inner child magazine

Travel . . . Passport  to  Our World

      Nilanjana Bose

Nilanjana Bose is a market researcher and a bi-lingual writer.  She has published a collection of short fiction, and is working on her second book.  Her pieces have also been published in Anandalipi, a US based journal.  She is from India, but has lived and worked in various locations in the Middle East and Africa, as well as traveling beyond. 

 Nilanjana's Web Site

Retracing the Journeys

the footprints of Henry, Catherine and Anne

There are different types of places: places that you visit once and it’s a super trip and a great place that can’t be any better, but just that once is enough to sate your wanderlust for it. And then there are the places that you can’t get enough of, no matter how many times you go there.  Sadly for me, most places on my itinerary fall into the second category, which means I am forever doomed to a certain residual but nagging level of discontent.  I am truly thankful for the opportunities of travel that have been given to me on a platter, places that have just plopped into my life without my doing anything to deserve them. Just that there is this problem of always wanting to retrace the journeys, in a different season, in a different season of life, if it’s during a midsummer night’s dream, then wonder what it’ll feel like during the winter of discontent?  If it’s as a child, then wonder what my own child would make of it, and so spinning on and on till there is no end to it.  Just plain greedy, but then there are so few places in the world that fall into that first narrow category.

The first time I went to London it was like a Monopoly game come alive.  I was a child who had played endless hours hunched over little red hotels and little green houses lined up neatly on both Park Lane and Oxford Street; passed through King’s Cross and Trafalgar Square on the way to “Go”.  Of course, like anyone else of my time, I had also read endless hours of Agatha Christie’s and Georgette Heyer’s, not to mention negotiated the twists of Oliver Twist and wept at the sting in the tail of the Tale of Two Cities.  So London was a completely unknown city revealed to be manifestly familiar when I came face to face with it for the first time, and it probably has been responsible for my one guiding principle for traveling anywhere into the world and into life generally: read to cope.

Once is never enough

I have traveled to London and beyond the city into UK several times – as a child, as a teenager, as half of a young adult couple, and then as a parent.  I have stayed a short 24 hour transit there in a poky room in a down market B&B, and I have also stayed fortnight long leisurely trips and gone into its suburbs to catch up with old family friends and then gone looking for childhood friends of my own.  I have stayed even longer and left the city behind wholly and traveled into other places, right up to the extreme north-eastern corner of Inverness and right down to  southern Cornwall.  Each time has been different, each time I have come away with a different small nugget of knowledge, both of the country and of myself.  

One of the things that really stands out after all this time and in all the various comings and goings into and out of the city is Hampton Court Palace.  I have no clear recollection of when I had been introduced to King Henry and Anne Boleyn, but I do remember how the Tudor obsession started.  First there was this biography of Henry, completely dry and factual.  Then there were the Jean Plaidy/Victoria Holt books, with their fictionalized romances but careful attention to historical details.  And then the icing on the cake was the film - Anne of the Thousand Days, which really set the seal on things. And somewhere in between all these, came the first trip to London and the mandatory visit to the London Tower, Anne’s apartments and the spot where she was executed.  A strong-willed woman and a strong-willed queen, subtly proclaiming her innocence even moments before her death

Living life king-size

You’ve got to admit that a king who combined such extremes of behavior and attributes within his person, who was a consummate sportsperson and a poet when young, and a glutton as he aged, he does intrigue the imagination. Here was a king who did really live life king-size, and paid no mean price for it.  And the women, for all their complete subjugation to their menfolk, were equally fascinating, talented and sparkling and steely and calculating all at the same time.  Living a precarious existence hinging on political fortunes and their own biological destinies but living it up as well.  Grace under pressure, worth getting to know.

So there I was, on one of my multiple trips, out on a beautiful early autumn day on my way to Hampton Court in Surrey.  I might mention that there are several train as well as bus connections from London to the village of East Molesey where Hampton Court is located; and if you can spare the time, in the summer boats run from Richmond and Kingston taking 3-4 hours to make much the same journey as King Henry would have done in his day, approaching the beautiful castle sailing the river.  I couldn’t, spare the time, that is; so I took the train, I prefer travel on rails to all other methods of transport anyways. The connections departed every half hour from Waterloo, and one could intercept them at Wimbledon.  And very conveniently, my personal transport staple when in London - the underground District Line - started right there at Wimbledon, so an exceedingly happy situation all around for me. It took around an hour to get there.

Rags-to-riches

The station in East Molesey was like any other rural English station, picturesque and miniaturized to my eyes, more used to teeming huge platforms of countries that do railways on a totally different scale.  A low platform, a practically deserted station, flower baskets still filled with late summer blooms, a bridge across the water, a short walk under a blue autumn sky speckled with a few clouds and I was there at the palace entrance.  The way was clearly marked right out of the station, I may add.  No chance of getting lost, even if the place had been a bit bigger or more complex.

