Time Team Special 35 Henry VIII's Lost Palaces

hampton court palace created by henry viii as his home to our eyes it's a perfect example of a typical tudor palace but perhaps it isn't we see it as henry's greatest legacy to the nation well maybe it's not that either henry viii was the most prolific builder in the history of the monarchy he built five major palaces four of which have disappeared and in this time team special we've been given unique access to explore the sights of all five we've got a rare chance to dig at the site of the first palace ever built by henry bewley palace we just gotta find out just how big it really is i don't think he's gonna be big we travel across europe to discover what inspired henry cool it's a bit dramatic in it we burrow under the center of london oh look at that look come down here that is quite extraordinary and we dig at hampton court itself unpicking the work done there by henry we've got to dig a hole see if there's anything there we've got to follow those hints in this very special film we'll reveal henry viii's legacy to this country of course he gave us hampton court but he gave us much more besides and by digging up some of his long forgotten palaces by looking at the work that he did there and by tracing the influences on henry we'll discover a man unlike the one you thought you knew we see why henry was known as henry the great [Music] in 1509 henry vii died and henry his son became henry viii his accession marked a major change in the story of the monarchy henry vii could be said to be the last of the great medieval kings henry viii shifted it from the medieval to the modern and this massive change can be seen most vividly in the buildings that he created he aspires to be a great patron of the arts and builder and it's his palaces which are the great uh symbol of that and the fact that some of those palaces still survive 500 years on is a testimony to just how much he achieved in that line it just built so much and also the policies he did build many of them were just so enormous that you would have been just overwhelmed by the scale let alone by anything else it's a shame that he's known principally for the fact that he managed to get himself six wives because it tends to obscure the complexity of the fellow at the time of his death he's given the title henry the great he's seen as a great builder and renovator of architecture henry was born in 1491 so was just 18 when he became king he inherited several palaces including greenwich and richmond but at the age of 25 he decided he wanted to build himself something modern that palace has gone now demolished but this school in essex is on the site the palace that henry built here was his first and it started an obsession with building that carried on for the next 30 years this is new hall school in chelmsford a building that sits on the footprint of henry's original one he built it in 1517 but at the time he already had two sumptuous places just outside london in richmond and greenwich so what did he want here henry called his new palace bewley beautiful place the name expressed his desire for fine things just outside chelmsford it was a day's ride from london and the east coast the whole of england faced east until henry viii time because we're trading over the baltic with germany and so the east coast ports like hull then harrich not far away um were major centers now to be between the capital and the eastern coastal ports was a good place to be essex had good flat hunting ground so it wasn't it wasn't a bad place to live at all what did it look like the first plans we have are a hundred years after henry left so we there is no drawing that shows us what he saw we have to work it all out pretty sure that the entrance gateway was built by him also sure that he built a new set of lodgings but once you get through the gatehouse into this area it's all to play for very little archaeology has ever been done on this site so we've got a rare chance to look at an original tudor palace the building that henry erected here has gone this school was put up on the same site we've got some much later images and a plan of what's supposed to be henry's palace but we simply don't know if they're accurate they've never been tested but we've done some geophysics and there's a clear target over what's marked on the plan as the gatehouse you can see quite clearly one tower entrance through the middle and then the second tower yeah see that we've got the one tower here it extends back um something like this yeah so you've got the tower there the actual entrance coming through here okay and then well another tower here i mean it basically lines up with the doorway you can see yeah i mean i reckon once you peel off the turf you know you're gonna be straight onto the archaeology no one's ever dug this gatehouse before if we find it and it marries up with the later plans it'll help prove they're accurate and john was right we hit archaeology straight away yeah that is plummeting on down there look we just got now find out just how big it really is gonna be big within a few hours phil's taken this a lot further and he's got the foundations of the substantial looking gateway you seem to have quite a lot of wall is it tudor tudorfill it is tudor and it is the gateway where i'm standing is the turret of the gateway and over underneath that spoiled tip there we've got the other turret and if you come around here you can actually see look look straight down the avenue the gap way between those two buttresses which is the gateway goes straight down the avenue straight into the main entrance of the [Music] school while henry was busy building bewley in essex on the other side of london hampton court was taking shape at the time it was owned by this man cardinal woolsey henry's right hand man his lord chancellor the second most important man in the country when woolsey bought hampton court it was simply a small manor house one that henry visited often the two men were close they have a genuine relationship and it expands across all kinds of issues it's not just you know politics administration that they spend a lot of time together and there's i think there's no doubt that woolsey is a very great influence on on awakening the kind of instincts which henry viii himself has the building projects during warsaw's period of time are very much something that both of them do morsi does the administration organizes it in a way that henry does more later after woolsey but that actually during that period of time it is a question of them working together woolsey enlarged his manor house by attaching a large accommodation block to it called base court behind those walls is a corridor linking all the guest rooms which believe it or not was revolutionary can you talk about revolutionary building design but all i can see is a half-timbered corridor well that's the revolution is having the corridor why do you so well you have to remember where we are we're standing within base court so that large quadrangle that when you arrive at court you sort of first enter where you're received um at woolsey's court and that henry viii called so that's out there so that's just out there and the big quadrangle all the way around yeah and then off all those corridors are two room apartments so you arrive as a nobleman at henry viii court and you bring your own resident you and you have to be sort of put up and when you come here you're put up in the lap of luxury why is a corridor so revolutionary because normally you would have had sort of lodgings arranged around a courtyard for um visitors to court or visitors to a nobleman's house um but each one would have had their own door um so you would have just sort of arrived and sort of gone in whereas here oh i see i see this is much more like um it's like a monastery with the corridor all around it except it's sealed up so this means that you can get from your apartment to anywhere else more or less anywhere else in the palace especially to the dining hall to all where sort of the great feasts and receptions are held without going out into the harsh english climate it's a premiere traveling absolutely having a corridor inside was way ahead of its time it was the very latest idea symptomatic of a new concept comfort so the new tudor palaces