Read A Journey Through Tudor England Online
Authors: Suzannah Lipscomb
A Journey Through Tudor England (20 page)
Kateryn Parr remains at Sudeley. In 1782, her tomb was discovered by a group of Georgian ladies. When they broke open the lead casing, they were astonished to see Kateryn’s perfectly preserved face gazing back at them. However, their vandalism began her body’s decay and, though grave-robbers managed to remove a few locks of hair and teeth, Kateryn was eventually reburied under a marble effigy in St Mary’s Church, in the castle gardens.
Although Kateryn is chiefly remembered today in the popular rhyme as Henry VIII’s wife who ‘survived’, it is Sudeley Castle, where she spent her happiest months, pregnant with Sir Thomas Seymour’s child, that stands as a more poignant memorial to this Queen of England, whose talents far exceeded her modern reputation.
Other Tudor treasures to spot at Sudeley: if you go on a tour of the private family apartments, you can see portraits of Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset; an early sixteenth-century court lady with a French hood (possibly Mary Boleyn); and Mary Tudor, Duchess of Suffolk by Johannes Corvus. Also in the apartments, look out for the extraordinarily well-preserved sixteenth-century Sheldon Tapestry and eighteenth-century copies of Hans Holbein the Younger’s court sketches by George Vertue.
‘Alas the while that ever ambition should be the loss of so noble a man, and so much in the King’s favour.’
T
hornbury Castle is a story of what might have been. It is also the only Tudor castle in England in which you can stay as a hotel guest.
Edward Stafford, the third Duke of Buckingham, built Thornbury Castle. Buckingham, like the Tudors, was descended from Edward III through the Beauforts and, additionally, through the Plantagenet prince Thomas of Woodstock. When Buckingham began his ambitious building project around 1511, a year after receiving a licence to castellate his manor and enclose a park of 1,000 acres, he evidently aspired to create a semi-regal castle-palace for himself.
Thornbury was built to resemble a medieval fortress. The main gate had a portcullis, and the outer of its two courtyards has no windows on the ground floor except crossbow loopholes and two gun ports beside the entrance. The north range of the outer court was designed like a barracks, to house Buckingham’s men and horses, while a high crenulated wall surrounded the inner court. This raises a question: did Buckingham intend Thornbury to be a defensive stronghold, either in the event of an uprising by his
unhappy Welsh tenants or, more ambitiously, as a place from which to launch an attempted coup against Henry VIII? Henry evidently thought the latter. The King was suspicious enough of Buckingham’s intentions to have him killed, even though historians today question the defensibility of the castle, and despite the fact that in 1518, Henry VIII called Buckingham his ‘right trusty and right entirely well-beloved cousin’.
There is no doubt, however, that Thornbury was intended to be seriously impressive: an appropriately lavish dwelling for the most prominent nobleman in the land. The outer courtyard, Base Court, was to be nearly two and a half acres: bigger even than the imposing Base Court at Hampton Court Palace. You can see the west range of lodgings beyond the vineyard, and wander through the overgrown remains of the north range of lodgings, where fireplaces in the walls (the large joist holes show that the original floor would have been at head height) sit forlornly, still unused. What at first glance looks like Tudor ruins is in fact a Tudor building site, for the castle was never finished.
The gatehouse leading into the inner court is decorated with coats of arms and family badges, including the golden knot of the Staffords, the swan and antelope of the Bohuns, the fiery wheel hub of Woodstock and the mantle of Brecknock, all of which testify to Buckingham’s royal ancestry. The gatehouse is also inscribed:
Thys Gate was begon in the yere of our Lorde Gode MCCCCCXI, the ii yere of the reyne of Kynge Henri the viii by me Edw. Duc. of Bukkyngha’ Erlle of Herforde Stafforde ande Northampto’: Dorenesavant.
The motto ‘
Dorenesavant
’ translates from Old French as ‘From now on, henceforth or hereafter’ and further suggested, to the suspicious at least, Buckingham’s regal pretensions.
The main castle was to have four great towers, only one of which is complete: the others remain only two storeys high. The Duke and Duchess’s living quarters were in this completed tower, to the right side of the inner court. Here, beautifully elaborate oriel windows overlook the privy garden, and the original and ornate brick chimneystacks rival any of the Victorian recreations at Hampton Court.
On the left side of the court were all the kitchens needed to provide for Buckingham’s household of 125 people: a wet and dry larder, an enormous bakehouse, the great kitchen and a privy kitchen. You can even see where the spits would have roasted. Opposite the gatehouse was Buckingham’s Great Hall. It was knocked down in the eighteenth century, but a recent excavation discovered tiles from its floor (a photograph of which can be seen at the castle). Their elaborate decoration — each was inscribed with the emblem, ‘
Honi soit qui mal y pense
’ (‘Shamed be he who thinks evil of it’: the motto of the Order of the Garter) — suggests that they would have been finer and more costly than the floor tiles at Hampton Court or Buckland Abbey. They are another indication that had it been completed, Thornbury would have been one of the largest and finest palaces in England.
All this grandeur befitted a man who valued his noble status highly. Buckingham’s first public role had been at Henry VII’s coronation when he was only eight years old. In adulthood, he was known for the gorgeous splendour of his clothing: in 1501, at the wedding of Prince Arthur to Katherine of Aragon, he wore a gown valued at a staggering £1,500 (around £730,000 today). He maintained a quasi-kingly court including, in 1508, such entertainers as two minstrels, two harpists, six trumpeters, two wrestlers, four players, a bear and a fool. He also did his bit for the monarch, supplying men for the French war of 1513—14, hosting Henry VIII with ‘excellent cheer’ at his house at Penshurst and accompanying the King to the Field of Cloth of Gold.
At times, Buckingham’s finery and grandstanding were taken for arrogance. Contemptuous of their lowly station, he treated his servants harshly, even suing eleven of them when they failed to meet his arbitrary expectations. Such behaviour ultimately cost him his life. Nor was he deferential to those with more power: he foolishly criticised Wolsey and the King’s pro-French foreign policy and, in November 1520, fell out of favour with Henry for retaining a royal servant named Sir William Bulmer. When, subsequently, Buckingham asked the King for permission to raise an armed bodyguard to suppress the riots among his tenants in Wales, Henry refused, no doubt aware that Buckingham’s father had mustered an armed guard in Wales shortly before rebelling against Richard III.
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.