Towards an Architecture of Majesty Majesty and Mortar: Britain's Great Palaces

Royal palaces

have been at the heart of our history for a thousand years.

The great hall. Magnificent.

Pious building has produced some of the most splendid architecture

in Britain.

The ultimate expression of power and privilege.

Some palaces have vanished, leaving hardly a clue they were ever there.

Ooh, this is amazing.

But many survive, revealing intimate details

of kings and queens and their taste for extravagance.

British palaces are temples to monarchy.

Enshrined within their walls are all the clues we need

to understand the nature of kingship.

Many monarchs were enthused by architecture -

connoisseurs of beauty and elegance.

A few almost bankrupted the nation

through their palatial aspirations.

Inside was a world of entertainment - public and private.

They were havens of pleasure.

But sometimes they were also places of fear,

oppression and even violent death.

Every palace reflects the character and fortunes

of the king or queen who created it.

No buildings in history have more dramatic stories to tell.

OMINOUS DRUMBEATS

No single building speaks of English history more powerfully

than the Tower of London.

Built by William the Conqueror after his invasion of 1066,

it is Britain's oldest surviving royal building.

Today, we think of the Tower of London

as a place of imprisonment, torture and execution,

but it started as the earliest Norman palace in England.

It was described as "Arx Palatina",

meaning "fortified palace".

That was the first time that term had been applied

to a building in England.

The first Arx Palatina took its name from the Palatine Hill in Rome.

Palatinas were the homes of Roman emperors -

architecture that proclaimed to the world

they were the most powerful men on Earth.

This tower, that became known as the White Tower,

must, when new, have been shocking to the people of London.

Anglo-Saxon kings and lords

had not built vast stone castles

so this tower was alien and intimidating.

It proclaimed that a new order had been established -

that the Norman invaders were here to stay.

BELL RINGS

For centuries it was said, whoever holds the Tower holds London.

And whoever holds London holds the nation.

The Tower was the single most important military building

in the kingdom, and it was more than just a fortress.

It contained the essential accommodation of the royal palace.

It was relatively comfortable and up here were private chambers

heated in the most pioneering way - by fireplaces set into the walls.

You can imagine a roaring fire here

with smoke exiting through a little flue cut into the wall up there.

So these private chambers had their own fireplaces.

Very modern.

Also, a very good supply of latrines in the thickness of the walls.

But, in many ways,

the most important aspect of this building was its sacred role.

DRAMATIC MUSIC

MUSIC GAINS CHORAL THEME

William had seized the English throne by brute force

so divine sanction was especially important to him.

At the heart of the Tower, he created one of Britain's most solemn

and beautiful churches.

This is a Chapel Royal -

just a sacred chancel.

There is no nave because there was no congregation,

just the King and the Queen, clerics

and the initiates of the court.

The chapel's like a finely balanced set of scales.

The pivot is here, in the sacred centre,

between these columns.

Over there is the King and Queen, representing worldly power.

And there is the altar, representing spiritual power.

For an harmonious monarchy, these had to be kept in balance,

but that, I suppose, is what this chapel was all about.

It might not look it but the Tower is a template

of every British royal palace that followed.

It offered not just security but comfort, innovation,

display, and split accommodation between the King and the Queen.

This was the King's bed chamber.

Now it's been faithfully recreated to show its appearance

in the late-13th century.

Here is a recreation of the King's bed,

based, like the room itself, on contemporary documents, accounts,

illustrated manuscripts.

A lovely thing with the sumptuous hangings and a canopy.

What intrigues me is his bed was portable.

It could be easily broken down and transported around the kingdom

with the King when he went on his journeys.

And here is a mighty fireplace.

A great canopy with lots of heraldic and symbolic decoration.

The arms of England, there.

You can imagine the fire was going.

How comfortable, how warm, how bright the room would have been.

And the walls are light with stencilling - all very jolly.

This really does display the elegance of majesty.

Medieval monarchs were often on the move around the kingdom

but the Tower was always a haven in times of trouble.

The earliest recorded account of a king spending any time here

relates to William I's grandson Stephen,

who spent Whitsuntide here in 1140.

He was taking advantage of the Tower's strong fortifications.

It was a refuge for him during the time of the anarchy -

the civil war he was fighting against his cousin Matilda

for possession of the crown.

Stephen was supported by his brother, the Bishop of Winchester,

who lived just across the river.

