# Bridewell Palace

former palace in the City of London, England; former prison

United Kingdom

Palace. 1864 CE

## Story

• Bridewell Palace stood on the Fleet between Fleet Street and the Thames, and Henry VIII used it as a London house from 1515 to 1523.
• Thomas Wolsey held the site from 1510. The brick courts, great stair, and long gallery were built on arches over reclaimed riverside ground.
• Edward VI gave the palace to the City in 1553. From 1556 it was a hospital, a school, and a prison, and the name bridewell spread to other houses of correction.
• Most of the palace burned in the Great Fire of 1666 and was rebuilt. The prison closed in 1855, and the buildings were demolished over the next decade.
• Excavation in 1978 uncovered the great staircase and stair turrets, and a dig in 2014 found a palace wing that had not been recorded.

## History

Bridewell Palace stood on the River Fleet in the City of London, between Fleet Street and the Thames, on the ground now called Bridewell Place. A royal house had long stood there by Saint Bride’s, and the ruined house on the medieval inn passed to Cardinal Thomas Wolsey in 1510. Henry VIII needed a new London home after the privy lodgings at Westminster burned in 1512.

From 1515 to 1523 he treated Bridewell as a main residence. The cost is given both as £39,000 and as more than £19,000, and the freehold is placed in 1531 rather than with the lease of 1515. The palace was brick, carried on arches over reclaimed ground, with two courts, a formal stair, and no great hall. The long gallery is described both as a run of 240 feet toward Blackfriars and as a range toward the Thames ending in two towers.

The house was prepared for the Emperor Charles V, nephew of Catherine of Aragon, who was received in England in 1520. Henry kept masques there, put on parliament robes there before going to Blackfriars, and there raised his son Henry Fitzroy to be Duke of Richmond and Somerset. In 1528 a papal delegation met at the palace about the king’s marriage, and in 1529 Henry and Catherine lodged there while that question was argued at Blackfriars.

After Thomas Wolsey fell, the palace was leased to the French ambassador from 1531 to 1539. Hans Holbein’s Ambassadors, painted in 1533, is placed in the house, with Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve. Henry had already shifted his London life to Whitehall, which he found larger. He died there in 1547.

Edward VI gave Bridewell to the City on 10 April 1553 as a workhouse, a hospital, and a place of correction for the poor and the idle. He died that July before the City had finished taking possession, and Mary confirmed the gift. In 1556 the palace became a prison, a hospital, and workrooms, and in 1557 Bridewell and Bethlem came under one set of governors. The charter supported a court, space for about two hundred prisoners, a school, and labour.

The name bridewell became the ordinary word for a house of correction, used for lockups in London and in cities far from the Fleet. Most of the old palace burned in the Great Fire of September 1666, when the flames jumped the river, and the prison was rebuilt in 1666 and 1667. In 1700 it appointed a doctor, the first prison to do so. John Strype’s edition of 1720, based on John Stow’s A Survey of London, includes a prospect of the rebuilt house.

William Hogarth set a scene of A Harlot’s Progress in the prison in 1732. Elizabeth Cresswell died there late in the seventeenth century. The prison closed in 1855. The buildings were taken down in 1863 and 1864, and they have also been described as demolished in 1855.

The school moved in 1867 to Surrey and became King Edward’s School, Witley.

Part of the cleared ground was used in 1874 for a hotel that the army took in 1915. The House of Lords judged that taking in 1920. Lever Brothers bought the building in 1921, and Unilever House was built at Watergate in 1931. A gatehouse front on New Bridge Street carries a relief portrait of Edward VI.

Digging in 1978 found the external great staircase, two stair turrets, and fragments of the long gallery, with the brick arches in the made ground. Tree rings from oak on the same site dated a late Saxon revetment to the middle of the tenth century. In 2014 a wing that had not been documented was uncovered at Dorset Rise. The palace courts now lie under later offices and a hotel.

