NICK DAY
Greenwich is a strong candidate for having the most famous place name on Earth. The story of how it came to be so is a remarkable chain of chance that continues even to this day. To visit Greenwich, it’s best to approach it by river, either at speed on an exhilarating commuter catamaran, or more slowly by tourist cruiser – where the occasional distinctively accented commentary from a crewman, whose Thames waterman family lineage might well stretch back to Shakespeare’s time, will entertain us with homespun wit and enlighten us with fascinating non-facts like the derivation of the word ‘wharf’: ‘WareHouse At River Front’!
AS YOU COME downriver you might like to imagine the brightly decorated flotilla, filled with optimism, pomp and fawning favourites, that brought the dashing King Henry VIII with his second and sexy young wife, Anne Boleyn, to the favourite of his many palaces. It was a journey Anne was to make in sombre reverse a mere three years later. There is nothing we can see, above ground, of that magnificent Tudor palace that stood in Greenwich. Greenwich Palace, in which Henry had been born, had everything the fun-loving king could want. In front of him was fast transit to some of his other magnificent homes upriver. Deptford and Woolwich dockyards, founded by his father, lay to port and starboard of his palace and gave him ample opportunity to play ships. He had his tiltyard and, near to them, the huge towered armouries where magnificently decorated suits of armour were continually and expertly tailored to his expanding girth. There was a deer park for hunting and hawking, and a huge banqueting house where riotous enactments of daring feats were played out over multi-course feasts. And there were the orchards and gardens in which he could flirt with his enticing young bride, confident that when he lay beside her that night she would arouse him sufficiently to produce the one thing he craved – an heir.
But this great Tudor palace came about almost by accident. To trace its history we must go back to the sudden end of a previous Henry’s reign – that of the hallowed victor of Agincourt, Henry V.
Henry V’s famous reign was in fact one of England’s shortest. He died, quickly and unexpectedly, after contracting dysentery in France at the age of thirty-four. His son, the new King Henry VI, was merely nine months old – the only king, incidentally, to be crowned King of England in London and King of France in Paris – and obviously unable to rule. In fact, the apparently weak and reputedly feeble-minded king was never to be an effective ruler at all and was ever heavily influenced by the powerful and ambitious people who schemed to gain his ear.
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The finest and most famous view of Greenwich is to be had from Island Gardens. You can get there by crossing the river on foot. There’s no need to get your feet wet, you go via the foot tunnel built early last century to enable workers to get to the Millwall and West India docks in the Isle of Dogs. Think of the firm who got the tiling contract – 200,000 tiles! As you reach the northern end you will pass through an especially narrow section that was a temporary repair to Second World War bomb damage. If you’re going to Greenwich by Docklands Light Railway you could get off at the stop before Cutty Sark and make your way into the gardens for a short but satisfying detour.
The other vantage point from which you can view Greenwich advantageously is from up by General Wolfe’s statue at the top of the hill on the south side of the Queen’s House. You look down the precipitous hill that provided popular sport in the nineteenth century. Young men and women would join hands and run down the hill. Inevitably the girls, unable to keep up with their longer-legged beaus, would tumble down the slopes, providing hopeful spectators a peep of petticoat and other forbidden delights. The park café is not far away down André Le Nôtre’s grand avenue, so you can fetch a coffee and a bun to chew on as you gaze across Greenwich to its capital. What did Louis XIV’s landscape gardener intend, do you think? It’s probable that he never visited the site to see that his avenue would not take a visitor direct to the Queen’s House. Perhaps he knew about this hill and planned this great excitement for approaching visitors, who would come along the avenue seeing nothing but sky ahead of them, and then suddenly and unexpectedly, as they stopped at the brink of the hill, have their vision launched across a simply vast expanse of court and countryside.