Bishop Henry was the most powerful cleric in the country.

Henry was not only powerful and well connected.

He was cultured.

He collected Roman antique sculpture excavated in Rome.

There can't be many people in 12th-century England doing that.

He loved books and had a passion for architecture -

for palatial architecture - to express his power and his taste.

Medieval bishops lived like kings

and so, naturally, they too lived in palaces.

All that survives of the once great Winchester Palace

is the west wall of the great hall, with its stupendous rose window.

And of course, the hall was the ceremonial heart of the palace.

The three openings that look like windows were in fact doors,

and their threshold shows us where the level of the main hall was.

Those doors led to the kitchen, the buttery and the pantry.

At this end of the hall, where I'm standing, this is the high end.

Here would have been the dais and the high table,

where Henry would have sat in his power and glory.

The palace was not located in a parish,

but in a self-governing liberty,

known as the Liberty of the Bishop of Winchester.

What this meant was certain rights normally reserved for the King

or for the parish authorities devolved upon the Bishop.

For example, he had his own law courts, his own police,

his own jail, known as The Clink.

So here, the Bishop ruled with the power of a worldly prince,

collecting his own rates and taxes.

Together with Lambeth Palace,

home of the Archbishop of Canterbury, they put immense

ecclesiastical power one side of the river

and royal power on the other.

Today, the 19th-century Houses of Parliament sit on the site

of the King's other London home, the old Palace of Westminster.

But one great medieval fragment survives.

Westminster Hall, over 70m long and 20m wide,

was the largest great hall in England. Indeed, in Europe.

An incredibly impressive token of royal power - of kingship.

It was Richard II, the great lover of art and architecture,

who transformed Westminster Hall into a potent

and powerful symbol of majesty.

He occupied the royal apartments here in the late-14th century.

This was where he met with his great council and was the site

of coronation banquets and home to the highest law court in the land.

Of vast scale, the hall became the heart, the power base

of medieval England, a centre of ceremony, of government, of law.

Virtually everything of importance that happened in medieval England

happened here.

The hall incorporates a piece of pioneering medieval engineering.

At the time, the roof covered the widest single span

in the Western world.

The roof comprises of a number of trusses.

Each truss incorporates a pair of horizontal oak beams called

hammer beams and here's a hammer beam with an angel at the end of it.

And the hammer beam is partly supported

by a curved oak brace...

that rests on a stone corbel in the wall.

From the end of the hammer beam just above the angels,

an arch springs that goes right the way across the hall

to the corresponding hammer beam on the other end.

Now, look carefully and you will see another arch that

rises from the stone corbel through the hammer beam,

right the way across the arch,

touching indeed the smaller arch to the other side of the hall.

So for greater stability, there are two integrated structural systems.

This is also a sacred space.

The angels in the roof suggest the vault of heaven itself.

While the King's personal emblem of a white hart adorns the walls.

The building proclaims both the earthly

and the spiritual status of the monarch.

This brilliantly engineered roof structure of heroic scale

was one of the wonders

of its age -

an architectural project of princely proportion.

And it still communicates, after all these centuries. Beneath it,

I feel a sense of pride, of wonder.

It makes the spirit soar.

The old Palace of Westminster was not strongly fortified, so kings

often had reason to flee back to the Tower in times of civil unrest.

By Richard's reign, the Tower's defences had expanded in size.

It was one of the strongest fortresses in the realm.

The walls are thick and these windows are later -

originally, it would have been narrow arrow slits.

And over here...

Good Lord! Here's the late medieval portcullis mechanism.

Incredible.

Um... It's very intact.

This sort of ship's wheel is for raising

and lowering the portcullis -

there it is, in its raised position.

Wonderful ratchet here.

Fantastic thing.

And down here...

is one of the murder holes

in the arch of this gatehouse.

Down there...well, would have been attackers - now there are tourists.

I can hear them! But frightful things would have been

poured down this hole upon them from the defenders in this room.

I suppose it would have been a killing zone created

by the portcullis being lowered and the doors here being closed.

This was very much a fighting chamber.

In a crisis, the Tower provided vital munitions, troops

and provisions.

It was also the storehouse for the Crown Jewels.

It homed the Royal Mint, source of the nation's currency.

This is where the Royal Mint was located, within the Tower,

from about 1280-1812.

And here are two coins that were struck here, both

date from the late-14th century from the reign of Richard II.

