Westminster today is a synecdoche for the United Kingdom's political life. Images of the nineteenth-century Houses of Parliament are immediately recognizable as the place where politicians work, and are discussed in contrast to ordinary life elsewhere. During the sixteenth century, the Palace of Westminster went from being a royal home, which also happened to house Parliament and royal administration, to being the center of public political life. Almost seventy years ago, Geoffrey Elton controversially identified a key change in the nature of English government from household government to state bureaucracy in the mid-sixteenth century.Footnote 1 This article returns to the debate Elton started and argues that this change was not planned, but rather was mediated by a series of decisions made over the course of the sixteenth century that opened up crucial geographical and institutional space between the royal household, based at royal houses elsewhere in the Thames Valley, and the work of administration and the law-courts, permanently housed at the Palace of Westminster.
Thanks to a series of major losses, both architectural and archival, to date the palace has received relatively little attention as a whole.Footnote 2 Many of its buildings and records were destroyed even before the devastating fire of 1834, and a full history of the palace and its place in English and then British political life is still to be written. What has been done highlights the complexity of the area's overlapping functions. Julia Merritt has written about the way in which the manor of Westminster came to have a social prominence after 1540, when nobles sought houses in the vicinity of Whitehall.Footnote 3 Chris Kyle and Jason Peacey have shown the richness of its intensely public political culture in the seventeenth century.Footnote 4 Alasdair Hawkyard has discussed the homes of the House of Commons at Westminster before 1548.Footnote 5 A special issue in Parliamentary History has made the case for understanding the Commons in relation to the palace's architecture.Footnote 6 There is, however, a disjunction between understandings of the palace as a royal home before 1500 and its transformation into the home of parliamentary governance and the bureaucracy of the state after 1600.Footnote 7 To trace the origins of this shift, this article therefore examines ideas about the court, the offices based at the palace, and the changes in the buildings themselves. During the sixteenth century, the palace was fought over, reimagined, and reworked to suit new administrative needs as well as a changing conception of royal power in relation to the public. I use surviving building accounts, buildings archaeology, antiquarian sources, and contemporary commentary to argue for Westminster as a key locale for the transformation of public political life during the sixteenth century.
This article aims to bridge something of a historiographical divide between the ways in which early modernists and medievalists have separately discussed the structures of English politics, and to bring in recent discussions in court studies about the importance of architecture and access.Footnote 8 By examining the Palace of Westminster as a source in itself, due to its status as the administrative hub of England and Wales in this period, it is possible to chart the transition from personal household government (of the kind T. F. Tout outlined for the fourteenth century) towards the more bureaucratic and impersonal state systems discussed by Michael Braddick for the long seventeenth century.Footnote 9 In doing so, I argue that there was indeed a shift in the function of government away from the monarch, but it was not due to Elton's single period of revolution masterminded by the king's Chief Minister, Thomas Cromwell, or anyone else. Rather it was the interactions between royal decisions, the increasing permanence of administrative offices in their Westminster homes, and pressure from the wider populace at Westminster that transformed political life in the sixteenth century. The removal of royal presence and its legitimation through ceremonial left a void.Footnote 10 The increasing audiences of government and increasing experience of administration interacted with the cumulative consequences of a series of decisions made about royal usage of Westminster to create a more impersonal state in which visible royal personal involvement in government was no longer the basis of the political system by the end of the sixteenth century.Footnote 11 These shifts then left open the possibilities that would be more fully explored in the early seventeenth century—of political and administrative life that might draw representative legitimacy from institutions alongside the monarch's person, such as the parliamentary installation of Henry, Prince of Wales, in 1610, and ending most dramatically at Westminster in the conflicts of the 1640s.Footnote 12
In addition to charting the shift in structures of power, this article explores the changing geography of political life in the sixteenth century as administrative and legal business at Westminster boomed. In recent decades, early modern historians have been interested in the idea of state power as something contingent, performed, and negotiated in particular locations, whether in a moment of conflict in 1534 Weymouth, as explored by Jonathan Healey, or in the performances of history plays in the theatres in the 1590s, recently discussed by Lucy Clarke.Footnote 13 While the metaphor of the stage and performance has not had the same influence on medieval historians, they too have considered the relationship between the governed and the institutions of government, with two different schools of thought placing different emphases on the key locations of political power within the English polity. For K. B. McFarlane and his followers, the framework for state action lay in the localities and particularly in the networks of friendship, kin, and alliance that bound the political elites.Footnote 14 In contrast, Elton was inspired in his thesis about the revolution in Tudor government by the work of the influential institutional historian of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, T. F. Tout, who charted the creation of new administrative offices out of the various functions of the itinerant royal household as central to understanding medieval politics.Footnote 15 This article examines the re-creation of the stage on which the emerging central state was performed for ever-larger audiences drawn from across England and Wales—and indeed beyond.
