Theobalds was a house originally built by William Cecil Queen Elizabeth I’s chief minister. It was quite unlike any courtier house built since Cardinal Wolsey’s Hampton Court, because it contained, not only all the rooms and facilities needed for the queen’s secretary to run the business of the state, but also a designated suite of lodgings for the monarch herself. In addition, as at Hampton Court in the 1520s, there were lodgings provided for many courtiers and aristocrats and their servants. The queen liked the house a lot, visiting on each of eleven years after 1571. Elizabeth’s enthusiasm for the house led Cecil to start, in around 1572, the construction of a whole new courtyard to the west of the house to contain two sets of lodgings, one for the queen and a suite mirroring it for a future royal consort. The quadrangle was not completed before William Cecil died in 1598.
After James I’s first visit to Theobalds on his way to London from Scotland in 1603 another nine visits followed in only four years. These visits demonstrated to the king that Theobalds was everything that the larger early Tudor houses, like Hampton Court, were not. It also was set in newly laid out pleasure gardens and integrated with a large hunting park which Cecil had formed enclosing former adjacent common lands. Most attractive of all, perhaps was its location, just 14 miles from Westminster. Sometime in late 1606 James began negotiations for its acquisition and the following May the house was transferred to the king – in the deed of transfer Theobalds was described as being ‘commodious for the residence of his highness’ court and entertainment of foreign princes or their ambassadors’.
As the king had decided that this would be a house of state, and would require adaptation to make it suitable, he appointed Cecil, together with the earls of Suffolk and Worcester to devise the required improvements. They ordered that the service buildings that had flanked the forecourt should be converted into new lodgings for the household and the former offices be removed to a new court to the north of the house. Meanwhile a large new stable yard was to be built with salvaged materials from the former royal house at Enfield. Internally there was not much to do. The king’s painter lost no time in stamping royal ownership on the state rooms painting the king’s and queen’s arms over each fireplace.
Although only the merest fragments remain of this once vast mansion the survey made of it in 1650 by the parliamentary commissioners, together with a few surviving drawings allow us to reconstruct what it would have looked like in the 1620s. The house was approached by a causeway from the main London to St Albans road; this opened into a walled forecourt with buildings (that were converted into household lodgings) to its north and south. Behind this were two brick-built courts divided by a central range containing the great hall and stair. The entrance front was deliberately low allowing a view of the towering mass of the great hall crowned with a clock tower in the middle of the house. As was usual, the royal lodgings were on the sunny south front; they were approached through the great hall and up Cecil’s grand stair that gave access, left and right to the two royal suites. The queen’s lodgings, on the east were those that had been used by Queen Elizabeth; James chose the newer lodgings on the west that William Cecil had begun, and which Robert had completed after his father’s death.
The queen’s lodgings were similarly arranged and at the end of her privy gallery was a lodging that had been used by Queen Elizabeth’s favourites, but now became her closet, an arrangement mirrored later at Denmark House.
Theobalds became one of James I most favoured country houses and was also enjoyed by Charles I. After the Civil War it was demolished and little remains on its site today.