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| Starkey on Henry |
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| Posted on: Friday, April 17, 2009 |
Category: Cultures |
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When, in the course of our conversation, Dr David Starkey uses the phrase 'prodigious accumulation' he is not referring to Henry VIII's acquisition of wives, nor indeed to the quantity and variety of publicity Starkey himself has succeeded in garnering in this 500th anniversary year of Henry's accession to the throne of England. He is talking about a rather neglected aspect of Henry's reign: the number of houses and palaces he owned.
'He was the most 'overhoused' monarch,' says Dr Starkey. 'He had 55 palaces by the end, having started with 12 or 13. It was a prodigious accumulation.'
The academic turned celebrity has his digits in various Henry-flavoured pies this month [ie April] - the exhibition he has curated at the British Library, a series on Channel Four and a new edition of his Henry biography. But he finds time to chat to me on the subject of Henry's various retreats and pieds a terre - and how visiting them can shed intriguing light on his reign.
Starkey has described Henry VIII as 'the axis round which English history turns', and though his time may have been half a millennium ago it seems extraordinarily recent in some ways. Tudor houses are the earliest surviving form of domestic architecture, so we know where and how Henry and his subjects lived. 'And you must remember that the Tudors were the first people we can actually recognise,' says Starkey. 'It was the beginning of modern portraiture. We know what Henry looked like.'
After suggesting that we bone up on Tudor history by looking at the portraiture in the National Portrait Gallery, Starkey improvises a brilliant itinerary for tracing Henry's life through his residences. It is, he admits, a 'very south-east story' - Henry ventured to other parts of England only twice in his life. 'You should begin with Greenwich, and if you can, arrive by water,' he says.
The son of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York was born at Greenwich, some five miles east of central London, on June 28, 1491. The River Thames was 'the great highway of Tudor London' - kings and bigwigs were forever sailing up and down it in gaily coloured barges - hence the recommended mode of arrival.
The palace in which the king was born was demolished in the 17th century (the Old Royal Naval College occupies the site) but the surrounding parkland and the tree line are pretty much as they were - 'at least until the Olympics bugger them up.' Although Henry retained a soft spot for the royal palace at Greenwich, which was known as Placentia or 'Pleasure', his idyllic childhood was spent a little way inland at Eltham.
Here, too, the original palace has gone but 'the Great Hall is absolutely intact. You can stand on the dais - if you're allowed to [you are] - and you're standing on the spot where Henry was introduced by Thomas More to Erasmus. It was like a David Frost show of 1499.'
Desiderius Erasmus, the great Dutch humanist, recorded the occasion: 'When we came to the hall, all the retinue was assembled... In the midst stood Henry, aged nine, already with a certain royal demeanour; I mean a dignity of mind combined with a remarkable courtesy.'
His childhood officially ended on April 24, 1509 when - two months short of his 18th birthday - he was proclaimed King Henry VIII. On the same day he took up residence in the Tower of London, which was both palace and prison as well as being the main arsenal of the kingdom.
The slogan promoting the current exhibition there - 'Henry VIII: Dressed to Kill' - says it all, says Dr Starkey. Henry had a lifelong interest in fortifications, armour and ordnance and his was a 'killing culture'. The Tudor weapons on display were 'instruments of death but also things of extraordinary beauty.'
Next we head further upriver to Hampton Court where this year they are using the permanent collections to tell the story of the young Henry VIII. 'This man is not the 'fat freak' [of popular imagination] but enjoys Obama-like adulation,' says Starkey. 'He is young, handsome and educated, the 'great white hope'.'
Though Hampton Court is most closely associated with Henry, another Tudor Palace, Knole in Kent, gives more of a sense of the period and for that reason is 'an absolute must,' he says. This rather gloomy pile pleased Henry so much that he instructed its owner, Thomas Cranmer, to give it to him.
Henry was 'ultra fashionable' and his palaces were the most stylish in northern Europe - if you like silver and gilt furniture and relentless ornamentation. Little remains in any of his houses of the original furnishings, bar tapestries, but Knole is the closest you get to the oppressiveness of the style - one Starkey admits he doesn't care for.
Elsewhere in Kent is the most beautiful of the great houses that Henry acquired and rebuilt, Leeds Castle, that fairytale vision built on islands in a lake. 'As far as I can say he spends three days there.,' says Dr Starkey. 'I call it a glorified b and b on the way to Dover.'
For a real sense of how the Tudors lived, he recommends a detour to Portsmouth. 'Henry is fascinated by shipbuilding so an absolute must is the Mary Rose. There are literally tens of thousands of artefacts from shoes to nit combs. The whole kit of a Tudor surgeon, including a dreadful thing for the administration of mercury up a chap's urethra. ... This is our English Herculaneum - a whole life frozen in sudden death.'
That sense of the past brought tantalisingly close to the present is what makes Ightham Mote, a moated manor house also in Kent, Dr Starkey's favourite Tudor property. For part of Henry's reign it was owned by one of his courtiers, Sir Richard Clement, and much of the Tudor fabric and atmosphere survives. 'The interior there will take you nearer to a senior gentlemen's house in the Tudor period that anywhere else you will find,' reckons Starkey.
And so he extemporises, thinking of more and more places - Hever, for example (inevitably, also in Kent) with its 'magical' exterior - until he arrives at a thought that tickles him. 'You can actually go to the place where he was conceived,' he chuckles.
Henry was conceived at the home of the second Duke of Suffolk at Ewelme, near Wallingford, in Oxfordshire, when his parents spent a month there in the autumn of 1490. The manor house is long gone, but the old church is still there, and some almshouses, and a profound air of old, unchanging England: 'A place,' says Dr Starkey, 'where you really do feel, 'What's 500 years?' '
Published in The Daily Telegraph on April 18 2009
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