Journey Through Tudor England

by Suzannah Lipscomb

  Born on 18 February 1516, Mary was the only child of Katherine of Aragon and Henry VIII to survive infancy. Aged just two and a half years old, she was betrothed to the French dauphin, Francis. The ceremony was by proxy (the dauphin was just twenty-eight weeks old, after all), and Mary was given a tiny diamond engagement ring for the occasion. When she was five, the engagement was broken off: it was decided that she would become not a French queen, but instead be betrothed to Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. In a miniature by Lucas Horenbout, Mary is shown wearing a brooch over her heart that says simply ‘the Emperor’. However, Mary would not be of marriageable age for another eight years, and after three years of waiting — during which Mary had become quite attached to the idea of her grown-up husband-to-be — Charles decided that he wanted to marry a different cousin, Isabella of Portugal, instead.

  It was a shame, as Mary was developing into a good catch. Highly educated, she spoke Spanish, French and Latin, and read Greek. Her accomplishments as a dancer and musician were demonstrated to the French envoys arriving to discuss a second French engagement in 1527. They praised her ‘silver tresses’ and ‘great and uncommon mental endowments’ but, again, a match could not be engineered.

  If Mary felt rejected after these fruitless betrothals, it was nothing compared to what happened next. In 1531, after her father had determined to marry Anne Boleyn, Mary was separated from her mother, Katherine, in a callous effort to persuade both mother and daughter to accept the new situation. Mary was only fifteen, and although she couldn’t know it, she would never see her mother again. She then suffered the indignity of being downgraded from ‘Princess’ to ‘the Lady Mary, the King’s daughter’ within a week of her half-sister Elizabeth’s birth in 1533. To make matters even worse, she was sent to Hatfield to serve in Elizabeth’s court, under the stewardship of Anne Boleyn’s aunt and uncle.

  After Katherine died in early 1536, Mary reluctantly agreed to swear both to Henry’s position as Supreme Head of the Church of England, and that her parents’ marriage had been incestuous and unlawful, making her a bastard. As a result, in July 1536, she saw her father for the first time in five years. It is not wildly speculative to imagine that the awful treatment she suffered at her father’s hands shaped her psyche and informed her later rejection of her father’s institutions when she came to the throne.

  It was not long before Henry was pushing her around the marriage board again. In 1539, at the age of twenty-six, she was told to consider another match, this time to the Lutheran duke, Philip of Bavaria, whose religion she could not countenance. She told one of her ladies that, ‘she would be, while her father lived … the most unhappy Lady in Christendom’.

  Nor did life get much easier for Mary during her brother Edward’s reign. She retreated to East Anglia, where her continued celebration of the Latin Mass in her chapel at Kenninghall put her in direct opposition to the new Protestant establishment. At one point, she considered fleeing the country, but her decision to stay meant that when Edward died at the age of fifteen, she was available to contest his ‘device for the succession’ that named Lady Jane Grey as his heir [see GUILDHALL and FRAMLINGHAM]. On 19 July 1553, she was declared England’s first Queen regnant and, three months later, the Spanish ambassador knelt and offered her Philip’s hand in marriage. (The irony of marrying the son of her first fiancé cannot have been lost on her.) At thirty-seven, Mary was eleven years older than he.

  Philip eventually arrived in England, with a personal entourage of around 4,000, in July 1554. When he reached Winchester, he was housed in the Dean’s lodging in the cathedral precinct, where Henry VII’s eldest son, Prince Arthur, had been born. The couple met two days before their wedding. Mary, who by this point must have thought she would never marry, was delighted with him, and if Philip found Mary badly dressed or pale and sagging, as his attendants reported, he didn’t comment on it.

  On the day of their wedding, both were sartorially resplendent. Philip wore a white doublet and breeches, with a mantle of cloth of gold (a fabric woven with threads wrapped in fine spirals of gold) adorned with pearls and precious stones, given to him by Queen Mary. Mary’s wedding dress was ‘rich tissue with a border and wide sleeves, embroidered upon purple satin, set with pearls … lined with purple taffeta’, with a high collar, partlet (sleeveless jacket) and a kirtle of white satin.

