Off to the next one

The courtier closest to Henry VII was the Groom of the Stool. He alone had the key to the king’s bedroom (fixed up with a new lock each time the court went on progress from grand house to grand house). He made sure the king’s straw mattress beneath his feather bed was stabbed each night lest any assassin hid there. And he attended the king when he eased himself.

Henry VII’s close stool was a box with a hole in the top, covered with fringed black velvet, the seat cushioned and the inside fitted with a pewter bowl. Henry, the first of the Tudors, introduced a new degree of privacy into royal life. At Westminster and Windsor he built new privy chambers (not privies, but private apartments). Of Westminster’s we can see no trace, since fire and rebuilding have destroyed most of the palace. But at Windsor this domestic block, built between 1498 and 1501, with its narrow ground-floor windows for safety and its own staircase, is now the library, where privileged historians beaver away.

Here the closet or day room next to the bedchamber had lovely views south towards Eton. It reminds me of Charles V’s house at Yuste, built half a century later for the emperor’s retirement. Like Henry VII, Charles also had a private view straight on to the altar where he could see the daily renewal of the sacrifice of the Mass. In Spain, the Jeronymite monks supplied the royal liturgy; in early Tudor England, the three most reliable and holy orders were the Observant Franciscans, the Bridgettines (monks and nuns) and the austere Carthusians. Henry VII made provision for all three when he rebuilt Sheen palace on the Thames and renamed it Richmond, after the earldom he had held while in exile. (Simon Thurley, who has made royal residences his study for decades, points out that only Westminster was called a palace at the time, other royal residences being manors or simply houses.)

We are often told that individuality and privacy developed as the Middle Ages gave way to the early modern period. What emerges from Thurley’s narrative of royal life from 1485 to 1603 is the loss by Henry VIII in his 38-year reign of the privacy that Henry VII had won for himself. Though Henry VIII retained an archaic great hall when he rebuilt Hampton Court, he also invited chosen guests to see him eat in his privy chamber. His daughter Mary, being a woman and unable to invite in men, returned her privy chamber to the privacy that her grandfather had introduced. Richmond, with its privy lodgings safely surrounded by a moat, was the first house that she occupied.

Partly because it was easier to keep warm, Richmond was a favourite place to live for Elizabeth too. She inherited more than 50 houses and castles, and despite two crisis meetings in the 1560s on their upkeep, she was so reluctant to alienate any property that she preferred to see five fall into ruin, including the huge manor of More in Hertfordshire and Enfield, one of her childhood homes. At Richmond, new wardrobes were built in to hold some of the Virgin Queen’s 1,900 items of clothing, maintained by brushing and by laundering cuffs and ruffs. Despite the celebrated treatise on the water closet, The Metamorphosis of Ajax (pun on “jacks intended”), written by her courtier Sir John Harington, Elizabeth seemed particularly fond of close stools, with ribbons and fringes, gilt nails, seats padded with cotton and the initials ER embroidered on the velvet. In 1581 she had 15 of these items made for her. When she sat on one, it was within an iron-framed tent, with cloth of gold and crimson silk curtains that buttoned up in the front. The Groom of the Stool having been abolished in Edward VI’s day, she was attended there by the First Lady of the Bedchamber.

Elizabeth lived in the rooms at Richmond where her father had lived, even though he had thought it sufficiently outmoded to serve as a retirement home for his divorced wife Anne of Cleves, who occupied it happily from 1540 to 1547, when the new king Edward’s managers evicted her. As for Elizabeth, she was not left to put down roots even in the winter when not on progress. In the muddy season she moved from Whitehall to Greenwich, then to Richmond and Hampton Court, all on the Thames. In the summer, the popular image of her on stately progress is not far out, for she made 23 of these tours in her 44 years on the throne, until the people of Surrey complained

Tudor monarchs whisked their court from palace to palace – often doing without chairs, says Christopher Howse Elizabeth I had fifty houses and castles, but let five fall down rather than sell any