Journey Through Tudor England

by Suzannah Lipscomb

  The Great Hall is one of the parts of Kirby to retain its ceiling, which helps conjure up its original state. Blue panels with unpainted oak beams recreate its original appearance. Stairs lead up from the hall to what was once the Long Gallery: a small section of the plaster decoration of the original ceiling of the gallery survives. Hatton’s real legacy at Kirby is, however, the state suite, with the Great Withdrawing Chamber and Best Bedchamber built in hope of that all-important visitor. It was here that James I stayed when he visited in 1619. Although the interiors were significantly altered in the eighteenth century, the original double bay windows remain one of Kirby’s most stunning features, and must be seen from the gardens to be appreciated. They were a magnificent statement of intent, but Hatton had little opportunity to enjoy them. In a letter of 1583 he planned his first visit to Kirby and added ‘leaving my other shrine, I mean Holdenby, still unseen, until that holy saint may sit in it to whom it is dedicated’.

  Sadly, Hatton’s ‘holy saint’ never made it to either Kirby or Holdenby. The cost of building these abandoned palaces was ruinous; on Hatton’s small salary as Vice Chamberlain of the Royal Household, he could not afford them. When he died, he left an enormous debt of £42,139 5s (today equivalent to £6.3 million). Elizabeth had ultimately made a ‘crab’ of him. Ironically, however, she did visit him four times at his London house, staying with him for five days and nursing him herself during his last illness in November 1591. He had given everything he had to serve her. It is poignant that his portrait [see NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY] pictures him clutching her image in his fingers, devoted in perpetuity. Kirby is symbolic, therefore, of the whole of Hatton’s life: a whimsical offering to a monarch, which was ultimately in vain.

  Sir Christopher Hatton’s principal house was at Holdenby, where he built a vast and gorgeous palace between 1570 and 1583. It was elegantly symmetrical and had two grand courts, with mullioned windows, Doric columns and onion domes. Courtier Thomas Heneage described it in Hatton’s day:

  For my own opinion, Holdenby is altogether the best house that hath been built in this age; and it more showeth the good judgement and honour of the builder than all the charge that hath been bestowed upon stones by the greatest persons and the best purses that hath been in my time.

  Two archways from the Green or Base Court dated 1583, and very much like those at Kirby, survive. Hatton’s debts meant that his descendants had to sell the house to the Crown, and much of the rest of Holdenby was demolished in 1650. The house that remains on the site is variously described as the kitchen wing of the original palace that was restored in the nineteenth century, or as being built in the nineteenth century in a style reminiscent of the old. Either way, the interiors are entirely nineteenth century, and this pretty house occupies only a small portion of the original great house.

  THE ELIZABETHAN ‘PRODIGY’ HOUSES

  Architectural fashion changed considerably in the second half of the sixteenth century. While Henry VIII had been a builder of palaces, Elizabeth I, well equipped with those her father had bequeathed her, let her suitors do the building for her. Across the country, they built mansions in the hope of impressing her; many of them were even laid out in the shape of an ‘E’ for ‘Elizabeth’. The key aesthetic for these prodigy houses, such as Burghley House, Kirby Hall, Holdenby House and Hardwick Hall, was symmetry. From the outside, a house needed to reveal a graceful order and proportion. This meant drawing on the expertise of master masons (the word ‘architect’ only began to be introduced to England at this time) such as Robert Smythson, John Symonds and William Arnold, who constructed many of the best.

  As well as impressing the Queen, a grand house could also demonstrate one’s classical learning: this explains the rising fashion for classical columns and pilasters (flattened columns), and the replacement of the serpentine, corkscrew brick chimneys of the early Tudors (seen at Thornbury, Ludlow and Framlingham) with chimneys instead shaped like columns, in small groups of twos and threes. Domes, cupolas, turrets and pinnacles all adorned the rooftops of these wonder houses, proclaiming wealth and magnificence from afar.

  The Elizabethan courtier’s house was expected to have big, decorative windows. The little rhyme, ‘Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall’ referred to this trend for huge expanses of expensive glass. The effect was to create houses that glittered brightly at night, lighting up the surrounding area so much that they became known as ‘lantern houses’.

