As a role model for living through lockdown, one might not immediately turn to King Henry VIII – a monarch better known for his acquisitive attitude to monasteries and wives than his habits for solitude and quiet contemplation.

In fact, argues a leading expert in the period, Henry was very familiar with quarantine – and there are lessons we can learn from this unlikeliest of figures when it comes to his approach to confinement.

In a new book, Eleri Lynn, the curator of the royal dress collection at Historic Royal Palaces, argues among other things that both Henry and his daughter Elizabeth I, despite their reliance on elaborate performance when in public, drew comfort from confined, private spaces, seeing small things and spaces as symbolically more meaningful.

“Henry would often place himself in self-isolation whenever there was even a hint of fever or plague or sweating sickness around,” said Lynn, with his servants only allowed to pass meals through hatches in a door.

For all his love of jousting and great sporting events, the king had secret private rooms beyond even his privy chambers – “the tiniest of rooms, where it was just him and his books, and his musical instruments”.

The Tudors, she said, “really latched on to the Renaissance concept of multum in parvo, which means ‘much in little’” – a philosophy of finding meaning in the smallest things and spaces.

“Of course the [philosophy] will always be challenged by the reality of living in tiny flats or looking after small children, or whatever. But there is a beauty to that concept I think.”

As an expert in Tudor textiles – it was Lynn who identified a lost dress of Elizabeth I that for centuries had been used as an altar cloth in an obscure Herefordshire church – her focus is on the fabrics with which the Tudors adorned their public and private spaces. And it is striking, she said, that the more private the room, the more expensive the adornments.

“By the time you got to the king’s or queen’s private bedchamber, you were looking at the most wondrous textiles, the richest embroidery, embroidered with pearls and diamonds and precious stones … That’s where they were wearing and using their finest stuff, and taking pleasure in it. I quite like that idea.”

Historic palaces are more spartan today than in Henry’s reign, said Lynn. “You have to imagine silk hangings from Italy, tapestries from the low countries, embroidered cushions made by the ladies of the court. And a really big feature was imported Persian and Turkish carpets, which is fantastically ironic for the Defender of the Faith, because these must have been Islamic prayer rugs.”

A focus on cloth in such a dynamic historical period might seem relatively obscure, but Lynn argues it is anything but. A major thread of new research in the book, called simply Tudor Textiles, is the extent to which fabrics were a catalyst behind England’s Elizabethan voyages of discovery.

“At the start of the Tudor period, British trade was absolutely dominated by the production and sale of domestic wool,” Lynn said, but during the 16th century Elizabethan merchants were forced to look to new markets for trade and profit. “The main focus of those missions was cloth and textile dyes.”