Journey Through Tudor England

by Suzannah Lipscomb

  Those at the top end of society also enjoyed other treats. At Henry VIII’s court, popular sweetmeats included marchpane (an early version of ‘marzipan’) made of ground almonds, rosewater and sugar, and ‘subtleties’: elaborate model decorations, probably made of sugar plate (or paste), sometimes with the addition of wax. A conceit was to make realistic nuts or cinnamon sticks from sugar plate dusted with cinnamon, or to serve wine in a goblet made of sugar; once the wine had been consumed, the goblet could be eaten. George Cavendish reports that to impress visiting French ambassadors in 1527, Cardinal Wolsey served up ‘so many dishes, subtleties, and curious devices, which were above a hundred in number, and of so goodly proportion and costly, that I suppose the Frenchmen never saw the like’, including a chessboard made of ‘spiced plate’, and a model of the then St Paul’s Cathedral, complete with towering spire.

  If this weren’t enough sweetness, at the end of meals, the King and Queen enjoyed sugar-coated spice, and a spiced wine called hippocras. No wonder many rich Tudors ended up with blackened teeth!

  ‘Built of fair and strong stone, not affecting so much any extraordinary kind of fineness as an honourable representing of a firm stateliness; handsome without curiosity and homely without loathsomeness.’

  ‘B uilt of fair and strong stone,’ as Sir Philip Sidney described it, Penshurst Place is a gorgeous medieval and Tudor manor house, set in beautiful gardens. Early in the sixteenth century, it belonged to Edward Stafford, third Duke of Buckingham; he entertained Henry VIII here at exorbitant expense (spending £2,500 or the equivalent of £1.2 million) in 1519. Today, Penshurst Place is chiefly remembered as the home of the Sidney family, whose most famous representative, Sir Philip Sidney, was fêted as the perfect courtier-soldier-poet of his day, owing in part to his early death at the age of thirty-one.

  After Buckingham’s untimely demise in 1521 [see THORNBURY CASTLE], Penshurst remained in the possession of the Crown until Edward VI bequeathed it to Sir William Sidney in 1552, who died two years later and passed it to his son, Sir Henry Sidney. Sir Henry was connected to the highest echelons of Tudor society: he had been educated with the boy-king, Edward, and married Mary, daughter of John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland. When Northumberland engineered the marriage of his son, Guildford, to Lady Jane Grey and acclaimed her as Queen in 1553 [see GUILDHALL], the Sidneys were lucky to escape the aftermath unscathed.

  With the twists and turns of Tudor history, the Dudley connection became one of honour when Queen Elizabeth I fell in love with Mary’s brother, Robert Dudley, later Earl of Leicester. There are portraits of them all here: Sir Henry and Mary Sidney (the former by Hans Eworth); Leicester in older age; Ambrose Dudley, Earl of Warwick; Edward VI; and Elizabeth in the Long Gallery. Meanwhile, Mary had given birth at Penshurst in 1554 to the first of the Sidneys’ seven children, Philip, named after his godfather, the Catholic-Spanish King of England. The young Philip would become famed at the Elizabethan court, but only really after his death.

  At the heart of the house in which Philip spent his childhood is the Barons’ Hall, a marvellous room with a central octagonal hearth and a sixty-foot roof timbered with chestnut beams, constructed by Sir John de Pulteney in 1341. The hall’s wooden eavesdroppers (the word comes from the sense that the eaves might drop down to listen in) are life-size satirical peasant figures and would surely have caught the child’s eye as he sat at the two long oak refectory tables that have been here since the fifteenth century and are the only surviving examples of their kind. The Minstrels’ Gallery was then newly added and the expensive and exquisite tapestries from Tournai and Brussels were still in their first flush of colour.

  Before he was six years old, Philip suffered a terrible bout of smallpox, which an early biographer described as having ‘laid waste, as with little mines, [to] the excellence and fashion of his beauty’. His mother, Mary, was also terribly scarred by the disease while nursing Elizabeth I through it in 1562.

  As Lord President of the Council of the Welsh Marches, effectively the ruler or ‘pro-rex’ of Wales, Sir Henry Sidney and his family lived for a time at Ludlow Castle, though retained Penshurst as their main home. Philip was schooled at Shrewsbury School, with his future friend and biographer Fulke Greville, before going to Christ Church, Oxford.

