The First State Bed of Henry VII & Elizabeth of York

[Music] hello my name is Jonathan Foyle my first job was at Hampton Court as a curator where I developed a special ism in the late Middle Ages and the Tudor period I'm now an author on historic buildings a consultant and lecturer and this film is about the most extraordinary object I've ever seen in how did you get to know this bed that was back in 2010 I just arrived back in the country and the bed was advertised at an auction in Chester I didn't have time to go and view it so I booked it a telephone bid for channel was successful he did it online I saw it online described as a Gothic Revival bed and at that point I had no reason to think it was anything other than that so when you saw it you went to collect it or was it delivered I was absolutely blown away when I went to collect the bed I've never seen anything like it the craftsmanship in it that I just looked at it and thought this this is it's a complete work of art and very very powerful it it was a power statement that was my first impression of it a power statement and not to Victorian as you as he thought it would be when you bought it well for 30 years have been dealing in beds usually Georgian sometimes Victorian beds often orc orc frameworks I've never seen anything like this the level of shrinkage the oxidization the fact that has been repaired the front posts have been tipped by 8 inches it just didn't ring true as a Victorian bird now you contacted me in 2012 two years after you came across the bed why did you why did you get in touch with me I contacted you originally about it bed by Benjamin Goodison which I believe could have been made for storehouse I mentioned that I had something else that you might be interested in an early royal Tudor bed and I remember my response to that which is don't be daft because everything of the Tudor palaces went with the Civil War I mean we simply don't have relics other than one part of a bedstead of Henry the eighth that's on display in Glasgow but other than that it's just gone so I thought I mean I'll be honest with you I thought it was a pretty daft claim to make but then I came up in January 20 13 to see it I remember it well I remember you recognized the age of some parts of the bed but rather confused about other elements of it and looking at things and I can understand why there's several things on the bed that just don't look correct but counter-intuitively it turned out later that these things are the very things that actually prove it is correct when I first saw this bed on the 10th of January 2013 my job was to tell whether it was a late medieval bed as its style might suggest or whether it was a 19th century interpretation of the Middle Ages there's a 400 year gap and it should be pretty easy to tell the difference but I was faced with something I simply didn't understand here is Adam and Eve why would you spend the night under an image of original sin what's that got to do with a suppose it king or Queens bed a bigger problem in my eyes is that a banner wraps around them and it's a biblical script it's from Corinthians and a big problem with it is that it's written in English now in the late 15th century if the style of the bed speaks of that period it doesn't speak of a Bible written in English because it was only in Henry the eighth's reign in the 1530s that he allowed the vernacular language to be the biblical text so that looked to me to be wrong for the late 15th century there was another issue I was looking at the beasts the lion and the dragon and they're not the armorial beasts of Henry the seventh which is a dragon and a greyhound the lion and the dragon only came in Henry the eighth's reign so I thought this must be the 19th century having misinterpreted the late Middle Ages and frankly got all those details wrong but it wasn't they who were wrong it was me the first one really obvious thing that I noticed about this bed is that it's a fragment these are the major survivals of a bed not intact as you'd expect a nineteenth-century bed to be this rail for example is a fairly new piece of timber and it slots only into half the depth of this mortise that was prepared for the original rail so the rail is gone it's replaced with this in this same post you see a very subtle line about six inches from the bottom where the bottom of the posts have been reached probably because of worm damage or something and you can see lots of worm damage in the lower footboard rail down here but then there are repairs like this this has all the hallmarks of a nineteenth-century sawn piece of timber being applied as a repair and you can see holes here where the pegs that hold the top footboard railing have been replaced re drilled over time when the joint worked itself loose and have a look at how the worm is eaten it's way under the surface just there when we get higher up we see at this level maybe even early 20th century repair very light oak with the dark stain over the top which is rubbed off to reveal the newness of this timber whereas the post itself here has a great depth of color so was this a bed of self-evidently old materials cobbled together in the 19th century from bits of salvaged or is it and essentially intact ancient bed that's just had a long history of usage and repair we approach that question using science [Music] what