sprouted loads of chimneys the clue to there being lots of fireplaces and the luxury of being warm the fact that henry viii in particular had all the latest in building and the latest in silverware and latest in clothes that wasn't just because he was the sort of person who liked that kind of thing it was because you had to have all that kind of thing to show that you were the leader of society it was a political statement as much as anything people want lovely rooms with carpets and tapestries and things like that and glazing you know a lot of the technology means that some of these houses are now possible but the main thing is is that you don't need any more to have something with a moat around it which you can defend in time of need the previous big building program said perhaps you know you can look at you know the arrival of william the conqueror when there's a lot of castles built because you need to have the castles to hold down england with henry at a time of peace you go okay what do we want now we want houses and palaces such house was at bully where phil's making good progress looking for the gatehouse bewley palace was to be a family home as henry lived there with his first wife catherine of aragon at the time it was built catherine gave birth to a baby girl all the remains of it now above ground is a huge crest that sits inside the new hall school chapel we know that this was attached to the gatehouse that fills digging there's a much later drawing where the crest can be seen phil that coat of arms is pretty big it kind of implies that this gatehouse must have been massive it really was massive tony i mean the trench that we've got here just scratches the surface and in fact he doesn't really address the gay house at all all we've really excavated is the gateway the gate house goes literally out to those trees over there in fact where the barrow is is one side the the walls of the gatehouse were absolutely massive and if you look over here we can actually show just how big this thing was because the main turret is going to go in there and at the back here you can see we've got this massive octagonal stairwell where we've plotted our walls onto the mapping they coincide exactly and where we've plotted them with the geophysics they coincide exactly at all so this is not a figment of imagination this is it's a massive stairwell in here the front the front literally goes out to that haha there it is he's enormous jonathan i think phil used the word massive about four times though from the archaeology all we know is that it's massive this way but that doesn't mean that it was particularly impressive going out that way it was a big shouldered square thing and this 18th century view shows exactly what it looked like to any visitor and there's the king's arms almost dwarfed this is our coat of arms from inside exactly but this is the narrow side in fact this internal face is broader still it is it on any scale of tudor gate houses this is a whopper but couldn't it have been rather like a 1930s cinema that you've got this elegant facade but behind it you've got nothing more than a prefab it did happen in some tudor houses you've got the promise here of great glazed interiors these fabulous chimneys showing people are kept warm in comfort but this site delivers go through that gatehouse and this is what you see that in fact forms just a small part of not just one courtyard but what contemporaries describe as being a complex of eight courtyards with all the paraphernalia for royal entertainment the brick work in here is early tudor this gatehouse sits exactly on the plans we have which proves that this is indeed a plan of what henry built with eight courtyards bewley palace was huge a magnificent palace henry had started the way he meant to go on his buildings reflected his personality [Music] henry's buildings say what things like the holbein picture of him say which is a sense of his own grandeur he dressed himself magnificently he had extraordinary tapestries he wanted his buildings are a similar symbol of what life should be like for him as a king and what he wanted to say about himself what henry wanted to say was i'm rich i'm powerful and i'm here to stay his next palace was his most audacious built solely to impress his neighbour the extraordinary palace at the field of cloth of gold [Music] this is new hall school in chelmsford site of the first major palace built by henry viii we've got drawings of what it looked like and we've got plans but they're all from a much later period than when henry was here what they don't tell us is where henry himself would actually have lived and stuart in order to try and find that out you want us to dig not over there but here in the gardens would these have been gardens during henry's time if we interpret these plans properly that we're standing on the edge of this range here and see these fancy bay windows all along here we're literally standing on the edge of those looking out onto what would have been gardens in henry's period extending up that slope very extensive layout of gardens you have this fancy architecture along this facade it's the sort of privacy and lovely view you'd expect the sort of place a king might be do you think stuart's right could this have been the king's quarters i think stewart's working on the principle of feng shui rather than anything you expect high status inner palace it's got to show off this first courtyard but the way in which tudor palaces are normally organized is you come through the gatehouse you go through the great hall on the far side of the lawn and then up to the royal apartments so the student thinks the king might have lived here you think way way way over there yeah but suppose stewart's right suppose the king did live here how would we prove it there are very few references to what this was like in henry's day none of the plans show the layout accurately but we do hear a reference to the king having a bath a very sunken bath and from hampton court we know that that the king's bath was heated by almost a furnace a ground floor pumping up the hot water so basically water heating so put in a trench and look for the plumbing yeah so jonathan thinks the royal apartments were here underneath the existing building and stuart thinks they're here in the front garden geophysics have given us a couple of targets in the area that stuart's interested in so that's where we start work while beuley was being built henry didn't have a problem with where to stay like all previous kings he already had a couple of big palaces greenwich palace richmond not to mention windsor castle and like all monarchs before him henry didn't stay long in one place for a tudor monarch there was a big difference between summer and winter in the winter you didn't travel very far you essentially kept your court moving between the really big palaces on the river thames so you'd be oscillating between richmond hampton court greenwich and in the summer you adopted a completely different pattern you set off from the thames valley and you would go much much further afield kings and queens have always traveled around the country traditionally in the medieval period it was a chance to clean the palace pump out the loose that kind of thing and wherever the monarch traveled to they'd give it a fresh lick of paint generally tarted up a bit although here in gloucestershire one man went just a little bit further this is acton court home of the poins family and in 1535 when henry planned to come here and stay a couple of nights lord points had that entire wing built just to accommodate the king acton court shows the nobility would go to great lengths to welcome royalty so at first like previous kings henry expected people to put him up as he toured the country but he didn't want to depend on others so he began a lifelong spending spree accumulating his own houses henry's palaces tell us a good deal about his kingship in terms of their sheer number henry viii owned 55 palaces or hunting lodges by the time of his death no english monarch before or since has owned so many palaces if you look at what henry vii did he spent a huge amount of his time staying with his courtiers staying particularly with the abbots and the bishops henry viii is totally different henry viii wants to