## Photographs

- [The Prospect of Bridewell from John Strype's, An Accurate Edition of Stow's Survey of London (1720) — John Strype](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6b/Prospect_of_Bridewell.jpg)
- [The Pass Room at Bridewell from Ackermann's Microcosm of London (1808-11). Drawing by Thomas Rowlandson and Augustus Pugin. At this time paupers from outside — Thomas Rowlandson (1756–1827) and Augustus Charles Pugin (1762–1832) (after) John Bluck (fl. 1791–1819)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/69/Microcosm_of_London_Plate_012_-_Pass_Room%2C_Bridewell_%28alt%29.jpg)
- [Pass Room, Bridewell — Thomas Rowlandson (1756–1827) and Augustus Charles Pugin (1762–1832) (after) John Bluck (fl. 1791–1819)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e3/Microcosm_of_London_Plate_012_-_Pass_Room%2C_Bridewell.jpg)
- [Pass Room, Bridewell — Thomas Rowlandson (1756–1827) and Augustus Charles Pugin (1762–1832) (after) John Bluck (fl. 1791–1819)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/Microcosm_of_London_Plate_012_-_Pass_Room%2C_Bridewell_%28colour%29.jpg)
- [Painting of Bridewell Palace, London by E. H. Maund, 1880 — E. H. Maund (painter)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/58/Maund_The-Courtyard-at-Bridewell-Palace-1880.jpg)
- [A Scene in Bridewell, plate IV. William Hogarth, A Harlot's Progress, April 1732 — William Hogarth](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/40/MollInBridewelldetail2.jpg)
- [A print of Bridewell Prison as re-built after the Great Fire of London (1666). The prison was rebuilt 1666-7. — Unknown author Unknown author](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/36/Bridewell_prison_rebuilt_after_the_Great_Fire.gif)
- [Bridewell Palace — Wikimedia Commons](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/ONL_%281887%29_1.012_-_Bridewell_in_1666.jpg)
- [Bridewell Palace — Wikimedia Commons](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c2/ONL_%281887%29_1.187_-_Bridewell%2C_as_rebuilt_after_the_Fire.jpg)
- [View of New Bridge Street, Black Friars, with the Albion Fire Office &c. and others — Wikimedia Commons](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f7/Image_taken_from_page_118_of_%27National_History_and_Views_of_London_and_its_environs_..._from_original_drawings_by_eminent_artists._Edited_by_C._F._P%27_%2811010957004%29.jpg)

## Sources

- [Bridewell Palace](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridewell_Palace) — Wikipedia
- [Henry VIII](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_VIII) — Wikipedia
- [Edward VI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_VI) — Wikipedia
- [Thomas Wolsey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Wolsey) — Wikipedia
- [Catherine of Aragon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_of_Aragon) — Wikipedia
- [Great Fire of London](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Fire_of_London) — Wikipedia
- [Elizabeth Cresswell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Cresswell) — Wikipedia
- [John Stow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stow) — Wikipedia
- [John Strype](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Strype) — Wikipedia
- [Augustus Pugin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustus_Pugin) — Wikipedia
- [Enoch Cobb Wines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enoch_Cobb_Wines) — Wikipedia
- [Henry Fielding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Fielding) — Wikipedia
- [Bridewell](https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/6.4/BRID2.htm) — Map of Early Modern London
- [Where did King Henry VIII live in London?](https://www.londonmuseum.org.uk/collections/london-stories/where-did-king-henry-viii-live-london/) — London Museum
- [Bridewell, Middlesex (London)](https://henryviiihouses.byu.edu/bridewell-middlesex-london/) — Henry VIII Houses
- [The Bridewell, Bridewell Place](https://historicengland.org.uk/education/schools-resources/educational-images/the-bridewell-bridewell-place-city-of-london-greater-london-al0147-024-01) — Historic England
- [Tudor Street tree-ring report](https://historicengland.org.uk/research/results/reports/1696/DENDRO-TUDORSTLONDON) — Historic England
- [Bridewell Palace excavations at Bridewell Place and Tudor Street, 1978](https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/library/browse/details.xhtml?recordId=3054637) — Archaeology Data Service
- [Archaeological excavation at 1 Dorset Rise](https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/library/browse/issue.xhtml?recordId=1149304&recordType=GreyLitSeries) — Archaeology Data Service
- [Black lives in early modern Bridewell](https://museumofthemind.org.uk/blog/black-lives-in-early-modern-bridewell) — Bethlem Museum of the Mind
- [Prospect of Bridewell.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Prospect_of_Bridewell.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Microcosm of London Plate 012 - Pass Room, Bridewell (alt).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Microcosm_of_London_Plate_012_-_Pass_Room,_Bridewell_(alt).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Microcosm of London Plate 012 - Pass Room, Bridewell.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Microcosm_of_London_Plate_012_-_Pass_Room,_Bridewell.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Microcosm of London Plate 012 - Pass Room, Bridewell (colour).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Microcosm_of_London_Plate_012_-_Pass_Room,_Bridewell_(colour).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Maund The-Courtyard-at-Bridewell-Palace-1880.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Maund_The-Courtyard-at-Bridewell-Palace-1880.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [MollInBridewelldetail2.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MollInBridewelldetail2.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Bridewell prison rebuilt after the Great Fire.gif](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bridewell_prison_rebuilt_after_the_Great_Fire.gif) — Wikimedia Commons
- [ONL (1887) 1.012 - Bridewell in 1666.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ONL_(1887)_1.012_-_Bridewell_in_1666.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [ONL (1887) 1.187 - Bridewell, as rebuilt after the Fire.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ONL_(1887)_1.187_-_Bridewell,_as_rebuilt_after_the_Fire.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Image taken from page 118 of 'National History and Views of London and its environs ... from original drawings by eminent artists. Edited by C. F. P' (11010957004).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Image_taken_from_page_118_of_%27National_History_and_Views_of_London_and_its_environs_..._from_original_drawings_by_eminent_artists._Edited_by_C._F._P%27_(11010957004).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons

## Detailed history

The ground under Bridewell Palace was already old when the Tudor brick went in. On the north bank of the Thames, just west of the City wall and beside the mouth of the River Fleet, land had been won out of the river by dumping and revetment. Oak recovered from the Tudor Street side of that ground includes a radially split plank whose rings run from the year 682 to the year 918. The timber has no sapwood. Taking the usual allowance of about thirty-two sapwood rings, give or take nine, the tree was felled after 941, and the structure it belonged to was put up in the middle of the tenth century. That structure was a late Saxon revetment, not a medieval wharf. Two other piles from the same dig matched each other and came from trees about eighty or ninety years old when they were cut. A rubbing post tied to a chalk foundation, once thought to be of the fifteenth century, had rings too narrow and too even to date. At the time the plank was dated, it was the only English timber whose rings reached back into the seventh century, and it pushed the absolutely dated English sequence back by about a hundred years. It also supplied the link by which timbers from Portchester and from Old Windsor were dated. The same riverside dumps, seen again in a smaller dig at Dorset Rise, make up most of the sequence before the palace: medieval reclamation and landscaping laid over earlier ground, with Roman pottery, tile, and other finds in the lower layers.

By the later Middle Ages a royal dwelling had long stood here by St Bride’s in Fleet Street. The church is among the oldest in London and takes its name from St Brigid of Kildare, also called St Bride. A tower on the site was replaced by the house called Bridewell. That house fell into ruin. The palace that followed was raised on the medieval St Bride’s Inn, directly south of St Bride’s Church, on the banks of the Fleet between Fleet Street and the Thames. The plot is the ground now called Bridewell Place, off New Bridge Street. One account puts the palace just outside the City wall. The lost river gate of its precinct, where the Fleet met the Thames, was called Watergate, and that name survives in the street.

Cardinal Thomas Wolsey took the property in 1510. Wolsey had been born at Ipswich in about March 1473, the son of Robert Wolsey and Joan Daundy. His father was later remembered as a butcher, though he owned several businesses, and the family had connections with the Wingfields and the Daundys. Wolsey was schooled at Ipswich and at Magdalen College School, then studied theology at Magdalen College, Oxford. He served Henry Deane, archbishop of Canterbury, and after Deane’s death entered the household of Sir Richard Nanfan. When Nanfan died in 1507, Wolsey passed into the service of King Henry VII. Under Henry VIII, who became king on 22 April 1509, Wolsey rose from royal almoner to the man who, by 1514, directed nearly every matter of state. He was bishop of Lincoln and archbishop of York in 1514. Pope Leo X made him a cardinal on 10 September 1515, with the titular church of St Cecilia, which set him above the other clergy of England. When William Warham resigned the lord chancellorship in 1515, Henry VIII put Wolsey in his place. Wolsey was often treated as an alter rex, another king. From 1524 he was papal legate for life. The offices brought him an income put as high as £35,000 a year. He used building to hold that rank: classical additions at York Place, the temporary palaces of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and the enlargement of Hampton Court, which he later gave up to the king. He also planned great tombs, founded a grammar school at Ipswich, and turned the income of decayed monasteries toward Cardinal College at Oxford, later King Henry VIII’s College and now Christ Church. He lived for about a decade in a marriage the canon law did not recognise, with Joan Larke of Yarmouth, and had a son, Thomas Wynter, born about 1510, and a daughter, Dorothy, born about 1512, before he arranged Larke’s marriage to George Legh.

Henry VIII needed a new house in London because the privy lodgings of the old Palace of Westminster burned in 1512. Westminster had been the main royal residence in London since 1049, and Henry had spent much of his early reign there. After the fire it stayed the seat of law, administration, and Parliament, and it kept the name of a palace, but it was no longer a home. Henry had been born on 28 June 1491 at the Palace of Placentia in Greenwich, the second surviving son of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York. His elder brother Arthur, Prince of Wales, died in 1502, and Henry was made Prince of Wales in 1504. He came to the throne at seventeen. A papal dispensation let him marry Arthur’s widow, Catherine of Aragon, on 11 June 1509, in the church of the Observant Friars outside Greenwich. Catherine had been born on 16 December 1485 at Alcalá de Henares, the youngest child of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile. She had married Arthur at Old St Paul’s on 14 November 1501, when both were fifteen, and was widowed at sixteen when Arthur died at Ludlow on 2 April 1502. She maintained that the first marriage had not been consummated. In 1507 she served as ambassador of Aragon in England, the first woman known to have held such a post in Europe. For six months in 1513, while Henry was in France, she was regent, and she had a part in the English stand against the Scottish invasion that ended at Flodden. Their only surviving child was Mary, born on 18 February 1516. Sons born in 1511, about 1513, and 1514 died at birth or within days, and a daughter was stillborn in 1518. Catherine had no further pregnancy after 1519.

