Britain's Tudor Treasure: A Night at Hampton Court

-Gosh.

-Wow, you look beautiful.

'David Starkey and I are putting on a royal ceremony.

I love the canopy.

Ladies and gentlemen of Hampton Court,

this is a fantastic night to be here,

and tonight we're going to see the palace being used

as it was by the Tudor court.

All of you remember the Tudors walked differently from us,

the shoulders go back.

Get the idea?

We're celebrating the extraordinary fact that this year,

Hampton Court Palace, Britain's finest Tudor building,

will be 500 years old.

For more than two centuries this was a pleasure palace

for the nation's monarchs.

But when you hear the name Hampton Court,

you inevitably think of the first king to live here, Henry VIII.

At Hampton Court, Henry's majesty was made manifest

through art and architecture.

But for Henry, and indeed for Hampton Court,

no day was more important than the 15th of October, 1537.

The occasion was the christening of Henry's son and heir,

Prince Edward, only three days after he had been born.

This was the day Henry had waited for all his adult life.

His own prestige, the cementing of the Tudor dynasty,

the promise of stability for England, all were riding on it.

What would it have been like

to be present at such a momentous occasion?

What was involved in staging such a splendid ceremony

under the eye of the most demanding of monarchs?

We're going to find out, with the help of a team of experts

who will bring Tudor culture back to life.

Lucy and I will draw on historical records.

Come on, look at it again, what does it really resemble?

It looks like a sort of video recording.

And we'll study the treasures and craftsmanship

of the Tudor era, to work out how the christening was staged.

I think there's a real problem.

The purpose of this structure is visibility.

Let me explain how it works. All the spectators are here.

We'll see how Henry rushed through a wildly ambitious rebuilding programme

to make Hampton Court the perfect showcase for a newborn prince.

And with a cast of nearly 100 volunteers,

we'll restage a Tudor procession, the set-piece event

that Hampton Court's most splendid rooms were designed for.

This is Tudor theatre, except that it's everyday life of the court.

Look at the gold on him, that's wonderful.

We'll watch as the finest costume, architecture and art combine

to bring Hampton Court to life

in a way not seen for nearly five centuries.

Normally as historians, we don't actually think of how things worked,

and this is all about how they fit together.

It shows me how much is missing from Hampton Court just as a building.

It needs its inhabitants.

Hampton Court, west of London, was Tudor England's most lavish building.

I'm the chief curator here,

so let me give you a little guided tour.

The first thing you need to know is that Henry VIII didn't begin building the palace.

He seized it from the man who did,

Cardinal Thomas Wolsey.

Henry then refashioned Hampton Court as an extension of

his own majesty and magnificence.

And one of his most striking additions was this Great Hall.

Now you might think that if you see this every day, like I do

because I work here, you'd get bored or jaded by it,

but it isn't the case at all, it's still just as impressive

to me as it was the very first time I saw it.

The Great Hall was situated so that you had to pass through it

to meet Henry in his state apartments.

The purpose of the room was to overwhelm.

But though Henry had tremendous power and authority,

all his riches could not buy the one thing he truly wanted -

a male heir.

# Gloria in excelsis Deo... #

Somewhere beneath the floor of Westminster Abbey

lie the remains of Henry VIII's first son,

Henry, Prince of Wales.

Born on 1st January 1511, this Henry was the New Year's Prince,

full of the joy and promise of those first carefree years

of the marriage of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon.

But the boy only lived for seven weeks.

Thereafter it was the same, sad story

as, in 24 years of marriage and six pregnancies at least,

Catherine only gave Henry a single child that lived.

And that was a daughter, Mary.

So, perhaps, Henry came to think, there was something wrong,

with the woman, with the marriage.

Perhaps a new wife would do the trick.

Seeking a divorce was no easy thing,

and in order to secure the annulment of his marriage,

Henry split from the Catholic Church,

dragging the country with him.

One man's quest for a son and for love

had triggered the upheaval of the English reformation.

Henry went on to marry his second queen, Anne Boleyn,

strong-willed and divisive.

And when she also failed to give him a son that lived,

perhaps it was time to look again.

Meet Jane Seymour,

wife number three.

And you really do feel like you're meeting her

because of Hans Holbein's amazing ability

to conjure up this completely realistic image.

Here she's in her late twenties.

One contemporary described her as "not a beauty" and "rather pale".

But there must have been something more to her than just plain Jane

because Henry acted so decisively to get her.

He married her only 11 days after executing her predecessor, Anne Boleyn.

Now, when I look at Jane's expression

I find it quite mysterious.

Do you think that she looks sensible,

or do you think she looks sinister?

Or is there even a little a hint of flirtatiousness

in the lowered lids?

And perhaps this is the secret of Jane's success,

she will be whatever you want her to be.