  Inside, however, the purpose and arrangement of the rooms was much the same as the early Tudor great house. The Great Chamber became increasingly important and, as such, was usually the most richly dressed room in the house. Precious tapestries from the Low Countries were the wall covering of choice. Failing that, the early Tudor linenfold panelling (wood carved to mimic folds of cloth) was replaced by more ornate, ostentatious designs. Either way, the walls were surmounted by plasterwork or painted friezes. Ceilings dripped with plasterwork arranged into elaborate geometric patterns, and stained glass, inlaid panelling, flamboyant overmantles, coats of arms and other heraldic devices displaying the family’s powerful connections were on show for all to see. As Great Chambers were frequently on the first floor, the stairs too became more ornate. The classical Tudor staircase at Burghley House is a splendid example of this.

  Another Elizabethan addition was the Long Gallery. These had been around earlier in the century — Lord Sandys added one to the The Vyne in the 1520s and Henry VIII installed one at Nonsuch Palace in 1538 — but they really took off in the last decades of Elizabeth’s reign. They were places to exercise indoors in poor weather, and even when it was sunny: for both men and women of high status, pale, alabaster skin was desirable. Combine a long gallery with decorative oriel windows, as at Montacute House, and you have a room with a view.

  ‘John Dee, a married priest, given to magic and uncanny arts.’

  Secret (and erroneous) report sent to Jesuit Francis Borgia, 1568

  Many of the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge are rich in Tudor architecture and history, but there are two neighbouring colleges in Cambridge that are worth particular attention. The gorgeous red-bricked front of St John’s was built in 1515 by John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester to honour Lady Margaret Beaufort, Henry VII’s mother. On its Great Gate, two yales (mythical creatures that are part goat, part antelope, part elephant) proudly bear her coat of arms. In 1546, Henry VIII amalgamated two earlier colleges with a new one to create Trinity, now the largest college in Cambridge. Trinity’s Great Gate of 1530 flaunts a statue of its founder with an orb and what should be a sceptre (the sceptre was stolen long ago, however, and ignominiously replaced with a chair leg). The two colleges are between them responsible for educating many famous alumni, including a trifecta of Williams (Cecil, Wordsworth and Wilberforce); Isaac Newton; and Lord Byron; while there is one person whose story they share: the fascinating, enigmatic and mysterious Dr John Dee.

  Dee — astronomer, mathematician, astrologer, cartographer, alchemist, secret agent and magician — is without doubt one of the most colourful characters of the Tudor, or any, period. Dee joined St John’s in 1542 at the age of fifteen to read for his undergraduate degree. St John’s would have looked very similar to how it looks today, at least in the first courtyard (First Court), which already had the stunning red-brick east wing that can be seen from the street and the ornate carved Tudor rose and portcullis above the entrance to Screens Passage. Dee would have studied in the college’s first library, to the left of Great Gate as you enter, on the first floor. An additional brick courtyard, Second Court, was constructed in Dee’s lifetime in 1598—99 (look out for the gutter heads spelling out the year of completion), with two fashionable oriel windows and a long gallery on the first floor of the north side, which retains its Elizabethan plaster ceiling and wood panelling.

  In recognition of his success at St John’s, Dee was elected a Fellow and Under-Reader in Greek at next-door Trinity in 1546. Fifty years later, in 1593, Trinity was substantially overha
uled by its master, Thomas Nevile, who moved the clock tower from its original position by the sundial to create Great Court — which was the largest courtyard in Europe — and added Queen’s Gate at the far side of the court, with its statue of Elizabeth I. But the Trinity of Dee’s youth is not all gone. Henry VIII had created Trinity out of King’s Hall and Michaelhouse, and the medieval buildings of King’s Hall are still standing, including part of the cloister walkway and Vigani’s Room. This room has remained essentially unchanged since the time of Richard II while, in the early eighteenth century, it was used as a laboratory by Isaac Newton himself. The spandrel at the entrance arch bears the arms of Richard III. One can imagine Dee looking up at King’s Hall or pacing on the Bowling Green, then the Fellows’ Garden, as he prepared to stage his production of Aristophanes’s Pax with its mechanical flying scarab beetle — the act that first convinced everyone he was a conjuror.