The intersections between architecture, access, and ritual are particularly important to understanding Westminster, because the medieval palace was distinctive in its geography of access, and the ways in which the monarchs, their administrators, and the public interacted that would not be replicated at Whitehall. The old palace conformed to none of the expectations that had developed over the course of the late fifteenth century about palace architecture and privacy. By 1500, the last major refurbishment at Westminster was a century in the past. Richard II had reworked the palace extensively. He restored both Westminster Hall and the Privy Palace, including the surviving hammer-beam ceiling in the hall, completed in 1399.Footnote 16 In the century that followed, the surviving accounts detail the necessary ongoing repairs, but there was no effort to reimagine the palace's geography. In the early years of Henry VII's reign, work concentrated on the queen's personal lodgings to the south of the site, for Elizabeth of York's comfort.Footnote 17 The wider palace remained a rabbit warren of rooms that largely opened into each other without clear sequences for privacy and control. Unlike the palaces that were built after 1450, there were no regular sets of rooms through which one could move from very public presence chambers through to the most private personal lodgings for the king and queen.Footnote 18 In addition to the inability to tightly control access and signal favor through such access, the rooms regularly had multiple functions that impeded any attempt to control access to the Privy Palace. For example, when Parliament was in session at Westminster, the Painted Chamber, originally the king's own bedroom in the Privy Palace, was used for joint meetings.Footnote 19 Similarly, the use of the Lesser Hall (also known as the White Hall) for the Court of Requests in the 1520s would have brought litigants and witnesses into the Privy Palace.Footnote 20 Access routes were sometimes unexpected, such as in 1494 when the future Henry VIII and his companions “toke thair waye secretly by our Ladie of Pew through St Stephen's Chapel on to the steyr foote of the ster chambre.”Footnote 21 Henry and those with him were moving along the riverbank side of the palace from the Privy Palace to the water entrance where their horses waited, but to move secretly through the palace they had to pass through the palace's oratory, its chapel, and the chapel's cloisters to reach the Star Chamber, passing from relatively private to relatively public areas and then back again. There was no entirely private route available to them, and by this point, most other palace architecture was designed around controlling privacy and access, particularly to royal ceremonial. Whitehall would become a very different type of space, even as it came to take on more public administrative functions in the seventeenth century. The type of private court ceremonial that Anna Keay discusses for Whitehall in Charles I's reign was not possible a century earlier at Westminster.Footnote 22
The Palace of Westminster was a stage on which the wider community could access governance and also affirm and legitimize their local self-governance, through its resident institutions, acting in public view: the law-courts, administrative offices, and Parliament, whose multipurpose spaces can be seen in Figure 1.Footnote 23 During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, those institutions regularly and habitually shared their buildings with the monarch, the royal household, and the wider court, and thus were stages of a different kind for the performance of royal authority.Footnote 24 By the end of the sixteenth century, the monarch, the household, and the court were permanently based elsewhere, if still within relatively easy reach, and were present for ceremonial such as the State Opening of Parliament.Footnote 25 Healey noted that most of the “authoritative buildings” of the early modern state had “complex, layered power” and those that were straightforward projects of royal authority such as royal castles were often far from local life.Footnote 26 But local affairs could be, and often were, brought to the center, and royal finance depended on local agents.Footnote 27 Healey's own case study survives in the archival record because it was brought to the Westminster Court of Star Chamber. By exploring the changing uses of the palace's rooms and corridors, which were available to both those undertaking the bureaucracy of the state and those who sought government there, we can chart changing political structures that reached far beyond the palace itself.
Map of the medieval Palace of Westminster. With thanks to Jill Atherton and Tim Tatton-Brown.
Using the Palace of Westminster as evidence for state-building and changing expectations of political life means that the key points of change are different to those that were used by Elton's Tudor Revolution and the subsequent debates about the nature of Tudor politics.Footnote 28 The changes do not neatly map onto individuals’ careers or even the divisions between reigns and regimes. Instead, the moments of change came when the consequences of a series of smaller decisions become apparent. The dates of significant change are thus almost accidental, points where a series of policy or personal decisions coalesced cumulatively into change that had implications for the government experienced by those who flocked to Westminster. There were three key points where decisions were made about the palace, whose implications were then worked out over the following decades. In 1502, Henry VII chose to stop using Westminster as his habitual royal residence when in London, preferring his new palaces at Richmond and Greenwich. Twenty-seven years later, in 1529, Henry VIII set up an alternative royal home in the manor of Westminster, formalizing the divide between government at the old Palace of Westminster and royal life and the court at Whitehall.Footnote 29 This divide would be extended over the rest of the century to meet new financial, political, and administrative needs. Finally, in 1572 when the site of the former St Stephen's College returned to royal ownership, its use became part of longer-running attempts to create administrative systems that connected the court with the governmental offices and to manage the flow of information and coin between the two sets of institutions, now routinely separated.Footnote 30 Across the entire century, the quality that made the Palace of Westminster crucial for the English state was its visibility to the political community, thanks to its status as the home of the law-courts and administrative offices. Thus, the changes in its usages created the environment in which the early modern bureaucratic state was created.
Royal home and royal administration, 1502 to 1529
At the start of the sixteenth century, Westminster united the monarch's personal life with that of his administration in one unwieldy, sprawling complex on the northern bank of the Thames; here the king's person and his government were regularly in the same place. For late medieval kings, Westminster was the center of their working lives. They spent on average between a third to half the year living there, and even when they were absent, they were rarely far away, itinerating through the houses elsewhere in the Thames Valley, connected to the administration based at Westminster by frequent messengers. The notable exception was when they were on campaign overseas, such as the years Henry V was in France. Some spent more time at Westminster for personal reasons, such as Henry VI's devotion to Edward the Confessor's shrine at Westminster Abbey, but no king could ignore the demands of the various administrative offices clustered around Westminster Hall for long, even if he could retreat with his household to the Privy Palace to the south.Footnote 31 When Parliament was in session, the lords occupied the Queen's Chamber or the Lesser Hall, while the Commons were found across the wall in Westminster Abbey's Chapter House.Footnote 32 Westminster Hall itself housed the central law-courts and the writing office of Chancery, while the Exchequer occupied two buildings opening off of the northern end of the hall.Footnote 33 Other administrative and legal institutions were not fixed at Westminster but were regularly to be found there. The King's Council, both a decision-making body based near the monarch and increasingly also an equity court, was colloquially known as Star Chamber after the room it occupied when at the old palace.Footnote 34 From the late fifteenth century, the Court of Requests, another equity court, which operated as part of the itinerant royal household, could also be found occupying various rooms in the palace.Footnote 35 All of these bodies drew their authority from the king's person, but were also capable of acting without his personal presence. The staff of these offices could often also be found in the royal household as part of the networks that bound together administration and the court and regularly shared the palace's thoroughfares.