So it's not surprising that when she became queen in 1536,

Jane chose an emblem that seemed to represent

exactly what Henry most wanted.

So David, we're looking here at Jane's personal emblem

of the phoenix, what's your reading of that?

Well, first of all it's a bird. Of course it's an imaginary bird...

Are you calling Jane a bird?

I think the debate is what species of bird she was, you know.

Anne's badge of course had also been a bird -

hers was a very proud falcon.

-An aggressive bird.

-An aggressive bird.

What Jane chooses is to say,

"I am different, what I am is a phoenix."

And the phoenix is the mythical bird

but it is the emblem of self-sacrifice.

It lives for 1,000 years...

If only she had!

..and it then dies by burning itself on a funeral pyre,

and then from the ashes there arises a new phoenix.

So it's a perfect model of exactly what Jane thought,

I imagine, that Henry wanted.

Like the phoenix, symbol of renewal,

Jane promised Henry the renewal of the Tudor dynasty,

and, sure enough, she soon became pregnant.

Henry was convinced that this time the baby would be a boy.

In early May, 1537, the royal couple arrived at Hampton Court

for their first stay as husband and wife.

It was quite easy to get to Hampton Court from central London

if you travelled by boat,

and yet it was out of the city, it was less vulnerable to plague.

And it was still grand,

big enough for all the ceremony involved in bringing up a prince.

So Henry ordered work to begin,

a major remodelling of the Queen's rooms for Jane,

and a whole new palace within a palace,

a new suite for his hoped-for son.

And all this was supposed to be finished in just five months.

Imagine what Henry's builders had to say when they heard that.

To understand what it was like for the builders at Hampton Court

in 1537, you have to put yourself in their position.

Thanks to our conservation work,

which never finishes at Hampton Court,

I often do just that.

I'm seven storeys up here. Probably best not to look down.

And this is what the palace looked like in the summer of 1537.

It was a building site.

Hampton Court was like a hungry monster

devouring supplies from across the Thames Valley.

And literally hundreds of men would have been swarming about

over the unfinished walls - the masons, the joiners, the labourers.

They'd all had to get used to working at breakneck speed.

Henry used to pay them overtime, and even get them candles,

so that they could work throughout the night.

On the north-east corner of the palace is

the only structure from the building work of 1537 to survive.

And it was by far the most important,

the set of apartments constructed for Henry and Jane's new baby.

These lodgings were effectively a palace within a palace.

Here, the hoped-for baby prince was given a bedchamber,

a bathroom with running water,

a special rocking chamber where special servants called the rockers

would have rocked him in his cradle.

He was also to have a whole suite of formal state rooms,

just like those of the King and the Queen.

For Henry VIII, Hampton Court was all about showing off,

showing off his style,

and his magnificence, and his possessions.

And his most precious possession of all was to be his baby boy,

exhibited to the world in these new lodgings here,

like a jewel in a treasure chest.

The birth of an heir to the throne was something to trumpet as loud as possible.

And now Hampton Court's Great Hall could fulfil its true purpose,

as a backdrop for the celebration, as a stage for the ceremony.

The set dressing was just as important as the room itself.

The tapestries are an absolutely essential part of the splendour of the Great Hall.

Tapestry's a really brilliant Tudor art form in so many ways.

It's flexible and portable,

so you can get it out to create scenery for special occasions.

Henry had more than 2,000 pieces of tapestry in his warehouses,

ready to go, to be unrolled for a christening, for example.

To us, the tapestries look kind of brown,

but that's because they've faded,

they would have had rich reds and bold blues,

and they would have glinted by candlelight because they were woven with gold thread.

And that explains the cost.

This particular set cost as much as a battleship.

Henry was a terribly impatient client.

As a result, these rooms were constructed at great speed.

The builders selected techniques and materials that could produce instant magnificence.

The roundels decorating this ceiling display coats of arms.

Here's Jane Seymour's emblem.

They look like they've been painstakingly carved from wood.

But appearances can be deceptive.

This is, in fact, a Tudor cheat.

All of these items are made out of leather mache.

You make this by getting leather, munching it up,

mixing it with brick dust and glue to make a paste,

that then you put into a mould.

Once it's set you take it out of the mould,

then you can paint it, like this replica,

and once it's looking nice and bright

you can stick it up on the walls, on the ceiling of your palace.

So it's very quick, it's very repeatable.

You can create a sumptuous interior in a jiffy.

You might wonder whether this isn't a bit too cheap and cheerful

for Henry VIII, did he mind that his palaces were knocked up overnight?

But I don't think that the Tudors were concerned about this.

To them architecture was on a continuum

that goes from temporary things like tents and pavilions,

and playful little structures made for parties, to palaces.

It's not as if they were building their palaces for centuries to come,

they were building them for the moment,

for the next big court occasion.

