Part 25, Hampton Court

Tuesday, 5/9/2017
Weather: cloudy, becoming partly cloudy. 46F/56F

Before leaving for Hampton Court, I worked on our Jerusalem postcard through most of the morning, and went through online bills from home to make sure they were covered. It was the story of our trip: there was never enough time! So it was around 1:45 pm by the time we got away from the hotel. The good part about the late start was that we didn’t have to deal with crowds in the stations or on the train because of traveling in the middle of the day. We rolled through many tidy suburbs on our way to East Molesey, the village next to Hampton Court 13 miles southwest of London.

It turned out that a bus ride was not required to get to Hampton Court from the train station … it was just a short walk across the Thames River bridge and we were there. We got our entry tickets at the ticket office and headed down the long walkway toward the red brick Main Gate.

Photo 2730, Main Gate at Hampton Court: red brick & the Tudor style

The rich history of Hampton Court is as much of the attraction as the palace itself. King Henry VIII is a central character in the story of Hampton Court … and where Henry VIII is involved, you know that there’s going to be a lot of intrigue and deadly power struggles. But to get to the beginning of the Hampton Court story we need to back up one chapter before Henry to Cardinal Wolsey.   Hampton Court was originally an old medieval manor belonging to a religious order, and in 1514 it was taken over by the Archbishop of York Thomas Wolsey. Wolsey was a highly ambitious and capable Catholic cleric, and by the time of his appointment as a cardinal in 1515, he was also the most powerful of Henry VIII’s secular advisors. During the following seven years, Wolsey undertook to transform Hampton Court into the grandest palace in England to reflect his new station – he went so far as to pattern his design of Hampton court on a contemporary Italian treatise on how one should design a cardinal’s grand palace in an era of rich cardinals in Italy. The work was guided by a core of Italian craftsman that specialized in upgrading the more ordinary Tudor buildings into Renaissance showpieces.

Photo 2749b, painting of Cardinal Wolsey by John Pettie. Source: Athenaeum.org

Wolsey’s influence was ascendant at court … he rose to the level of Lord Chancellor, King Henry VIII’s chief advisor, and was a member of the Privy Council where the most important affairs of state were discussed and decided. Although he was a Catholic cleric, he became adept at negotiating shifting alliances, including several times leading to war with France. His downfall was his inability to negotiate with the Pope an annulment of Henry’s 24-year marriage to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, due to her inability to give Henry a male heir. They didn’t know about Rh negative problems in those days. This failure to intercede on Henry’s behalf with the Pope cost Wolsey all of his power and position in Henry’s court.  Perhaps trying to forestall his downfall, Wolsey made a gift of Hampton Court to Henry in 1528, but despite this grand gesture Wolsey was soon charged with treason by Henry, a favored method Henry used for disposing of people he no longer had use for. Wolsey was on his way to London to answer to the treason charges when he died reportedly of natural causes. One could be forgiven for thinking that Wolsey’s illness was accelerated by knowing the fate awaited him in London.

The iconic Holbein portrait of Henry VIII, c. 1537, age 46, near his prime.  Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Almost immediately upon taking ownership of Hampton Court, Henry started an expansion program to enable the palace to accommodate the king’s court of nearly a thousand people that went with him when he moved about. In 1529, he quadrupled the size of the kitchens, and in 1532 added the Great Hall with its grand hammer-beam ceiling.

Photo 2741. The Great Hall with its hammer-beam ceiling

Although Hampton Court was Henry’s favorite palace, it was also the site of much of the turmoil with his six wives. His second wife Anne Boleyn was beheaded on trumped-up adultery charges before her new apartments at Hampton Court were completed. Henry’s heir Edward VI was born there, and Edward’s mother, Henry’s 3rd wife Jane Seymour (Henry’s favorite) died there from childbirth complications. And Henry learned of his 5th wife Catherine Howard’s infidelity while at mass at Hampton Court, which lead to her date with death at the Tower of London.

By the way, the English have a ditty to help keep track of Henry’s six wives and their fate: “divorced, beheaded, died … divorced, beheaded, survived”: Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard, and Catherine Parr.

After Henry’s death in 1547, Hampton Court fell into a period of less use and some decline under subsequent monarchs, through the English Civil War, until the time of William & Mary some 150 years later. They were contemporaries of France’s Louis XIV, and when they compared Hampton Court to Louis’ Palace of Versailles, Hampton Court came off as a rather dowdy and run-down royal palace. To remedy this situation William and Mary embarked on a 3rd great transformation of Hampton Court with designs by the great architect Sir Christopher Wren (London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral et al). The original plan had been to demolish Henry’s Hampton Court palace, section by section and replace it with a grand palace in the Baroque style, but the work largely ceased after Mary died in 1694, and William lost interest. Although the entire plan was not implemented, a large section of the back (east side) of the palace was completed per the Baroque plan, and makes a marked contrast with the older Tudor sections on the front, or western side.

The older Tudor sections and the newer Baroque sections are both constructed of red brick, which at first blush does not appear to have the same grandeur and sense of permanence as the great buildings of stone such as St. Paul’s or the Houses of Parliament. But the implementation of the two styles was pulled off with enough deftness that you don’t really notice the difference. In fact, I did not even become aware of the two styles until reading about it after returning home. I also found that the older Tudor red brick style grew on me: the crenelated (notched) parapets like old medieval castles, the pointed arched windows, the towers, the fancy chimneys. And it’s not quite as cold and gray as the great stone structures.

Photo 2767.  William & Mary’s Baroque style meets Henry VIII’s Tudor style at far top right

Since we only had about 3 hours until closing, we figured out where to put our time, as one could easily spend a whole day there. We went to King Henry VIII’s apartments, which included the Great Hall, a smallish Council Room for meetings of the Privy Council, where state power was wielded. In an adjacent room, there was a “participation re-enactment” in which another fellow and I were pulled out of the crowd to take part in a mock search of the Queen Catherine Parr’s apartment for “religious contraband”, whereby this fellow was evidently trying to frame the queen for heresy. It made you realize how dangerous life was during the Reformation in Henry VIII’s era – it was a time when expressing any opinion contrary to the Church could get you burned at the stake for heresy. There were enemies for every point of view.

Photo 6346. Participation re-enactment – the king’s inquisitor interrogates the visitors

Photo 2756. Privy Council Chamber: where the decisions were made

We went on to visit the rest of the rooms in Henry’s apartments, including his bedroom, then went on to see the rooms used by William and Mary. Except for some exceptional rooms, like the one with the fancy folded napkins, they started looking all alike. There were many beautiful views of the gardens on the back side of the palace always pulling me to take another window shot.

With those items behind us, we went out to the east gardens in back and wandered around taking photos to our heart’s content. The gardens were beautiful with the vast lawns freshly mowed and with the flowers in bloom. There were lots of school kids there playing on the lawns, plus couples lingering on benches or even napping in the longed-for sun of springtime.

Photo 2791. Hampton Court east garden, converging avenues, pyramidal yew trees, fountain

Photo 2823. The Long Water, England’s answer to the Grand Canal of Versailles

Around 5 o’clock we returned to the train station across the river and headed back to our hotel in London for the evening. That late start was a killer – I realize now how much we missed at Hampton Court, such as the kitchens, Wolsey’s rooms, appreciating the architectural features of the three transformations, and the vast grounds and many gardens. It’s on our list for another visit to give it a full day. It’s always good to leave something to see next time!

Next: Windsor Castle