  At half past ten in the morning, Mary entered through the west door and walked the length of the cathedral, past the rich hangings of arras and cloth of gold, to the quire which had been built by Richard Fox, Bishop of Winchester, thirty years or so earlier. The couple stood before the fifteenth-century Great Screen on a specially constructed dais. The carved figures in the screen had been removed and destroyed during the Reformation (the current figures date from the nineteenth century), but above Mary’s head remained colourful wooden bosses on the ceiling that proclaimed, through the ubiquitous Tudor rose, portcullis and fleur-de-lis, her right to rule. As sovereign, she stood on Philip’s right side, and the Bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner, married them. In the Triforium Gallery you can see an X-frame armchair that is thought to have been the chair that Mary sat on during the wedding ceremony.

  Now, at last, England was safely tied to Catholic Spain and, before long, they could hope for a Catholic heir. But it was not to be. Soon after the wedding, Mary believed she was pregnant and withdrew for her lying-in but, humiliatingly, no baby came. Mary was heartbroken when Philip left to govern the Netherlands. He only returned after seventeen months, and then only for four. During this time, once again, Mary believed she had become pregnant and, once again, it turned out to be a phantom pregnancy, the product of hope and anxiety.

  When, a year later, in 1558, Mary succumbed to a fever that would prove to be fatal, she may legitimately have felt that life had been cruel to her. She was unloved and mistreated as a daughter, horse-traded by her father for political gain, separated from her beloved mother and abandoned by her only husband. Posterity remembers her as ‘Bloody Mary’. Better perhaps to look on the glory of Winchester Cathedral and think of Mary’s one day of love, hope and faith.

  ‘[Sandys] so translated and augmented it, and beside built a fair Base Court that at this time [it] is one of the Principal Houses in all Hamptonshire.’

  John Leland, 1542

  William, Lord Sandys, is not a name that most of us are familiar with. It is a shame: this soldier and courtier was a regular Tudor ‘Flashman’, constantly popping up for a front-row seat at an improbably large number of key events during Henry VIII’s reign. The Vyne was the house he rebuilt to celebrate and chart his success, and it retains some incredible and unique treasures of the Tudor age.

  Lord Sandys was one of those few lucky men who managed to pass from one reign to the next without losing royal favour. Born in 1470, he rose under Henry VII and after his marriage to Margary Bray became a Knight of the Body (an honorary bodyguard to the monarch), a ceremonial and coveted post that he continued to hold after Henry VIII’s accession. Sandys was evidently seen as a safe pair of hands as Henry VII entrusted him with two crucial roles: receiving Katherine of Aragon when she landed in England, and accompanying his daughter, Margaret, to Scotland to marry James IV.

  For Henry VIII, Sandys was an early and long-time favourite, and the King heaped positions of status upon him. Several pieces of evidence point to Sandys’s privileged standing: Henry went to stay with Sandys at The Vyne less than a year after his coronation and later charged Sandys with accompanying his sister Mary to France in October 1514 to marry Louis XII. In 1517, Sandys was given the prestigious position of Treasurer of Calais, which he held for nine years and, like anyone who mattered in 1520, he attended the Field of Cloth of Gold [see LEEDS CASTLE]. He was also made Knight of the Garter, created Baron Sandys and returned to court in 1526 as Lord Chamberlain. This role meant, as Wolsey’s Eltham Ordinances decreed, that he was required to give ‘continual attendance in the causes of [the King’s] counsel, unto what place so ever his Hig
hness shall resort’: he was one of Henry’s right-hand men, always present to advise.

  It was during this fortunate and comfortable phase that Sandys started to renovate his brick and stone mansion in Hampshire. The house today has seen much change since: chiefly, it was originally far larger; possibly even as big as Hampton Court. It was much reduced by Chaloner Chute, when he bought The Vyne in the mid-seventeenth century, and further changed over the following 200 years. Nevertheless, three of the prized features that Sandys introduced remain as distinct and wonderful evidence of both his eye for design, and his lofty associations.