The seeds of a terrible dissent were sown by Henry V’s will in which the baby king’s uncle, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, was appointed Protector of England. A fateful rivalry was assured by the appointment of the young king’s great-uncle, Henry, Cardinal Beaufort, to the boy’s personal care. The one had charge of the king, and the other of the realm. It wasn’t going to work. The two men were each rich and powerful, with strong retinues of devoted followers. Shakespeare chronicled their disputatious careers in his Henry VI trilogy where we hear Humphrey rail against the ‘presumptuous priest’ who plots against him:
No, prelate; such is thy audacious wickedness,
Thy lewd, pestiferous, and dissentious pranks,
As very infants prattle of thy pride.
Humphrey had inherited the manor of Greenwich in 1427. With its commanding view of the river, his great house, ‘Bella Court’, was to be an ideal home for a man embroiled in a threatening power struggle. A licence was granted ‘to empark 200 acres of land, pasture, wood, heath and furze, to enclose the manor house and mansion with walls, to crenellate the same, and to build a tower of stone and mortar in the park’. This tower was, as we shall see, the foundation of a significant legacy. We can assume that Humphrey built it because from its crenellated battlements he and his security staff would have a commanding view of that other great highway to Europe, the Dover road. From there, and from his bedroom window looking out on the river, he could keep a watchful eye on significant comings and goings.
Humphrey set himself to arrange a strategic marriage for the young king with one of the three available Armagnac heiresses. Meanwhile Beaufort, determined to further consolidate his influence over the young king, cunningly and deviously manoeuvred the bright and vivacious Margaret of Anjou into the boy’s affections. Humphrey’s cause was lost and, perhaps to rescue his future and favour, he rashly offered his splendid Greenwich home for the young couple’s honeymoon. We can imagine Margaret sitting at the great dining table, admiring the view over the enwalled private park. She instantly fell in love with Bella Court and, it seems, determined that it should one day soon be hers.
Humphrey was to lose the power struggle. His wife was sentenced to life imprisonment for practising witchcraft on the young king, and he himself was to die in most mysterious circumstances while awaiting trial in Bury St Edmunds on a concocted charge of high treason. Margaret lost no time in occupying the handsome Greenwich house. Now it was cleared of Humphrey’s fusty books, she redecorated and refurbished, celebrating her occupation with ornamental sprays of marguerites all over the place. During the next five years she was to upgrade the house with the latest in interior design, extending it with pavilions, arbours and a jewel house. So now, with a royal resident, the house was no longer simply a house, but a palace: the Palace of Pleasaunce.
Now we should race ahead across a hundred years of history to the great Tudor Palace of Placentia that had accrued on the site, the palace to which Anne Boleyn came downriver in 1533. The wilful and seductive Anne Boleyn, Henry’s second wife, had been enlisted at great political cost. Henry’s expectation was that she would help correct a humiliating and persistent failure to create a male heir. But Anne’s magic failed to produce the desired male heir in Henry’s image. A (probably female) child was stillborn in the summer of 1534, and Anne was to suffer a second stillbirth the following year. Henry’s affection for her lasted barely twelve months. He regularly and openly sought his pleasures elsewhere. Anne’s only surviving child was the flame-haired Princess Elizabeth – the future virgin queen – whom we can picture in the early months of 1536 trailing around the palace with her forlorn and threatened mother watching the whispering in corners, and secretive comings and goings that were signs of a simmering plot to free the king for yet another marriage.
On 24 January 1536 an unwise opponent had unseated the king in the Greenwich lists. Henry was unconscious for several hours and undoubtedly concussed. A wound was re-opened on his leg that would remain unhealed for the rest of his life. The painful abscess would severely limit the degree to which he could joust and dance in future. Now the once sporting and competitive athlete comforted himself by consuming colossal calories which he was unable to burn off. Anne would find her increasingly obese, bad-tempered husband, with his permanently suppurating leg ulcer, distinctly unattractive, and Henry was impatient to be rid of her. On 29 January, an already difficult day when Catherine of Aragon was being interred at Peterborough Cathedral, Anne discovered her husband with a young lady-in-waiting named Jane Seymour sitting on his knee. Tragically, that night Anne miscarried of a fifteen-week-old foetus – the prince that might have saved her.
