The very name Nonsuch is enough to send a shiver down the spine. A royal palace, now completely lost, that was built to be without equal by our most famous King. Although it is depicted in half a dozen paintings and prints and has been excavated by Professor Martin Biddle, it is still as elusive and fascinating as ever. It still retains an aura of mystery and legend, and as with most lost buildings, it has attracted confusion, exaggeration and misunderstanding.
The bare facts are clear. On the thirtieth anniversary of his accession, 22 April 1538, Henry VIII set out to build a remarkable residence for his young son Prince Edward (the future Edward VI). Its site was scientifically identified after detailed research and survey, its designers presented the king with blue prints which he signed, and it was constructed at great speed with military efficiency and precision. The structural work was probably largely completed by late 1541 but work dribbled on for several years fitting out the interiors. Henry died in 1547 without ever having properly enjoyed its delights.
Nonsuch was built near Cheam on the site of a village called Cuddington which was completely levelled to make way for it. It was set in gardens and two large parks which were remodelled in the later sixteenth century. Today neither palace, garden nor parks remain. The only structure that can be visited is the ruin of one of Henry’s banqueting houses stranded in a modern park. We have Charles II to blame for this. After the Civil War he gave it to his mistress the Duchess of Cleveland who, having no interest in the old Tudor palace, sold it for building materials.
It was designed by a highly successful indigenous design team Christopher Dickenson and William Clement, the architects and builders of Hampton Court. Nonsuch was far smaller (perhaps a third of the size of Hampton Court today), but it was laid out both in its generality and its particulars like its parent. Just as at Hampton Court there were two gatehouses, one broad leading into the outer court and a taller narrow one to the inner, as at Hampton Court on the north there was a kitchen court.
Work started on site in the early summer of 1538. The palace was not only funded by money raised from the dissolution of the monasteries it was literally built on the crunched up remains of Merton Abbey. Over 3,600 loads of chalk and stone were delivered to the site and formed foundations and the core of masonry walls. The outer courtyard and its gatehouse were faced in stone (some of it reused from Merton), but the important part of the palace, the inner court, the part where the royal lodgings were, was timber framed. Indeed Nonsuch probably qualifies as the largest timber framed structure ever to be erected in England.
What of course distinguished Nonsuch was not these entirely traditional details but the remarkable stucco panels that filled the rectangular voids in the timber framing. While these were in the medieval tradition of pargetting, their design and manufacture were new to England in the 1540s. The man in charge of the stucco work has long been identified as the Italian Nicholas Bellin of Modena who had worked at Fontainebleau for Francis I of France. At Nonsuch the stucco was made in panels, not from a mould in negative, but modelled in situ. The stucco mixture contained marble dust and set quickly to a hard creamy stone-like texture giving the impression of a stone-clad building. The timber framing between the panels was clad with strips of slate, which was partially practical, as it protected the timber members from rotting, but it was also a decorative treatment.
They stucco panels were mainly three quarter life size figures from classical history and mythology and also the liberal arts and the cardinal virtues and vices. Presiding over all in the middle of the south side, were figures of Henry VIII and Edward, Prince of Wales. This programme was not chosen by accident and represented an educational programme devised for the young prince. Standing in the inner court the future Edward VI was physically surrounded by a three dimensional tutorial in all that a young European prince should know.
Nonsuch was prodigiously expensive, it cost at least £25,000; in fact after Whitehall and Hampton Court it was the third most expensive building construction of an architecturally profligate reign. To put that into context the cost of the 1,000 ton warship Henry Grace a Dieu, possibly the most powerful of the reign, including three auxillary vessels, was £8,700.