An article about Kings College from the Wall Street Journal-

Excerpt:

After founding King’s College in 1441, King Henry VI spent several years buying and leveling a large swathe of Cambridge’s formerly flourishing commercial center, closing streets and cutting off access to the river to enclose what he hoped would be England’s largest and greatest college. The chapel’s foundation stone was laid in 1446 but, as in so many current urban-renewal projects, it would take an additional 65 years to finish the stonework and 40 years on top of that for the interior, as the town’s economy languished.

In the meantime, Henry VI was murdered in 1471 at the order of Edward IV, who had seized the throne. Edward IV was replaced in 1483 by another usurper, Richard III—an enthusiastic financial backer of the chapel until he was killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field. Thus, in 1485, the project again halted. It took a few years, but the victorious Henry Tudor, who had become Henry VII, saw the usefulness of supporting the chapel to buoy up the legitimacy of his reign. What finer propaganda than associating himself with a building devoted to the glory of God—”an act of patronage,” according to Ms. Hicks, “that would help to save his soul, advance learning and, above all, emphasize his family’s rightful hold on the crown”? Better still, the stained-glass windows, which Ms. Hicks says were the most powerful decorative art of the Middle Ages, offered a direct, storytelling opportunity for Henry to ally himself and his family with the prophets of the Old Testament and the apostles and disciples of the New—not to mention with the Holy Family itself.

Embellished with emblems of Tudor glory and heraldry, the 2,300 separate glass panels of the painted windows were installed between 1515 and 1546, during the reign of Henry VIII, by Flemish craftsmen, many of whom had fled religious wars on the continent only to find themselves castigated as job-stealing “alien strangers” and “denizens” by the less-skillful workers of the London guilds.

The basic format of the windows followed the medieval theological typology in which stories from the Old Testament in the upper register provided prototypes for the New Testament below—the Ascent of Elijah in his chariot predicted Christ’s Ascension, for example. The typology provided all sorts of opportunities for educational but also political messages. Henry Tudor’s son, who had succeeded him as Henry VIII in 1509, showed almost no interest in the chapel until his adviser Cardinal Wolsey argued that they needed the university’s support in his contentious divorce from Katharine of Aragon, followed by the split with Rome. The royal coffers reopened in 1526 and Cambridge came through. Ms. Hicks laughingly cites Window 4, installed around 1541, in which Solomon and Sheba above prefigure the visit of the Three Kings below. Henry VIII’s monogram, HR for Henricus Rex, is inserted on the shield of a cherub—but, more important, Solomon’s face is that of Henry, who is thereby shown as a powerful king, anointed by God, a fount of wisdom and poetry, and even a renowned lover.

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