-accentuating styles of the early sixteenth century, the Elizabethan trend was for a more effeminate style of dress. In fact, the narrow waists and swelling hips of men’s clothing at the end of the century appeared to echo the feminine figure of the monarch.
Women’s clothes
In the first half of the century, the basic item of female dress was a kirtle — a sleeveless dress with a square décolletage that fitted to the body and then fell to the ground. In the second half of the century, a ‘kirtle’ came to mean the skirt alone, with the bodice (meaning a ‘pair of bodies’, as front and back were two parts) made separately. The bodice was reinforced with boning and made of rich fabric.
On top of this was worn a gown or overdress. It opened at the front and was laced or pinned together. Sleeves were made separately and tied onto the bodice. In the early sixteenth century, it was fashionable to have large oversleeves on top of quilted undersleeves, which (having tried them myself) seriously restricted the movement of the arms.
Women’s undergarments included their own version of the linen shift or smock, a padded bum roll to pad out the skirt at the hips and multiple petticoats. From the 1550s, the farthingale came into fashion, although Katherine of Aragon had introduced it to England as far back as 1501. It was a hooped underskirt that gave a bell-shape to skirts (a little like a Victorian crinoline). Tudor women did not wear knickers.
The early sixteenth century headdress was an English gable hood, shaped like a little birdhouse and displaying the centre parting of the hair. Anne Boleyn introduced the French hood, a more flattering semi-circular hood worn further back on the head. Under the hood, women wore a linen cap or coif.
During Elizabeth I’s reign, especially after the introduction of starch to England in 1564, female dress became stiffer. The ruff — originally a frill on the collar of the linen smock (which had developed a high collar by mid-century) — became increasingly large and elaborate, until it had to be supported by a wire frame. The bodice extended to a point, often with the help of a stomacher, an inverted triangle of material reinforced with whalebone busks (strips inserted into the casing). Sleeves too were propped up with wires and whalebones, and became exaggeratedly puffed and padded. Finally, in the 1590s, the farthingale changed into a drum or wheel shape that carried the skirts out at right angles from the waist before then falling to the ground. All these fashions emphasised a desirable tiny waist.
‘Great, goodly, and so princely that we have not seen the like.’
Perhaps most famous now as the site of Britain’s biggest music festival, Glastonbury has an ancient and deeply spiritual history. Legend has it that Joseph of Arimathea travelled to Glastonbury bearing the Holy Grail, and the hawthorn bush you can see here is said to be an offshoot of his staff where he planted it in the ground. It is reputed to be the fabled Isle of Avalon where King Arthur was buried: in 1191, a coffin of a man and a woman with golden hair was unearthed under Glastonbury Abbey on the site where Arthur and Guinevere were said to be entombed. Glastonbury is also well known for its tor — a natural, 518-foot-high conical hill visible for miles — that
many hold to be an uncommonly mystical place, but in Tudor times, it became notorious for one particularly gruesome event.
In the early sixteenth century, Glastonbury Abbey was a vast and famous Benedictine monastery; the church at the Abbey, at 580 feet long, was the longest monastic church in the country. The central towers rose to 216 feet, two or three times the height of the remaining ruins of the Lady Chapel. It was important enough for Henry VII and his retinue to visit in 1497.
Like all the abbeys, Glastonbury would suffer as a result of the dissolution of the monasteries [see FOUNTAINS ABBEY]. Unlike most, however, not only the Abbey, but its abbot, too, would perish in the process.
When Henry VIII’s commissioners visited Glastonbury in September 1539, they reported that the Abbey was so ‘great, goodly, and so princely that we have not seen the like’, ‘a house meet for the King’s Majesty’. It held enormous wealth for the King’s coffers, but Henry was not going to get it without a fight: the abbot, Richard Whiting, refused to surrender the monastery.
The King’s commissioners set about building the case against him. They cross-examined the abbot, allegedly finding evidence of his ‘cankered and traitorous heart and mind’. They ransacked his study and discovered a book that opposed the King’s divorce from Katherine of Aragon. Finally, they came across a gold chalice, and other plate and ornaments that had been hidden from the commissioners ‘in walls, vaults, and other secret places’. They considered this embezzlement and ‘manifest robbery’. In all, Whiting’s crimes amounted to high treason. Though a ‘very weak man and sickly’, the abbot was confined to the Tower of London, and on 14 November he was tried and condemned.