stay in his own house in his own house at bewley our dig's going well in this trench we're looking for the remains of what might be the royal apartments the geophysics have been fairly clear and the detail is so good you can actually see the individual windows according to the radar king henry should have been stood here looking out of the bay window were we right yes you were right there's a bay window just here you can see this circular shape that's one over there helen is actually uncovering another bay window over there just exactly where john had predicted what we're seeing at bewley palace is the scale of the design it's grand a big wing a huge gatehouse even at the age of 25 henry surrounded himself with splendor and wanted to impress his subjects but he also wanted to impress on a wider stage so his second palace was a very different beast altogether an audacious piece of political and actual engineering in the year 1520 henry viii of england met francis the first of france the meeting took place in france but on a piece of land just outside calais which was in english hands henry saw the meeting as a chance to really show off to his powerful neighbor and the way he organized the whole thing epitomized his love of ostentation he turned up with an entourage of 5 000 people most of whom were put up in highly decorated beautifully painted tents observers of the scene were bowled over by it so much so that it became known as the field of cloth of gold [Music] the field of cloth of gold was an extraordinary event with jousting and feasting the english mingling with the french and henry's arrival was spectacular [Music] his personal retinue for the field of cloth of gold which is probably exceptional but that's 3997 people and about 2 000 horses and then his wife has about uh 1100 people in her retinue so put that all together and you're around about 5 000 people but the most remarkable part of the whole thing was this building it was 300 foot long and 300 foot deep a palace built for henry's stay a palace that was only built for the duration of the event just over two weeks it's on two levels it's partly brick and timber construction on the the ground floor timber and canvas on the first floor but with real glass in the windows and designed to impress with its sheer scale the cost of it and its facilities of course there's the fountains out the front of it which supposedly flowed with white and or red wine when great events happened in the course of the two weeks so it really was the technological marvel of the field of cloth of gold it was painted to look like a renaissance palace and it had sumptuous rooms inside great hall a chapel i think decorated in blue with gold stars and the dining hall had taffeta lining the floor and there were rich colors and it was it was incredible building the great thing about it was that because it was a temporary structure you could make it more fashionable than anything that appears to have been being built as a permanent structure at the english court so you have this large classical style scalloped arch over the entrance gateway classical style pillars and so on this field a few kilometers from calais in northern france is where the event took place ten thousand people were here staying in enormous tented pavilions a sea of colored gold cloth that gave the event its name the field of cloth of gold [Music] just beyond the field is the town of gean where henry had his temporary palace built it's a small market town now with no hint of a palace in it but we found where it stood in the painting we can see the castle gate bystanders on the right and the palace looking at the modern town plan we've worked out that the castle gate would have sat here the bystanders on the right were along here where these houses are now which means that the palace would have been somewhere in this area we can reveal that this tatty bit of ground is the site of henry's palace just here henry viii built the most extraordinary showy pretentious palace imaginable it was a warning to the rest of europe don't mess with me it's about a display of wealth it's about a display of loyalty from your subjects the fact that you have lots of noblemen there who are all showing how loyal they are to you and how prepared they are to come with you to a peaceful event in france so it's showing what you can do what your country can do how strong your monarchy is you think of all the comment about that the bird's nest stadium at the chinese olympics in a sense it's a bit like that you know technological marvel able to to do what it's required to do is designed as a very i was going to say concrete but you know a timber and brick manifestation of henry's wealth and sophistication this is the great lost palace it's easy to forget it it was only up for a few weeks it was about henry viii making his mark marking the cards of the french this was henry at his most outrageous big and bold [Music] and over at henry's first palace at buley in essex we've got more evidence that henry went large even at a young age bewley was a big place with a huge gatehouse and eight courtyards it had an enormous crest on the gatehouse marking henry's territory and we also now have some impressive windows these are quarters fit for a royal you've got some intriguing looking archaeology here matt yeah it's great isn't it we're standing inside the building main back wall there can you see the slight curve in the bricks that's where we've had these large bay windows and inside this lovely brick floor here and can you see the drainage channel sloping away from it down there that's original we hadn't expected a floor like this the drain suggests this is a kitchen or laundry but it's a small one and jonathan has a theory about it i think this is too small an area for the king's quarters that would have included his bathroom we've got a lot of small rooms on this ground floor area that shows its service but the bay windows are for rooms above which are rather grander so an important person who needs a lot of activity to service them and i think that this is a laundry area and maybe kitchens away from the main laundry and kitchens on the far side of the site for someone who needs extra care and attention and it's this year 1516 that young princess mary is born that's henry's daughter who became queen mary exactly bloody mary yeah i think this is a nursery wing of the palace to have found this nursery floor is fantastic with plague gripping london keeping a young child out at the family home in essex would have been a good decision and we've also found an amazing clue that we're on the right lines in this arrogance pomegranate on the crest it's got the usual display of seeds through a slit but this one has a cuda rose emerging from it a clear symbol of the birth of a young tudor confirming that this palace is all about the issue of children by the 1520s henry had really got the building bug he'd already built bewley and his temporary palace in france but now he's started work on a new project a massive palace that's still with us 500 years later hampton court palace impressive that's fantastic and he's really impressive you ever been here before no i haven't i i i mean for me it's too close to london and i don't like london so i know i've never been here you get the same disease that i got then if it's inside the m25 you don't go there i think we can blame henry viii for that attitude you know he seems to spend all his time in these palaces around london whereas the medieval kings had palaces all around the country in the days before television and before things like heads on stamps the only way people ever saw their monarch or the queen was if they perambulated around the country my fear my hatred of london would probably mean that the only thing i'd ever have is my head on a block i'm sure i would you and me both phil you and me both this is amazing it's huge it's far bigger than i thought it was going to be hampton court was one of henry's favorites we think of it as his biggest monument and we're getting the chance not just to excavate untouched parts of it but also to touch the glamour that henry brought to the place [Music] hampton court looks very different depending on where you approach it from from this side the east it looks a bit like the palace of