This wonderful thing is

a gold noble,

worth six shillings and eight pence,

a third of a pound.

On it was an image of Richard,

sailing upon his ship of state.

And here is a half groat, a silver half groat,

worth tuppence.

Again, with a wonderful portrait of Richard on it and on the back,

it's stamped London, meaning it was made right here.

This, the half groat, could have bought me two gallons of ale.

And a craftsmen at this time, say the 1380s,

would have earned about five pence a day in London.

Minting coins with one's image upon the coin was an attribute

of kingship, it made quite clear who had financial control of the realm.

In one of the rooms that housed the Royal Mint,

a remarkable wall painting has been discovered.

Jane Spooner,

Curator of Historic Buildings at the Tower,

has been investigating its secrets.

Jane, it seems strange to find such a high-quality piece of sacred art

in a place like this. Why is it here and what does it mean?

It's connected with the workings of

the Royal Mint which was based

here in the Middle Ages.

As a prestigious space, it would be decorated with a rich painting.

It's tragic of course that the focus of this medieval painting

has been obscured or destroyed by this Tudor chimney breast.

That's right.

The painting in the middle would have been a crucifixion of Christ.

-Can you take me through the figures?

-Yes, sure.

You start off with John the Baptist, who was the last prophet,

who also is pointing at Christ on the cross

and pointing at the Lamb,

and he's reminding the people in the room to remember their duty to

God, to remember Christ's sacrifice for mankind.

And then, just behind me, we've got St Michael holding the scales,

weighing the souls. That means the Last Judgment.

Right.

He's actually reminding us to behave well in life because if we don't,

we will be judged at the moment of death and also at the end of time.

Those two things determine how long our soul spends in Purgatory

and if we go to heaven rather than hell.

-Useful warning for men dealing with bullion.

-Exactly!

And there were lots of crooks in the Mint at this date.

They ended up often as prisoners or being hung,

so it had a particular resonance for the people working here.

Fascinating. This obviously relates to the Mint, as you say,

but this is absolutely... The expense of the decoration,

-the pigment, this is a room of a palace, isn't it?

-Yes.

Only in a palace would you find such a room in that period.

We often think about castles today and the Tower of London

as a dark and gloomy place full of dungeons and torture and death.

But actually, this castle in particular was used by royalty

and some of the interiors would have been extremely grand.

And as for Richard II, King when this was painted,

his cousin forced him to abdicate in 1399.

Now, Richard's palace became his prison.

Such was the uncertain fate of medieval kings.

This is the earliest surviving detailed map of the Tower,

it dates from 1597.

You can see what a strong fortress it was,

surrounded by a water-filled moat

and the river, here.

And to the north...

open fields of fire!

To stop attackers.

And here, I can see

"Posts of the Scaffold".

This is Henry VIII's palace connecting down here

to the Lanthorn Tower from the White Tower in the centre.

Henry of course was the last monarch to build

anything of significance within the Tower.

Henry's palace at the Tower has now vanished, but he's left

his signature on the building in the form of the extraordinary

domes that crown the four turrets.

To get inside one is a rare privilege.

This is the largest dome and from here,

I can see its construction,

which...

Good heavens!

..turns out to be absolutely spectacular!

Because beyond these joists,

I can see an array of CURVING braces or struts

which are helping to support the outer dome.

Indeed, the curve of these struts mimics

the profile of the outer dome.

It's incredible really - they're much more complex than they need

to be, they could have been just simply straight struts.

But there they are, a wonderful creation of great beauty.

The domes are a Renaissance flourish to a medieval structure

and symbol of change in more ways than one.

I'm standing on the roof of the White Tower and from here,

you get a splendid view of these curvaceous lead-clad domes.

They were created in 1532 as part of the embellishment of the Tower

in preparation for the coronation of Henry's new Queen, Anne Boleyn.

They are novel and characterful and I suppose in a way,

they allowed Henry to make his mark on this ancient fortress

and in the process,

change its look and the silhouette of the City of London for ever.

The next time Anne Boleyn came here, she was a prisoner.

She'd failed to give Henry the son and heir he desired.

That sealed her fate. He wanted rid of her.

She was found guilty of adultery and incest

and on the 19th of May,

1536,

she was led from the Tudor palace that stood here

to the block over there...

..and beheaded.

