Journey Through Tudor England Read online

  A Journey Through

  TUDOR

  ENGLAND

  SUZANNAH LIPSCOMB

  PEGASUS BOOKS

  NEW YORK LONDON

  To my husband, Drake, for his long-suffering of my sojourns in the sixteenth century, and for having unwittingly become a Tudor traveller himself.

  Introduction

  London and Greater London

  The Tower of London

  National Portrait Gallery

  Tudor Portraiture

  Westminster Abbey

  Charterhouse

  Lincoln’s Inn

  Guildhall

  Eltham Palace

  Richmond Palace, Surrey

  Hampton Court Palace, Surrey

  An Heir and a Spare

  South East

  St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, Berkshire

  The Mary Rose, Hampshire

  Winchester Cathedral, Hampshire

  The Vyne, Hampshire

  Royal Progesses

  Hever Castle, Kent

  Leeds Castle, Kent

  Food in Tudor England

  Penshurst Place, Kent

  The Early Tudor Great Hall

  Rochester Castle, Kent (with Allington Castle)

  Christ Church College, Oxford, Oxfordshire

  Broad Street, Oxford, Oxfordshire

  Loseley Park, Surrey

  Arundel Castle, West Sussex

  South West

  Pendennis and St Mawes Castles, Cornwall

  Buckland Abbey, Devon

  The Spanish Armada

  Sherborne Castle, Dorset (with Sandford Orcas Manor House)

  Hailes Abbey, Gloucestershire

  Sudeley Castle, Gloucestershire

  Thornbury Castle, Gloucestershire

  Clothing in Tudor England

  Glastonbury Tor and Abbey, Somerset

  Montacute House, Somerset

  West Midlands

  Ludlow Castle, Shropshire (with Castle Lodge)

  Tutbury Castle, Staffordshire

  Kenilworth Castle, Warwickshire

  Shakespeare’s birthplace, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire

  Elizabethan Theatre

  Harvington Hall, Worcestershire

  East Midlands

  Bosworth Battlefield, Leicestershire

  Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire

  Social Climbing the Tudor Way

  Burghley House, Lincolnshire

  Kirby Hall, Northamptonshire (with Holdenby House)

  The Elizabethan Prodigy Houses

  East of England

  St John’s and Trinity Colleges, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire

  Peterborough Cathedral, Cambridgeshire

  Hatfield Old Palace, Hertfordshire

  Tudor Sports and Pastimes

  Kett’s Oak, Wymondham, Norfolk

  The Shrine at Walsingham, Norfolk

  St Mary’s Church, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

  The Church of St Michael, Framlingham, Suffolk (with Framlingham Castle)

  North East, North West, Yorkshire and the Humber

  Gawsworth Hall, Cheshire

  Little Moreton Hall, Cheshire

  The Typical Tudor House

  The Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, Merseyside

  Pontefract Castle, West Yorkshire

  Fountains Abbey, North Yorkshire (with Whitby Abbey)

  Acknowledgements

  Further Reading

  Appendix: Opening Times and How to Get There

  Index

  ‘I have so travelled in your dominions both by the seacoasts and the middle parts … that there is almost neither … cities, burgs, castles, principal manor places, monasteries, and colleges, but I have seen them, and noted in so doing a whole world of things very memorable.’

  John Leland’s Itinerary, written 1539—45 and dedicated to Henry VIII

  Igrew up very near the site of Nonsuch Palace. Its very name, ‘None-such’, conjured up a mythical, fabled palace without parallel. The streets nearby had names like ‘Anne Boleyn’s Walk’, ‘Aragon Avenue’ and ‘Tudor Close’. Hampton Court, with its profusion of twisted chimneys, was not all that far away. I remember as a child going to fairs, riding and even ice-skating in its shadow. Somewhere along the line, these childhood moments sowed the seeds of a lifelong fascination with the Tudors. I don’t think I’m the only one.

  As a nation, we have a continuing obsession with our notorious ‘Bluebeard’ Henry VIII, and our famed ‘Gloriana’ Elizabeth I. Their lives — one much married, the other unmarried — are part of our common currency of ideas. Their age attracts us because it has all the best stories: the break from Rome and Catholicism, wives beheaded or cast aside, boy-kings, dissolved monasteries, Protestant martyrs, the Spanish Armada, New Worlds, and some of the best characters: Shakespeare, Holbein, Anne Boleyn, Francis Drake and Walter Ralegh.