  In these early years, Dee was furiously absorbing knowledge about science, astrology and mathematics, which he was later to align with alchemy, magic and the supernatural. People like Dee gave rise to the concept of the Renaissance man, in an age where it was still possible to be expert in many fields of knowledge that were not yet fully separated by the rigid divisions that characterise them today. He visited the Continent soon after his election to Trinity and met the famed cartographer Gerardus Mercator. Dee returned with two Mercator globes and various wonderful mathematical instruments that he donated to the college. After Trinity, he spent a further two years studying at the University of Louvain, and in 1550 was asked to lecture, to packed halls, in Paris.

  Dee’s activities soon found him in need of financial patronage to continue his scholarship. William Cecil, Lord Burghley recommended him to Edward VI in 1551 and from this, Dee received an ongoing living from two rectories. He did not initially favour so well under Mary. He was arrested in 1555 for calculating the ‘nativities’ of Mary, her husband Philip and the Princess Elizabeth in order to cast their horoscopes, and accused of conjuring and witchcraft. Here we have the first indication of Dee’s incredible, persuasive charm: he convinced the fearsome Bishop Bonner of his orthodoxy and, rather than burning for heresy, was named Bonner’s chaplain. He was even commissioned by Mary to collect and preserve the ancient and medieval manuscripts dispersed from the monasteries by the Reformation, which became the basis of an extraordinary library: by 1583, with 3,000 books and 1,000 manuscripts, Dee had the largest private library in England. Nor did his favour with Mary hamper his relations with the new monarch, Elizabeth, whose handlers hired him to calculate the most astrologically auspicious day for Elizabeth’s coronation.

  Dee’s work was developing a reputation. His Propaeduemata Aphoristica, published in 1558, explored what might be called astrological physics: the influence of the movements of the sun, moon and planets on earthly events, and the forces of attraction in the cosmos. From the perspective of the modern mind, his thinking was part scientific: he was interested in the ebb and flow of tides, as if prefiguring Newton’s work on gravity; and part magical: he believed the rays emanating from these heavenly bodies could affect human souls.

  In an age when the lines between what was science and what was magic were less clear than today, Dee was vulnerable to the charge that he was a ‘conjuror’ — something he always strongly denied. As he explained in his ‘Mathematical preface’ to an English translation of Euclid’s Elements of Geometrie, he was simply interested in putting mathematical principles into practice. Science and magic also mixed in Dee’s increasing preoccupation with alchemy. In 1565, he settled in Mortlake, Surrey, and built laboratories in which to search for the philosopher’s stone — the fabled substance that would turn lead into gold. Ten years later, Elizabeth I paid him a visit at a most inopportune time: the day that Dee was burying his wife, Katherine. Nevertheless, he found time to show her some of his magical equipment including a distorting mirror, which might be the black obsidian mirror that can be seen today in the British Museum. (Dee soon remarried, to Jane Fromond of Cheam, who was thirty years his junior.)

  Dee was also called on for his geographical and navigational skills. In 1580, he presented two rolls to the Queen and Lord Burghley ‘proving’ that early Britons, including King Arthur, had visited North America which, he argued, gave England rights to conquest and colonisation in the New World: a brilliant piece of ex post facto history serving political interests. Remarkably, he was the first to coin the term ‘British Impire’ (in its original spelling). He was also frequently consulted on the search for passages through the north-east and north-west, and advised Martin Frobisher, who brought back a piece of ore from the New World that was mistakenly believed to be gold. It was in this role as ‘intelligencer’ on new lands and voyages that he may have worked as a secret agent for Elizabeth I. He signed his secret messages to the Queen with two zeros and a reverse long-division sign, making him the original ‘007’.

  Things began to go wrong for Dee in 1582. In his alchemical search, he became obsessed with the esoteric world of scrying (almost literally crystal ball gazing), and was assisted by a man of dubious integrity called Edward Kelley. Kelley and Dee believed they could receive knowledge direct from angels that had been lost to mankind since the prophet Enoch. Over the next seven years, the pair became inseparable, and their search for the secret of transmuting metals into gold took them as far away as Bohemia and Poland. They finally fell out after Kelley received the message that he and Dee should hold everything in common, including swapping wives for one night.

