If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home (14 page)

This desire to control access to the royal presence helps to explain why keys were such a big deal in a palace. The Groom of the Stool was the king’s most important servant and attended him on the ‘Stool’, which is the close stool or toilet. As his badge of office, the Groom of the Stool wore the bedchamber’s single ‘gold Key in a blue Ribbon’, and there were strict instructions that ‘no other Keys for the Bed-Chamber &c. be made or allowed’.

Until modern times, kings rarely slept alone. But Henry VIII would not sleep with his wife unless he wanted to have intercourse with her – for this purpose he would visit her in her own chamber. Generally, in his bedroom, a small wheeled bed was pulled out each night from beneath the king’s big bed for one of his gentleman attendants. Favoured servants such as Thomas Culpepper ‘ordinarily shared [the King’s] bed’.

Over time, though, Henry VIII grew annoyed that so many people considered themselves entitled to barge into his bedroom any time they wanted. So he built himself a new bedchamber in his so-called ‘secret lodgings’ at Hampton Court, and here he tried to start afresh with a much stricter access policy. He issued new orders to his bedchamber staff, insisting that his six Gentlemen of the Bedchamber could no longer enter the royal bedchamber without permission. Only his favourite, Henry
Norris, had that right, and ‘the King’s express commandment is, that none other of the said six gentlemen, presume to enter or follow his Grace into the said bed chamber, or any other secret place, unless he shall be called’.

Queens likewise had an extensive bedchamber staff, and also ended up with many more people than they wanted in their bedrooms. But it was very difficult to eject anyone who thought they had permission, established by precedent, to be there. On one occasion the eighteenth-century Queen Caroline had to spend a whole hour hearing the rival arguments of her Ladies of the Bedchamber and her Lord and Vice Chamberlains. Their dispute was whether the two men were allowed into the queen’s bedchamber, ‘a right always pretended to by them & always contested by the Ladies’.

People would brag about their privilege of entry, if they had it, because it was such an important sign of status. Once, when Caroline was recovering from a miscarriage, the Countess of Manchester insisted that her husband’s high position gave her the right to visit Caroline’s bedside. She marched right into the bedchamber of a desperately ill woman, just to prove to her peers that she could.

This all seems rather trivial to modern eyes, but it really was of the greatest importance. The people who spent time with the king or queen, from day to day, could affect the very government of the country. It’s easy for powerful people, through inattention or laziness, to fall under the thumb of their closest servants and advisers, and to make poor decisions as a result. So the history of the royal bedchamber department, from the Tudors to the Stuarts, also tells the story of royal power.

Henry VIII successfully retained control over his bedchamber staff, as the resetting of his relationships with them upon the construction of the ‘secret lodgings’ demonstrates. The structure of power at court changed under Elizabeth I because, as a woman, she spent more time in her bedchamber and privy
lodgings. Yet her Ladies of the Bedchamber were not as powerful as their male predecessors had been. There was less access to the queen by her male courtiers, but Elizabeth was a powerful enough personality to use this to her advantage, rigidly insisting on making her own decisions and imposing them on her court.

Her successor James I, however, was a weaker character. When he came down to London from Scotland, he staffed his bedchamber with old Scottish friends. A little clique developed, and James fell rather under the spell of the manipulative Duke of Buckingham, his favourite, who was well able to get the king to agree to what he wanted without bothering with the Privy Council. It was this sort of high-handed rule by an arrogant inner group that led James I and then Charles I into trouble. Eventually their subjects became so weary of their imperiousness that they rebelled. So some of the seeds of the cataclysmic English Civil War – in which a greater proportion of the population was killed than in the First World War – were sown amid the politics of the royal bedchamber.

Great aristocrats also found their bedchambers distressingly public places, where the conflicts of the various factions in their households were played out. From the seventeenth century onwards, though, bedrooms were less important places for politics. With the decline of personal power and the rise of a more democratic form of government in the shape of the Parliament, the bedrooms of the great became period pieces, interesting for what had gone on there in times gone by. They became tourist attractions, rather than places of power.

The indefatigable tourist and house-snooper named Celia Fiennes infiltrated the Duke of Exeter’s own apartments and saw his blue velvet bed at Burghley House near Stamford in 1698. She found the rooms ‘very large and lofty and most delicately painted’, but the Duke’s pictures rather upsetting: their subjects ‘all without Garments or very little, that was the only fault, the immodesty of the Pictures especially in my Lord’s
apartment’. One feels disappointed in the duke, obviously, for his objectification of women, but he also deserves a little sympathy for being obliged through courtesy to let the super-nosy Celia Fiennes poke about in his bedroom.

But even while royal power was gradually dwindling, aristocrats in their great country houses often maintained a special bedroom – and indeed a special bed – for visiting sovereigns. These ‘state beds’, rarely slept in, are like colossal temples to luxury, and they’ve often survived astonishingly well because of their lack of use. In fact, whether or not the beds were really intended to be slept in is a matter of hot scholarly debate. Some might merely have been commissioned out of a sense of self-importance and tradition (
plate 1
).

People visiting country houses were simply staggered by the sight of some of these state beds. A poet was moved to verse by the sight of the one at Harewood House in Yorkshire:

Hail, glorious structure! Noblest of our isle,

Finished by artists bred on every soil,

What gold can finish or what taste can shew

Beyond conception strike the astonish’d view.

