Eltham Palace

So here we are at the old palace of Elpham which I think was established way back in the 1300s and gradually became a royal palace during the medieval age and was used by Henry VIII. Indeed obviously he met the famous Erasmus here when he was a child and later the likes of Elizabeth was lodged here in the royal nursery and I've come here around Easter 2012 and in fact Anne was here about Easter 1534 to see Elizabeth and in fact these ruins you can see in front of me here are part of the west wing which was the privy apartments and these foundations were the of the Queen's lodgings and as we begin to move around, it no longer exists and in fact there's no sign of it but just where this bush is and where that tree is was roughly the position of the old chapel and it was here in Easter 1534 that there was a famous incident where Mary and Anne met in the chapel. Mary apparently curtsied and Anne didn't see it and it was later reported to her and she extended a message of goodwill to Mary and Mary rather rudely replied in public that she had curtsied only to the altar and to the good lord and not to Anne. Another one of Anne's attempts to build bridges with Mary was thus thwarted. So Eltham palace was a leisure palace, not only was it used as a royal nursery it was also used to house foreign visitors and was used as Greenwich took precedence in the sort of 1530s was used as Henry's sort of just a simple hunting lodge really although it was big enough to house the whole court of nearly a thousand people. The ruins in front of me as we walk along, probably still part of the Queen's Privy lodgings, there was a gallery that looked out right across and as you can probably see, we'll see if I can zoom in, Eltham occupied a very high piece of ground and we can see the London skyline in the distance and in fact I rely being informed by reading an account of Eltham that certainly from probably the upper levels of the royal apartments you could actually see the spire of the old gothic St Paul's as well as the lofty vaulted roof of Westminster Abbey. It's a really fine beautiful view overlooking sweeping parkland, it's a bit different now, all I can see is suburban London and high-rise flats. If I turn around you can see obviously the main Great Hall, I'm afraid the sun's a little bit in our eyes so I'll try and move around. The Great Hall was built by Edward IV in I think 1479 and is the main medieval remains of the castle. It's absolutely beautiful inside, it's got the third largest hammer beam roof in England after Hampton Court and Westminster Hall, unfortunately no photographs are allowed but you can see these big angular bay windows here, this is at the high end where Henry and Anne or any other king and queen would have sat at the top end of the hall and on each side if you're inside on each side there's typical sort of Tudor stone vaulted doorways that would have led out to the king's apartments to the south and to the queen's apartments to the north. So if I move over here, let's just have a look at the main doorway, I have read that the coat of arms of Edward IV, which I think was a York, not coat of arms but the Yorkist rose and falcon apparently is over the doorway, I don't know whether it is because I have never been here before. I can't really see it myself, I can see, what's this, let's have a look. Oh yes there's the, certainly the Yorkist rose, I'm not seeing a falcon but this would have been the main entrance into the Great Hall and if you turn around it was built so that it directly faced the main entrance across Richard II's I think 14th century stone bridge and I'll just take you over here to have a look at that because it's quite beautiful. So this would have, I've been walking across the main courtyard here in front of me, right where the the modern art deco house, this would have all been courtier lodgings and if we just look along here you can see that, well there would have been a big gatehouse here just in front of me and you can see that we have the beautiful original medieval stone bridge and if I just take you around here you'll be able to see the original moat which I believe was one of the widest moats of any of the castles and here we have that wonderful four stone arches that make up the bridge leading into the castle. So that's Eltham Palace, that's probably all I can tell you about the outside so I hope you've enjoyed this little tour and I'll leave you with one last look of the Great Hall as you would have seen it but you rode across the bridge with Henry in his entourage in one of his visits to one of his great royal houses.