The house by the Fleet has been described in two overlapping ways. One account says Wolsey built it from 1510 and transferred it to Henry VIII in 1515. Another says it was previously Wolsey’s house, and that from 1515 to 1523 Henry acquired it and turned it into his own palace after the Westminster fire. A third reckoning says Henry acquired the lease from Wolsey in 1515 and did not acquire the freehold until 1531. The first building accounts have not survived. The cost has been given as £39,000, and financial records have also been read as showing that more than £19,000 was spent. Henry treated Bridewell as a main London residence from 1515 to 1523. Stow’s survey, completed in the form published in 1598 and again in 1603, places the finish of the work in 1523, after Henry had added wings. The palace was built largely of brick. Because the ground was reclaimed riverside, the foundations used brick arches to carry the walls. There were two courtyards, both set parallel to the Fleet and opposite the Blackfriars. The royal lodgings rose three storeys around the inner court. A grand processional stair led up to them from the outer court. Bridewell was the first royal palace in this sequence to do without a great hall, and the formal stair became a feature Henry repeated in later houses. Another description stacks the king’s rooms above the queen’s, on two levels, at the north end of the long gallery and away from the river, and calls that arrangement, together with the gallery itself, the height of court fashion in the 1520s. It also places one of the earliest formally planned staircases in English architecture beside the chapel in the outer court. Kitchens and a gatehouse stood on the north side of the outer courtyard. The long gallery is given as 240 feet, about 73 metres, running from the inner court to Blackfriars and coming out at Apothecaries Hall on Blackfriars Lane, which then continued past the western front. The same gallery is also described as running from the inner court to the Thames and ending in two towers. The outer-court works look, from the documents, like additions to the first build. A prospect of the palace was later engraved for the 1720 edition of the London survey, and the palace appears on the Copperplate map of London, surveyed between 1553 and 1559.

The palace was built for the entertainment of the Emperor Charles V. Charles was Catherine’s nephew. In 1520 he paid a state visit to England, and Catherine pressed Henry to ally with Charles rather than with France. A chronicle of that visit says that at the beginning of spring the emperor took ship in Spain, was received royally by Henry VIII, who had married Charles’s aunt Catherine, and that among the king’s gifts was a lodging built on purpose for the emperor on the Thames, called Bridewell, after which Charles sailed on to Flanders and was received with joy. As soon as Charles had gone, Catherine went with Henry to France for the meeting with Francis I known as the Field of the Cloth of Gold, where Wolsey had charge of the temporary buildings. Within two years England and France were at war again, and there was talk of betrothing Charles to the princess Mary. Henry used Bridewell himself. At one Christmas he came there with many young gentlemen, and they put on masking clothes before taking the royal barge down the river to a masque and a dinner. On another occasion he and his nobles put on their parliament robes at Bridewell and went on to the Blackfriars church, where the Chapel Royal sang a Mass of the Holy Ghost. The palace was also a place where Henry raised peers. Edward Hall records that Henry Fitzroy, the king’s son by Elizabeth Blount, was six when the king knighted him and called him Lord Henry Fitzroy. At Bridewell, led in by two earls, Fitzroy was created Earl of Nottingham, and then the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk led him back and the king created him Duke of Richmond and Somerset. The same day a child of two was made Earl of Lincoln.

The marriage that had begun in 1509 broke the men who tried to save it, and it broke the palace’s life as a royal house. By 1526 Henry was taken with Anne Boleyn, one of Catherine’s maids of honour, and he was unwilling to leave the crown to Mary in a dynasty that had come out of the Wars of the Roses and had no settled custom of a woman on the throne. He came to believe that the marriage to his brother’s widow was sinful, and that the papal dispensation was void because it rested on Catherine’s statement that she had come to him a virgin. Catherine refused that account and refused to return to the title of dowager princess of Wales. Henry opened the annulment in 1527. Pope Clement VII was caught between Henry and Catherine’s nephew Charles V, and he delayed. In 1528 a papal delegation held its preliminary meetings at Bridewell before advising the pope on whether the king could put Catherine aside. In 1529 Henry and Catherine lodged at Bridewell while the question of their marriage was argued at Blackfriars. Wolsey could not deliver the annulment. It was said that Anne and her allies persuaded Henry that the cardinal was dragging the case. Wolsey was stripped of his offices and of his property in 1529, including York Place, which Henry took and made into Whitehall, his main London house in place of Westminster. The pope moved the decision to Rome. Wolsey was left as archbishop of York and went north for the first time to do that duty. At Cawood Castle he was charged with treason, a charge Henry often used against ministers who had lost favour, and he was ordered back to London by Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland. He left Cawood on the evening of 7 November 1530, stayed that night at Pontefract, and spent the next fortnight at Sheffield Manor with the Earl of Shrewsbury. He fell ill with dysentery. Sir William Kingston, constable of the Tower, took him into custody. Wolsey left Sheffield on 25 November, passed through Nottingham, and reached Leicester Abbey on the evening of 27 November so weak that he had to be carried upstairs. He lost his sight, sank on the night of 28 to 29 November, made his confession at seven in the morning, and died an hour later. He was buried at the abbey on 1 December 1530. The great tomb he had planned was never used for him. Henry later thought of taking the black sarcophagus for himself. It now holds Lord Nelson in the crypt of St Paul’s.