kind of science can be used on an object like this bed well if we take for example the lion's each of which was cut from the same timber that makes the post that it sits on then we can look at it in different ways we can look for example at the back and see the saw marks now a very modern piece of timber might have circular saw marks and they would give away a product of the industrial revolution of mechanized saw power but if we're looking at the late Middle Ages and seeing more or less parallel lines like this these are quite difficult to diagnose because although England had no mechanized saws at that time and generally had quite rough sawing the continent was full of water powered sawmills everything depends on exactly where the timber comes from so the techniques we can throw at it are two main ones one of them is dendrochronology where when you look at the ring pattern of the timber a skilled analyst should be able to identify where the timber comes from because each ring records the climate of that particular summer and winter another technique is to look at the surface underneath this typically Victorian looking glazed Pugh varnish and see whether there might be any remains of color because if there's one thing about the late Middle Ages it wasn't afraid of color and so sometimes you find little fragments just tucked away in the corners and my first encounter with this bed I suggested to Ian he should have dendrochronology done to see whether the tree rings might tell us where the timber was from and at what particular year it was felled he'd already had that service provided which came back with a devastating result the bed is supposed to have been made of American white oak growing in the Massachusetts New York area sometime after 1756 a mid 18th century reading for timber didn't make sense for either a late 15th century style bed or a 19th century revival of that style so a second reading was needed meanwhile I suggested to Ian that the varnish should be analyzed to see whether there were any traces of paint characteristic of either 19th century chemicals or medieval paintwork under the surface what we needed was someone specialist in the archeology and chemistry of historic paint finishes and the person we turned to once led English Heritage's conservation lab her name is Helen Hughes Helen what's involved in your science of paint analysis what paint analysis is basically a general work in historic interiors so I take paint from the walls paint samples and if I look at them and under higher magnification I could see the plaster wood substrate and then I can see all the decorative layers so what this tells me it also tells me the colors and the taste of the people who are living in that houses but if I analyze the materials it also gives me an indication of the date of the application of the paint and what's involved in taking paint samples and analyzing them well the first thing you have to do Jonathan is to collect the paint samples and as you know the bed wasn't obviously painted but we could detect bits of the paint that had been on the bed had collected in the sort of the interest seized and the depths of the carbon it was crusty it was crushing you can sort of see here I was sort of more like a dental hygienist just scraping away these sort of this residue and also I mean you can sort of see how tiny these sort of it the residue was there so this residue is the original painted surface that's been scraped off and bound up in Victorian varnish victim exactly it seems because what we've got here when we look at it under the microscope we've got paints that has a Stratego fee it has an undercoat a binding layer a topcoat and then in some cases been embellished with very bright reds yellows and in some cases a blue but this is really special because it does indicate that someone has gone to a lot of effort time and money and Spence to paint this bit because you're applying chemistry you're looking at things in high-powered microscopes and you've been doing that for many years did it compare closely with other schemes that you'd seen of this period then yeah it's fortunate because when we've been working on that I was working at Martha's house at Ledbury which is dated 14 80s as well and so we could actually take the the paint there again a very limited palette very sort of simple iron oxides iron Reds and things ah and we could pay the stick painter to agree with that from the bed and they're very similar okay now this is the original painting because you found if I remember right you found many generations well found well not many I find two I found signs of where again on the residue just just we're fortunate to get that bit that obviously somebody at some point has come along and done some touching up on the bed and if you bear in mind that this bed was designed to be dismounted and transported then obviously it's going to be a bit of wear and tear the King you know we think it's a high-status bed it would be repaired took a sample some about a hundred areas on the bed they're all carefully labeled so I mean there's enough information here for some PhD student to spend the rest of their life analyzing this and far greater detail and I can this is a major task it is yes Helen we're analyzing an object which might be late medieval it might be Victorian or it might be a