If these deeds seem insufficient to qualify as treason, it is probably because they were: they were the pretext that Thomas Cromwell needed to get rid of Whiting because he was an obstacle to the King’s plans. A note in Cromwell’s files makes this clear. It reads, ‘Item the Abbot of Glastonbury to be tried at Glastonbury and also executed there with his accomplices.’ Not only does it order Whiting’s arraignment, it also assumes his guilt and decides his punishment before he had even been tried.
On 15 November 1539, after being dragged behind a horse through Glastonbury on a hurdle, Whiting was executed on the tor with two of his monks. The place was well chosen to magnify his misery. Standing on the blustery top of the tor, near the fourteenth-century St Michael’s Church tower, you can imagine that Whiting’s last sight would have been the turrets of his doomed abbey. He was hanged, quartered and beheaded: the quarters were displayed at Wells, Bath, Ilchester and Bridgwater, and his head was mounted on the gates at Glastonbury Abbey. An observer said that he and his monks ‘took their deaths patiently’.
Whiting’s real crime was to decline Henry VIII’s invitation to donate his monastery to the Crown, and he wasn’t the only one — Hugh Cooke, Abbot of Reading and Thomas Beche, Abbot of Colchester did so too. Beche expressly voiced his opposition to the dissolution and denied the King’s position as Supreme Head of the Church of England, allegedly saying ‘that those who made the King so were heretics’.
It is astonishing that from more than 800 religious houses, only three abbots stood up to defend the centuries-old monastic life from royal usurpation. Sadly, most surrendered their abbeys without a whimper. After the deaths of the Carthusian monks [see CHARTERHOUSE], of Thomas More and Bishop John Fisher, and of the Pilgrimage of Grace rebels of 1536, including many monks [see PONTEFRACT CASTLE], few dared to join Beche in calling the King and his advisers ‘wretched tyrants and bloodsuckers’.
As a result, by 1540, not a single monastery remained in all of England. Richard Whiting on Glastonbury Tor was one of the valiant few who refused to go gently, and he paid the price.
‘The magnificent house of my most worthy and, right Worshipful neighbour … Sir Edward Phillippes … so stately adorned with the statues of the nine Worthies.’
Traveller Thomas Coryate, 1611
Named after the nearby pointed hill (‘mons acutus’ in Latin), for many, Montacute is one of the most enchanting and endearing of all the Elizabethan mansions. It is a spectacularly beautiful house. Wrought out of the local tawny-coloured Ham Hill stone, it is grand and symmetrical, but neither too ostentatious nor too severe. Today it is an outpost of the National Portrait Gallery, displaying a wonderful selection of must-see Tudor portraits: the greatest collection you can find in one place outside the National Portrait Gallery itself.
The man responsible for building Montacute was Sir Edward Phelips, a Somerset lawyer and MP, who eventually became Speaker of the House of Commons and Master of the Rolls. He worked with a master mason called William Arnold, who also designed and built Wadham College, Oxford. Between them, they constructed a house that encapsulated the design values of the Elizabethans.
As the building records do not survive, we don’t know the exact dates of construction. The house is mentioned in William Camden’s Britannia of 1607, and there are three clues at Montacute itself to date it further: ‘1601’ is carved above the entrance on the west front, ‘1599’ features in the plasterwork overmantle in the dining room and a panel of heraldic stained glass in the Great Hall is dated ‘1599’. The date of completion is probably 1601, so the house must have been started by 1596 at the latest, and possibly as early as 1590.
Built on the usual ‘E’ pattern (for Elizabeth I), Montacute deliberately eschews the ‘quaint’ higgledy-piggledy style of houses like Little Moreton Hall for a symmetrical squareness. At the same time, with the addition of the curved gables, balustrade and statues of the Nine Worthies (historical, biblical and legendary heroes) on the upper floor of the east front, the result is a softened version of the more angular lines of Hardwick Hall.
