Bromley Hall
In the time of Henry VIII this was a small but exquisite royal palace, set in an acre of formal gardens. Today you might pass it without suspecting any of this - the building has been much altered for uses ranging from a training college for midwives to a factory over the past five centuries, there is a car park next to it, and a busy section of motorway passes straight outside its windows.
Long before Tudor times the monks who owned the land had a house here, Bramberley Lower Manor, which was the midst of marshland and next to the River Lea. Nobody knows who had the old manor house demolished and rebuilt in the 1480s, but in 1509 the new house was leased to John Blount, one of Henry VIII's bodyguards and father of Bessie Blount, who was later to have a child with the king.
Although Bromley Hall was far smaller than almost any other royal residence, it was made using the best materials and decorations – there are still pins and blocks in the walls where the tapestries hung, and the wall paintings and carvings that survive are beautifully carried out.
There was only one staircase and no fireplaces, so it is likely that this was a house used for parties – perhaps for hawking, which the king loved, perhaps as a stopping place on the way to deer hunting expeditions, perhaps simply for socialising with a select group of friends. One theory is that the court would stop here to wait for the tide was right to take them back to Greenwich by boat by way of the River Lea after a day’s hunting in Epping Forest.
This may have been one of the “houses of pleasure” we know Henry VIII liked to use as holiday homes away from the formality of court life. During the hunting season it was very difficult to persuade the king to think about anything but that day’s sport, and Ralph Sadleir was one of the people who regularly had to spend many hours waiting for the royal attention or a signature on a document.
The painting of the archer was probably originally on one side of a window, looking out over the marshes and guarding the king and his guests as his human bodyguards did. We can only imagine how the rest of the room was decorated: Here are some ideas.