By September, the Prince's rooms were nearly ready.

Everyone assumed that the baby would, of course, be a boy.

Attention now focused on the Queen's bedchamber.

Jane had to spend the whole of the last few weeks of her pregnancy

shut up, cooped up in there,

whether she liked it or not.

In the Tudor court, virtually all the King and Queen's actions

were accompanied by ceremony.

The rules, preserved in a collection of writings called The Royal Book,

dictated that Jane must spend the last month of her pregnancy

in a kind of purdah.

No man could pass through this door.

Even Henry was banned from her bedchamber.

The actual bedroom still survives,

although today we just use it as a meeting room.

The Royal Book explains how it was decorated.

There were tapestries, rich Arras,

all over the ceiling and down the walls.

And on the floor there were carpets laid over and over,

as if they were making a sort of cocoon for the queen.

The windows were blocked up and covered

except for just one tiny little chink to let in light.

The Tudors believed that this would keep out airborne diseases.

When labour finally began it lasted for two days

and three nights. Ouch!

People gathered to pray for her,

there were vigils, there was a solemn procession at St Paul's.

And when the baby was born, Jane hardly got the chance to hold it.

It was snatched from her and taken to those new apartments.

But Jane was triumphant.

It was a boy.

Edward was born at two o'clock in the morning

on the 12th of October, 1537.

His arrival was greeted with national rejoicing.

Hymns of thanksgiving were sung in all the parish churches of London.

The church bells rang out.

The celebrations continued far into the night,

with street bonfires and lashings of free food and wine.

As for the proud father himself,

visibly relieved, he settled down at Hampton Court

to oversee his son's christening in person.

The christening would advertise Edward's legitimacy,

and confirm Henry's standing in the eyes of the world.

Nothing quite this crucial had been laid on at Hampton Court before.

Lucy and I want to find out what it actually looked like.

And there's a remarkable record that can help us.

Lucy has a copy in her office.

Take a look at this extraordinary thing.

Whee!

Isn't it amazing?

It's a drawing of the christening procession

of little future King Edward VI

who's right up here at the end.

And this is a drawing that was done in ink by a herald

and it's just wonderful to see all the things that they were wearing

and who was there, isn't it? I just love this picture.

The reason, of course, that it works so well

and would actually... Come on, look at it again.

What does it really resemble?

It looks like a sort of video recording.

So you can see these as kind of separate frames

-as going along there.

-It's almost like watching a film.

I think there might be about 90 of them altogether in the procession.

-Even more than 90.

-There were more because what they've done,

they've done them representatively.

-So these are the choir boys.

-Oh, they're so cute!

Cute little choir boys in their surplices and very curly hair.

-Very curly hair!

-Very, very curly hair,

-and, but there would have been dozens of them.

-Yes.

Then you get clergy and so on and esquires and gentlemen

and knights and so on, all bigwigs going along there.

And this man, looking a very, very Catholic Archbishop indeed

with his mitre, is the man, in fact, who is going to turn

the Church of England into a Protestant church,

it's Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer.

But then you start to look

and you see great nobles with bits of towelling.

This is, in fact, the Earl of Sussex,

and he is carrying the basins in which the godparents

are going to wash their hands and the towels.

Then here you've got the salt

which also plays an important part in the exorcism,

in other words, the driving out of the evil spirits before the christening.

And, this is carried by the Earl of Essex

and he, too, has got a kind of towel worn as a sort of stole round his neck.

And this is Edward's sister Elizabeth, the future Elizabeth I.

But the slightly tricky thing for us is that

this picture was done 30 years after the event that it shows,

so some of the characters have in fact grown up.

-Like poor Elizabeth.

-She looks about 35.

-She should be five.

-She should be younger.

She's about 33 here and she should be three.

Yes, exactly. She was all of three-and-a-half,

and she had to be carried in the arms of a chap.

It would've been undignified.

So then finally, the little prince himself, he's the climax, isn't he?

-He is the climax.

-He's wearing a massive christening gown,

that's being carried by about, ooh, about seven people,

which makes him look like the Very Hungry Caterpillar.

And he's underneath this canopy of estate as well

and they're carrying torches.

You must have known that the important people were coming

when this part reached you.

Yes, with the procession then going, as it were, into reverse order of precedence,

so not I think probably entirely happy about her position

is the King's eldest daughter, his eldest child, Mary, there.

-Yes, quite right.

-Because there's only one heir to the throne.

-Yes, it's all about him.

-That's him, it's all about him.

Now, when you look at Hampton Court Palace today, obviously it's

an amazing survival, but what's missing of course is the people.

The people, the life, the colour, the ceremony

and I think it could be very, very interesting and exciting

to put all of these people back into their original place.

It will help me sort of imagine the palace in a new way I think.