  The first is the extraordinary floor-to-ceiling oak linenfold panelling (wood carved to mimic the folds of cloth) in the Long Gallery. Look closely and you will see that each panel is carved with the heraldry of one of Sandys’s contemporaries or patrons, thereby creating a visual Who’s Who of Tudor England in the 1520s. Although painted much later (probably in the nineteenth century), it can be dated to between 1515 and 1529 not only through dendrochronology (dating by counting tree rings), but also through the coats of arms and insignia that have been chosen. Taken together, it represents an almost complete corpus of Tudor heraldry. Thus, you can hunt for: fleurs-de-lis; portcullises; Tudor roses and ‘HR’ standing for Henry VIII (the Latin Henricus Rex); the pomegranate (the symbol of Granada) and castle (for Castile) of Katherine of Aragon; the rose and pomegranate growing together on one stem; a cardinal’s hat and initials ‘TW’ for Thomas Wolsey (giving us our start and end dates); the mitres and initials for Richard Fox, Bishop of Winchester, William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury and Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of Durham; three sickles and ‘WH’ for Sir Walter Hungerford (who in 1540 suffered the ignominy of being the first person executed under a new law outlawing buggery and sodomy); and Lord Sandys’s own devices, which include a winged half-goat, a rose merging with the sun and a ragged cross.

  The carving of the royal arms over a doorway is thought to mark the entrance to Henry’s chambers on the three occasions that he stayed at The Vyne and, like the gallery as a whole, is a proud demonstration of Sandys’s close alliance with the King and his court: Sandys included so many badges of honour to Henry in his house that were this practice to be replicated by someone today, we might suspect them of an unhealthy obsession! But such shrines to living people were not uncommon for Tudors: a grown man of the court would think nothing of inscribing and carving his monarch’s symbols or initials into his own residence. (Many of Elizabeth’s male courtiers had whole manor houses built in the shape of an ‘E’ [see MONTACUTE HOUSE].)

  In the Stone Gallery, you will find a stunning terracotta roundel of a Roman emperor, likely to be Probus, which is a real treasure, as it has survived in remarkably good condition. He was probably chosen for The Vyne because Probus was famous for introducing viticulture — the vine — to England. He has looked down on visitors to The Vyne for nearly 500 years and now, as then, is a visual association with Wolsey and Henry VIII, and a symbol of Sandys’s artistic patronage and powerful connections. It was sculpted in the 1520s by the Italian craftsman Giovanni da Maiano: the same man who carved matching roundels at Wolsey’s Hampton Court Palace.

  Finally, Sandys commissioned one last piece of brilliant art to reflect his relationship with Henry VIII. In 1525, he ordered three wonderful stained-glass portraits of the royal family to be made for the chapel. These vivid, colourful depictions were created just down the road in Basingstoke, and show Katherine of Aragon in the left window, Henry VIII in the centre and his sister, Margaret, Queen of Scotland, on the right. The portrayal of a barefaced king with long, ginger hair is particularly interesting. All are kneeling in prayer, and Henry VIII himself would have knelt to pray in this chapel when he visited in 1531, and again with Anne Boleyn in 1535.

  Although Sandys had been something of an Aragon supporter, he was first and foremost loyal to Henry: he both faithfully attended Anne’s coronation on 1 June 1533, and served as one of the jurors at Anne’s trial three years later. His role as eyewitness to history did not stop there: he was one of only three barons to receive gifts of monastic land from Henry VIII during the period of the dissolution; he was present at the baptism of Henry’s long-awaited heir Edward in October 1537 at Hampton Court; and, a month later, attended Jane Seymour’s funeral at Windsor Castle; he even tried those involved in the Exeter conspiracy of 1538—9. Only death — his wife’s in March 1539, and his own in December 1540 — could end his extraordinary talent for ubiquity.

  Other Tudor sights to see at The Vyne: the chimneypiece in the Tapestry Room is almost certainly Tudor; it was moved from the Dining Parlour in the 1840s. Concealed behind the panelling in the Strawberry Parlour, there is a small Tudor doorway. Parts of the original, larger Tudor house were found in the lake, and are displayed in the Stone Gallery. The panelling in the Dining Parlour is Tudor too, and there are some lovely pictures here, all copies, depicting Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk; Mary Neville, Lady Dacre; Henry VIII; and my favourite, the six-year-old Chrysogona Baker, Lady Dacre in 1579, looking like a little Elizabeth I. The choir stalls in the Chapel are of early Tudor design; look out for the give-away roses and pomegranates.