So we can picture the scene at the great May Day tournament. The frustrated and stony-faced king sitting with his queen in the royal box overlooking the tiltyard. We can imagine their total lack of rapport. Sir Henry Norris and the Earl of Rochford were listed to joust against each other. The former was a favoured courtier and trusted intimate of the King, the latter another favoured courtier and brother to the Queen. The story goes that they rode up together to the great tower overlooking the tiltyard in order to salute their master and monarch. Anne took out a handkerchief and let it fall to the combatants. Henry Norris caught it and, thrilled with the intimate gesture, tucked it into his armour as a token of good luck.
Henry was furious and stormed straight out of the tiltyard. Norris was arrested and sent to the Tower. The next day Rochford was dispatched after him. They were to be joined by two further gentlemen of the privy chamber, Sir William Brereton and Sir Francis Weston. Anne herself was taken upriver to be accommodated in the same chamber in which, a mere three years before, she had tremulously anticipated her royal progress down to Greenwich as Henry’s new queen.
The king had badly needed a fresh marital start. There was a strategic imperative to make peace with Emperor Charles V, and disposing of the queen who had controversially displaced Spanish Catherine would be politically most expedient. The small committee of advisers especially assembled by the King advised him that his wife must be proved to have been plotting against his life. The charge could be seasoned with accusations concerning the kind of carnal behaviour of which people would judge her capable. The perfect solution. It needed only appropriate evidence and ready confessions. Gossip of licentious behaviour was fomented and collected.
Norris, Brereton and Weston were tried in Westminster Hall. In spite of their spirited denials, none of their judges could dare to find them innocent. Anne and her brother had special hearings in the great hall of the Tower, where seating was built for some two thousand spectators. Rochford’s trial was a sensation. His behaviour with the queen, it was claimed, had not merely been flirtatious but adulterous and also, of course, incestuous. The court heard lurid accounts of how brother and sister kissed with their tongues in each other’s mouths. A further charge against him was so explosive that it could not be read out in court. It was passed to him in a written document. Rochford, utterly careless now of his fate, made it clear to all what the charge was: he had apparently put it about that the King was unable to perform. The humiliation for the proudest of kings was unbearable. Rochford would be lined up with his companions beside the execution block on Tower Hill, and suffer the torment of being the last to go. They were executed one by one on 17 May as Anne was forced to watch the succession of executions from a window in the Tower. Henry ordered that Anne herself was to be executed within the Tower walls, with a swift and sharp sword wielded by an executioner specially brought over from France. So she was dispatched on 19 May after a careful speech telling the thousands of spectators that her husband had been ‘one of the best princes on the face of the earth, who has always treated me so well that better could not be’.
Was Anne guilty of ‘daily carnal lust’ and ‘vile provocations’? Who can know? Certainly she invited the attention of young men of the court. Certainly she was sexually coquettish, and certainly there was a tradition in her time, that she indulgently promoted, of courtly love. And her intimates would often visit her quarters to pay court. The degree of her guilt is anybody’s guess, but her forwardness with men and her insouciant outspokenness allowed people at the time to be unsurprised at the judgement against her. The fact that Henry, notwithstanding his pride and sensitivity over matters sexual, commuted her sentence from the traditional ghastly hanging, drawing and quartering for treason, to simple decapitation, seems the best evidence for the innocence of all concerned.
Henry impatiently paced up and down at Whitehall Palace until he heard the cannon fire from Tower wharf confirming Anne’s execution, then immediately set off to see the young Jane Seymour. A mere two weeks later, on 1 June, they sat together as King and Queen in the magnificent banqueting house adjacent to the Greenwich tiltyard.
So much of our journey through Greenwich’s past has been with the help of our imagination. It must be time to consider what we can actually still see. At the very centre of the extraordinary assembly of architecture, which has been designated a World Heritage Site, sits Inigo Jones’ impudent and bijou conceit, the Queen’s House. We should consider it without the colonnades that extend from either side – they were added in the early nineteenth century to shelter pupils at the Royal Naval Hospital School from inclement weather. We should also exclude the former school buildings at either end of those colonnades and which now house the stirring galleries of the National Maritime Museum.