combination of both those things if it were cobbled together from old material relatively recently so what could paint tell us what I can say is in the areas where did find paint there was a consistent photography so I'm sort of seeing a priming layer and undercoat a top coat and in some cases the sort of they're figuring of the wood on the top and that seems to be common to all the areas of the bed that I found and I did sample a lot of areas I mean I must have so roughly what percentage of the bed seems to have been treated in a uniform way I would think that the whole thing must have been primed undercoat and treated with this sort of base brown let's call it a green in color from what I can see because my samples were fairly extensive you know from that the bedposts at the bottom to the top and the head and and all of the the alliance so I can say with sort of felt of confidence that it seems to be an overall paint particularly those apply to the entire beds so you're saying that that all the parts of the bed were treated in a uniform way which suggests that it was made at one point in time there are however a number of fairly obvious repairs on the bed did you compare the surface of the repair yes because he pointed out that the ends of the the legs had been replaced and and there's nothing on those they were it was clean as a whistle then of course we have traces of a more expensive elaboration that lies over the greening and that was carried out in very high-quality iron oxide color so we've got Purple's Reds yellows very high iron content but suggest a very expensive pigments and then we also found but only on the bed head tiny traces of ultramarine blue ultramarine not removing now this was very expensive you can imagine that it was mined in Afghanistan lumps of it were taken across to Venice this is this is lapis lazuli this is lapis largely a very expensive precious stone got to vanity would you in processed very laborious process to process into pigments so it would have been smuggled in the captain's top pocket and classed as a high-class spice so you've been working in pain for 30 years amazing how often do you come across early use of ultramarine on on architectural elements on furniture and almost never this utterly rare and highly expensive material be cheaper to use gold in the spectrum of easy to impossible could somebody have contrived this scheme as a faker to kid you that you're looking at five hundred year old paint when it's actually just 100 years old no Jones it would be impossible because I've tried and I can't even feel for myself I mean I'm not often asked to recreate historic schemes and we've got all the information we can buy all the pigmentations we can make it we can collaborate with the best painters and decorators for the end of the day when we think we've done quite well if I take a sample of my own paint system my own recreated scheme look at it under the microscope it's misses by a mile in terms of the texture of the paint the subtlety of the application so I would say it would be impossible as an archaeologist and historian I don't question science lightly but the results of the paint analysis meant that a second opinion on the dendrochronology was now inevitable what was discovered in the second opinion were several remarkable things firstly of ten samples drawn all seemed to be so closely matched that they were from the same tree now that corroborated the results of the paint which told us that this was one essentially intact object the tree was felled at one point in time it was then uniformly colored when was this tree felled well the second opinion showed us that it was undateable oak didn't come up with an American result but said it was undateable because every four years there was disturbance in the tree rings and that is typical of what's called the cockchafer beetle which lives in Central Europe they have a four year cycle of infestation whereas in America the cycle is three years for a fourth opinion we then went to DNA the new science which tells us where the origin of timber is now this is generally used for illegal forestation but we went to a company who had done the DNA on the mary-rose ship and they took several samples from the Lions which we know are cut from the same timber as the post and part of the headboard and what they found is that all of the results which came back with the positive reading were of a European oak and the center of gravity was in the area around Bavaria Austria or the Czech Republic what we now had them was irrefutable evidence so this was not only an ancient bed if still undateable by its timber it did have paint characteristic of the late Middle Ages the question then now we know how old it is is what does it tell us [Music] the headboard can be read like a book the book is generally the Bible and in the late Middle Ages the Bible had a typology behind it that means a type and anti-type for every problem there's a solution so the beginning of the Bible was Genesis and mankind being cast out of paradise the end of the Bible is the mirror opposite is the return to paradise in Revelation and that is what these characters show they're not just Adam and Eve but they're the answer to Adam and Eve here is Christ and the Virgin undoing the sins of Adam and Eve because they hold in their hands not the apple of temptation