The Meeting-Places of Parliament in the Ancient Palace of Westminster

Abstract

The importation into England of church furnishings of most kinds has been going on since the early Middle Ages. The focus of this study is on wooden furnishings and the early 19th century, when a specific group of patrons scoured mainly France and the Low Countries for the furniture that had been prised from churches, as a direct and indirect result of the French Revolution. The taste for such material was fuelled by a Romantic enthusiasm, although ironically much of it was in the Baroque style. The historical setting for this nostalgic explosion in interest is briefly sketched, as well as an account of its development into the early 20th century.     

Pirate Ports and Harbours of West Cork in the Early Seventeenth Century

In the early part of the seventeenth century in Ireland select harbours along the southwest coast of Munster acted as the North Atlantic headquarters for pirates, primarily made up of English mariners. The places picked by the pirates as their bases were spatially strategic and three harbours in particular dominated this West Cork landscape—Baltimore, Leamcon and Crookhaven. Complicit English officers facilitated this activity and pirates and their families settled on the estates of the local officials while others used this pirate landscape as a staging point for plundering adventures further afield. As a consequence, piracy in Irish waters at that time had a profound influence on local economies, social activities and, in some cases, political events. Indeed the tolerance shown to it in the early seventeenth century in the southwest may be explained by the fact that it facilitated the colonial effort ongoing under the Munster Plantation and thus, inadvertently, suited the purposes of official government.     

The Armada Paintings in the New Palace of Westminster

In June 2008 a team of artists began the gargantuan task of creating the series of Armada mural paintings for the house of lords. They were embarking on a two-year project, which would bring to completion the original decorative scheme planned for the prince's chamber by the Royal Commission on Fine Arts ¹ during the 1840s. This, in turn, would reconnect the original historical association, which the Armada tapestries had held with the house of lords since the mid 17th century until their destruction by fire in 1834. This article places these Armada mural paintings within the historical context of this project at the Palace of Westminster and documents some of the methodology behind the programme of work to re-create this celebrated series for the walls of the house of lords.     

The Armada Tapestries in the Old Palace of Westminster

The tapestry series of the ‘Defeat of the Spanish Armada’ was a national artistic treasure which hung in the old Palace of Westminster from the mid 17th century until the fire of 1834. This article outlines the creation of the tapestries in the 1590s and covers the major treatments of them in illustrations of parliamentary interiors and in John Pine's 1739 engravings; it ends with a short account of the curious episode of the tapestry which escaped the conflagration. In the absence of any known historical record of how the tapestries were displayed, suggestions are offered about how many and in what order they hung in the two chambers occupied successively by the house of lords (before and after 1801), and about how they were physically supported on the walls of the Parliament Chamber.