Among the many places of interest that lie within easy reach of London,
there is none, if we except Windsor Castle, that can be held to vie in
historic and artistic charms with the Queen’s magnificent palace at
Hampton Court.
Nowhere else do we meet with attractions so uncommon, and yet so
varied, as those which are to be found within its precincts. There we
may behold a building, which still remains, altered and restored though
it has been, an almost perfect specimen of Tudor palatial architecture,
side by side with the best example existing in England of the debased
classic of Louis XIV., namely Wren’s State Apartments. There, too, we
may feel, in a more than ordinary degree, amid its red-brick courts,
solemn cloisters, picturesque gables, towers, turrets, embattled
parapets, and mullioned and latticed windows, that indescribable charm
which invests all ancient and historic places. While walking through
Wolsey’s courts we may recall the splendour and wealth of the mighty
Cardinal; and while standing in Henry VIII.’s chapel, or his gorgeous
Gothic hall, ponder on the many thrilling events within the palace
in the days of the Tudors and Stuarts--the birth of Edward VI. and
the death of Jane Seymour; the marriages of Catherine Howard and
Catherine Parr; the honeymoons of Philip of Spain and Mary Tudor, and
of Charles II. and Catherine of Braganza; James I.’s conference with
the Puritans; and Cromwell’s sojourn here in almost regal splendour.
And while passing through William III.’s splendid suite of rooms, with
their painted ceilings, carved cornices, tapestried and oak-panelled
walls, we may mentally people them again with the kings and queens,
and statesmen and courtiers, who thronged them in the last century.
Moreover, by the aid of an unbroken series of historical pictures and
portraits, illustrative of three centuries of English history, we may
recall the past with a vividness that no books can ever excite.
And then, when satiated with art and archæology, we can relax the
mind by wandering beneath the shade of Queen Anne’s stately avenues
of chestnut and lime; strolling in the ever delightful gardens where
Wolsey paced in anxious meditation a few weeks before his fall;
where Henry VIII. made love to Anne Boleyn and to Catherine Howard;
along the paths where Queen Elizabeth took her daily morning walk;
past the tennis-court where Charles I. played his last game on the
day he escaped from the palace; beneath the bower where Queen Mary
sat at needlework with her maids of honour; along the terrace to the
bowling-green and pavilions where George II. made love to Mrs. Howard
and Mary Bellenden; under the lime-groves which sheltered from the sun
Pope and Hervey, Swift and Addison, Walpole and Bolingbroke.
[Illustration: HAMPTON COURT PALACE, ENGLAND.]
Yet, strange to say, though Hampton Court is so rich in historic
associations, it has found no writer to investigate and chronicle
its past. Any one curious as to its history must make researches for
himself, or be content with the scanty and often misleading information
supplied in old country histories and topographical works.
In the same way its architecture, which is particularly characteristic
of the Tudor period, and in many points most unique and instructive to
the student of ancient manners, has to a great extent been overlooked
in books where these topics are treated of.
The whole domain, consisting now of about 1,900 acres, has been
divided, probably ever since Saxon times, into two parts by the highway
from Kingston and Hampton Wick to Hampton, which passes in front of
the garden gates, within 250 yards of the palace. To the north of this
road lies Bushey Park, which, with its appurtenances, is fringed on
its western, northern, and eastern sides by the districts of Hampton,
Teddington, and Hampton Wick; while to the south of the Kingston road
lies the House or Home Park, bounded on its three sides by the Thames
and the palace, with its various subsidiary buildings, courtyards,
gardens, and grounds.
The natural features of the country in which Hampton Court is situated,
are not particularly striking. The ground is flat, with scarcely an
undulation rising more than twenty feet above the dead level, and
the soil, though light and gravelly, supports very little indigenous
timber. Indeed, in primeval times, the whole district of Hampton
appears to have been an open track, forming part of the famous Hounslow
Heath, to which it immediately adjoins; and the thorns in Bushey Park,
with a few ancient gigantic elms and oaks in the Home Park, are the
still surviving remnants or traces of its original state. One of the
oaks, which is believed to be the largest in England, is as much as
thirty-seven feet in girth at the waist; and there is a magnificent
elm, of which the smallest girth is twenty-three feet, and which is
known as “The Two Sisters,” or “King Charles’s Swing.”
Nevertheless, the surrounding prospect must, from the earliest times,
have been not unpleasing. The stretch of the river opposite Hampton
Court--studded with eyots, and bordered with luxuriant meadows fringed
with willows--is one of the prettiest in the lower Thames; and the
stream, which is particularly clear and swift at this point, is always
lively with boats and barges. When we add, that the view from the
palace extends, across the river, over a wide expanse of
“Meads forever crowned with flowers,”
clusters of trees, flowery hedgerows, and broad undulating heath-clad
commons,--
“To Claremont’s terraced height and Esher’s groves,
By the soft windings of the silent Mole,----”
and that in the distance can be traced the dim blue outline of the
Surrey hills; while on another side appear the crowded gables and the
picturesque old church-tower of Kingston, we have enumerated all the
natural and local amenities of Hampton Court.
Several motives probably weighed with Wolsey in fixing on Hampton
Court as a residence. In the first place, he was in need of a secluded
country place, within easy access of London, whither he could withdraw
occasionally for rest and quiet, without being too far from the centre
of affairs--as he would certainly have been, had he retired to his
diocesan palaces of York, Lincoln, or Durham. At the same time he
was anxious to select a place where his health, which suffered much
from the fogs and smoke of London, might be recruited in fresh and
pure air. We may presume, too, that he was not regardless of the
advantage attaching to a site on the banks of the Thames, in days when,
on account of the badness and danger of the roads, no route was so
safe, convenient and expeditious as the “silent highway” of a river.
Indeed it would take Wolsey scarcely more time to be rowed down, by
eight stout oarsmen from Hampton Court to the stairs of his palace at
Whitehall, than it now takes one to go up to Waterloo Station by the
South Western trains.
Wolsey had no sooner entered into possession of Hampton Court, than he
began with characteristic energy to plan the erection of a vast and
sumptuous edifice, commensurate with the dignity and wealth he had just
attained to. He was then on the threshold of his career of greatness,
and already receiving enormous revenues.
The old manor-house already stood in the midst of an extensive domain
of pasture land, consisting of some two thousand acres. All this he
proceeded to convert into two parks, fencing them partly with paling,
and partly enclosing them with a stout red-brick buttressed wall,
a great part of which remains to this day, and may be identified by
its deep crimson colour, toned here and there with chequered lines of
black, burnt bricks. There may be found, too, inserted in this wall
of Wolsey’s, in the Kingston road near the Paddock, a curious device
of these black bricks, disposed in the form of a cross evidently an
allusion to his ecclesiastical character; and similar crosses may be
observed on an old tower, standing near a piece of ground which was
formerly the Cardinal’s orchard, and on one of the turrets in the Clock
Court. At the same time he surrounded the house and gardens with a
great moat--a precaution which is noticeable as the mediæval custom of
so defending dwelling-places had generally died out, since the Wars of
the Roses, and Wolsey’s moat here must have been one of the last made.
It remained as a prominent feature in front of the palace till the time
of William III., and traces of it still exist on the north side of the
palace.
His gardens, also, were to be an appanage in every way worthy of the
princely residence he was projecting.
The general plan and scope of the building were, no doubt, determined
by the Cardinal himself, whose style was so distinct, both in this
palace and in his other edifices, from the ordinary ecclesiastical
Gothic, as to be often designated by the term, “The Wolsey
Architecture.”
The material selected was red brick, stone being employed for the
windows, the doorways, the copings of the parapets and turrets, the
string courses, and the various ornamental details--such as pinnacles,
gargoyles, and heraldic beasts, on gables and elsewhere.
The first portion taken in hand was, doubtless, the great west front
of the building, which extends, with its two wings, from north to
south, 400 feet. This façade, though only two stories in height, has
considerable beauty about it, and the picturesque turrets at the angles
of the building, the embrasured parapet, the chimneys of carved and
twisted brick, the graceful gables with their gargoyles and pinnacles,
and the varied mullioned windows, form an admirable specimen of
Tudor domestic architecture. It still preserves much of the charm of
old work, although it has frequently been subjected to repairs and
alterations; but the effect is marred by the absence from the numerous
turrets of the leaden cupolas (or “types” to use the correct old
English term) which, with their crockets, pinnacles, and gilded vanes,
formerly gave so uniquely picturesque an appearance to this part of the
building.