but the apple as a symbol of salvation and that's why this snake-like creature still has the apple in its beak a snake with a beak you say that can't give away temptation it's a curious looking animal it's not something that's going to be obvious to a Victorian eye but it certainly was to the medieval eye because this creature is a basilisk or cockatrice which means basically a chicken's head on a serpent and we read about that in the Bible in Psalm 90 now this is one of the Royal Psalms and its importance is that it was recited at bedtime when monarchs went to bed it's the last thing they heard and that makes sense of these two characters which I'd misunderstood as being Henry the eighth's heraldry because when a cockatrice is coupled with a small lion and then a dragon these are the three symbols of Psalm 90 all symbolic of evil which are trampled by Christ and the Virgin so these saviors are overcoming symbols of evil absolutely engrained medieval piece of imagery next to Henry if this is the King and the profile suggests that it is with a slightly aquiline nose is this symbol it's an acorn and this is symbolic of male fertility from acorns mighty oaks grow on her side and she in turn very much has the profile of Elizabeth of York you see here a bunch of grapes biblically Mary gave her son and in church the grapes returned to the communion wine which symbolize Christ's blood so now you have two symbols identifying these characters both from fertility and the giving of blood now in a marital bed this is exactly what you'd expect to see it's all about this couple as saviours whose offspring were intended to consolidate their union and save the nation when we look at the royal arms flanking them and only monarchs had the license to use a Royal Arms in this comprehensive way without any family symbolism to the contrary then you see this wonderful figures like strawberries in here symbolic of paradise you see blackberries also to do with the crown of thorns and Christ's blood all of these with roses as well of mary's purity and the red ones being again blood sacrifice all of this is absolutely intrinsically faultlessly medieval so if that's what it tells us then is a couple in Union overthrowing sin what about this script from Corinthians the biggest problem I had with it is that this script was written in English and strictly that wasn't legal until Henry the eighth allowed the Bible to be produced in English in the late 1530s but what if this was a secondary script there's one rule about added scripts on objects like this they can't stand proud of the surface you can't invent layers of wood they have to be in sized if they're secondary originally the Bandar old script would have simply been painted onto the surface of the timber similar plain surfaces still exist on the band rolls of the crests and when you look closely at examples in Lancashire in particular of scripts that surround the Stanley family that Henry's mother had married into you see precisely this kind of script used in the early 16th century if this then was additional you would expect it to relate to a Bible maybe fifteen thirty to fifty and indeed in 1537 a Bible was published with exactly this English spelling which King Edward the six the Protestant and the scourge of Catholics also used in his prayer book this sin would seem to be a secondary addition to turn what is a a bed of highly Catholic symbolism into something acceptable to a Protestant audience who read the plain words of English and those words are the sting of death is sin the strength of sin is the law by applying these words the mysticism of Adam and Eve and Christ and the Virgin was reduced to a simple Protestant tale of good and evil and that is a fascinating part of the bed story who in the nineteenth century could have invented that kind of precise multi-layered history for this object there's one piece of symbolism which really sealed the deal for me on this beds authenticity and it's these figures here they look like flowers don't they but in fact their flaming stars and they appear in Christ's hand in the book of Revelation when he delivers the Tree of Life when paradises return it's all part of the same biblical source but this is very specific demonics because the seven star symbolized the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit qualities of wisdom and governance conferred upon kings and queens at the point of coronation what's doubly remarkable and rather obscure knowledge is that the seven stars were wheeled out as a major symbol for the marriage pageant of Henry and Elizabeth eldest son Arthur when he was married to Catherine of Aragon in 1501 [Music] we've seen what the symbolism tells us about the bed but what about the style who made it and and when and why when we look at all this organic vegetation we're looking at a court mode of the 14 70s through to 90s it comes from Germany and it's swept Europe's courts by storm it's worth remembering that Henry the seventh who's often argued to be a Welsh King in fact spent his youth in Brittany where he was in exile amongst the French courts and had access to these developing European mode so when he came to the throne in 1485 he had a very open European Sensibility he understood the way in which foreign ambassadors should witness a major piece of statecraft like the presentation of