The royal palaces of the Tudor period - Hampton Court Palace, the Tower of London, Greenwich Palace, St James' Palace, Nonesuch, Whitehall and Richmond Palace, amongst others - are the subject of this illustrated book, in which the author examines the way in which Tudor palaces functioned on the inside.
The story of the Stuart dynasty is a breathless soap opera played out in just a hundred years in an array of buildings that span Europe from Scotland, via Denmark, Holland and Spain to England.
Hampton Court Palace, to the south-west of London, is one of the most famous and magnificent buildings in Britain. The original palace was begun by Cardinal Wolsey, but it soon attracted the attention of his Tudor king and became the centre of royal and political life for the next 200 years. In this new, lavishly illustrated history, the stories of the people who have inhabited the palace over the last five centuries take centre stage. Here Henry VIII and most of his six wives held court, Shakespeare and his players performed, and Charles I escaped arrest after his defeat in the Civil War. William III and Mary II introduced French court etiquette, and Georgian kings and princes argued violently amid the splendid interiors. Alongside the royal residents, there have been equally fascinating characters among courtiers and servants. Queen Victoria opened the palace to the public in the nineteenth century, and since then millions of visitors have been drawn to Hampton Court by its grandeur, its beauty and the many intriguing stories of those great and small who once lived here.
What was it like to live as a royal Tudor? Why were their residences built as they were and what went on inside their walls? Who slept where and with whom? Who chose the furnishings? And what were their passions? The Tudors ruled through the day, throughout the night, in the bath, in bed and in the saddle. Their palaces were genuine power houses - the nerve-center of military operations, the boardroom for all executive decisions and the core of international politics. 'Houses of Power' is the result of Simon Thurley's 30 years of research, picking through architectural digs, and examining financial accounts, original plans and drawings to reconstruct the great Tudor houses and understand how these monarchs shaped their lives.
Glenn Richardson provides the first history in more than four decades of a major Tudor event: an extraordinary international gathering of Renaissance rulers unparalleled in its opulence, pageantry, controversy, and mystery. Throughout most of the late medieval period, from 1300 to 1500, England and France were bitter enemies, often at war or on the brink of it. In 1520, in an effort to bring conflict to an end, England’s monarch, Henry VIII, and Francis I of France agreed to meet, surrounded by virtually their entire political nations, at “the Field of Cloth of Gold.” In the midst of a spectacular festival of competition and entertainment, the rival leaders hoped to secure a permanent settlement between them, as part of a European-wide “Universal Peace.” Richardson offers a bold new appraisal of this remarkable historical event, describing the preparations and execution of the magnificent gathering, exploring its ramifications, and arguing that it was far more than the extravagant elitist theater and cynical charade it historically has been considered to be.
The massive kitchens at Hampton Court were built to supply the entire household of Henry VIII. They were the first professional kitchens organised on such a scale. Brears provides a practical guide to their running, dispelling many of the misconceptions about the cooking and eating of meals in Tudor England. Including authentic recipes from the period, adapted for modern kitchens, such as Chicken Farced and Smothered Rabbit and White Leach (a form of cool jelly), All the King's Cooks is fully illustrated with colour photographs recreating the life of the kitchens. With the author's own detailed drawings, no other book gets so close to the sights, sounds and smells of the Tudor kitchen.
A new, transformative history – in Tudor times there were Black people living and working in Britain, and they were free ‘This is history on the cutting edge of archival research, but accessibly written and alive with human details and warmth.’ David Olusoga, author of Black and British: A Forgotten History A black porter publicly whips a white Englishman in the hall of a Gloucestershire manor house. A Moroccan woman is baptised in a London church. Henry VIII dispatches a Mauritanian diver to salvage lost treasures from the Mary Rose. From long-forgotten records emerge the remarkable stories of Africans who lived free in Tudor England… They were present at some of the defining moments of the age. They were christened, married and buried by the Church. They were paid wages like any other Tudors. The untold stories of the Black Tudors, dazzlingly brought to life by Kaufmann, will transform how we see this most intriguing period of history. *** Shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize 2018 A Book of the Year for the Evening Standard and the Observer ‘That rare thing: a book about the 16th century that said something new.’ Evening Standard, Books of the Year ‘Splendid… a cracking contribution to the field.’ Dan Jones, Sunday Times ‘Consistently fascinating, historically invaluable… the narrative is pacy... Anyone reading it will never look at Tudor England in the same light again.’ Daily Mail
The book takes as its starting point the argument that the only way to understand fully a building such as Hampton Court is to set it in the political and social context of its time and to explore the lives and motivations of its builders. The picture that emerges is on the one hand intensely personal - one of architects and builders fulfilling the whims of kings and princes. On the other hand, it is bureaucratic: Hampton Court is revealed first as the royal household, then as a palace claimed by grace-and-favour residents and finally, by visitors and tourists as their own. The history of the building is taken right up to the beginning of the twenty-first century. The twentieth-century story of Hampton Court is one of conservation and of changing attitudes towards opening up the complex to the public - it covers everything from the agonising discussions as to whether to build public lavatories to an account of the private enterprise that caused an octogenarian to make a personal fortune out of opening the maze to the public. It includes also the story of the terrible fire of 1986 and its aftermath. Social history and architectural history sit side by side in this intriguing account. New and important attributions are made to the architects Hugh May, Nicholas Hawksmoor, William Talman, Colen Campbell and Edward Blore amongst others. Moreover, the palace and its setting are placed in their European context and their long-term architectural significance is gauged. The book is lavishly illustrated with original paintings, prints and drawings, while a specially commissioned suite of plans and reconstructions reveals the evolving form of the buildings.