In the same week that Westminster’s Big Ben stopped ticking, time also stood still at Hampton Court Palace with the removal of King Henry VIII’s 500-year-old astronomical clock for conservation and restoration work to be undertaken.
This rare astronomical clock is one of the most significant late-medieval clocks in Europe, with only a handful of clocks predating King Henry’s surviving today. Removing the clock, which is located in the upper stories of a Tudor Gatehouse, will allow Historic Royal Palaces’ curators and conservators to study the dials up close which will hopefully help them discover more about the history of the clock over the past five centuries.
It will also enable a condition assessment of the copper dials and the existing paint and gilding scheme, which is suffering from flaking caused by weather exposure. Once this assessment and analysis has been completed, an appropriate programme of conservation will be undertaken to halt any further deterioration of the paint scheme. As well as the dials, the complex clock mechanism will be dismantled and removed by specialists from the Cumbria Clock Company so they can assess and conserve the mechanism and gears as necessary.
King Henry VIII commissioned Nicolas Kratzer (a Bavarian and friend of court painter Hans Holbein) to design an astronomical clock for his palace at Hampton Court, which was installed around 1540. The astronomer and ‘Devisor of the King’s Horologes’, working with French clockmaker Nicholas Oursian, created not only a marvel of Tudor engineering with complex mechanics, but also an enviable work of art. It also had great practical use showing the time, month, day of the month, position of the sun in the zodiac, the phase and age of the moon. It also determined the time at which the moon would cross the meridian and therefore the time of high water at London Bridge, useful if you, like King Henry, travelled to London by Royal Barge.
Originally there were two clock faces, one on either side of the gatehouse, both powered by the complex mechanical and gearing system created by Oursian (whose initials, N.O., and the date 1540 can still be seen on the mechanism). The smaller dial which faced Base Court was for guests, however, this was replaced in 1835 by a slate clock face from St James’s Palace bearing the monogram of William IV. The larger dial, measuring over 2.5 metres wide, overlooked the royal courtyard and survives today with a still striking, although probably less intricate, paint scheme. A description of works by George Gower, ‘Serjannte Painter’ to Elizabeth I, gives us insight into how spectacular the original Tudor dial looked with seas, ships and continents depicted:
’for cleansing of the two dialls the great diall with the howres of the day and the night, the course of the Sunne and Mone, xii Signes with the Carectors of the Planetts …, the Sea, shipps and Territories …all wrought in oyle coullors as Vermilion, Bise, White leade etc and gilded with fine golde…’
Over the centuries, the mechanism and dials of Hampton Court Palace’s astronomical clock have been removed and repaired on numerous occasions. Whilst nearly all of the original Tudor paint scheme has been removed from the dials and the mechanics of the clock altered to make it operate accurately, the astronomical clock remains an iconic feature of Hampton Court Palace, with thousands of visitors every year studying its face, as King Henry VIII did 500 years ago.
Visitors to Hampton Court Palace will have a rare and unique opportunity to view the dials of the astronomical clock up close when they go on public display in Clock Court from today until the end of October 2007. The removal and restoration of the astronomical clock is part of a larger project to repair and conserve the Tudor brickwork and stonework of Anne Boleyn’s Gatehouse at Hampton Court Palace. The project will take approximately nine months, which will include reinstating Henry’s famous astronomical clock in April 2008.
