I. THE ROYAL PALACE OF NONSUCH, SURREY.

The wanton destruction of the celebrated palace of Nonsuch, sacrificed to the extravagance and consequent embarrassments of the first Duchess of Cleveland, was probably the heaviest loss which English architecture has suffered since the Dissolution of the Monasteries. As an example of domestic architecture, just at the period of its transition, it was unique in combining in one building the familiar and almost unaltered features of the old English home with the most daring and fantastic ideas of the Italian Renaissance. Any additional information, therefore, which bears upon its character is of special value, not from an archæological so much as from an architectural point of view. Hence the discovery of an entirely new view of Nonsuch Palace is ample excuse for marshalling once again the facts of its architectural history.

The building activity of the first two Tudor kings is a somewhat neglected subject, since nearly all their greatest works have perished and the modern mind refuses to visualise the gorgeous descriptions of the chroniclers, even when illustrated by the somewhat bizarre creations of contemporary artists.

And yet the more the subject is studied the more the conclusion is forced upon one that the old-time historians were guilty of little exaggeration, and that the Tudor palaces were amongst the remarkable buildings of Europe. The Spanish gentlemen who accompanied Phillip II. to England were amazed at the magnificence of the palaces of the English kings, in comparison with which they admitted the Alcazar at Madrid, the residence of Castilian royalty, was a thing of no account.

Henry VII.’s chapel fortunately remains intact as an example of the structure which a Tudor king (otherwise noted for his excessive parsimony) thought suitable for his tomb-house. His palace at Richmond and his great hospital at the Savoy were on a corresponding scale of profusion. With his son Henry VIII. the ideas of the Renaissance were given a freer hand. The father had employed an Italian to design his tomb, and the son, towards the close of his reign, invited Italian architects to design his buildings.

The architectural works of Henry VIII. consist chiefly of a series of palaces, no fewer than five, which he erected in the course of his thirty-eight years’ reign, apart from a number of manorial residences, such as his riverside mansion at Chelsea. Of these palaces, Bridewell, Guisnes, and Nonsuch have entirely vanished, but the gatehouse and other remains at St. James’s exist, and the mutilated remains at Beaulieu, in Essex, are still remarkable.

It is with the latest (in point of date) and in every way the most remarkable of these that we are at present concerned. The palace of Nonsuch achieved a reputation throughout Europe which has never been accorded to any other English building before or since.

Situated on the richly-wooded slopes of the Surrey hills, amongst the fairest prospects in the Home Counties, the ancient manor-house of Cuddington (between Cheam and Ewell) appears to have early attracted the attention of Henry VIII. In 1538 he acquired the manor from Richard de Cuddington, and with a delightfully Tudor directness proceeded at once quietly to remove the church and village and divert the roads, that nothing might interrupt the view from his windows or destroy the symmetry of his house and grounds. The site being thus cleared of its ancient buildings, the new palace was begun.

Many tons of stone quarried at Merstham, in the Reigate hills, were used on the works, and the great priory church at Merton was destroyed piecemeal to provide materials. The accounts still existing for the year 1539 preserve the names of every man employed, from the clerk of works to the labourers and apprentices, some 230 in all.

Although it had been in progress for nine years, Nonsuch was still incomplete at Henry’s death in 1547, but was nevertheless far enough advanced to be habitable.

The celebrated Sir Thomas Cawarden, Master of the Revels, was warden of the palace and parks of Nonsuch during the final years of Henry VIII. and in the time of Edward VI., but in 1557 Queen Mary granted the building and parks to Henry, Earl of Arundel, and his son-in-law, Lord Lumley, who eventually completed it by adding the outer courtyard.

Under Queen Elizabeth Nonsuch reached its zenith. For many years it was her favourite residence, and after her death it rapidly declined. Sold by the Commonwealth, it reverted to the Crown at the Restoration, and finally came to an ignominious end at the rapacious hands of the Duchess of Cleveland, who destroyed the house and cut up the park into farms.