It was in the reign of Henry VIII that the Tower became

really notorious as a place of imprisonment, torture and execution.

Indeed, it was in this very vaulted cell that, by tradition,

Sir Thomas More was held in 1534

on the orders of Henry VIII

for refusing to acknowledge the King as the head of the Church.

And from this room, More is taken over to Tower Hill for execution.

This book lists prisoners of the Tower -

and there are thousands of them -

dating from 1100 to 1941.

Maud or Matilda FitzWalter.

She was held prisoner "in the north-east turret

"of the White Tower" for "repulsing the advances of King John".

And she died.

It says here she was "poisoned by an egg sent to her"

in her cell "by the King".

What a bounder!

I mean, it seems to me that the pages are particularly packed

in the 16th century here, during the reign of Henry.

Page after page as one looks through here - hanged,

hanged, hanged, hanged, hanged, hanged...

Over the next few centuries,

the Tower became more of a prison than a royal residence.

Most of all, it was a storehouse for munitions and weapons.

Henry never stayed here again.

It's highly appropriate that Henry VIII,

the English monarch with the largest and most aggressive personality,

should have had more palaces than any other British king.

He acquired them in various ways.

He built them,

he confiscated them or was given them

by courtiers seeking favours.

The most famous of his palaces is Hampton Court.

Work on Hampton Court began in 1514.

It was to be the grand residence of Cardinal Wolsey,

Henry's chief adviser for the first half of his reign.

Wolsey understood the power of architecture

and his home set a new standard

for courtly living and comfort -

a palace for the new Tudor age.

Hampton Court is so familiar,

so revered,

that it's easy to take it for granted.

But it is a phenomenal creation,

a phenomenal survival.

It was, after all, conceived by one of the proudest

and, after the King, most powerful men in England

and was built at a critical time in the development of English

architectural tastes - as the late Gothic gave way to the Renaissance.

Wolsey wanted his palace to proclaim to the whole world

that he was a great Renaissance prince of the Church.

Henry always liked Hampton Court, treating it as his own,

often arriving here unannounced.

So when Wolsey fell from favour for failing to secure Henry's

divorce from Catherine of Aragon, Wolsey, to appease the King,

gave him the palace.

Henry, of course, snapped it up.

For Henry, there's much to appreciate

and learn from Wolsey's architectural taste.

Gatehouses and crenulations were an ornamental flourish to the past.

The fine chimneys boasted of a house that was well heated

and comfortable.

And within the building's late Gothic frame,

there's a hint of the classical age to come.

The most fascinating details here are these terracotta roundels.

They're among the earliest Renaissance sculpture

ever produced in England.

They were commissioned by Wolsey in 1521

and made by the Italian sculptor Giovanni da Maiano.

Recent research has established that they were made here,

not in Italy, because they were wrought out of local clay.

Each one is by tradition said to depict a Roman emperor -

this one being Hadrian.

From building accounts,

we know Wolsey had eight or ten of these roundels made

and each one cost two pounds, six shillings and eightpence

and one pound to install.

Wolsey was inviting heroic comparisons

between Henry and Caesar.

Alas, it wasn't enough to save him.

After Wolsey's fall from favour,

Henry started his own improvements at Hampton Court.

The great hall - magnificent.

The grandest and best preserved Tudor great hall anywhere.

Created for Henry in the early 1530s, almost certainly replacing

a smaller great hall on the site

that had been built for Cardinal Wolsey.

And here, look - an open hearth!

This is a consciously old-fashioned detail for the 1530s, by which time

fireplaces had been placed more conveniently in wall openings.

I suppose Henry wanted to assert traditional English values

with people being hardened, sitting in the smoke of burning English oak.

Or he was evoking the golden age of the Middle Ages of myth -

the court of King Arthur

with himself, of course, the King.

This hall was largely symbolic and ceremonial.

We have this arrangement here for Henry and the Queen to sit,

as Arthur and Guinevere, but they rarely dined here.

They dined elsewhere in more comfort and convenience.

And that magnificent hammer beam roof up there -

wonderful piece of carpentry -

originally painted with golden stars

to look like the heavens.

And on each of the horizontal hammer beam timbers

projecting from the wall, are little heads. Why?

Well, they're warnings really,

to be careful what you say in this court, this great hall.

Somebody will always be listening.

The symbolic language in the great hall continues.

Henry's years of worry were over.

A son and heir had been born in 1537.

