Journey Through Tudor England

by Suzannah Lipscomb

  After a moving speech, and having quipped to the sheriff that the axe was ‘sharp medicine … a physician for all diseases’, Ralegh was executed on 29 October 1618. Bess carried away his head in a red leather bag and kept it with her until her death. Ralegh had already surrendered Sherborne to the Crown. On his death, the attorney general declared, ‘He hath been as a star at which the world has gazed; but stars may fall.’

  If Ralegh’s castle isn’t Tudor enough for you, just down the road is the golden-coloured Sandford Orcas Manor House. This virtually unknown gem is a wonderful sixteenth-century house that you can tour, for a small fee, with owner Sir Mervyn Medlycott. The current family has owned the house since 1736, and it was restored in 1978. The Great Hall dates from around 1550: the fireplace and splendid eighteen mullion windows are original, though the furniture and panelling are Jacobean. There is a ‘solar room’ above the Hall with the same mullion windows and a Jacobean four-poster bed from 1620. Note the spiral staircases, indoor porches, gatehouse and garderobe. Look out for the leather Tudor children’s shoes, found behind a cabinet where they had probably been put to ward off evil, and some fine examples of Elizabethan blackwork (decorative embroidery), including a bodice and coif (linen cap), embroidered with gold thread.

  ‘But a duck’s blood’

  The ruined abbey of Hailes in Gloucestershire is a desolate reminder of a world that vanished in the 1530s. For Hailes was once one of the most famous abbeys in England, attracting pilgrims from far and wide to visit its precious holy relic: the Blood of Hailes, a silver and crystal phial said to contain Christ’s blood.

  Established in 1246 as a Cistercian abbey, Hailes was founded by King Henry III’s brother, Richard, Earl of Cornwall. We can imagine that it looked a little like a small version of Westminster Abbey: it was built at the same time and had the same ‘chevet’ design, or coronet of chapels, at its east end. This is where the shrine containing the holy blood was housed.

  Earl Richard’s son, Edmund, had given the blood to the monks at Hailes in 1270. He came by it in Flanders, and the Patriarch of Jerusalem, later Pope Urban IV, had guaranteed its authenticity. For centuries the masses flocked to Hailes to behold this most sacred of relics, in hope of absolution from their sins.

  In 1538, the Blood of Hailes became the centre of a scandal. On 24 February 1538, John Hilsey, Bishop of Rochester preached at St Paul’s Cross in London against the idolatry and deception of Hailes and its sister abbey of Boxley in Kent. The Rood of Grace from Boxley, carved with figures thought to move by supernatural intervention, was exposed as an automaton. As Hilsey explained, ‘It was made to move the eyes and lips by strings of hair … whereby they had gotten great riches in deceiving the people.’ When Hilsey stopped speaking, the rood screen was unceremoniously broken up into little pieces by the crowd. Then Hilsey turned his attention to the Blood of Hailes. He said that he had been told twenty years earlier, in a confession by the abbot’s mistress, that it was ‘but a duck’s blood’.

  Hilsey could get away with this claim because, having made himself Supreme Head of the Church of England in 1534, Henry VIII liked to think of himself as an Old Testament king, like David or Josiah, who had a special mandate from God to bring down idols and reform religious abuses. The royal injunctions of 1536, part of the first wave of doctrinal statements by the new Church of England, bemoaned the fact that, ‘superstitions and hypocrisy [had] crept into divers men’s hearts’. With the Blood of Hailes, Henry VIII had a chance to prove his reforming credentials.

  The Bishop of Worcester, Hugh Latimer, led a commission to Gloucestershire to examine the relic in October 1538. He concluded it was not drake’s blood, but ‘unctuous gum [that had been] coloured’ and seized the phial. On 24 November 1538, Hilsey preached again at St Paul’s, saying that the blood was merely ‘honey clarified and coloured with saffron, as had been evidently proved before the King and his Council’. Whether duck’s blood, saffron honey or coloured gum, what was certain to the examiners was that it was no holy relic. It may be that Abbot Sagar, whom Latimer nicknamed ‘the bluddy abbott’, told the truth when he swore that he had inherited the relic and displayed it in good faith, but to Henry VIII, it was further proof of the greed and dishonesty of the Catholic Church, and provided a great opportunity to seize the wealthy abbey.

  On Christmas Eve, 1539, Sagar surrendered his abbey to the King’s commissioners. Over subsequent years the Abbey was gradually demolished, leaving only an outline today, where many pilgrims’ feet had sought an encounter with the divine.

  Hailes Abbey is emblematic of the end of popular medieval devotion, and marks the beginnings of an age whose population would be less ready to accept the pronouncements of the clergy on trust alone.

  ‘As truly as God is God, my mind was fully bent the other time I was at liberty to marry you before any man I know.’

  The graceful honey-coloured Sudeley Castle, in the heart of the Gloucestershire countryside, is mostly Elizabethan, with beautiful late medieval ruins, exquisite gardens and a separate chapel. Now owned, and still inhabited, by the Dent-Brocklehurst and Ashcombe family, there has been a castle at Sudeley since before the Norman Conquest of 1066. Sudeley has a rich Tudor history: Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn stayed here in 1535, and Elizabeth I held a party here to celebrate the defeat of the Armada (there is a stained-glass window of her in the stairwell of the house to mark this). Sudeley’s chief distinction, however, is as the final resting place of one of England’s most under-appreciated queens, Henry VIII’s sixth wife, Kateryn Parr.