Like Hardwick Hall, Montacute also has desirable, and expensive, acres of glass to light up the interior and provide gorgeous views over the surrounding countryside. Seen from a distance, the contrast between dark, glittering glass and honey-coloured stone is visually arresting, although it is this very combination of too much glass and easily eroded ham limestone that makes the structure of Montacute weak today.
The house was designed to be approached from the east front through a gatehouse that once stood between the two domed pavilions at the corners of the forecourt. These pavilions are decorative follies, intended for no use except to look pretty. Now, you’ll enter from the west and, when you do, you’ll find yourself inside a house that has barely changed since it was built.
The first room you encounter is the Great Hall, which retains its original oak panelling, chimneypiece and unusual stone screen with classical columns. Spot the arms of Elizabeth I in the centre of the heraldic stained-glass windows, which are also original. At the far end of the hall is a rather surprising inclusion: a plaster panel depicting a ‘stang ride’. This shows the story of a man who secretly helps himself to beer, only to be caught and hit on the head with a shoe by his wife. A neighbour spots them and the hen-pecked husband is humiliatingly paraded around the village ‘riding the stang’ (a wooden bar or pole), because he has allowed gender norms to be turned upside down. It says much about social relations under the Tudors: the man’s crime is not taking the beer, it is that his wife has authority over him. Hierarchy was everything, and that included men’s rule over women. Men who fell short in this respect would be shamed.
Four portraits on the ground floor are must-sees: one of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester; one, in the dining room, of Mary, Queen of Scots (probably derived from a miniature of her by Nicholas Hilliard in 1578); one of Jane Seymour (after Hans Holbein) in the library ante-room; and the last, of Montacute’s builder, Sir Edward Phelips himself, in the Great Hall.
On the floor above, the Great Chamber — now the library — is another impressive room with its original panelling, plaster frieze and forty-two shields of heraldic stained glass. The most striking feature is the magnificent chimneypiece with Corinthian columns made of Portland stone. Only the ceiling is Victorian.
Perhap
s the most remarkable room in the house is the Long Gallery, on the second floor, which stretches the entire length of the house. It is the longest of its kind to survive — 176 feet long — with semicircular oriel windows at each end that act as viewing bays. Here is where you’ll find the great collection of portraits.
In the first room, you’ll find notables from the reign of Henry VIII, including Sir Thomas Wyatt, the poet, painted around 1540, by an unknown artist. There is a picture of Kateryn Parr, from around 1545, looking severe and sporting the high-necked fashion of the period, but wearing a man’s bonnet. Thomas More’s portrait, after Holbein, shows him as Lord Chancellor, and here you can also see Sir William Petre, Secretary of State from 1544 to 1557. We also have Sir William Butts, one of Henry VIII’s over-worked physicians, and his jowly-cheeked patient, seen here in later life. Finally, we see Henry’s son in a regal profile picture of Edward VI from the studio of William Scrots.
Another room displays pictures of Elizabeth I and her court. Here is Elizabeth in a glorious painting known as the Armada Portrait, attributed to George Gower. Elizabeth, in her moment of triumph, drips in pearls (which was the Tudor symbol of virginity) and precious stones, and her rich attire is covered with gold stars. The cropped scenes behind her show fireships being sent to attack the Armada and the sinking of the fleet off the Irish coast. Nearby, note particularly portraits of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester from around 1575, the time of his last bid for Elizabeth’s hand [see KENILWORTH CASTLE]; Sir Christopher Hatton [see KIRBY HALL]; Sir Nicholas Throckmorton and Elizabeth Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury or ‘Bess of Hardwick’ [see HARDWICK HALL]. There is also a portrait of Sir Walter Ralegh replete with symbolism. Ralegh is decorated with pearls — symbolising his allegiance and devotion to the Virgin Queen — and wears a cloak that depicts the rays of the moon. There is a small crescent moon in one corner and the inscription in Latin reads ‘Love and virtue’. Ralegh is suggesting that Elizabeth is Cynthia, the moon goddess, endowed with supernatural powers.
Journey Through Tudor England Page 14