“So little has remained for us today of these
ephemeral places.
We have a few – like the one at Hampton
Court, the one at Melford Hall in Suffolk”.
Janet Wertman
This is a companion to my (Damien Mackey’s) article:
Henry VIII’s palaces missing
Tudor Banqueting Houses -
Then AND NOW (!) - Janet Wertman
Tudor Banqueting Houses – Then AND NOW (!)
Published by janetwertman on May 18, 2019
A banqueting house was a “separate pavilion-like building reached
through the gardens from the main residence.” They
became very popular during the Tudor era – even memorialized by Henry VIII in
fanciful structures at Hampton Court and Nonsuch Palaces. But most of the time, they were
temporary – tents atop platforms (lavish tents atop massive platforms to be
sure!).
We have extensive details of royal tents from reports and paintings of
the Field of the Cloth of Gold and its fabulous array of golden pavilions. We
also have a wonderful description of the temporary banqueting house that
Elizabeth built at Whitehall in 1581 ahead of negotiations for her potential
marriage to the Duc of Alencon. The 332-foot-long structure, which took almost
400 people a little over three weeks to build, was held up with 30 masts; its
canvas walls were painted to look like stone; its roof was painted with stars,
clouds and sunbeams to look like the sky and the insides were decorated with
“292 glass lights… and… all manner of strang[e] flowers… garnished with spangs
of gould [and fruits like] pomegarnetts, orrnges, pompions, cowcumbers, grapes,
carettes, peas and such like”. The structure lasted for 25 years – and then
James VI built a more permanent building that we can (and do!) still visit
today.
Courtiers, too, built these structures – especially in the “prodigy
houses” that Wikipedia defines as “large and showy English country houses built
by courtiers and other wealthy families, either ‘noble palaces of an awesome
scale’ or ‘proud, ambitious heaps’ according to taste.” They also note that
many of the grandest “were built with a view to housing Elizabeth I and her
large retinue as they made their annual royal progress around her realm.”
So little has remained for us today of these ephemeral places. We have a
few – like the one at Hampton Court, the one at Melford Hall in Suffolk. We
might be about to have another.
There is a grassy hump in the Sudeley Castle grounds that went ignored
for more than 400 years…and that is now believed to cover the remains of the
banqueting house built to in 1592 to welcome Elizabeth and her retinue who came
for a three-day celebration of the fourth anniversary of the victory over the
Spanish Armada.
Sudeley has crowdfunded a dig that begins on Monday (May 21) and runs
through June 2 …. DigVentures, who’s running the project, is planning on uploading photos and videos
from the dig team, as well as interactive 3D models of the trenches. They will
also be adding details of all the artifacts, layers and discoveries they make,
and they’ve created communities on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. The best
part: according to Maiya Pina-Dacier, their Head of Community, if the wifi
signal is good enough they even hope to do a livestream video (everybody start
crossing your fingers now). ….
“… start crossing your fingers now”.
And at: Search for the Banqueting
Hall of Queen Elizabeth I part 1.pdf
we read:
Travel Tales
The Search for the Missing Banqueting Hall
and Tudor Garden
of Queen Elizabeth I – Part 1
by Lew Toulmin
In the summer of 1592, Queen Elizabeth I and her very large retinue of
courtiers arrived at Sudeley Castle, a magnificent structure in the Cotswolds,
in Gloucestershire, southwest England. The official goal of this visit was to
celebrate the fourth anniversary of England’s defeat of the Spanish Armada, and
to honor Giles Brydges, 3rd Baron Chandos, owner of the Castle. But a possible
secondary goal was to force Chandos, whose formerly Catholic family had
previously been given the Castle by Catholic Queen “Bloody Mary,” to spend so
much money on entertaining his guests, that he would have no resources left to
resist Elizabeth’s rule!
Elizabeth may have also sought some revenge against the Chandos family
and enjoyed forcing him to pay her homage, since Chandos’ grandfather (1st
Baron Chandos) had been Elizabeth’s jailer for a short time at the Tower of
London, when he was the Lord Lieutenant (the commander) of the Tower and she
was incarcerated there.
The highlight of the lengthy royal visit to Sudeley Castle was an epic
three-day party, probably one of the largest and most expensive in British
history. The event involved jousting, bear and bull baiting, dancing, singing,
a specially commissioned play, a pageant, mummers, and of course lots of
feasting and drinking. The party was held in a temporary Banqueting Hall.
There is no historical description available of the Sudeley banqueting
hall, but there is a description of a likely similar temporary banqueting
structure built at Whitehall in London in 1581, as part of Elizabeth’s marriage
negotiations with the Duc d’Alencon. (She was 48 and he was 26 at the time.)
This structure took 375 laborers 3 weeks and 3 days to build (i.e., about 9000
person-days!). It was 332 feet long, held up by 30 masts, made of canvas
painted to look like stone, and the ceiling was painted with stars, clouds and
sunbeams to look like the sky. The inside was decorated with “292 glass
lights…and all manner of strange flowers…garnished with spangs of gould…and
fruits like pomegarnetts, orrnges, pompions, cowcumbers, grapes, carettes, peas
and such like.” (sic!)
Temporary structures like this were meant to impress the common folk,
convey the notion of the divine right of kings to rule, and allow the monarch
to slowly progress around the kingdom. They played a major role in the famous
1520 event The Field of the Cloth of Gold at Calais -- the famous meeting
between Henry VIII and Francis I, King of France. But because of their
temporary nature, relatively little hard information on them is available via
historical documents, paintings or archaeology.
Historians and experts at Sudeley wanted to find the site of the
banqueting hall, but had no success until they noticed a large, lumpy, unused
field in the area east of the Castle, in an area first thought to be an old
Saxon manor house, but then suspected of being a buried Tudor Garden.
Beginning in the early 16th century, Tudor Gardens became important
places to entertain, feast, and display new-found wealth and power.
(Previously gardens had been small private affairs.) During the reign of
Elizabeth, this trend accelerated, and gardens filled with exotic plants and
designs became even more elaborate, due to her love of display and clever use
of design, fashion and architecture for political messaging. Nobles vied to
build ever more elaborate gardens, to lure Elizabeth to visit. Such gardens
could include private areas where political scheming could not be overheard,
rosemary bushes shimmering with gold leaf, fountains, statues, and “bridges
magically brimming with wine.”
Because of the transitory nature of gardens, and the destruction of
almost all Tudor Gardens during the later open landscaping craze led by
Capability Brown, there is only one other likely Tudor Garden in Britain.
Hence the possibility of identifying, mapping, and studying a previously
unknown one is very exciting for historians and landscape architects. And with
modern plant micro-identification and paleo-environmental techniques, it may be
possible to identify some of the exact plants used in these exotic displays.
Sudeley Castle General Manager Wendy Walton stated that, “Finding an
intact Tudor garden like this is an astonishingly rare occurrence. Bringing it
back to the surface would be an amazing achievement, and would give us the
chance to find out what it would have been like in the days when Anne Boleyn,
Elizabeth I and Katherine Parr, Henry VIII’s last wife, walked its pathways.” ….
***