Scenes from the Old Testament chime with Henry's life.

The great artistic glory of the hall are the Abraham tapestries.

There are ten of these, each one is very large. They were commissioned

by Henry in the late 1530s,

made in Brussels for the great hall.

Incredibly impressive.

They were vastly expensive.

Big demonstrations of wealth, made of silk

with gold and silver thread,

they would have been sensationally bright when new, sparkled.

Anyone entering here would have been overwhelmed by the colour.

Now the subject matter is fascinating. This one,

we see God appearing to Abraham, the great patriarch -

the man who was called the "founder of nations",

who had a difficult time,

a great quest to gain a male heir.

Married three times.

All of this, of course, for Henry, had great meaning.

It represented his trials, his tribulations, his aspirations.

Few of Henry's rooms survive intact.

This was the great watching chamber where he dined in greater privacy

and where his guards controlled access

to the private apartment beyond.

Today, the corridors, with their watchful eyes from the past, echo

the uncertain fortunes of royalty in the 15th and 16th centuries.

Later monarchs would modernise relentlessly at Hampton Court

as if to sweep away a more volatile age.

The Tudor palace beyond this point was radically transformed

in the 1690s for William and Mary.

But a secret part of the Tudor palace survives -

now not open to the public.

The fine late-17th-century panelling is witness to

how many of Henry's rooms have disappeared.

But now, with building work going on,

there's a chance to re-evaluate the Tudor fragments that survive.

One rarely seen room

is known to this day as Wolsey's Closet.

The heraldic ceiling made out of leather mache - pressed leather -

almost certainly does date from Wolsey's time.

There is his motto up there in Latin -

"Lord be my helper".

Above me is a Tudor rose.

And the important point is that this room does suggest

the richness of the early interiors of Hampton Court,

the richness of the royal apartments of Henry VIII.

And there are challenging decisions ahead at Hampton Court,

regarding the original Tudor interior,

where to reveal one layer of history means another would be lost.

This room doesn't look Tudor,

but it was in fact part of Henry VIII's bedchamber.

It is believed that below this early Georgian panelling

that there are Tudor wall paintings.

How intriguing!

I wonder what they can be of?

What would be appropriate for the bedchamber of Henry VIII?

As with so many palace interiors, this room has changed over

the centuries, indeed it's in the process of change once again.

All around the main palace buildings are smaller buildings

to service every need of Henry and his court.

This could be a street in the centre of an ancient town.

In fact, I'm in the heart of the Tudor palace.

Hampton Court was at one level like a small town,

with goods and people coming and going.

When the court was here, there could be up to 800 people

in the palace, needing food and drink and their laundry done.

The kitchens at Hampton Court are an astonishing survival -

a vast food factory that once served

the Tudor court with 1,200 meals a day.

Marc Meltonville is a food historian.

So, we're cooking beef - nothing more exotic, like venison?

I suppose beef was popular in the Tudor times.

Beef is the most recorded dish that is cooked on the spit here,

followed by mutton, venison comes a poor third to that.

And this is the beef they would have cooked? Where was the beef from?

Everybody thinks it will be cows roaming in the grounds, but it's not.

There just isn't room and that's not a very good status symbol

for a king - a king doesn't live on a farm.

A king has gardens to walk in and all his food is brought in,

that's better showing off.

Everything here about the food would have been about

showing how you are wealthier than everybody else.

That's good for your guests, good for your foreign guests,

-that shows your country is doing well.

-These are tantalising

-great slabs of flesh here.

-Yes.

Shall we get one, or both, on the spit?

-Yes, I think we should. Robert could join us...

-Ah, hello!

Right, in we go.

-Wow. So this... You're going to do this for two hours.

-Oh, yes.

And we should have not two pieces,

but you'd carry on loading that spit up, so eight or nine pieces per bar.

So these are local resources being devoured by the palace.

Wood, the oak trees, and also the local animals.

What a devastating experience, a long stay at the palace!

You can't have a long stay.

You can only stay at any of the palaces for two or three weeks,

after which the merchants, the warehouses,

the farms that supply this palace, start to run out.

And I suppose it stinks - the cesspits overflow...

You're going to need everything cleaned up!

-That's looking good.

-I have high hopes.

I mean, beef cooked on the turn must be different.

It should be some of the juiciest beef you've had.

That does look absolutely wonderful.

