V&A acquires earliest picture of Henry VIII's lost palace of Nonsuch
artanddesign/2016/dec/09/v-and-a- acquires-earliest-picture-henry-viii- lost-palace-nonsuch
The palace itself was sold by Henry’s daughter Mary, then came back into royal ownership when her sister Elizabeth acquired it to settle a debt. It became one of her favourite residences, and Thomas Tallis’s heart-stopping composition Spem in Alium, a motet for 40 voices, is said to have been first performed to mark her 40th birthday by choirs singing from the towers.
The diarist Samuel Pepys saw Nonsuch in 1665, and wrote that “all the house on the outside is covered with figures of story … and most of the house is covered with lead and gilded”. Within a few years it was rubble: Charles II gave the building to his lover Barbara Castlemaine who pulled it down and sold off anything worth salvaging.