The Palace of Westminster also did not correspond to ideas around ceremonial, even though it was the palace used for much of the most significant royal display in this period. For example, the mid fifteenth-century Liber Regie Capelle, which details the practices of the Chapel Royal and would continue to be used until the sixteenth century, states that the king and queen would process to and from the chapel on feast days.Footnote 36 At Westminster, the routes to the chapel were either through a narrow passage from the Privy Palace or through multiple heavily used rooms. There was no straightforwardly ceremonial route that could be used for the king to be seen on his way to mass and that would give controlled access for petitioning. Instead, Henry VII and Henry VIII used the Palace of Westminster for large spectacles where the intention was that the public would witness royal presence and royal magnificence. Henry VII's first return to Westminster from progress in the summer of 1486 was the subject of a detailed heraldic account, because of the palace's historic significance as the place of legitimate government and administration. Henry was greeted as king by the canons of St Stephen's College and by the abbey monks, who processed with him through New Palace Yard to the abbey.Footnote 37 Other than the coronations—Henry's own in 1485, Elizabeth of York's in 1487, and Henry VIII's in 1509—the other major event held at Westminster to display the success of the new dynasty was the week of celebrations for the marriage of Prince Arthur in 1502. Arthur and Catherine of Aragon were married in London at St Paul's Cathedral, but the celebrations were hosted at Westminster immediately afterwards. The herald's description suggests that there was a deep concern throughout for as many people as possible to see these celebrations and thus demonstrate the security of the new dynasty.Footnote 38 In a similar vein, tournaments were held at the palace to celebrate the birth of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon's short-lived son, Prince Henry, in 1511 and for the knighting of Charles Brandon in the spring of 1512.Footnote 39 For jousts in 1515, there would have been work to set up the stands for spectators and the tournament area; there are no surviving detailed accounts for that occasion, only brief mentions in the king's book of payments.Footnote 40
Henry VII and Henry VIII came to Westminster to engage with the administration based there, particularly early in their reigns when they were still establishing themselves with the administration based in the palace. In the early years of his reign, Henry VII followed his medieval predecessors in spending large parts of the year living in the palace.Footnote 41 After 1502, he tended to stay there for the feast of Epiphany, for particular moments of public spectacle, and for the large council meetings held at All Hallows in early November.Footnote 42 Henry VIII followed his father's pattern. He can be seen to be staying in Westminster for a few days at a time in the 1510s, both before and after the 1512/13 fire.Footnote 43 The fire, John Stow tells us, destroyed the Privy Palace, and only the areas around Westminster Hall, which were the public and administrative areas, were left in regular use.Footnote 44 Whether the privy lodgings were habitable or made habitable for Henry's short stays or whether the king used other areas of the palace as a temporary residence at this time is unclear. After this point, Henry continued to attend to particular government ceremonial at the palace, but did not reside there. He chose to stay at Lambeth Palace or elsewhere in London and come to Westminster for the day.Footnote 45 By 1526, even those most conservative of guides—the royal household ordinances—acknowledged the change. The Eltham Ordinances make it clear that Westminster had been removed from the royal itinerary.Footnote 46 Westminster was not listed among the standing houses,Footnote 47 where the full panoply of Chapel Royal display accompanied the king. Instead, the palace was a venue for particular types of events, when the monarchy was deliberately on unusually full display and the lack of privacy was not a disadvantage. Additionally, Cardinal Wolsey was probably involved with the rebuilding of the cloisters of St Stephen's College within the palace complex with heavily royal iconography around the same date, showing the continued importance of the palace.Footnote 48 Hence in 1515, John Taylor was still able to use Westminster as his reference point for royal public magnificence when discussing Henry VIII's ceremonial entry into Lille.Footnote 49
Despite Henry VII's choice to make more use of Greenwich and Richmond in the last seven years of his reign and Henry VIII's increasing absence from Westminster as his reign continued, the links between the royal household and royal administration continued to be very strong at all levels of the social hierarchy and across the various offices in both areas of royal service. Sir William Stanley, who served in local government under the Yorkists, was both the Chamberlain of the royal household and one of the two Chamberlains of the Exchequer under Henry VII.Footnote 50 Sir John Heron and Sir John Cutte's concurrent posts in both the King's Chamber within the household and in the Exchequer facilitated financial cooperation between the two key institutions of early Tudor finance.Footnote 51 Henry VII's financial management increasingly worked through the Chamber, rather than the Exchequer, but the two institutions were not in competition, as they shared personnel and regularly moved coin back and forth. That officers of the Chamber came to work out of rooms in Westminster Abbey, and the Jewel Tower in the Privy Palace from 1505 increased the cooperation there, even as the king himself was less frequently at the palace.Footnote 52 Lesser men such as the King's Remembrancer, Robert Blagge, used their active work in the Exchequer to advance themselves and their families. Blagge moved from the Exchequer to the Chamber, as he climbed the ranks.Footnote 53 Similarly, the goldsmith John Daunce built his wide-ranging administrative and household career on his first known post as Teller of the Exchequer, where he received and paid out coin.Footnote 54 Under Henry VIII this pattern continued, with the added involvement of Thomas Wolsey as Chief Minister to draw the various departments together. For example, John Gostwick can be found as a Gentleman Usher of the Privy Chamber in the 1510s, then making a financial career in Wolsey's household and as an auditor of the Exchequer, before becoming involved with the new Court of First Fruits and Tenths in the 1530s.Footnote 55 Richard Lee appears active both at Westminster and in the royal household, including as an Esquire of the Body in 1509 and as clerk of Star Chamber from 1516 until at least 1527.Footnote 56 Both of these men and many others can also be linked to Wolsey's household, along with the officers of Chancery, under Wolsey's management in his role as Chancellor.Footnote 57
From 1502 until 1529, the pattern of usage and royal activity at Westminster was at a low ebb. Late medieval ideas about the close connection between the king and his administration and the importance of being seen in public as a legitimate ruler continued to shape the patterns of use of the palace. The royal household, the administrative offices, and the person of the monarch were closely linked, both spatially and in terms of personnel. When the public came to Westminster for Parliament or the law-courts, they would also often find the king's closest advisors alongside his administration. The routine presence of the public at Westminster to access governance meant that Henry VII and Henry VIII chose to use the palace as a venue for the most visible royal ceremonial when they wished for the widest audience to their actions. Equally, the palace's design and lack of modernization meant that they increasingly chose to spend most of their time at the more private, up-to-date houses elsewhere in the Thames Valley, particularly Richmond, completed in 1502. These houses allowed for the management of the royal household and court and the control of access to the king's person, but they did not serve as working administrative bases in the way that Westminster had, and looking forward, Whitehall would.
