Hampton Court Palace

• 1. Introduction

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  Hampton Court Palace stands beside the River Thames, twelve miles upstream and southwest of central London. It exists today partly because a frightened cardinal gave it away in 1529. Thomas Wolsey, Archbishop of York and chief minister to Henry VIII, had spent years building it. Now he watched the king's frustration with him harden into anger. He knew his life was in grave danger. Handing over his greatest possession was a last attempt to survive.

  The gift did not save him, but it started something larger than he could have planned. Over the next three centuries, the palace would host a honeymoon, a Bible commission, a prison sentence and a pregnancy that was not real. It would also be partly demolished in a race against a rival French palace. Why did a royal home end up wearing two completely different faces? What did kings and queens do inside these walls? And what became of the place once no monarch wanted to sleep there?

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• 2. Wolsey's Showpiece

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  In 1514, a teenage heir named Henry Daubeney gave up his lease on a Thames-side property only a month after inheriting it. The Order of St John of Jerusalem, which owned the land, promptly leased it to Thomas Wolsey. Daubeney's father, Sir Giles, had held it since 1494 and had built the Great Kitchens, which survive today in altered form. Before him, the land was leased to a man named John Wode in the mid-15th century.

  Wolsey spent 200,000 crowns over seven years to make this the finest palace in England. He designed it as a Renaissance cardinal's residence, with a symmetrical rectangular plan and grand rooms on a raised main floor. The historian Jonathan Foyle suggests he drew on Paolo Cortese's 1510 manual for cardinals, which included advice on building palaces.

  The Base Court was his work, with forty-four lodgings for guests. Beyond the inner gatehouse lay the Clock Court, holding the best rooms of all, set aside for the king and his family. Wolsey's seal can still be seen above the entrance arch of the clock tower. Henry stayed in those state apartments as Wolsey's guest in 1525, just after they were finished.

  The look of the place was a hybrid. English builders working in the Gothic tradition were joined by a small group of Italian craftsmen who added Renaissance ornament to plain Tudor buildings. One of them, Giovanni da Maiano, made eight relief busts of Roman emperors, which were set into the brickwork. The architectural historian Sir John Summerson saw in the palace "the essence of Wolsey", a churchman who wanted foreign ambassadors to see that England could live as graciously as Rome.

  In January 1527, Henry and his courtiers arrived in masque costume, disguised as shepherds, to play mumchance and dance. Wolsey died in 1530, just a year after giving up the house, and left the king with a palace that needed far more room.

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• 3. Henry's Kitchens and Clock

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  Henry VIII owned over sixty houses and palaces, yet very few could hold a court of more than a thousand people. Within six months of taking Hampton Court, he began making it his principal residence. His first move was practical rather than grand. In 1529 the kitchens were quadrupled in size, so that the king could provide free food and drink, known as bouche of court, to everyone attached to his household.

  The architecture of the new additions followed Wolsey's example: Gothic-flavoured Tudor with restrained Renaissance touches. That blend stayed almost unchanged for nearly a century, until Inigo Jones brought strong Italian classical influences to the London palaces of the first Stuart kings.

  Between 1532 and 1535, Henry added the Great Hall, the last medieval great hall built for the English monarchy, along with the Royal Tennis Court. The hall has a carved hammerbeam roof, and in Tudor times it was the palace's most important room. The king dined there in state on a raised dais. Henry was so impatient that masons were made to keep working through the night by candlelight, and the project still took five years.

  In 1540, the gatehouse to the inner court received an astronomical clock, an early example that still keeps time. Its dial shows the hour, the moon's phases, the month, the date, the sun and star sign, and high water at London Bridge. That last detail mattered to courtiers who came by barge from the city, because low water turned the bridge into dangerous rapids.

  The same gatehouse is now called Anne Boleyn's gate, after Henry's second wife. Work on her apartments above it was still going when she was beheaded.

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• 4. Births, Betrayals and Phantoms

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  In 1537, Jane Seymour gave Henry the son he had wanted so badly, the future Edward VI, at Hampton Court. She died at the palace two weeks later. Four years after that, while the king attended Mass in the palace chapel, he was told of the adultery of his fifth wife, Catherine Howard. She was confined to her rooms for a few days, then sent to Syon House, and from there to the Tower of London. Legend says she broke away from her guards and ran down the Haunted Gallery to beg Henry for mercy before being caught.