versailles all straight lines and sharp angles william iii knocked down much of the tudor palace and built this in its place on the other side though is the tudor part largely built over a 30-year period over there now long disappeared was the tilt yard where the jousting took place in this day the tilt yard was absolutely huge it stretched from right over there where that wall is down to there where that wall is now by where the big tree is not only that it was out here two right down to that wall and over here down to that wall of course none of those walls were here at the time but what were here were five towers four of them were demolished about 400 years ago the other one is just there behind that cafe and we've been given the unique opportunity to excavate the other four what we don't know is where they were or what they were used for this drawing of them is one clue we have as to where they might have been we've done some geophysics and stuart's done a full landscape survey so where do we go from here kent surely somebody must have looked for these towers before oh they've always been a matter of real intrigue because they're so beautifully depicted in this wind guard view of about 1558 but people really haven't had the opportunity to do that partly because this area has been so developed over the years so it became gardens and kitchen gardens and was divided up by walls and one has always survived which is the one behind us which became a cafe and when that was extended there was a little bit of work done over here behind the wall and that showed up maybe a bit of wall in this area a bit of possibly tower yeah but stuart if we know they're here shouldn't they be incredibly easy to find i would think so wouldn't you but if you look carefully at the bits on wingard's drawings and you know this architectural reality to it and knowing that that's the the one that's in the tilt yard cafe environment you can start to define where they ought to be so what i've done is it got my best guess as it were using all that information where they might be within within these compartments here john we've got acres of lovely grass here you've got solid archaeology surely this should be a doddle for geophase well that's the problem have we got solid archaeology geophysics can only detect what's surviving what do you mean some of this masonry might have been nicked yes it could easily have been robbed out and with the sort of landscaping that's gone over the years um it's difficult to know what we're looking at but we have got some positive results i mean here close to where we stood now you can see the possible footprint of a tower the suggestions are definitely there but taken as a whole i i mean to be honest we've only really got hints of what might be there what are we gonna do i think we've got to look at the hints you know we've got to look at the the geophys purple areas where they tie up with stewards suggestions we've got to dig a hole see if there's anything there we've got to follow those hints so we explore three areas under the patio where a bit of wall had been found before on the lawn opposite the standing tower and along a wall joined to the standing tower this will take quite a bit of unpicking these little towers in the tilt yard yeah what on earth are they forking the two easiest ones i think are these two and you see they sort of mirror each other yeah here and here and there's they sit within the wall and they probably mark the entrance into the tilt because you see there's no wall between them yeah i mean maybe also changing rooms for the two teams so if you're jousting or you're in a mock battle then you have two teams who are competing one against the other so that might explain those two the changing rooms and there's one possibility and then you've got this amazing one in the middle that shows off the sort of magnificence of the palace and it clearly had amazing views out over the estate and also out over whatever is going on around it so are they partly viewing platforms it's possible henry is watching and his leading quarters are watching the battles they're probably being served really remarkable food um sort of amazing nibbles yeah and that might be being cooked here because we've got this very big fireplace it's all like theater isn't it really it is it's a theater of war and it's tied up with this whole idea of chivalry and courtly love and it's it's played out here and this is what hampton court is all about it's a palace of pleasure across a 30-year period the tudor part of hampton court burst into life [Music] cardinal woolsey had extended the original manor house by adding this huge accommodation block base court henry took things a lot further starting in 1529 over the next 15 years henry turned this place upside down his very first actions defined his intentions behind this wall is base court the luxury lodgings built by woolsey very nice very genteel but as soon as henry got here he started building from there in that direction and it's all kitchens the kitchens were a big part of this new palace of pleasure these kitchens were designed to feed up to a thousand people at a time henry planned entertainment on a lavish scale sorting the kitchens out was his first priority but his work on the kitchens was just the beginning for the next 15 years henry was obsessed with building at hampton court palace he kept adding to it he wanted it to be magnificent he wanted it to impress he wanted the best of everything and after the kitchens he turned here to his next big change the enormous and magnificent great hall [Music] we're in the great hall of hampton court palace the most magnificent tudor space in the entire country but if you think that's exciting take a look at those these are the abraham tapestries they're called that because they tell the story of the biblical hero abraham and believe it or not apart from the crown jewels those are the most valuable historical artifacts in the entire country which may seem a bit surprising after all they do look a bit faded and manky don't they certainly compared with the glories of the ceiling but if you look closely those threads are made of silver and [Music] gold the thing that's really really important is textile and supreme amongst all the textiles were the tapestries these were hugely hugely valuable artifacts and putting them into a sort of modern context a set of tapestries would cost the amount as same amount as as a warship so henry viii had a choice of building a warship like the mary rose or ordering a set of tapestries by the end of his life henry had 600 tapestries and an average nobleman might have 50. it's it's on a lavish scale so it would have just been a sense of or at the magnificence and splendor of this king which is what it's all about what would this rumor look like when these tapestries were in their glory it would have absolutely shone basically so the gold and silver thread in the tapestries would have shown where you see the red and the blue still quite clear all the other colours in the tapestries the greens the yellows and the whites and the blacks that have been that vivid so they would it would have been like having a sort of hd television sort of all around you and then the floor wouldn't have been this sort of plain wooden floor it would have been a tiled floor with large almost certainly green and white tiles so you've got that sort of glistening beneath you and then above the wonderful ceiling not the oak and gilt color that it is today but painted blue beasts is the word that they use um so that would have sort of shone back down so you would have been surrounded by color so it's a complete immersive experience [Music] the tapestries as they are today don't fill the room full of color but conservators have devised a way of shining lights onto a tapestry each beam corresponding to a single original colour and the result is that the tapestries would actually have looked like this [Music] putting this with the colored ceiling and floor we get an idea of how this great hall would have looked [Music] these palaces were garish and we if we went into them now would think this is pretty ghastly i mean nouveau riche is the word that some people have used to describe it i mean gold anything that could be gilded probably was very