  ROYAL PROGRESSES

  The Tudor monarchs never stayed in one place for long, and especially not during the summer months. Their peregrinations had more one than purpose. To some extent, it was a logistical and hygienic necessity. Moving around was seen as a way to avoid the seasonal bouts of plague or the ‘sweating sickness’ in London. Moreover, the court could number over 1,000 people — the population of a small town — and ate such vast quantities of food that they easily exhausted an area’s resources. Meanwhile, their waste and rubbish mounted up. As a friend wrote to Sir John Harington in the 1590s, Elizabeth’s ‘palace at Greenwich and other stately houses … are oft annoyed with such savours as where many mouths are fed, can hardly be avoided’: the court needed to move to another palace to escape its own excrement.

  Progresses were also an important opportunity to be seen. In an age before mass communication, these progresses fulfilled the crucial political function of displaying a monarch’s magnificence to his or her subjects, and allowing local gentry and officials a chance to access and display loyalty to their sovereign. The chronicler Edward Hall wrote of Henry VIII in 1515:

  This summer the King took his progress westward & visited his towns, castles there & heard the complaints of his poor commonality & ever as he rode, he hunted & liberally departed with venison; & in the middle of September he came to his manor of Woking & thither came to him the Archbishop of York whom he heartily welcomed and showed him great pleasures.

  Hall also reveals another key purpose of the progress: pleasure. Henry VIII travelled in order to hunt; Elizabeth to enjoy the hospitality and extraordinary entertainments of her subjects. The Imperial ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, wrote in June 1531 that he had ‘sent one of [his] men to Hampton Court to ask for an audience from the King, but he was already gone to Windsor and other places to amuse himself and pass away the time … For the last fortnight he has done nothing else but go from place to place …’

  The crucial difference between the progresses of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I was that Henry stayed, for the most part, in his own houses. By the time of his death, Henry VIII had acquired or built over sixty great houses and palaces in which he stayed as he travelled around his realm. This is one reason why Henry VIII seldom left the south and east of his kingdom, although there were exceptions. Henry’s long progress to the West Country in 1535 took him as far as Gloucestershire where, as well as staying in his castle at Thornbury (acquired from the Duke of Buckingham in 1521), he also stayed with Sir Nicholas Poyntz, who built an entire new wing onto his manor house, Acton Court, for the occasion: quite an undertaking given that Henry rarely remained in one place for longer than a few days. Henry VIII’s furthest progress north was in 1541 when he travelled to York to meet James V. Not only did the Scottish King not show up, but soon after he returned
home, Henry discovered that his wife, Katherine Howard, had betrayed him en route [see PONTEFRACT CASTLE].

  Elizabeth I was even more enthusiastic about travel. She went on progress every summer of her forty-five-year reign, but she too confined her expeditions to twenty-five of England’s forty counties. Elizabeth, however, preferred to stay in her courtiers’ houses. Clergyman William Harrison wrote in 1577 of Elizabeth I, ‘when it pleaseth her in the summer season to recreate herself abroad, and view the estate of the country, every nobleman’s house is her palace’.

  Although technically a sign of favour and an opportunity to seek patronage, having the Queen to stay was something of a dubious honour. It put one to great expense and inconvenience, did not necessarily result in new offices or grants and could easily go disastrously wrong.

  The Queen did not travel light. Foreign visitor Jacob Rathgeb commented in 1592 that ‘when the Queen breaks up her Court with the intention of visiting another place, there commonly follow more than three hundred carts laden with bag and baggage’. Others estimated the figure to be nearer 400 or even 600 carts. Elizabeth brought with her a minimum of 150 people, who needed to be housed and fed, and this demanding Queen also required lavish entertainment, often at great cost. William Cecil, Lord Burghley knew this well: Elizabeth visited his house at Theobalds thirteen times; her ten-day visit in 1591 cost him £1,000 (equivalent today to more than £125,000). The most extravagant example is Elizabeth’s nineteen-day visit to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester’s, house in 1575 [see KENILWORTH].