After Wolsey’s fall the palace was leased to the French ambassador from 1531 to 1539, and it was used to house foreign ambassadors. Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors, of 1533, is placed in this house. It shows Jean de Dinteville, the ambassador answerable to Francis I, with Georges de Selve, bishop of Lavaur. Some details of rebuilding in 1533 and 1534 survive, but by then Henry had stopped living at Bridewell. He found it too small, and he preferred Whitehall, the old York Place, where he began a long rebuilding, with a turreted gate, gardens, and a tennis court. He married Anne in secret in 1532. In 1533 Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury, declared the marriage to Catherine void. Clement excommunicated Henry. The Acts of Supremacy made the king supreme head of the Church of England. Catherine would not accept that title. She lived on at Kimbolton as the woman Henry would only call dowager princess of Wales, and she died there on 7 January 1536. She was buried at Peterborough on 29 January. Henry had Anne Boleyn and later Catherine Howard beheaded. A jousting fall in 1536 left him with a leg wound that would not heal. He grew heavy and could not move as he once had. By the end of the reign in 1547 he had more than fifty houses, more than any English monarch before him. He died at Whitehall on 28 January 1547, aged fifty-five, and was buried in St George’s Chapel at Windsor.

His only surviving son was Edward VI, born on 12 October 1537 in Jane Seymour’s rooms at Hampton Court. Jane seemed to recover, sent letters announcing a prince, and then died on 24 October from the birth. Edward was christened on 15 October, with his half-sister Mary as godmother and the four-year-old Elizabeth carrying the chrisom. He was a strong infant. The story that he was a sickly child has been challenged; apart from a dangerous quartan fever at four, and poor eyesight, he was generally well until his last six months. He became king on 28 January 1547 and was crowned on 20 February, aged nine. He was the first English monarch raised a Protestant. Because he never came of age, a council ruled: first his uncle Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, from 1547 to 1549, then John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, from 1550 to 1553. The reign was marked by high prices, unrest that broke into rebellion in 1549, and a war in Scotland that at first went well and then ended in withdrawal from Scotland and from Boulogne in exchange for peace. Under Edward the English church became recognisably Protestant. Clerical celibacy and the Latin Mass were abolished, and English was required in services, including a communion with a Protestant emphasis. Henry had broken with Rome but had kept most of the old doctrine and ceremony. Edward did not.

On 10 April 1553, Sir George Baron, mayor of London, was called to the court at Whitehall. There the king gave him, for the commons and citizens, the house of Bridewell, to be a workhouse for the poor and idle persons of the city. The gift was also framed as Bridewell Hospital, an orphanage and a place of correction for wayward women, and as a house for vagrants, homeless children, petty offenders, and disorderly women. Edward was already dying. He and his council drew up a Devise for the Succession to keep the realm from returning to Rome, and he named his Protestant cousin Lady Jane Grey, setting aside his half-sisters Mary and Elizabeth. He died on 6 July 1553, at fifteen, before the City had finished taking possession of Bridewell. Jane was proclaimed and was deposed by Mary nine days after she became queen. When Sir William Gerrarde, the mayor, and the aldermen entered Bridewell and took possession under Edward’s gift, the grant had to be confirmed by Queen Mary. The City took full possession in 1556 and turned the palace into a prison, a hospital, and workrooms. By 1556 part of it was a jail known as Bridewell Prison. In 1557 the City put Bridewell and Bethlehem under one administration, once Bethlem Royal Hospital had become the responsibility of the Bridewell governors. Bethlem itself had passed to the City in 1547. From the 1570s the Court of Governors of Bridewell and Bethlem met every two or three weeks and decided how both houses were to be run. The minute books of that court survive. The minutes from 1577 to 1610 have been read for the black men and women who came before the governors, and for the ways the court treated them.

