Hampton Court: A Theatre of the Tudor Monarchy
Hampton Court arrived as part of the Tudors’ property portfolio at an odd moment in the dynasty’s history. It was not somewhere that they had inherited from their predecessors – like Westminster, the Tower of London, Greenwich, or Windsor – nor was it a place which they had commissioned – such as Henry VII’s ‘second paradise’ at Richmond. The palace had been a manor owned by the monastic order of the Knights Hospitaller, who made a tidy sum renting it to various wealthy Londoners looking for a place in the countryside, then as now. Sir John Wode, Speaker of the House of Commons during the reign of Edward IV, rented it for years and, when serving as one of Richard III’s vice-admirals, he perhaps imported the bell bearing a prayer to the Virgin Mary as Star of the Sea, which still hangs and rings at the palace today. After Wode, the estate was rented first by Henry VII’s chamberlain, Sir Giles Daubeney, and after him by Henry VIII’s chief minister Cardinal Wolsey who transformed it into a palace after securing such a generous rental agreement that he was able to treat it like a freehold. A ‘magnificently enlarged’ Hampton Court passed from his control when Wolsey fell from favour after his seeming inability – Henry VIII suspected it was in fact reluctance – to secure an annulment of his king’s marriage to Katherine of Aragon. Hampton Court, coming into royal possession in staggered stages between 1529 and 1531, thus arrived after the Tudors had acquired most of their earlier palaces and just before their coffers were swelled by their en-masse confiscation of monastic properties during the Dissolution of the Monasteries.
By the time Hampton Court was a first used as a Crown property to host a queen consort – Anne Boleyn, immediately after her 1533 coronation – the King had secured the transferral of the lease from Wolsey and then the deeds from the Knights Hospitaller. Queen Anne came from two families with a great interest in architecture. Her paternal grandmother, Lady Margaret Boleyn, had been born in Kilkenny Castle, Ireland, as eldest daughter of the Earl of Ormond, head of one of the greatest aristocratic clans not just in Ireland but in northern Europe. Fabulously wealthy, the Butler dynasty were keen patrons of the arts and architecture, the latter being an interest inherited by Anne’s father, Sir Thomas Boleyn, who spent a fortune renovating their estates at Hever Castle, Kent; Blickling Hall, Norfolk, and New Hall, Essex. Having spent much of her education in France, Anne had also been exposed to some of the more impressive works of royal architecture in the sixteenth century. Immediately after her first residence there as queen, Anne Boleyn helped mastermind a series of renovations and expansions that would build on Cardinal Wolsey’s legacy to see Hampton Court continue its evolution into becoming one of Europe’s most admired – and splendid – palaces. In a brutal irony, Anne Boleyn’s major innovation at Hampton Court – the construction of a new wing to house a queen’s apartments and courtyard – were finished only a few weeks before her execution and several months after her last visit to the palace.
Although neither lived to enjoy them, Wolsey and Anne Boleyn had left Hampton Court a palatial residence and Henry VIII, albeit with less of a precise vision, continued their work by attaching Hampton Court to one of the world’s largest hunting demesnes after he seized neighbouring Church properties. The palace hosted several major moments in Henry’s later life – his son was born there in October 1537, his third wife died there in the same month, his fifth wife’s downfall began there in November 1541 – after discovering that she had hired one of her former pre-marital lovers to her household staff, Henry left her at Hampton Court and never saw her again – and he married his sixth wife, Katherine Parr, there in July 1543.
For his children, the palace was to be no less significant. It was his son Edward VI’s favourite home; his sister and Henry’s daughter Mary I spent her honeymoon there, and the middle sibling, Elizabeth I, survived a brush with smallpox at Hampton Court that nearly killed her in 1562.
These events are ones I look at in my book on Hampton Court, The Palace; they are important and, I think, fascinating, but equally so is the role that Hampton Court played in Tudor society, not just to the Tudor royals. The book is divided into four sections – the House of Tudor, Stuart and Cromwell, Hanover, and Windsor – with each chapter focussing on a different room through a different person in a different decade. The changes the country experienced at Hampton Court in the Tudor section are, in many ways, windows into the English, then British, experience. Giles Daubeney’s staff are a window into what everyday life, or something like it, was like at the end of our Middle Ages. Two Irish noblemen – James Butler and his nephew Barnaby Fitzpatrick – were to try to negotiate the future of Tudor Ireland by living in the shadow of the royals at Hampton Court. Fundamentalist Protestant preachers flocked around Queen Katherine Parr and King Edward VI there, in a desperate, impassioned attempt to secure what they believed would be the ‘perfect’ Reformation of the English Church. Mary I did not just enjoy her honeymoon there, but she also retreated there to await the birth of a child who would never come and, according to many of her critics, may in fact have been a misdiagnosis of the disease that would later kill her. The stepdaughters of Calais’s governor – soon to return to French control – came to Hampton Court as ladies in waiting.
The sense of history flowing in and out of Hampton Court is palpable and thrilling. For the Tudors, it was a home they seized and expanded – much as they did with the throne itself. It was a theatre for many of their most impressive, as well as scandalous, moments, yet it also mattered as a venue for their Irish, Welsh, and ‘Calicien’ subjects (as the inhabitants of the Pale of Calais were known). Although its history is not that of Wolsey’s ‘most wholesome Manor’, it is still very much that of the ‘most magnificent’ palace of Hampton Court.
Gareth Russell is a historian and author of The Palace: From the Tudors to the Windsors, 500 Years of History at Hampton Court.
