Detail of Tapestry of The Story of Abraham: The Departure of Abraham in Great Hall of Henry VIII’s Apartments

Great Hall

 

Visit England’s last and greatest medieval hall. The Great Hall is also one of Britain's oldest theatres.

 

Henry VIII’s Great Hall

 

The room is spanned by a large and sumptuously decorated hammer-beam roof and its walls are hung with Henry VIII’s most splendid tapestries, The Story of Abraham.

 

William Shakespeare’s company—the “King’s Men’”—performed for King James I over Christmas and New Year in 1603-4.

 

In the 21st Century the Prime Minister at the time, Tony Blair, chaired an informal meeting of the Heads of State and Government of the European Union in the Great Hall on the October 27, 2005, following in a noble tradition of royal and political entertainment.

 

Historic Tourists to the Great Hall

 

“Going up into the left wing of the palace one comes to an enormous hall with an arched roof made from some Irish wood which, so they say, has the natural property of keeping free of cobwebs.”

—Baron Waldstein, tourist (1600)

 

“Hampton Court is as noble and uniform a pile, and as capacious as any Gothic architecture can have made it …The great hall is a most magnificent room…”

—John Evelyn, diarist (1662)

 

In the 16th century, Hampton Court was a palace, a hotel, a theater, and a vast entertainment complex. The Great Hall was, by itself, all of these things. It was used, every day, as the staff canteen for the lower ranks of Henry’s court. Up to 600 people ate here in two sittings, twice a day. On special occasions, however, the tapestries rolled out over the walls, candelabra were strung across the ceiling on wires, and the lights from hundreds of candles transformed the hall into a magical setting for a fantastical court masque.

 

The Great Hall is the largest room in the palace, 32 m (106 feet) long, 12 m (40 feet) wide, and over 18 m (60 feet) high. A vast team of masons, carpenters, bricklayers, and laborers began to build it for Henry VIII in the 1532, and it was finished in 1535, becoming the last medieval Great Hall built for any English monarch. The walls are still hung with the best tapestries in Henry VIII’s vast collection depicting the Story of Abraham—faded through the years but still beautiful. The tapestries under the gallery depict the Story of Hercules and the Triumph of Fate. Most characteristic about this large hall is the large wooden hammer-beam ceiling—the initials of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn are still a part of the decoration. The ceiling was designed by the King’s Master Carpenter James Nedeham, was painted blue, red, and gold.

 

The Abraham tapestries which line the walls today were commissioned by Henry himself, and probably first hung here for the visit of a large French Embassy in 1546. This was just one of the magnificent state occasions when all the great rooms of Hampton Court were filled with the “swaggering theater” of court life. The Great Hall played host to dance and drama, with Henry himself earlier in his reign playing a starring role in specially written chivalric inventions, rescuing helpless maidens from dangerous castles.

 

When Henry VIII reigned, this was the most important room of the entire castle—seen through a courtier’s eyes. This is where the King would dine on a dais overlooking his court—in fact Henry was so impatient with this particular room that he made the masons work at night by candlelight as well as all through the day! Shakespeare performed a play of his in front of James I on New Year’s-day 1603—the same year that Elizabeth I died.

 

A History of the Great Hall

 

The center of life for most of the more-ranking members of the court was the Great Hall, where in Tudor times they dined in two shifts in the middle of the day.

 

The St. Valery family, who owned the Palace land from 1086, had built a chamber block and Great Hall. It remains exists beneath the existing Great Hall. In 1495, a list was made recording that the Great Hall of the house when it belonged to Lord Giles Daubeney contained two fixed tables, two long trestle tables, four benches, a cupboard, and a railing around the central hearth.

 

A visitor of high rank in Tudor times would expect to pass through the Great Hall into the more exclusive rooms beyond.

 

In 1532, Henry VIII rebuilt the Great Hall, the first in the sequence of rooms leading towards his private lodgings. It seems that Wolsey himself had begun rebuilding Lord Giles Daubeney’s hall; the oriel window, for example, is almost identical to that constructed by Wolsey’s masons at his Oxford College, Christ Church. It is not quite clear how far Wolsey’s work had advanced, but this oriel window now became part of a dramatically improved Great Hall.

 

Henry’s designers, Christopher Dickenson and James Nedeham, sat down to work in their tracing houses. The roof of the Great Hall is of hammerbeam construction. This design traditionally allowed carpenters to span halls of a greater width than the longest available timbers. However, timbers twelve meters (forty feet) in length, the width of the hall at Hampton Court, were readily available. The hammerbeam design, echoing the roof of Westminster Hall, was deliberately chosen to symbolize royalty, antiquity, and chivalry. A stone hearth lay in the center of the hall, and smoke was intended to escape through a shuttered louver above it in the medieval fashion. Yet the absence of any sort on the timbers of the louver itself throws doubt upon whether this archaic feature was ever used. The roof was decorated with carved and painted heads, and badges celebrating the King and Queen. The carved screen that remains today was erected across the “lower” or entrance end of the Hall, supporting a gallery for musicians above, while a dais was constructed at the other, “higher” end. Anne Boleyn’s badges and initials appear next to Henry VIII’s beneath the royal coats of arms decorating the Hall’s roof.

