In the spectacular Tudor stained glass windows now being re-installed at a National Trust mansion in Hampshire, a slim and beardless young Henry VIII kneels meekly in prayer near his beloved wife Catherine of Aragon and his sister Margaret. The artists who painted the beautiful little white dogs, symbols of fidelity, curled up sleeping near the two women, could never have imagined the centuries of religious and political tumult to come, and the orgy of stained glass smashing particularly targeted at such blatantly Roman Catholic and royalist imagery.

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“The detail is fantastic – these guys were absolutely at the top of their form,” said Steve Clare, who has led a major restoration project on the glass with his son, Jack. He also looks after the famous stained glass at King’s College, Cambridge, but says the quality of the glass at The Vyne is as good – and may have been made by the same Flemish craftsmen.



Henry himself, who visited the house several times, would have seen the windows – and his second wife Anne Boleyn may have seen the portrait of her predecessor. The glass was commissioned by Sir William Sandys, his Lord Chamberlain, who remained loyal to his king but also to Catherine, keeping the windows and her pomegranate emblems in wood carvings when many others took account of regime change and swept away any traces of her reign.



The windows are regarded as among the best from the period not just in the UK but in Europe. But the glowing colour and exquisite detail was in danger of complete destruction as pollution attacked the glass from outside and condensation from the inside, causing water to pool on the lead glazing strips against the fragile painted surface.

Sandys commissioned the windows for a nearby church but at some point moved them to his magnificent private chapel at The Vyne, which is how they survived. According to family legend, shakily supported by a 19th-century note in the archives, the glass was taken out in the English civil war, packed into crates, and sunk in the fish ponds in the garden. Other glass from the original windows went to another church, where it was destroyed in the second world war.

The work by Clare’s Holy Well company has cleaned the fragile painted surfaces but repaired cracks and re-leaded sections only where they left the panels unstable. They are now being reinstalled in front of plain outer windows, with a gap to allow air to circulate around the Tudor glass, which should help preserve them for centuries to come. The ugly outer grilles and encroaching shrubs have also been removed, so light streams in again through the jewel colours.

The restoration has been conservative, keeping not just every inch of the Tudor glass but the discoloured repairs from the 18th century and cruder repairs from the 1940s. Clare – who once made a particularly difficult piece in his own time, and posted it to a stained glass expert who had insisted contemporary craftsmen couldn’t match medieval skills – welcomes the approach but says it has caused him some pain.

He bent to glare at the figure of Henry VIII. The delicately painted face is original and the blue cloak wonderfully made of glass of varying thickness to give subtle variations of shade – but part of the crimson doublet is one crude inserted chunk of red glass. “That’s got a bit of age to it, probably from the 1940s, but it’s really not right. It’s probably the right call to keep it – but it has caused some soul searching. It would have been nice to do better by him.”

All the stained glass should be back in place by Easter but until then a platform allows visitors a unique close-up view of the windows and the work on them.