The Queen's Houses Page 3

  Richard III

  The quaint ceremony of ‘degradation’ – when a Garter knight was removed from the roll for one of a variety of offences – is described in manuscripts by Elias Ashmole, the Windsor Herald to Charles II, in relation to Edward, Duke of Buckingham, condemned for treason and beheaded by Henry VIII in 1521. The Garter King of Arms first demanded that he return the badges of knighthood. His banner was taken down from St George’s Chapel, then:

  ‘he read aloud the instrument of degradation; after which one of the heralds, who was placed ready on a ladder set to the back of the convict knight’s stall, at the words “expelled and put from among the arms”, took his crest, and violently cast it down into the choir, after that his banner and sword; and … all the officers of arms spurned [literally kicked] the achievements out of the choir into the body of the church … so out of the west door, thence to the bridge, and over the ditch.’

  And there they lay amongst the rubbish in the open sewer the ditch had become.

  George V wearing the regalia of the Order of the Garter

  Today, the insignia of the Garter is once more the gift of the sovereign and every year in June when The Queen is in residence for Ascot Week the members of the order meet at Windsor Castle. After a lunch in the state apartments they process on foot to St George’s Chapel wearing the blue robes, insignia and plumed hats of the order to take up their position in their designated stalls for the Garter Service. No formal ceremony of degradation has been held in recent years – the last being The Duke of Ormonde in 1716 – though several members, including Kaiser Wilhelm and Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria during the First World War, had their appointments annulled, and Emperor Hirohito, during the Second World War, had his banner removed from St George’s Chapel. The latter was reinstated on the Emperor’s state visit to Britain in 1971.

  To help those knights who had served with him with their own feudal retainers at Crécy but had been captured and impoverished by the need to sell their estates to raise ransom money, Edward III also established in 1352 the Alms Knights – known until 1833 as the ‘Poor Knights’ after which date they were given the formal title of the Military Knights of Windsor. They received an annual stipend and accommodation in the Lower Ward in return for daily prayer in the chapel for the monarch and the Garter knights and for their souls after death. They still exist and today wear the ceremonial scarlet uniform of army officers of the early nineteenth century. They must parade at numerous official functions as well as the Garter ceremonies and state visits. It is estimated they are on parade some 50 times a year.

  The Military Knights of Windsor on parade

  Royal prisoners and rebuilding

  Richard II was at Windsor shortly after his accession in 1377 and celebrated the Christmas of 1378 there. After his marriage to Anne of Bohemia at Westminster in 1382 it was recorded that The King ‘carried the Queen to Windsor, where he kept an open and noble house’. During his 20-year reign Richard spent a great deal of money in maintaining an opulent court to reinforce the status of the monarchy. With Windsor Castle furnished with a series of suitably lavish apartments he turned his attention to the Palace of Westminster where he commissioned the rebuilding of Westminster Hall with its extraordinary 240-foot-long hammer-beam roof, the largest medieval timber roof in Northern Europe, which still survives over 600 years later.

  Henry IV

  On his accession in 1399, Henry IV ordered Richard’s child queen, Isabella, daughter of King Charles VI of France (whom Richard had married aged six in 1396), to move out of The Queen’s apartments. Henry celebrated Christmas that year at Windsor when an attempt was made to murder him by Richard’s supporters but the plan was betrayed and Henry escaped to London unharmed.

  The Devil’s Tower at Windsor Castle

  By 1404 the castle was in dire need of repairs and mentioned in a petition to The King that year by the House of Commons as amongst the castles that were ‘ruinous’. Seemingly the money assigned for its repair had, instead, been granted by Henry IV to his supporters. Henry preferred the Palace of Eltham to the dilapidated Windsor during the latter part of his reign and the castle was used mainly as a prison. On his accession Henry had quickly captured Edmund, Earl of March, then aged seven and the heir presumptive to Richard II, and his younger brother, and kept them throughout their childhood at Berkhamsted and Windsor Castles. Edmund was released after Henry IV’s death in 1413, the same year that the Welsh warlord, Owain Glyndower was imprisoned there.