And so the preparations begin.

A team of experts will spend several weeks helping us create

Tudor clothes and objects similar to those used in the christening ceremony.

In Cumbria, Ted Thompson has been recreating the huge torches

and candles carried in the procession.

They used an enormous amount of beeswax,

making them luxurious in their own right.

Meanwhile, in Nottingham, Ninya Mikhaila is making

a christening costume fit for baby Prince Edward himself,

including a purple silk mantle lined in ermine

Don't worry, no real stoats were harmed.

And finally, the most monumental item of all,

a huge structure in Hampton Court's chapel,

designed to elevate the christening font

so that the courtiers could clearly see the ritual being performed.

I want to know what it was really like.

Even better, I want to make one.

Sadly the BBC won't let me have a full size one,

so I've come to see someone who can work on a smaller scale.

Now, Ben, you've made many a Tudor building in miniature

-before now, haven't you?

-I have now, yes, several, yeah.

Well, you know that the sources are sometimes a little bit hard

-to decipher.

-They certainly are.

-Let's have a look at this picture of Edward's font, then.

-Yes.

How does this drawing strike you, as a draughtsman?

Well, obviously the person who drew this started off with

very good intentions and they created a lovely octagonal shape

and it looks like it's drawn with a ruler very carefully,

and then, as they've gone in, the detail has gradually got

more and more and more chaotic and cramped,

so by the time they get to this staircase they're really in trouble.

But I think there's enough detail in here to go from...

-..to have a go.

-..to build a model.

Shall we just compare it to this written description of it?

It says that the font itself

was, "Set upon a mount or stage

"of four degrees in height."

What do you think that means, "four degrees in height"?

Well, I think it must mean four platforms or stages.

Which has your font right on the top.

And then there's this wonderful sort of shower effect on the top.

And then above is this incredible canopy.

Is that actually going to fit into the chapel at Hampton Court?

I imagine that because of the...

just the logistics of how much space you need between each layer,

that it would literally take up the entire space in the chapel.

-That's really big.

-It is huge.

It would have been very, very impressive.

While Ben sets to work on the font,

back at Hampton Court I start recruiting volunteers

from among my colleagues to dress up in Tudor costume,

including tights, and to take part in the procession.

But the ceremony wasn't all about costumes and furnishings.

Our historical cookery expert Marc Meltonville

is busy in the Tudor kitchens.

He's preparing an authentic delicacy

that will feature in the christening celebrations,

sweet and crispy wafers.

The wafers were the kind of small

but important detail that had to be just right for a royal ceremony.

But Henry's determination to put on the best possible show

came with a risk.

The terrible levels of infant mortality amongst Tudor children,

even royal ones,

meant that they were normally christened immediately.

In Edward's case, however, Henry delayed for three whole days,

to give time to summon the right number of people of the right rank,

wearing the right clothes and doing and carrying all the right things.

And woe betide anybody who didn't.

Processions were an essential component of Tudor royal events.

For Edward's christening, not only senior members of the court

but, for the first time, the royal baby himself would be on show.

Henry had invited foreign diplomats, pictured here.

This was a matter of international prestige.

It was the job of the court heralds to ensure

the procession followed the correct etiquette.

They play a key role in royal ceremonies to this very day.

At the College of Arms in London, herald Peter O'Donoghue

is showing me the original of Lucy's scroll,

here depicting his predecessors,

as well as other records of Edward's christening.

This document is written as a set of instructions,

it's in the future tense,

it's noted in the margin as to what happened.

Now, what does that mean?

The heralds would have probably drawn up this document,

basing it on the precedents of previous royal christenings,

which they would have in their records. It's very sequential.

You've got a procession set out - first these people,

then these people, then these people.

This is the sort of document the heralds could use to make sure

everyone's in the right place in the procession,

stop people milling around and so on,

and I think that's exactly what the heralds would have done,

they would have brought order to the proceedings.

We know Tudor ceremonies were never rehearsed.

Isn't this a key to another extraordinary difference

at this time? Then, you didn't need to rehearse a ceremony,

you barely needed to rehearse an order of precedence.

The Henrician court was a ceremonial place every day,

getting up in the morning, washing your hands,

-these were ceremonial occasions.

-Going to the loo!

These were ceremonial occasions, these were opportunities for the display of majesty of the crown.

This would have been a more luxuriously furnished version.

-Of everyday life.

-Exactly, and in fact it's interesting

when you read these plans, and instructions,

what they concentrate on, apart from the order in which people should walk,

they concentrate on the luxurious hangings and soft furnishings,

because those were the things which were to be different.

These soft furnishings are no minor detail.

The christening would have thrilled with rich colour,

with Edward carried under a canopy of cloth of gold.

Textiles were at the heart of the spectacle,

projecting magnificence and reinforcing status.

