The Archaeology of Royal Weddings

current archaeology | www.archaeology.co.uk

britain Royal weddings

May 2011 |12

The sound of smashing porcelain paralysed us with fear. Looking down at the kitchen floor, ‘29th July 1981,’ read one of the shat-tered pieces, laying next to the heart shaped portraits of The Price

of Wales and his broken bride, tragically cracked in two. My best friend had dropped the most pre-cious thing we had ever been given. His mum was going to kill us.

I sometimes reflect on my hapless friend’s royal wedding cup with the detached eye of an archae-ologist. It doubtlessly ended up in a Yorkshire landfill, where it now rests in the July 1981 layer. Modern royal weddings spawn all manner of dis-posable souvenirs and paraphernalia, but what survives from earlier periods of history? Moving further back into the past, how much archaeolog-ical evidence remains for other royal weddings? Can archaeology, with its long, unsentimental view of history, tell us anything we don’t already know about these celebrated occasions?

TheAs Prince William and Kate Middleton’s nuptials this month stir feverish national excitement, what light can archaeology shed on the pomp and pageantry of the most magnificent of Royal occasions? Brendon Wilkins goes in search of the evidence.

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Marriage of Queen Victoria, on the 10th February 1840, 1840-42 (oil on canvas) by Hayter, Sir George (1792-1871). On 10th February 1840, Queen Victoria married her cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha in the Chapel Royal, St James. Though white has long been accepted as the traditional colour of the wedding dress, it was actually Victoria’s dress - white satin trimmed with Honiton lace – which established this new tradition. White has been by far the most popular choice, ever since, for bridal gowns.

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of Scotland in 1100, ostensibly to secure an heir that could unite England and Scotland. The prag-matic choice of bride could seal treaties between warring nations, and royal children were some-times betrothed before they could walk. Henry ‘The Young King’ was engaged to Constance of Castile when he was 5 and she was 2, and Isabella of Valois married the 29 year-old Richard II when she was only six. In such matches, personal feel-ings were irrelevant. Weddings were a contract signed behind closed doors, between dynastic families. Love was not part of the equation.

What lies beneath?

Weddings are the least considered, among all the ‘rites of passage’ studied by archaeologists. We are on much firmer footing with funeral rituals, not least because mortal remains survive in the ground for us to study. A royal funeral may demand the con-struction of monumental architecture and burial with a wealth of grave goods, but what type of evidence might be expected for royal wedding? Recorded history from 1066 onwards suggests that they leave little or no trace. Throughout the Medieval period, royal weddings were small pri-vate affairs -with big political consequences.

The primary purpose of royal matrimony was political, such as Henry I’s marriage to Mathilda

left & inset The site of the Hermitage at Grafton Regis. This was the place of the secret marriage of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville in 1464. Back then, it would have been obscured by dense tree cover, birch and oak woodland, set within the north-eastern quadrant of the Whittlewood Forest.

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the Woodville oak, grafton regisOn 4th September 2000, in an act of symbolism

and spirituality verging on Old English paganism,

Prince Charles planted this tree (christened the ‘The

Woodville Oak’) to replace the so-called ‘Queen’s

Oak’, which, according to legend, was the tree under

which Edward IV met Elizabeth Woodville in 1464.

The Queen’s Oak was believed to have survived for

over five hundred years, until its tragic demise in

1997 following an arson attack. Subsequent tests

conducted on the perished oak indicated, however,

that it was a mere 340 years old and therefore not

the oak of legend.


bride; the favours he bestowed on Elizabeth and her family served to intensify seething dynastic resentments.

The proof is in the plough-soil

In 1964 and 1965, Christine Mahany excavated what, on the surface, appeared to be little more than a jumble of lumps and bumps outside the village of Grafton Regis. This was the same ‘Grafton’ that Elizabeth Woodville had grown up in; the village acquired the suffix ‘Regis’ in the 16th century when Henry VIII took possession

Much has been made about Kate Middleton’s status as a commoner who won a Prince’s heart, but she is just one in a long line of upwardly mobile lasses who have married close to the throne, including the Queen Mother herself, Elizabeth Bowes Lyon. But to find the biggest upset to Royal protocol, we have to go back to the 15th century, and the tumultuous years of the War of the Roses.

A tryst in the tale

Elizabeth Woodville lived the last of her days amongst the nuns at Bermondsey Abbey. When she died on 8th June 1442, her simple funeral belied her true status in a dynastic struggle for the crown of England. The rise of the Woodville family from common stock to the Royal house-hold reflects the complex social and political upheaval in England during the War of the Roses (1455-1485). As the houses of Lancaster and York (the red rose and white rose respectively) embarked on a sporadic thirty-year conflict, Elizabeth’s father fought for the Lancastrian cause. Elizabeth’s first husband was killed in the battle of St Albans fighting for the Lancastrians, and as the tide shifted in favour of the Yorkist’s claim, her lands were confiscated.