  James I of Scotland

  Perhaps the most famous prisoner was James I of Scotland, who was captured on his way to France in 1405 at the age of 11. After two years in the Tower of London he was brought to Windsor where he remained for the next 11 years. He was allowed £500 a year (approx. £350,000 today) and to keep a retinue of Scottish nobles with him. His captivity continued after the accession of Henry V in 1413 and two years later he was joined by The Dukes of Bourbon and Orleans and other French noblemen who had been captured at the Battle of Agincourt. While at Windsor he was kept in an octagonal tower known then as the Maiden’s Tower – now called Devil’s Tower – in the south-west corner of the Upper Ward. There he famously fell in love with Joan Beaufort, the niece of Richard II, whom he observed from his tower walking in the garden below, which he described affectingly in his poem the ‘King’s Quair’. This is one of the few descriptions of formal gardens at Windsor in the Middle Ages, a garden ‘made fast by the tower’s wall’ beset with shaded alleys, green arbours at each corner and planted with hawthorn hedges and sweet juniper. The poem continues:

  And therewith cast I down my eye again,

  Where as I saw walking under the tower,

  Full secretly, new comyn her to plain,

  The fairest and the freshest younge flower

  That e’er I saw, methought, before that hour;

  For which sudden abate, anon did start

  The blood of all my body to my heart.

  Joan was to become, in due course, Queen of Scotland. James I of Scotland’s captivity was not onerous, he was made a knight at Windsor in 1421 and attended Queen Catherine’s coronation at Westminster as a guest the same year.

  The Great West Window of St George’s Chapel, Windsor

  The most celebrated visitor to Windsor during the reign of Henry V was the very grand and very glamorous Sigismund of Luxemburg, who had become King of Hungary in 1387 and was made Holy Roman Emperor in 1433. Intending to help heal the longstanding rift between England and France, Sigismund landed at Dover in May 1416 with a fleet of 400 ships, which in turn disgorged an entourage of 1500 dignitaries. Henry rode out from London to greet Sigismund with his own entourage of some 5000 nobles and knights. The sight of such a huge number of mounted nobles must have been extraordinary. Sigismund bore a gift of either the heart of St George or an image of St George in pure gold (the records are unclear) and was accompanied to Windsor by the Garter knights ‘each booted and spurred and in his habit’, where he was inducted into the Order of the Garter in St George’s Chapel.

  The induction was followed by an enormous and elaborate feast, which must have strained the resources of the castle catering staff. The Black Book of the Order of the Garter records: ‘The finery of the guests, the order of the servants, the variety of courses, the invention of the dishes, with the other things delightful to the sight and taste, whoever should endeavour to describe would never do it justice.’ As one writer aptly describes it: ‘during the personal and ritual reign of monarchs, statecraft is very much the art of ostentation and largesse’. By the end of Sigismund’s four-month stay of ceremonial entertainment Henry had persuaded him to support his claim to the French throne.

  It was at Windsor in 1421 that Henry’s wife, Queen Catherine, gave birth to the son who would soon become Henry VI. The infant Henry remained behind at Windsor when Catherine travelled to France the next summer to be with her husband. Their time together would be only too brief. Henry V had achieved what English Kings had f
ought for since the days of Edward III, and had become the recognized heir to the Kingdom of France, but he died of dysentery at the Château de Vincennes on 31 August 1422 at the age of 35.

  After an unhappy reign, deposition, bouts of madness, and the beginning of the Wars of the Roses, Henry VI was probably murdered by his successor, Edward IV, in the Tower of London in 1471. Fourteen years after his death Henry’s body was moved from Chertsey Abbey to St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle, where he had been born, for reburial. He became popularly regarded as a martyr and miracles began to be ascribed to him, culminating in the compilation of a book of miracles attributable to his intercession at St George’s Chapel. Henry had been a considerable patron of architecture, but he devoted most of his energies to his magnificent foundations of the nearby ‘The Kynge’s College of Our Ladye of Eton besyde Windesore’, usually known as Eton College, and ‘The Kynge’s College of Our Ladye and Saint Nicholas’ in Cambridge, now known as King’s College.