bright colors primary colors blues reds these are textiles shot through with gold thread silver thread very very bright vivid colored silks you're entering a world of color you're entering a world of sensory overload if you like over at the tilt yard in our search for the missing towers we're getting mixed results we put trenches in alongside this wall under this patio and here on the lawn where matt is struggling so did we get this tower then matt well it's not looking great i mean we positioned this trench here because the geophysical showed an anomaly yeah um and the the sketches and the views showed something in approximately this area but we opened this huge trench and we're down onto the natural sand there um and there's no sign of any walls the closest we've got really is this line of rubble along here oh there's red stuff all along here yeah if you go all the way along here in fact if you look where yatek's digging here yeah we took the opportunity to push the trench just in that direction you can see it coming around there he appears to have a cut or something across the bottom i mean it looks as if you've got a lot of bricks in the bottom there including one of those some vitrified bricks they make they make the patterns up within the walls yeah so you're thinking there's a wall under that path yeah we've just caught the edge of it here it's going out that way we can't get at that no at the patio we're not having much luck either there's nothing here no sign of any walls our best hope at this stage is alongside the wall connected to the one remaining tower so where are we on the print then kent well what we hope is that we're here so if you remember over here we have the tilt yard tower that survives it's now our cafe yeah and what that seems to do is to mark the entrance into the tilt yard so the wall comes up on this side and that side but there's nothing in the middle so have you got on then rebecca the interesting stuff is this early wall that we've got the foundations for down the bottom here that rubble down there rebecca i mean it looks to me like very irregular bricks and stone could that not be just foundations for this later garden wall well it's possible that that's foundations but looking at it the way that it's not actually evenly matched brick it's sort of odds and sods it looks like it's sort of been nibbled away and it's actually what's left from robbing of the earlier tower so how are you going to resolve that i'm going to dig a big hole dodge the middle and go down basically because presumably if it's the tower it's going to have a massive foundation whereas if it's just a garden wall it's going to be relatively light i would have thought if we find more of it then we're looking at the tower if we find less of it then it's the garden wall the tilt yard we're exploring at hampton court is one of many features henry created to impress he was desperate for the tudors to be seen as the only rightful monarchs steeped in the country's traditions there was a complete tudor obsession with sort of chivalry and knights and shields and banners and beasts great passion for heraldry displaying your coats of arms your ancestors coats of arms your wife's coats of your family's coats of arms there was no way going into a tudor palace that you could be under any illusion that you were in the palace of a very very rich very very powerful man who knew what he wanted henry knew exactly what he wanted he wasn't just building for the sake of it he was building to make a mark henry's father had stolen the throne and then his older brother arthur had died so henry always felt the need to prove himself as king the propaganda messages of his father's court are being constantly pumped at henry even more than they would have been at arthur his elder brother because henry's there on the spot and of course those propaganda messages are all about how the tudors have been providentially raised up as a dynasty by god to solve england's problems the tudor rose the red rose and the white rose superimposed on each other to produce a new family that will end all england's problems now of course the problem with that potentially from henry's point of view is that if he can't carry on that dynasty then something must be terribly wrong that's god's job for the tudors then why can't henry do it and probably that underlies some of henry's frantic concern to have a son to carry on the family mission [Music] showing the world he was in charge showing everyone he meant business demanded that the outside of henry's palaces had to be as splendid as the inside most people would have only passed hampton court by on the river so even the outside had to look good not only were the bricks naturally red and black but they were also painted black and red and the mortar was outlined in white and then it was surrounded all over with the most fabulous weather veins all over the top that were gilded and you can imagine how fabulous they would look on a sunny day and of course it was such a large place as well you couldn't possibly miss it the thames was a bit like the m25 in those days with lots of traffic up and down it so plenty of people would have seen it so it was a very very solid way of saying look i'm here to stay don't mess with me henry worked on hampton court for 15 years and in that time transformed it completely he added all these kitchens and the great hall he rebuilt the king's lodgings in 1533 he built this wing as the queen's new lodgings for ann berlin this was all added in 1537 for james seymour if you look at the phases of building that happened at hampton court most of them can be tied in with his marriages by building new suites of apartments for the latest queen but also making provision for children he either hoped to have or he actually had and just after the birth of henry's son edward these five towers were built in the tilt yard after three days worth of digging we now have got some positive results we found a lot more than we did hoped for oh that's good that's great isn't this what do you mean that's good well we were hoping to get great deep foundations weren't we well it's our foundation wall for the tower that we were looking for yeah why do you think that might be the tower wall rebecca well we said yesterday that if it was the foundation for the tower it would be going down and fairly substantial as opposed to being a fairly slim garden wall foundation and uh yes there's a lot more of it but do you think it still might be going under this building behind the wall i think it's likely i think this sort of more recent house is actually put on the former footprint of the old tower in other words you think it's facing that way rather than that way towards phil yeah i think there's a lot more tower behind me this way under the building covered by this red roof sat one of the missing towers this stonework is the only evidence left that it was here but it's enough and over at matt's trench we've got more good news he's found a wall albeit just a small part of one this is a bit of a triumph isn't it that's definitely a tail oh yeah i mean it's only a tiny bit of it but it shows that we're on the site of where this tower was i think the whole thing's worked actually because i mean that one's still there and of course the one under the wall which is where the red roof cottage is that's another one and because we know the positions of those i think we can say that the middle one must be somewhere under this wall and the only one we don't know the position of is the one under the grass a bit further over so we've found three we think we know where a fourth one was yeah three and a half out of five yeah i reckon so why have we found so little of them there i think that's to do with the date when they were demolished which seems to be the late 17th century and at that date it was well worth recycling all the bricks of stone everything and reusing them elsewhere because brick was quite a valuable commodity in those states in the south east of england whereas other parts of the site they don't bother recycling later on in the 18th century because they're by that time manufacturing enormously they can buy millions of bricks from oxfordshire or bedfordshire or whatever it isn't worth recycling but at this time it is and i think that's