and he's agreed to walk us through the history of this special place before we go. Then, in the next episode, through the wonders of time travel and internet, we will actually be at Thornbury Castle, where we're going to get a personal tour of the castle and the grounds. So for this episode, we're going to explore the history, and in the next episode, we're going to explore the place in person. So we hope you like to switch up to our usual format.

Welcome, Tony.

And for those that visit, they can walk in the footsteps of the Tudors, they can stay in the bed, room that Henry V. 8th occupied. They can stand on the steps where Henry V. 8th mounted his horse, or they can stroll in the Tudor Gardens.

They couldn't afford the upkeep of it and as a result it fell into disrepair. But then round about 1800 castles came back into fashion and as a result the Howard's Lord Thomas Henry Howard uprated the castle and made it into a country house mansion. And then later on, in about 1960, 6 it became a hotel. And the current owners have uprated the hotel, made it very luxurious. So it is a superb place to visit. I don't speak as the ancient of the castle.

I'm just a local historian who's fascinated with the building.

There's a very famous book by Dr. Barbara Harris from Berkeley University in California. She wrote about Thomas Stafford and we'd got various bits and pieces in the museums. So that was my foundation. And I then went on to do further research from there with help from my colleagues and produced a book and then went down to the castle and said to the manager, would you like to sell it? And he said, well, while you're here, would you be interested in doing tours of the castle?

That was in 2013, and I've been a tour guide at the castle ever since.

he was a threat because he had a son. And we all know the efforts that Henry the 8th went to get a son. He was touted as a potential king if Henry the 8th died. And he did lots of things to get up the king's nose. Now, all kings were paranoid. But in the case of Henry the 8th, by 1521, he was becoming more paranoid than ever. He was having. somebody taste his food. He would make sure that his bed had not got any knives in it before he slept in it.

And because Edward Stafford was very arrogant and pushed his luck, he just went too far. He started talking about what would happen if the king died. And as he was a potential beneficiary in those circumstances, that was just a step too far. That was just a step to far. So he was invited to go and see Henry VIII at his palace at Greenwich. And in April 1521, he left Thornbury, went up to London, got on a barge on the River Thames to go to the palace at Greenwich.

And when you're on a barge on the River Thames, there are other destinations that belong to Henry the 8th. the Tower of London and he was arrested and taken to the Tower of London. He was tried for treason. And on the 17th of May, 1521, he was beheaded. One of the interesting things about that is that the hotel had to close because of COVID. And obviously they were anxious to reopen it as soon as they could.

And so without any knowledge of the date at all. They opened it on the 17th of May, 2021. Exactly 500 years to the day after Henry VIII had been beheaded. I just had to have lunch there that day. It was just too good an opportunity to miss.

It's just that the Staffords were on the wrong side on every occasion. Fascinating stuff.

And it remained like that for 33 years. And then it was then that his daughter, Queen Mary the First, actually gave it back to, gave it back to Buckingham's family.

That really started 300 years of religious turmoil in this country. And one of the problems from the new regime, was that if you did not sign up to the state religion, you were suspect. So to a certain extent, anyone who wanted to pursue a different form of Christianity was potentially disloyal to the government. And that resulted in a lot of religious persecution. and, for example, it resulted in a lot of Englishmen traveling across the Atlantic to America so that they could express their religious freedom.

So it was a very significant year from that point of view. It was also significant because Anne Boleyn was not very popular, that there was a lot of sympathy for Queen number one, Catherine of Aragon, which she was very charming. And so she was able to persuade people that she wasn't as bad as they thought she was. So her travelling round the country was also significant to try and persuade people that she was quite a nice person.

Henry V. 8th had got to persuade everybody that the new religion was the way to go. So there was a big persuasive project going on between those two at that time. One of the other significant things of the royal progress that year was that one of the other places that Henry VIII visited was Wolf Hall. Wolf Hall was the home of the Seymour's. And ten months after their visit to Thornbury, Jane Seymour became wife number three and Anne Boleyn was beheaded.

