The Queen's Houses Read online

  Henry I

  It was William the Conqueror’s fourth son, Henry I, described by biographer Judith Green as ‘in many respects highly unpleasant’, who first established Windsor as a royal residence in the twelfth century. He enlarged the castle, built a chapel and in 1110, on the feast of Whitsuntide (Pentecost – the seventh Sunday after Easter), he invited the ‘nobles of the realm’ to attend him there.

  This was the first court to be held at the new palace and also the occasion for the betrothal by proxy of his five-year-old daughter Matilda to Henry V, King of Germany and Emperor of Rome, then in his forties. Henry I held court at Windsor again in 1114, and in 1121 he was also married there to Adeliza of Louvain as his second wife, in an attempt to provide for his succession following the death by drowning of his only legitimate son William the previous year. The couple were childless and after Henry’s death in 1135, reportedly from a surfeit of lampreys (a type of eel), his succession was disputed, plunging England into nearly 20 years of what is known to history as the Anarchy.

  Henry II

  Henry’s grandson Henry II inherited the kingdom of England in 1154 at the age of 21 and within 20 years had expanded what became known as the Angevin Empire to include England, a large part of Wales, half of Ireland and half of France (he married Eleanor of Aquitaine as her third husband). Henry II was an inveterate builder of castles and royal residences throughout his empire, spending prodigious sums (it was the largest single item of royal expenditure) and he rebuilt and enlarged his grandfather’s work at Windsor to convert it into a palace. The old timber walls surrounding the Upper Ward were gradually replaced with stone, as was the Round Tower on top of the motte. Two sets of royal apartments were created, along with a Great Hall where his large retinue could be entertained in suitably lavish style, as befitted a powerful king.

  The rise of Windsor

  Henry’s son Richard the Lionheart spent most of his ten-year reign from 1189 out of England, either in his possessions in France, on crusade or in prison. His expenditure on castle building was considerable – but mostly spent on the vast Chateau Gaillard in Normandy. His younger brother John succeeded him and it was during his reign that the Angevin Empire created by his father Henry II collapsed. In order to raise the large sums needed to reclaim his lost territories John imposed a wide variety of taxes, penalties and fines.

  The Magna Carta document of 1297

  In a long-running dispute with William de Braose, once a court favourite and one of his most powerful barons, John captured William’s wife Matilda and their eldest son and, in 1210, imprisoned them in the vaults of Windsor Castle where they were starved to death. John’s final defeat in his war with the French precipitated a revolt among the barons of England, weary of John’s failures in battle and his despotic rule. Having taken several large cities, as well as London, the successes of the rebel barons compelled John to sue for peace. The momentous meeting on 15 June 1215 at Runnymede, close by Windsor Castle, resulted in what came to be known as Magna Carta, an attempt by the barons to limit the power of The King. Nevertheless, war ensued and the future King Louis VIII of France invaded England and reached London in 1216, where he was proclaimed King in St Paul’s Cathedral by the rebel barons. During the ensuing months Louis’ supporters took many of the great strongholds between London and the coast. The rebels besieged Windsor for two months, causing great damage to the curtain walls of the Lower Ward, but the castle withstood.

  A map of Berkshire in 1610, by renowned seventeenth-century cartographer John Speed

  In the midst of this war, in 1216, John died and his son Prince Henry, at the age of nine, inherited an uncertain crown. However, many of the rebel barons switched sides and in September 1217 Louis relinquished his claim to be King of England. In due course Henry III was to transform Windsor into one of the greatest palaces of the realm.

  After Henry attained full power in 1227 he constantly shuttled between ten different palaces, castles, abbeys or priories, favouring Westminster (the seat of government and the usual venue for the fledgling parliament) and then Windsor above all others.

  Henry III

  At Windsor Henry could escape from constant scrutiny, the hosts of petitioners and the daily pressure of business, yet remain close to the corridors of power. Consequently he pioneered the use of Windsor as a retreat for himself, his household and the immediate court, much as the royal family does today. It is a tradition, then, that dates back almost 800 years.