the reason this has gone other places elsewhere haven't no one has found anything here before finding these two bits of wall give us a glimpse of another part of henry's palace at hampton court another part of it that was lost up here on the roof at hampton court you get a real sense of the complexity and grandeur and sheer scale of henry's architecture but all that over there is down to him as well all around henry's palaces he created vast green spaces to be his private hunting grounds today 500 years later they survive even in the very centre of london at some of our finest parks [Music] henry viii was the most prolific builder in the history of the monarchy but four of his major palaces have been lost even at hampton court palace the only tudor palace left in the country much of henry's work has gone half of the palace was knocked down by william iii in this area the tilt yard changes over the last 400 years destroyed the tilt yard towers that had been built by henry but we managed to find hints of them it's only a tiny bit of it but it shows that we're on the site of where this tower was and now we've got another incredible opportunity to find a part of henry's palace that has been lost somewhere in this garden just after the birth of his son edward henry built a bowling alley there's a plan of the palace that shows a structure here where the bowling alley was supposed to be and it sits across these two small gardens we know very little about tudor bowling alleys so we've got lots of questions about how they were constructed and what they look like this long structure sort of reaching out into the gardens is one of two of the bowling alleys that henry had at hampton court so it shows how it ties in to the range behind us yeah that was prince edward's lodgings and then sort of runs past the tennis court here which is another building just behind us so the 64 thousand dollar question johnny can you see that on the geophysics what do you mean can we see look at jimmy's radar results they're absolutely fantastic there's the wall line showing clearly and look these little blobs those are the actual buttresses surviving our first trench in this rear garden will try to find the end of the building [Music] but in the front garden where we opened a large trench against the existing garden wall we've got a bit of a result dan you seem to have uncovered quite a lot of brick indeed yes uh three different layers of it the top one being the 18th century garden wall an offset with a similar date but more interestingly this piece of wall underneath where the bricks are a lot smaller and appear to be tudor now that is intriguing is it wouldn't it be nice if we actually found the wall of the bowling alley right under the garden wall well it's on the right alignment anyway because we know it comes off that building at the back one side of the bowling alley seems to be under this garden wall what we have to do now is find the other side [Music] bowling was very popular in tudor times henry himself built several alleys and as he loved to gamble on games that probably included bowling but none survive and the only picture is this one it shows a long narrow building with what looks like a small room at the end we don't actually know how the tudors played bowls the alleys themselves seem to have sloping sides to them possibly so that you could roll a ball and it could overtake the one in front to get to the skittles at the end at the far end was there a place where servants could wait and then jump into the alley and set up the skittles again it's a very strange sport so i think it's particularly interesting to try and unravel the the structure of the building because the structure of the building is one of the ways we might be able to understand how this pretty bizarre tudor sport was actually played after another day's worth of digging we've got the other wall and it's a big one when i was last here mick this was a tiny little trench which you were going to project that way in order to find the other wall of the bowling alley well that's right and another wall that's shown on the map and so we did that we're pretty sure that wall is on top of one side and we came across this wall here and this would have joined onto the building at the back but there's a problem with this piece of wall here which is what on the 18th century plan it's shown with buttresses along it there's no buttresses there no and we've opened enough of a length to see if there would have been so that sort of threw us into a bit of a conundrum was this actually the bowling alley wall or not yeah so come and look at this over here because we got dan to project the line through here the line of that wall the line of that wall which you see at the back and you see in front of him there oh but for us yeah on the chalk block foundation and then what's the interval down between them it's about two meters so two meters that way look look down that hole oh come on have a look buttress city we've got another one so this definitely is the bowling so it's definitely the bowling alley it's going that way if you go and look over the wall up there's like that ladder there you're serious yeah yeah you look over the wall you'll see the rest of it got your crampons with you i must resist the temptation to go and pull the ladder away hey faye what you got over in your trench then well we've got a continuation of the wall you've got in your garden running all the way through here we haven't got the end of it yet i mean it's at least 60 meters long at the moment 60 meters for a bowling alley mig can we really believe that henry chucked his bowls 60 meters well it must have had lots of strong arm muscles to do that wasn't they it's rare to find evidence of a bowling alley they've all disappeared so finding this tells us a lot more about them at 60 meters this bowling alley was three times the length of the alleys we used today for ten pin bowling it must have been a very different game from what we think of as bowling maybe they played it in stages the bowling alley was one of the last parts of hampton court to be built by henry his building work here was largely finished by the end of the 1530s by any standards hampton court is and was an impressive size but it was nowhere close to being the size of the largest palace henry ever built here at white hall in the center of london in 1530 around the time he was building the great hall at hampton court henry began work on whitehall palace his work here was to last for the rest of his life he probably never saw it without scaffolding on it whitehall palace was a joint project between henry viii and amberlynn and amazingly we still have the accounts this very day of large sheets of paper being delivered to them at greenwich and they undoubtedly sat down with a pen and with these large sheets of paper and sketched out what it was they wanted to have built and the royal workmen turned that into construction drawings and off they went so i think something that is very very important to remember about henry viii in this new enthusiastic phase he has he is a hands-on patron he's not handing it over to an architect to deal with it he himself is specifying precisely what it was he wanted to live in whitehall palace covered most of the area occupied by whitehall today on this side of the road was the living quarters across here in what's now horse guards parade ground was the fun part [Music] this was the tilt yard this is where they held tournaments so from just behind me right the way up there more or less up to trafalgar square was where people got their horses and thundered up and down with their their javelins and their lances and over here this was what you might call the recreation center the entertainment complex it still is it's downing street well you're you're right i mean just to the left of where 10 downing street is there you had the tennis courts you had four tennis courts you had a bowling alley there is a cockpit for cockfighting and there is an ornamental gardens and a whole series of galleries on the edge of what was the tilt yard here sits what's now saint james's park and that too was once part of henry's palace at whitehall it's quite easy when you think of these palaces just to think of the buildings the bricks and mortar in the