It was interesting looking at Anne Boleyn's downfall because it's quite similar to that of Edward Stafford. Edward Stafford had speculated about what would happen if the king died and Anne Boleyn made some remarks to a character called Sir Henry Norris and she said to Norris something like, you look for dead man's shoes. If aught happened to the king, you would have me. And that just what Thomas Cromwell needed, that provided Thomas Cromwell with the poison to feed to the King, and that brought about her downfall.

So she had, to a certain extent, speculated about what would happen if the king died in a similar fashion to Edward Stafford. So it was a downfall for both of them.

And he wrote about the fantastic clothing that was being worn. Only it wasn't Henry the 8th clothing he was talking about. It was Edward Stafford's. So, So Edward Stafford was a fashion Easter, like the very latest of everything, liked to flaunt his wealth and have the very best of everything, and was very happy to outdo the king. Story number two, on one occasion, Edward Stafford was holding a bowl of water for the king to wash his hands.

And after he had finished, Cardinal Wolsey put his hand. in the water. And Buckingham immediately poured the water over Cardinal Wolsey. It was a deliberate action. And the reason he did it was Buckingham was one of the most prestigious people in the country. His pedigree of all his ancestors made him extremely special, or he thought it made him extremely special. And Wolsey was the son of a butcher. And there was no way that somebody of Buckingham's high and mighty status was going to act as a servant.

To Wolsey. It didn't matter that Wolsey was the right-hand man of the king, was effectively the most powerful man in the country after the king. He was of low birth. And there was no way that somebody of low birth was going to find themselves being weighted on by Buckingham. So we've got somebody who's very arrogant, very overly proud of his heritage, likes to flaunt his wealth, and it's very happy to make sure that he basically does everything to outdo the king.

And that is reflected in his castle. It's interesting that at the time that Staff had started to build his castle, he started building it in 1507. And by then, fashions were changing. People weren't building castles. They were building palaces. A castle basically was a fortification. A palace. A palace was a castle basically was a fortification. A palace was something of comfort and style. So a castle was hard power, a palace was soft power. So it's strange that Buckingham would apply for a license to build a castle in 1510, having started his building three years earlier.

But in fact, he didn't build a castle. He built half a castle and half a palace. And if we look at the castle elements, that's very traditional. It's got all the elements that you'd expect. It's got gun ports for his cabins, very thick walls, battlements. It's got barracks for his soldiers, everything you'd expect in a fortification. And it's when we look at the palace side of things that you can see the way he flaunted his wealth and made sure that everybody knew that he was from a whole list of very important families.

So if you walk from the outer courtyard where the castle elements are into the inner courtyard, the first thing that gives you the wow factor of the palace side of things is a chimney. Chimneys built a brick were very much undue to the fashion. The style of them came from the continent. So this is Stafford having the very latest of everything and making sure that there's a certain cachet about having something from the continent. But Stafford being Stafford, he went further than that.

There are various elements on the actual chimney itself showing the heritage from his various families, making sure that everybody knows that he's not just descended from one important family. He's descended from a whole raft of them. And it's interesting when people compare this chimney with the one in London at Hampton Court, Henry the 8th Palace, people are often making the comparisons between the two. And Hampton Court was built in 1515, and there is a date on the Thornbury Castle chimney of 1514.

So in other words, Stafford was the leader in this. He was building his chimney. He was building his chimney. before the ones in Hampton Court were built. If we look at other parts of the palace aspect, round the other side of the building, he's changing from flaunting his wealth with brick to flaunting his wealth with glass. Glass was very expensive at that time and people would actually leave glass in their wills. so expensive. And on the opposite side to this chimney, he has got a whole range of windows.

Again, typically of Stafford, he's bang up to date. And so these windows themselves are in the latest Tudor style, which is known as perpendicular gothic. So he's showing the latest fashions, but Stafford being Stafford, he's got to go one step further. And it's very interesting when you look at these windows, his quarters were on the first floor. His wife, the Duchess, had her quarters on the ground floor. And if you compare the windows, his windows are taller than his wife's on the ground floor.

so they let in more light. Also, the windows on his floor, there's one set in particular that are semi-circular. And they immediately catch your eye over the ones on the ground floor. They are so ornate, it would have obviously taken the very best of craftsmen to fashion this window. So not only is he up to date, but he's even got to be sub-to-date. superior to his wife. One of the other Tudor fashions was that the gardens would have timber galleries round them.