  Somewhere in this mix, the Tudors define what it means to be English. Through the translation of the Bible into English, the establishment of the Church of England, the founding of the navy, the beginnings of empire and the defence against the threat of foreign invasion, the Tudors represent the foundations of much of our corporate culture and historic identity. When the Channel Tunnel opened in 1994, the two figures chosen to represent England and France in great mock-ups were the sixteenth-century rival kings Henry VIII and Francis I. Who else but Henry VIII could capture Englishness so completely?

  The sixteenth century is also one of the first periods from which we have an overwhelming amount of surviving material. Our documentary sources are vast: chronicles, letters, ambassadorial accounts, poems, plays, treatises and state papers fill our National Archives. We have portraits of the Tudor monarchs painted from life, unlike those that came before, and sixteenth-century houses are still the ideal cottages in the countryside to which middle England aspires. Above all, we have extraordinary grand houses, palaces, churches and castles that evoke a time past and a heritage shared. This book is a way into exploring that history.

  TUDOR TIMELINE

  This book is intended to be both a practical handbook to fifty of the best and most interesting Tudor houses, palaces and castles, and a colourful introduction to the key characters, stories and events of the Tudor age. It is designed to be a companion both to the visitor to these fifty sites, and to the historical visitor to the Tudor period.

  Any attempt to draw up a list of fifty Tudor places would find its critics, but there has been reason at work in the choosing, and I thought it might be helpful to explain the criteria by which places have made it into this book.

  The first principle was that there must exist something worth seeing.

  Not every important Tudor site has been preserved. So many Tudor houses, palaces and buildings did not survive: William Cecil, Lord Burghley’s great house at Theobalds (pronounced ‘Tibbles’); Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk’s mansion at Kenninghall; Nonsuch Palace; Greenwich Palace; the Old St Paul’s Cathedral; Bedlam Hospital for the mad. In London, only sacred sites like churches and the stone-built Guildhall survived the Great Fire of 1666. The London houses of Sir Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex, among many others, have been lost to us. When something does survive of these lost places from the sixteenth century, such as the Gatehouse at Richmond Palace, the panels from Nonsuch Palace at Loseley Park or the arches at Holdenby, I have included them.

  This means that some of the sites I have chosen are ruins: Tutbury Castle, Hailes Abbey and Kenilworth, Pontefract and Ludlow castles, but they are evocative, and the places important.

  Many are, however, glorious buildings of great architectural importance: Montacute House, Hardwick Hall, Hampton Court, Burghley House and Kirby Hall ar
e all spectacular, and I’ve included some gems like Little Moreton Hall and Gawsworth Hall — beautiful examples of black and white wattle-and-daub gentry housing — or the simple yet elegant Sandford Orcas Manor House, a sixteenth-century stone house in Somerset.

  But not all are houses. There are fortresses and castles such as the Tower of London, Pendennis Castle and Rochester Castle. There are also abbeys and monasteries such as Fountains Abbey, Walsingham, Glastonbury and Charterhouse, which have important stories to tell about the religious changes afoot in sixteenth-century England.

  Some too are tombs: we travel to the tomb of Mary Tudor, Henry VIII’s sister, in Bury St Edmunds; to the many graves at Westminster Abbey; to the unadorned tomb of Katherine of Aragon at Peterborough; and the simple black slab that marks the resting place of Henry VIII and his third wife, Jane Seymour, in St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle.

  I am also a firm believer in the value of things. There are occasional entries where little remains from the period except tantalising shreds of evidence that evoke a particularly strong or striking story: whether they are portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, Arundel Castle or the Walker Art Gallery, or objects at Bosworth Battlefield. In one case, our story centres on a 500-year-old tree in Wymondham; in another, it is a simple memorial in the road in Broad Street, Oxford and sixteenth-century doors licked by the flames of the martyrs’ pyres that tell our tale.

  The book attempts to draw attention to the most fascinating parts of the architecture, or to the best parts of the collections but, above all, I hope you’ll feel a sense of walking in the footsteps of the great iconic figures of the Tudor age.

  The second principle was that each place should tell a fascinating tale about an important character, event or story from the turbulent Tudor period.

  This does mean that some beautiful places were not included, including some of my favourites, such as Haddon Hall, Longleat, Broughton Castle and Oxburgh Hall, but this was never intended to be merely a guidebook to architecture. The stories, as well as the places, are important.

  The stories and places intersect in different ways. For Thornbury Castle, Kirby Hall, Buckland Abbey, Sherborne Castle and Hardwick Hall, the buildings are very closely tied up with the fates of their owners. It is as if the destiny of the owner has been played out in stone and glass.

