HENRY VIII's Lost Palace - WHITEHALL

Today Whitehall, between Westminster and the City of London, is the seat of His Majesty's Government. Here, on either side of a broad street running from Parliament Square to the south to Trafalgar Square in the north, you'll find the buildings of the great governmental departments. And at the centre of them is of course Downing Street, where at number 10 resides the head of the British Government, to give him his official title, the First Lord of the Treasury, otherwise known as the Prime Minister. Whitehall is the seat of British Government and Power today for historical reasons, because it was the seat of Government and Power in the early modern period. The great, lost Palace of Whitehall, which occupied much of this space and gave its name to the area, was the Sovereign's primary residence in England's capital between the 1530s and the end of the 17th century. It was from the Palace of Whitehall, the centre of court life, that the Sovereign ruled and governed. With a few small exceptions, which I'll look at later in the video, most of this great palace has been lost. But in this video, I want to take you back to the 16th and 17th centuries and explore the lost palace as best we can, using contemporary visual sources. So what happened to Whitehall Palace? Well, on the evening of the 4th of January 1698, a laundry maid within the palace attempted to dry some wet washing by lighting a charcoal brazier. This most ordinary of daily tasks led to a fire that reduced most of the palace to a smoking ruin. As well as the buildings, the blaze also consumed many great works of art from the royal collection. King William III, who in 1698 was reigning alone after his wife married the second's death four years earlier, ordered that one part of the palace, the banqueting house, be saved. But in the effort to save that, much of the inhabitable palace was sacrificed. It wasn't a great loss to William. An asthmatic and in poor health, he found Whitehall Palace old, damp and uncongenial, and preferred to live either at Hampton Court, his miniature version of Versailles, or in the privacy of Kensington Palace on the edge of the Royal Parks to the west of Whitehall, which he and Mary had built. After the fire, the formal centre of court life in England and the Sovereign's official residence was transferred to St James's Palace, which as we will see was but a hunting lodge constructed by Henry VIII in St James's Park. Whitehall Palace in 1698 was hardly grand by European standards. Sprawling over 23 acres and built piecemeal, it was chaotic and inconvenient for court's life, and by the late 17th century afforded the king very little privacy. Whitehall became the principal royal palace in London quite by accident really. It began life as York Place, and from the 13th century was the official townhouse of the Archbishops of York. In the 1510s and 20s, York Place was the residence of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, who held it by right of his office as Archbishop of York. Wolsey, an avid builder at all of the residences he lived in, began to reconstruct the medieval York Place as soon as he was translated to the see of York in 1514, creating, as at Hampton Court, a grand new hall, chapel and long gallery. He constructed new staterooms and a fine private apartments for himself facing the river. This reconstruction gives an indication of what York Place looked like in 1529. While Wolsey was creating this lavish new residence for himself, the king, Henry VIII, struggled to accommodate himself and his court in his capital. The king of England's primary London residence, the Palace of Westminster, just a stone's throw from Whitehall, was unfit for habitation in this period. In 1512, three years into Henry's reign, the privy apartments of the king had been destroyed by fire. Henry had few choices of residence in London open to him. There was the Tower of London, but it was more fortress than home. So in 1515, Cardinal Wolsey gave to Henry another of his London houses, the Palace of Bridewell, and until the 1530s, this was Henry's principal residence in London. Although the king expanded Bridewell, the palace was set on a very confined plot on the west bank of the River Fleet and was insufficient in size to accommodate Henry VIII and his growing court. When the king was at Bridewell, Parliament and the Privy Council had to convene next door on the other side of the Fleet at Blackfriars. Therefore, the king spent much of his time at his out-of-town residences in Greenwich and Richmond. In October 1529, Cardinal Wolsey fell from the king's favour and in early 1530, Henry VIII used the opportunity of the cardinal's exile in the north of England to seize York Place for his own use. Nobody, of course, would say no to Henry in this matter and in February of 1530, he recovered, a fancy way for confiscates, York Place. The deed of recovery states that the palace would be intended for the use of the king and his heirs and assigns forever and so York Place began life as the primary London residence of the sovereign. Henry triumphantly tours York Place with Anne Boleyn and even before marrying her, he moves her in. By 1532, York Place had been renamed the Palace of Whitehall, the name reflecting its whitewashed riverfront and perhaps also to whitewash the fact that Henry had, in effect, stolen it. In the 1530s and 40s, Henry gradually expanded the palace Wolsey had begun. He kept the Great Hall, the chapel and the long gallery that