So am I right in thinking this central strip is actually cloth of gold?

Yes, this is cloth of gold

and what makes it a cloth of gold is the inclusion of

the metal threads. So these are used in the weft,

and the metal threads consist of a silk core

and around that core would be wrapped a very thin strip of metal,

usually high quality silver, gilded.

How much would this have cost in their money?

They range in price, but we have examples

which were costing six pounds, six shillings a yard.

Well, nowadays that sounds like something quite cheap from a chain store.

Then it is over a year's income for an ordinary working man,

-for three feet, less than one metre.

-Very much so.

Who was allowed to wear cloth of gold?

It was specified that the really expensive cloth of gold

could only be worn by the King and his immediate family.

So, in other words, his wife and his children.

Then the higher ranks of the aristocracy were permitted to wear

-cloth of gold but only for gowns and doublets.

-A concession!

So in limited amounts in their clothing,

and then below that no-one was permitted to wear it.

So what about the king's eldest daughter, his eldest child, Mary?

Mary selects cloth of silver not cloth of gold.

Was that modesty?

Um, No, I don't think it was.

Cloth of silver is slightly less expensive, but only slightly,

and one of the reasons why it actually has such prestige is

there's a relatively small amount of it produced,

so it makes it harder to get hold of, so actually,

by choosing something that's slightly less expensive in itself,

but more exclusive, you can actually stand out that way.

We've got then the court's ability at short notice

to muster hundreds, if not thousands, of yards

-of the most precious textile in Europe.

-Yes.

Sheer crass vulgarity,

showing off wealth.

Yes, or magnificence, if you want to put a better gloss on it!

-The polite word is magnificence, the real word is bling.

-Yes!

Now, after weeks of preparation,

our restaging of the procession at Hampton Court is about to begin.

Is anyone actually naked in here?

No, it looks safe.

First I want to see the best-dressed woman in the procession,

Henry's eldest daughter, the Lady Mary,

she of the cloth of silver dress.

Tell me a bit more about what Lady Mary is wearing.

This is a very fabulous outfit,

because a dress like this was made out of a series of parts

that you could mix and match, wasn't it?

Yeah, it was, and actually it's quite difficult to discern

when you look at a portrait of the finished perfection

how many layers there are, but there's a surprising

number of layers. First she has her linen smock

and this is the only bit that could be washed in water,

so that's the bit that keeps the clothes clean

and her from being made sore from the clothes.

Then on top of that she has a layer that we can't see at all

which was a petticoat.

And then on the top of that she has an under dress

which was called a kirtle and so what you can see here,

this line of jewels around her neckline

and the front part of the skirt

are all part of that one kirtle.

-And then finally this sort of silver gown goes on top, does it?

-Yes.

And then these enormous turn-back sleeves

and then these ones are just tied in.

-Just tied on, yes, I see.

-And they're called fore sleeves

so Lady Mary could choose to have a different pair of fore sleeves

and a different kirtle and she'd have a whole new look.

She looks like a proper princess but she's held together with string.

-That's right, there's the secrets revealed.

-Pins and string,

that's the secret of looking good at the Tudor court, isn't it?

But what of the little chap who all the fuss is about?

First, Ninya and I have to do rather a lot of swaddling.

The Tudors followed this ancient practice of tightly wrapping infants in cloth.

And Edward really was the star of the show.

His parents would've been absent from the ceremony

because the focus was to be him, not them.

For once, this wasn't about the King or the Queen.

So now we're going to turn you into a royal baby, yes, we are.

You're being very good.

Edward is now ready to be wrapped in the gown Ninya has made.

It's truly fit for a prince.

You deserve no less, Edward,

than a 12-foot, purple and gold, ermine-lined train.

More than 90 volunteers are finally assembled,

in full costume, in Hampton Court's Great Watching Chamber.

-Gosh, what a sight!

-Wow, you look beautiful.

Let's have a look. Let's inspect the troops.

-Splendid, don't they look good?

-Amazing.

'Although Henry, according to strict etiquette,

'wasn't actually present for the procession or christening...'

I love the canopy!

'..the King would have been the first to hear

'if anything wasn't quite up to scratch.'

Ladies and gentlemen of Hampton Court,

this is a fantastic night to be here.

Now tonight, for all intents and purposes,

it is the 15th of October 1537.

And we all know why we're here, we're celebrating 500 years

of this palace of ours being built by Cardinal Wolsey.

And tonight we're going to see the palace being used

as it was used by the Tudor Court.

And what's really great tonight is that this is going to be

done by the people who live and work here still today,

just like those Tudor courtiers

lived and worked and used this building as well as we do.

It's a very good thing that you're all natives of this place.

You mustn't look as though you're surprised

or that you're doing anything you don't do every day.

Every time you, gentleman of the choir, enter the chapel,

you enter it in a procession.