  Dee returned home destitute in 1589, and things deteriorated from there: his library and laboratory had been ransacked; his brother-in-law refused to return his house; and his eight children needed feeding. Little is known of his life in his later years, when his diary falls silent, except that forced by poverty he took a post as Warden of Christ’s College, Manchester, where many of his children and his wife died of the plague in March 1605.

  Dee died in 1609. Despite his many works and great renown, his early promise, which first emerged at St John’s and Trinity, was never fully realised. He spent his life and brilliance chasing white rabbits, but found only dead ends.

  Other Tudor treasures to see: Trinity has a copy, after Holbein, of the portrait of Henry VIII from the Whitehall Mural, which presides over the hall. Here, too, are portraits of Francis Bacon; Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex; and Mary I in 1554, after Antonis Mor. The Elizabethan Master’s Lodge also has a Tudor drawing room that contains portraits of all six of Henry VIII’s wives: this is open to the public once a year. Trinity Chapel was completed in 1567, although the woodwork is baroque and Georgian. In Vigani’s Room are Elizabethan bowls, made of negrum (a tropical hard wood), and the Wren Library, designed by Sir Christopher Wren in the seventeenth century, contains great treasures including, on display, a copy of Shakespeare’s first folio.

  ‘I beseech you for the love that has been between us, and, the love of God, let me have some justice.’

  Peterborough Cathedral is the final resting place of Katherine of Aragon: possibly the most abused and neglected Queen in England’s history.

  People have worshipped on the site of Peterborough Cathedral since 655. The current cathedral (it was an abbey until 1541) was started in 1118 after a fire destroyed an earlier building. With its beautiful thirteenth-century Gothic west front, this striking cathedral looks very much as it would have done when Katherine of Aragon was buried here in 1536. Even the early sixteenth-century blue and gold starred ceiling at the east end above the High Altar and the intricate vaulted ceiling of the New Building would have been in place.

  Although it is also the former burial place of Mary, Queen of Scots (her son, James VI and I, removed her body to Westminster Abbey in 1612), it is Katherine’s grave that has become a place of pilgrimage. When I last visited, someone had laid pomegranates, fresh flowers and palm crosses on her tomb. The cathedral still holds a remembrance service for her every year in January. There is still sympathy f
or this constant, faithful but abandoned first wife after 500 years, and after what she went through, who would begrudge her this honour?

  Katherine, born ‘Catalina’ in December 1485, was the fifth child of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile. Her early life was spent travelling through Spain with her illustrious parents, and she lived at the Palace of the Alhambra from 1499 to 1501. She later adopted the pomegranate, the symbol of Granada, as her badge.

  At the age of three, she was betrothed to the English prince, Arthur. Since the wedding was scheduled to take place after Arthur turned fourteen, Katherine lived her entire life knowing she would be Queen of England. Highly educated, with pretty auburn hair, she left her parents and her homeland in September 1501, as a teenager, landing in Plymouth on 2 October. Apart from a very brief visit by her sister, Juana, in February 1506, Katherine would never see her family again.

  The would-be Queen arrived in London on 12 November 1501 in a magnificent procession. Just two days later she married her young bridegroom at St Paul’s. But within six months, Katherine was a widow: Arthur died on 2 April 1502 [see LUDLOW CASTLE]. Later, when her marriage to Arthur’s brother, Henry, was challenged, she would swear that her marriage to Arthur had never been consummated.

  Katherine was moved to Durham House in London and, on 23 June 1503, it was agreed that she would marry the new heir, Henry, when he reached fifteen, three years later. So she waited. It must have been a terrible time for her. Consider: widowed, purposeless, her planned marriage far from certain, separated from her family in a country where she did not speak the language and kept in relative poverty by her father-in-law: it is no wonder that she was frequently ill. A recent biography by Giles Tremlett suggests that during these years Katherine displayed the symptoms of an eating disorder, such as anorexia nervosa, and regularly went several months without menstruating. In the spring of 1509, she wrote to her father, ‘it is impossible for me any longer to endure what I’ve gone through … I’m still suffering from the unkindness of the King and the manner in which he treats me’. She begged to return to Spain to join a convent.