Hampton Court Palace is a Grade I listed royal palace in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, southwest and upstream of central London on the River Thames.
The building of the palace began in 1514 for Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Archbishop of York and the chief minister of Henry VIII. In 1529, as Wolsey fell from favour, the cardinal gave the palace to the king to try to save his own life, which he knew was now in grave danger due to Henry VIII's deepening frustration and anger. The palace became one of Henry's most favoured residences; soon after acquiring it, he enlarged it to accommodate his sizeable retinue of courtiers.
In the early 1690s, William III's massive rebuilding and expansion work, which was intended to rival the Palace of Versailles, destroyed much of the Tudor palace.Dynes, p. 90. His work ceased in 1703, leaving the palace in two distinct contrasting architectural styles, domestic Tudor and Baroque. While the palace's styles are an accident of fate, a unity exists due to the use of pink bricks and a symmetrical, if vague, balancing of successive low wings.Dynes, p. 86. George II was the last monarch to reside in the palace.
The palace structure and its grounds are cared for by an independent charity, Historic Royal Palaces, and are open to the public. The palace displays works of art from the Royal Collection. The palace gardens include the Hampton Court Maze, the royal tennis court, and the world's largest grape vine . The palace is the site of the annual Hampton Court Palace Festival and the Hampton Court Garden Festival, held in the Home Park.
History
Medieval What would become Hampton Court Palace was originally a property of the Order of St John of Jerusalem. It was leased first to John Wode in the mid-15th century, and then to the statesman Sir Giles Daubeney in 1494. Daubeney expanded the previous structures, and built the Great Kitchens that still survive today (although much altered). After Daubeney's death in 1508, his 14 year-old heir, Henry Daubeney, had to wait until 1514 to inherit his father's possessions. A month later, he relinquished his lease, and the Order of St John of Jerusalem re-leased Hampton Court to Thomas Wolsey.
Tudor times
Thomas Wolsey, Archbishop of York, chief minister to and a favourite of Henry VIII, took over the site of Hampton Court Palace in 1514.Summerson, p. 12. Over the following seven years, Wolsey spent lavishly (200,000 crowns) to build the finest palace in England at Hampton Court. Today, little of Wolsey's building work remains unchanged. The first courtyard, the Base Court,"Base" in this instance simply means "lower" in the hierarchy of courtyards; it is not topographically lower. (B on plan), was his creation, as was the second, inner gatehouse (C) which leads to the Clock Court (D) (Wolsey's seal remains visible over the entrance arch of the clock towerSpelthorne Hundred: Hampton Court Palace: architectural description, A History of the County of Middlesex, Volume 2: General; Ashford, East Bedfont with Hatton, Feltham, Hampton with Hampton Wick, Hanworth, Laleham, Littleton (1911), pp. 371–379. Retrieved 21 March 2009.) which contained his private rooms (O on plan). The Base Court contained forty-four lodgings reserved for guests, while the second court (today, Clock Court) contained the very best rooms the state apartments reserved for the king and his family.Thurley, p. 6. Henry VIII stayed in the state apartments as Wolsey's guest immediately after their completion in 1525.
In building his palace, Wolsey was attempting to create a Renaissance cardinal's palace of a rectilinear symmetrical plan with grand apartments on a raised piano nobile, all rendered with classical detailing. The historian Jonathan Foyle has suggested that it is likely that Wolsey had been inspired by Paolo Cortese's De Cardinalatu, a manual for cardinals that included advice on palatial architecture, published in 1510. The architectural historian Sir John Summerson asserts that the palace shows "the essence of Wolseythe plain English churchman who nevertheless made his sovereign the arbiter of Europe and who built and furnished Hampton Court to show foreign embassies that Henry VIII's chief minister knew how to live as graciously as any cardinal in Rome."Summerson, p. 14. Whatever the concepts were, the architecture is an excellent and rare example of a thirty-year era when English architecture was in a harmonious transition from domestic Tudor, strongly influenced by perpendicular Gothic, to the Italian Renaissance classical style. Perpendicular Gothic owed nothing historically to the Renaissance style, yet harmonised well with it.Copplestone, p. 254. This blending of styles was realised by a small group of Italian craftsmen working at the English court in the second and third decades of the sixteenth century. They specialised in the adding of Renaissance ornament to otherwise straightforward Tudor buildings. It was one of these, Giovanni da Maiano, who was responsible for the set of eight relief busts of Roman emperors which were set in the Tudor brickwork.Copplestone, p. 257.
Henry VIII and his courtiers visited Wolsey at Hampton Court in masque costume in January 1527, disguised as shepherds to play mumchance and dance.Richard P. Sylvester and Davis P. Harding, Two Earl Tudor Lives: Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey (Yale, 1962), pp. 28–29. Wolsey was only to enjoy his palace for a few years. In 1529, knowing that his enemies and the King were engineering his downfall, he passed the palace to the King as a gift. Wolsey died in 1530.