 

In the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the Great Hall was used as a “masking house” or indoor theater at Christmas and New Year. The painted canvas backdrops included representations of “seven cities, one village, and one country house”.

 

In the time of James I, a new dais was built in the Great Hall to accommodate the King and Queen and the ambassadors from foreign courts who would be invited to watch the spectacles of the season. One of these was Samuel Daniels’s masque The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses. His stage directions record how the Queen herself took “the part of Pallas, in a blue mantel, with a silver embroidery of all weapons and engines of war, with a helmet-dressing on her head”. She descended by a winding stair from a “paradisical mountain” constructed at the lower end of the hall to perform a dance before the King seated beneath his Cloth of Estate. All the ambassadors and courtiers joined in the dancing, and young Prince Henry was thrown between them “like a tennis ball”. The celebrations in the Great Hall for the New Year in 1604 included performances by the King’s Men, whose resident dramatist was William Shakespeare.

 

The Great Hall was repaired in 1614.

 

Some of the wooden stags’ heads mounted with antlers that remain in the Great Hall and Horn Room date from Stuart times. The Palace’s collection of horns, later described by John Evelyn as “vast beams of stags, elks, antelopes etc.” also came to include the fossilized horns of an Irish elk, excavated from a bog in County Clare and presented to Charles II in 1684.

 

When William III and Mary II started considering rebuilding the palace, one design featured Henry VIII’s Great Hall at the center of a grand Baroque entrance facing North. Double avenues marching south across Bushy Park would have culminated in a vast semicircular courtyard built around the Great Hall.

 

In 1718, under George I, the Great Hall was converted into a theater (fulfilling the intentions of William III, who had begun to fit it out for the purpose). This work was probably undertaken by gentleman architect Sir John Vanbrugh, who was himself a playwright and theater impresario. Curtains covered the large windows, boxes and seats were installed, and the assembled audience faced west towards the stage erected in front of the screens passage. The canvas scenery was painted by Sir James Thornhill. Sir Richard Steele’s company from Drury Lane performed seven plays before the assembled court, including Hamlet and Henry VIII by Shakespeare, both appropriate to the setting.

 

On the orders of King George III in 1800, architect James Wyatt removed the theater from the great Hall, revealing the Tudor interior that had not been seen for a century. In this work, Wyatt began the process of making the great Hall even more tutored than it had ever been, by opening a new doorway from the dais into the Great Watching Chamber in an exemplary copy of the arched doorway in the adjacent Horn Room. This replaced a historically inaccurate doorway added in the 18th century. In addition, new flagstones were laid on the floor, and the walls were plastered to look like ancient stonework.

 

A.C. Pugin’s Specimens of Gothic Architecture (1821-1823) contained the first detailed measured drawings of the Great Hall and its roof.

 

With a deep romanticism and affection for Gothic styles and picturesque irregularity—and with an equally deep distaste for Sir Christopher Wren and the Baroque—Edward Jesse, Itinerant Deputy Surveyor in the Office of Woods, Forests and Land Revenues, supervised a series of restorations and re-presentations. The most notable was that of the Great Hall itself. Left clear and relatively bare by Wyatt, it was transformed between 1840 and 1846 into a state that Jesse believed Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII would have recognized instantly. The great series of Abraham tapestries, one of the glories to have survived Henry VIII’s reign, was returned there from the King’s State Apartments. They hammer beam ceiling was repainted and the windows of both the Great Hall and the Great Watching Chamber were filled with stained glass to the designs of Thomas Willement. Heraldic badges and figures in the glass evoked the genealogy of Henry VIII’s wives, of the King and his family, and of his chancellor, Thomas Wolsey. Willement incorporated the dissent of each of Henry VIII’s wives in the windows on the north and south sides of the Hall, interspersed with the King’s badges. The stained-glass was but one element in the redecoration of the Tudor Hall. Artful arrangements of arms and armor were placed around the walls on specially constructed corbels, and deer antlers (all from the parks) were added for further effect. The impressive displays included St. George slaying the dragon, although there is no evidence that armor had ever been previously hung in the Hall. Some was newly made; the rest was lent by the Tower of London. This arrangement survived until 1925. When Jesse had finished, it was “probably the finest and most brilliantly embellished building in Europe”, in the words of the correspondent of the Gentlemen’s Magazine.