  Kateryn Parr has generally been dismissed as a dowdy old widow whom Henry VIII married solely to have a nursemaid, but this sorry analysis overlooks the evidence of her considerable beauty, vitality and intelligence, and her life of great hardship, adventure, passion and peril.

  For a start, she may have been a widow when she made her royal marriage, but she was anything but dowdy. A lock of her pretty strawberry-blonde hair at Sudeley confirms the loveliness seen in her recently identified portrait at the National Portrait Gallery, where she is youthful, with delicate features, a tiny waist and evident sartorial flair.

  Her unlined face does not bear the marks of her tumultuous life. Left without a father at the age of five, Kateryn — who had, extraordinarily enough, been named after her godmother Katherine of Aragon — had to leave the carefree, encouraging and scholarly environment of her mother’s house when she was married off at sixteen to a frail young husband, Edward Borough. For the first two years of their marriage, she made her uncomfortable home with her bullying new father-in-law at Gainsborough Old Hall. When Edward died, Kateryn was still only twenty, and now an orphan: her mother had died two years earlier.

  Her uncertain future was secured by marriage to John Neville, Lord Latimer of Snape Castle in Yorkshire, in 1534. Though just twenty-one years old to his forty, Kateryn served Latimer well as a stepmother to his two teenage children. Latimer’s daughter, Margaret Neville, would later become Kateryn’s maid-of-honour. Though their nine-year marriage was happy enough, all was not peaceful. In 1536, during the Pilgrimage of Grace rebellion [see PONTEFRACT CASTLE], an armed mob of rebels took Lord Latimer prisoner. Two months later, Kateryn herself faced great danger when an armed mob ransacked Snape Castle, seizing her and the children as hostages. It is little wonder that after this Kateryn was keen to move south!

  In the winter of 1542—3, Kateryn was in London and, with the help of her sister, Anne Herbert, had taken up a position as one of Mary Tudor’s ladies-in-waiting. This brought her into contact with the high-fliers of Henry VIII’s court, including Sir Thomas Seymour, brother to the late Queen, Jane. Seymour was handsome, charming and recklessly ambitious. When Latimer died in February 1543, Seymour began to court Kateryn, and the twice-widowed Kateryn fell, for the first time, wildly in love. As she later wrote to Seymour, in a love letter that can be seen at Sudeley Castle:

  I would not have you to think that this mine honest goodwill towards you to proceed of any sudd
en motion or passion for as truly as God is God, my mind was fully bent the other time I was at liberty to marry you before any man I know.

  But marry him she could not, because she had caught the King’s eye and, no matter what her heart preferred, a proposal from Henry VIII could not be turned down. Henry VIII married his sixth wife on 12 July 1543 in the Queen’s private chapel at Hampton Court Palace before a small crowd of nineteen close friends and family.

  A capable, accomplished and energetic queen, Kateryn was an important patron of the clergy, arts and education. She guided the rising stars of the Church, Matthew Parker (later Elizabeth I’s Archbishop of Canterbury), Miles Coverdale and Nicholas Ridley [see BROAD STREET]. It was she who sponsored the artists William Scrots, Master John, Lucas and Susanna Horenbout, the Bassano family of court musicians and the playwright Nicholas Udall. She founded Well Grammar School in Clare, Suffolk. She even excelled in scholarship herself: Kateryn was both the first Queen of England to publish her own book, and the first English woman to publish a work of prose in the sixteenth century. You can see her signed, beautiful 1546 copy of her Prayers and Meditations, bound in red silk and embroidered with gold and silver thread, in the exhibitions at Sudeley.

  As stepmother to the future Queen Elizabeth, Kateryn was an important role model. Entrusted with the position of Regent-General when Henry went to war in France in 1544, Kateryn demonstrated strong female rule to the young Elizabeth: England’s greatest monarch undoubtedly learnt the skills of queenship at Kateryn Parr’s side.

  When Henry VIII died in January 1547, Kateryn’s years of duty finally seemed behind her. She impetuously rushed ahead with a marriage to Thomas Seymour in May, well before the usual two years of mourning were up, and by Christmas (which they spent with Edward VI at Hampton Court), the now four times married Kateryn was finally pregnant by the man she loved.

  In the summer of 1548, Kateryn and Thomas moved to his beautiful country house at Sudeley in advance of the birth, with Lady Jane Grey in attendance. In preparation, Seymour had spent £1,000 (around £340,000 today) adding to the ancient castle, which already included a magnificent Banqueting Hall with fine oriel windows (now in ruins).

  On the eve of her labour, both princesses wrote to encourage her: Elizabeth thanking her for writing despite ‘being so great with child’, and Mary hoping ‘to hear good success of your Grace’s good belly’. Heralded by these well-wishers, on 30 August 1548, the thirty-six-year-old Kateryn gave birth to her first child, a healthy girl, whom she named Mary after her eldest stepdaughter. Thomas could boast joyfully of his little daughter’s prettiness.

  But their happiness was short-lived. Within days, Kateryn had developed the fever that comes from puerperal sepsis, a bacterial infection caused by a doctor’s lack of hygiene. She died on the morning of 5 September 1548. Wrapped in a waxed cloth and encased in lead, she was buried in the chapel at Sudeley (later ruined in the Civil War). Her chief mourner was the ill-fated Lady Jane Grey [see GUILDHALL]. Crazed with grief, Seymour’s subsequent foolish acts led to his execution on Tower Hill, while their daughter, Mary, does not seem to have lived past the age of two.

  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.’

  Thornbury 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 inscri
bed 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.