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:
"Why come ye not to court?
To whyche Court?
To Kynge's courte,
Or to Hampton Court?--
Nay, to the Kynge's court:
The Kynge's Courte
Shulde have the excellence;
But Hampton Court
Hath the preemynence.
And Yorke's Place
With my lord's grace,
To whose magnifycence
Is all the conflewence,
Sutys and supplycacons
Embassades of all nacyons."
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:
"The yeomen and grooms of the wardrobes were busied in
hanging of the chambers with costly hangings, and
furnishing the same with beds of silk, and other
furniture apt for the same in every degree. Then my Lord
Cardinal sent me, being gentleman usher, with two other
of my fellows, to Hampton Court to foresee all things
touching our rooms, to be noblily garnished accordingly.
Our pains were not small or light, but travailing daily
from chamber to chamber. Then the carpenters, the
joiners, the masons, the painters, and all other
artificers necessary to glorify the house and feast were
set to work. There was carriage and re-carriage of
plate, stuff and other rich implements; so that there
was nothing lacking or to be imagined or devised for the
purpose. There were also fourteen score beds provided
and furnished with all manner of furniture to them
belonging, too long particularly here to rehearse. But
to all wise men it sufficeth to imagine, that knoweth
what belongeth to the furniture of such triumphant feast
or banquet."
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 L20,000 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.
[Illustration: 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".
[Illustration: ANNE BOLEYN'S GATEWAY, CLOCK COURT]