  Henry died in January 1547. His daughter Mary I later brought her new husband, King Philip, to Hampton Court for their honeymoon, after their wedding at Winchester. She also chose the palace as the place to give birth to her first child. She had first wanted Windsor Castle, which felt safer against rebellion. Hampton Court, though, was much larger and could house the whole court.

  The child never came. Mary waited more than five months for a baby who did not exist, and it was the first of two phantom pregnancies. The palace had become so unlivable from keeping the court in one place that the household eventually moved to much smaller Oatlands Palace.

  Mary's half-sister Elizabeth I left a gentler mark. She had the eastern privy kitchen built, which is now the palace's public tea room.

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• 5. Stuart Stage and Prison

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  In January 1604, the Great Hall hosted two entertainments for the new Stuart court: The Masque of Indian and China Knights and The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses. Scottish courtiers also performed a sword dance for Anne of Denmark on the 6th of January, which observers compared to a Spanish matachin. James I had inherited the throne after Elizabeth I's death in 1603, as her first cousin twice removed.

  Later that year, James met representatives of the English Puritans at the palace, in what became known as the Hampton Court Conference. The two sides did not reach an agreement. However, the meeting led James to commission the King James Version of the Bible.

  James's son Charles I made the palace his honeymoon retreat in 1625, with his fifteen-year-old bride Henrietta Maria. Later it became his prison. After his execution in 1649, the palace passed to the Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell. The government auctioned off much of the contents but largely ignored the building itself, so it escaped with little damage.

  After the Restoration, Charles II and James II used Hampton Court but preferred to live elsewhere. Charles was a keen art lover and filled the palace with over 400 artworks. Many of them still hang in its galleries. By the end of the 17th century, though, the palace looked old-fashioned beside the French court at Versailles, and that comparison would doom much of the Tudor building.

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• 6. Rival to Versailles

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  In 1689, shortly after Louis XIV's court settled permanently at Versailles, joint monarchs William III and Mary II decided that Hampton Court needed to catch up. Within months of taking the throne, they began a rebuilding plan. They intended to demolish the Tudor palace section by section and replace it with a vast Baroque one, keeping only Henry VIII's Great Hall.

  Sir Christopher Wren, then the country's most eminent architect, drew up the plans, and William Talman served as master of works. Wren's design for a domed palace echoed work by Jules Hardouin-Mansart and Louis Le Vau, who both served Louis XIV. One theory holds that the grand scheme was dropped because it resembled Versailles too subtly. In those days, a sovereign could barely picture a palace that did not copy Versailles's repeating Baroque rhythm.

  The finished wings still repeat their windows in long, steady beats under a flat skyline. Pink brick set against pale Portland stone gives the surface more variety than Versailles had. Inside the Fountain Court, the windows gain pointed pediments, and one description called the effect "Startling, as of simultaneous exposure to a great many eyes with raised eyebrows."

  Half of the Tudor palace was lost, including Henry VIII's staterooms and private apartments. In their place came two suites of equal value, one for the king and one for the queen, to honour their joint rule. Each had its own state staircase. A gallery along the east front linked them, a modest echo of Versailles's Hall of Mirrors. Antonio Verrio painted frescos on the King's staircase, and Jean Tijou made its delicate ironwork. Grinling Gibbons, Sir James Thornhill and Jacques Rousseau also decorated rooms, while Daniel Marot designed furnishings.

  William lost interest in the work after Mary's death. In 1702 he fell from his horse in Hampton Court Park, and the injuries killed him later at Kensington Palace. His sister-in-law Queen Anne, who reigned from 1702 to 1714, loved the fresh country air and hunting. Between 1703 and 1705, Verrio painted her Drawing Room ceiling with the queen among divine figures. In 1710, she asked Wren to renovate the Chapel Royal, which gave it the timber altarpiece and box pews seen today.

  George I and his son George II were the last monarchs to live here. In 1717, John Vanbrugh designed six rooms for George I. George II and Queen Caroline of Ansbach then brought in William Kent, whose work included the Queen's Staircase in 1733 and the Cumberland Suite of 1737, built for the Duke of Cumberland.

