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William Portington
William Portington (1544-1629) was an English carpenter and joiner, originally from St Albans, employed by Elizabeth I and James VI and I. He was master carpenter of the Office of Works. Career and works Portington was employed by Nicholas Bacon (Lord Keeper), Sir Nicholas Bacon, the Lord Keeper, for his buildings on Fetter Lane. Nathaniel Bacon of Stiffkey, Sir Nathaniel Bacon of Stiffkey and Sir Nicholas Bacon, 1st Baronet, of Redgrave, Sir Nicholas Bacon of Redgrave, Suffolk, Redgrave paid him £20 in May 1579. Portington was employed in April and May 1603 during preparations for the Coronation of James I, coronation of King James and other ceremonies, supervised by Simon Basil and William Spicer. His account survives in the library of the University of Edinburgh. He repaired and altered the privy lodgings at the Tower of London and built new sheds for the kitchen and a pump to bring water from the Thames to the kitchen cistern. He repaired the "standard" or fountain at Westmin ...
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St Albans
St Albans () is a cathedral city in Hertfordshire, England, east of Hemel Hempstead and west of Hatfield, north-west of London, south-west of Welwyn Garden City and south-east of Luton. St Albans was the first major town on the old Roman road of Watling Street for travellers heading north and became the city of Verulamium. It is within the London commuter belt and the Greater London Built-up Area. Name St Albans takes its name from the first British saint, Alban. The most elaborate version of his story, Bede's ''Ecclesiastical History of the English People'', relates that he lived in Verulamium, sometime during the 3rd or 4th century, when Christians were suffering persecution. Alban met a Christian priest fleeing from his persecutors and sheltered him in his house, where he became so impressed with the priest's piety that he converted to Christianity. When the authorities searched Alban's house, he put on the priest's cloak and presented himself in place of his guest ...
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Cecil House
Cecil House refers to two historical mansions on The Strand, London, in the vicinity of the Savoy. The first was a 16th-century house on the north side, where the Strand Palace Hotel now stands. The second was built in the early 17th century on the south side nearly opposite, where Shell Mex House stands today. Exeter House The first, also called Exeter House or Burghley House, was on the north side of The Strand; it was built in the 16th century by William Cecil (later Lord Burghley) as an expansion of an existing house; Cecil moved his London residence there in 1560, and Queen Elizabeth I of England supped with him there, in July 1561, "before my house was fully finished", Cecil recorded in his diary, calling the place "my rude new cottage." When Cecil was created Lord Burghley in 1571, this London seat became known as Burghley House. It was a symmetrical double-courtyard brick house of three storeys, with four-storey corner turrets. A central entrance led from The Strand into t ...
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Henry Frederick, Prince Of Wales
Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales (19 February 1594 – 6 November 1612), was the eldest son and heir apparent of James VI and I, King of England and Scotland; and his wife Anne of Denmark. His name derives from his grandfathers: Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley; and Frederick II of Denmark. Prince Henry was widely seen as a bright and promising heir to his father's thrones. However, at the age of 18, he predeceased his father when he died of typhoid fever. His younger brother Charles succeeded him as heir apparent to the English, Irish, and Scottish thrones. Early life Henry was born at Stirling Castle, Scotland, and became Duke of Rothesay, Earl of Carrick, Baron of Renfrew, Lord of the Isles, and Prince and Great Steward of Scotland automatically on his birth. His nurses included Mistress Primrose and Mistress Bruce. Henry's baptism on 30 August 1594 was celebrated with complex theatrical entertainments written by poet William Fowler and a ceremony in a new Chapel Roya ...
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Westminster Abbey
Westminster Abbey, formally titled the Collegiate Church of Saint Peter at Westminster, is an historic, mainly Gothic church in the City of Westminster, London, England, just to the west of the Palace of Westminster. It is one of the United Kingdom's most notable religious buildings and since Edward the Confessor, a burial site for English and, later, British monarchs. Since the coronation of William the Conqueror in 1066, all coronations of English and British monarchs have occurred in Westminster Abbey. Sixteen royal weddings have occurred at the abbey since 1100. According to a tradition first reported by Sulcard in about 1080, a church was founded at the site (then known as Thorney Island) in the seventh century, at the time of Mellitus, Bishop of London. Construction of the present church began in 1245 on the orders of Henry III. The church was originally part of a Catholic Benedictine abbey, which was dissolved in 1539. It then served as the cathedral of the ...
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Catafalque
A catafalque is a raised bier, box, or similar platform, often movable, that is used to support the casket, coffin, or body of a dead person during a Christian funeral or memorial service. Following a Roman Catholic Requiem Mass, a catafalque may be used to stand in place of the body at the absolution of the dead or used during Masses of the Dead and All Souls' Day. Etymology According to Peter Stanford, the term originates from the Italian ', which means scaffolding. However, the ''Oxford English Dictionary'' says the word is " unknown derivation; even the original form is uncertain; French pointing to or , Italian to , Spanish to ." The most notable Italian catafalque was the one designed for Michelangelo by his fellow artists in 1564. An elaborate and highly decorated roofed surround for a catafalque, common for grand funerals of the Baroque era, may be called a '. Papal catafalques Large processions have followed the catafalques of popes. The households of the car ...
