A Brief History of the Tudor Age Read online

  Wolsey amassed the money which he needed to found his college at Oxford by obtaining a Papal Bull under which he suppressed twenty-two monasteries and seized their assets, and by asking, cajoling, and in some cases bullying and threatening, many noblemen and wealthy persons and institutions into contributing donations towards the cost of the work. The future of his colleges was threatened when he was dismissed as Lord Chancellor and disgraced in 1529. Henry VIII seized part of the revenues of Cardinal’s College at Oxford, and ordered the removal of Wolsey’s coat-of-arms which had been placed in every window; but he allowed the college to continue after changing the name to ‘King Henry VIII’s College’. It is now known as Christ Church. But to Wolsey’s great grief, his college at Ipswich was suppressed on a legal technicality; the teachers and students were ejected, and the property was seized by the King.

  After Wolsey’s fall, Henry VIII had four residences in the immediate vicinity of London – Whitehall, Greenwich, Richmond and Hampton Court – as well as his palace of The Moor, his manor house at Enfield, and his houses at Newhall, Hunsdon, Oatlands and Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, where his daughter Elizabeth lived. He frequently stayed at Hampton Court, and built additions to the palace, with an inner courtyard which was adorned by a great clock which Nicholas Oursian made for him in 1540; it showed the days of the week, and of the months, as well as the hours, the time of high water at London Bridge, the phases of the moon, the signs of the zodiac, and the sun moving round the stationary earth. But Henry was not satisfied with these residences. He built himself a new palace of St James’s in the fields to the north-west of Westminster, less than a mile from Whitehall; and he had a more ambitious project in mind. He wished to build a palace which would not only be bigger and better than any of his existing houses, but which would outshine the palaces of any other prince in Europe. It was to be built near Ewell in Surrey and called Nonesuch.

  The building work began in 1538. Henry demolished the whole village of Cuddington, which ceased to exist, enclosed and compulsorily acquired more than 1,000 acres of agricultural land, and diverted several highways. He employed not only his usual English builders, but invited the famous Italian artists Antonio Toto dell’Annunziata of Florence and John of Padua to do the elaborate decorations on the gateways and façade of the palace. The result was a building rather different from the Gothic style of Hampton Court, St James’s and the other buildings which had been erected since the days of Edward IV; it was a mixture of Gothic with the more ornate style of the Italian Renaissance.

  Nonesuch Palace had not been completed when Henry VIII died in 1547, and he only spent four days there. The work was finished after his death, but Mary sold it to the Earl of Arundel. Elizabeth I often stayed there as Arundel’s guest. It was at Nonesuch in August 1585 that the treaty was negotiated, after so much hard bargaining, between Elizabeth’s counsellors and the Dutch delegates, by which she eventually agreed, reluctantly, to send military assistance to the States of the Netherlands in their fight against the rule of Philip II of Spain. In 1592, Arundel’s heir sold Nonesuch to Elizabeth. After her death, the palace became a favourite residence of James I’s Queen, Anne of Denmark, but it was pulled down by Charles II in 1670. The ruins were excavated by archaeologists and historians in 1959–60.

  After Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, he granted many of their lands as gifts to his counsellors and courtiers. Some of these counsellors and courtiers had served him for many years, often incurring personal expense in his service, and they expected and received these gifts as a suitable reward. Others obtained their share of the loot by luck. In the seventeenth century, the grandchildren of these fortunate people, and of their envious rivals, told stories of how their grandfathers had acquired their properties. They told how Sir Nicholas Partridge had won the Jesus bells at St Paul’s Cathedral from Henry VIII one night at dice, and how a Devon gentleman, John Champernown, on a visit to the court, seeing a number of courtiers kneeling to the King as he passed by, knelt beside them, and to his surprise was granted the priory of St Germans in Cornwall as a gift because some officials had made a mistake. But in most cases the monastic lands were sold by the King to gentlemen and other private individuals. Some of the purchasers were speculators who bought the lands in order to resell them at a profit; but one way or another, the lands were ultimately acquired in most cases by the local country gentlemen.