The house ran on the royal charter. It did not have a parliamentary act behind it, but it kept a court that could try and punish, it could hold about two hundred prisoners, it kept a school for orphan and vagrant children, and it set prisoners to work for their bread. Edward’s grant included 700 marks of land lately belonging to the Savoy, toward the workhouse at Bridewell and the hospital of St Thomas in Southwark. Like other civic hospitals, it was also supported by gifts, parish collections, and taxes on the companies. John Taylor, looking back, called it a royal house of state and port, built by Henry VIII, who kept court there, and given by Edward, a little before his early death, to be a hospital. The City, he said, did many pious things there, and yet for vagabonds, runagates, whores, and idle knaves it was little better than a jail, where they chopped chalk for meat, drink, and blows. Thomas Dekker wrote of a daughter beating hemp in Bridewell. Ben Jonson wrote of women lashed there. A phrase book of 1638 could already say, “I’ll send you to Bridewell.” A Latin dictionary of 1587 glossed a slave kept at forced labour as a Bridewell bird. The word settled into the language as a prison, and especially a house of correction. It was even used out of its time: a play on the legendary Brutus of Britain puts a character down as brought up in the university of Bridewell. James Pilkington, preaching on the burning of St Paul’s in 1561, pointed to London hospitals founded in his own day, where the poor were relieved, children brought up, and the idle set to work, and he said Bridewell was a good school. Thomas Adams could call it broad hell in one sermon and, in another, a bath that scoured the idle back to labour, with the whip as medicine and a beadle to see the diet of work was taken. Most literary mentions are harsh. A ballad lines up the people who will be tried there. Dekker’s Honest Whore, by contrast, has a speaker praise the building for beauty, strength, capacity, and ancient form, and for standing near the river, and say that few court houses could better it.

The name became the ordinary word for a large prison, in England and in cities settled from Britain, including Dublin and New York. London itself reused it. The Clerkenwell Bridewell opened in 1615, and there was a Tothill Fields Bridewell in Westminster. Across England, Ireland, Scotland, Canada, and the United States the same word was taken for a city’s main lockup, usually near a courthouse, as at Nottingham, Leeds, Gloucester, Bristol, Dublin, Cork, and Edinburgh. The Old Bridewell in New York City is dated from 1768 to 1838. In 1867 Enoch Cobb Wines and Theodore William Dwight reported to the Legislature of New York on the prisons and reformatories of the United States and Canada. They wrote that the prisons standing between the common jail and the state prison went by different names in different states: house of correction, penitentiary, workhouse, bridewell, and city prison. Illinois, they noted, had a bridewell in Chicago, managed by the common council of that city. Wines had been born on 17 February 1806 in Hanover Township, New Jersey, and he died on 10 December 1879. He graduated from Middlebury College in 1827, taught, and began to preach in 1849. He was a Congregational minister, a professor of languages, and for a time president of a university in St Louis. From 1838 to 1841 he taught at the Philadelphia Central High School, and in 1839 he became the first teacher of ethics in an American high school. In 1862 he became secretary of the New York Prison Association, and in 1870 of the National Prison Association. In 1871 and 1872 he organised in London the first international congress on prison discipline. His books include the 1867 report written with Dwight, a report on that London congress, and later surveys of prisons and of institutions for children. The London word had travelled far enough to need a definition in an American report, and the man who wrote that definition came back to London to hold a congress on the same subject.

Inside the London house, the people who were sent there were often women accused of sexual offences. That pattern makes the last years of Elizabeth Cresswell part of the building’s history rather than a stray anecdote. Cresswell, also called Mother Creswell and Madam Cresswell of Clerkenwell, was born about 1625, probably at Knockholt in Kent, into a Protestant family with ties to the Percivals and to the court of Charles I. By July 1658 she was called a bawd without rival, keeping a brothel in Bartholomew Close off Little Britain. At Hicks Hall that month, constable John Marshall said she had been found there with various gentlemen and women, and that some of the women were sent to Bridewell. She tried to bribe her way out of the publicity. By October 1658 she was at St Leonard’s, Shoreditch, in a house she had taken for a £100 fine and £40 a year. Neighbours told the Westminster court of drinking, dancing, and swearing on Sundays and fast days, of doors locked on couples, and of women slipping in at a back gate. They said she was set to hard labour. By 1660 she and Damaris Page were the best-known figures of that London trade. She advertised women of every complexion, kept agents who found girls across the country, sold drink and company at a house by Whetstone Park in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, ran a headquarters in Back Alley off Moor Lane near Cripplegate, kept an office at Millbank for noblemen’s custom, a mansion at Clerkenwell, and a house of assignation. She took in gentlewomen who had stood with the king in the civil war and had since lost their place, and set them to work near the Royal Exchange, where they were called the countesses of the Exchange. Charles II used her houses and called the organisation a sound one. The apprentices who could not afford her prices, and who were forbidden to marry, made her a target. On Shrove Tuesday 1668 the Bawdy House Riots began, and for five days apprentices burned and smashed brothels, including hers in Moorfields. After the riot she and Page are named on the satirical Poor Whores’ Petition to Lady Castlemaine, the king’s mistress, asking that the brothels be rebuilt out of the public taxes and warning Castlemaine that the same rough hands would show a great lady no more favour than they had shown the petitioners. Samuel Pepys noted that Castlemaine was horribly vexed. The printer was arrested, but the censor could find nothing a jury would notice. Cresswell was widely taken for the lover of Sir Thomas Player, the City chamberlain, though one biographical account says there is no evidence of that, only that he used her brothels. She paid for his Whig campaigns. He was attacked as a friend of Titus Oates and of the Duke of Monmouth. In 1681 she was convicted of more than thirty years of bawdry, with some of her own women giving evidence, and she lost the Moorfields house, but the trade went on. Her health failed, probably from tuberculosis. A portrait engraved by Marcellus Laroon shows her ill and worn, and it hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. She was shut up in Bridewell Prison, possibly for a debt she did not pay, and she died there. One account puts the death at some point between 1684 and 1698. Another puts it around 1698. Her will asked for a decent burial at Knockholt in the manner of the Church of England. She was not buried there, and she was probably laid in the Bridewell graveyard. A story, repeated often and probably not true, says she left £10 for a sermon that would speak no ill of her. A young clergyman is supposed to have preached at length on morality and then said that she was born well, lived well, and died well, for she was born with the name of Cresswell, lived at Clerkenwell, and died in Bridewell.