What is known of the building itself is derived chiefly from the Parliamentary Survey taken in 1650 (which gives a detailed account of the palace and grounds) and from two views—one by Hofnagel (published in Braun and Hohenberg’s “Civitates Orbis Terrarum”) and the other an inset in Speed’s Map of Surrey. Both of these represent the garden or south front of the house, and the appearance of the north front and sides has up to the present time been quite conjectural. I am able, however, to reproduce a third view, taken from the north-west, showing this front and the flank of the building. The original engraving (from a picture then in the possession of Lord Fitzwilliam) was published by the Society of Antiquaries in 1765, with the title “Richmond Palace from the Green.” That this picture is not Richmond, but Nonsuch, is capable of easy proof. The angle-turret on the extreme right at once suggests this, and a careful perusal of the Parliamentary Survey leaves not the slightest doubt on the point. The avenue, the bowling-green, and the two gatehouses, the inner one with its clock-turret, are all fully described, and one can only be surprised that this interesting fact has never before been discovered.

The palace consisted of two main courtyards surrounded by buildings and almost equal in size (the outer 115 ft.⁠[6] by 132 ft., the inner 137 ft. by 116 ft.). The style employed in the first of these presents nothing extraordinary. Built, according to Evelyn, by Lord Lumley, but more probably by his father-in-law, the Earl of Arundel, early in Elizabeth’s reign, it was constructed of stone throughout, with a handsome gatehouse three stories high, with octagonal angle-turrets in the centre of the north front. This gate stood on the axis of the great avenue that led up to the house from the London Road.

Nonsuch had the unusual arrangement amongst English Tudor plans of two gatehouses, the one behind the other. This was probably due to the outer courtyard not having been contemplated in the original design. The inner gate stood between the two courts, and was, with the whole of the buildings behind it, the work of Henry VIII.

The architect appears to have been a Florentine artist named Antonio Toto dell’ Nunziata, upon whom Henry VIII. conferred a patent of denization in 1538. He is referred to by Vasari (Lives of the Painters ), who asserts that he entered the service of the King of England, for whom he executed numerous works, and more especially the principal palace of that monarch, by whom he was very largely remunerated.⁠[7] His name occurs with some frequency in the records of the later years of Henry VIII. He resided in the parish of St. Bride, Fleet Street.

Fig. 2.—NONSUCH PALACE, FROM THE SOUTH.

Drawn by

Speed (1611).

Fig. 3.—NONSUCH PALACE, FROM THE NORTH-WEST.

Vetusta Monumenta, Vol. ii. (1765).

In 1544 that much-discussed Italian, John of Padua, makes his appearance as Devizer of the King’s Buildings, and as Nonsuch was the most important then in progress, it is quite possible that he also was employed upon the works.

This first building, the joint product of Italian design and English craftsmanship, was entered from the north by an ascent of eight steps under the inner gatehouse, which is described in the Survey of 1650 as “of free stone three stories high, leaded and turreted in the four corners, in the middle of which gatehouse stands a clock case turreted and leaded all over wherein is placed a clock and bell.” The remarkable appearance of this gate is best shown in Speed’s view, which also shows the charming oriel window (somewhat similar to that at Hengrave Hall, Suffolk) over the inner arch, and the sundial above.

The remainder of the building was two stories high, of which the walls of the ground floor, according to the Survey, were of stone and the upper portions of timber. Externally, however, the garden or south front was of timber construction from the ground up. Facing the privy garden, with its marble fountains, obelisks, and pyramids, this front was flanked by two polygonal turrets five stories high, carried up well above the main building and finished with lead parapets and lanterns with heraldic lions bearing standards, “the king’s beastes” of Tudor documents, on every angle. “These turrets,” says the Survey, “command the prospect and view of both the Parks of Nonsuch and of most of the country round about and are the chief ornament of the whole house of Nonsuch.”

In the centre of the front was a large oriel window, probably to the Presence Chamber, which was on the first floor.

The building was a timber frame, the spaces between the studding being occupied by pargetted panels bearing the celebrated series of “statues, pictures, and other antique forms,” which aroused such universal admiration during the century and a half of their existence.

