A Brief History of the Tudor Age (16 page)

No cathedrals were built during the Tudor Age. All the old dioceses already had cathedrals which had been erected before the end of the fourteenth century; and when Henry VIII created six new
dioceses in 1540 the abbey churches of some of the dissolved monasteries were converted into the cathedrals of the new dioceses. But a number of new parish churches were built, at the expense of
wealthy merchants and manufacturers. The thriving woollen clothiers built splendid churches at Lavenham and Long Melford in Suffolk and at Taunton in Somerset; and the equally prosperous
ironmasters of the Weald of Kent built a spacious church in the village of Cranbrook which was much larger than the ordinary parish church.

The prestige building during the years between 1475 and 1550 could not have been carried out on such an extensive scale by the old building methods of the local independent masons and carpenters
who had so slowly and patiently built the simple houses and cottages, and also the castles and cathedrals, of the Middle Ages. The new builders were big businessmen; they employed many workmen,
used large cranes for work on high buildings, and worked far afield, beyond the districts where they lived and had their business offices. When building in brick developed on a large scale in
England, the Dutchman, Baldwin, opened a brickworks at Tattershall in Lincolnshire, where he made bricks for buildings all over south-east England. There was another large brickworks at Eton. These
and other brickworks were able to supply Edward IV with over two million bricks for the additional fortifications which were erected at Dover Castle
in 1480. The new type of
builder, with his large labour force and modern methods, could complete his work much faster than the builders in earlier times. It had taken more than fifty years to build most of the medieval
cathedrals; but the great edifices erected under Henry VII and the later Tudors were usually finished within fifteen years. As usual, the increased efficiency, and the splendid products which
resulted from the improved working methods, were achieved at a cost in human terms. The masons and carpenters who worked for the new builders were still skilled craftsmen, but they could no longer
exercise their personal judgment and taste. They had now to work according to the plan of the master-builder who employed them.

The size of the operations and the reputation of the new type of builders gave their names a snob value. Noblemen and bishops who emulated the building projects of the King and Wolsey wished not
only to build better and bigger houses than their rivals, but liked to boast that they had engaged Wastell, Vertue, Redman or Needham to carry out the work. In some areas, a local man was able to
develop a large building firm and acquire a reputation which ensured him a monopoly of the important building projects in the neighbourhood. William Orchard of Headington, on the outskirts of
Oxford, built the tower and other buildings at Magdalen College, the Divinity School, and Bernard College (later St John’s College) in the university, and the ante-chapel at Eton, between
1480 and 1504, and after his death Brasenose College at Oxford was built in 1519 by one of his pupils. In the west country, Hart built the great church towers at Bristol, Cardiff and Wrexham; and
in the North, Christopher Scoyne carried out the work at Ripon Minster, at St Mary’s, Beverley, and at Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire, and on the spire of Louth church in Lincolnshire, between
1505 and 1525. He was also responsible for the upkeep of Durham Cathedral.

But the other famous builders were not limited to any particular area. Wastell built the tower of Canterbury Cathedral, Henry VII’s chapel in Westminster Abbey, and the chapels in
Peterborough Cathedral and King’s College, Cambridge. William Vertue worked at St George’s Chapel and the Lady Chapel at Windsor, at King’s College, Cambridge, at
Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and on the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula in the Tower of London and St Stephen’s Cloisters in the palace of Westminster. Henry Redman, from Ramsey in
Huntingdonshire, succeeded his father Thomas at Westminster Abbey and carried out the work on the tower of St Margaret’s, Westminster, at Eton, at Greenwich, and at Windsor Castle, and built
Hampton Court, York Place, and Cardinal’s College at Oxford for Wolsey.

The roods and timber work at all these buildings for Wolsey were done by the famous master-carpenter, Humphrey Coke. Another famous carpenter, James Needham, designed the roof of the great hall
at Hampton Court, and was responsible for the work at the Tower, at Rochester at Greenwich, at Eltham, at Petworth and at Knole. Most of these eminent builders held for a time official positions in
the King’s service. Needham worked for some years for the garrisons at Berwick and Calais, and accompanied the army which invaded France in 1523. They were masters of their city livery
companies and mayors of their home towns, though none of them followed the example of the builder, William Veysey, in the reign of Henry VI and became a member of Parliament. Needham, who began
working at a master-carpenter’s wage of tenpence a day, was able to buy extensive properties in Hertfordshire and Kent.