 

In the late 19th century, many events were held in the Great Hall, including fund-raising evenings of entertainment held by Princess Frederica of Hanover, a descendant of George II.

 

The Great Hall was the object of the most thorough program of works, after dry rot and beetle infestation were found in the roof in 1922. Decayed timbers were replaced, and a steel truss system was inserted into the hammerbeam roof structure. The painted decoration on the timber was stripped away, as were many of the corbels, armor, and other novelties that Jesse had introduced in 1844.

 

The Story of Abraham Series

 

Ten panels from a series of Brussels tapestries made from 1540 to 1543 depicting the scenes from the life of the Prophet Abraham, from Genesis, chapters 12-24, woven in the workshop of Willem Pannemaker, perhaps after designs by Pieter Cocke van Aelst. The scenes depicted are: the Departure of Abraham; the Return of Sarah; the Separation of Abraham and Lot; the Meeting of Abraham and Melchizedek; God appears to Abraham; the Circumcision of Isaac and the Expulsion of Hagar; the Sacrifice of Isaac; the Purchase of the Field of Ephron; the Oath and Departure of Eliezer; and Eliezer and Rebekah at the Well.

 

Although it is not yet known if Henry VIII commissioned this set of ten tapestries, that it is the only known set of this series woven in gilt-thread, suggests that it is highly likely Henry was the patron, and that the Hampton Court set is the first weaving. Two other sets are recorded, one in Madrid and one in Vienna, neither of which combine gilt-thread with silk and wool. Henry’s tapestry collection was extensive, exceeded only in number by Louis XIV of France at the end of the seventeenth century. Henry owned a number of other tapestry series woven with gilt metal-wrapped thread, none of which survive. One hundred years after Henry’s death, after the regicide of Charles I, the Royal Collection was valued, and large quantities sold off. The Abraham series, however, was not sold, but reserved for Cromwell’s use. The series was valued at the astonishing sum of £8260, far in excess of any other work (or collection of works) of art, and almost double the value of the next most valued tapestry series, the Caesar set, valued at £5022. Henry may have conceived of this series and its Old Testament Patriarchal subject matter as particularly powerful in the context of his own political situation: following the Break with Rome in 1530, the establishment of the Church of England and the Dissolution of the Monasteries, Henry may have used the Story of Abraham, and the Covenant with God as a means of legitimizing his own direct God-given rule. Furthermore, Henry’s desperate attempts to provide a male heir and to secure the Tudor dynasty are hinted at in The Circumcision of Isaac, in which God’s covenant with Abraham is continued through his son Isaac. The subsequent use of the tapestries in England is also significant: the set remained at Hampton Court, probably in The Great Hall, but were brought to Westminster Abbey for later Tudor coronations, possibly for Elizabeth I’s coronation. They may have been used at early Stuart coronations, as many Tudor rituals were continued under the Stuarts. They were certainly used to splendid effect at the coronation of James II in 1685 when they were hung about the Theatre and Shrine of Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey. During William III’s reign, some of the Abraham tapestries furnished the new King’s apartments: that tapestries some one hundred and fifty years old, not a newly commissioned set, were used to furnish the King’s Bedchamber, gives a strong sense of the importance and magnificence that these tapestries imparted.

 

Two other high-quality weavings of the same design survive, one in the Spanish royal collection and the other in the former Habsburg collection in Vienna. Neither includes gold thread.

 

•Provenance: Probably commissioned by Henry VIII circa 1540, and delivered autumn 1543 or early 1544, Hampton Court Palace. Recorded in 1547 inventory taken after the death of Henry VIII. They were displayed during the solemnization of the peace with Spain in December 1530, the celebration of St. George’s Feast in April 1635, and the receptions of the Moroccan and of the Spanish ambassadors in 1637 and 1649 respectively. Recorded in the 1649 inventory of Charles I’s Goods when they were valued at £10 per yard or £8260. Pieces from the set were hung in Westminster Abbey for the coronations of Charles II and James II. Mentioned in the 1695 inventory taken after Queen Mary II’s death. In 1742 tapestries from the set were recorded in the Audience Chamber and Drawing Room.

•People Involved:

oCreator(s):

Attributed to: Pieter Coeck van Aelst (1502-50) (designer); Henry VIII, King of England (1491-1547) (commissioners); Wilhelm Pannemaker (maker)

Attributed to the Circle of: Bernard van Orley (c. 1488-1541/2) (designer); Brussels (place of production); Flemish (nationality)

oAcquirer(s): Henry VIII, King of England (1491-1547)

•Physical Properties:

oMedium and Techniques: Woven wool and silk tapestry with gilt metal-wrapped thread

wool; silk (textile); gold thread

tapestry; woven

oMeasurements: 482.0 × 770.0 cm (whole object)

•References:

oAlternative Title(s): The Departure of Abraham

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