  Many of the monasteries owned property in different parts of England, often far away from the monastery building; but the building itself was one of the valuable assets of the monastery, especially the lead on the roof. The commissioners who were sent to suppress the monasteries were ordered to make sure that the lead was not stripped from the roof, and stolen, by the local inhabitants during the time that the house was empty after the monks had left. In order to prevent these thefts, the commissioners themselves stripped the roofs and sent the lead to the King’s officials in London; it was usually shipped by sea from the nearest port. The result was that the buildings fell rapidly into decay, and as the gentlemen who bought the monastic lands did not wish to live in the monasteries, they demolished them and built new houses on the site, or nearby.

  In the case of the great magnates, the new house was often a splendid mansion erected by one of the famous builders in their usual style. Lord Russell, who served on Henry VIII’s Privy Council, first as Lord Admiral and then as Lord Privy Seal, was granted Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire; and Sir Willam Herbert, who married Queen Katherine Parr’s sister, obtained Wilton Abbey near Salisbury. In the reign of Edward VI, Russell and Herbert commanded the troops who suppressed the Catholic rising in Cornwall, and they supported Northumberland’s coup d’état which overthrew Somerset. Russell was rewarded by being created Earl of Bedford, and Herbert was made Earl of Pembroke. They both built impressive houses at Woburn and Wilton; but Wilton was enlarged and altered by Inigo Jones in the middle of the seventeenth century, and Woburn was completely rebuilt in 1747.

  William Fitzwilliam, Earl of Southampton, the Lord Admiral of England, built himself a splendid house at Cowdray on the outskirts of Midhurst in Sussex; the work, which was begun in about 1535, was carried out by the famous builders who had built Hampton Court and the other palaces for Wolsey and Henry VIII. It was there that he brought Margaret, Countess of Salisbury, the daughter of Edward IV’s brother, the Duke of Clarence, as a prisoner. Her son, Reginald Pole, had gone to Italy, where he was created a cardinal by the Pope, and had written from Venice to Henry VIII denouncing him for repudiating Papal supremacy and putting to death Bishop Fisher, Sir Thomas More and the Carthusian monks who refused to acknowledge Henry as head of the Church of England. Pole told Henry, in his letter, that he was worse than Domitian, the Caesar who had persecuted the Christians in the first century after Christ.

  The Countess of Salisbury and her son, Lord Montagu, wrote to Pole denouncing him as an abominable traitor, and sent a copy of their letters to the King; but this did not save them for long.

  In 1538 Montagu was arrested. The evidence showed that he had said in a private conversation: ‘I like well the doings of my brother the Cardinal [Pole] and I would we were both over the sea’; and he had also once said, again in a private conversation, that when Henry VIII was a little boy, his father Henry VII did not like him. On this evidence, Montagu was convicted of high treason, and beheaded. Someone testified that Montagu’s friend, Sir Edward Neville, had once said, when he was a guest at Cowdray, that ‘the King is a beast and worse than a beast’, which was enough for him to be convicted as a traitor and beheaded together with Montagu.

  Southampton and other members of the Privy Council arrived at the Countess of Salisbury’s house at Warbledon in Hampshire, to interrogate her servants and search the house. They found no evidence against her except that she had forbidden her servants to read the Bible in English and had once been seen burning a letter – and why should she do this unless it was a letter from her son, the traitor Reginald Pole? The old Countess, who
was nearly seventy, was taken to Cowdray and from there to the Tower, and as there was insufficient evidence to convict her of high treason she was condemned to death as a traitor by an Act of Parliament.

  Henry kept her in the Tower for two years after the Act of Attainder had been passed, and then suddenly ordered her to be beheaded within the Tower, in the privacy of Tower Green, in May 1541. The old lady did not realize what was happening to her, and when she was told to lay her head on the block, she began wandering slowly and aimlessly around Tower Green. When they had managed to get her to the block, the inexperienced and nervous young headsman botched the execution, and only succeeded in killing her at the third or fourth stroke of the axe.

