A Brief History of the Tudor Age (15 page)

When Wolsey was at the height of his power and wealth – Lord Chancellor, Papal Legate, Archbishop of York, Bishop of Durham and Abbot of St Albans – he decided to found a new college
in his old university of Oxford and a school in his native town of Ipswich. It was a period of great expansion in the university. Wolsey’s own college of Magdalen had been founded in 1458,
but the buildings were not finished until thirty years later, at the beginning of the Tudor Age. The great bell tower, which was added immediately afterwards, was being built when Wolsey was Bursar
of the college in 1498 and 1499, and it was finished in 1505. In 1500, extensive work was being carried out at Bernard College, the residence of the Cistercian monks who were scholars at the
university, which was afterwards converted into St John’s College. During the next twenty years Corpus Christi College and Brasenose College were founded and built. In Cambridge, Jesus
College, where Cranmer was a student and teacher, Christ’s College, St John’s College and Buckingham College were built between 1496 and 1519. The name of Buckingham College was changed
to Magdalene College after Buckingham’s execution for high treason. At King’s Hall, the great gate was built, and other work carried out, between 1518 and 1535; the college was later
incorporated into Trinity College.

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.