Every time... Where's the...? Who's the Duke of Norfolk?

Where is he? Oh, there, yes, you're looking very, very splendid.

I mistook you for Henry VIII. Never mind.

Every time you, Milord of Norfolk and your fellow Knights Of The Garter

walk at Windsor you are in procession.

All of you remember, too, the Tudors walked differently from us.

The shoulders go back.

Women also - look at the postures in Holbein -

walk with that sense of authority and dignity.

Everybody carrying something, it's precious.

Those of you who are carrying the salt, erm, the basins,

those of you with towels, again these are objects of dignity.

Whoever has got the task of carrying the Lady Elizabeth,

you should also be looking terribly smug.

You are Viscount Beauchamp, the brother of the Queen,

this is the moment that's going to make you.

You, sir, that is an instrument of authority.

If you look in the drawing, you can actually see them

holding it down here, so you're actually...

Back, you know, it's that.

OK?

Hampton Court was designed with royal ceremony in mind,

and our procession will walk the established route

that had to be followed to the Chapel Royal.

First, Edward was collected from the royal apartments.

And now, the procession proper begins,

down this long processional corridor.

The torches at the front are unlit,

not because of the fire hazard,

but for ceremonial reasons.

Next come the choir and the clergy.

Here are the heralds, tabards over their arms,

keeping an eye on the proceedings.

Then the senior members of the court,

and the nobles bearing their towels and gold and silver plate.

And here, under his cloth of gold canopy,

is Edward himself, carried by the Marchioness of Exeter.

It's a canopy of state, for indoor use as well as for out,

the kind of ceremonial object these rooms can comfortably accommodate.

The Lady Mary, godmother-to-be,

and the noblewomen follow behind.

And now, the procession's grandest moment

as it passes through the Great Hall,

in front of the priceless tapestries,

Henry's splendid stage set.

The walls would also have been lined with crowds of onlookers,

cordoned off from the route by barriers.

But David and I have a perfect view from the minstrel's gallery above.

This is Tudor theatre, except that it isn't theatre,

it's everyday life of the court, but to us

it looks so theatrical, doesn't it, their coming in like that?

But actually, it is theatre.

There is no difference between the theatre of Shakespeare

and the real court.

They actually re-used court costumes in the plays.

Look at the gold on him, that's wonderful.

Also all of these rooms are set.

They're hung with the most precious tapestries.

We get used to thinking of these as furnished rooms.

They were only semi-furnished.

They're furnished by the people, aren't they?

-In their red velvet...

-They are now.

-..their cassocks,

and the tapestries would sort of have been in that register of brightness too.

Another thing that we are looking at here,

is the dress of the creme de la creme,

the top 300-400 people in the country.

And that distinction between the different ranks of society

through dress is also very alien to us.

What I think is particularly odd

in the modern perspective is that you see people

clearly of enormously high dignity, with great chains of office,

-carrying things.

-Carrying a towel!

-A towel wrapped round your neck.

-And actually, Tudor clothes can't easily be cleaned.

-No, no.

-With all those precious fabrics...

-A lot of brushing.

..and particularly the ones which have metal thread,

they're very, very vulnerable.

The last thing you want to do is get them wet.

Now we can't see, because they are under the canopy.

Well, I can if I sort of go down like that.

I can just see a bit of the baby's robe.

Yes, we've got the baby, and we've got his train being carried.

And here's the Lady Mary with her train being carried

by Lady Kingston, I think it is.

And here are all the other ladies.

It's a bit like being at the opera, isn't it?

That's the sort of time when you would see a lot of people

coming through a wonderful, bizarre place carrying torches.

It doesn't normally happen in modern life.

As the procession now makes its way down the Great Staircase,

David and I get ahead.

They're coming down out of all the royal apartments

that are on the first floor in stately fashion.

And they're coming through what was then the main

private courtyard of the palace built by Wolsey.

What's quite good is to see how all the different spaces

of the palace link up because if you're in one of the rooms,

it's very splendid, but you can't think of it in isolation.

They are linked.

And this is what we don't normally see.

We don't see how the things link together, using ceremony.

It's like the glue that makes the palace really stick together.

I think actually having put this thing on

has knitted everything together. I don't know about you,

but I've had to think about how various things connected

with each other in a way which I'd never done before.

You know about costume, you know about Tudor ritual,

you know about what things are carried and whatever,

but you've never actually bothered to think, "Could this be carried?

"What did you do with a towel round your neck?"

All of these questions that are theoretical

now actually become vigorously practical.

Normally, as historians, we don't actually think of how things worked,

and this is all about how they work and it's a wonderful exercise.

It shows me how much is missing from Hampton Court just as a building.

It needs its inhabitants.