This was very much a new fashion, and sure enough, Edward Stafford would have had a timber gallery round his privy garden or private garden, as it was called. And again, he went one step further. his timber gallery extended into the church so that he could leave his quarters, walk round his timber gallery, walk into the church, walk into the church, and take his pew on the first floor and look down on the congregation below. And that's very much a metaphor for how Edward Stafford saw himself.

He saw himself as above everybody else and superior to everybody else. So it was very typical of him. And one of the other features which is worth looking at is over the gate from the outer courtyard into the inner courtyard, there is an inscription beautifully typed. Sorry, I should say beautifully carved. We need to edit that. if we don't type things in the ched. So it's beautifully carved and what it says is Edward Stafford, Third Duke of Buckingham, Earl of Hereford, Stafford and Northampton, built this gate in 1511.

So we've got a date for the gate. But the interesting thing is to have an inscription. like that. It's very unusual with castles for people to put that sort of writing on the outside. They will sometimes have family symbols, but to have writing like that is basically it's the height of Stafford's hubris. Only Edward Stafford would plaster his name all over it and make sure that everybody knows he's not only third due. of Buckingham, but he's also Earl of Hereford, Stafford and Northampton.

The castle itself is in very nice stone. It's a stone that the geologists know as Oolite, but to us mere mortals, we know it as limestone. So it's a very attractive castle with its stonework and everything about it basically flaunts the wall. wealth of Edward Stafford.

So as a reward, they gave it back to her. But they were weren't as well off, obviously, as Duke of Buckingham being. They only got that property back. The king had sold all the others, so they didn't get the other properties back. And as a result, it fell into disrepair. And castles went out of fashion. And then around about 1800, where they came back into fashion, the owner at the time, started the revival of the castle.

That was Lord Henry Thomas, and he started the revival of the castle and basically it became a country house mansion then until the 1960s. And it was then in the 1960s that Kenneth Bell, a restaurateur, took it over. And he converted it into, firstly a restaurant, a restaurant and then a hotel. And it's been like that, ever since. He actually bought Thornbury Castle in 1966 for 26,000 pounds.

you have to employ specialist builders. So everything you do in the castle is very expensive. So it remained at a hotel and is still a hotel today. It had a big makeover. The most recent owners of it have had a big makeover of it and made it very luxurious. And from the museum's point of view, we are absolutely delighted with the new owners because you never own a building like this. You are only its custodians. And the current custodians love the whole Tudor idea and are spending a lot of money in making sure that people have a Tudor experience.

And I've never met anybody who actually could claim that they have seen Jasper Tudor. But the castle does have one hidden secret because in the 1980s, the gardener decided that a tree had got to come up and he dug it out and it revealed the tired floor of the manor. house, which Edward Stafford had laid round about 1500. And what happened was they called in the county archaeologists because they realised that this was something important, and they did a full survey of it, and it revealed a tiled floor which displayed the emblem of the knights of the garter because Edward Stafford was a knight of the garter and sure enough he'd got to let everybody know that he was one of the privileged few.

The knights of the garter are our oldest chivalry order and is limited to the king and 25 others. So this is Stafford saying, I am one of the 25 most important people. And around the edge of the edge of the edge of the edge of the edge of that display. Again, he shows some of his family symbols because he never misses the opportunity to tell everybody about his family heritage. So they did the survey of the floor and it was in pristine condition, almost as good as it was 500 years ago.

And then when the archaeologists had done the survey, they covered it up again. again. Now, most people find this quite shocking. But we have so much archaeology over here. And obviously people say, well, how are you going to make sure you protect it for the future? And so it's been in that very good condition for 500 years. So if you cover it up again, it will remain like that for the next 500. The owner at the time that it was discovered, Kenneth Bell, did ask if he could put a glass roof over some of it.

And he was told no, because Frost and Sun might spoil it. I've spoken to the new owners to see if there is any change in that. But decisions on that take a long while. So who knows, in a few years' time, we might be able to see it again.