the Royal bed when we look closely at the details though we can see Bradish in areas like this which you'll find in East Anglian churches in particular and at the top of these posts are oculi which are rather specific to Suffolk so it would seem that in this oak rich area of Suffolk the King's master carpenter was interpreting a European court style to present in front of the eyes of Europe what the bed looks like is one thing but can we show that it belonged to some kind of school is there any comparable work that can be securely dated which really pins this in the era that it seemed to belong to well in spring 2014 I had the most extraordinary tip-off that an early antiques specialist in Chelsea had four posts and they were all identical to these they had the same linen fold and then the double stepped base a rope molding this fine pointed diaper more rope molding double capital and then the oculi when the four posts were laid out on the floor of the dealer's shop I was astonished because they were self-evidently ancient much older than 19th century that had a life as Salvage where they've been hidden away in a wall one of them had a flame scorch typical of joinery practice from the 15th through to the 17th century it's a kind of witch mark to appease fire sprites because there was a great danger but more importantly in the middle of them were knots much like those framed square chunks in the middle of the headboard of this bed but the knots on these posts told us who they were made for one had an H another part of an R and another had a fleur-de-lis which matched those on the bed they were made by the same workshop and the four posts now on the floor having been pulled out of a stud wall after several hundred years had an original life around the walls of a royal interior having framed panels and what Helen Hughes found is that the posts have exactly the same kind of paint finish as the bed coal black and red iron oxide the final piece of scientific evidence came in March 2017 the tree rings of the clearly medieval wainscot posts were found to match those of the beds Timbers though none can be dated in absolute terms we can now say that both were made by the same medieval workshop we now had more work from the workshop of the bed which proved when it was made in the late 15th century for H R since the discovery of the matching post this bed is no longer an object in splendid isolation that might be 15th century might be 19th century the two things were made by the same workshop with knowledge of each other by the same hands and they were made for one particular person H in accounting for the story of this bed over half a millennium has proved a tall order but where did you first think it had come from well yeah it had challenges it was a tall order but initial research had thrown up a couple of examples that were very very similar from the Lancashire area one being the Thomas Stanley Baird the other being the lovely hall bed I realized that being a royal visit there Henry and Elizabeth had gone to see Margaret Beaufort and Thomas Stanley in the summer of 1495 so my assumption was that the bed was possibly made as a gift for them certainly to accommodate them the Royal lodgings were built there for that visit it made perfect sense at the time that the bed was part of that scheme one thing I remember on the first visit to the bed you almost not gently flipped open your research folder and I was stunned because I saw a photograph of an eighteen forties copy of this not a particularly good copy either by someone called George Shaw how did you come across George Shaw as part of the research I realized this gentleman George Shaw had actually copied the bed well I believed he had copied the bed I could see two examples of a much smaller bed that were clearly mechanical in their nature they lacked the beautiful proportions of this one to my eye it was clearly evident that they were copies eventually I went to George Shaw's house which is in Upper mill in Saddleworth and as part of that journey I was accompanied by a historian who'd been transcribing some of his Diaries we went into what was his library and as I returned out of the library I saw the missing crust from the bed being used as a pediment above his door so what did George Shaw's both copying and then cannibalizing this bed tell you George Shaw was obviously in all of this bed because much of the decoration in his house was inspired by decoration we see here on the bed I mean his fireplace was the typical triptych arrangement we have here on the bored of just more fanciful strawberry hill type canopy to it [Music] we've now got enough information to see the age of this bed the fact that it was very highly colored and with the richest pigments and that it matched the joinery of royal interiors also without doubt is that this image is solely specific to a royal wedding when we look through the Chronicles of Henry and Elizabeth's reign Bernhard Andre their French chronicler tells us that in late 1485 a marriage bed was prepared for them they were married on the 18th of January 1486 in Westminster Palace and there's only one place that marriage bed could have gone it's in the painted chamber a room made for Henry the third now the painted chamber is gone today it burned in 1834 and this water color is called Stoddart shows a mural 11 feet