What became Greenwich Palace was originally built by Humphrey Duke of Gloucester. He was granted the manor of Greenwich in 1427 and laid out a hunting park there; ten years later he began a house which was completed around 1439.
Greenwich Palace was a special kind of residence known as a pleasaunce. This was just what it sounded like – a pleasure ground, a building reserved for private delectation. The pleasaunce was, unusually for the time, built in brick; it had two courtyards and a great garden, little garden and an orchard to its south. There also was a fine chapel with stained glass, a gallery overlooking the garden, a hall, kitchens, gatehouse, and a dovecot.
It was this brick pleasuance, with a conjoined friary of Observant Friars, that Henry VII decided to rebuild in around 1500. Henry VII put his new house right on top of the old one and on the same alignment parallel with the river. It too was of brick and hundreds of thousands of bricks were made in the park nearby. The new manor of Greenwich (The Tudors did not call it Placentia) was, like its predecessor, a courtyard house with its principal façade facing the river. In the midst of this was a great brick tower containing the king’s privy chamber and privy closets.
Henry VIII was seventeen when he became King in 1509; tall, muscular and full of testosterone, with an imagination captured by chivalric romances and the heroic deeds of knights. He had money too. His father had left the royal finances in a good state. First, only months after his accession, he commissioned new stables at Greenwich, one for his coursers, the horses he used for jousting and hunting, and a second for a stud in Greenwich Park. Close to the stables the king commissioned his great armoury mill. This was a highly novel venture. Up to this point the top-quality armour worn by man and horse, both in the tiltyard and on the field of battle, had to be imported. Henry wanted a native workshop making armour to rival the great pieces worn by European princes and had invited armourers to England in 1511. But it was the start of construction of his mill in 1515 and the employment of eleven Dutch and German armourers that marked the start of what were to be the Greenwich Armouries, a royal armour factory that supplied the Tudor court.
The third great work at Greenwich in Henry’s early years was a permanent tiltyard. The king took a great interest in this; he was an expert in the sport and personally drew out the plan of the tiltyard for his meeting with Francis I of France in 1520. At Greenwich an area was laid out of approximately 650ft long and 250 feet wide and on its western edge were built permanent grandstands in the form of two towers and a linking gallery.
So Henry VIII’s Greenwich was a fully self-contained royal headquarters. It had to be because in 1512 Westminster Palace had been ravaged by fire. Henry had no interest in rebuilding it and so he made Greenwich his main residence. Thus between 1512 and 1532, when Whitehall was completed, Greenwich was the principal residence of the Tudor monarchy, its ceremonial and its domestic hub. In the latter part of henry’s reign it was used less because after 1538 the king re-orientated his life westwards to Hampton Court.
During her reign Queen Elizabeth had occupied the king’s lodgings on the river front and so by 1603 the Tudor queen’s side, on the south, was hopelessly inadequate and old-fashioned. At the start of James I’s reign the priority was to make the consort’s rooms habitable again. Anne of Denmark was given a new privy kitchen, stairs down into the gardens, a new fashionable ceiling in her privy chamber and a bathroom. But the most telling alteration in 1622-3 was to the chapel. The royal pew was given a great new bay window looking into the body of the chapel, lavishly carved with pendants, putti bearing the king’s arms and winged victories. The chapel walls were painted with an elaborate mural scheme by the sergeant painter, John de Critz, while the ceiling was repainted and gilded. In short, the interior of the chapel was transformed beyond recognition.
In November 1614 Greenwich Palace was added to Anne of Denmark’s jointure. Anne had always used Greenwich independently from the King and it was the place she chose for her many confinements. But from 1614 onwards she regularly held court at Greenwich herself; staying there, for instance, at Easter in 1617. Anne immediately began to embellish her new residence: she added three rooms on the garden front supported by an Italianate loggia, probably like that at Somerset House, and she commissioned Inigo Jones to build her the building we know today as the Queen’s House. Inigo Jones was probably asked to start work on the design in October 1615. John Chamberlain picked up gossip that the new building would cost £4,000, but the Queen only spent £1,400 of that before work was stopped on 30 April 1618. The following year she died and with only the foundations laid, the site remained abandoned until 1630, a period of twelve years. In that time James was a very infrequent visitor to Greenwich and in due course the house was granted to Charles, Prince of Wales.
Although under Anne the Queen’s House was probably not seen as a particularly important commission, the same cannot be said for its completion under Henrietta Maria. The total cost of completing the house over five-and-a-half years was £7,500. Paid out of her personal income of about £28,000 a year, this was easily the Queen’s largest single architectural outlay, even the new chapel at Somerset House of 1630-5 cost only £4,045.
During the commonwealth all but the queen’s house was virtually demolished and at the Restoration Charles II laid new plans for Greenwich. Before the Civil War it had been used as the place for diplomatic receptions – ambassadors landing there from Gravesend and going on to Tower Wharf. Right from the start Charles had no intention of re-creating a traditional standing house to which the court would remove and stay at length. Charles’s new Greenwich was probably intended to be a ceremonial gateway to the kingdom following early Stuart practice.
Work on the new palace ground to a halt as a result of the financial difficulties faced by the king in the late 1660s and in the following decade he was to concentrate what sums became available on the refurbishment of Windsor Castle. A visitor to Greenwich in the 1670s would have seen the boarded up hulk of the king’s block, set amidst piles of demolished brick and stone from the Tudor palace and the Queen’s House surrounded by half-dug foundations.
The site of the Palace was eventually to be built on and given, by Queen Mary II, as a hospital for seamen in the 1690s. In the late 1800s it became the Royal Naval College and is now home to the University of Greenwich and Trinity Laban Conservatoire.