Westminster and Whitehall, 1529 to 1572
After the fall of Cardinal Wolsey in 1529 and Henry VIII's decision to rebuild the cardinal's Westminster home at York Place, just to the north of the medieval palace, to be his new home of Whitehall, administration and the court began to be separated. This would have long-lasting implications for both the structures of governance and ideas around governance that would continue to be worked out in the following forty years under Henry VIII and his children. Whitehall's physical proximity to the old Palace of Westminster has tended to obscure the major shift in political gravity that the new palace engendered in a period where administration was itself in a great deal of flux thanks to the creation of new offices and the reorganization of older ones. Simon Thurley has noted that the new spaces of Whitehall were related to the mechanisms of Elton's model of the Tudor revolution in government, but the implications have not been explored in depth.Footnote 58 They continued to ripple outwards after 1547 and changed both petitioners’ experience of the court at Whitehall and their experience of administration based at Westminster, despite attempts to treat both sites as a single complex.
Westminster and Whitehall need to be considered in relation to each other, but also as separate physical entities. Although they were close together, they had very different patterns of use and function, despite contemporary attempts to treat them as a single entity. In 1536, Thomas Cromwell as Chief Minister oversaw the creation of a new liberty that encompassed both these royal homes, joining them together legally and ensuring that commentators would regularly refer to Whitehall as the king's Palace of Westminster.Footnote 59 In 1529 the ambassador from the Holy Roman Emperor, Eustace Chapuys, called Whitehall “the house which once belonged to the Cardinal [Thomas Wolsey].”Footnote 60 In 1533, “Westminster” was still the old palace, but in 1536, the French ambassador was summoned to “Westminster,” clearly Whitehall, for a conference with the Privy Council.Footnote 61 Similarly, in 1551, the London diarist Henry Machyn called Whitehall “Westminster” in relation to Princess Mary's arrival at court.Footnote 62 In Cromwell's legal formulation, the old palace was to “from henceforth be reputed, deemed, and taken only as a member and parcel of the said new palace” and thus administration was subordinated to the king's person and his court.Footnote 63 However, that was not how it would play out over the longer term. The creation of the liberty and the monarch's return to living in the manor of Westminster may seem as if it were a return to the pre-sixteenth century patterns of the king living alongside his administration, but that is to ignore the dramatically different access patterns, alongside changes in the staffing of the household and administration. Rather, the architecture of the new palace and the usages of the old palace combined to create further distance between the monarch, administrative personnel, and the systems that provided governance as well as the public that sought that governance. Whitehall conformed to the patterns of usage of the other royal homes and served as a focus for the court and courtiers, while the old Palace of Westminster increasingly stood apart as the home of law, administration, and administrators, with occasional forays into royal ceremonial.
The king's Chief Minister in the early part of this period, Thomas Cromwell, was at the center of Elton's much critiqued thesis about the transformation of Westminster's administration.Footnote 64 One of the major critiques is that of David Starkey, who has pointed to the importance of the Privy Chamber within the household in political life and Cromwell's use of the men working there.Footnote 65 Before 1529, administration and the chamber would have worked in greater proximity when the king was at Westminster. Cromwell wrote the legislation that made the entire area a liberty, free from ordinary jurisdiction, and that made Whitehall a royal residence. Yet his own working practices within this new enlarged complex remain opaque and would repay further study. In the changing spaces of administration, Cromwell seems to have made it his business to link together the existing key institutional levers of power across Westminster and the royal court, wherever it was to be found, and the court was now not at the old palace. Although he was working in changing spatial contexts, and at the same time as new administrative offices, he does not seem to have particularly grappled with the potential implications of the lack of public visibility of Henry VIII and the future of the old palace. In his days working for Cardinal Wolsey in the 1520s, he would have come to know the old palace and the physical intersection of the offices well. Between the requests for him to obtain documents and his own notes about bills he had promised to acquire, he was clearly regularly present at the old palace's administrative offices and law-courts.Footnote 66 Sometimes his presence in the manor involved danger, such as in 1527, when there was plague and rioting, and Cromwell helped to organize a watch on Wolsey's behalf.Footnote 67 The new financial offices he helped to create in the 1530s were found haphazard space wherever it might be claimed, as near as possible to other offices, as will be further discussed below. His own Westminster lodgings were first at Whitehall until 1536 and then afterwards largely at St James’ Palace, Henry VIII's new hunting lodge in the manor, giving him some distance from both officials and the wider court.Footnote 68 His interest in the law-courts, the Privy Council, and the Exchequer, to name just three offices, would have brought him back to Westminster, even as his meetings with the king after 1529 were elsewhere at court.Footnote 69 Michael Everett has argued for the importance of his regular attendance at the Privy Council, which met both in the Star Chamber at the old palace and in the new royal lodgings at Whitehall, as the source of his political influence.Footnote 70 In 1538, he was present at either Whitehall or the old palace when the wife of a man in sanctuary showed him a draft pardon for her husband.Footnote 71 All of these are preliminary observations, but they are suggestive. His business was confined to neither palace, even as new possibilities began to emerge more generally out of the changing circumstances in which he worked.
The physical distinctions between the old palace and Whitehall were very strong and this had the effect of reducing the accessibility of the monarch. Whitehall was planned and built in a series of campaigns after 1529 to match recent ideas about palace architecture and the wishes of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. It would continue to be developed throughout Henry VIII's reign, but most of its major elements were in place by the mid-1530s.Footnote 72 The key difference for governance was that, in contrast to the old palace, visitors could be kept well away from the royal household and the court unless they were wanted. The royal lodgings were designed for privacy and increasing control, with orderly sets of rooms organized into ranges where access was strictly limited. However, royal visibility was important enough to legitimate kingship and the workings of political life that there were also regular routes where the king and his court might be seen in predictable ways. One of the best examples of this is the importance to petitioners of the regular processions to the palace chapel on Sundays and feast days for mass, as discussed by Fiona Kisby.Footnote 73 At Whitehall, the route to and the design of the chapel conformed to the patterns that have come to be seen as typical in the historiography of the royal chapels.Footnote 74 The king and queen could process along public galleries to the chapel on feast days and then sit in the Holy Day Closets above the nave to hear mass. On selected feast days they might descend from the closets to take communion. Both of these design choices increased the separation between the monarch and observers, while heightening the visible ceremony of the occasion. The public processional route also allowed members of the public to try to petition the king on his way to or from mass, even if the household ordinances said that an usher was supposed to prevent individuals from approaching.Footnote 75 At Easter 1539 John Worth wrote of precisely this type of ceremonial. According to his letter to Lord Lisle in Calais, Henry VIII processed around Whitehall and then took part in the ceremony of creeping to the cross, a strongly pre-Reformation practice.Footnote 76 This was in contrast to the old palace, where both regulated public space and truly private space were rare. Whitehall's design allowed Henry VIII and his successors to control the stage, while also taking advantage of the audience provided by the administrative offices and law-courts still based at the old palace.