Such costly furniture, such beds of state!

Thomas Chippendale in 1761 recommended that a state bed should measure 7 ft across and 8 ft long, with a canopy 15 ft high (by comparison, a standard modern double bed measures 4 ft 6 ins by 6 ft 3 ins). The Duke of Bedford’s state bed at Woburn Abbey was commissioned from Samuel Norman of Soho Square. It cost £378, but if its current worth is calculated according to average earnings today, the sum would be nearer half a million pounds.

While a state bed may seem sumptuous, kings and queens often wished they could sleep somewhere lower-key. Sickness in a state bed, for example, was a miserable experience. Pitiful, aged Elizabeth I passed the last few nights of her life upon a pile of cushions ‘laid for her in the privy chamber hard by the
closet door’, rather than in her 11-ft, ostrich-feather-topped and decidedly inconvenient bed.

During the last week in the life of Mary II, which she spent in her grand bed at Kensington Palace, her husband William III passed his nights with much more humble sleeping arrangements. One morning in December 1694, Mary had woken up to discover on her arm the rash heralding smallpox. She put her affairs in order, paid her bills and resigned herself to death, which came a week later. During these final few days, her distraught husband slept on a lowly servant’s pallet bed in the corner of her bedchamber, so as to miss none of the few remaining hours he had in the company of his beloved wife. ‘You can believe what a condition I am in, loving her as I do,’ he wrote. ‘If I should lose her, I shall have done with the world.’ One might suggest that, as a constitutional king whose power was limited by the Bill of Rights, William III could willingly sleep in a bed at which Henry VIII would have turned up his nose whatever the circumstances.

So the decline of the power of the monarchy was accompanied by the decline of the stateliness and scale of its beds. It’s remarkable to think that Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip spent their honeymoon on the royal yacht
Britannia
each sleeping in their own narrow single bed. There was not one double on board.

13 – A History of Sleep

Sleep may be reckon’d one of the Blessings of Life.

Sarah Cowper, 1712

There are two ways of telling the time: by the hands of a clock, or by the shadow on a sundial. That’s why we still give the hour ‘o’clock’, of the clock, and by implication not ‘of the sun’ or ‘of the dial’. Until the eighteenth century, when ordinary people began to get access to clocks, the sun told most people when to get up and when to go to bed.

The cost of candles and firewood meant that only the richest and most powerful Tudors could turn night into day. Yet it did sometimes happen: once, eager for a building project to be completed, Henry VIII made his workmen labour all night by candlelight, and rewarded them with beer and cheese.

But consider the difficulty of coping with a long winter night if you couldn’t afford the lighting to ease its passing. There’s a fascinating theory, promoted by the historian Roger Ekirch, that people living in pre-industrial times dealt with the darkness by sleeping in two spells, the ‘first sleep’ and the ‘second sleep’, with a couple of hours or so of wakefulness in between.

The British night lasts fourteen hours in winter, and human beings simply don’t need to sleep for that long. Modern experiments have shown that the body clocks of humans kept regularly
in darkness for fourteen hours at a stretch gradually gravitate towards two periods of slumber, with a middle stretch spent awake. Could this sleep pattern have been widespread in the days when nights were still long and dark?

There are indeed occasional documentary references which support this theory. A pattern of two sleeps a night would explain why, for example, in the sixteenth-century story
Beware the Cat
, its hero, ‘newly come to bed’, has a quarrel with his two room-mates, who had ‘already slept’ their ‘first sleep’. Also, in
A Treatise of Ghosts
(1588), the author can refer in a matter-of-fact manner to the time ‘about midnight when a man wakes from his first sleep’. Perhaps these forgotten wakeful hours in the middle of the night were an important part of life for medieval and Tudor people.

How might they have passed the time? Maybe they chatted to a husband or wife. The French doctor Laurent Joubert recommended in the sixteenth century that this was the best time to conceive children: ‘after the first sleep’ couples should have ‘more enjoyment’ and ‘do it better’. He recommended that afterwards they ‘get back to sleep again, if possible, or if not, at least to remain in bed and relax while talking together joyfully’. Perhaps people even felt their way around their houses in the dark. Certainly they must have had a drink or relieved themselves: the Tudor Andrew Boorde recommends that ‘when you do wake of your first sleep you shall make water if you feel your bladder charged’.

Some people even left their beds to go about their business. Poor men went out to rob houses, and women got up to ‘brew a Load of Malt in the Back Kitchen’ or to put a load of washing to soak. ‘Often at Midnight, from our Bed we rise,’ explains Mary Collier in
The Woman’s Labour
(1739).

If there really was such a broken pattern of sleep at night, it’s not surprising to discover that people made up for it with naps in the middle of the day. ‘At noon he must have his sleeping time,’
complained Bishop James Pilkington about the ordinary working man, and Thomas Rowlandson’s
Haymakers at Rest
(1798) shows labourers literally asleep in the fields. A workman’s right to sleep during the daytime was officially recognised in 1563 by
The Statute of Artificers
: half an hour was to be allowed daily to each workman ‘for his Sleep when he is allowed to sleep … which is from the middest of May to the middest of August’.

Samuel Pepys recorded taking real pleasure in a broken night. He delighted in falling asleep and waking up again and again: