It was just before he became a cardinal that Thomas Wolsey, on 11 January, 1515, took a ninety-nine years’ lease of the manor of Hampton Court from the Knights Hospitaller of St. John of Jerusalem, and at once set about building the magnificent pile which remains his most enduring monument. There appears to have been here an earlier manor house or mansion, for there is a record of Henry the Seventh visiting it a few years before the lease was granted; but probably Wolsey did away entirely with the older building and planned the whole place anew. Rapidly rising in royal favour the Cardinal designed a lordly pleasure house on the banks of the Thames, where he could worthily entertain his pleasure-loving sovereign, and where he could hold state in a manner that should prove impressive in the eyes of ambassadors and other important visitors from foreign Courts.

It is said that Wolsey’s health was such that it was necessary for him to have a residence away from London, yet his position made it essential that he should still be within easy reach of the capital; therefore he “employed the most eminent physicians in England and even called in the aid of doctors from Padua, to select the most healthy spot within twenty miles of London”, and the result was the selection of Hampton and the erection of the princely Palace which has seen its royal neighbours of Hanworth and Richmond pass from palaces to mere fragments, and Nonsuch disappear entirely.

Having acquired his new manor Wolsey lost no time in getting his designs carried into execution, and the magnificent edifice, built about five courts or quadrangles, grew so rapidly that in 1516 he was already able to entertain Henry the Eighth here. The whole Palace was of red brick, and surmounted by many castellated turrets topped by ornamental lead cupolas. The western portion of the buildings probably gives us a very fair idea of the whole as it was planned, though all the turrets from this aspect are wanting their cupolas, though the gatehouse is less lofty than it was originally and though some more westerly buildings have disappeared.

As the Cardinal waxed in importance his stately palace grew until its magnificence set tongues wagging, and it was said that the Churchman’s residence outshone in splendour the castles of the King. John Skelton, in his satire Why come ye not to Court? probably only gave fuller expression to things which many people were saying, when the powerful favourite was approaching the period of his declination:

York Place was Cardinal Wolsey’s scarcely less magnificent residence at Westminster.

Whether inspired by jealousy owing to the things said of the state upheld by Wolsey, or whether his repeated visits simply inspired the monarch with envy of his Chancellor’s new palace cannot be said, but when Hampton Court had been building for ten years King Henry, we are told, asked the Chancellor why he had erected so magnificent a place. “To show how noble a palace a subject may offer to his Sovereign,” was the reply of the Cardinal—a truly courtly and an unquestionably costly compliment. The King accepted the noble gift, but Wolsey continued from time to time to occupy his own whilom palace at Hampton and was besides given permission to make use of the royal palace at Richmond. This was in 1525, and already it may be the shadow of coming events was over both the powerful Churchman and the fickle King, though Wolsey was still three or four years from that final downfall which was soon followed by his death.

Though the ownership of Hampton Court had passed from the subject to the sovereign, the former continued on occasion to do the honours of the place to distinguished visitors. In 1527, for example, there came a noble “ambasset” from France, and arrangements were made for the due entertainment here of the French nobles and their retinue. A full account of it is given in George Cavendish’s Life and Death of Thomas Wolsey, the earliest of our biographies and assuredly one of the most delightful. There is not space here to transcribe Cavendish’s full account of the splendid entertainment accorded to “this great ambasset ... who were in number above fourscore and the most noblest and worthiest gentlemen in all the court of France”; but the biographer, who was gentleman-usher to the Cardinal, and thus well situated for giving an authoritative record of things, was also an admirable narrator, and from his description we may get a good idea of Tudor prodigality and splendour. Not only were there the fourscore French nobles, but there were also their trains and the many home visitors who must have been invited to accompany them; so that two hundred and eighty beds had to be arranged. We are told how the best cooks were brought together, and wrought day and night in the preparing of “divers subtleties and many crafty devices”, how the purveyors “brought and sent in such plenty of costly provisions as ye would wonder at the same”, and further:

Cavendish goes on to tell of the sumptuousness and wonder of the entertainment which the Cardinal gave to his guests before speeding them on their way to Windsor on the following day. Of the furnishing of the chambers for the “fourteen score beds” prepared for the guests, he gives details which suggest an extraordinary display of gold and silver; but the whole account should be read in the biography of Wolsey, where it gives us a peculiarly full and detailed description of the splendour of banqueting in Tudor days. And it must be added, that though “the Frenchmen, as it seemed, were rapt into paradise”, yet this feast at Hampton Court was but as “silver is compared to gold” when contrasted with that which the King gave at Greenwich a little later to speed his parting guests on their homeward journey. In the full account which Cavendish gives of the feasting at Hampton Court and in his description of the furnishings of York House, Westminster, when Wolsey left it on his last unhappy journey, we have glimpses of the richness and magnificence to which the great men of the sixteenth century had attained in the heyday of Henry the Eighth. King Henry was at Hampton Court, engaged in practising archery in the park when George Cavendish arrived with the news of Wolsey’s death, and the bluff King paid his old and too loyal servant the tribute of saying that he would rather have given £20,000 than he had died. The King did not, however, let any sentiment about the builder of Hampton Court trouble him long or interfere with his plans.

A CORNER OF WOLSEY’S KITCHEN

When the monarch came into full possession of Hampton Court he soon converted the lease into freehold by arrangements with the Knights Hospitaller, and at once set about having it made yet more magnificent than before. Among his improvements was the erection of the Great Hall—one of the finest buildings of the kind belonging to the Tudor period that remain to us; he rebuilt, or at any rate considerably altered, the Chapel, and made many other changes in the Palace. His additions and alterations may sometimes be recognized by the working of his monogram and those of his wives into the decoration, as in the roof of Anne Boleyn’s Gateway, where that unhappy lady’s initial is to be seen. For though this roof is a modern restoration, it is a restoration believed to be in accordance with the original design. Such evidence is not therefore always conclusive, for sometimes the monograms are not contemporary records—as in the windows of the Great Hall where the stained glass, full of such personal allusions, is all modern, having been put in between sixty and seventy years ago. Those responsible for the replacing, after a long interval, of the glass that had been destroyed when all concerning royalty was out of favour, worked in monograms and devices in a way that misleads many visitors, some of whom seeing “H” and “J” in the glass, too rashly assume that it dates from the time when Jane Seymour was the much married monarch’s queen.

When Anne Boleyn’s ambition was gratified and she was made Henry’s second queen—vice Katherine of Arragon, divorced—Hampton Court became for a time a scene of royal revelling. It was not so for long, however, for already the King’s passion was cooling. It was at Hampton Court that King Henry’s hopes of a son and heir were disappointed for the third time, when, early in 1536, Anne there gave birth to a still-born child. In the following May the unhappy Queen’s brief triumph was brought to a tragic close by the sword of the executioner on Tower Hill, and on the very next day King Henry was formally betrothed to Jane Seymour. In October of the following year Queen Jane gave birth in this Palace, presumably in that part of the buildings demolished more than a century and a half later, to a son who afterwards became King Edward the Sixth. The arrival of a male heir was no doubt a matter of great gratification to King Henry, and served to lessen any sorrow that his easily salved affections might otherwise have felt from the fact that the Queen only survived the child’s birth but a brief while. When he was but three days old the infant prince was christened here in great state. The Princess Mary held her tiny brother, twenty years her junior, during the ceremony at the solid silver font, while the child Princess Elizabeth, herself carried, bore the chrysm. Nine days after the christening of her son Queen Jane died.

The birth of Prince Edward in the Palace seems to have increased King Henry’s liking for his Thames-side pleasaunce, and in 1540 he caused the Honour of Hampton Court to be created by Act of Parliament—the Honour including a number of manors on both sides of the Thames. But the King further showed his liking for the place—and his scant regard for his subjects—by making it the centre of a Chase, having a large extent of the land on either side of the river afforested and enclosed with palings so that, though growing corpulent and unwieldy, he might yet be able to indulge in his favourite pastime of hunting.