  Aged just eighteen years, Philip was given an important duty in the realm of international diplomacy. In 1572, Elizabeth I dispatched him to accompany Edward Fiennes de Clinton to Paris to sign the Treaty of Blois, which promised that neither England nor France would aid their mutual enemy, Spain. This meant that Philip was in Paris for the August wedding of King Henri of Navarre (later Henri IV of France) to Marguerite de Valois, and for the terrible massacre of Protestants on St Bartholomew’s Day that followed it. Philip then spent three years on an extended proto-Grand Tour of Europe, during which he met the great and good of European society and saw the European Renaissance — painters like Titian and Tintoretto — first hand.

  Philip returned to England in May 1575, glittering with cosmopolitan glamour, and possibly a little full of himself, given his widespread international recognition as the son of the ruler of Wales and nephew and heir to the Queen’s paramour, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. Quite an adventure for a young man of just twenty-one. The Tudor loggia (gallery of columns) built by Sir Henry at Penshurst, which can be seen from the window of the Tapestry Room, is one of the imports from Philip’s travels in Italy. Philip joined the Queen on progress that year and witnessed Leicester’s spectacular entertainments to win her hand [see KENILWORTH CASTLE].

  In the Solar Room and Long Gallery at Penshurst, there are portraits of Philip, showing him at around the time of his return, with his strawberry-blond hair and effete moustache, dressed in a huge (though fashionable) ruff. English antiquary John Aubrey described him as ‘extremely beautiful’. In these portraits and the one at the National Portrait Gallery, there is no sign of smallpox devastation. There is also a fascinating picture in the Solar Room from 1581 of Elizabeth dancing la volta with Leicester (remember Cate Blanchett and Joseph Fiennes in the film Elizabeth?), in which Philip can be seen pointing out to his uncle that the Duc d’Alençon, one of the men courting Elizabeth, has his arm around another lady.

  Although Aubrey added to his description that Philip looked ‘not masculine enough’, in fact, part of the trouble during his years as a courtier was that he was a little too macho and too easily angered. At court, he quarrelled with the earls of Ormond and Oxford, and was rebuked by Elizabeth for acting with contempt to his social superiors. Had his years of entertaining kings and dukes around Europe given him a restless haughtiness when dealing with the earls of England? This may have been a reason why, along with his failure to advance the foreign interests of the Queen, he remained without an official post or knighthood until 1583. Though he was famed abroad, he was a courtier without honour in his own country.

  In 1579, Philip decided to pick up his quill and write what he dubbed his ‘toyfull booke’, which he called Arcadia. It was an epic romance in five books with ancillary songs and poems, which he had started some years earlier. In 1579, he retired to his sister, Mary, Countess of Pembroke’s home at Wilton, to complete it. A year later, perhaps in response to the marriage of Penelope Devereux, once earmarked by Sir Henry as a suitable match for his son, Philip composed Astrophil and Stella, a sequence of 108 sonnets and eleven songs. It tells the story of the unhappy love of Astrophil (‘star-lover’) for the married Stella (‘star’). The language of Tudor courtship is replete with images of the heavens, of stars, moons and suns.

  Underneath his untroubled surface, however, Philip began to despair for lack of an official position and money. What he needed to do was wed a wealthy woman and, in September 1583, he chose Frances, the fifteen-year-old daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham. While the marriage partly alleviated his financial woes, Philip was not destined for a settled domestic life. Wanderlust struck again after a mission to Europe in 1584 had to be abandoned. This time, Phili
p dreamed of making a fortune in the New World. He invested in Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s voyage to North America and, in return, was granted three million acres of undiscovered lands there (one can only imagine the value of such a landholding today). He also sought to join Sir Francis Drake’s voyage to the West Indies in September 1585. But his monarch had different designs for him: he was ordered to go to the Low Countries to fight with Leicester, in what turned out to be a fairly fruitless battle, against the Spanish.