middle but of course they were actually just a sort of pin prick in the middle of a huge area of land huge chunks of london still belong to the crown estate belong to the royal parks simply because henry viii put them there when he was building this huge landed buffer zone around his palaces part of it was just status if you had a huge royal palace you wanted to set it in huge land holdings and that's really what henry viii was doing he wanted to be able to get on his horse and to be able to ride for 10 miles on his own land this is part of henry's legacy to us around all his palaces he left us big open spaces that we can all enjoy today even in the centre of london [Music] the palace of white hall is gone there's nothing left on the ground but there is under the ground in a basement underneath the ministry of defense building and what you're actually going to see is his wine cellar oh look at that look come down here that is quite extraordinary but simon if this was just the wine cellar and it looked so spectacular what was the rest of the place like every single room here was designed specifically to try and emphasize henry viii's wealth his taste his power his influence his piety whatever it might be but if you and i had been peasants at that time well you wouldn't but i might would we have thought oh wow this is incredibly modern well for a start you wouldn't have got in here so you wouldn't have had a chance to do that you might have walked through the street and you would have looked from the outside and what you would have seen would have been a sort of fantasy building it would have been covered in gilded veins and flags and the outside of the brickwork would have been painted the brickwork wasn't just left to look like brick it was painted red and the joints were painted white on the outside of it the windows were brightly painted they all had stained glass in so whitehall palace was very very bright it was very magnificent it was a fantasy building it was like something out of tales of chivalry out of the court of king arthur whitehall was a fantasy building it was the biggest palace in europe henry wanted his european neighbours to understand just how powerful he was [Music] he saw himself up there with the great emperors in rome at hampton court woolsey installed these terracotta roundels on the walls to remind us who was in charge decorating a building in this way was drawn from the latest fashion that was sweeping europe from the great italian renaissance from florence and rome the italians had the inspiration and the craft skills henry wanted what they had when we talk about henry and his relationship with rome we tend to see things in a pretty straightforward way henry had a row with the pope split with rome and started the church of england except that actually things were much more complex than that henry started out as a big fan of rome he even wrote a book called in defense of the seven sacraments which basically said the pope was absolutely right and martin luther was completely wrong many of the ideas the tudors used in their buildings came from here and from florence the mind of the tudor designer was incredibly greedy what they wanted to do was suck in influences from all over the place and they turned to classical mythology and the bible and they mixed them with the influences that were beginning to come from the italian renaissance just a few hundred meters from the vatican a nondescript building sits off to one side this was known as the palazzo inglesi the english palace this building belonged to henry viii the tudors were in the heart of rome and loving what they saw so they stole ideas where they could classifying italian style was cutting edge it's clearly linked with images of overwhelming power roman emperors the roman empire if you want to compare yourself with a great ruler from the past constantine for henry in his later phases when he's thinking of himself as a great christian ruler who's revivifying the church in england all those parallels come very naturally one thing the italians were doing was decorating the outside of their buildings much of the work was very intricate and fancy it appealed to henry up to this time about 1490 the florentines had been playing with systems of ornament classical ornament on the facades of their palaces but here it's introduced to rome and it covers the facade of this marble palace with the sort of decoration that you actually find for the first time in england in the buildings of henry viii courtiers hampton court stores is full of demolished bits of terracotta just like that the terracotta rounds at hampton court are a great example of this and they're busts of roman emperors they're paragons of rule it's a very humanist thing to look back to these classical examples of emperors who who ruled fairly the symbol of them is henry is a great ruler and woolsey puts them there to suggest that where henry led others followed henry's interest in the italian renaissance meant others began to decorate their buildings in a similar way this is leomani tower just a few miles from bewley palace lord mani had been with henry at the field of cloth of gold he saw the magnificent palace there with its decorated exterior so he did the same thing here himself and went mad with decorated stucco in an italian style and at acton court built for henry's three-day visit in 1535 the owner probably even hired in workmen from henry's court to decorate the inside in an italian style he knew would please the king the intention was to be magnificent for him and for other renaissance princes magnificence was the key to success if you had it you flaunted it magnificence bespoke your power your your your political uh ascendancy and so the more magnificent you appeared the more you know more people would take you seriously as a ruler henry's sense of the magnificent didn't just come to him late in life though even in his early twenties he appreciated the beautiful and insisted on things being done in a grand manner and to see that properly we need to go back to bewley palace the palace he built when he was just 25. we've got a theory we want to test and to do that we need to find the chapel [Music] which means digging up the school's car park let's hope it's there [Music] at the site of bewley palace in essex we're digging the chapel built by henry viii we're finding huge cuda walls and we know that the chapel was big just how big can be seen here on the right westminster abbey next to it is saint margaret's church and this window was originally in the chapel at bewley bewley palace was the first palace built by henry viii it was cutting edge in its day the latest designs were making their way here from europe in books on architecture like this one which jonathan discovered in oxford this volume contains a book by an italian architect called alberti it was essentially a book on how to build palaces um so he begins by saying right here's an architect this is his job and the way that he should conceive a building according to book one is through lineaments and what he means by there we are linear mentis libra primus on online and lines are all about sitting down with a clean sheet of paper or parchment and drawing out on site to the outlines of your building to achieve clarity on the ground but can you say that any of the principles in here actually influenced the building of henry's palaces a surveyor called william bolton comes on the scene in about 1503 and he's a surveyor on hindu vii chapel on hampton court on bully and then on the field of cloth of gold every one of those is designed according to perfect squares alberta's principles in chapter one seem to have been understood by the british court um and they've they've they've taken this to heart and back of bully built by bolton we can see evidence of this thinking one of our targets this week has been to find the chapel and by the look of it jonathan you're bang on the money it's amazing isn't it a vast building this one wall's about five feet thick and we're on the corner of the chapel the southeast corner where it meets the vestry and that great chunk of brickwork in there is the platform for the altar so we're right under the east window built in 1517 this chapel shows just how early henry adopted european thinking these walls