Richard II and the First Angel Roof

Westminster Hall is the oldest surviving building of Westminster Palace. Once used for feasts, coronations, and, ironically, the deposition of King Richard II, it is now the meeting place of the British Parliament. The palace is in central London, on the north bank of the Thames River.

If you've visited Westminster Hall, you've gazed up at the beautiful late Gothic ceiling that looks a little bit like heaven, the first angel roof. In 1397, master carpenter Hugh Herland (ca. 1330-1411), working in oak, designed this angel roof for Richard II as part of a remodeling project.

The purpose of the remodeling was twofold. First, replace the original closed roof trusses with open trusses, making the space look bigger without changing to its volume. The ceiling spans more than 68 feet in all, but is now open in the center for over twenty-five feet of the span, from the end of one hammer beam to the other.

Second, populate this new heaven with angels in honor of Richard II (1367-1400). Carved wooden angel sculptures decorate the hammer beams and appear to be hovering between heaven and earth.

Richard II used the iconography of the angel to help support his ideas about the divine right of kings, a fact to which Shakespeare alludes in his play Richard II. In Act 3, Scene 2, the king says,

For every man that Bolingbroke hath press'd
To lift shrewd steel against our golden crown,
God for his Richard hath in heavenly pay
A glorious angel: then, if angels fight,
Weak men must fall, for heaven still guards the right.

In 1377, during his coronation procession from the Tower of London to Westminster Hall in 1377, Richard accepted his crown from a mechanical angel (Richard II, The Art of Kingship, ed. by Anthony Goodman and James Gillespie, London: Clarenden Books, 1999).

In 1392, at the procession marking his reconciliation with the City of London, Richard again received his crown from a mechanical angel, as an eyewitness reports: “At his entry into Cheapside ... came two angels down from a cloud, the one bearing a crown for the king...and the other another crown, which was presented to the queen . . . ."

On September 30, 1399, Richard laid aside his crown in Westminster Hall in favor of the upstart, Bolingbroke, now King Henry IV.

Westminster Hall in the Palace of Westminster, London as drawn by Thomas Rowlandson and Augustus Pugin for Ackermann's ''Microcosm of London'' (1808-11).