  Edward IV, who became King in 1461, used the castle regularly for magnificent pageants, particularly to mark the feast of St George. During his reign, in 1475, work began on the new St George’s Chapel, to the west of the old one, together with the horseshoe cloister and lodgings for the college community. Several existing buildings, including three towers, were demolished to make way for it. Directed by the master mason, Henry Janyns, who had served his apprenticeship at Eton College chapel, and supervised by the Bishop of Salisbury, this was to be the most ambitious church-building project in Western Europe in the latter half of the fifteenth century. Much of the funding needed was plundered from the estates of a variety of aristocratic houses whose titular heads were minors and therefore wards of the Crown.

  By the time of Edward IV’s death in 1483 a great portion of the chapel had been completed, the celebrated choir stalls were in place and the choir nearly finished. The building was finished under the direction of the indefatigable Sir Reginald Bray who also provided, and bequeathed, some of the money necessary. Edward IV directed that his body should be buried in his new chapel. His coat of mail, adorned with gold, pearls and rubies, hung above his tomb until it was stolen by Cromwellian soldiers during the Commonwealth (1649–59).

  Edward IV

  Little new building work took place at Windsor for the next 200 years. Henry VII, who reigned from 1485, completed the roof of his father-in-law Edward IV’s chapel, and created a small chapel to the east from the remains of Henry III and Edward III’s chapel to serve in due course as a shrine for the now venerated Henry VI. In 1506 the Great West Window was finished, one of the largest in England. Henry VII also added a three-storey tower with decorative oriel windows.

  Henry VII preferred his palace at Sheen (later renamed Richmond Palace) to Windsor, though he continued the tradition of keeping the feast of St George there in as opulent a way as before. Ambassadors were entertained there and treaties signed. A record exists of the time of King Philip and Queen Joanna of Castile’s visit to the castle in 1506. They had been shipwrecked off the Dorset coast and kept as hostages by Henry – though with due deference to their status, Henry’s own chambers, lavishly furnished, in the new tower were accorded to Philip – until he had signed a defence pact and a trade agreement heavily biased in favour of English interests. This record describes in detail the furnishing of the castle and the entertainments provided for Henry VII’s ‘guests’, which included hunting in the park, dancing, masques, tennis playing (The King of Castile won his set on a wooden tennis court in the Round Tower ditch, which had a gallery for spectators and was later rebuilt in brick), and ‘baiting a horse with a bear’ in the courtyard. The opportunity was taken to invest The King of Castile with the Order of the Garter with its accompanying pomp and ceremony.

  Henry VIII

  Henry VIII at Windsor

  Henry VII died in 1509 ‘the richest prince in Christendom’ and the following year his son Henry VIII paid his first visit to Windsor Castle as monarch. Seventeen when he inherited the throne, Henry VIII was much admired for his zest, energy and accomplishments. He is described during that first visit as exercising himself daily in ‘shooting, singing, dancing, wrestling, casting of the bar, playing at recorders, flute, virginals, in setting of songs, and making of ballads’, and his tennis playing was ‘the prettiest thing in the world’. Henry was much attached to the castle and the recreation afforded by the woods of the Great Park. He was described by an ambassador as drawing ‘the bow with greater strength than any other man in England, and jousts marvellously’, which, allowing for courtly obsequiousness, indicates that he was an accomplished sportsman.

  Windsor Great Park

  At the very beginning of his reign, to aggrandize the approach to the castle, Henry VIII rebuilt the gateway into the Lower Ward, creating the imposing structure that now bears his name. According to tradition it was from this gate that Henry VIII rode out in 1532 to meet Anne Boleyn before leading her into the old presence chamber of the castle to endow her there with the title of Marquess of Pembroke – a title in her own right – to give her the required status before she became his Queen.

