A Journey Through Tudor England (21 page)

‘
Great, goodly, and so princely that we have not seen the like
.’

P
erhaps most famous now as the site of Britain’s biggest music festival, Glastonbury has an ancient and deeply spiritual history. Legend has it that Joseph of Arimathea travelled to Glastonbury bearing the Holy Grail, and the hawthorn bush you can see here is said to be an offshoot of his staff where he planted it in the ground. It is reputed to be the fabled Isle of Avalon where King Arthur was buried: in 1191, a coffin of a man and a woman with golden hair was unearthed under Glastonbury Abbey on the site where Arthur and Guinevere were said to be entombed. Glastonbury is also well known for its tor — a natural, 518-foot-high conical hill visible for miles — that many hold to be an uncommonly mystical place, but in Tudor times, it became notorious for one particularly gruesome event.

In the early sixteenth century, Glastonbury Abbey was a vast and famous Benedictine monastery; the church at the Abbey, at
580 feet long, was the longest monastic church in the country. The central towers rose to 216 feet, two or three times the height of the remaining ruins of the Lady Chapel. It was important enough for Henry VII and his retinue to visit in 1497.

Like all the abbeys, Glastonbury would suffer as a result of the dissolution of the monasteries [see F
OUNTAINS
A
BBEY
]. Unlike most, however, not only the Abbey, but its abbot, too, would perish in the process.

When Henry VIII’s commissioners visited Glastonbury in September 1539, they reported that the Abbey was so ‘great, goodly, and so princely that we have not seen the like’, ‘a house meet for the King’s Majesty’. It held enormous wealth for the King’s coffers, but Henry was not going to get it without a fight: the abbot, Richard Whiting, refused to surrender the monastery.

The King’s commissioners set about building the case against him. They cross-examined the abbot, allegedly finding evidence of his ‘cankered and traitorous heart and mind’. They ransacked his study and discovered a book that opposed the King’s divorce from Katherine of Aragon. Finally, they came across a gold chalice, and other plate and ornaments that had been hidden from the commissioners ‘in walls, vaults, and other secret places’. They considered this embezzlement and ‘manifest robbery’. In all, Whiting’s crimes amounted to high treason. Though a ‘very weak man and sickly’, the abbot was confined to the Tower of London, and on 14 November he was tried and condemned.

If these deeds seem insufficient to qualify as treason, it is probably because they were: they were the pretext that Thomas Cromwell needed to get rid of Whiting because he was an obstacle to the King’s plans. A note in Cromwell’s files makes this clear. It reads, ‘Item the Abbot of Glastonbury to be tried at Glastonbury and also executed there with his accomplices.’ Not only does it
order Whiting’s arraignment, it also assumes his guilt and decides his punishment before he had even been tried.

On 15 November 1539, after being dragged behind a horse through Glastonbury on a hurdle, Whiting was executed on the tor with two of his monks. The place was well chosen to magnify his misery. Standing on the blustery top of the tor, near the fourteenth-century St Michael’s Church tower, you can imagine that Whiting’s last sight would have been the turrets of his doomed abbey. He was hanged, quartered and beheaded: the quarters were displayed at Wells, Bath, Ilchester and Bridgwater, and his head was mounted on the gates at Glastonbury Abbey. An observer said that he and his monks ‘took their deaths patiently’.

Whiting’s real crime was to decline Henry VIII’s invitation to donate his monastery to the Crown, and he wasn’t the only one — Hugh Cooke, Abbot of Reading and Thomas Beche, Abbot of Colchester did so too. Beche expressly voiced his opposition to the dissolution and denied the King’s position as Supreme Head of the Church of England, allegedly saying ‘that those who made the King so were heretics’.

It is astonishing that from more than 800 religious houses, only three abbots stood up to defend the centuries-old monastic life from royal usurpation. Sadly, most surrendered their abbeys without a whimper. After the deaths of the Carthusian monks [see C
HARTERHOUSE
], of Thomas More and Bishop John Fisher, and of the Pilgrimage of Grace rebels of 1536, including many monks [see P
ONTEFRACT
C
ASTLE
], few dared to join Beche in calling the King and his advisers ‘wretched tyrants and bloodsuckers’.

As a result, by 1540, not a single monastery remained in all of England. Richard Whiting on Glastonbury Tor was one of the valiant few who refused to go gently, and he paid the price.

‘The magnificent house of my most worthy and, right Worshipful neighbour … Sir Edward Phillippes … so stately adorned with the statues of the nine Worthies.’

Traveller Thomas Coryate, 1611

N
amed after the nearby pointed hill (‘
mons acutus
’ in Latin), for many, Montacute is one of the most enchanting and endearing of all the Elizabethan mansions. It is a spectacularly beautiful house. Wrought out of the local tawny-coloured Ham Hill stone, it is grand and symmetrical, but neither too ostentatious nor too severe. Today it is an outpost of the National Portrait Gallery, displaying a wonderful selection of must-see Tudor portraits: the greatest collection you can find in one place outside the National Portrait Gallery itself.

The man responsible for building Montacute was Sir Edward Phelips, a Somerset lawyer and MP, who eventually became Speaker of the House of Commons and Master of the Rolls. He worked with a master mason called William Arnold, who also designed and built Wadham College, Oxford. Between them, they constructed a house that encapsulated the design values of the Elizabethans.

