Eltham Palace

• 1. Introduction

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  Eltham Palace sits in southeast London, a place where a medieval great hall and a jazz-age mansion share the same roof. The hammerbeam ceiling soaring overhead is the third-largest of its kind in England. The Art Deco interior sealed behind those ancient walls has been called a "masterpiece of modern design". Two eras of extraordinary ambition occupy a single postcode in the Royal Borough of Greenwich, and the story of how they ended up here together involves a Byzantine emperor, a young prince who would become Henry VIII, a pet lemur with his own room, and a fire watcher standing alone on a medieval rooftop during the Blitz. What turns a royal hunting seat into a ruin, and what draws someone to pour wealth and imagination into that ruin centuries later?

• 2. A Palace Fit for Emperors

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  Anthony Bek, the Bishop of Durham, gave the original palace to Edward II in 1305, setting off three centuries of royal occupation. Edward III may have founded the Order of the Garter partly because of something that happened here, though the exact incident is recounted only in one account. Henry IV considered Eltham his favourite palace, and in December 1400 he welcomed the only Byzantine emperor ever to set foot in England: Manuel II Palaiologos, who stayed until mid-February 1401. A joust was staged in his honour, and the occasion was commemorated in thirteen letters written in old French, addressed to Henry's daughter Blanche of England. Each letter claimed to be from a legendary patron praising one of the knights who competed. Two of the combatants, William Bardolf and John Clinton, are identified within those letters by their heraldry. The letters were probably read aloud during the tournament itself.

• 3. Young Henry and a Surprised Scholar

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  Edward IV built the Great Hall in the 1470s, and it was within those walls that the boy who would become Henry VIII spent his formative years. In 1499, the scholar Erasmus arrived at Eltham, having been taken there by his friend Thomas More on what was presented as a simple walk from a nearby estate. Erasmus recorded the encounter in detail. He found the royal children gathered in the hall along with the full retinue of the palace and of Lord Mountjoy. Henry stood at the centre, nine years old, already carrying what Erasmus called "a dignity of mind combined with a remarkable courtesy". More had brought a written gift; Erasmus had nothing prepared. During dinner, Henry sent him a note asking him to write something. Erasmus went home and, despite feeling estranged from the Muses after a long break from poetry, finished a poem within three days. The palace also hosted Tudor Christmas celebrations regularly, until the rebuilding of Greenwich Palace drew the court away. Eltham remained useful for hunting in the enclosed parks around it, the Great Park running to 596 acres, the Little Park to 333, and the Home Park to 336.

• 4. Ruin and Neglect

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  By 1610, the palace had passed from active royal use, though the courtier Roger Aston was still keeper of the little park and built four bridges there for the convenience of James VI and I. The painter Anthony van Dyck was given a suite of rooms in the 1630s as a country retreat, long after the royal family had abandoned the site. The English Civil War brought serious damage: the parks were stripped of trees and deer. John Evelyn visited on the 22nd of April 1656 and recorded a bleak scene, writing that "both the palace and chapel in miserable ruins, the noble wood and park destroyed by Rich the rebel." Charles II granted Eltham to John Shaw, and in its reduced state, consisting of Edward IV's Great Hall, a former buttery known as Court House, a bridge across the moat, and some walling, it stayed in Shaw's family line as late as 1893. The 15th-century bridge survived and still crosses the moat today.

• 5. The Courtaulds Arrive

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  In 1933, Stephen Courtauld and his wife Virginia, known as Ginie and born Peirano, took a 99-year lease on the derelict palace site. They hired the architectural firm Seely and Paget to restore the Great Hall and design a modern house attached to it. The architects added a minstrel's gallery and a timber screen to the medieval hall while drawing inspiration from Christopher Wren's work at Hampton Court Palace and Trinity College, Cambridge. The interior decoration was divided among several hands. Swedish designer Rolf Engströmer created the entrance hall, where light from a glazed dome falls on blackbean veneer and figurative marquetry. The Italian designer Piero Malacrida de Saint-August took on the dining room, drawing room, Virginia Courtauld's circular bedroom, and the adjoining bathroom. Stephen was a younger brother of Samuel Courtauld, who founded the Courtauld Institute of Art. Stephen's study contains a statuette version of a work called The Sentry, copied from a Manchester war memorial by sculptor Charles Sargeant Jagger. Both Stephen and Jagger had served in the Artists' Rifles during the First World War. The Courtaulds also redesigned and improved the gardens around the house.

• 6. Mah-Jongg and the Blitz

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  The Courtaulds kept a pet lemur named Mah-Jongg, who was given his own room on the upper floor of the house. A hatch connected his quarters to the flower room below, and he had the run of the entire house. The family remained at Eltham until 1944, and the war years brought the building close to catastrophe. In September 1940, Stephen Courtauld was on duty as a member of the local Civil Defence Service when German incendiary bombs struck. He was standing fire watch on the roof of the Great Hall itself when the attack damaged it. After surviving the Blitz, the family left for Scotland in 1944 and then moved to Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. In March 1945 they gave the palace to the Royal Army Educational Corps, which moved its full administration to Eltham in 1948. Staff eventually relocated to Worthy Down Camp in Hampshire in 1992, following the formation of the Educational and Training Services Branch of the new Adjutant General's Corps.

• 7. Restoration and Afterlife

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  English Heritage assumed management of the site in 1995 and completed major repairs and restoration of the interiors and gardens by 1999. The palace today is owned by the Crown Estate. English Heritage had taken responsibility for the Great Hall as early as 1984, more than a decade before managing the rest of the site. The combination of medieval stonework and Art Deco glamour has made Eltham a favourite location for film and television productions. Among the titles shot here are The Gathering Storm in 2002, Brideshead Revisited in 2008, and the series The Crown in 2017. English Heritage also lists Eltham on its register of most haunted places, where the ghost of a former staff member is said to have once led tours of the palace while it was supposed to be empty. The 15th-century bridge that Roger Aston's employer James I once crossed still stands at the edge of the moat, connecting the medieval and modern halves of this improbable survivor.