The king's move to Whitehall made space available in the old palace that was used for two things: expanded administration and grace-and-favor lodgings. There was no grand plan, but the net effect of the choices made by Henry VIII during this period was to remove all functions of the palace that had made it a royal home. In the following decades, the surviving areas of the Privy Palace were allocated to other functions and became associated with them, rather than simply being temporary occupants of spaces that might also be used by the court. The House of Lords took over the Queen's Chamber as their permanent meeting place, while the Painted Chamber was used for various administrative purposes, including conferences between the houses.Footnote 77 The Court of General Surveyors originally reused the medieval “Prince's Chamber,” probably the former Queen's Chapel, thus moving administration on a more permanent basis into areas of the former Privy Palace.Footnote 78 The law-courts similarly came to be the sole routine occupants of Westminster Hall, other than when there was a coronation banquet or other exceptional royal ceremonial. Equally, the Privy Council was now divided between the judicial functions that remained in the Star Chamber and the administrative meetings that might be held in any royal palace but tended to take place at Whitehall.Footnote 79 The various expansions of the Exchequer's premises will be dealt with below, because they are tied up with the new revenue courts of the 1530s, but the Exchequer too became more firmly established within the palace. In 1548, the precinct of St Stephen's College within the palace became available on the dissolution of the chantries.Footnote 80 Its chapel became the first permanent home of the House of Commons, where MPs were to remain until 1834.Footnote 81 Rather than being allocated to administration at this point, the rest of the collegiate site was granted to a series of influential MPs who used it as a residence.Footnote 82 Other areas of the palace were similarly handed over to those who wished to have Westminster lodgings, including plots within the former Privy Palace.
The withdrawal of the monarch from routine engagement with those working in or visiting the old Palace of Westminster went alongside two other developments that helped to reshape political culture and ideas about the role of the state. First was the rapid growth in the reach of the administrative offices at Westminster due to the confiscation of much of the Church's lands and revenues, initially the monastic lands from 1536 to 1539 and then those of the chantries in 1545 and 1548. Secondly, partially as a consequence, came the growth in business for the law-courts from around 1560, both locally and nationally.Footnote 83 These developments brought a wider range of individuals to Westminster than had come previously and helped to shape the population's increasing experience of the state as a bureaucracy rather than as the medieval corporate and household kingship. The decision to confiscate the lands of the monasteries immediately created new potential contacts between the Crown and those who had been tenants of the Church as well as those former members of religious orders who now had to draw pensions from the Exchequer. The former tenants owed their rents to the receivers and bailiffs of the Court of Augmentations, while the former members of religious orders needed to draw their pensions or have them drawn for them at the Exchequer.Footnote 84 The need for guidance to navigate the Exchequer can be seen in the series of sixteenth-century printings of the fifteenth-century ordinances listing fees and officials.Footnote 85 As the king sold or granted out the former lands of the Church, the new owners needed their proofs of ownership to be recorded in the documentation of the Court of Augmentations or Chancery. Contemporaries were aware of the problems. Thomas Wriothesley wrote to William Paget in 1546, expressing concerns over the work of the Court of Augmentations, saying that the use of the new courts would cause the older ones to decay and cause confusion in creating documentation in Chancery.Footnote 86 Inevitably, confusions or double grants needed to be litigated and that too brought individuals to Westminster to plead their cases before the courts, particularly the judicial side of Augmentations. The legal and financial business that thronged the palace in the years after 1536 came to a palace without the regular presence of the monarch and dealt with bureaucracies that were increasingly complex and autonomous in appearance.
That autonomy was two-fold. In addition to the importance of the expanding sums managed by the royal financial administration to the creation of a bureaucratic state, as noted by Peter Cunich, its workings in these decades brought new individuals into contact with an increasingly distinct administration where personnel were shared between the financial offices and fewer officials had connections to the royal household and the court. The increase in the amounts of money handled at Westminster meant that in practice alterations would become necessary as financial responsibility was spread between many offices based at the old Palace of Westminster, with associated judicial and arbitration functions.Footnote 87 At their height in the 1540s, six departments handled different aspects of royal finance. They were the Exchequer itself, the Courts of Augmentations, First Fruits and Tenths, General Surveyors, and Wards and Liveries, with the Duchy of Lancaster existing in parallel but often sharing personnel. The two new offices of the Courts of Augmentations and First Fruits and Tenths were accommodated alongside the other offices in the old palace. A new set of offices for the Court of Augmentations was built in 1537 at a cost of £662, on the site of an earlier set of Exchequer offices near Westminster Hall, formerly used by the then obsolete auditors of foreign accounts.Footnote 88 The Court of First Fruits and Tenths, perhaps because of its more limited remit over ecclesiastical payments, seems never to have had a fixed home and thus probably continued to meet in whatever rooms happened to be available within the complex.Footnote 89 Between them, they handled most of the new revenues from the confiscation and sale of monastic and collegiate lands that, along with the debasement of the coinage, swelled the coffers and resources of the Crown for a time.Footnote 90 At the same time, the Exchequer drove many of the practical innovations of how to manage coin and communications. These innovations incorporated the Privy Council into the authorization process for payments, and found ways to incorporate new forms of authority into their procedures that did not rely on the monarch's personal and routine involvement.Footnote 91