In building, as in so many other aspects of Tudor life, a great change took place after 1550. Neither Edward VI, Mary nor Elizabeth I engaged in building as Henry VII and Henry VIII had done.
With Whitehall, Greenwich, Richmond, St James’s and Nonesuch in the neighbourhood of London, apart from their manors further away, they did not need another palace, and all of them, for
different reasons, were much more economical than Henry VIII. The building of new towers and chapels in abbeys and cathedrals, and of new parish churches, also virtually
stopped. But the nobility still built mansions, and so did some of the wealthier and more important knights and gentlemen.

These mansions were built in a new style. The palaces which Wolsey and his contemporaries erected had Gothic gateways and façades; inside the house, there was a big banqueting hall with
large windows, but the other rooms were small, with small windows, though all the windows were of glass, unlike the apertures with shutters of the houses of earlier generations. On the first floor
there was a long gallery on all four sides of the building, with bay windows at regular intervals in which there were fixed window seats. When public receptions took place at court, the King would
often withdraw with one of his counsellors, or with a foreign ambassador, ‘into a window’ and sit and talk to him there in privacy, as no one else would venture to approach.

After 1550, the great houses built by the nobility were usually in stone, not brick, and the Gothic façade was replaced by simpler perpendicular frontages. They were built on four sides
of a central courtyard, which was far larger than the courtyards of the first half of the century, so the sides of the building were much longer. Many of the rooms were large, with very large glass
windows; the people who saw them were amazed, and had the impression that the house was made of glass. The lay-out and appearance of the houses resembled the palaces that had been built thirty
years earlier on the Loire in France, but the size and features were exaggerated in the great houses of later Tudor England.

Many of these houses were wholly or partly demolished, and converted into even larger houses, in the late seventeenth and in the eighteenth centuries; but Longleat House, which the courtier and
soldier, Sir John Thynne, built near Warminster in Wiltshire, still stands today, unaltered externally, just as it looked when it was completed in 1585. Kirby Hall in Northamptonshire, which was
built for Sir Humphrey Stafford in 1575, and Wollaton near Nottingham, built for Sir Francis Willoughby in 1588, are other examples of the very large mansions in the modern style which
knights, not noblemen, were erecting for themselves in the reign of Elizabeth I. Willoughby was a local landowner, but he built Wollaton with the money that he made in his ironworks,
his glass manufacturing works, from selling woad to dyers, and above all from the profits of his coal mines.

In the year in which Wollaton was finished – the year of the Armada – Edward Phelips began building Montacute House near Yeovil in Somerset. At Montacute, money came first, then the
house, and rank came last. When the Cluniac priory of Montacute was dissolved, Henry VIII granted the site and manor to his secretary, William Petre, who sold it to his fellow courtier, Sir Thomas
Wyatt. It was forfeited to the crown when Wyatt’s son was executed as a traitor after his revolt against Mary in 1554. She granted it to Petre again, whose son sold it to Robert Dudley, Earl
of Leicester, who immediately resold it at a profit to Robert Freke, a gentleman from Dorset. But it was a young man from an unimportant local family, Edward Phelips, who, after he had become a
successful barrister of the Middle Temple, built Montacute House; and it was after the house was completed in 1601 that he became Speaker of the House of Commons, was knighted, and last of all
bought the manor of Montacute and the former monastic lands from the impoverished Freke. Montacute House is smaller than Longleat and Wollaton, but considerably larger than the gentlemen’s
manor houses which were built, in much the same style, in the second half of the sixteenth century.

William Cecil was brought up in his mother’s house at Burghley in Northamptonshire, on the south-eastern outskirts of Stamford. As it was ninety miles from London, it could hardly be
reached in two days’ travel from the court, and when Cecil became Secretary of State under Edward VI he bought a house at Wimbledon; but he continued to spend much time at Burghley, even
after he was again appointed Secretary of State by Elizabeth I on her accession, and in 1555 he began building a much larger house there.