As the building records do not survive, we don’t know the exact dates of construction. The house is mentioned in William
Camden’s
Britannia
of 1607, and there are three clues at Montacute itself to date it further: ‘1601’ is carved above the entrance on the west front, ‘1599’ features in the plasterwork overmantle in the dining room and a panel of heraldic stained glass in the Great Hall is dated ‘1599’. The date of completion is probably 1601, so the house must have been started by 1596 at the latest, and possibly as early as 1590.

Built on the usual ‘E’ pattern (for Elizabeth I), Montacute deliberately eschews the ‘quaint’ higgledy-piggledy style of houses like Little Moreton Hall for a symmetrical squareness. At the same time, with the addition of the curved gables, balustrade and statues of the Nine Worthies (historical, biblical and legendary heroes) on the upper floor of the east front, the result is a softened version of the more angular lines of Hardwick Hall.

Like Hardwick Hall, Montacute also has desirable, and expensive, acres of glass to light up the interior and provide gorgeous views over the surrounding countryside. Seen from a distance, the contrast between dark, glittering glass and honey-coloured stone is visually arresting, although it is this very combination of too much glass and easily eroded ham limestone that makes the structure of Montacute weak today.

The house was designed to be approached from the east front through a gatehouse that once stood between the two domed pavilions at the corners of the forecourt. These pavilions are decorative follies, intended for no use except to look pretty. Now, you’ll enter from the west and, when you do, you’ll find yourself inside a house that has barely changed since it was built.

The first room you encounter is the Great Hall, which retains its original oak panelling, chimneypiece and unusual stone screen with classical columns. Spot the arms of Elizabeth I in the centre of the heraldic stained-glass windows, which are also original. At the far end of the hall is a rather surprising inclusion: a plaster panel
depicting a ‘stang ride’. This shows the story of a man who secretly helps himself to beer, only to be caught and hit on the head with a shoe by his wife. A neighbour spots them and the hen-pecked husband is humiliatingly paraded around the village ‘riding the stang’ (a wooden bar or pole), because he has allowed gender norms to be turned upside down. It says much about social relations under the Tudors: the man’s crime is not taking the beer, it is that his wife has authority over him. Hierarchy was everything, and that included men’s rule over women. Men who fell short in this respect would be shamed.

Four portraits on the ground floor are must-sees: one of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester; one, in the dining room, of Mary, Queen of Scots (probably derived from a miniature of her by Nicholas Hilliard in 1578); one of Jane Seymour (after Hans Holbein) in the library ante-room; and the last, of Montacute’s builder, Sir Edward Phelips himself, in the Great Hall.

On the floor above, the Great Chamber — now the library — is another impressive room with its original panelling, plaster frieze and forty-two shields of heraldic stained glass. The most striking feature is the magnificent chimneypiece with Corinthian columns made of Portland stone. Only the ceiling is Victorian.

Perhaps the most remarkable room in the house is the Long Gallery, on the second floor, which stretches the entire length of the house. It is the longest of its kind to survive — 176 feet long — with semicircular oriel windows at each end that act as viewing bays. Here is where you’ll find the great collection of portraits.

In the first room, you’ll find notables from the reign of Henry VIII, including Sir Thomas Wyatt, the poet, painted around 1540, by an unknown artist. There is a picture of Kateryn Parr, from around 1545, looking severe and sporting the high-necked fashion of the period, but wearing a man’s bonnet. Thomas More’s portrait, after Holbein, shows him as Lord Chancellor, and here you can also see Sir William Petre, Secretary of State from 1544 to 1557. We also
have Sir William Butts, one of Henry VIII’s over-worked physicians, and his jowly-cheeked patient, seen here in later life. Finally, we see Henry’s son in a regal profile picture of Edward VI from the studio of William Scrots.

Another room displays pictures of Elizabeth I and her court. Here is Elizabeth in a glorious painting known as the Armada Portrait, attributed to George Gower. Elizabeth, in her moment of triumph, drips in pearls (which was the Tudor symbol of virginity) and precious stones, and her rich attire is covered with gold stars. The cropped scenes behind her show fireships being sent to attack the Armada and the sinking of the fleet off the Irish coast. Nearby, note particularly portraits of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester from around 1575, the time of his last bid for Elizabeth’s hand [see K
ENILWORTH
C
ASTLE
]; Sir Christopher Hatton [see K
IRBY
H
ALL
]; Sir Nicholas Throckmorton and Elizabeth Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury or ‘Bess of Hardwick’ [see H
ARDWICK
H
ALL
]. There is also a portrait of Sir Walter Ralegh replete with symbolism. Ralegh is decorated with pearls — symbolising his allegiance and devotion to the Virgin Queen — and wears a cloak that depicts the rays of the moon. There is a small crescent moon in one corner and the inscription in Latin reads ‘Love and virtue’. Ralegh is suggesting that Elizabeth is Cynthia, the moon goddess, endowed with supernatural powers.

Finally, the Long Gallery itself has two portraits you must see: William Cecil, Lord Burghley who holds the white rod of the Lord High Treasurer and displays a cameo of Elizabeth on his hat [see B
URGHLEY
H
OUSE
]; and Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex (the last man to whom Elizabeth lost her heart) by Marcus Gheeraerts.

Montacute, perhaps unusually for a great house of its time, may not have a richly storied past replete with love, betrayal, fortune and tragedy, but it is no less worth visiting for that. Come for the collection of portraits, its tasteful Elizabethan style and its beautiful surroundings in the Somerset hills.