Prodigy Houses: Fit for a Queen
Hosting is hard work, and those who say otherwise are either lying, or terrible hosts. The cleaning, planning, cooking, serving, charming and sometimes wooing is utterly exhausting. It is a marathon, which when the guests arrive, finally culminates in a sprint.
In order to be a successful host you have to think Swan. You must glide serenely from room to room, a smile here, a refill there, all the while frantically paddling away to keep the evening running smoothly. However, hosting is often worth it. A successfully hosted event can lead to all sorts of wonderful advancements, be they romantic, social, or even financial. Never was this more true than for the Tudors, who managed to turn the noble art of hosting into a competitive sport. For the Tudors, and subsequently the Stuarts, hosting, specifically hosting the monarch, meant power. Which at the time, meant survival. However, in order to host the Crown, you had to attract the Crown, which was no small feat, and seeing as the Crown traveled with a 300 person strong retinue, required no small house. To host a Queen, you need a Palace. So the nobility got building, and the era of the Prodigy House began.
Prodigy houses are defined as large, showy Elizabethan and early Jacobean houses. They vary somewhat in style, but generally tend to feature a hell of a lot of glass (which nowadays would be like having a tap for fizzy water, or a japanese toilet. Basically it meant you were rich), certain post Gothic features, and towers above the roofline. The principal aim of these houses was to host the monarch during their summer progress, so they were often designed with the monarch's taste in mind. Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk, the ultimate Tudor sycophant, knew that to be close to Henry VIII, meant keeping him entertained, so in 1541 he gave his wife's ancestral home Grimsthorpe Castle the facelift of its life, and in doing so managed to snare a royal visit. Later, under Elizabeth I, Sir William Cecil even went as far as designing Burghley House in the shape of an E in honour of his Queen (which is somewhat ironic seeing as she never actually stayed there.)
However, as the saying goes, be careful what you wish for. When Sudeley Castle was remodeled to attract Elizabeth I in 1574, the 3 day party thrown by the Chandos family financially crippled them, as not only were the hosts expected to house the Monarch, they were also required to entertain them. This meant banquets, performances and non stop frivolities. The cost of building these properties was ruinous, but the cost of actually hosting the court was apocalyptic. Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester, who was hoping to not only win the ear of the Queen, but also her hand, set the bar for competitive hosting in 1575 when he hosted the Queen for 19 days, a stint which almost bankrupted him (to put this into context, for the Queen's 3 day visit to Sir Thomas Egerton’s estate in 1602 his expenses included 24 lobsters, 624 chickens and 48,000 bricks. The receipts from this stay have been carefully preserved and total at £2,013, which in today’s money is almost £10,000,000!!).
By the 1600’s competitive hosting had reached Ambani levels of ridiculous, with the Earl of Warick hosting a mock battle which accidentally set fire to a local village, and the nobles began begging the Lord Chamberlain to be left off the official hosting schedule. That being said, your position at court, and therefore your safety depended on your ability to host the crown, so more often than not, the Tudor nobles dug deep.
So next time you close the door on your final, unruly guest, remember to be grateful that although at times the evening might have felt like a battlefield, your life did not actually depend on it!