Elizabeth returned home to her father’s manor in Grafton, Northamptonshire, where hearing news that the King was hunting nearby, she set out to plead with him for restoration of her lands. What passed between them on that fateful day – 1st May 1464 – we will never know, but according to legend they met under an oak tree, where the King tried in vain to alleviate her distress by sug-gesting she become his mistress. The 25 year old Elizabeth was a renowned beauty, ‘with heavy lidded eyes like those of a dragon;’ she spurned his initial advances, until he swept her back to her father’s manor, and married her in secret.

The wedding took place in the family chapel, and the only people present at the ceremony were her mother, a priest, two anonymous wit-nesses, and a boy to help with the mass. Not even Elizabeth’s father knew of the marriage, which remained a closely guarded secret until the fol-lowing September, when the King’s advisors unveiled their plans for far more profitable, and foreign, wedding match. The idea that a King could have married for love was unheard of in the 15th century, but there was little the nobles could do without provoking outright rebellion. Edward struggled to prove the credentials of his

buyer beware!Anyone who has ever experimented with internet dating will recognise the sinking

feeling when you finally meet the object of your affections, only to find that they

look nothing like their photograph. Henry VIII shares your pain.

Keen to cement a vital alliance with Germany in the wake of the Truce of Nice

(1538), the King’s Chancellor, Thomas Cromwell, urged a match with Anne of Cleves,

daughter of a German Duke. By March 1539, negotiations were well underway, but

Henry still had misgivings, and dispatched his personal artist, Hans Holbein the

Younger, in the summer of 1539 to paint Anne and her younger sister Amalia, who he

was also considering marrying. Holbein was under strict instruction to be as accurate

as possible, and not flatter the sisters. Holbein painted Cleves, square-on and in

elaborate finery.

Henry planned to meet her at Greenwich Palace, but was impatient to see his

future bride, and rushed to meet her at Rochester almost as soon as she had landed

in the country. Henry was woefully dismayed by her appearance, but dragged his

heels to the alter nonetheless, grumbling ‘if it were not to satisfy the world and my

realm, I would not do that I must this day for none earthly thing.’ Continuing in the

same vein, the couples

first night was equally

disagreeable, Henry later

remarking ‘I liked her

before not well, but now I

like her much worse.’

There was little love lost

on her side either, and less

than seven months later

she returned her wedding

ring, ‘desiring that it might

be broken into pieces as a

thing which she knew of no

force or value.’ She readily

agreed to an annulment,

on grounds of non-

consummation.

right Holbein the Younger’s portrait of

Anne of Cleves.



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from Elizabeth Woodville’s manor, could this it also have been the family chapel - and the loca-tion for her secret wedding to Edward IV? And if so, how had the site so comprehensively disap-peared from popular memory, so that by 1964 not even local tradition could identify the bewil-dering complex of rubble which lay just below the surface?

Mahany and her team identified a number of different phases corresponding to historical doc-uments charting the development of the site. The earliest mention comes from an undated charter (between 1180 and 1205), which was witnessed by a ‘Helias, hermita de Grafton.’ Little more can be said of Helias, but he was likely to have been an Augustinian monk, perhaps commencing his religious life in the Abbey of St James (founded in 1140s) who later followed a call to solitude. Monastic authorities enjoyed close links with religious hermits, benefiting from their relation-ship with celebrated Holy Men; at sometime in the 13th century his small cell was enlarged into a complex church for orations, hospital for travelers or paupers, and accommodation for brothers. By 1256, the site was inhabited by a small religious community and continued to prosper until the second half of the 14th century.

At about this time Elizabeth Woodville’s family had succeeded to lands in the area, residing in what would become the Manor house in Grafton. Episcopal registers in Lincoln show that Thomas Woodville was taking an increasing interest in

of her family manor. The investigation warranted two excavation seasons, because a Medieval structure began to emerge that could not easily be explained. Mahany discovered a pillared cloister measuring 10.3 metres by 10.6 metres internally, flanked by a chapel (14.6 metres x 4.5 metres) and several other associated buildings. Beyond the main building lay a dovecote, and what may have been a hospital and an industrial complex.

The excavators realised that this intriguing evidence for a small monastic settlement could have been the ‘Hermitage of Grafton’, an Augustinian religious house that 19th cen-tury Antiquarians had placed in Shaw Wood, three miles from Grafton Regis. If this was the Hermitage of Grafton, less than a stone’s through

above The Museum of London team excavates at Greenwich Palace, 2006. The Queen Anne building borders the excavations to the right; in the bottom right corner can be seen the partition between the Tudor tiles and the seventeeth century Flemish tiles. left Another view of the excavations at Greenwich. The Queen Anne building in the background was designed and built by Sir Christopher Wren, and was completed in 1749.