The increasing separation between the royal household and administration can be seen then in the careers of those men who worked in the old palace. They might work across many of the offices in the palace, but now they were rarely also to be found in the royal household. During these decades, the division between the royal household and administration became stronger as it became less convenient to try to combine roles. Men like Sir William Paget, who focused on their presence at court, tended to use deputies to carry out their obligations at Westminster. Paget used his deputies extensively in his role in the Signet Office while he served as secretary to the council and in more nebulous intelligence and finance roles.Footnote 92 Sir Walter Mildmay also made his career in this complex environment, first in the Court of Augmentations, then in General Surveyors, and on other financial commissions through the 1540s and 1550s. What is notable about his career is that until he was made a Privy Councilor in 1558 he held no position in the royal household, despite serving in ever more senior roles in Crown finance.Footnote 93 Mildmay and William Cecil moved from administration to the court when they became Privy Councilors and would serve as links between the monarch and the administration that acted in the queen's name, as will be seen in the next section. Thomas Audley, who ended his career as the Lord Chancellor, in the early 1530s was, unusually, both a Groom of the Chamber at court and the Attorney General for the Duchy of Lancaster, based out of the Duchy Chamber in the old palace. He was among the last such royal servants.Footnote 94 The lesser men who worked in the Exchequer were increasingly only to be found in the other financial offices or in the Commons. Edmund Downing, who was the deputy Chamberlain of the Receipt of the Exchequer from 1560 to 1576, never held an household office.Footnote 95 Similarly, the antiquarian Nicholas Brigham, one of the Tellers of the Exchequer, who also oversaw the sale of Crown lands in the 1550s, had come to Westminster due to his experience in the financial management of the Duke of Norfolk's household, but was not drawn on for the royal household.Footnote 96 Sir John Baker was at the same time Chancellor of the Court of First Fruits and Tenths, and the Exchequer, Under-treasurer of England in the 1540s, and an MP.Footnote 97 Parliament was often the link between the two groups who were called on to advance royal interests in the Commons.Footnote 98 For example, the MP John Tamworth's career was built in the royal household where he was Master of the Privy Purse, among other roles, from 1559, as well as serving on local commissions, without holding any administrative positions.Footnote 99
Even after Henry VIII stopped using Westminster as a standing house, the palace remained available to him. “The great house at Westminster,” to quote Chapuys’ description, was a potential royal home, alongside its administrative functions.Footnote 100 The 1536 Act of Parliament renamed York Place as Westminster and so papered over the novelty of the functions of the new palace. It also formalized an increasingly deep divide between the king's court, based at any of the royal homes, and his administration, which had increasingly settled at Westminster in the fourteenth century, and now had ever more permanent homes within the old palace. The Privy Council, split between the administrative and advisory body that remained with the monarch at court, and the judicial body that continued to meet in the Star Chamber in the old palace, epitomized this shift. Similarly, other offices became more strongly identified with their new and exclusive lodgings. The law-courts did not have to share Westminster Hall with the king's household, while other offices started their move into the Privy Palace, particularly the Court of General Surveyors and the House of Lords. By the 1550s, the House of Commons had also acquired its own home in the former St Stephen's Chapel and the Exchequer offices had been remade. This increasing physical identification between the offices and the buildings they occupied went alongside a growth in business brought to the courts by the effects of the Reformation. Even as more individuals had contact with the work of the offices and courts based at the old Palace of Westminster, the monarch increasingly had less contact with those offices and with the wider public. Instead, Henry VIII and his children were able withdraw into the court, where access was more tightly controlled and where fewer individuals had reason to come. Whitehall's formal lodgings were not Westminster Hall, open to the public, thanks to the law-courts and the administrative offices surrounding them. This divide between the administrative and social elements of kingship was also increasingly reflected in a divide between those who made their careers at court or in administration.
Public palace and public governance, 1572 to 1599
The last three decades of the sixteenth century saw a series of attempted reforms in governance, anxieties about the effectiveness of royal administration, and a deepening of the divide that had begun to open up in the 1530s between the court and administration, creating the rupture between public governance and the monarch that would feature so starkly in the politics of the early seventeenth century. This played out at Westminster both through decisions made about how to use the various rooms and lodgings within the palace and in what members of the public saw when they visited. Foreign visitors such as Paul Hentzner, who visited England in 1598, dismissed the palace complex as an administrative center and emphasized that the court was worth seeing, calling Whitehall “truly royal” and making pleasure excursions to Hampton Court.Footnote 101 A confluence of events in 1572 brought together significant alterations at the old palace, both in terms of the buildings themselves and the administrative systems they served. In that year, William Cecil became Lord Treasurer and immediately began financial reforms in order to solve the financial crisis of the previous year.Footnote 102 At the same time, a significant set of the palace's grace-and-favor lodgings were brought back into administrative use, signaling a new understanding of the palace's functions and audiences. For this period, we are particularly fortunate to have the detailed diaries of Richard Stonley, one of the minor officials of the Exchequer, who was charged with embezzlement in the 1590s after a forty-year career in royal administration. His two surviving diaries give an insight into the working patterns of the old Palace of Westminster during this period and the new ways developed since 1529 to connect it to the decisions made by the Privy Council, which was based at the royal court, wherever it might be found.