  Others are places that shaped people, not places shaped by people. Trinity and St John’s Colleges in Cambridge and Lincoln’s Inn in London were the training grounds of the astrologer Dr John Dee and the martyr Sir Thomas More. Hever Castle, Eltham Palace, Shakespeare’s birthplace, Gawsworth Hall and Hatfield Old Palace were all childhood homes, though in every case our protagonists returned as adults too.

  Sometimes there was just a moment that changed everything. Anne of Cleves’s meeting with Henry VIII at Rochester determined her fate. Winchester Cathedral was the scene of Mary I’s happiest day. Henry VIII and his entourage stopped for just one night at Leeds Castle on their way to the Field of Cloth of Gold. Prince Arthur’s death at Ludlow Castle altered the entire course of Tudor history.

  Some stories will be well known, others will be less familiar; all are, I hope, compellingly and divertingly retold. I have drawn on primary sources and on the latest research to direct you to interesting treasures and overlooked titbits. Being confined by the evidence means I have not included tales unless I can verify them (so the apocryphal tale of Sir Francis Drake playing bowls at Plymouth when the Armada arrived didn’t make the cut!): I want you to be able to trust what you read, even if the text, designed for the general reader, is written without the scholarly apparatus of references.

  The third principle was that the list must cover the geographical diversity of England, as far as possible.

  In some ways, my hands were tied: the Tudor monarchs rarely ventured north and had a preference for London and the South East, so the northern regions are the least well covered, but this is an inevitable consequence of the material.

  I chose to cover England, rather than Britain, because it would be anachronistic to do otherwise. Scotland was very certainly not Tudor in this period, and the Irish were fighting the colonialist powers of the English: I didn’t think that either nation would appreciate coming under the erroneous blanket heading of ‘Tudor Britain’. Wales, it is true, after the Acts of Union of 1536 and 1543 was joined to England, but Wales and England were still uncomfortable bedfellows — despite having Welsh Tudors on the throne — so I have confined myself to England alone. But, within these confines, I’ve tried to give coverage of as many regions and counties as possible.

  Finally, the fourth principle was that taken together, these stories would represent virtually every significant person and event of the Tudor age, to ensure that there were not, for example, fifteen entries on Henry VIII and nothing on Shakespeare.

  This was harder. Many great characters left no fixed abode, or didn’t build houses. Sir Francis Walsingham invested his fortune not in palaces, but in people: in Elizabeth I’s spy network, rather than a lasting edifice to his name. Many places that were built do not survive. There are two men that I feel particular chagrin about not covering in any depth — Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex and Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset — but there had to be something to see. Christopher Marlowe, another fascinating character, was murdered by Ingram Frizer in a lodging in Deptford: but where is that now?

  This is fundamentally a book about where history happened.

  For several years, I was a curator at Hampton Court Palace and one of the things I grasped while working for Historic Royal Palaces was the value of telling ‘history where it happened’. There is something undeniably powerful about walking along the Processional Gallery at Hampton Court in the very steps that Henry VIII would have taken as he emerged from his privy chambers and went to the Chapel Royal, or standing where Sir Christopher Hatton stood at Kirby Hall as he yearned to return to his ‘holy saint’ and great love, Elizabeth I. When I was discussing this book with Natalie Grueninger of www.onthetudortrail.com, she put it perfectly: when in those places, only time, not space, separates us from the people whose lives we seek to understand. The great historian G. M. Trevelyan once wrote:

  the poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing after another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone, like ghosts at cock-crow.

  In the places featured in this book, the veil between the past and the present seems very thin. It feels possible to see the past reenacted before one’s eyes — as if one could almost reach out and touch it.

  Finally, I’ve observed several things in my search for Tudor places. In some ways, they rarely exist. There are precious few buildings that are exclusively Tudor, and have not been changed in any way since Elizabeth I sat on the throne. In fact, the standard story for England’s great houses is something along the lines of: what you see now is a 1930s renovation of a Victorian restoration of a sixteenth-century building that was slighted (partially destroyed) during the Civil War, and originally stood on a Norman site!

  There are so many different scenarios a building can go through. At the end of all of these, what appears to us today is an accident of happenstance and history that has depended on the whims of a building’s individual owners, the mishaps of time (fires play a large part) and the fashions and politics of the day. Many originally Tudor buildings have been substantially altered in the intervening centuries: the interiors of Burghley House, for example, were overhauled in the late seventeenth century by John Cecil, the fifth Earl of Exeter, while at Hampton Court the private apartments of the Tudor palace were demolished to make way for William and Mary’s new baroque palace.