And then you get to try roast beef

as it would have been in the Tudor court.

Mm! Certainly, you know, a food fit for a king!

This is what that fellow Henry VIII would have been gorging on,

I can fully understand it.

This is what both Henry

and all of his court would've been getting, so you'd have gone away

as a visitor saying not only does the King eat the finest roast beef,

the finest dishes, but so do his courtiers and so do his guests.

England is truly magnificent.

Hampton Court was at least a couple of hours journey from London.

And the royal apartments at Westminster had burned down.

The second half of Henry's reign would see royal building

in London on an astonishing scale.

Henry could simply have rebuilt the royal apartments

in the Palace of Westminster,

but he decided to make his London residence more glorious and visible.

So in 1529, he planned the development of Whitehall Palace.

Today, almost nothing survives of Henry's greatest palace.

But the busy thoroughfare of Whitehall still bears its name.

Whitehall was the largest palace in Europe.

Its buildings stretched from the banks of the River Thames to

the deer enclosure of St James's Park

and the hunting fields of Soho right up to present-day Oxford Street.

It was a palace in two halves with a public Street

through the middle.

A pair of magnificent gatehouses linked the two sections

of the palace while still allowing traffic to pass beneath.

On the side closest to the Thames were the royal apartments,

while the buildings on the north side, next to the park,

were devoted to pleasure, including tennis courts, bowling alleys

and a pit for cockfighting.

What we know today as Horse Guards Parade

was a palace tiltyard for jousting,

one of Henry's favourite pastimes.

But for Henry, Whitehall would begin to feel

dominated by affairs of state.

The shift in emphasis echoes today in the government ministries

that have made Whitehall their home.

It would be yet another palace

that offered the King an escape and privacy.

The only palace created by Henry from scratch

and to survive is this, St James's Palace.

Like Hampton Court, the palace is organised around a series of courts.

Much of this one is Tudor,

but most of the palace was rebuilt during the 17th and 18th centuries.

When Whitehall Palace burnt in 1698 and during the 18th century,

this was a dominant royal palace in central London.

It's where ambassadors were received, where court assemblies

took place and remains the official address of the monarchy.

Today, St James's Palace is a poignant reminder of how

Tudor Whitehall must have looked.

Towering gatehouses, walls, buttresses and battlements.

An entire world swept away.

By the time Henry had completed his frenzy of building in Westminster,

there was Whitehall Palace, St James's Palace, the rebuilt

Palace of Westminster and their associated deer park and hunting

reserve, he'd covered much of what we now think of as central London.

But Henry still wasn't finished.

Now he would embark on the most extraordinary palace of all -

he called it Nonsuch because it would have no equal.

Today, it's only possible to walk over the site, over the grave

of one of the most extraordinary buildings ever created in Britain.

Nonsuch Palace stood here, in front of me.

This obelisk marks the location of the entrance gate, it would

have towered up there, massive arch.

Then beyond was the outer court...

The next obelisk you can see, marks the site of the central gatehouse.

And the third obelisk,

that marks the location of the royal apartments.

Now, within this relatively small area stood one of the greatest

palaces ever built in Britain.

In 1682, the palace was pulled down and over time,

even the location of the site was lost.

It became almost mythical, just a few contemporary images

survived that did little to show the layout or details of the building.

Then, in 1959, to much public excitement,

the site of the palace was rediscovered and excavations began.

MAN: 'The foundations, which have endured for more than 400 years,

'those of Nonsuch Palace, near Epsom, which were originally laid in 1538,

'to support a new extravagant country residence for King Henry VIII.

'Eventually, in 1671, the palace came into possession of Charles II's

'mistress, Barbara Villiers, who was created Baroness of Nonsuch

'in consideration of her personal virtues.

'But however all-embracing her virtues,

'they did not include a love of architecture, for she had

'the palace demolished and sold it piecemeal.'

Ooh, this is amazing!

To understand how amazing this palace was when it was built

in the mid-16th century, you've got to imagine yourself arriving here.

This courtyard, quite traditional, quite simple, really.

Then, through this gatehouse in the middle, and then suddenly,

entering the inner courtyard which must have exploded into life.

The amazing imagery, this huge stucco panel

showing the classical world, not familiar in mid-Tudor England.

Roman emperors, gods and goddesses...

And this dazzling white stucco,

these deeply moulded panels,

as if they are coming to life, leaping from the wall.

