Henry VII is not known as a great builder, unlike his son and heir. Yet the king loved big, beautiful and richly furnished houses and was responsible for commissioning several significant residences.
Henry VII had very little experience of royal houses when he came to the throne. He had been brought up in the depths of Wales and had only ever seen Westminster Palace once as a teenager for a few hours. His experience of royal palaces had therefore actually been gained in France when he briefly joined the French court before his invasion of England. It can be argued that few ascended the throne with less experience of royal houses and royal building than Henry. However, the years of poverty and semi-imprisonment in exile gave him an insatiable appetite for luxury and fine houses: very early in his reign he was commissioning big sets of expensive tapestry for his residences.
But the first fifteen years of Henry’s reign was dominated by political instability and a lack of ready cash, both of which contributed to a lack of any significant royal building. Indeed, the Office of Works received very little from the Exchequer in those years; but all that changed in the mid-1490s. Through careful management, royal income had risen from £17,000 a year in 1489 to about £105,000 in 1505. While he never became a builder on the scale of his son, expenditure on domestic construction totalled around £28,000 between 1594 and his death. Meanwhile he spent another £40,000 on pious building works often associated with his houses.
While he added a fine tower at Windsor Castle, which can still be seen, it was at Sheen and at Greenwich where his major works were commissioned. At Sheen, which he renamed Richmond after his own title, he created an outer court and impressive great hall and chapel whilst refurbishing the Lancastrian royal Lodgings. At Greenwich he completely replaced the early riverside pleasaunce with a new building. It is this structure that tells us most about how he liked to build. It was of brick, completely unfortified, and contained outer lodgings in a two-story range on the riverside. His own private rooms were in a tower on the riverfront. The tower contained his privy chamber – a private room in which he spent most of his time served by staff of a household department confusingly also called ‘the Privy Chamber’. In terms of planning Henry VII’s invention of this new department and the creation of private towers in which they served his daily needs was his legacy to his son. Stylistically his buildings were little different to those of Edward IV and he, like his immediate predecessors, favoured the use of the, now fashionable, brick.