1580: What Was a Morning Like for Queen Elizabeth I at Hampton Court Palace

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🏰 Hampton Court Palace, autumn 1580: twenty-two years into her reign, Queen Elizabeth I begins her day with a ceremony that is less a toilette than a theatre of state. Step inside the Tudor Bedchamber, reconstructed with artificial intelligence from historical studies and historical records of the age.

Behind the red brickwork and the twisted chimneys of the palace she inherited from Henry VIII, the Virgin Queen is dressed layer by layer by her Ladies of the Bedchamber. A smock of fine Holland lawn embroidered with blackwork. A Spanish farthingale of whalebone. A pair of bodies lined with buckram. A kirtle of damask, a gown of velvet trimmed with sable, hanging sleeves worked with pearls and silver spangles. The great cartwheel ruff is folded with heated poking sticks and starched with the yellow starch newly imported from Flanders.

📜 The documentary follows every stage of the morning. The Venetian ceruse laid upon the skin, the vermilion of cinnabar on the cheeks, the auburn hairpieces pinned under cauls of gold net, the pearls from the Persian Gulf, the rubies of Hormuz, the diamonds of Golconda. In the antechambers, the ambassadors of Spain, France, and Scotland wait their audience. Blanche Parry, Chief Gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber, keeps the jewel coffers. Pin by pin, the ritual composes the enduring image of Gloriana.