An Archaeological Reconstruction of Thomas Wolsey's Hampton Court Palace
Resource type
Doctoral thesis
Creator (person)
Foyle, Jonathan
Date published
2002
Abstract
Hampton Court Palace began life as a medieval manorial camera of the Knights Hospitaller. Thomas Wolsey leased the manor for 99 years in late 1514. At this time, Wolsey was the newly elected Archbishop of York and a cardinal-in-waiting, but not yet lord chancellor of England. This thesis argues that Hampton Court was almost totally rebuilt for Wolsey to a single and consistent design from January 1515; that it was completed in around 1521, and it was then intermittently refurbished until 1528. Henry VIII took the palace over informally in 1526, then permanently in late 1528. Henry’s own remodelling of Hampton Court between 1529 and his death in 1547 was substantial, and from that time until 1760 it served solely as a royal palace.
Hampton Court is therefore a complex, multi-period building, constructed at the crucial point of English history which has been seen as the beginning of Renaissance influence on the visual arts in England. As this, by far the best surviving, Tudor palace was regarded as superlative in its own day, it has the potential to provide a uniquely rich material resource for understanding elite secular architecture of the early sixteenth century in England. However, this potential depends upon thorough methodological analyses. This thesis is borne of a conviction that many fundamental questions about the formal development of the palace remain, because they have previously been answered with assumptions due to the artificial divorce between the disciplines of archaeology and architectural history. As a result, no account of Wolsey’s Hampton Court has yet been produced which convincingly synthesizes a cultural and personal context with comprehensive archaeological evidence.
The inherited view of Tudor Hampton Court Palace is that it represents an ‘essentially traditional architectural structure. Renaissance ideas of planning and proportion cannot be said to have determined the design of Wolsey’s house’ (Gunn in Gunn & Lindley 1990: 34). To this ‘far from innovative’ house (ibid.), its famous Italian sculpture was incongruously ‘applied or added onto the surface’ (ibid.). It is usually accepted that the ‘High Renaissance of English Architecture’ (Howard 1987: 184) arrived only in the middle of the sixteenth century, in Somerset House (1547-52) and the final phase of Longleat (1572-) (Howard 1985 vol. I p.3; Summerson 1991: 43-4, 58-61). However, Maurice Howard has emphasised that ‘the proper exercise of the stylistic is essentially dependent on the theoretical, for without the latter, stylistic idiom is simply grafted onto something to which it does not belong’ (Howard 1985, vol. I: 112). Therefore, in order to make valid judgments on Hampton Court’s success as a work of architecture, or as mere building, it is essential to trace evidence for the presence or absence of such theory. The stumbling block is that the palace first requires a faithful reconstruction.
In this thesis, the combination of archaeological survey methodologies, interpreted via the contextual and biographical methods of architectural history, reveals a large amount of new evidence for the conception, extent, detail and development of the palace that Wolsey established from 1515- c.21. Many of the salient discoveries are borne of the application of metrology, through which the original methods of geometric and proportional design may be recovered. By tracing and comparing its plan to a new contextual study of English design practices from 1380-1530, it will be seen that Hampton Court was set out according to a geometric skeleton of a distinctive type and complexity, and to a scale unsurpassed in a single work of English domestic architecture at that date.
The records of previous archaeology and recent research excavations toward this thesis are shown to confirm Wolsey’s geometric masterplan. Furthermore, new typological survey work is able to separate the palace’s Tudor fabric into distinct phasing through distinguishing characteristics in the work of the masons who successively built for Wolsey and King Henry VIII. Evidence will be presented toward an attribution of Wolsey’s planner as William Bolton, with detailed design by the King’s own Master Mason, William Vertue. This thesis suggests that the palace’s design was in great part a response to the authority of published Italian sources on appropriate accommodation for a cardinal, and on the issues of planning, aesthetics and proportion, which are here demonstrated to have been available to Wolsey’s pro-Roman humanist circle. It is further argued that they brought about a fundamental change in the practice of English elite architectural design in this period.
The archaeological corroboration of Vertue’s master plan for Wolsey’s palace provides a sound basis for reading the architectural influences from which this layout was derived. It is here argued that the first-floor hall, and the state chambers beyond it, represent a very early importation of the principle of the piano mobile in England. The level, sequence and volumes of these rooms bear a strong relationship to the contemporary Italian cardinals’ palaces in Rome, the elements of which were summarized in the Curial Humanist Paolo Cortesi’s prescriptive treatise De Cardinalatu (1510). This thesis offers new evidence for Wolsey having built a first-floor great hall; it recovers the form of his cellar and Great Chamber, reveals a completely unsuspected Italianate arcaded gallery in the Inner Court, and revises the original form of his chapel with the implication of an accompanying claustral yard. Beyond Wolsey’s own work, it demonstrates that Henry VIII’s builders recycled much of Wolsey’s building materials in ultimately shaping the remainder of the Tudor palace we see today. From this, there is enough material to propose a radically new reconstruction of the palace at the end of Wolsey’s occupation.
Therefore, contrary to the present interpretative emphasis of the palace as a remodelling of an inadequate and incomplete bishop/minister’s palace to superior standards of regal magnificence, Hampton Court will be shown to have been a product of Wolsey’s experience in humanist, collegiate, royal and episcopal circles, which represents an Anglicised interpretation of Paolo Cortesi’s paradigm for a cardinal’s palace. As such, this thesis offers both a clearer depiction of how Hampton Court was first seen and inhabited, and also a major new resource for reassessing the earliest influence of printed books in promoting a ‘Renaissance’ architecture in England.
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