This pair of towers are,

in a way, the most extraordinary part of the palace.

They are prospect towers, rising high,

from where one could watch the hunt taking place in the park around.

And between them,

is the main elevation of the palace with a bay window there.

These are incredible, the architecture is intensely practical

because it contained a water cistern.

So, the water, under gravity,

would be fed into pipes around the royal apartment

making the accommodation here incredibly comfortable.

This must be one of the earliest examples of piped water in England.

For Henry, the building and acquisition of palaces

had become an obsession.

But when he died, the mania died with him.

His daughter, Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen, built no new palaces.

Instead, she preferred to be the guest at the houses of her subjects,

as she made her theatrical progresses around the country.

She stayed here, at Ingatestone Hall in Essex in the 1560s,

the guest of Sir William Petre.

Those subjects fortunate enough to receive a visit from the Queen

had to have pockets deep enough to cover the high cost

of entertaining the Queen and her court.

In front of me, I have documents

relating to the cost of the Queen's visit here in 1561.

These are copies of the documents, they're wonderful things.

But the handwriting is very hard to read,

so I have a transcript here.

And, I can see that a large proportion of the items

relate to food and drink consumed here during the great festivities.

Some very exotic and some unfamiliar.

There's a great stag being delivered,

and there's oysters, there's fish, there's heron...

and wine from Gascony.

And a turkey cock - tremendous!

And the total cost of all of this is £136 and 10 shillings,

about £34 a day. A lot of money.

So, the question is, what did William have to gain from this visit

beyond impressing the neighbours?

You might think, "Not a great deal."

He was 60 years old almost, a made man.

He'd weathered very difficult times,

he had great wealth, a lot of land.

So, what more could he get? Well, in fact, a lot.

He, like the other people receiving the Queen, had a long-term view.

They wanted to secure their gains, to protect their possessions.

They wanted to lobby her and perhaps, in the process,

gain access to some more funds and lucrative commissions.

But really, in the end,

their aim was to protect the long-term future of their families.

As the Queen grew older, the future of England felt far from certain.

A likely heir to the throne was Elizabeth's cousin,

James VI of Scotland -

a man with obsessive beliefs on kingship and architecture.

The English were intrigued

and there are clues to the character of the man here,

at Stirling Castle, the place where he grew up.

In the 16th century, Scotland was an independent nation

with strong and direct cultural ties to continental Europe,

as is revealed by this extraordinary royal palace.

The clues to understanding the nature of James

are on the outer walls of the palace.

On this side, are figures of frightful demons and monsters,

images from a dark and ancient world of superstition.

In front of me is a winged devil with pendulous breasts,

presumably a female devil, standing on a twisted column,

rising from the back of a screaming figure.

Being on the outer wall of the palace,

I suppose these figures are our guardians,

intended to frighten off potential invaders.

On the inner face of the palace, are figures from a classical myth.

They could proclaim this a palace of a Renaissance prince.

The choice of deities and their attributes

suggests a classical pedigree for divine kingship.

Up here is Ganymede, cupbearer to the gods,

who served Zeus, the king of the gods.

And here...is Venus.

Goddess, of course, of love and beauty. Gosh, she's wonderful.

And here is Saturn,

associated with measuring, with numbers, with architecture.

And then, there's Flora,

goddess of fertility, of the cycle of life and death.

And above all, in the classical cornice,

flutter a hierarchy of angels.

This building is a diagram of divine kingship.

The mix of provincial superstition with classical learning

was a heady brew.

And there was more.

James had published his philosophy of monarchy for the world to read.

It was a declaration of intent.

In 1599 he wrote the Basilikon Doron,

which is really a long letter to his son, Prince Henry,

about divine kingship.

In this book, James argues for the autocratic nature of kingship -

that kings are ordained by God and are answerable only to God,

and are indeed, in many ways, god-like themselves.

Here James talks about the "just symmetry and proportion

"betwixt the height of your honourable place

"and the heavy weight of your great charge."

Kingship came with a price.

It was great power, but a heavy responsibility.

James, that strange and complex force from the North,

haunted by visions of demons, divine kingship,

was set to revolutionise palace-building in England.

Next time, out with the old and in with the new.

Kings lifted up to the heavens.

The biggest palace ever dreamt of...

and the smallest.

Recreating the glories of ancient Rome

and Buckingham Palace breaks the bank.