Together with Edward III and George IV, Henry VIII was one of the greatest royal builders. In 1509 there were around twenty royal houses and a small number of royal castles which were still set up for royal use. In the first twenty years of the reign were added around another twenty and between 1529 and his death in 1547 there were at least another twenty five. So, all in all, Edward VI inherited perhaps seventy domestic residences.
The king’s appetite for building increased with age. Before 1530 he bought several houses, and extended them, as well as embellishing some existing ones, but showed no real lust for building. His interests were in hunting and war and the Henry VIII gate at Windsor (c.1511) and the extensive stables (1509) and armour factory (1515) at Greenwich are typical architectural expressions of this.
The fall of Wolsey and the king’s passion for Anne Boleyn changed all this. After 1530 he became a major builder, extending and embellishing York Place and Hampton Court, both of which he took from Wolsey and embarking on setting both in a huge landholding dotted with subsidiary residences for his family and as private retreats. The suppression of the monasteries led to eleven former monasteries being turned into royal houses, most were chosen on the basis of their convenient location. Thirteen houses were either taken from unfortunate courtiers who fell foul of the king or were the subject of ‘swaps’ which were uneven exchanges of fine mansions for land the king did not want. Nonsuch was the only house built from scratch. Almost all the houses acquired by the king in the 1530s and 40s were in the Home Counties and the south of England. Other than Hull, York and Newcastle there wasn’t a royal manor further north than Collyweston in Northamptonshire.
Some houses that were acquired from courtiers needed little alteration but the monastic houses mostly needed extensive remodelling. The largest royal houses, known as the standing houses (as they were retained fully furnished the year round) also were subject to major building programmes. The king retained a large and complex works organisation led by capable architects and designers to undertake the work. He used the royal power of impressment to compel craftsmen to join his workforce.
We don’t actually know how much Henry spent on building during his reign: if all the recorded expenditure is added up the total is around a quarter of a million pounds, but it must have been at least twice that as financial records are not full enough to give us a total for work at houses like Greenwich where there was a great deal of building. Added to whatever figure we take as a total for bricks and mortar is the cost of furnishings and plate; all in all the total spent on his domestic residences can have hardly been less than a million pounds and most of this was spent after 1530, much after 1536 when the Court of Augmentations (receiving monastic revenues) came on-stream.
Henry’s houses were much more flamboyant than his father’s. They were showy, gaudy and flashy often erected at great speed for a particular occasion. His designers and decorators blended traditional gothic forms with heraldic motifs and elements from antique sources transmitted from Italy via France, Germany and the Low Countries. The style in which they were built I have called Chivalric eclecticism as the objective was to create a sense of a chivalric world at the centre of which was a great warrior king – Henry himself.