across it's divided into five arches of double and single proportion therefore the middle three constitute half the width five feet six that is the width of the bed and remarkably when you set up the headboard panels against those arches one determines the other that answers the question of why doesn't this four-poster bed carry drapes because after all isn't that what for poster beds are for this one has no evidence of drapes for this specific reason that at westminster the drapes were carried on external posts giving a corridor around the bed a bit like a hospital bed and the further benefit that that held is that included within that space was this opening a cat row file through to the chapel of st. lawrence next door and when the priest at that chapel recited night prayers or complain he included through the use of Psalm 90 reference to the three beasts that the Royal couple themselves within this bed are shown trampling a more integrated perfectly suited work of art I cannot imagine [Music] the very precise imagery about fertility and marriage shows that the bed doesn't and cannot belong to the 1490s by 1495 they'd had four children but the bed could have accompanied them to Lancashire now having fulfilled its promise of delivering issue indeed in that year a new bed was made for Westminster with a mattress six inches wider than this the first of a whole series of beds that went up to 11 feet across and in fact filled the whole width of this mural this was the end of the age of enclosed posts it was the beginning of an age when royal style would influence Lancashire's joinery through the 17th century the bed appears in a number of remarkable ways in the area between Lancashire and Yorkshire first in 1500 Henry and Elizabeth apparently having left the bed at Latham house Thomas Stanley Henry's stepfather who with Henry's mother Margaret Beaufort owned Latham made a series of beds by his regional Lancashire workshop which took this essential design and slightly more clumsily rendered it in a regional vernacular style several of those beds survived to this day and they survived because they all emerged from Latham house during the process of the Civil War by that time John Speed the antiquarian and map maker had visited Lancashire to make a map of the county he showed on his map a picture of Henry the seventh and Elizabeth of York in the same year he made the frontispiece to the King James Bible and as part of that frontispiece in the so called genealogies he showed Adam and Eve in a very similar pose to this bed but more remarkably with the same biblical text wrapped around them in a banner the difference between the bed and speed's version is the speed rejected the 1537 Bible and indeed went for the updated Geneva Bible which was current in his own lifetime so he dated the picture that the bed showed him when he visited Lancashire and no doubt went into the inner sanctum of Latham house there in 1593 Latham had according to its inventory not one but two state beds of an even value one was worth 20 pounds the other worth 13 pounds this is the one that would be valued at 20 pounds Thomas Stanley's inferior copy was the 13 pound bed both those beds exist because when the Roundheads opened cannon fire on Latham we have a diary entry to explain that the bed's propped the gatehouse against the cannon fire the daughter of the Countess of Derby held out against the Parliamentarians married into a Yorkshire family into the wentworths and in 1695 we learn through an inventory at Wentworth Woodhouse that she brought with her the two state beds that were from Latham into that fine house near the Pennines just south of Huddersfield then in 1842 after a century of silence a remarkable man called George Shaw an early antiquarian went to an old house near Huddersfield and there he found a dilapidated bed after its repair he said you'll be one of the first and finest of its kind [Music] this object is so specific it can only be the marriage bed of Henry the seventh and Elizabeth of York it's not only got royal arms but the rose symbols their dynastic red and white roses which show this couple whose facial profiles match poor trails of them of their early reign in a moment of marriage speaking of fertility which was answered later in 1486 by the birth of their first son Arthur you might call this the birthplace of the Tudors but it's more than that when you read the imagery it's a manifesto of their reign which starts to make all kinds of new sense out of manuscripts and documents and places which have not to date provided us with the full picture this is the place to come but moreover this is a place that they knew the absolute focus of royal identity was the journey through a now lost palace where people would have seen this brightly colored almost like an altar by which to frame that royal couple it's survival the fact it's cheated time allows us to relive that experience and view the dawn of the Tudor dynasty with ancient eyes [Music] you [Music]

Channel: inhousefilms

Views: 251,386

Rating: 4.8995895 out of 5

Keywords: history, tudors, tudor history, henry vii, henry viii, documentary, furniture history, historian, story, war of roses, bed of roses, english, england, english history, 15th century

Id: exBhe7N8Lgg

Length: 39min 15sec (2355 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 13 2019