Hampton Court sits on the Thames about twelve miles west of central London, and it is really two palaces joined together: a red-brick Tudor complex at the front and an English baroque palace at the back, built 180 years apart and never reconciled.
Wolsey’s mistake
Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Henry VIII’s Lord Chancellor, began building in 1515 and produced the most magnificent house in England — grander than anything the king owned, which turned out to be a serious error of judgement.
When Wolsey failed to secure Henry’s annulment from Catherine of Aragon and fell from favour in 1529, he handed the palace over in an attempt to save himself. It did not work; he died the following year on his way to face a treason charge.
Henry’s palace
Henry rebuilt and vastly extended it, and the Tudor half is the finest surviving royal architecture of the period. The highlights:
- The Great Hall — with a hammerbeam roof and Henry’s tapestries, still hanging where he put them.
- The Tudor kitchens — enormous, and the best-preserved medieval kitchens in Europe. They fed a court of 600 twice a day, and food is regularly cooked in them for visitors.
- The Chapel Royal — still a working place of worship, with an extraordinary blue and gold vaulted ceiling.
- The astronomical clock of 1540, which shows the phase of the moon and the time of high water at London Bridge — genuinely useful when the river was the road to the city.
Five of Henry’s six wives lived here, and his only legitimate son Edward VI was born here.
The baroque half
In the 1690s William III and Mary II commissioned Christopher Wren to demolish the whole thing and build a British Versailles. He got as far as replacing the state apartments before money and Mary’s death stopped the project, leaving the Tudor front intact.
The result is one of the more fortunate accidents in British architecture: two entirely different palaces, side by side, both first-rate.
The maze
Planted around 1700 and the oldest surviving hedge maze in Britain. It covers a third of an acre, takes about twenty minutes to solve, and defeats a satisfying number of people. Jerome K. Jerome devoted a chapter of Three Men in a Boat to getting lost in it.
The ghosts
Hampton Court claims to be among the most haunted buildings in Britain, and the palace does nothing to discourage it. Catherine Howard, Henry’s fifth wife, is said to run screaming along the Haunted Gallery, as she reportedly did when arrested — she broke free and ran to beg the king for her life while he was at Mass. He ignored her. She was beheaded three months later.
Visiting
Run by Historic Royal Palaces, reachable by train from Waterloo in about 35 minutes, or by boat from Westminster if you have most of a day. Costumed interpreters play out episodes of Tudor court life through the rooms, which is done considerably better than that description suggests. The gardens, including the Great Vine planted in 1768 and still fruiting, are worth as much time as the house.