  Windsor was also the base for Henry III’s Queen, Eleanor of Provence, and their children, who were born between 1239 and 1253. After repairing the considerable damage caused by the siege engines and building the stone curtain wall and the three great towers that still today form the west end of the castle, Henry then set about refashioning the royal apartments to make them ever more comfortable. He left the Great Hall at a modest size since it was not designed to host great public events, but the rest of Henry’s new interiors were lavishly decorated with copious use of stained glass, carved stonework, glazed tiles and painted walls. As a result of his work at Windsor a contemporary chronicler writing at the Abbey of Pershore in the Flores Historarium described it as ‘that most flourishing castle, of which at that time there was not another more splendid within the bounds of Europe’.

  Edward III

  With considerable unrest, shifting allegiances, several uprisings and even deposition during the latter part of his reign, it was vital for Henry III to keep the most important bishops and barons on side. His hospitality at Windsor was lavish, impressing those he entertained with a display of regal wealth and power. The household rolls that have survived from that time are a mine of information. For example, the average daily fare for a week at Windsor in the late summer of 1260 was £13 (approx. £11,000 today), at a time when to pass muster as a knight required an annual income of £15 or more. Henry III was equally generous to the poor. When staying at Windsor it was his practice to feed 150 paupers a day.

  Over 34 years, to the end of his reign in 1272, Henry had spent over £21,000 (approx. £14 million today) on the castle, a vast sum of money in the thirteenth century, and more than he had spent on any other of his myriad building projects, apart from the rebuilding of Westminster Abbey. During the nineteenth-century rebuilding of the Upper Ward, architectural fragments from the thirteenth century were uncovered – alas, they are all that remains of Henry’s palatial building.

  The Knights of the Round Table

  Forty years after Henry III’s death, in November 1312, Henry’s great-grandson, the future Edward III, was born at Windsor Castle, son of Edward II and Isabella of France. Between the 1350s and 1370s, he was to become one of the castle’s greatest benefactors. Edward III ruled for 50 years and is best remembered for his exploits as a soldier, subjugating the Welsh and Scots and initiating the Hundred Years War against the French in pursuit of his claim to the throne of France.

  Fascinated by the legends of King Arthur, supposedly the very embodiment of chivalry, and with his knights of the Round Table, it was during a joust held at Windsor in 1344 that Edward announced the formation of a new chivalric order, the Order of the Round Table. Work commenced on a vast circular, arcaded structure within the Upper Ward of the castle to house the enormous table required to seat 300 knights and as a focus for feasting and chivalric ceremony. Royal clerk Adam Murimith described the occasion:

  ‘the king gave a great feast at which he announced the foundation of his Round Table, and took the Oaths of certain lords, barons and knights who wished to become members of the said Round Table … he afterwards commanded that a most noble building should be built, in which to hold the Round Table … and instructed masons, carpenters and Other workmen to carry out the work, providing both wood and stone, and not sparing either labour or expense’.

  Detailed building accounts survive, revealing that nearly 200 workmen were on site throughout the year 1344 and 52 oaks were taken from the woods of the Prior of Merton near Reading for The King
’s works. An archaeological dig by the television programme Time Team in 2006 discovered the foundations of the building and measured it at 60 metres (200 feet) in diameter.

  Contemporary chronicles mention that as soon as he heard of Edward III’s intentions. the French King, Philip VI, instituted his own Round Table to tempt the knights of Germany and Italy ‘in case they set out for the table of the King of England’. But before Edward’s impressive structure could be roofed it was pulled down. Times had changed. Instituted as an aid to recruiting knights for the wars in France, the purpose of the order became redundant once it was discovered, after the campaign of 1346 and the victory at Crécy, that service in France could be very profitable.

  The scourge of the Black Death

  In 1348 the Black Death reached England and over the next two years killed approximately one half of all those living in the country. In the close-packed city of London with its narrow, sewage-sodden streets it was far worse, with recent estimates by archaeologists suggesting that two-thirds of the city’s population of 60,000 were killed by the disease. Edward III did not escape the calamity – his daughter Joan and two of his sons, Thomas and William, died of the plague. At Windsor, its population possibly doubled by the influx of craftsmen and labourers working on the castle – which was the largest secular building project in England during the Middle Ages – it is estimated up to one-third of the population perished.