Most of the old palace was destroyed in the Great Fire of London and rebuilt in 1666 and 1667. The fire burned from Sunday 2 September to Wednesday 5 September 1666. It began shortly after midnight on the Sunday in Thomas Farriner’s bakery in Pudding Lane. The maid was the first to die, too frightened to climb out after the others. Lord Mayor Sir Thomas Bloodworth hesitated to pull houses down for a firebreak. An east wind turned the fire into a storm. Samuel Pepys watched from the Tower, then from the river, and carried the news to Charles II and the Duke of York at Whitehall. On Tuesday 4 September, the worst day, the Duke of York tried to hold the line at the Fleet, from Fleet Bridge down to the Thames, hoping the river would stop the flames short of Whitehall. Early that morning the fire jumped the Fleet. It destroyed Old St Paul’s, whose scaffolding, put up for work under Christopher Wren, caught and brought the lead roof down onto the books stored in the crypt. The count of the damage includes Bridewell Palace among the City prisons that were lost, together with something between 13,200 and 13,500 houses, 86 or 87 parish churches, and 44 company halls. The City and the crown were already on bad terms. London had been a republican stronghold in the civil wars, and the magistrates of 1666 would not at first accept royal troops inside the City even to fight the fire. Rumours blamed the French and the Dutch, England’s enemies in the Second Anglo-Dutch War. A French watchmaker, Robert Hubert, confessed, was hanged at Tyburn on 29 October 1666, and was afterwards shown to have been at sea until two days after the fire began. The king urged the homeless to leave London and settle elsewhere, and a Fire Court sat from 1667 to sort landlords and tenants so that rebuilding would not wait on ordinary lawsuits. London was rebuilt on much the same medieval street plan. Bridewell was among the houses put back at once. The rebuilt prison, still on the palace site, continued as a prison, a workhouse, and a school. In 1700 it became the first prison to appoint a doctor.

The building the fire had spared only in part, and the building raised just after it, were recorded by the next generation of London antiquaries. John Stow, born about 1525 in the parish of St Michael, Cornhill, was a tailor’s son who became a freeman of the Merchant Taylors’ Company in 1547 and a historian rather than a tallow chandler. He wrote A Survey of London, first published in 1598, with a second edition in 1603, besides summaries and annals of English history. He lived his last years in St Andrew Undershaft and died on 5 April 1605. His papers and his eye for the fabric of the city are the reason the Tudor use of Bridewell, the gift of 1553, and the confirmation by Mary can be followed in such detail. John Strype, born in Houndsditch on 1 November 1643 and buried at Leyton after his death on 11 December 1737, was the son of a Huguenot silk throwster who had left Brabant. Strype was educated at St Paul’s School, entered Jesus College, Cambridge, on 5 July 1662, and took his degrees from St Catharine’s Hall in 1665 and 1669. He spent his working life as curate of Theydon Bois and of Leyton, and he wrote the lives of the Reformation bishops from papers that included the Burghley manuscripts. In 1720 he published A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster, an updated edition of Stow’s A Survey of London. That edition carries the engraving called The Prospect of Bridewell. In April 1732 William Hogarth published A Harlot’s Progress, and the fourth plate is A Scene in Bridewell, a picture of the prison as a moral stage. Between 1808 and 1811 a view of the Pass Room at Bridewell was drawn for Ackermann’s Microcosm of London by Thomas Rowlandson and Augustus Pugin.

The architect known as Augustus Pugin was born on 1 March 1812 in his parents’ house in Bloomsbury, so his birth falls after those plates were issued. He was the son of the French draughtsman Auguste Pugin, who had come to England in the French Revolution and married Catherine Welby. Augustus Pugin learned to draw from his father, worked for the goldsmiths Rundell and Bridge and for the Windsor upholsterers, designed scenery for the opera Kenilworth, failed in a venture supplying Gothic carving, and then became the leading designer of the Gothic Revival in England. He is remembered for the interior of the Palace of Westminster and for its clock tower, and for churches in England, Ireland, and Australia. He died on 14 September 1852. His sons carried on the practice. The Pass Room plate and the architect share the name Augustus Pugin, and the dates do not let the child have drawn a view published before he was born. The credit on the plate and the date of the birth both stand.