Within six months of coming into ownership, the King began his own rebuilding and expansion. Henry VIII's court consisted of over one thousand people. While the King owned over sixty houses and palaces, few of these were large enough to hold the assembled court, and thus one of the first of the King's building works (in order to transform Hampton Court to a principal residence) was to build the vast kitchens. These were quadrupled in size in 1529, enabling the King to provide bouche of court (free food and drink) for his entire court.Thurley, p. 8. The architecture of King Henry's new palace followed the design precedent set by Wolsey: perpendicular Gothic-inspired Tudor with restrained Renaissance ornament. This hybrid architecture was to remain almost unchanged for nearly a century, until Inigo Jones introduced strong classical influences from Italy 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) and the Royal Tennis Court.This court is still in use for the game of real tennis, an older version different from the present game. It is now the oldest extant real tennis court. The Great Hall has a carved hammerbeam roof. During Tudor times, this was the most important room of the palace: here, the King would dine in state seated at a table upon a raised dais.Summerson, p. 21. The hall took five years to complete; so impatient was the King for completion that the masons were compelled to work throughout the night by candlelight.
The gatehouse to the second, inner court was adorned in 1540 with the Hampton Court astronomical clock, an early example of a pre-Copernican astronomical clock. Still functioning, the clock shows the time of day, the phases of the moon, the month, the quarter of the year, the date, the sun and star sign, and high water at London Bridge.Thurley, p. 18. This last item was of great importance to those visiting this Thames-side palace from London, as the preferred method of transport at the time was by barge, and at low water London Bridge created dangerous rapids. This gatehouse is also known today as Anne Boleyn's gate, after Henry's second wife. Work was still under way on Anne Boleyn's apartments above the gate when Boleyn was beheaded.Williams, p. 53.
During the Tudor period, the palace was the scene of many historic events. In 1537, the King's much desired male heir, the future Edward VI, was born at the palace, and the child's mother, Jane Seymour, died there two weeks later.Thurley, p. 9. Four years afterwards, whilst attending Mass in the palace's chapel, the King was informed of the adultery of his fifth wife, Catherine Howard. She was then confined to her room for a few days before being sent to Syon House and then on to the Tower of London. Legend claims she briefly escaped her guards and ran through the Haunted Gallery to beg Henry for her life but she was recaptured.Thurley, p. 23.
King Henry died in January 1547 and was succeeded by his son Edward VI, and then by both his daughters in turn. It was to Hampton Court that Queen Mary I (Henry's elder daughter) retreated with King Philip to spend her honeymoon, after their wedding at Winchester.Williams, p. 52. Mary chose Hampton Court as the place for the birth of her first child, which turned out to be the first of two phantom pregnancies. Mary had initially wanted to give birth at Windsor Castle as it was a more secure location, and she was still fearful of rebellion. But Hampton Court was considerably larger and could accommodate the entire court and more besides. Mary stayed at the palace awaiting the birth of the "child" for over five months, and only left because of the uninhabitable state of the palace due to the court being kept in the one location for so long. Her court departed for the much smaller Oatlands Palace. Mary was succeeded by her half-sister, Elizabeth I, and it was Elizabeth who had the eastern (privy) kitchen built; today, this is the palace's public tea room.
Stuarts and early Hanoverians
The Tudor period came to an end when Elizabeth I died in 1603. She was succeeded as monarch by her first cousin-twice-removed, James I of the House of Stuart, an event known as the Union of the Crowns.Susan Doran, From Tudor to Stuart: The Regime Change from Elizabeth I to James I (Oxford University Press, 2024), pp. 12–14.
Two entertainments for the Stuart court were staged in the Great Hall in January 1604, The Masque of Indian and China Knights and The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses.Martin Butler, The Stuart Court Masque and Political Culture (Cambridge, 2008), p. 63. On 6 January, Scottish courtiers performed a sword dance for Anne of Denmark. Their dance was compared to a Spanish matachin.Maurice Lee, Dudley Carleton to John Chamberlain, 1603–1624 (Rutgers UP, 1972), pp. 53–54. Later in 1604, the palace was the site of King James' meeting with representatives of the English Puritans, known as the Hampton Court Conference; while an agreement with the Puritans was not reached, the meeting led to James's commissioning of the King James Version of the Bible.Thurley, p. 10.
King James was succeeded in 1625 by his son, the ill-fated Charles I. Hampton Court was to become both his palace and his prison. It was also the setting for his honeymoon with his fifteen-year-old bride, Henrietta Maria in 1625. Following King Charles' execution in 1649, the palace became the property of the Commonwealth presided over by Oliver Cromwell. Unlike some other former royal properties, the palace escaped relatively unscathed. While the government auctioned much of the contents, the building was ignored.Thurley, p. 11.
After the Restoration, King Charles II and his successor James II visited Hampton Court but largely preferred to reside elsewhere. By current French court standards, Hampton Court now appeared old-fashioned. It was in 1689, shortly after Louis XIV's court had moved permanently to Versailles, that the palace's antiquated state was addressed. England had joint monarchs, William III and Mary II. Within months of their accession, they embarked on a massive rebuilding project at Hampton Court. The intention was to demolish the Tudor palace a section at a time while replacing it with a huge modern palace in the Baroque style retaining only Henry VIII's Great Hall.Summerson, p. 16.