  The Garter ceremonies were now extravagant, ostentatious and very costly, with great calvacades of riders accompanying the knight or knights elect to Windsor. Elias Ashmole wrote, ‘this proceeding on horseback was generally set forth with exceeding pomp … the great number … on gallant coursers … the multitude of their own attendants well mounted, the richness of whose apparel, jewels, gold chains, rich embroideries, and plumes of feathers of their lords colours, even dazzled the eyes of the beholders’. By contrast, in the summer of 1517, when the plague was at its height in London, Henry VIII escaped to Windsor with only his physician and three of his favourite courtiers in attendance.

  In May 1519 the crowd of courtiers, heralds, servants, messengers, trainbearers, swordbearers, prelates, bishops and the knights of the Garter riding two by two who accompanied The King to a St George’s Day ceremony at Windsor was so enormous that the retinues had to be restricted by rank. Sixty horsemen were allowed for each duke, 50 for each marquess and so on down to 16 for an ordinary knight. The subsequent feasts on the eve of St George’s Day and on the day itself consisted of 28 and 36 different dishes.

  At Windsor in 1522, two years after the glamour and extravagance of the Field of the Cloth of Gold where the Kings of England and France met near Calais, Henry entertained The Queen’s nephew, Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain, whose parents had been ‘guests’ of Henry VII at Windsor in 1506. The object was to cement their alliance and a series of masques were performed laden with symbolic meaning, and the usual competitive outdoor pursuits were indulged in, followed by gargantuan feasts.

  In 1524, in the days when he was still persona grata in Rome and a few years after he had been granted the title Fidei Defensor, or Defender of the Faith, Pope Clement sent Henry at Windsor a three-foot high golden rose tree in a golden pot, the uppermost rose a ‘fair sapphire’. In the 1530s Henry built a terrace of wood, in fact a vast ‘deck’, over the cliff edge below the royal apartments, where a target was set up ‘for the Kyng to shott at with his hand-gonne’. He also created a huge arbour painted in the Tudor livery colours to use as a banqueting house.

  In 1536 the uprising known as the ‘Pilgrimage of Grace’ broke out in Yorkshire, prompted by a combination of economic, political and religious grievances. Henry VIII hunkered down at Windsor and directed operations himself against the insurgency, writing detailed instructions to his commanders. By now he had become grossly fat and ropes and pulleys were installed in his various palaces to help him up and down stairs. Shortly before his death in 1547, a study of his late armour kept at the Tower of London showed he had a 52-inch waist, making him somewhere between 20 and 25 stone in weight.

  The fate of Henry VIII’s tomb

  Henry VIII’s third wife, Jane Seymour, whom he adored, died at Hampton Court after giving birth to his longed-for son, in due course to reign as Edward VI. Sh
e was buried in a vault in the middle of the choir aisle of St George’s Chapel at Windsor. Henry directed in his will that he should lie by her side in an imposing vault. For such a powerful monarch whose intemperate policies changed the face of England forever, his final resting place is anything but imposing.

  The memorial stone in St George’s Chapel, marking the tomb of Henry VIII and Charles I

  Henry had intended to create a tomb of great splendour based on the work already done by the disgraced Thomas Wolsey, who was a Canon of Windsor in 1511 before becoming a cardinal five years later. The lady chapel of Henry VIII’s father had been granted to Wolsey and in the early 1520s he commissioned a Florentine artist to design his tomb for the chapel. It was to be a black marble sarcophagus on which his effigy was to lie, raised two feet above a black and white marble base. At each corner was to be a pillar of copper on which an angel held a candlestick. The design called for groups of angels and children to adorn the sides of the tomb holding up the Cardinal’s arms. Wolsey died in disgrace at Leicester in 1530 and was buried in the abbey there, but by then Henry had earlier sequestered Wolsey’s tomb and set about aggrandizing it for himself.