Nonsuch Palace, Henry VIII’s lost hunting lodge

One of the few contemporary views of Nonsuch Palace, a massive hunting lodge near Cheam, Surrey, built for Henry VIII and begun in 1538. In the foreground is a coach carrying Elizabeth I; although the palace was sold by Queen Mary in 1556, Elizabeth was a frequent visitor, and signed the 1585 'Treaty of Nonsuch' with the Dutch there, provoking the Spanish Armada. The palace came to a sad end. In 1670 Charles II gave it to his mistress, Barbara Palmer, Duchess of Cleveland; a decade later she had it pulled down to sell off the building materials to pay gambling debts. Joris Hoefnagel (1542-1601) was a Flemish artist who travelled around Europe with Abraham Ortelius, and provided many illustrations for the 'Civitates Orbis Terrarum', the town atlas in which this view appeared. The watercolour on which this is based, regarded as one of the earliest realist landscape watercolours in England, is in the British Museum (BM 1943,1009.35).