In the 15th Century Cambridge was a noisome and unhealthy place, dank and foggy with a stagnant ditch as its boundary. It was verminous and filthy, as generations of scholars testified, and was prone to cold winds that blew in directly from the Russian steppes. Yet in these unhappy surroundings there rose a great and shining chapel, a jewel box and a treasure house of light.

The King's Glass, by Carola Hicks, is the story of the life and death of kings, all of them memorialised in the stone and the windows of King's College Chapel. Principal among them is Henry VI. He inherited the throne at the age of nine months and in 1441, at the age of 19, he began work on the preparation of the fabric that became the chapel.

According to Hicks in this well-researched and interesting study, Henry became “obsessed” with the project. He saw himself as the architect of immensity, doing honour to God in the most ostensible possible way. Nine years into the project he suffered a complete mental breakdown. According to one contemporary he became a mere shadow on the wall. But the walls of the chapel itself had not yet risen.

Henry's successors, Edward IV and Richard III, continued the project with enthusiasm; neither of them was granted a long life, however, and Richard perished without a horse on the field of Bosworth. The victor of that battle, Henry Tudor or Henry VII, also became a patron of the still only half-built chapel. It looked like a ruin, standing forlornly with no roof and large gaps where the windows should have been. Henry VII was eager that his relative, Henry VI, be declared a saint. What better way of assisting this process than by continuing his original act of piety?

Henry, in particular, was able to design the stained glass of the 26 great windows. This book is in part a hymn to their light, with glass of beryl and amethyst, sapphire and emerald. It was a form of painting with light. The style of the chapel, 0perpendicular, itself represented the architecture of light; it was a representation of luminous and translucent Gothic. The chapel might have had walls of glass.

The windows were also images of majesty, embellished with heraldic devices and the emblems of the reigning dynasty. The red rose was everywhere. And here, too, was the red dragon as an emblem of the original British or Celtic tribes that had marched under the banner of the Welsh Tudors. The chapel was an exercise in historical memory as well as piety. The painted windows were also a form of dramatic narrative, with a sequence of scenes outlining a saint's legend or a biblical story.

The means of creating stained glass was itself a kind of miracle, needing the skills of both alchemist and artist. The tool for cutting glass, for example, had to be cooled in “the urine of a three-year-old goat fed only on ferns or, if that was really unavailable, the urine of a small red-headed boy”. Here stand revealed the complexities of the 16th-century mind.

The master glazier chosen by the King was Flemish, one of a community of Flemish glaziers living in Southwark at the time. They were barred from the city, where they were accused (quite rightly) of taking jobs from local workmen; but they represented the latest fashion in glass-making. It was a task of great intricacy and, as Carola Hicks explains, of some peril — death by fire or death by lead poisoning was matched only by the prospect of falling from a precarious scaffold.

Henry VII has often been criticised as a grasping and parsimonious monarch, filling the coffers with coin that his prodigal son later squandered. But in fact he was a munificent patron of art and of architecture, with works at Richmond, Greenwich, Windsor and Westminster as well as Cambridge. On his death Henry VIII resumed the great work of the chapel, but it would take more than 30 years to complete the glazing of windows that comprised more than 2,300 separate glass panels. Carola Hicks shows that their religious imagery was already out of date, and that the scholastic pairing of scenes from the Old and New Testaments was already being replaced by the more rigorous principles of Renaissance humanism.

There was one other complication. It is known as the Reformation. Henry VIII continued to subsidise the chapel project, but now he was the head of the Church that it purported to represent. Now the imagery of the windows had to be reassessed to conform to the new imperatives of the reformed Church. Many reformers were in fact opposed to stained- glass windows, as an intolerable obstacle to the true understanding of God. There had to be a compromise. So Henry VIII was compared with the kings of the Old Testament, already in place on the windows, smiting the enemies of God. For obvious reasons images of Paul were preferred to images of Peter. Satan appeared in the habit of a friar. The glaziers had another problem. As the poor queens kept on disappearing, various new heraldic emblems and coats of arms had to be inlaid. So, for example, Anne Boleyn's falcon became Jane Seymour's phoenix.

By concentrating her gaze upon one of the outstanding buildings of England, Carola Hicks provides a history of an entire culture. It was a culture of intense visual display in which costliness and ornamentation were seen as moral as well as aesthetic virtues. She also conveys very well the atmosphere and texture of the times — the court intrigues, the moods of the London populace, the conditions of labour, are all documented here.

The windows of King's College Chapel survived the glass-smashing zealotry of Edward's brief and unpleasant reign. They survived the via media of Elizabethan religious polity, and by accident were not even harmed by Cromwell's parliamentary visitor, who on surveying the chapel noted with dismay “one thousand superstitious pictures”. It was a close-run thing. Yet it was not the end of the story of the chapel. The last window was not installed until the spring of 1879. The project had taken 438 years. The King's Glass, then, is in miniature the story of the nation.

The Kings Glass by Carola Hicks

Chatto £18.99

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