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• 7. Gardens and Treasures

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  In 1662, workers dug the Long Water, a great canal that forms the central avenue of three fanning out from the east front. Charles II ordered it, and pupils of André Le Nôtre, Louis XIV's landscape gardener, laid it out. It was another bid to match Versailles. Nothing authentic survives of Henry VIII's gardens. A small knot garden planted in 1924 only hints at how they once looked.

  The Privy Garden on the south side was originally William III's private retreat. It was replanted in 1992 in period style, with clipped hollies and yews along geometric paths, and it is closed in by semicircular iron gates by Jean Tijou. The Banqueting House, built around 1700, sits above the Thames for informal meals. Nearby, a conservatory shelters the Great Vine, which by 1968 had a trunk 81 inches thick and a length of 100 feet. It still produces grapes each year.

  George London and Henry Wise planted the Hampton Court Maze in the 1690s for William III. It began as hornbeam and has since been repaired with many kinds of hedge.

  At the bridge over the moat stand ten heraldic statues called the King's Beasts. They represent the ancestry of Henry VIII and his third wife Jane Seymour, and include the Seymour unicorn, the black bull of Clarence and the White Greyhound of Richmond. A modern Tudor garden on the site of the old Chapel Court Garden is decorated with eight smaller wooden beasts, carved from English oak by Ben Harms and Ray Gonzalez. Paint consultant Patrick Baty researched their historically correct colours.

  Inside, the single most important work is Andrea Mantegna's Triumphs of Caesar, in the Lower Orangery. The Raphael Cartoons once hung in the Cartoon Gallery but now belong to the Victoria and Albert Museum, so copies painted in the 1690s by Henry Cooke take their place. The King's Privy Chamber holds a crystal chandelier from around 1700, possibly the first in the country. In the King's Guard Chamber, muskets, pistols, swords and armour are arranged in decorative patterns on the walls. A bill dated 1699 to a John Harris is thought to describe that very display.

  The palace also holds most of the Royal Ceremonial Dress Collection, over 10,000 items including clothing, letters, diaries and scrapbooks. It has designated status from Arts Council England.

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• 8. Afterlife of a Palace

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  From the moment he took the throne, George III refused to set foot in Hampton Court. He remembered a humiliating scene in the state apartments, when his grandfather George II struck him over an innocent remark. He did plant the Great Vine in the 1760s, and in 1773 he had the top two storeys of the Great Gatehouse removed.

  Starting in the 1760s, empty rooms were given to grace and favour residents, rent-free tenants chosen by the Lord Chamberlain to reward service to the Crown. From 1862 until his death in 1867, the electricity pioneer Michael Faraday lived there. New admissions slowed from the 1960s and ended in the 1980s. Three residents remained in 2005, and none by 2017.

  Victoria's reign brought the palace to the public in 1838, after a heavy-handed restoration that cut the gatehouse by two storeys and stripped the lead cupolas from its four towers. Visitors came by boat from London, and by train after Hampton Court railway station opened in February 1849. By 1881, more than ten million visits had been recorded.

  On the 2nd of September 1952, the palace received Grade I listed status. Other structures in the grounds are also listed separately, including the early 16th-century tilt yard tower, the sole survivor of five, and Wren's Lion Gate.

  In 1986, fire swept through the King's Apartments and killed Lady Daphne Gale, widow of General Sir Richard Gale, who lived in a grace and favour apartment. She often carried a lit candle to bed, which is thought to have started the blaze. Restoration lasted until 1990. The Royal School of Needlework moved into the palace in 1987, and the headquarters of the charity Historic Royal Palaces sits there too.

  The 21st century brought rock keyboardist Rick Wakeman, who performed The Six Wives of Henry VIII here in 2009. The Road Cycling Time Trial of the 2012 Summer Olympics also used the grounds. The palace marked its 500th anniversary in 2015, with daily dramatised historical scenes. Construction is dated to the 12th of February 1515. On the 9th of February the following year, the Catholic archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, celebrated vespers in the Chapel Royal. That was the first Catholic service at the palace in 450 years.

  The palace has also lent its looks elsewhere. The Vanderbilt family modelled Florham, their estate in Madison, New Jersey, on Wren's work here, and it was built in 1893. Screen credits include The Private Life of Henry VIII, A Man For All Seasons, The Favourite and Bridgerton. And in a poem published in 1842, Lydia Sigourney described a visit to Hampton Court with a bridal party after a wedding in March 1841.

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