Nonsuch appears to have been one of the earliest instances of this type of work in England. Le Neve, who saw the house when half destroyed, describes them as done in plaster-work made of rye-dough [sic], very costly. “There are,” says Evelyn, “some mezzorelievos as big as life—the story of ye heathen Gods, emblems, compartments, &c.” On the garden front were represented the labours of Hercules. There is evidence that these reliefs were painted, and to enhance further the richness of the whole design the faces of the half-timber work were covered with gilded scales of lead or slate nailed on, after the fashion still to be seen in many Continental towns.

Apart from the abstract question of taste, it can easily be imagined that a building so adorned must have presented an appearance of extreme sumptuousness, and while it is impossible to regard it quite as a serious essay in architecture, yet as an example of a rare exotic grafted on an alien stem it is of extraordinary interest.

It can only be compared in the history of English art with that lordly pleasure-house which King Henry VIII. erected near Guisnes in the Calais pale on the occasion of the Field of the Cloth of Gold. That a marked similarity existed between the two buildings is evident from the minute description of the Guisnes palace to be found in Hall’s Chronicle.

The existing remains of the palace consist solely of the base of a chalk wall, faced with red brick in Old English bond, some 275 ft. in length and lying at right angles to the great avenue leading from the London Road. In all probability this formed a part of the wall surrounding the privy garden, and the main building lay rather to the north of it, on the axis of the avenue.

Some little distance to the west of the house was a building known as the Banqueting House. It is described in the Parliamentary Survey as “one structure of timber building of quadrangular form pleasantly situated upon the highest part of the said Nonsuch Park commonly called ‘the Banquetting House’ being compassed round with a brick wall the four corners whereof represent four half moons or fortified angles.” The house itself was three stories high, with a lantern above and a balcony placed “for prospect” at each of the four corners.

Considering the material, it is not surprising that it has quite disappeared; but the artificial platform upheld by brick retaining walls is in existence. The “fortified angles” which caught the eye of the Parliamentary Commissioner are still preserved, and, with them, remains of the double flight of stone steps leading up to the entrance.

“The Banquet House” figures largely in Elizabethan literature, though its origin and date of introduction are somewhat obscure. There can be little doubt that it was due to one of those vagaries of fashion, combined with the sixteenth-century passion for the new and strange, which attempted to transplant a custom from its native southern soil to the uncongenial air of England. The fashion once started, however, held its place with remarkable tenacity, and received its final form under the hand of Sir Christopher Wren and his school in the Orangeries at Kensington and Richmond.

The example at Nonsuch is one of the earliest in this country to which a definite date can be assigned. It is mentioned as a completed building in the first year of Edward VI., and consequently must have formed part of the original work of Henry VIII. and his Italian advisers.

A document preserved at Loseley Place contains an inventory of goods received for furnishing the Banqueting House in 1547. They include nine Turkey carpets and one carpet of green satin embroidered upon with sundry of the king’s beasts, antique heads, grapes and birds, &c. Evidently the interior decoration of Nonsuch fell little short of the exterior in magnificence.

One other building deserves a passing mention. “The Standing” in the park was used by Elizabeth as a convenient vantage ground from which to view the hunting. No trace of it remains, but, fortunately, a complete structure of this class is still standing in the Hunting Lodge in Epping Forest, and it too is associated with the name of this queen. The upper stories of the timber framing were left open between the studding or uprights, forming a convenient gallery from which to view the sport.

Fragments of the destroyed palace found their way to Gaynsford Hall, Carshalton, to Durdans by Epsom, and to the vicarage at Ewell; but these houses have since been rebuilt and all the authentic remains of the most remarkable of Tudor buildings lie buried beneath the turf of Nonsuch Park. The archæologist is apt to think that monastic houses and feudal castles are alone worthy of his attention; but the recovery of the ground plan of Nonsuch would be an achievement of even greater architectural value, while its wealth of historic associations places it far above them all in sentimental interest.

—A. W. C.

Fig. 4.—THE BANQUETING HOUSE.

Drawn by

Alfred W. Clapham.

THE FORTUNE THEATRE, LONDON (1600)

Fig. 5.—VIEW OF INTERIOR.

Drawn by

Walter H. Godfrey.