Queen Elizabeth I’s missing banqueting house

 

 

“So little has remained for us today of these ephemeral places.

We have a few – like the one at Hampton Court, the one at Melford Hall in Suffolk”.

Janet Wertman

 

 

This is a companion to my (Damien Mackey’s) article:

 

Henry VIII’s palaces missing

(5) Henry VIII’s palaces missing

 

Tudor Banqueting Houses - Then AND NOW (!) - Janet Wertman

Tudor Banqueting Houses – Then AND NOW (!)

Published by janetwertman on May 18, 2019

 

A banqueting house was a “separate pavilion-like building reached through the gardens from the main residence.” They became very popular during the Tudor era – even memorialized by Henry VIII in fanciful structures at Hampton Court and Nonsuch Palaces. But most of the time, they were temporary – tents atop platforms (lavish tents atop massive platforms to be sure!).

 

We have extensive details of royal tents from reports and paintings of the Field of the Cloth of Gold and its fabulous array of golden pavilions. We also have a wonderful description of the temporary banqueting house that Elizabeth built at Whitehall in 1581 ahead of negotiations for her potential marriage to the Duc of Alencon. The 332-foot-long structure, which took almost 400 people a little over three weeks to build, was held up with 30 masts; its canvas walls were painted to look like stone; its roof was painted with stars, clouds and sunbeams to look like the sky and the insides were decorated with “292 glass lights… and… all manner of strang[e] flowers… garnished with spangs of gould [and fruits like] pomegarnetts, orrnges, pompions, cowcumbers, grapes, carettes, peas and such like”. The structure lasted for 25 years – and then James VI built a more permanent building that we can (and do!) still visit today.

 

Courtiers, too, built these structures – especially in the “prodigy houses” that Wikipedia defines as “large and showy English country houses built by courtiers and other wealthy families, either ‘noble palaces of an awesome scale’ or ‘proud, ambitious heaps’ according to taste.” They also note that many of the grandest “were built with a view to housing Elizabeth I and her large retinue as they made their annual royal progress around her realm.”

 

So little has remained for us today of these ephemeral places. We have a few – like the one at Hampton Court, the one at Melford Hall in Suffolk. We might be about to have another.

 

There is a grassy hump in the Sudeley Castle grounds that went ignored for more than 400 years…and that is now believed to cover the remains of the banqueting house built to in 1592 to welcome Elizabeth and her retinue who came for a three-day celebration of the fourth anniversary of the victory over the Spanish Armada.

 

Sudeley has crowdfunded a dig that begins on Monday (May 21) and runs through June 2 …. DigVentures, who’s running the project, is planning on uploading photos and videos from the dig team, as well as interactive 3D models of the trenches. They will also be adding details of all the artifacts, layers and discoveries they make, and they’ve created communities on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. The best part: according to Maiya Pina-Dacier, their Head of Community, if the wifi signal is good enough they even hope to do a livestream video (everybody start crossing your fingers now). ….

 

“… start crossing your fingers now”.

 

And at: Search for the Banqueting Hall of Queen Elizabeth I part 1.pdf

we read:

 

Travel Tales

 

The Search for the Missing Banqueting Hall and Tudor Garden

of Queen Elizabeth I – Part 1

 

by Lew Toulmin

 

In the summer of 1592, Queen Elizabeth I and her very large retinue of courtiers arrived at Sudeley Castle, a magnificent structure in the Cotswolds, in Gloucestershire, southwest England. The official goal of this visit was to celebrate the fourth anniversary of England’s defeat of the Spanish Armada, and to honor Giles Brydges, 3rd Baron Chandos, owner of the Castle. But a possible secondary goal was to force Chandos, whose formerly Catholic family had previously been given the Castle by Catholic Queen “Bloody Mary,” to spend so much money on entertaining his guests, that he would have no resources left to resist Elizabeth’s rule!

 

Elizabeth may have also sought some revenge against the Chandos family and enjoyed forcing him to pay her homage, since Chandos’ grandfather (1st Baron Chandos) had been Elizabeth’s jailer for a short time at the Tower of London, when he was the Lord Lieutenant (the commander) of the Tower and she was incarcerated there.

 

The highlight of the lengthy royal visit to Sudeley Castle was an epic three-day party, probably one of the largest and most expensive in British history. The event involved jousting, bear and bull baiting, dancing, singing, a specially commissioned play, a pageant, mummers, and of course lots of feasting and drinking. The party was held in a temporary Banqueting Hall.

 

There is no historical description available of the Sudeley banqueting hall, but there is a description of a likely similar temporary banqueting structure built at Whitehall in London in 1581, as part of Elizabeth’s marriage negotiations with the Duc d’Alencon. (She was 48 and he was 26 at the time.) This structure took 375 laborers 3 weeks and 3 days to build (i.e., about 9000 person-days!). It was 332 feet long, held up by 30 masts, made of canvas painted to look like stone, and the ceiling was painted with stars, clouds and sunbeams to look like the sky. The inside was decorated with “292 glass lights…and all manner of strange flowers…garnished with spangs of gould…and fruits like pomegarnetts, orrnges, pompions, cowcumbers, grapes, carettes, peas and such like.” (sic!)

 

Temporary structures like this were meant to impress the common folk, convey the notion of the divine right of kings to rule, and allow the monarch to slowly progress around the kingdom. They played a major role in the famous 1520 event The Field of the Cloth of Gold at Calais -- the famous meeting between Henry VIII and Francis I, King of France. But because of their temporary nature, relatively little hard information on them is available via historical documents, paintings or archaeology.

 

Historians and experts at Sudeley wanted to find the site of the banqueting hall, but had no success until they noticed a large, lumpy, unused field in the area east of the Castle, in an area first thought to be an old Saxon manor house, but then suspected of being a buried Tudor Garden.

 

Beginning in the early 16th century, Tudor Gardens became important places to entertain, feast, and display new-found wealth and power.

(Previously gardens had been small private affairs.) During the reign of Elizabeth, this trend accelerated, and gardens filled with exotic plants and designs became even more elaborate, due to her love of display and clever use of design, fashion and architecture for political messaging. Nobles vied to build ever more elaborate gardens, to lure Elizabeth to visit. Such gardens could include private areas where political scheming could not be overheard, rosemary bushes shimmering with gold leaf, fountains, statues, and “bridges magically brimming with wine.”

 

Because of the transitory nature of gardens, and the destruction of almost all Tudor Gardens during the later open landscaping craze led by Capability Brown, there is only one other likely Tudor Garden in Britain.

 

Hence the possibility of identifying, mapping, and studying a previously unknown one is very exciting for historians and landscape architects. And with modern plant micro-identification and paleo-environmental techniques, it may be possible to identify some of the exact plants used in these exotic displays.

 

Sudeley Castle General Manager Wendy Walton stated that, “Finding an intact Tudor garden like this is an astonishingly rare occurrence. Bringing it back to the surface would be an amazing achievement, and would give us the chance to find out what it would have been like in the days when Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth I and Katherine Parr, Henry VIII’s last wife, walked its pathways.” ….

 

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