Henry VIII Read Online Free PDF

upper floors of the keep. Successive kings had built further towers and a ring of outer fortifications, and in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries every monarch from Henry III to Richard II had helped to create a lavishly appointed palace.
    Henry III built a great hall and chambers on the east side of the inner ward between the White Tower and the Wakefield and Lanthorn Towers. The great hall had a steeply pitched timber roof, tall windows, and stone pillars (it was crumbling into ruin by the late sixteenth century). Edward I had constructed the original royal watergate beneath St. Thomas’s Tower; it has been called Traitors’ Gate since the sixteenth century. By then, the court was using the gate built by Edward III by the Cradle Tower. The Wardrobe Tower was used from mediaeval times to store royal robes and hangings.
    The Tower was a favourite residence of Edward IV, who divided Henry III’s great chamber into an audience chamber, privy chamber, and bedchamber. Henry VII added a gallery to the Cradle Tower and converted the Lanthorn Tower into a royal lodging with a bedchamber and a privy closet; Henry VIII would have a Renaissance-style altar in here, “wrought round about the edges with antique.” 35 These rooms were later hung with tapestries depicting Antiochus, King of Syria, which are said to have been the work of Katherine of Aragon, Katherine Parr, and Mary I. Henry VII also built a tower to house a library next to the King’s Tower, in which was the bedchamber used by Henry VIII and from which projected a gallery traversing the garden below. 36
    For centuries the Tower had housed a royal menagerie (in the sixteenth century lions were actually kept in the Lion Tower), the royal armouries, the royal mint, and the royal treasure. Until 1661, the crown jewels were housed at Westminster Abbey, not at the Tower.
    Although it had not yet acquired a sinister reputation, the Tower held unhappy associations for Henry. His mother had died in childbirth there, and her brothers, “the Princes in the Tower,” were widely reputed to have been murdered in the fortress by Richard III. Henry would rarely visit the Tower, although he carried out works there; it was he who added the decorative caps on the White Tower and who first had ordnance placed along the Tower wharf. As a royal residence, the Tower was old-fashioned, cold, damp, and malodorous: its moat was now a squalid refuse dump. Nevertheless, Henry had had the royal lodgings refurbished for his coronation, and they were gaily hung with cloths of red, green, and white—the last two being the Tudor colours.
    On 22 June, the King, in a ceremony instituted by Henry IV at his coronation in 1399, dubbed twenty-six new Knights of the Bath, 37 many of whom were his closest friends and attended upon him in his privy chamber. All had been purified in the requisite ritual baths, served the King at dinner, and kept vigil throughout the night in the Norman Chapel of St. John in the White Tower, the earliest-surviving royal chapel. Prior to the Reformation, it boasted brilliant wall paintings, stained-glass windows, and a colourful rood screen (all had disappeared by 1550).
    The next day, 23 June, saw London rejoicing as the King and Queen went in a glittering procession through Cheapside, Temple Bar, and the Strand to Westminster Palace. London was still a walled, mediaeval city, although its suburbs were rapidly sprawling out beyond the walls: along the Strand, for example, were to be found the great houses of the nobility, with gardens leading down to the river. The city’s skyline was dominated by the spires of the Gothic cathedral of St. Paul and eighty other churches. London was prosperous, lively, and very congested, due to its narrow streets and crammed-in, jettied buildings; most citizens, therefore, used the Thames as the main thoroughfare.
    In honour of the coronation, buildings along the processional rouute were hung with