At the end of July, 1540, King Henry quietly married Katherine Howard, and in August she was openly shown at Hampton Court as his fifth queen. Little more than a year later and the Palace saw the beginning of the slow drama which ended with her execution on Tower Hill in February, 1543; for it was while Henry was at Mass in the chapel here that Cranmer put into his hands the beginning of the evidence which was to prove a fatal net for the entangling of Queen Katherine. The story runs that the Queen sought to have a personal explanation with King Henry, but he would not see her after once the charges were made, and when she tried to get to him in the chapel she was borne shrieking away by the attendants along what is now known as the Haunted Gallery. There her wraith has since been seen and heard!

The bluff King seems to have been little troubled by his various pasts, nor to have been worried at all by earlier associations, for in the summer of 1543 he was married here at Hampton Court, to the last of his queens, Katherine Parr, in the presence of the daughters of Katherine of Arragon and Anne Boleyn, the Princesses Mary and Elizabeth. Thus the Palace has associations with all of the six queens of King Henry, the one of whom Hampton Court has least memory being Anne of Cleves, the Queen who appears never to have had even the briefest place in the roving affections of the King, and who enjoyed little of the Court splendour beyond the magnificence of her reception at Greenwich. Anne was at Hampton while awaiting the decree of divorce which followed close upon the ceremony of her marriage; and it was the neighbouring Palace of Richmond that became the home of this Queen, who was promptly removed from the position of the King’s wife to that of his “sister”.

Edward the Sixth during his short reign appears to have been but little associated with the place of his birth, though he was here when the Protector Somerset was nearing his fall, and hence were sent out frantic appeals to the people to come armed to the defence of their youthful sovereign. Here King Edward splendidly entertained Mary of Guise, Queen-Dowager of Scotland, on her journey through England. The most notable association of Hampton Court with the boy-king’s reign is, however, that it was then that the aggrieved people of the surrounding afforested area dared to give voice to their feelings and petition against that oppression before which they had had to bow under Henry. The petition was successful, and the district was dechased, the palings and deer being removed.

King Edward’s dour sister-successor Queen Mary and her sombre spouse Philip of Spain were scarcely the people to make the place bright on their occasional visits, and when they were here shortly after their marriage it was said “the hall door within the Court was continually shut, so that no man might enter unless his errand were first known: which seemed strange to Englishmen, that had not been used thereto”. The most gorgeous association of the depressing couple with Hampton Court was the Christmas feast of 1554, when the Great Hall was illuminated “with a thousand lamps curiously disposed”.

When Elizabeth came to the throne the Palace became again the centre of much Court splendour. It is a curious fact that although magnificence and pomp are generally more associated with Roman Catholic than with Protestant Courts, the Tudors were exceptions to the rule. Under Queen Elizabeth, Hampton Court saw again something of the brilliancy and pageantry in which her father had delighted. Here Her Majesty held high revel at Christmas on more than one occasion—“if ye would know what we do here,” wrote one in attendance to a friend, in 1592, “we play at tables, dance—and keep Christmas”. Elizabeth had been brought to Hampton Court shortly after the marriage of her sister with Philip, in the hope that she might be turned to their way of religion, but though she was for a time a sort of semi-prisoner in the Palace it became one of her favoured places of residence after her accession. Here she toyed with the idea of matrimony and entertained wooers or their ambassadors, and here she held high state and gorgeous pageantry of which many records have been kept. Elizabeth appears, indeed, to have had something of her father’s love for the place and to have added to it or embellished it from time to time. On the south side of the Palace, Wren’s reconstruction stops short at beautiful bayed windows doubly decorated with the monogram E.R. and the date 1568.

A foreign Duke visiting Hampton Court during Elizabeth’s reign described it as the most splendid, most magnificent royal palace of any to be found in England or any other kingdom, and the details which he gives seems to bear this out. More especially was he struck by what a later verse writer described as “that most pompous room called Paradise”, a room which, according to the ducal description, “captivates the eyes of all who enter by the dazzling of pearls of all kinds”, and “in particular there is one apartment belonging to the Queen, in which she is accustomed to sit in state, costly beyond everything; the tapestries are garnished with gold, pearls, and precious stones—one table-cover alone is valued at above fifty thousand crowns—not to mention the royal throne, which is studded with very large diamonds, rubies, sapphires and the like that glitter among other precious stones and pearls as the sun among the stars”.

ANNE BOLEYN’S GATEWAY, CLOCK COURT