By William III’s time, the Great Bedchamber was no longer used for sleeping. The later Stuarts were greatly influenced by the ceremonies of Louis XIV, the Sun King in France, which included a ceremony of dressing and undressing each morning and evening ‘performed’ before members of the court and sometimes visitors.
At Kensington Palace is the so-called ‘Mary of Modena’ bed, which, although containing later fabric, is associated with the story that a surrogate baby was smuggled into the queen’s bed in a warming pan. The presence of large numbers of courtiers and others acting as witnesses to a royal birth makes this story implausible, but it’s nevertheless fascinating to think of a baby’s arrival as such a public occasion.
Henry III might have slept in a bed in the niche set into the wall of the Upper Wakefield Tower at the Tower of London, and the room’s large windows, chapel and fireplace suggest that it could have been his principal bedchamber. Edward I, on the other hand, moved into the more pleasant painted bedchamber of St Thomas’s Tower, overlooking the Thames. These medieval kings slept in collapsible beds that travelled with them from place to place.
