A Journey Through Tudor England (4 page)

Elizabeth’s court is also represented here in great numbers. There is John Astley, her tutor, from 1555; and William Cecil, Lord Burghley, her Secretary of State and, later, Lord Treasurer [see B
URGHLEY
H
OUSE
] wearing the rich, black velvet that signified wealth. There are also notable portraits of her favourites. Two of the many portraits of Elizabeth’s favourite, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, are here: one from 1575, the year he last wooed her [see K
ENILWORTH
C
ASTLE
], and a Hilliard miniature from 1576. In the portrait, Leicester wears the somewhat effete clothing of the Elizabethan male: a figure-hugging doublet in red and gold thread, and short, wide breeches, with his legs unabashedly on show in silk stockings. Another of Elizabeth I’s favourites, Sir Christopher Hatton [see K
IRBY
H
OUSE
], is depicted in a Hilliard miniature from 1581, as is the upstart Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, who has also been painted life-size by Gheeraerts.

Here, too, are the great and good of her court: Sir Francis Drake, in miniature and in life-size with his hand resting on a globe to mark his circumnavigation, which he’d completed just before these portraits were painted [see B
UCKLAND
A
BBEY
]; and Sir Walter
Ralegh, dashing in his miniature of 1585, but greyed in his image of 1602, where he’s pictured with his son (also named Walter), who would later die in the search for El Dorado [see S
HERBORNE
A
BBEY
]. Sir Philip Sidney, the soldier-courtier-poet whom the Elizabethans adored [see P
ENSHURST
P
LACE
], is flatteringly depicted (with no sign of his acute childhood smallpox scars) in neck armour. Surprisingly, given that facial hair fashions at the time worked on the basis that beards equalled masculinity, Sidney is barefaced, maybe as a symbol of his youth.

Also, be sure to spot Thomas Howard, fourth Duke of Norfolk, executed for treason in 1572 [see A
RUNDEL
C
ASTLE
]; the miniature of Francis Bacon, Viscount St Alban, the English philosopher, from 1578; and an unbecoming portrait of his father, Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, painted a year later. Sir Henry Lee is also shown in a fascinating picture painted by the great artist Antonis Mor, with his sleeves decorated with armillary spheres and lovers’ knots symbolising Elizabeth, and three mysterious rings.

Finally, there are two portraits that tell wider stories. The portrait of Anne, Lady Pope, pregnant and with her three children, was probably painted before she entered the dangerous period of childbirth (which one in four women did not survive). Notice that two of her children, although in skirts, are actually boys: boys would only be ‘breeched’ — taken out of girls’ clothes and put in breeches — at the age of six or seven. The last is a very unusual narrative portrait of the minor courtier, soldier and diplomat Sir Henry Unton, from 1596. Commissioned by his widow, Dorothy Wroughtson, and read right to left, it shows his whole life and death, including his travels, banqueting, music-making and an Elizabethan masque. It is a wonderful summary, in oil, of the amusing and arduous world of the Tudor gentry.

‘Partners both in throne and grave, here we sleep, Elizabeth and Mary, sisters, in hope of the resurrection.’

W
estminster Abbey is home to 1,000 years of royal history. Edward the Confessor first founded an Anglo-Saxon abbey here in 960, and the present abbey dates from 1245 when it was built by Henry III to house Edward the Confessor’s shrine. The pointed arches, flying buttresses and rose windows are typical of the French-inspired Gothic style that was fashionable in thirteenth-century architecture, and nearly every addition to the Abbey since — including the eighteenth-century West Towers by Nicholas Hawksmoor — have copied the thirteenth-century original. The one exception is the beautiful sixteenth-century fan-vaulted Lady Chapel in the east end of the Abbey behind the High Altar, which was built by Henry VII after the death of his beloved wife, Elizabeth of York, in 1502. He, too, was subsequently buried here.

Henry VII chose Westminster Abbey as his wife’s resting place because the couple had solemnised their momentous union here
on 18 January 1486. (This was the last royal wedding at Westminster Abbey until 1919, when the Abbey was readopted by the modern royals with Princess Pat’s — one of Queen Victoria’s granddaughters — nuptials.) The marriage between the nineteen-year-old Elizabeth and the recently crowned King Henry VII was cause for celebration indeed. It marked the coming together of the warring houses of York and Lancaster: an end to the bloody Wars of the Roses that had torn England apart on and off for over thirty years. A strikingly attractive and intelligent woman, with long golden hair, Elizabeth wore her finest robes for the wedding — described as glowing ‘with gold and purple dye’ — and a necklace ‘framed in fretted gold’. She carried symbolic white and red roses.

As with HRH Prince William and Catherine Middleton’s — the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge — wedding in April 2011, Henry and Elizabeth’s nuptials were marked by festivities and street parties. Accounts say that the wedding was ‘celebrated with all religious and glorious magnificence at court and by their people with bonfires’.