continue and they meet with the gatehouse renaissance design hit essex and it was the surveyor william bolton who was responsible the main principle is organizing an entire site with geometry and what's the geometry well he uses a square he sets that down first and then he rotates it to give you an eight-pointed star and within that shape he draws a second square and that then gives you the width of each of the ranges that surrounds this courtyard and the direction of everything that comes off it you can see at the top there so our trench here and the gate house are linked by that geometry we're standing here on that part and over there at the apex of the corner of the square is the gatehouse exactly fact it skims the angle of the gate ass turrets themselves the point is that bolton regularizes the heart of the thing with this geometry and that purity that rationality that order is exactly what a monarch could want to be represented by henry's lost palaces were all built along similar lines bewley was built around the idea of perfect squares so was the palace at the field of cloth of gold as was hampton court a classically simple idea brought over here from europe by the renaissance king henry and with his last great palace henry's embrace of the renaissance seems to leave traditional tudor way behind in the year 1538 henry's love of classical european renaissance architecture reached a brand new level at last he'd had a son called edward and once edward was born henry embarked on building a new palace which was defined as much by its name as anything else it was called non-such palace which meant palace beyond compare it was the smallest of his palaces it had no great hall no large public chapel but it was arguably his finest work and it looked extraordinary the most magnificent was nonsuch we can tell that from the designs that would have been um extraordinary it was based on this italian renaissance style of architecture and interior decoration and it would have that would have been the most magnificent of his palaces it's a great shame we don't have that nonsuch palace was here in surrey in 1959 even before time team was around this was the site of the biggest public archaeological dig ever held in this country martin biddle led the dig [Music] it must be the most extraordinary place to dig and were you just here for one summer yes we we we did it in ten flaming weeks of 1959. over 100 people were digging you know we had 75 000 visitors to the excavation and it was treated as if it was a romano british house very thoroughly stratigraphic and very carefully controlled non-such was clearly henry's last great burst of uh italianate decoration and what's spectacular about it was the inner courtyard with these giant stucco figures of which only fragments now survive right so we're now the inner gate house we're going to walk up eight steps okay into the inner court now if we stood here as a visitor what we would see rising high on the wall facing us the wall of the south range will be a great stucco figure of henry viii with the young son edward by his side and at the top they have the images of empire the 32 roman emperors then below that on the king side the gods the great figures of classical antiquity and on the queen side the goddesses very fitting biddle and his team found the building's outline and they came across incredible fines over one thousand five hundred fragments of stucco panels nearly a thousand pieces of carved and gilded slate and six thousand fragments of decorated plaster all of which have been fixed onto the building's walls nonsuch looked amazing with all its fancy adornment this was the italian renaissance gone mad it was henry's swan song there's one surviving palace that looks like non-such would have looked this is palazzo spada in rome cool it's a bit dramatic in that it's amazing it's a really architectural theater it's built into the 1540s so actually it's a little later than non-such yes but this is typical of where roman classical palace design gets to it's covered in stucco of the gods inside an emperor's outside there are gods like venus up there and there's mars there with the sword there's a whole encyclopedia but hercules is really popular in palace design because everyone wants to be here it's like wearing your favorite football shirt fabulous when you say this is the next best thing to nonsuch would nonsuch actually look like this if you take the size of this courtyard it's about the same as each of non-such as two courtyards and the heights about the same as well but if you were in the middle of non-such you'd have seen stucco work like this exceptional in england for its date and it shows you exactly what we lost when nonsense was demolished but it doesn't look tudor it doesn't look typically tudor but that's because we're used to what happens to survive and when you pick apart the archaeological evidence for the materials the craftsmanship the very different approaches to tudor building we realize that we really don't have the full picture and that's the value of archaeology statues like these also adorned non-such as walls this is where henry saw himself at the heart of figures like this alone among the gods and the emperors [Music] these classical figures were thought to be figures of power and at long last edward has been born to henry as a son to continue the tudor dynasty so henry and edward are amongst the gods and the goddesses and the emperors and the liberal arts and virtues the whole thing is a massive dynastic statement it's a statement of hope for the future of the dynasty statement about the status of the dynasty and it's the greatest piece of propaganda ever erected by any english ruler propaganda and realpolitik or was it just plain fantasy which of these worlds did henry live in well he lived in both this painting is the perfect example of how henry wanted to present himself surrounded by his loving wife and children this is his daughter the future queen mary this is his son and heir edward this is his other daughter the future queen elizabeth and this is his wife jane seymour except this painting could never have happened like this because jane died while giving birth to edward it's not real it's the world as henry wanted it to be deciphering henry's world isn't easy just when you think you're right you might not be we know that this background is white hall palace or is it the difficulty about henry viii's palaces is that so few of them survive so we don't really know what whitehall look like we don't really know what greenwich looked like we don't really know what richmond looked like and so when we look at non-such which is actually one of the better documented ones it's very tempting to say oh isn't this fantastic this is out of the out of the ordinary this is very unusual but we don't know we do know that some of the same people who worked on non-such worked at whitehall and it would be surprising if a palace that was almost certainly built for the his son and heir was more magnificent than the principal palace of the realm at whitehall so i think what we can say about nonsuch is that it was absolutely the latest style but it's very very likely that big chunks of whitehall palace in particular were very very similar seeing non-such throws all our ideas about tudor building up in the air but then there's almost nothing left of most of henry's palaces even at hampton court much of his work was replaced by william iii what we do have left there gives us a glimpse of henry's world henry's legacy to us is big open spaces and grandiose architectural statements the great hall and the interiors hint at the splendor the roundels hint at the renaissance hampton court shows henry as a man of power an intellectual who studied the renaissance and imported it here and most of all we see a man who was determined to impress his subjects and the world with his importance and his own [Music] a priest was magnifice for abusing young boys deliver us from evil on more for tomorrow at 10. well here on channel 4 next we continue to mark 500 years since henry's accession to the throne with david stark's mind of a tyrant [Music]

Channel: Erik Carter

Views: 74,720

Keywords:

Id: PIHj-Z8j0zI

Length: 76min 27sec (4587 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 10 2021