The procession now heads for its destination,

the only space in Henry's palace to rival the Great Hall in grandeur.

The Chapel Royal is the one part of Hampton Court

that's been in continuous use since it was built.

Henry installed its most striking feature, the magnificent ceiling.

But at Edward's christening,

all eyes would have been on the construction that filled the nave.

An extraordinary, red and gold stage.

And my own, slightly smaller version, is finally ready.

-What do you think?

-Gosh!

-Do you like it?

-It's a pretty impressive thing, isn't it?

-It's very impressive.

The colours are right, the sense of dominant scarlet and gold

like most things in the court of Henry VIII.

The canopy, the elaboration and whatever of that is splendid.

I think that there's a real problem.

The purpose of this structure is visibility,

that every single move, every single processional move

up to the font, around the font should be visible.

Let me explain how it works.

-All the spectators are here in the body of it.

-Yes.

-And the entry point is here.

-Yes.

And in our drawing it's suggested that that's actually guarded

by warders with their halberds,

and the way to pass through it is to come along these side passages,

-and there are no doors here.

-No.

Because that's the walls of the nave that we're standing in.

Then at this end you need to be able to get to the altar

so that's what that door is for.

And this door here goes to the so called traverse

-that's like a little...

-Changing room, a baby changing room.

Exactly, exactly.

And then inside we can see from the drawing that there are steps up

all four sides so I'm imagining some kind of wonderful moment

when perhaps four people at once all come up.

That would be really splendid if that did actually happen.

Well, of course the godparents would come up.

So they would all be standing up here.

It would be like the arrival on the stage of the boy band.

And then there's the crowning moment where absolutely everybody

in the whole space can see what's going on here.

There's the dipping of the baby underneath this

really terrific little canopy.

So it was a kind of combination

of court drama and Christian drama

with this baby turning into a Christian and turning into a prince.

Curiously it's his first drama, his first great scene.

So we've got a stage, but what sort of ceremony took place on it?

We know Edward's christening was incredibly traditional,

still Catholic in all but name.

Despite having kicked off the Reformation,

Henry wasn't about to take any chances with his son's soul.

What made this royal christening different was its luxury,

or, as David would say, its bling.

It centred on a series of precious objects of gold and silver,

similar to these at Oxford's Ashmolean Museum.

Now, Philippa, in the christening procession

you can see quite clearly that people are carrying

a lot of heavy metal.

Almost certainly mostly gold I should think,

-though there would have been some silver gilt.

-Like this!

Absolutely, this of course is

one of the key objects,

the salt. Wonderful hexagonal salt, very heavy, you can see,

or sense the weight of it.

So, when the christening procession got to the door of the chapel,

the priest is going to use the salt somehow to exorcise the baby,

to drive the devil out, how does that work?

It was certainly, it was a very ancient belief,

well pre-Christian, that salt had...it had preservative powers,

but it but it also had powers against evil.

After the exorcism at the church door,

Edward is brought inside the chapel,

undressed, and taken to the font.

The font is lined with the finest linen.

Edward's immersed three times in the holy water

and anointed with oil before being handed to his godparents.

And there's a point where the godparents have to wash their hands.

This is where this wonderful basin comes in to play.

-Do you see the little drainage hole?

-Oh, yes.

And then on the back the spout,

and this would be held by a nobleman with a towel,

slightly tilted.

And I'm washing my hands, underneath the spout like this.

-And the other basin would be below it.

-Would catch it.

And then a long towel over the shoulder to dry the hands

This is the only one surviving in the world.

-It's a wonderful thing.

-It's just fabulous.

Almighty God, of his infinite grace and goodness,

give and grant good life and long to the right high,

excellent and mighty Prince, Prince Edward, Duke of Cornwall

and Earl of Chester,

son to our most dread and gracious Lord, King Henry VIII.

Larges, Larges.

This is the great, transformative moment.

With the proclamation of his titles,

baby Edward becomes a royal prince.

The torches are finally lit,

the trumpets sound, as a blaze of light,

and a blast of sound, welcomes the new heir to the throne of England.

The choir of the Chapel Royal sings the Te Deum,

and Prince Edward is confirmed.

The ceremony, sacred and secular,

religious and royal, is now complete.

And now, with everybody still in the chapel,

it's time to celebrate.

Just for a moment, that rigid hierarchy from the procession dissolves,

and everybody gets to join in with the goodies,

the wine, the sweetmeats, and those special wafers.

It's a bit like a Tudor cocktail party.

Nobody's rank matters for the moment,

except for the royal baby's.

And everybody rejoices.

Finally the procession returns from the Chapel Royal,

reversing its route,

to present the christened Prince to the King and Queen.

I wonder what Jane was thinking as she looked out through this window,

down onto the christening procession of her son, 477 years ago.

Perhaps she felt satisfaction and achievement, job done.