Wolsey had built and these continued in use throughout the next two centuries. Henry expanded the footprint of the palace of the south and to the west with a large privy garden. Henry couldn't expand the palace that far west as running north-south next to the palace was the public highway, the main road that linked Westminster to Charing Cross and the city. But to get over the restriction in sight, Henry expanded the palace across the road and developed here an area that was devoted to sport, a Tudor sports complex. An avid sportsman, he constructed a large octagonal cockpit for cockfighting, a bowling alley, a series of real tennis courts and a tilt yard for jousting with the timber gallery overlooking it. You can see the layout of this part of the palace in Agar's map of London from 1560. A large residential block was also created on this west side of the road to accommodate the expanding court. It was called the Cockpit Lodgings and had four angled turrets topped with lead onion domes. To the west of his sports complex, Henry purchased an area of marshland from Eton College which he then drained and created a deer park, St James's Park. In the corner of this park was a small leper hospital dedicated to St James and between 1531 and 1536 Henry VIII replaced this with a little hunting lodge, a palace in miniature that he could use as a place to retreat from court to life. This is now St James's Palace. Although the road through the palace complex was not removed, access along it was strictly controlled by means of gates to the north and to the south. The southern gate was known as the King Street Gate as it opened into King Street which was a narrow road long since gone that led to the precincts of Westminster Abbey. The impressive northern gate was known as the Holbein Gate in the 18th century as it was believed at that time that Hans Holbein, the painter, had designed it. There's no evidence of that. This gate was also a bridge between the main palace to the east of the road and the sports complex to the west of the road. This painting from the 1660s by Dunkert shows the view of the palace from St James's Park with many of the Tudor buildings of the sports complex still standing. You can see in the centre timber steps that led down from the Holbein Gate to the tilt yard. The building to the right with the octagonal roof is the cockpit. Both gates are very well recorded in engravings because they survived into the 18th century. The King Street Gate appears to have been Renaissance in style, built or rebuilt in the 1540s and it was adorned with busts and figures. The Holbein Gate appears to have been constructed with a pattern of flint flush work and the front of the gate was seemingly decorated with terracotta roundels with busts of Roman emperors much like those at Hampton Court. Both gates survived the 1698 fire but the King Street Gate was demolished in 1723 and the Holbein Gate in 1759 because they impeded traffic along Whitehall. In this engraving of 1753 you can see the south side of the Holbein Gate. What you have on the right is the banqueting house, we'll talk about that in a moment, and the great block on the left hand side is the cockpit lodgings. These lodgings survived as part of the treasury building until the 1830s. Henry VIII's privy lodgings on the eastern side of the palace were linked to the sports complex by a long vaulted passageway called the privy gallery that led to the room over the Holbein Gate. The King could therefore walk directly from his private apartments to the sports complex and to the Deer Park without crossing the road or getting wet. This privy gallery at the centre of the King's private apartments was primarily constructed using recycled material. It was first constructed in 1529 by Cardinal Wolsey at his palace at Eashore. It was demolished while the disgraced Wolsey was in a residence at Eashore and was brought to Whitehall by water and re-erected here, which must have been humiliating for Wolsey. Although Henry VIII reused many of the buildings Wolsey had constructed in the main palace complex, in the 1530s the King constructed sumptuous new private apartments or lodgings along this privy gallery. They were arranged in much the same way as we see at Hampton Court, with a series of staterooms decreasing in size that ensured tightly controlled access to the King's person. We know very little of how these spaces were furnished or decorated except for the King's inner sanctum, the privy chamber. In 1537 Hans Holbein was commissioned to paint a large mural in oils on the privy chamber wall surrounding a window or door. It portrayed Henry and his then Queen Jane Seymour with figures of Henry's parents, Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, above them. This great visual expression of Tudor dynastic power actually survived the 1698 fire but was not considered worth preserving and was lost if the buildings were demolished. Thankfully Charles II had the foresight to make a copy of it. It was in this privy chamber under the shadow of this great mural that Henry VIII died in January of 1547. Henry liked to ensure that he was always at the centre of power and off the privy gallery to the north was a chamber where the privy council could meet. This projected out and overlooked the palace's main courtyard, the inner or great court where comings and goings could be easily observed. Beyond the great court there was an outer court called the pebble court and on the west side of this was a large gateway from