  Wolsey was not the only great ecclesiastical dignitary to indulge in splendid building projects, though none of the others could compete with him. In Edward IV’s reign, Cardinal Bourchier, the Archbishop of Canterbury, built a very impressive manor house at Knole on the outskirts of Sevenoaks in Kent. Bourchier’s Lancastrian successor as Archbishop, Cardinal Morton, modernized his London residence at Lambeth on the south bank of the Thames by adding a gateway in the Gothic style of the period; he also rebuilt the tower of Canterbury Cathedral, replacing the old structure with the tower which still dominates the cathedral today. The work was finished in 1497, three years before Morton’s death. William Warham, who succeeded Morton as Archbishop after a short interval, built a very large palace at Otford, though it was only three miles north of his smaller, but impressive, house at Knole.

  Warham was always eclipsed by Wolsey, but he survived him, and did not die until 1532, when Henry was on the point of repudiating his allegiance to Rome. Henry’s appointment of Thomas Cranmer as Warham’s successor was seen on all sides as a step towards breaking with Rome and moving in a Protestant direction. When Cranmer became Archbishop, he had eleven impressive residences – Lambeth, Croydon and Mortlake in Surrey, and Canterbury, Knole, Otford, Maidstone, Charing, Ford, Wingham and Aldington in Kent; but Henry VIII forced him to get rid of Knole, Otford, Maidstone, Charing, Wingham and Aldington in a number of exchanges by which he acquired a new palace at Beakesbourn near Herne, but which worked out very much to the disadvantage of the see of Canterbury. The Archbishop’s palace at Canterbury was burned down in an accidental fire in 1543, leaving him with his four palaces at Lambeth, Croydon, Beakesbourn and Ford.

  Cranmer’s secretary, Ralph Morice, wrote a short biography of Cranmer for his friend John Foxe, when he was an old man, in about 1565. He described how on one occasion, thirty years before, Henry VIII asked Cranmer, in Morice’s presence, to agree to an exchange by which Henry would acquire Knole for himself. Cranmer, who was very fond of Knole, was reluctant to agree, and suggested to Henry that it would be better if he gave him Otford instead, as it was larger and would be better able to accommodate all the gentlemen and servants who escorted Henry when he travelled to his houses in the country. Henry said that he did not like Otford as much as Knole, because Otford was in low-lying country, and Knole was on higher ground, and he always felt unwell when he was at Otford. This may have been imagination on Henry’s part, because it was a widespread belief in the Tudor Age that people who lived in houses on high ground were less likely to catch the plague and fevers than those who lived in houses in low-lying districts. As Cranmer continued to stress the advantages of Otford, Henry said that he would have both Otford and Knole, so that his retinue could stay in the larger and less healthy house at Otford while he himself and a small number of attendants stayed three miles away at the pleasanter and healthier house at Knole. So Cranmer was forced to surrender both Otford and Knole to Henry, in exchange for far less valuable property, in 1537. Morice was anxious to defend Cranmer from the critics who condemned him for agreeing to these exchanges which so impoverished his see for his successors. ‘For as touching his exchanges men ought to consider with whom he had to do, specially with such a Prince as would not be bridled nor be against said in any of his requests.’

  Abbots and priors built, as well as bishops, not foreseeing that their monasteries would soon be dissolved. Improvements were carried out to the abbey churches at Westminster, Peterborough and Sherborne Abbeys. Splendid new apartments were built for the private residences of the abbots and priors at Mulcheney Abbey and Montacute Priory in Somerset, at Forde Abbey in Dorset, and at Thame Abbey in Oxfordshire. In all these cases the work was not finished until less than ten years before the dissolution of the monasteries.

  No cathedrals were built during the Tudor Age. All the old dioceses already had cathedrals which had been erected before the end of the fourteenth century; and when Henry VIII created six new dioceses in 1540 the abbey churches of some of the dissolved monasteries were converted into the cathedrals of the new dioceses. But a number of new parish churches were built, at the expense of wealthy merchants and manufacturers. The thriving woollen clothiers built splendid churches at Lavenham and Long Melford in Suffolk and at Taunton in Somerset; and the equally prosperous ironmasters of the Weald of Kent built a spacious church in the village of Cranbrook which was much larger than the ordinary parish church.