  Edward III’s work at Windsor Castle took over 20 years to complete and as each stage of the work reached completion craftsmen (‘diggers and hewers of stone’ and ‘glaziers’ are specifically mentioned) from all over England were ‘pressed’ for service to complete the next phase, particularly after the Black Death had dramatically reduced the available pool of trained and experienced craftsmen. Writs were issued to the sheriffs of the various counties and men were forcibly brought to Windsor to work for The King and, under penalty of £100 (approx. £70,000 today), were not to depart without a licence.

  The chronicler Raphael Holinshed relates in 1359 that The King ‘set workmen in hand to take down much old buildings belonging to the castle, and caused divers other fine and sumptuous works to be set up in and about the same castle, so that almost all the masons and carpenters that were of any account in the land were sent for and employed about the same works’. Another wrote, ‘almost all the masons and carpenters throughout the whole of England were brought to that building [Windsor Castle], so that hardly anyone could have any good mason or carpenter except in secret’. One group of recalcitrant masons on their way to Windsor from Yorkshire were made to wear distinctive red clothing ‘lest they should escape from the custody of the conductor’.

  The man who oversaw this extraordinary traffic in men and materials was the brilliant administrator William of Wykeham, appointed in October 1356 first as Justice of Labourers and finally as Surveyor of the Works at Windsor Castle and Park. His rise in The King’s service from humble beginnings was meteoric. In 1361 he was ordained, five years later he was Bishop of Winchester and the next year he was appointed Lord Chancellor of England. He went on to oversee the building of two famous foundations of his own, Winchester College and New College, Oxford. He died in his eighties, one of the richest men in England.

  Edward’s alterations and rebuilding in the Lower Ward were a direct result of the requirements of his newly formed Order of the Garter and the clergy and officers required to service it. He placed his new private apartments close to the state apartments in one large palace complex that included his magnificent St George’s Hall. This was obliterated in the rebuilding of the seventeenth century but is known to us from an engraving by Wenceslaus Hollar of the Garter Feast on St George’s Day in 1672. This shows an impressive space, with a vast and elaborately timbered roof above two rows of windows. The old chapel was entirely rebuilt but by 1390, scarcely 40 years later, it was described as ruinous and the celebrated poet Geoffrey Chaucer was appointed clerk of works to the chapel to oversee its repair.

  Windsor Castle from the South, by Wenceslaus Hollar, 1666

  The Knights of the Most Noble Order of the Garter

  The emblem of the Order of the Garter

  In 1348, the same year as the Black Death was decimating the population of England, Edward founded a new college dedicated to St George at Windsor, and with it a group of knights who were to be called the Knights of the Most Noble Order of the Garter. This order, with its 25 knights with the sovereign at their head, was initially divided into two ‘teams’ for the purposes of the jousts, Edward as captain of one, and The Prince of Wales – Edward, the Black Prince – the other. It is amongst the earliest of the chivalric orders founded at the major courts of Europe during the Middle Ages, and the longest-surviving, still inducting new knights as vacancies occur.

  In October 1361 the Black Prince celebrated his marriage at Windsor to his cousin Joan, Countess of Kent, the ‘Fair Maid of Kent’ whom the French chronicler Jean Froissart called ‘the most beautiful woman in all the realm of England, and the most loving’. She was the daughter of Edmund of Woodstock, son of King Edward I and Margaret of France. Four years later Edward III’s eldest daughter Isabella married at Windsor and in 1369 Edward’s much-mourned Queen, Philippa of Hainault, died aged 45 at the castle.

  Edward III died after a stroke, aged 65, in 1377, the year in which he admitted his grandsons, ten-year-old Richard, son of Edward, the Black Prince who had died the previous year, and Richard’s cousin Henry, son of John of Gaunt, to the order of the Garter.