the street, the court gate, which was the primary entrance into the palace. The Tudor court gate which adjoined the banqueting house to the south survived into the 17th century to be remodelled in the reign of Charles II and it is depicted by Inigo Jones in one of his drawings for the banqueting house and in its remodelled form is shown in this engraving of the 1694 funeral procession of Mary II. The Tudor queen's apartments were seemingly located between the king's apartments and the river spreading out into the long white painted building that Wolsey had constructed on the riverfront. Henry VIII also appears to have constructed a long gallery with an open walk along the east side of the privy garden connected to his lodgings and in later years this was remodelled and became known as the stone gallery. Although there was the court gate from the road, a large proportion of people visiting Whitehall would have approached it by river. The river Thames was the superhighway of London in the 16th and 17th century. Henry VIII was always moving between his various palaces at Greenwich, Richmond and Hampton Court by barge. There were two water gates that those arriving by river could use. One to the south was connected to the king and queen's privy apartments and was the privy steps or privy bridge, while the second further north was known as Whitehall steps and was used by most visitors and courtiers. In successive reigns the palace continued to be developed and in the reign of Elizabeth I some land was reclaimed from the Thames to the east of the royal apartments so that they were not quite so close to the river. In 1581 when a marriage has been negotiated between Elizabeth and Francis Duke of Anjou, the queen ordered the construction of a banqueting house for his entertainment. This was constructed of timber and painted canvas on the west side of the great court. It remained there until 1607 when it made way for a second temporary banqueting house constructed by James I. In 1619 James commissioned a permanent stone banqueting house to replace the temporary one and this was designed by Inigo Jones. Completed in 1622 at a cost of £15,618 it is the only major survival from the palace. A tour de force of Palladian classicism, the space rises two storeys and was intended as a space both for banquets and for court entertainments called masks. It wasn't finished by the time James I died and his son Charles I completed the work, installing ceiling paintings by Peter Paul Rubens that showed his father being welcomed and wreathed in laurels by the gods. Charles I would of course walk out of one of the first floor windows of the banqueting house to his execution in 1649. After the fire of 1698 and the loss of the Tudor Chapel Royal, the banqueting house would serve as the Chapel Royal until 1893. This was where the Royal Maundy took place every holy week. James I was very proud of this modern new addition to the palace and had a view of its facade included in his state portrait of 1620 even before it was complete. You can see it, the view, through a window behind him. I'm intrigued by the space that James stands in in this painting. I feel he's probably shown within the privy council chamber which would have had a view of the banqueting house from its window. Notice the windows are glazed with the inscription God and My Rights, the English royal motto in French. When Charles I came to the throne he had great plans to demolish the ramshackle palace and start again keeping only the banqueting house. An Inigo James was commissioned and he produced a grand scheme inspired again by the Italian Renaissance classicism of Palladio with grand facades to the river and St James's Park. Inside would have been state departments and lodgings arranged around courts but still with the road running through the centre. Of course Charles I didn't have the funds to realise what would have been a wonderful scheme when the plan was aborted with the outbreak of the English Civil War. Thankfully several artists in the 17th century produced views of Whitehall Palace from various angles that provide wonderful evidence of its arrangement. In 1647 a bohemian artist named Wenceslas Holler captured this prospect of the palace from the riverfront. On the left hand side we see the onion domes, the cockpit lodgings and in the foreground before them were the king's privy apartments which looked inwards towards the privy garden and away from the river. On the riverfront were the privy stairs and Holler produces a separate engraving that shows these stairs a long covered timber pontoon stretching from the flats where waiting barges could be boarded and the sovereign could enter the barge without getting wet. Between the privy stairs and the looming presence of the banqueting house were the queen's apartment set behind a block that affronts the river. We see the roof and copula of Wolsey's Great Hall next to the banqueting house though it was in reality in front of it and between it and the river was the Chapel Royal. The buildings you see on the riverfront were the royal wardrobe and kitchens and next to them is Whitehall stairs. To the right of the stairs are lodgings for court officials and offices which straggled along for some distance into what is now Scotsland Yard which in the Middle Ages was the London residence of the King of Scots. Of course after 1603 the King of Scots was also the King of England. In 1695, three years before the fire, Leonard Niff produced a bird's eye view of the palace. During