An especially striking feature in Wolsey’s west front, as in other
parts of the Tudor building, is the delicately moulded forms of the
chimney shafts which rise in variously grouped clusters, like slender
turrets above the battlements and gables. They are all of red brick,
constructed on many varieties of plan, and wrought and rubbed, with the
greatest nicety, into different decorative patterns. Some are circular,
some square (but set diagonally), and some octagonal; and they are
grouped together in twos or fours, with their shafts sometimes carried
up solid, and sometimes separate.
Another charm is the deep crimson of the bricks, approximating often
to a rich purple, which contrasts favourably with the staring scarlet
of modern red-brick work. This is particularly the case in the south
or right-hand wing, one of the most picturesque portions of the whole
palace.
By the month of May, 1516, the building had so far advanced that Wolsey
was able to receive the King and Queen at dinner in his new abode. This
was a time when Henry delighted to honour with his company his “awne
goode Cardinall,” as he termed him, at pleasant little entertainments,
when he could throw off the restraints of royalty, and join in
unconventional intercourse with his personal friends. During dinner or
supper the minstrels usually played music, and afterwards the King and
a few intimate friends took part in a masquerade or an impromptu dance.
Sometimes he “would oblige the company with a song,” accompanying
himself on the harpsichord or lute. At other times the King would visit
the Cardinal in state accompanied by his whole court.
After Wolsey’s return from the meeting at the “Field of the Cloth of
Gold,” in 1520, he appears to have made more prolonged stays than
heretofore at Hampton Court, which had now nearly arrived at that stage
of completion in which he left it. We are not able exactly to define
the limits of the Cardinal’s palace, for after his death Henry VIII.
carried out many alterations and additions, which in their turn have
been subsequently modified; but we can form a rough idea of its extent.
We have already noticed the West Front as being entirely Wolsey’s; the
same may be said of the First Court, otherwise called the Base Court,
or Utter (that is _Outer_) Court, which is the largest courtyard
in the palace, being 167 feet from north to south, and 142 from east
to west. It gives us no mean idea of Tudor palatial architecture; and
when we restore in imagination the green turf which originally covered
the area, the cupolas on the turrets, and the latticed windows, we
see it as it appeared to the great Cardinal when riding through it on
his mule. It has a look of warmth and comfort and repose, and an air
of picturesque gloom which is in pleasing contrast with the staring
vulgarities of the “cheerful” cockney buildings of the present day.
The Clock Court, access to which is had from the First Court through
the archway of the Clock Tower, formed the inner and principal part of
Wolsey’s original palace; but the alterations that it has undergone
since his time cause it to present a very different appearance now. In
the first place, the present Great Hall, which occupies the whole of
its north side, though often called Wolsey’s hall, was not erected by
him, but, after his death, by Henry VIII., though it doubtless stands
on the site of the smaller and older hall of the Cardinal’s building.
Then half of the east side of the court was rebuilt by George II.,
while the original south range is almost entirely obscured from view by
the Ionic colonnade of Sir Christopher Wren. Here, however, we are in
one of the most interesting corners of Hampton Court; for behind this
colonnade remains the original range of buildings in which are situated
the very rooms occupied by Cardinal Wolsey himself.
Attached to this corner was one of the Cardinal’s galleries, in which
he used to pace, meditating on his political plans, on his chances for
the popedom, and on the failing favour of the King. To this, which must
have been demolished by William III., and to the other long galleries
in the First Court, Cavendish makes reference in his metrical life of
his master:
“My gallories were fayer, both large and long
To walk in them when that it lyked me best.”
On the north side of the last two mentioned courts is a long intricate
range of buildings, enclosing various smaller courts, and containing
kitchens and other offices and bedrooms for the numerous members of
his household. Much of this part of the building, together with the
cloisters and courts to the north-east, called the Round Kitchen and
Chapel Courts, seem also to have been the work of the great Cardinal.
The chapel, however, was remodelled, if not entirely rebuilt, by Henry
VIII., though we may assume that it occupies the same site as that of
Wolsey and the ancient one of the Knights Hospitallers, whose tombs
perhaps lie beneath the kitchens and other offices contiguous to the
Chapel Court.
When, therefore, we take into consideration William III.’s demolitions,
which included some of the Cardinal’s original structure as well as
Henry VIII.’s additions, we may conclude that Wolsey’s palace cannot
have been very much smaller than the existing one, which covers eight
acres, and has a thousand rooms.