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the fortunes of the hermitage, supporting it financially, and petitioning the parent Abbey of St James to appoint a master. At some point in Edward IV’s reign, possibly because they were unhappy at the abbey’s failure to support the hermitage, the Woodvilles took over the chantry and undertook a major reconstruction of the building.

The excavators found a number of coins of Edward IV in the rebuilt areas, and considerable remodeling. The cloister was sealed off, curtailing the inhabited area; a new room with two hearths was built, and the chapel was re-floored: tellingly,

above A close-up of the glazed Tudor tiles: confirmation that this was, indeed, the chapel royal where Henry VIII married to wife number four, Anne of Cleves, on 6th Jan 1540.

Wedding venuesWhen it comes to wedding venues, there seems to be only one of two choices for today’s self-respecting British

royal: Westminster Abbey or St. Paul’s Cathedral. Westminster Abbey has certainly been the location of many

royal weddings (14 in total) but it is worth remembering that no royal nuptials took place there between 1382

and 1919 – over 500 years of British history.

The return to Westminster in the 20th century, as well as Charles and Diana’s decision to break with previous

tradition and wed in St Paul’s Cathedral, has much to do with fitting more guests in, highlighting the trend for

treating Royal weddings as monumental public occasions.

However, there was another venue that was much in vogue in years past: The Chapel Royal at St James’

Palace. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, a flock of royals tied the knot in there, including Prince Fredrick

and Augusta in 1736, and Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in 1839 – their wedding certificate, signed by the

Archbishop of Canterbury, today hangs on the wall in the vestry.

The Chapel Royal at St. James’s Palace was constructed by Henry VIII, and decorated by Hans Holbein in honour

of the king’s short-lived marriage to Anne of Cleves. If the Chapel Royal at Greenwich can be said to be at the

heart of the Royal palace, then the Chapel Royal at St James’ Palace has a heart all of its own: when Queen Mary

I died there in 1558, her body was taken for burial at Westminster Cathedral, but her heart and bowels were buried

beneath the choir stalls, and there they remain to this day.

above The Chapel Royal at St James’ palace, long a

favourite venue for British Royal weddings.

with tiles bearing the crest of the houses of York and Woodville. Given the limits of our evidence, this is as close to a smoking gun as we are likely to get. We will never know for certain if this small family chapel was the scene of Edward IVs elope-ment, but the substantial renovations certainly took place soon after, perhaps to commemorate the ceremony that took place. By the time Henry VIII had succeeded to the lands at Grafton in the 1530s, the Hermitage had been levelled.

The King’s Great Matter

If there is one monarch in British history likely to have left archaeological evidence for royal wed-dings, it is six-times bridegroom Henry VIII. In a desperate bid to sire a male heir – the ‘King’s Great Matter’ as the constitutional crisis was known – he personally selected four of his wives from his own court, something that would not be seen again until the 20th century. His other two wives were political matches – his brother’s wife Catharine of Aragon (married on 11th June 1509) and Anne of Cleves (4th October 1539). He married both queens in the Chapel Royal at Greenwich Palace; in January 2006, archaeolo-gists monitoring building work at the Old Royal Naval College discovered brickwork belonging to this chapel, with its tiled floor in situ.

The Palace of Placentia, as Greenwich Place was known, was built on the banks of the River Thames, and was Henry VIII’s favourite palace. It has never been established with certainty when the first royal occupation occurred at the site, but the accounts of the Office of the King’s Works,



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and Anne of Cleves in the first floor Closet, what he saw through the window was the tiled floor and altar that have now been revealed.’ Unlike Hampton Court and St James’s Palace, where the chapels have been altered, at Greenwich we can see what Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth would have seen.

Sovereigns and keepsakes

From the 11th to the 16th century, royal weddings remained very private affairs,

but as the powers of the monarchy declined and Britain began a transi-tion to a modern system of govern-ment, old barriers were broken down. A flourishing print culture stimulated

an appetite for royal weddings, and popular accounts of weddings in this

period are supplemented with com-memorative medallions, tokens and nov-

elty items that we would recognise today; conceptions of royal marriage were beginning to change in the popular imagination, and become something that the public had an emo-

tional stake in, however slight. Entering into the late post-Medieval and modern period, much more evi-

dence for royal weddings survives, as mass produced souvenirs entered the archaeological record. Just such a find was made by a metal detectorist Marie Hunt in a field near Owestry, Shropshire, in July 2010. She found