  On 22 September 1586, at the Battle of Zutphen, Philip was wounded. He was not wearing thigh armour and a musket ball struck him just above his left knee, shattering the bone. His friend, Greville, would later tell the story of how, injured on the battlefield, Philip declined a drink of water and offered it instead to a wounded common soldier. Twenty-five days later, he died of gangrene in the wound. His father-in-law, Walsingham, arranged a splendid state funeral for him — he was the last commoner to have a state funeral until Nelson in 1806. His funerary helm (a special helmet marking his reputation as a warrior) remains at Penshurst. With accolades to his heroism, youth and courtly poetry abounding, in death he managed to achieve the status he had not been accorded in life. We can perhaps think of Sidney as a forerunner of the nineteenth-century Romantic poets, who also travelled, lived impecuniously, dreamed large and died untimely deaths.

  Other Tudor treasures to see: look out for the portraits of Philip’s brother, Robert, first Earl of Leicester (after Leicester’s death) and his wife, Barbara Gamage; a black sixteenth-century lute by Padova Vienderville; a sixteenth-century harpsichord, gilded in rococo style; a cast-lead bust of the head of Elizabeth I from the effigy on her tomb in Westminster Abbey (from 1605); an alleged fragment of Sir Philip Sidney’s shaving mirror; and Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester’s sword of state.

  THE EARLY TUDOR GREAT HALL

  Every great Tudor house displays its individuality, but nearly every grand house had, as its centrepiece, a Great Hall. The Great Hall was the centre of activity. Traditionally, it had been the place where the King or nobleman would dine alongside their retainers and servants on a daily basis but, by the sixteenth century, the hall was instead generally used for servants’ dining, as a common room and entrance hall, and on special occasions for feast days, plays and entertainments. A year after Elizabeth I’s death, Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men, performed A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the Great Hall at Hampton Court. It was also conventional to feed hoards of guests at Christmas and on other great feast days, as when Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, offered meals to 235 ‘strangers’ at Framlingham Castle at Christmas 1526.

  Great Halls vary dramatically in size. The Barons’ Hall at Penshurst, for example, is sixty-two feet by thirty-nine feet, which was enormous in fourteenth-century England, when it was built. The Great Hall at Guildhall is a much larger 151 feet by 48 feet. Nevertheless, they do all have similar, recognisable features: every hall has a raised dais at one end, generally lit by a large bay window, which is where the great man of the house would sit. The other end is the service end, partitioned off by ornately carved wooden screens that helped prevent draughts. In the sixteenth century, it became fashionable to build a minstrels’ gallery over the screens’ passage (there is an example of this at Penshurst), as a place for musicians to entertain.

  Underneath the Great Hall you would probably find a vaulted, cave-like room, known as the undercroft, which was ostensibly a cellar or storeroom. Some of them are so fine, however, as to suggest they had other uses as well. Every house had a chapel, and most royal palaces also had private closets for worship.

  As the nobility and monarchy withdrew — for comfort and privacy — from dining in the Great Hall, they moved into other rooms: the Great Chamber, and beyond it, the Privy Chamber. By the end of the sixteenth century, the lord of the manor would likely have slept in the Privy Chamber, named after its position between the Great Chamber and the privy.

  The privy, also known as the garderobe (after the Old French for ‘wardrobe’, like our use of the word ‘cloakroom’), or more colloquially, the Jakes, was generally a wooden seat over a hole dropping down a shaft into a pit or even, quite commonly, straight into the moat. At Hampton Court in 1536, a ‘Great House of Easement’: a twenty-eight-seater latrine on two floors, was built over the moat, though the waste was directed into a nearby river.

  ‘Say what they will, she is nothing as fair as she hath been reported.’

  Rochester is a forbidding, medieval stone castle, situated in an impressive and strategically important position on the banks of the River Medway. There has been a castle on this site (as so often is the case) since soon after the Norman Conquest, but the ragstone keep that still stands was built around 1127 by the then Archbishop of Canterbury, William of Corbeil. It is one of the finest and oldest surviving twelfth-century castles in England. Although besieged twice in the thirteenth century, and captured and ransacked during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, it remains, albeit in partial ruin, fundamentally intact. It Was already ancient when Henry VIII surprised his fourth wife-to-be, Anne of Cleves, here on New Year’s Day 1540 — and it was her behaviour at Rochester that determined not only the course of their marriage, but her entire future.