Or perhaps she looked down with a sense of wistfulness,

that's where the colour and the life is now,

Jane has been left behind, she was just the incubator after all.

I'm absolutely certain, though, that she thought about the future.

The goal of her life had been achieved.

What would be left?

In the immediate days after the christening,

not much thought seems to have been paid to the Queen.

Following normal Tudor practice,

Jane would remain in her bedchamber for another month,

until the ritual purification ceremony known as churching.

But something was very wrong.

It appears that Jane developed a fever following Edward's birth.

Dr Elizabeth Hurren is a medical historian

who has studied the contemporary accounts.

It's possible that she had something called sepsis,

which was commonly known as puerperal fever or childbed fever

and it's an infection of the uterine tract.

If we look here,

one gets an infection here and that would be very worrying

because that's a very big killer of women in the past.

And on day 11 there's this natural laxe

or gushing out that could have been the placenta.

Well, that's a possibility.

It's probably partially come away because

they would have expected some of it to come away at the birth.

So first of all she falls ill with this fever, this sepsis, and then

maybe the placenta was trapped inside, going bad and poisoning her.

Yes, and in a pre-antibiotic era

that's just too much for her to deal with.

Why did Jane's midwife not put up her hand and pull the placenta out?

Well, it's a royal midwife, you've been chosen for a birth.

Now you have a certain status, of course you have,

but the fact if you just haven't handled as many births

as a common midwife.

Is it possible then, and this is really horribly ironic,

that Jane's being the Queen was actually bad for her health

because people were reluctant, they didn't want to get on with it,

they felt a bit nervous and they weren't all that experienced?

Yes, if you look at all of Henry's wives actually

it's one of the great ironies

of the number of childbirth problems that they actually had

and the price that royal women have always paid in childbirth.

We don't often think about that,

but in the end you have to deliver the bloodline of England,

that is your role, that is your job

and you pay the price in the birthing room.

As the Queen's condition worsened, the news would have spread through

Hampton Court's corridors and undercrofts.

Henry was due to leave Hampton Court,

but he lingered on as Jane's life hung in the balance.

On the night of the 24th of October, 1537,

less than two weeks after the birth of her son,

Jane died.

In a sombre, shadow version of the christening of Jane's son

two weeks before, now Jane's own body was carried

with a torch-lit procession through Hampton Court.

It was led by priests.

The route was hung with black cloth.

It was watched by courtiers and servants held back behind barriers.

Many of the same people were here who'd been at the christening.

It was almost the same event,

but now in a minor key.

Here in the Chapel Royal, Jane's body lay in state for two weeks.

It was guarded 24 hours a day.

Eventually, she was taken to Windsor Castle.

She was transported with great ceremony,

drawn by six chariot horses,

and there she was buried.

And when Henry himself died, he too chose to be buried at Windsor.

Out of all of his wives,

Jane was the one with whom he wanted to spend eternity.

So what became of their son Edward,

over whose birth his father had rejoiced so much,

but for whom his mother had paid such a terrible price?

Here he is, in a painting at Hampton Court,

attributed to his court painter, William Scrots.

Although Edward can only be 10 or 12,

he's given, a bit pathetically, for he is a little boy,

his father's brash, swaggering pose.

But there's an intelligence and seriousness in the face -

there had need to be.

He succeeded to the throne when barely nine years old,

following Henry's death in January 1547.

And while Henry VIII's flirtations with Protestantism

were a matter of pure convenience,

his son Edward was a true believer.

His reign was marked with political upheaval

and radical Protestant reform.

But the reign proved to be a short one.

And Edward VI, England's boy king,

was dead at the age of only 15,

coughing up his heart from tuberculosis.

Not only did Edward die young,

he died without an heir.

As did his half-sister Mary who succeeded him to the throne.

Then, of course, came his sister Elizabeth,

the childless Virgin Queen.

For everybody at Hampton Court on the 15th of October 1537,

all dressed in their finery,

Edward's christening must have felt like the dawn of a new age,

the beginning of something.

But actually, it was an ending.

Edward was the last of Henry's line.

He was the last Tudor, there would never be another Tudor christening.

And Hampton Court would never witness an event

of such splendour and significance again.

But the story of the palace was far from over.

King Henry VIII was the greatest palace builder in English royal history,

and yet, within a century and a half of his death,

most of the 55 palaces that he'd built

had either been allowed to fall into ruin and decay

or actually demolished.

Not so Hampton Court.

Instead, here, subsequent kings extended it

and rebuilt it, magnificently.

But behind the majestic Baroque facade,

so much of the Tudor palace still remains.

They kept it to recognise the importance of Henry VIII

in defining the monarchy.

And in the 500th anniversary year of Hampton Court,

it still has so much to tell us about Henry VIII

and the history of England.