Royal Domain

An economic and social crisis gripped the whole of western Europe during the fourteenth century. The combination of rising population and declining agricultural yields created the conditions for the Great Famine of 1315-17 followed by the Black Death in 1348, estimated to have killed as much as one half of the English population. These disasters created severe labour shortages, shifting the balance of economic power from landowners to peasantry, freeing them from their feudal ties. England’s old feudal order disintegrated in the savage civil Wars of the Roses during the fifteenth century. The victorious Tudor dynasty which emerged from the conflict embarked on the path of absolutism, a trend that was occurring across Europe. Absolutist monarchies sought to consolidate power within a centralised state, with the ruling monarch the ultimate embodiment of that power. The imperative of absolutism was to preserve the power and status of the aristocracy in a post-medieval society that was becoming increasingly bourgeois, led by the merchant class in the towns and the landed gentry in the countryside. Henry VIII was the English king who most closely resembled an absolutist monarch, and by leading the Reformation of the English church he reigning supreme over both his temporal and spiritual realms. Absolutist monarchies projected their hegemonic power through epic programmes of monumental building. The Renaissance movement originating in Italy provided intellectual and cultural support for their endeavours by revisiting the cultural legacy of the classical world. In particular, Renaissance architecture offered a new classically-inspired language in which to express the meanings of hegemonic buildings. While Henry VIII presented himself as a Renaissance prince, Tudor architecture was a curious amalgam of classical and medieval motifs in the persistent spirit of English exceptionalism. In his lifetime Henry accumulated over fifty palaces and mansions in this distinctive indigenous stye, most notably Hampton Court, his principal country retreat, and Whitehall Palace, his new seat of government. Henry’s daughter Elizabeth prudently redefined the relationship between absolutist monarchy and hegemonic building. She shifted the responsibility for building great houses from the monarchy to the new Tudor aristocracy; her courtiers paid for the building and maintenance of these houses, which the queen would graciously occupy as she made her annual progress around the country. The magnates competed for royal favour by building the most lavish houses, favouring the Strand waterfront as the most desirable location for their London townhouses. Their hegemonic building reached a climax under Elizabeth’s successor James I. While magnates favoured the flamboyant Jacobean style which had evolved from the more sober Elizabethan, the king himself sought to embrace the Italian Renaissance by commissioning Inigo Jones, the country’s first true classical architect, to design two new palace buildings: the Queen’s House at Greenwich and the Banqueting House on Whitehall.