  The Black Prince

  The castle that Edward III built at Windsor, at once a defensive stronghold and a magnificent palace, the centre of his court and government, cost him £50,000 (approx. £36 million today). Despite acquiring men and materials at reduced prices (until the depredations of the plague on the labour market resulted in higher wages) this sum was the largest ever expended on any building by any monarch throughout the whole of the Middle Ages. His castle provided the basic structure that survived for 400 years until the rebuilding undertaken in the eighteenth century refaced or encased much of his work.

  The College of St George and the Order of the Garter

  Henry III’s chapel of St Edward, built at Windsor over a hundred years before, was refitted by Edward III from 1350 as the collegiate chapel of his newly founded Order of the Garter and rededicated to St George (it was still also dedicated to Edward the Confessor and the Virgin Mary). The same year, he gave his new foundation the Cross of Gneth – claimed to be a piece of the true cross – which became the chapel’s most famous relic, and in the days when important relics meant a steady income from pilgrims, its most important asset. To Henry’s chapel he added a new entrance porch in 1353–4 with exquisite tracery vaulting, and rebuilt the adjoining cloister and chambers to accommodate the Dean, 12 canons and 13 priest-vicars of the new foundation.

  The insignia of the Order of the Garter

  The Garter knights, established in 1348, were limited to The King and his eldest son as Prince of Wales (the first incumbent was the Black Prince), each with 12 Companion Knights drawn from those tested in battle, as in a tournament. Membership was a reward for loyalty to the sovereign and for military merit. Each knight was assigned a stall in the choir of the chapel (the choir stalls in use today were completed by 1484) from which a banner showing their coat of arms was hung and underneath which a helm – or helmet – was crowned with a carved and painted representation of the knight’s crown or crest. A metal stall plate with the knight’s arms was originally fixed to his stall on his death as a memorial but by the time of Henry VIII they came to be fixed during the lifetime of the incumbent; 800 stall plates survive, crowding the back of each stall in a jumble of heraldic history, the earliest dating from around 1390.

  Archaeological fragments uncovered from the chapel of Edward III show it to have been built in the decorated English Gothic style and colourfully painted. The effect must have been dazzling, with colourful knights’ banners and light strea
ming through the stained-glass windows. Edward III’s state sword, as Founder of the Order, was brought from the old chapel to the new, and still hangs behind the altar.

  In 1358, on the feast of St George ten years after the order was established, Edward held a great tournament at Windsor at which King John II of France, who had been captured by the Black Prince at Poitiers two years earlier and was being held prisoner at Windsor, was a guest of honour. He took part in the tournament ‘on a horse richly caparisoned’ together with several noblemen of his court who were also prisoners but who, due to the courtesies of chivalry, were allowed to take part. John’s ransom agreement, signed in 1360, ceded one-third of western France to the English and required a payment of an enormous three million crowns – a king’s ransom. Earlier, in 1349, King David of Scotland and several French noblemen including the Constable of France, to whom the prize of the day was given for his prowess, had also taken part in the Garter tournament, despite being captives of the English Crown.

  Henry VII

  When the Lancastrian Henry VII came to the throne after defeating the Yorkist Richard III at Bosworth Field in 1485, he married Elizabeth of York, the eldest daughter of Edward IV and niece of Richard III, so uniting the two warring factions. Edward IV had already admitted his wife, sister and three daughters as Ladies of the Garter ten or so years before. In symbolic celebration of the end to the feud he created the Collar of the Order of the Garter, a chain with 26 enamelled roses in which the red rose of Lancaster is blended with the white rose of York to create the Tudor rose. The roses are formed within garters and linked with gold knots. From the chain hangs an ‘image of St George on horseback, who, having thrown the Dragon upon his back, encounters him with a tilting spear’. The Collar was worn over the mantle and secured with white ribbons, as it is to this day. In 1488 Henry VII created his mother Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby (who was 13 when she gave birth to Henry), a Lady of the Garter, the last woman to be admitted until Queen Alexandra, wife of King Edward VII, in 1901.