Despite its increasing use by royal administration and Parliament over the course of the sixteenth century, as well as later shifts towards using Whitehall for administrative space, the Palace of Westminster continued to be a location for public royal ceremony. It tended to be used for particular kinds of public royal ceremonial, as indeed it still is today, which united the person of the monarch, their government, and Parliament, such as coronation banquets and the State Opening of Parliament.Footnote 103 These events usually focused on the formal expression of the monarch's relationship with the political community, mediated through the institutions and long royal history of Westminster. Ceremonial that had become particular to Westminster continued to be held there, while those public events that might be held at any royal residence were no longer held at the old palace. While Elizabeth I came to Westminster for the state openings during her reign, she never attended a chapel service at the old palace, for example. While the increasingly confident parliamentary display has naturally received the most historiographical attention, the other ceremonial uses of the palace continued to be important to the Crown. In Pauline Croft's discussion of the parliamentary installation of James I's son Henry as Prince of Wales, the use of Westminster as the venue was important for displaying political harmony between the king, Parliament, and the wider political community, despite the simmering tensions between them.Footnote 104 Westminster continued to be particularly publicly accessible and thus suitable for this type of royal image-making. This installation was one of the last such events held at the old palace. Henry's brother Charles was not installed as Prince of Wales in the same way. In the next reign, as Charles I's relationships with the political community became more troubled, he retreated into private court activities and personal rule at Whitehall, leaving the public stage at Westminster to Parliament.Footnote 105 In this, he continued and exacerbated the trends begun in the early sixteenth century towards a bureaucratic sense of the emerging state, as seen in the occupants of the buildings. While beyond the scope of this article, it is worth noting that Charles II began the gradual move of financial personnel to Whitehall. The Treasurer and then the Treasury Commission, a division of the Privy Council with financial responsibility from 1667, began to meet in the Council Chamber in Whitehall after the Restoration.Footnote 106
Turning back to the late sixteenth-century shifts at Westminster itself, in 1572, a major section of the palace returned to governmental use on the death of Edward Hastings, Lord Loughborough, who had held the collegiate buildings of St Stephen's as a private residence for over a decade.Footnote 107 The college's buildings were brought into the dominant usage of the palace at this point: administration. The building works at the old Palace of Westminster since 1559 had concentrated on making it meet the needs of government and administration. Grace-and-favor housing was correspondingly de-emphasized, even as courtiers continued to seek accommodation close to Whitehall and Parliament.Footnote 108 In 1563–65, work had begun on new buildings for the Exchequer, starting with a new “record house” and then rebuilding many of the other buildings in the vicinity.Footnote 109 By 1572 the Exchequer Chamber to the east of Westminster Hall had been rebuilt, and new buildings, including a range on New Palace Yard, had been added for the use of officials, including the Treasurer's and Queen's Remembrancers. This required rehousing the Court of Wards, which moved to “the upper end of Westminster Hall,” immediately to the south.Footnote 110 The college's site was then swiftly added in 1572 to this emerging Exchequer complex to the east of Westminster Hall, where resident officials managed the Crown's revenues and where individuals came to interact with government. After repairs and upgrades from 1572 to 1574, further works were required in the mid-1580s.Footnote 111 The college became the working base for the Tellers of the Exchequer, the Auditor of the Exchequer (also known as the Writer of the Tallies), and Walter Mildmay as Chancellor.Footnote 112 The tellers dealt directly with coin paid into and out of the Treasury and thus had regular contact with both the Privy Council and the general public, as can be seen in the constant stream of letters to them about upcoming financial obligations and payments that were expected.Footnote 113 The Auditor of the Exchequer, Robert Petre, who oversaw the tellers’ work, also was heavily involved in the juggling efforts to balance available cash with the Crown's financial obligations. Francis Walsingham in 1577 asked Robert Petre to confirm which of the tellers would be responsible for paying him, “if it bee not Mr Freak [Robert Freke].”Footnote 114 Mildmay gave up his rooms in St Stephen's by around 1586, probably because he was more often at court and the pressure on space in the palace was intense.Footnote 115
Richard Stonley, one of the Tellers of the Exchequer, was very far from the most reliable agent of Crown finance; however, he gives us a glimpse into the administrative world of Westminster at the end of the sixteenth century.Footnote 116 Three of his diaries survive and are now in the Folger Library because he was an early purchaser of William Shakespeare's plays. The two diaries that deal with his time at the Exchequer cover the years 1581–82 and 1593–94.Footnote 117 By 1581, he had nearly thirty years of experience in the Receipt, where he had been first appointed in February 1554.Footnote 118 In between the two diaries, his financial accounting practices were called into question by an enquiry by the barons and Treasurer of the Exchequer and he was forced to start repaying the £12,608 that he had misused and lost.Footnote 119 His 1593–94 diary reveals that he was clearly much less trusted to handle the Crown's cash and was under tight scrutiny from the auditor.Footnote 120 His last diary records life in debtors’ prison, where he died in 1600.Footnote 121 Stonley's career was in some ways typical of a later sixteenth-century administrator because he, like most of his colleagues, worked only at Westminster. He served briefly as an MP, but otherwise can only be found in the administrative offices rather than having any connection with the royal household. Instead, his personal connections were with the City of London, where he lived, despite the vow in one of his diaries to spend more time in his lodgings within the Palace of Westminster rather than pay for boat fare.Footnote 122 Stonley's major connections were to the Petre family, with whom he dined regularly at their home in Essex and elsewhere.Footnote 123 Robert Petre was a colleague in the Exchequer. His brother had been one of the Westminster officials who had moved from financial court to financial court before finishing his career as a member of the Privy Council and Stonley's patron.Footnote 124
Stonley's Westminster was one of administration rather than frequent royal display; he never notes that the queen was herself present at the palace. He regularly rode to the palace from his home in the City of London to either work in his offices in the cloister or to “keep the receipt,” by which he meant being available to make or receive payments in the receipt of the Exchequer, just off the northeast corner of Westminster Hall.Footnote 125 Stonley tended to be present during the law terms, the four periods each year when cases were heard in the law-courts during the mornings. During the term, Stonley and his fellow tellers appear to have had a rota for who would be available to the public, and outside of term Stonley at least ignored the palace, despite the admonition that the tellers were always to be present in the mornings.Footnote 126 Stonley received messengers carrying money at his home in the city, as he paid for carrying part of the tax receipts from his house to the chests at Westminster, but payments were nearly always made at the palace, such as when he mentioned disbursing pensions in 1581.Footnote 127 There was not always enough coin available to him: in 1593 Stonley had to answer “such p[er]sons as had success for paymentes of money… and put them over till Monday next.”Footnote 128
This entire system was driven by a system of letters and discussions linking together the queen, the Privy Council, and the officials based at Westminster. In 1572, the Privy Council received a primer on how the Exchequer worked to aid them in this system.Footnote 129 Weekly certificates were supplemented by explanatory letters when necessary.Footnote 130 In 1588, the Auditor of the Receipt, Robert Petre, wrote to Cecil at court to give him and, by extension, the Privy Council, further financial information.Footnote 131 Petre told Cecil and the council how much money was available in the Receipt, what demands he expected on the stored money, and when more cash was expected to be deposited. He also expressed his judgment that the Exchequer could meet the demands for pensions to be paid without harming the queen's financial interests. In 1593, his successor, Vincent Skinner, similarly wrote of his intention to juggle finances to meet payments due and asked for Cecil's authorization for his plan.Footnote 132 Confusion was also dealt with by letter, as when in 1576 the former teller Roger Alford was asked about an authorization for double payment in a privy seal warrant that it turned out Alford had already paid in 1558.Footnote 133 Occasional meetings supplemented the written discussions, such as when Stonley went to Hackney to speak to Walter Mildmay in person in December 1582 and to Hendon in November 1593 to speak to Sir John Fortescue, the Chancellor, about Exchequer business.Footnote 134 Finally, when the spending was complete, accounts were sent to court rather than being approved at Westminster.Footnote 135 The distinction was now very marked between the lesser administrators who kept the offices running and who were the point of contact for the public at Westminster and those who served on the Privy Council at court.
