Bridewell was built as a Royal Palace in 1522 by Henry VIII in honour of a visit by Emperor Charles V (Borer 138-9). It was located west of Ludgate Hill, with Fleet Street to the north and the Thames to the south (Salgado 184). Henry often visited the palace after the Emperor's visit, and it was from there that he announced his intention to divorce Queen Katharine and marry Anne Boleyn. After the divorce proceedings, which were held there, Henry did not return to Bridewell (Borer 139).
In 1553, Edward VI gave Bridewell to the city with the proviso that it was to be a workhouse for the poor and unemployed of London (Salgado 184). Bridewell was intended to train three types of the poor: children of the poor who appeared to be able to do only manual labour, invalids who were able to handle light work, and convicts who had already been punished and were in the reformatory stage of their sentence. Unfortunately, Edward died ten days after granting the letters patent concerning Bridewell to the city and Queen Mary waited three years before she confirmed the Charter (187).
By 1557, Bridewell was fully operational with two manpowered treadmills for grinding corn, a glovemaking factory, a bakehouse, and a clothworkers' shop for women (Rumbelow 41). Bridewell also had a smithy where nails were made and sold (Borer 141). Although the productivity of Bridewell's workers makes it look like it was a successful workhouse, Salgado points out that, during the last year of Mary's reign, it was little better than a prison for the punishment of whores and vagrants. He says that "[b]y the end of 1556 Bridewell was fully operational as a house of punishment, if not yet of correction" (187). Whores who were arrested ended up at Bridewell after receiving their punishment, which was usually having their heads shaved and then being carted through the streets with a paper on their foreheads stating their crime. Some of these women were whipped at the tail of the cart as well as at Bridewell, where the whipping would be performed in front of the board of governors (52-53).
Despite Elizabeth I's seeming indifference towards Bridewell, it played a significant role in London during her reign because it served as a recruiting centre for her military campaigns in Ireland and the Netherlands (189). Bridewell was also a prison for "captives from the Spanish Armada as well as for Catholic and Puritan religious prisoners" (190). In 1602, the management of Bridewell was taken over by four Londoners: Thomas Brownlow, draper, Nicholas Bywater, tanner, Thomas Daniel, weaver, and Thomas Stanley, gentleman. Soon after they had taken over, Bridewell changed from a centre of correction to a virtual brothel. The whores were selling their bodies in the same place where just months before they were being whipped, and, instead of keeping vagrants in the rooms, the new administrators were letting the rooms out for a profit. A committee of inquiry looked in to the scandal at Bridewell, and Brownlow, Bywater, Daniel, and Stanley "appear to have got off scot-free on surrendering their lease to the city" (191).
Bridewell survived until the nineteenth century, when it was demolished in 1855 and replaced with a school for the education of boys and girls. When describing the closing of the final chapter in the history of Bridewell, Borer states that "the name of Bridewell, with its horrible associations of public floggings, solitary confinement and the treadmill, which went on until the very end, was dropped" (291).