  The prestige building during the years between 1475 and 1550 could not have been carried out on such an extensive scale by the old building methods of the local independent masons and carpenters who had so slowly and patiently built the simple houses and cottages, and also the castles and cathedrals, of the Middle Ages. The new builders were big businessmen; they employed many workmen, used large cranes for work on high buildings, and worked far afield, beyond the districts where they lived and had their business offices. When building in brick developed on a large scale in England, the Dutchman, Baldwin, opened a brickworks at Tattershall in Lincolnshire, where he made bricks for buildings all over south-east England. There was another large brickworks at Eton. These and other brickworks were able to supply Edward IV with over two million bricks for the additional fortifications which were erected at Dover Castle in 1480. The new type of builder, with his large labour force and modern methods, could complete his work much faster than the builders in earlier times. It had taken more than fifty years to build most of the medieval cathedrals; but the great edifices erected under Henry VII and the later Tudors were usually finished within fifteen years. As usual, the increased efficiency, and the splendid products which resulted from the improved working methods, were achieved at a cost in human terms. The masons and carpenters who worked for the new builders were still skilled craftsmen, but they could no longer exercise their personal judgment and taste. They had now to work according to the plan of the master-builder who employed them.

  The size of the operations and the reputation of the new type of builders gave their names a snob value. Noblemen and bishops who emulated the building projects of the King and Wolsey wished not only to build better and bigger houses than their rivals, but liked to boast that they had engaged Wastell, Vertue, Redman or Needham to carry out the work. In some areas, a local man was able to develop a large building firm and acquire a reputation which ensured him a monopoly of the important building projects in the neighbourhood. William Orchard of Headington, on the outskirts of Oxford, built the tower and other buildings at Magdalen College, the Divinity School, and Bernard College (later St John’s College) in the university, and the ante-chapel at Eton, between 1480 and 1504, and after his death Brasenose College at Oxford was built in 1519 by one of his pupils. In the west country, Hart built the great church towers at Bristol, Cardiff and Wrexham; and in the North, Christopher Scoyne carried out the work at Ripon Minster, at St Mary’s, Beverley, and at Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire, and on the spire of Louth church in Lincolnshire, between 1505 and 1525. He was also responsible for the upkeep of Durham Cathedral.

  But the other famous builders were not limited to any particular area. Wastell built the tower of Canterbury Cathedral, Henry VII’s chapel in Westminster Abbey, and the chapels in Peterborough Cathedral and King’s College, Cambridge. William Vertue worked at St George’s Chapel
and the Lady Chapel at Windsor, at King’s College, Cambridge, at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and on the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula in the Tower of London and St Stephen’s Cloisters in the palace of Westminster. Henry Redman, from Ramsey in Huntingdonshire, succeeded his father Thomas at Westminster Abbey and carried out the work on the tower of St Margaret’s, Westminster, at Eton, at Greenwich, and at Windsor Castle, and built Hampton Court, York Place, and Cardinal’s College at Oxford for Wolsey.

  The roods and timber work at all these buildings for Wolsey were done by the famous master-carpenter, Humphrey Coke. Another famous carpenter, James Needham, designed the roof of the great hall at Hampton Court, and was responsible for the work at the Tower, at Rochester at Greenwich, at Eltham, at Petworth and at Knole. Most of these eminent builders held for a time official positions in the King’s service. Needham worked for some years for the garrisons at Berwick and Calais, and accompanied the army which invaded France in 1523. They were masters of their city livery companies and mayors of their home towns, though none of them followed the example of the builder, William Veysey, in the reign of Henry VI and became a member of Parliament. Needham, who began working at a master-carpenter’s wage of tenpence a day, was able to buy extensive properties in Hertfordshire and Kent.

  In building, as in so many other aspects of Tudor life, a great change took place after 1550. Neither Edward VI, Mary nor Elizabeth I engaged in building as Henry VII and Henry VIII had done. With Whitehall, Greenwich, Richmond, St James’s and Nonesuch in the neighbourhood of London, apart from their manors further away, they did not need another palace, and all of them, for different reasons, were much more economical than Henry VIII. The building of new towers and chapels in abbeys and cathedrals, and of new parish churches, also virtually stopped. But the nobility still built mansions, and so did some of the wealthier and more important knights and gentlemen.