Alongside the complete distinction between the royal court and administration came a clear sense that Westminster was the place for public business, even among the Privy Councilors, and that the courts and offices based there looked to the needs of the wider population. Chancery commentator John Norden wrote that the common people flocked to Westminster for access to the courts, including here the offices such as Chancery and the Exchequer, during term time, and the presence of Parliament, that “draweth unto it a great accesse of noble persons and others.”Footnote 136 Similarly, in 1598, Paul Hentzner noted that Elizabeth I's ancestors used to live at Westminster, “for at that time the kings of England determined causes in their own proper person,” but now had a truly royal palace at Whitehall, so that the work of administration could be separated from the monarch and their court.Footnote 137 At the start of the conflict in the Exchequer over record-keeping practices, fees, and housing that would be called by Elton “the war in the Receipt,” Robert Petre reacted with exasperation to the proposals of another Exchequer official, Chidiock Wardour, emphasizing the redundancy of his suggestions to maintain an extra record of payments in the pells and to store coin centrally that would slow down an already slow process for the Crown's creditors and debtors.Footnote 138 Appellants continued to need to use knowledgeable neighbors and connections to navigate this complex system. In 1576, for example, one of Walter Mildmay's neighbors asked Mildmay's son-in-law for help in navigating the world of justice and the audit at Westminster because he could not go himself in person: understanding what was going on was still difficult.Footnote 139 Walter Mildmay told another petitioner, Robert Seyngfeld, that Mildmay's own home of Apethorpe in Northamptonshire was “noe place to here that matter, but [he] would here yt in the Quenes Exchecker.” Seyngfeld followed this up with a letter complaining that he was “not able to trawell” to Westminster and asking that Mildmay make an exception to the rule that public business was to be kept for when he was in the correct location for it.Footnote 140 Mildmay seems to have held firm that Seyngfeld needed to find a way to bring the matter to Westminster, whether in person or by proxy.
Alongside the clear sense from contemporary commentary that the palace was a place of administrative business went a substantial increase in the amount of that business being handled at the palace. Here the law-courts are the best example, because the number of cases brought to the central courts can be tallied. Due to the need for Chancery writs for litigation and the Exchequer's increasing role as an equity court dealing with financial matters relating to the now-defunct Courts of Augmentations and First Fruits and Tenths, they too will have seen rises in business in this period. Christopher Brooks has noted how the law-courts continued to increase their business during these last thirty years of the sixteenth century, adding to the business of the palace, with a meteoric rise after 1560, to about ca. 13,000 cases annually in 1580 and ca. 23,000 cases in 1606.Footnote 141 He argued that the increase in litigation came from a combination of factors, including growing trade, inflation making the old rules about suits needing to be concerned with goods over the value of 40 shillings apply to more potential suits, and the long-range effects of the Reformation on manorial courts. All of these elements increased the numbers of litigants who could come to Westminster and interact with the bureaucracies there to seek redress or to defend themselves.Footnote 142 Added awareness and training in the law, whether formally at the Inns of Court or through informal networks and news culture also helped to increase the accessibility of the law-courts.Footnote 143 Stonley himself was among these litigants, with cases relating to his lands in Essex and elsewhere.Footnote 144 The palace was a busy place by the end of the sixteenth century, but it was busy with Parliament, bureaucracy, and the law, not with the monarch's own presence. Instead, the court surrounded the monarch, and administration was directed from there, often at a considerable distance. The Westminster institutions were now a state bureaucracy rather than a household government.
Conclusion
Across the sixteenth century, the old Palace of Westminster went from being the king's chief palace to the home of administration carried out nominally in the monarch's name. Before 1502, no king might ignore for long the Palace of Westminster and its assorted administrative and judicial functions. By 1593, John Norden could note that petitioners regularly asked Elizabeth I to spend more time at Whitehall so that they could attempt to get through the layers of security to bring their requests to her in person near to where they were accessing government at the old palace.Footnote 145 Between these two moments, the years after 1529 had seen increased business thronging the corridors and less overlap between the personnel of the monarch's household and their administration, suggesting to Elton the appearance of a Tudor revolution in government. Yet, these dates do not mark definitive turning points, but moments when the policy implications of a cascade of choices reveal themselves in the sources. Even as the accidental and incremental transformations in the sixteenth century saw the administrative offices based at the Palace of Westminster become distant and distinct from the monarch's person, those changes were themselves not fixed. They were dependent on the continuing sense of utility in the bureaucratic arrangements offered to the wider population, and the interplay between the monarch, their officials, and Parliament. In the charged political atmosphere of the 1640s, Speaker Lenthall denied Charles I the knowledge of where five MPs had gone and asserted the rights of the Commons in their own home over the king's rights to his palace outside the moments of public royal ceremonial that continued intermittently at Westminster. It was perhaps the nadir of the separation between the monarch and Westminster's occupants. New choices would be made after the Restoration as Charles II chose to move Treasury officials into Whitehall and began to create administrative systems that worked for him, once again spatially linking personal governance, some officials, and the court, but this time not at Westminster, but at Whitehall. Further developments then made the modern Palace of Westminster the home of Parliament as opposed to the home of government at Whitehall. Across the sixteenth century that trend was present, but not inevitable or complete. It was an episode in the long and complex creation of the modern political and governmental systems in and around the manor and then the city of Westminster.
Open access