Through the middle of the eighteenth century the prison was still part of ordinary London justice, in the same decades when Henry Fielding was writing and then sitting as a magistrate. Fielding was born on 22 April 1707 at Sharpham Park in Somerset, the son of Lieutenant-General Edmund Fielding and Sarah Gould. He was educated at Eton, where he formed a lasting friendship with William Pitt the Elder. His mother died when he was eleven. In 1728 he went to Leiden to study classics and law, and poverty brought him back to London to write for the theatre. Plays such as The Author’s Farce and Tom Thumb mocked the town and the government of Sir Robert Walpole, and the Theatrical Licensing Act of 1737 is taken as a direct answer to that work. His novels include Shamela in 1741, Joseph Andrews in 1742, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling in 1749, and Amelia in 1751. With Samuel Richardson he is counted among the founders of the English novel. As a magistrate he used his office to found the Bow Street Runners, London’s first professional police. He died on 8 October 1754. Bridewell was still receiving prisoners through all of those years. Nothing in his life as it is written says that he sat at Bridewell or sent a particular prisoner there. What the dates show is that the house of correction on the Fleet was still at work while the man who built the Bow Street force was policing London and putting its disorder into fiction.

The prison part of Bridewell closed in 1855. The buildings were demolished between 1863 and 1864. They have also been described as demolished in 1855. The school that shared the site, called at different times Bridewell Royal Hospital, Bridewell School, and Bridewell Royal Hospital School, moved in 1867 to a larger site in Surrey and took the name King Edward’s School, Witley, which marked its four hundred and fiftieth year in 2003. Before that move, the governors had offered a house of occupation on part of the St George’s Fields ground used by Bethlem, and that school is the one later settled at Witley. The school still keeps Bridewell Day every March at St Bride’s in Fleet Street. Some prison work lingered on the City site after the formal close. The census of 1871 names Joseph Ashley, beadle and turnkey, in charge of two prisoners. In 1881 Ashley was still there, as collector and beadle, and no prisoners are named.

Part of the emptied ground was used in 1874 for De Keyser’s Royal Hotel. In 1915 the hotel was taken for military purposes. The taking became a leading case on the royal prerogative, decided by the House of Lords in 1920. By 1921 Lever Brothers had bought the hotel building for the head office of the business. Unilever House, built in 1931, stands at the corner of Watergate. The main body of the old palace ran south from a rebuilt gatehouse, now the front of the office block at 14 New Bridge Street, which carries a relief portrait of Edward VI. The ground between that gate and the river corner runs on through the Hyatt Regency London Blackfriars Hotel to Unilever House. A building called Bridewell Court stands on the palace site, on Tudor Street, and the embankment has left it a long way from the present Thames. The nearby Bridewell Theatre, at the St Bride Foundation, takes its name from the palace. In the film A Hard Day’s Night, Paul’s grandfather, played by Wilfrid Brambell, reports that the police have the poor lad in the Bridewell and that he will be pulp by now, meaning Ringo. The joke only works because the Tudor hospital-prison had become a common noun.

The brick palace itself was found again in the ground. In 1978 Derek Gadd and Tony Dyson excavated at 9–11 Bridewell Place and at 1–3 Tudor Street. The work was published in 1981. They showed a palace built largely of brick between 1515 and 1523, with brick arches in the foundations to deal with the made ground by the river. On the principal courtyard they uncovered part of a range, two stair turrets, and the external great staircase. The outer courtyard, on the documents, looked like an addition. Fragments of the long-gallery foundations were seen as well. The Tudor Street dig was one of three around the palace, with Bridewell Place and with Kingscote Street in 1977. The six oak samples from Tudor Street were sent to Sheffield for tree-ring dating, which is how the late Saxon revetment under the later chalk and the palace dumps was recognised. In 2014 Douglas Killock, for Pre-Construct Archaeology, excavated at 1 Dorset Rise, a little to the north of a standing building and in the courtyard beside it, with a drainage trench in the basement. Medieval reclamation dumps formed most of the sequence before Bridewell. The dig found major walls of a wing of the palace that had not been documented. The finds include pottery, a statuette, glass, tile, a drain, pits, brick, a ditch, and foundations, from Roman, medieval, and later levels. The trench sat at grid 531552, 181003. Those two campaigns, the stair and the gallery in 1978 and the unrecorded wing in 2014, are what fix the plan of a palace that the nineteenth century had cleared and that offices, a hotel, and a river embankment had then covered. The gatehouse front on New Bridge Street, with the boy king’s portrait, is the public face of a house whose courts, gallery, and prison yards are now under the pavement.

Canonical page: https://getsitesee.com/places/bridewell-palace