  By 1539, Henry VIII had been mourning Jane Seymour’s death for a couple of years and his advisers urged him to marry again in order to secure the succession with a bevy of boys. A number of European women were considered (including Christina, Duchess of Denmark, whose legendary response was that if she had two heads, ‘one of them would be at the King of England’s disposal’). In an effort to bolster Henry’s alliances in Europe, his first minister Thomas Cromwell urged Henry to marry one of the daughters of the German Duke of Cleves. Soon after, reports of the beauty of the eldest, the twenty-four-year-old Anne, reached Henry’s ears. English ambassador Christopher Mont claimed that ‘everyone praiseth the beauty of the said Lady, as well for the face, as for the whole body, above all other ladies excellent’, and added that in looks she surpassed the Duchess of Denmark ‘as the golden sun excelleth the silver moon’. Hans Holbein was dispatched to the Continent to paint images of Anne and her sister Amelia for the King’s consideration. Henry found the picture of Anne so appealing that he retained it in his royal collection long after he had dispensed with the flesh-and-blood version.

  On the strength of Holbein’s portrait, the King decided to marry her. Anne set out in November 1539 to travel the slow land-route to the English territory of Calais, and thence on to the mainland. By New Year’s Eve, she had arrived at Rochester Castle, where it was intended that she would spend the New Year holiday, before travelling on to meet her groom-to-be at Blackheath on 3 January. Entertainment was provided for the young lady to pass the time while she waited for her bridegroom: entertainment such as the blood sports so favoured by the Tudors.

  On New Year’s Day, Anne was standing by a window watching bull-baiting on the grass beside the keep when six gentlemen burst into her room unannounced, all hooded and disguised in identical gowns. One of the men stepped forward to present her with a gift from the King. He started kissing her and made advances. Disconcerted, but not flustered, the demure Anne seems to have tried to ignore this break with courtesy by ‘regard[ing] him little but always look[ing] out of the window on the bull-baiting’. The man swept out of the room and returned moments later in a gown of purple velvet. It was, of course, Henry VIII himself.

  The King had hoped that: by surprising Anne he would ‘nourish love’, because it was a widely known chivalric notion that true lovers could recognise each other through a disguise. He also probably hoped that his sheer royal bearing and dashing good looks would win her attention. Her lack of response was deeply humiliating. The lesson Henry took was that she was unschooled and lacked the cosmopolitan wit of the courtly lady that he sought. There was some truth to that: Anne was very parochial in her education and accomplishments, and she barely spoke English, let alone Latin or French. But what was more painfully obv
ious was that at forty-eight, and with a waist of nearly fifty-four inches, Henry was no longer the Adonis he had once been.

  According to his close servant, Sir Anthony Browne, Henry spoke barely twenty words to Anne and left quickly. The next day he told Browne that he saw, ‘nothing in this woman as men report of her’, and to Cromwell, that he liked her, ‘nothing so well as she was spoken of’. As time went on, he became more emphatic, telling Cromwell, ‘Say what they will, she is nothing as fair as she hath been reported’ and on the day of their delayed marriage, 6 January 1540, muttered, ‘If it were not to satisfy the world and my realm, I would not do that I must do this day for none earthly thing.’ Hardly what one hopes the groom will say before he walks down the aisle.

  Anne has been slandered throughout history as an ugly ‘Flanders’ Mare’ (a phrase invented in the seventeenth century), but Henry only made passing mention of her looks, and other people continued to praise her beauty. On their wedding day, the chronicler Edward Hall reported that Anne was ‘so fair a Lady of so goodly a Stature & so womanly a countenance’ and her hair, ‘fair, yellow and long’.

  The real problem was Henry’s sense of shame and humiliation. This meant that when he came to consummate the marriage, and touched her belly and breasts, he quickly convinced himself that ‘she should be no maid … which struck me so to the heart when I felt them that I had neither will nor courage to proceed any further in other matters’. It had to be her fault and not his.

  On 9 July, Anne was informed that the court had decided her unconsummated marriage had been annulled. Although initially distraught, she gathered her wits and played her hand well. Agreeing to being honoured as the King’s ‘sister’, she earned Henry’s gratitude, and with it an income of £4,000 a year and the palaces of Richmond and Bletchingley, to which were later added Hever, Kemsing and Seal: not a bad haul for six months of benign companionship.