Up close – Greenwich
There is a fascinating detail, unnoticed by almost everyone, in James Thornhill’s hagiographic celebration of the Hanoverians on the west wall of the Painted Hall.
George, Elector of Hanover, was the son of the childless Queen Anne’s cousin, Sophia, who by the Act of Settlement had been declared heir to the throne. There were some fifty-six people ahead of her in the line of succession but they were all Catholics. Sophia was a convenient Protestant. You’ll see Sophia of Hanover standing proudly just up and to the right of her son. That little house on her head was all set to be replaced by the English crown, but after running to take shelter from a rain shower one day, the eighty-three-year-old Electress expired. So her son inherited the crown.
Over thirty years before, George had wed his cousin, Sophia Dorothea, in a marriage that brought bling but not bliss. He sought regular satisfaction from his wife’s maid of honour, Ehrengard Melusine. This affair was public and permissible. His wife, on the other hand, was having a rip-roaring affair with the dashing Count von Königsmark, whom she had loved since she was a young girl. George was so incensed by the continuing affair that during one furious row he threw his wife to the floor, tearing out great hanks of her hair, and was only prevented from strangling her when attendants pulled him off.
The affair could not be suffered to last. One morning in 1695, the sated count was waylaid as he was about to let himself out the back door. Enormous sums of money had been paid to secure his demise. He was never seen again. Sophia Dorothea was sent far away to Ahlden Castle and forbidden to see her children again. The wife who should have ridden in the coronation coach to Westminster Abbey was hidden away from the world for more than thirty years.
So what fascinating detail did the mischievous Thornhill provide for us? Look at the carpet fringes below George’s feet. You’ll see a small pale patch in the painted marble step where it looks as if someone has started to clean the painting. Look carefully just to the left of that patch and you will see the ghostly form of a lady’s hand reaching out from where she has been swept under the carpet!
Now we must advance our story by leapfrogging two queens. The Stuart King James I and his wife, Queen Anne of Denmark, were not the best of friends. Their already difficult relationship had been severely strained when Anne had accidentally killed her husband’s favourite hunting dog. In an attempt at reconciliation James granted Greenwich to his wife for her personal resort. Inigo Jones was an admired designer of court masques who had travelled to Italy and was enthralled by the exactly proportioned Renaissance architecture he had seen there. His commission to build for the Queen a small house of her own, behind the old palace, was to have a profound influence on the further development of architecture in this country. The novelty of Jones’s ‘curious devise’ can be appreciated if we imagine its clean, pale stucco exterior set against the small-windowed and crenellated red-brick gateways of Hampton Court or St James’s palaces; for so Greenwich Palace looked when Inigo applied his genius to the Queen’s commission in 1616. There is a fine model on the ground floor of the Queen’s House that helps us to imagine how things looked at that time.
Greenwich Palace had been bedevilled by an unfortunate geographical coincidence. It so happened that the dockyards of Woolwich and Deptford had developed into sites of enormous importance for this island nation. Most inconveniently, the traffic generated between them was channelled along a right of way that passed between Greenwich Palace and its backyard. It was on to a puddle in this very thoroughfare that Sir Walter Raleigh courteously threw his cloak lest his beloved queen should muddy her beautifully embroidered shoes.
We can stand on the very spot under the Queen’s House and imagine the road stretching away in each direction. Inigo Jones had the splendid idea of building the queen’s new house in two equal halves, one on each side of the road. He would join those two rectangular buildings with a single bridge so that the Queen could enter her front door and go out of her back door without ever having to step in puddles. Sadly, Queen Anne never lived to take advantage of this pretty conceit.