In the summer of 1559, Cecil decided to use his house at Burghley for an important diplomatic meeting. In May John
Knox returned to Scotland from his exile in Geneva, and
his sermon in Perth sparked off a popular revolution all over the Scottish Lowlands, led by the Protestant lords of the Congregation. Within seven weeks the Congregation had entered Edinburgh in
triumph, and the French government was preparing to send troops to suppress the revolt against Mary Queen of Scots and her husband, King Francis II of France. Cecil was convinced that England must
intervene to support the Congregation in Scotland; but Elizabeth was very reluctant to help rebels, and was particularly hostile to Knox, who only a year before had written his book against
‘the Monstrous Regiment of Women’ in which he argued that for a woman to rule was against God’s law.

Cecil, who had known Knox when they were both at Edward VI’s court, was eager to meet him to discuss the best way in which English aid could be given to the Scottish Protestants; but he
realized that it was important that it should not be generally known that Elizabeth’s Secretary of State was meeting this notorious revolutionary leader, and he may not even have told
Elizabeth about it. He therefore planned to meet Knox at Burghley, and wrote to Sir Henry Percy, the Deputy Warden of the East and Middle Marches, to give Knox instructions as to what he should do.
Knox was to come incognito to Holy Island near Berwick, and then travel south along the Great North Road towards Stamford; but he was to leave the highway a few miles north of Stamford and ride
across the fields to Burghley, entering the house by the back gate. He was to remain there, taking care not to leave the house, until Cecil arrived a few days later. Cecil assured Percy that he had
given orders to his household to make sure that Knox would be well supplied with food and drink at Burghley. He probably remembered that Knox always appreciated good ale and wines.

Cecil’s plans went wrong. Knox had been a preacher at Berwick for some years in the reign of Edward VI, and when he arrived by sea from Scotland at Holy Island he was recognized by some of
his old parishioners. In view of this, Percy thought
that it would be wiser if Knox did not go on to Burghley, and when Cecil heard what had happened he agreed that it would be
too risky for the meeting to take place. Knox returned to Scotland, and Cecil conducted his negotiations with the Congregation through the Scottish Protestant lords who were less hateful to
Elizabeth than Knox.

When Elizabeth created Cecil a peer in 1571, he took the title of Lord Burghley after the name of his house, and soon afterwards again began enlarging Burghley. The work was eventually finished
in 1587. The exterior remains almost unaltered today, though the interior was much changed in later times. Cecil took the greatest interest in the building work, and himself suggested many of the
details to his English and Dutch master-masons. The house contained many features of the architecture which was beginning to appear in Italy by the end of the sixteenth century and which resembled
the elaborate Baroque mansions of a hundred years later.

Cecil also built himself another large house at Theobalds near Cheshunt in Hertfordshire, only just off the Great North Road. The building work began in 1563, when he had almost finished the
first stage of the work at Burghley, and was largely completed by 1575. Unlike his urban residence of Cecil House in Drury Lane, Theobalds had the advantage of country air, but was much nearer to
London than Burghley House. Elizabeth I stayed with him at Theobalds on ten occasions, the last time in 1597, less than a year before his death. The German traveller, Paul Hentzner, visited
Theobalds a few days after Burghley died; and though he could not go into the house, as all the family were in London for the funeral, the gardener showed him around the grounds. He was very
impressed by their size, by the large lake with the rowing boats provided for the use of the guests, by the complicated labyrinths, the white marble fountain, and the summer-house containing marble
statues of twelve Roman Emperors. In 1607 Burghley’s son Robert gave Theobalds to James I in exchange for Hatfield House; but Theobalds was another of the royal residences pulled down by
Charles II.

Thomas Howard, who loyally served Elizabeth I after his father, the Duke of Norfolk, was beheaded as a traitor, became an influential courtier and was created Earl of
Suffolk by James I. In 1603 he began building his great mansion at Audley End, near Saffron Walden in Essex. Lord Cobham began rebuilding Cobham Hall in Kent in 1584.