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laid out with flower beds, sparkling fountains, ornamental summer
houses and surrounded by a superb park, it contained everything
that money could buy or thought could devise to add to its
grandeur. Floors were heavily carpeted; rooms, furnished from
the dis-established monasteries and churches, were richly decorated,
and the genius of the world's greatest painters was expended
on its walls and ceilings which were hung with fine Arras cloth
and tapestries, with silk and crimson velvet from Montpelier in
Gascony and with ermine, sable and fox from Ireland; cloth of
gold, blue cloth of silver broached upon satin ground, white
damask, each richly emblazoned with Royal emblems, were
lavishly used; servants' liveries of blue murrey and horses with
"hobby harnesss" of green velvet and aglets of silver, all were
here assembled to receive distinguished personages from the world
of arts, crafts, trades and professions.
From the beginning of the 15th century when Westminster had
again become the centre of government, the Palace of Placentia,
the favourite royal resort up to the time of James II (1685),
became the scene of countless tournaments, pageants and lavish
spectacles. Greenwich in its hey-day and during one of the most
colourful periods in English history, was the haunt of most
eminent people of the time and the great Elizabethan admirals,
statesmen, philosophers, writers, musicians and courtiers thronged
the riverside and splendid palace nestling at the foot of Greenwich
Hill in some 200 acres of beautiful sward and delightful woodlands.
Among these could be numbered the painters Holbein,
Rubens and Vandyke—men of letters such as Shakespeare, Bacon,
More, Johnson, Milton, Sidney, Spencer, Evelyn and Pepys—
seamen and explorers such as Drake, Hawkins, Raleigh, Blake,
Cabot, Lord Howard, Davis, Frobisher, etc.—Tallis and Bull the
composers—Newton the celebrated philosopher-mathematician
and friend of Flamsteed, the Astronomer Royal—Harvey, the
physiologist—Gresham, the astute merchant and financier and
"money-finder" for the Royal Households—the list seems endless
but, with such habitues, it was no wonder that the Court of
Greenwich was the most popular in Europe. A sign of its
popularity was the fact that in 1586, due to the concourse of
visitors to the Palace, local bakers were constrained to apply for
a warrant to obtain corn from various markets in Kent. It was
towards the end of this "golden age" in 1675, on a Warrant of
Charles II, that the Royal Observatory was founded and, to the
design of Christopher Wren, Flamsteed House was built on the
site of Duke Humphrey's tower.
Almost as if to create a surfeit of grand edifices, an exquisite
building designed by Inigo Jones with ceilings by Gentileschi and