Not long after, Henrietta Maria, the Catholic wife of Charles I, inherited it for her own pleasure and delight. The scorching political temperature of the 1640s, however, drove her and her son into the arms and succour of Louis of France. At the magnificent and extravagant French court, the young Prince Charles learned how a monarch might live. So, once the British monarchy was restored by popular request in 1660, the ambitious king engaged John Webb, Inigo Jones’s pupil and nephew, to build him a fabulous new palace at Greenwich overlooking the Thames. Webb was also to expand the now Dowager Queen Mother’s House of Delights at the back of the palace by building a bridge at each end, turning Jones’s innovative little H-shaped villa into a rectangular house.
Part of the reason for the demise of Charles I had been his insistence on the right to raise and spend money without reference to Parliament. After the Restoration the monarch’s expenditure was to be far more constrained and the new King Charles II was continually strapped for cash. The sum granted by Parliament for constructing his grand new palace ran out when only one of the three planned ranges had been built (and before even that had been completed).
Charles II was succeeded by James II, whose Catholic tendencies could not be tolerated and whose reign did not last long. In 1689 William of Orange landed with his army at Torbay and marched unopposed on Whitehall. James’s daughter Mary had married the Protestant Dutchman as a tactical alliance, but had grown to love him tenderly and, estranged from her father, was complicit in the plan for her husband’s accession.
It is this caring woman that we have to thank for the sublime array of buildings on the Greenwich riverfront. In 1692 the British Navy had achieved an extraordinary victory over the French at La Hogue and thwarted an invasion of England. Mary had been distressed to learn that the heroic seamen, many of them now with significant parts missing, had no provision for their future. She determined that something must be done in the way that Wren’s hospital for retired soldiers had been founded in Chelsea. William, who so adored her, indulged this wish and determined that her Uncle Charles’s unfinished palace in Greenwich would be an ideal location ‘where the great number of ships continually passing and re-passing would afford constant entertainment’.
Christopher Wren was thoroughly exercised by the project and offered his services for free. First he would build a matching block facing King Charles’s unfinished building. His own architectural style had progressed somewhat from John Webb’s and he would add to the south a magnificent and separate building in his distinctive and eccentric baroque style. Now that he was an ingenious dome expert, he would place a huge dome over a chapel at the centre of his richly flowing design that would knock France’s Les Invalides into touch.
The old Tudor palace, seriously decayed since the Civil War, was demolished and used to embank the river. When Mary saw the broad view of the Thames that was then opened up from the Queen’s House she was horrified that Wren proposed to block it. She demanded he go back to the drawing board and devise a plan that would preserve her view. The result is an odd, but strangely satisfying, assembly of buildings, which Samuel Johnson described as ‘too much detached to make one great whole’. Certainly the Queen’s House is not quite up to the task of being the focal point of such a substantial perspective. When Canaletto painted the view from across the river he couldn’t resist adding a few details to the house to better balance the composition. The Observatory, set off the axis on top of the hill, is a further oddity that reminds us that so much of this visual feast was arrived at by chance rather than design.
Charles II recognised himself as a monarch of a new age and he took great interest in matters scientific, sponsoring the foundation of the Royal Society to promote innovation and research. He was ruler of a nation whose powerful naval and merchant fleets were to make this tiny island master of the largest empire the world has ever seen. Dominance of world trade and security of the high seas were paramount. Safety at sea had historically been severely compromised by the simple fact that one of the two vital dimensions of space remained accurately incalculable. A ship’s position north to south could be determined by observations of the sun and the stars. The other horizontal dimension, however, could only be roughly calculated by a system known as ‘dead reckoning’. A ship’s direction of travel could be determined by its compass. A log would be tossed over the side attached to a knotted rope; the number of knots running overboard over a set time measured by sand-glass would give a figure for speed. Some speedy chartwork could then plot an estimated position. But it’s evident how maritime navigation was prone to significant and catastrophic error. Ships were forced to keep to familiar, well-travelled routes that were consequently insecure.
