Thurley - Houses of Power: Everyday Life in Tudor Royal Palaces

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First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Bantam Press
an imprint of Transworld Publishers

Copyright Simon Thurley 2017

Cover design by Sarah Whittaker/TW
Cover images: Tudor Rose Shutterstock
Greenwich Palace iStock
Holbein Gate and King Street Gate Hulton Archive/Getty
Henry the Eighths palace at Nonsuch Bettmann/Getty
Other images courtesy of Simon Thurley

Simon Thurley has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.

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Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781473510807

ISBN 9780593074947

Maps and plans redrawn by Liane Payne.

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For my mother, who gave me my love of history

IN 1972, ON a family holiday in Brittany, I was taken to see the Chteau of Largot deep in the woods of Elven near Vannes. Although it is now an ivy-covered ruin, the colossal soaring tower that still stands shows that it was once a powerful place. I didnt know it at the time, but between 1474 and 1476 the five-storey Tour dElven was home to the Earl of Richmond, the future king Henry VII of England. Henry, confined in a stone chamber on the fifth floor, was the guest of Francis II, Duke of Brittany. The seventeen-year-old Henrys rather tenuous claims to the English throne through his mother and, less so, through his father, led to an attempt in 1483 to put him on the throne and, as a result, he became a magnet for disaffected Lancastrians and a target of intense hostility for the ruthless usurper King Richard III.

The Tour dElven shows just how unpromising Henry Richmonds situation was in 1476. Spartan, secure and impossibly remote from London, it epitomized his isolation and political irrelevance. Few at the time, including Henry himself, could have predicted that this penniless young aristocrat would successfully bring to an end the Wars of the Roses, the dynastic squabbles that had dominated fifteenth-century England. But by the time of his death in 1509, when he handed the throne on to his teenage son, this is exactly what he had achieved.

When Henry VII won the throne in 1485 the English monarchy was 500 years old. As king, he inherited both a well-developed system of government and an extensive network of residences. These ranged from mighty castles such as Pontefract, Kenilworth and Dover to elegant riverside retreats such as Sheen and Greenwich. Royal houses differed from those of the aristocracy because it was from them that the king ruled. They were much like 10 Downing Street today, in that executive power was exercised in a domestic context, the private and political completely and inextricably mixed.

What was different from today was the all-pervading importance of etiquette, and not in the trivial sense of forbidding elbows on the table. By the Tudor period royal etiquette was a complex and subtle series of written rules and regulations governing the way people at the heart of power did things. This protocol affected the way royal buildings were designed and the way they were lived in. As a result, royal residences were a special type of building uniquely providing the setting for ceremonial and power.

Over the centuries royal buildings have been appreciated and admired in different ways: most often as supreme examples of this architectural style or that; but more recently people have begun to be interested in what royal buildings can tell us about monarchs lives. In 1984 I became fascinated by this interaction between power, protocol and architecture, by the way that royal buildings contained evidence which, if it could be unravelled, would reveal a great deal about the way kings and queens lived and governed.

The problem was that most Tudor royal houses were gone. A bit of Tudor Hampton Court survived and some of St Jamess Palace; many royal castles still remained, ruined, but few of the parts where monarchs lived were still standing. So understanding royal houses first required a reconstruction of how they once were. In trying to do this there were two important tools: the first was archaeology, because many royal houses have been excavated over the years; the second was the financial accounts prepared for the building maintenance and furnishing as well as the occasional surviving plan or drawing. Using these tools I found that it was possible, in many instances, to draw accurate plans of what Tudor royal houses were once like.

Over the last thirty years I have had the chance to work on the archaeology of at least a dozen Tudor royal houses and have hunted down the documents that make sense of the jumble of brick walls and fragments of stone. For others, where everything has gone, or where digging has yet to happen, some good guesses can still be made based on the English obsession for bureaucracy. As a result, we now have a huge body of information on how Tudor royal houses looked and what went on inside them. But most of my work, and the work of others, has been published in obscure academic journals or in expensive monographs too heavy to hold in one hand; more importantly, nobody has put it all together and asked what does it mean, what does it tell us about our most famous reigning dynasty?

This book, for the first time, tells the story of the Tudors through what they built and where they lived. It is not just a catalogue of who built what, although it does do that; more importantly, it sets out to show that, as Tudor royal life changed so did the buildings that they inhabited. So, if you can work out the way that the buildings developed, you can, by deduction, tell the story of the Tudor monarchy from the inside.

My starting point is at the oldest royal house we still have standing, one founded by William the Conqueror, and a place I knew well for eight years as its curator: the Tower of London.