Westminster Abbey is not only famous as a place for royal weddings. It is, of course, the country’s coronation church: thirty-eight English and British monarchs have been crowned here since 1066, including all the Tudor monarchs, except Lady Jane Grey. The only other exceptions are the boy-king, Edward V, one of the ‘Princes in the Tower’ who was murdered before he could be crowned, and Edward VIII, who abdicated in 1936 to marry the American divorcée Wallis Simpson. The coronation chair, dating from 1298, on which every subsequent crowned monarch sat, can be seen at the Abbey, while the first monarch to introduce English into the coronation ceremony, Elizabeth I, also gave the Abbey its special status as a ‘Royal Peculiar’, answerable directly to the monarch.

The Abbey is also significant in Tudor history for being the burial place for many of the period’s famous and most important figures.

If the Tudor dynasty has a founder, it is probably Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby, and Henry VII’s mother, through whom he derived his claim to the throne (she was Edward Ill’s great-great-granddaughter through John of Gaunt’s son, John Beaufort). On her tomb, in the south chapel aisle of the Lady Chapel, her effigy is a delicate gilt bronze sculpture by the Italian Pietro Torrigiano, with an impressively lifelike face and wrinkled old hands, dating from 1511.

Nearby, Edward VI, Henry VII’s grandson, was buried under the altar in the Lady Chapel by his half-sister, Mary I, thereby deliberately avoiding an elaborate tomb, which could have become the locus of Protestant pilgrimage.

In turn, Mary and Elizabeth are buried at the Abbey, too. In the north chapel aisle of the Lady Chapel, one can see their large white marble tomb, on which Elizabeth lies in effigy. It is decorated with gilt Tudor roses, fleurs-de-lis, portcullises (the symbol of a ‘strong fort’, representing the Beaufort line of Henry VIII’s grandmother) and even, interestingly, the falcon: Anne Boleyn’s badge. In a final twist of fate these two rivalrous half-sisters are buried not only together, but with Elizabeth on top of Mary. Part of the Latin inscription reads in translation: ‘Partners both in throne and grave, here we sleep, Elizabeth and Mary, sisters, in hope of the resurrection.’

The obvious missing Tudor is Henry VIII himself, who can be found at St George’s Chapel in Windsor. Somewhat ironically, the most prestigiously placed Tudor tomb is that of Henry VIII’s most overlooked wife, Anne of Cleves [see R
OCHESTER
C
ASTLE
]. Anne’s tomb, erected in her memory by Mary I (probably because Anne was one of the only people who showed the adult Mary affection), is to the right of the thirteenth-century mosaic pavement in front
of the High Altar, and befits her wisely adopted status as the ‘King’s sister’.

Another splendid tomb is that of James VI of Scotland and I of England’s mother, Mary, Queen of Scots. James had also paid for Elizabeth I’s tomb — a generous gesture given that she had executed his mother at Fotheringhay in 1587 — but he retaliated a little by making his mother’s tomb more magnificent than Elizabeth’s.

James I also erected the monument and effigy to Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox. Margaret is a rather under-recognised figure at the Tudor court, but her lineage and succession were of vital importance to the future of England. She was the daughter of Henry VIII’s elder sister, Margaret Tudor, and of Archibald Douglas, the sixth Earl of Angus. After her fiancé (or possibly even husband), Lord Thomas Howard, died in the Tower — where both he and Margaret had been imprisoned in 1536 for contracting marriage without Henry VIII’s permission — Margaret married Matthew Stewart, Earl of Lennox. Their son, Henry, Lord Darnley, would go on to marry Mary, Queen of Scots and father the future James VI and I. Margaret herself, however, died in 1578 in poverty, as none of her eight children who kneels by her side on her monument survived her. Her fine and colourful alabaster effigy is a fitting tribute to a king’s niece and grandmother, who experienced little of such favour in life.

Finally, there is another important Tudor woman buried at the Abbey. Frances Brandon was the daughter of Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, and his third wife, Mary: Henry VIII’s younger sister and widow to the French King, Louis XII. Married first to Henry Grey, Marquess of Dorset, later Duke of Suffolk, Frances was the mother to three girls, among them Lady Jane Grey. It is through her that Lady Jane Grey had a claim to the English throne. Frances’s second husband, her lowly Master of Horse, Adrian
Stock (or Stokes), had the alabaster monument that you can see in St Edmund’s Chapel built for her, in 1563.

There is one last discovery for the Tudor visitor to make, but you have to go next door to St Margaret’s to see it. At the east end of the church is a dazzling Flemish stained-glass window, commissioned as a gift by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain to mark the engagement of their daughter, Katherine of Aragon, to Henry VII’s eldest son, Prince Arthur. By the time the window arrived, in 1509, Arthur was long dead, and Katherine had married his brother, Henry. Like many of the tombs in the Abbey, this window represents a cold and lasting memorial of the often frustrated hopes and loves of the Tudors.