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Peter Street (carpenter)
Peter Street (baptised 1 July 1553, died in May 1609) was an English carpenter and builder in London in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. He built the Fortune Playhouse, and probably the Globe Theatre, two significant establishments in the history of the stage in London. He had a part in building King James's Banqueting House in Whitehall Palace and he may have been responsible for the settings for the king's royal masques. Early life Street was the fourth of eight children of John Street, a joiner of St Stephen Coleman Street parish in the City of London, and his wife Margaret Bullasse, who married in 1546. He was ten when his father died in 1563 and was the only one of his brothers and sisters to survive into adulthood. At the age of sixteen, on Lady Day in 1570 (25 March 1570), Street was indentured for an eight-year term of apprenticeship to carpenter William Brittaine. After a year, Street's talent was noticed by Robert Maskall, an important figure in the carpe ...
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Robert Stickells
Robert Stickells or Stickles (died 1620) was an English architect and clerk of works. Career Stickells was first recorded working to clear obstacles from the harbour at Dover. In 1591 he supervised the panelling of Grocer's Hall in London. He became clerk of works at Richmond Palace. In 1597 Stickells made some memoranda and sketches referring to the contrast between ideas of Vitruvius and Gothic architecture, antique and the modern. He is thought to have been involved in the construction of Lyveden New Bield from 1604, and made a drawing for the lantern roof. James VI and I began building a new Banqueting House at Whitehall Palace in 1607, probably designed by Robert Stickells. A model for the roof was made by a Scottish designer, James Acheson. William Portington was the carpenter, and Peter Street made a special augur to hollow out the columns. King James visited the construction site in September 1607 and, according to John Chamberlain, was displeased with the placing of pi ...
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Whitehall Palace
The Palace of Whitehall (also spelt White Hall) at Westminster was the main residence of the English monarchs from 1530 until 1698, when most of its structures, except notably Inigo Jones's Banqueting House of 1622, were destroyed by fire. Henry VIII moved the royal residence to White Hall after the old royal apartments at the nearby Palace of Westminster were themselves destroyed by fire. Although the Whitehall palace has not survived, the area where it was located is still called Whitehall and has remained a centre of government. White Hall was at one time the largest palace in Europe, with more than 1,500 rooms, overtaking the Vatican, before itself being overtaken by the expanding Palace of Versailles, which was to reach 2,400 rooms. The palace gives its name, Whitehall, to the street located on the site on which many of the current administrative buildings of the present-day British government are situated, and hence metonymically to the central government itse ...
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Banqueting House
In English architecture, mainly from the Tudor period onwards, a banqueting house is a separate pavilion-like building reached through the gardens from the main residence, whose use is purely for entertaining, especially eating. Or it may be built on the roof of a main house, as in many 16th-century prodigy houses. It may be raised for additional air or a vista, with a simple kitchen below, as at Hampton Court Palace and Wrest Park, and it may be richly decorated, but it normally contains no bedrooms, and typically a single grand room apart from any service spaces. The design is often ornamental, if not downright fanciful, and some are also follies, as in Paxton's Tower. There are usually plenty of windows, as appreciating the view was a large part of their purpose. Often they are built on a slope, so that from the front, only the door to the main room can be seen; the door to the servants' spaces underneath was hidden at the back (Wrest Park). The Banqueting House, Gibside ...
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Silkworm
The domestic silk moth (''Bombyx mori''), is an insect from the moth family Bombycidae. It is the closest relative of '' Bombyx mandarina'', the wild silk moth. The silkworm is the larva or caterpillar of a silk moth. It is an economically important insect, being a primary producer of silk. A silkworm's preferred food are white mulberry leaves, though they may eat other mulberry species and even the osage orange. Domestic silk moths are entirely dependent on humans for reproduction, as a result of millennia of selective breeding. Wild silk moths (other species of ''Bombyx'') are not as commercially viable in the production of silk. Sericulture, the practice of breeding silkworms for the production of raw silk, has been under way for at least 5,000 years in China, whence it spread to India, Korea, Nepal, Japan, and the West. The domestic silk moth was domesticated from the wild silk moth '' Bombyx mandarina'', which has a range from northern India to northern China, Korea, ...
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The Masque Of Beauty
''The Masque of Beauty'' was a courtly masque written by Ben Jonson, and performed in London's Whitehall Palace on 10 January 1608. It inaugurated the refurbished banquesting hall of the palace (the predecessor of Inigo Jones' building). It was a sequel to the preceding '' Masque of Blackness'', which had been performed three years earlier, on 6 January 1605. In ''The Masque of Beauty'', the "daughters of Niger" of the earlier piece were shown cleansed of the black pigment they had worn on the prior occasion. The show Like its earlier companion piece, ''The Masque of Beauty'' was performed by Queen Anne and ladies of her court, and witnessed by King James. The number of court ladies included was increased from the twelve in ''Blackness'' to sixteen. In addition to Queen Anne, the participants were the Countesses of Arundel, Bedford, Derby, and Montgomery, and the Ladies Chichester, Walsingham, Windsor, Anne Clifford, Elizabeth Girrard, Elizabeth Guilford, Elizabeth Hatton, M ...
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The Vision Of The Twelve Goddesses
''The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses'' was an early Jacobean-era masque, written by Samuel Daniel and performed in the Great Hall of Hampton Court Palace on the evening of Sunday, 8 January 1604. One of the earliest of the Stuart Court masques, staged when the new dynasty had been in power less than a year and was closely engaged in peace negotiations with Spain, ''The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses'' stood as a precedent and a pattern for the many masques that followed during the next four decades. Design and music The name of the masque's designer is not recorded in the historical sources; some scholars have argued that he may have been Inigo Jones, who had recently returned to England from the royal court of Anne of Denmark's brother Christian IV, and so had a connection with her courtly establishment. The stage set had clear similarities with Jones's later masque work; the set for ''The Vision'' consisted of a large mountain, plus a Temple of Peace and a Cave of Sleep at t ...
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