the reigns of Charles II and James II a large part of the Tudor privy apartments had been rebuilt. The Tudor privy gallery had been remodelled and partially replaced with brick built lodgings constructed to accommodate the court and Charles II's mistresses and illegitimate children. Towards the end of his reign Charles II moved the wardrobe and the kitchens further north and he intended to replace these Tudor ranges with new buildings. In 1683 his brother James II started that work and a substantial new block called the New Building designed by Christopher Wren was constructed on the riverfront. These contained new apartments for James and for his consort Mary of Modena. The stone gallery edging the privy garden and some of the earlier Tudor lodgings to the south seemed to have been demolished at this time and it is likely had James II continued on the throne that the whole of the riverfront of the palace would have been rebuilt and remodelled. There were further improvements too. The privy stairs were abandoned and a new set of stairs known as Queen Mary's Steps, after Mary of Modena, were constructed that led down from the New Building to an extraordinary 280 foot long terrace, Queen Mary's Terrace, that projected 70 feet into the Thames and served as a new landing place. With the exception of the Banqueting House only meagre remains of the palace survive. One of the most impressive survivals is the large vaulted cellar that was once below Cardinal Wolsey's Great Hall. 70 foot long by 30 foot wide it continued in use after the fire as the cellar for the houses that were constructed on the cleared palace site. In the early 20th century this whole area was cleared once again to construct a new Ministry of Defence building. Work began on this building in 1938 but was interrupted by the Second World War and was resumed in 1949 and the decision was made in 1949 to preserve the cellar, a task that required great effort. The Tudor cellar was encased in steel and concrete and through a careful operation it was moved on railway tracks 43 feet to one side where the hole it was formerly in was deepened and it was then moved back and dropped to occupy a lower position. 10 bays long and with the vault supported on stone pillars it is an evocative space. During the excavations for the Ministry of Defence many of the footings of the lost palace were found and among the things uncovered were Queen Mary of Modena's river steps and part of her great terrace and you can still see these exposed where they've been high and dry since the construction of the Victoria Embankment in the 1860s and are now many feet from the riverfront. Remnants of Henry VIII's palace on the west hand side of Whitehall, the sports complex, do remain too. The most substantial part of the palace to remain here is called the House at the Back, so called as it was attached to the back of Henry VIII's cockpit and looked out over St James's Park. Rebuilt in the restoration period this building served as a residence for several members of the royal family and of the court and was in 1670 the residence of the Duke of Albemarle. In the middle of the 18th century Sir Robert Walpole, the first Prime Minister, was given the House at the Back and 10 Downing Street, built in the 1680s, as an official residence for the first Lord of the Treasury. They were amalgamated to form a single house. Although much altered in the 18th century, all the major rooms of number 10 Downing Street, including the Cabinet Room, are within this surviving part of Whitehall Palace. Now right next to 10 Downing Street is the 18th century Treasury building built by William Kent between 1733 and 1736 on the footprint of the demolished cockpit. And next to this fine building is what is now the Cabinet Office, which was built in the 19th century as an extension to the Treasury by Charles Barry. It was built to replace the Tudor cockpit lodgings. But in the yard between these two buildings is a stretch of Tudor wall with several Tudor windows and some Tudor chimneys are immured in this later structure, one built of brick and flint flushwork, giving a surprising sense of the grandeur of the lost palace. And below the Georgian Treasury building is a Tudor passageway that has been retained that once linked the tennis courts to the south with the tilt yard to the north. And of course Henry VIII's tilt yard has also been redeveloped. In the 1670s Charles II transformed the yard into barracks and stabling for the Horse Guards. The present Horse Guards building occupies the site of the Tudor tilt yard and Horse Guards Parade, where Trooping of the Colour takes place each June, is the area of St James's Park just outside Henry VIII's sports complex. Many thanks for watching. When I was researching this video I inevitably found myself down another rabbit hole and the rabbit hole this time was the history of 10 Downing Street, so expect a video soon all about that. If you enjoy this channel you're bound to enjoy my magazine The Antiquary. Published every month it is a labour of love for me and in it I explore some of the more obscure aspects of our shared history, all beautifully illustrated in full colour. It chips across the world, is offered in print and digital format and readers give it five stars on If you love your history like me, particularly the history of objects, buildings, people and places, why not consider subscribing? Subscribing helps support my work and the channel too. 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