a group of silver coins, which were unusual in that they included a silver

gilt medal commemorating the 1625 marriage of Charles I to the French prin-

cess Henrietta Maria. The head of the medal depicts the portraits of

Charles I and Henrietta Maria, under rays from heaven, whereas the reverse shows Cupid with flowers and references the union of the roses of England and lilies of France. The inscription is a modified quote from Virgil’s Aeneid, FVNDIT .AMOR. LILIA. MIXTA. ROSIS./.1625. (Love pours out lilies mingled with roses). The medal

show that Henry VII’s palace was an entirely new development. Among the earlier buildings that were demolished to accommodate it was the old chapel, which came down in the years 1500–1511. Construction of the new palace proceeded apace and between March 1500 and July 1504 the accounts include payments to the master mason Robert Vertue and the master carpenter Thomas Benks for work on ‘the chapel, gallery and two closets at Greenwich’. It is likely that the new Tudor chapel was built on the already con-secrated ground of its predecessor.

When archaeologist Julian Bowsher finally located the Tudor chapel whilst monitoring routine building work, he found that the floor was laid with three distinct areas of tiles. In the centre were glazed Tudor tiles, formed in a chequered pattern with diagonally laid tiles at the surviving western edge. Linear breaks in the floor either side of these tiles were suggestive of parti-tion bases. Beyond these, to the north and south, were later plain Flemish tiles. The east wall, surviving in some places to a height of 0.7 metres above the floor, had no trace of any rendering. It had been assumed that any surface at ground floor level would have been fur-nished with wooden panelling and plastered at the first-floor level. There were, however, two putlog holes (for supporting timberwork) within the brick face towards the southern end, clearly created during construction. The floor of the chapel seemed to have been supported by two pairs of brick walls set equidistantly apart. These walls stood directly below the partition lines within the tiled floor and the putlog holes in the east wall. This would suggest that whatever structural feature surrounded the altar was conceived during construction and retained when the extremities of the floor were retiled.

The importance of the archaeological information about the Tudor chapel royal, which was such a focus for the majesty of monarchy and the setting for occasions of great splendour, ceremony and music, cannot be understated. Historian and broadcaster, Dr David Starkey, said ‘This discovery brings home the reality of the weddings of Henry VIII more directly than any other surviving buildings, and gives us a real sense of the absolute heart of the Palace. When Henry was married to Catherine of Aragon

beloW Silver gilt medal commemorating the 1625 marriage of Charles I to the French princess Henrietta Maria, founding 2010 in a Shropshire field by a metal detectorist.

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was found with six other coins with varied wear and clipping, suggesting that they were come from a single body of material deposited on one occasion, probably in the early 1630s.

They consisted of two sixpences of Elizabeth I, two pennies of James I and two pennies of Charles I. The wear and clipping visible on the coins of Elizabeth makes it probable that they had experienced considerable currency, which would certainly be compatible with the idea that they represent 17th century deposits. Medals are not usually found with coins in this way, but given that the other coins had experi-enced considerable currency, it is possible that this one served as a pocket piece. It could have been carried around for luck, as a symbol of loy-alty or as even a marital memento.

If the last thousand years of history was wiped clean, and all we had to go on was the artefacts, objects and scattered sites to inform us about royal weddings, we would unfortu-nately know very little. But taken together with the long view of history, the buildings and objects that archaeology reveals give an appreciation of the human scale of these royal events. Looking back through the centuries, we can see that royal weddings have changed sig-nificantly; from small, private ceremonies with little personal feeling in the Medieval period, to the large State occasions of the last century, where private feelings are front and centre. Having met outside of royal circles and enjoyed a long courtship, William and Kate epitomise just how far the public’s expectations have travelled. Rather than a political union for the benefit of the country, we now expect that first and foremost, a royal marriage should be a love match: the fairytale wedding in full bloom. Reflecting on another commoner’s path to the royal household through the Medieval forests of Northamptonshire, it seems that history really does repeat itself after all.

above The modern royal marriage: perfectly illustrating the shift to public inclusion in the previously private ceremonies of Royal weddings, a map was published detailing the procession route of the royal carriages to and from St Paul’s Cathedral for the wedding of Prince Charles and Princess Diana in 1981, and the official programmes of their wedding are a hugely popular piece of memorabilia.

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sourcebrand, e. 2011. Royal Weddings. Shire Publications. ISBN 978-0747810933

parker, g. 1981. The Medieval Hermitage of Grafton Regis. Northamptonshire Past and Present. Vol VI: 247-252. ISSN 0140 9131

bowsher, J. 2007. The Chapel Royal at Greenwich Palace. Journal of the Society for Court Studies 11 (2)155-61

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