To this intractable problem there was a tantalisingly simple theoretical solution in that the Earth turns through its 360-degree axis every 24 hours. Knowing the difference between the time at your present position from the known time at a standard point further back round the globe (perhaps where you started) would tell you exactly how far round that 360 degrees you might have ventured. It was a simple method that was simply impossible; the necessary accuracy of timekeeping was unachievable. Clocks were driven by a pendulum mechanism that would not stand the rolling of a ship. Metal expands and contracts, oil thickens and thins. An inaccuracy of just one minute a day would render calculations a hundred miles out in just a week.
Louis XIV of France was in the vanguard of the search for an answer. He had established an observatory in Paris that sought a solution in the skies – and that might one day give France ownership of the world prime meridian. It was a great stroke of fortune for Charles II, therefore, that his French mistress – ‘the Catholic whore’ – Louise de Kerouaille, should have a friend, Le Sieur de St Pierre, who knew what to do and how to do it. He was invited to London and outlined the theory to the king and the Royal Society.
It had long been known that the moon and the stars move in a repeating and predictable pattern. The position of the moon against the backdrop of the stars, because it is so much closer, varies according to one’s position on the Earth. As a system for navigation, however, using the moon’s transit had seemed beset with unpredictable and inaccurate variables, because the moon has an irregular and complex orbit. But Le Sieur de St Pierre convinced Charles that it would be a worthwhile project for some committed R&D. With minimal financial resources, Wren was persuaded to build an observatory from architectural scrap using the foundations of Duke Humphrey’s tower. The resulting building was, Wren said, ‘for the Observer’s habitation and a little for pomp’. John Flamsteed was appointed the first Astronomer Royal, and in an exhausting forty years made some thirty thousand separate observations. The task was complicated by the fact that the moon has an eighteen-year cycle. It was only after the diligent efforts of a succession of Astronomers Royal, over one hundred years, that the first tables were published enabling navigation by the so-called lunar distance method. Meanwhile, catastrophic maritime loss due to inaccurate reckoning continued. In one shocking shipwreck that was a direct result of his faulty navigation, Admiral Sir Clowdisley Shovell lost four of his five ships and two thousand men. To stem this tide of loss the Longitude Act of 1714 offered a huge prize for the manufacture of a reliable and accurate timepiece. Such a clock, in fact a series of such clocks, was submitted by a Yorkshire carpenter named John Harrison. The story of this remarkable man and his friction-free timepieces is told up there in Flamsteed’s Observatory. Harrison’s final offering to the nation was a chronometer, five inches in diameter but weighing several pounds, that lost only four seconds in eighty-one days.
Navigation using time alone was simple, elegant and accurate, but the lunar distance method, while necessitating some arcane mathematics, was much cheaper to implement. The accurate chronometer was fearfully expensive, whereas a carefully machined and optically perfect sextant and the necessary tables could be purchased for a mere twenty pounds. Anything could happen to a clock in the hostile oceans, but the heavens were ever there. So we have much for which to thank Le Sieur de St Pierre. And the French have much to resent.
It was Sir Neville Maskelyne, the fifth Astronomer Royal, who first drew the prime meridian through Flamsteed House so that it passed diagonally across the Royal Park and on over the Thames. His meridian was to be only one of many under consideration at the Washington conference convened in 1884 to settle the matter once and for all. A decision in favour of Greenwich was by no means secure, but it was a lucky chance for us that the Canadian delegate had calculated that three-quarters of the world’s shipping already used Greenwich as their standard. He persuaded the conference that the most practical and least bothersome solution was to finally approve the line through Greenwich as the worldwide standard meridian. We needn’t be surprised that the French clung obstinately to their own meridian, measured two degrees east of Greenwich, until 1911 when they insisted they would fall in with the rest of the world only if Britain fell in with the metric system. In fact their formal adoption of Universal Time calculated from the Greenwich Meridian came as late as 1978, four years after the metric system began to be taught in British schools. It’s ironic that in Greenwich Market today, right under the old sign bearing the legend, ‘A false balance is an abomination to the Lord but a just weight is his delight’, you can still buy coffee measured out before your eyes to an exact 227 grams – that’s half a pound to you and me.