Hampton Court is a rags-to-riches story, it began life as a humble grange for a religious order in the 13^th century. In other words, it was a large barn with a few rooms attached where the book-keeping was done and records preserved.  But by the time the 15^th century was drawing to a close, the owners had rented out the property to one Giles Daubeney, an up and coming courtier who needed a home close to London.  Daubeney was to become a prominent member of the royal court of Henry VII, the father to our handsome Henry, and his choice of a country retreat paid off well.  

The residence was handily located, an idyllic rural oasis away from the hustle and bustle of London but conveniently close to it.  The courtier must have made improvements to the property, but little is known of the details.  On his death the property passed onto the next occupant, Thomas Wolsey, and he, a vastly influential man and a cardinal, made it into a grand palace many times the size and splendor of what it was earlier.  Its apparent raison d’être was to complement the grandeur or King Henry’s court in London, but not all of Wolsey’s contemporaries agreed with that view, there was much envy and talk.   

Wolsey fell from grace, not because he outshone his king, but because he couldn’t or wouldn’t bring about a divorce which the king desperately wanted, and with that it passed into the possession of Henry VIII.  He in his turn spent lavishly and made the palace, which was grand enough even before, into a sophisticated architectural showpiece, where he entertained international delegations and where he brought each of his six wives to stay.  By the time he finished, a few years before his death in 1547, the palace had tennis courts, bowling greens, recreational gardens, and a huge hunting park.  It had a communal lavatory that could accommodate 28 people simultaneously.  It had kitchens spread over 36,000 sq ft, and a vast cavernous dining hall, The Great Hall, where courtiers sat at two long tables placed perpendicularly to each other, their exact place determined by their rank.  Apart from, of course, having private apartments for the king and all his family members.  It was Henry’s favorite palace, he stinted no expense and made it into his dream home.

After him the palace passed eventually to the Stuarts and William III undertook a massive renovation in the 17^th century, for which the old Tudor royal apartments were demolished and rebuilt by the famous architect Christopher Wren. The gardens were redone also around the same time and subsequently.

Flashback to Tudor times

Going inside, I found King Henry’s palace had been recreated for the tourist.  The Tudor court had been brought to life in many ways, whether through short documentaries detailing events and personalities involved, or through tableaus of actors dressed in period costumes, or exhibits of Henry’s tapestries.  The Great Hall is one of the buildings that survives from Henry’s time and it was here that the courtiers and a household numbering hundreds would sit down to a meal twice a day.  The Tudor kitchens had been re-enacted too, somewhere with life-size models and elsewhere with live actors in tableaus – the Spicery, the Great Kitchen with its six fireplaces, the larders numbering three, one for meat, one for fish and the last for dry pulses and provisions. The Chapel Royal stood with its intricately decorated interiors much the same as it must have when Henry’s son Edward was baptized here almost six centuries years ago.  The glitz of history made manifest not just in bricks and stone, but also with various modern tools.

Outside, there were the gardens with the iconic conical 2-300 year old yew trees and the lawns sparkling smooth in the angled sunlight.  I passed through the royal apartments, where holographic 3-D images recreated court protocols and permitted me a glimpse into the privy chambers, and then thrust me out into the cool green shade of the lawns. Parked on one of the benches, I vaguely thought back to my very first visit to the Tower of London, the first visit to a royal palace.  No interactive displays, no holographic recreations, and no tableaus in there then.  Things had changed in marvelous ways, the British certainly knew how to market history and use technology to tell a riveting, detailed tale.

We all know how the tale ends, its tragic climax and the denouement.  Both Anne and Catherine came to a sad finale, though in completely different ways.  However, the two women often stereotyped, one as a the Betrayed Wife the other as the Sorceress, both affirmed to me the strength and resilience of females, regardless of which century they are born in.  Catherine and Anne both refused to cave into pressure, that too royal pressure.  The first refused to go quietly into a nunnery and give Henry the divorce he so much wanted, the second insisted on being married to him.  

And what of Henry?  He seemed as much a victim of his times as his ladies, just as unhappy, frustrated and lonely in his quest for a male heir, moving from one woman to another, knowing that the succession was shaky, his only legitimate son sickly and unlikely to survive long on the throne once the father was out of the picture – such complicated yet relentless paths pursuing unhappiness. A complex and tormented ruler trapped in an obese, repulsive shell, a poet with an eating disorder.  I had never found it easy to dismiss him as another old monstrous lecher-cum-foodie. Making my way out of his palace in the late afternoon light that seemed even more difficult than before.