Hampton Court was originally one of the farms belonging to the Knight’s of St. John of Jerusalem. Its growth into one of the most important houses in sixteenth and seventeenth century England was fundamentally affected by its position on the Thames within easy reach of London and its proximity to a number of royal palaces.
In the fourteenth century Hampton Court was used by the royal family as a staging post to the Black Prince’s house at Byfleet, in the fifteenth as a stepping stone to the Lancastrian house at Sheen and in the early sixteenth as a base for Richmond.
It was purchased by Thomas, Cardinal, Wolsey, in 1514 to be his private country residence, close to the King at Richmond. Wolsey transformed what had been a modest house into one of the largest and most impressive houses in England. What remains of his work today is, most impressively, the outer courtyard set aside for his guests. The inner court, today Clock Court, had, on its east side, a three story range with rooms on the ground floor for Princess Mary, on the principle floor for the king, and the top floor for the queen. To the south were probably rooms set aside for Wolsey himself. On the east was a long gallery projecting out into the gardens and a chapel.
Lavish New Style
When Henry VIII took Hampton Court from Wolsey in September 1529 it is doubtful that he had properly formulated his plans for the building. But it is likely that in the next two or three years he decided to turn it into his most important and lavish country palace. Building works to do this continued for eight years and cost £47,000, making it one of the single most expensive royal building projects ever. Wolsey’s house was extended with new kitchens, new apartments for the king, queen and Prince of Wales, a tennis court, bowling alley, formal gardens and two hunting parks. It was built in a completely new style. Not in the restrained late medieval brick and stone gothic of Wolsey’s work but with a flamboyance that exploded onto the architectural scene like a starburst.
We know from the diaries of numerous foreign visitors who were shown the palace what the interiors looked like. Jacob Rathgeb tells us that ‘This is the most splendid and magnificent royal palace that may be found in England or indeed in any other kingdom’, and a similar view was held by Christian IV’s diarist, who wrote that ‘the castle of Hampton Court is the finest in all England’. This had largely been the view held by travellers since the early 1550s. In August 1554 Pedro de Hoyo, writing from Hampton Court, told his correspondent that it was ‘the finest house in the country and some say the world’.
By the early 1540s Hampton Court was, other than Whitehall, the most magnificent of all the royal houses, set in a massive royal estate and extensive hunting ground and surrounded by a series of satellite houses for royal recreation. While both Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I used Hampton Court extensively, none made any alterations to the house their father completed.
Memorial to the Tudors
By the accession of James I, in 1603, Hampton Court must have looked very old fashioned. Both its architecture and its furnishings were virtually unchanged since Henry VIII’s death and there may have been an expectation that this house, like most of the other royal palaces, would soon be modernised by James I and his avant garde architect Inigo Jones.
But despite the fact that in 1603 there was an explosion of court culture and building on a scale that had not been seen since the death of Henry VIII, Hampton Court was not to share in the upsurge. It was to be immaculately preserved as a sort of memorial to the Tudors. Early Stuart Hampton Court was specifically and deliberately antiquarian. Its role as an ancestral home in antiquarian taste shaped its early Stuart function as the focus for ambassadorial receptions.
This careful preservation as an ancestral seat saved Hampton Court from demolition under the commonwealth. In April 1653, after the palace had been surveyed for sale and demolition, a resolution was passed in parliament exempting Hampton Court suggesting that parliament itself had fallen for the antiquarian myth so carefully preserved and nurtured by the Stuarts. This certainly was the view of the Venetian ambassador, who wrote that Hampton Court had been saved as ‘a relic of departed greatness’.
Neither Charles II nor James II were very interested in Hampton Court. Charles converted some lodgings for the Duke of York and built himself a small modern block where the royal council met when the court was at Windsor. Otherwise he was content to grant the house to Lady Castlemaine as her residence and the residence of his bastards by her.
Large Summer Palace
William and Mary re-drew the royal pattern of residence. They disliked Whitehall and used a new house at Kensington as their London base and decided to rebuild Hampton Court as a summer residence for the full court. The new building was designed in the office of Works by Nicholas Hawksmoor and Sir Christopher Wren. The palace they designed, although cloaked in the latest French architectural guise, was essentially Henry VIII’s palace in Plan. The new quadrangle contained the same rooms, in the same order that Henry VIII would have known. The obligatory formula for the ceremonial life of an English King.
Under Queen Anne the court went into rapid decline. Hampton Court was now a dinosaur. The monachy simply did not need a full-blown ceremonial palace like Hampton Court. Although she flirted with completing the Queen’s apartments left incomplete on William III’s death, Anne barely lived there and died with the palace still unfinished. George I made little use of it and when George II used the palace for a ten-year period before his last visit in 1737 it was in a very different way to that envisaged by William III. The palace was too big, many of the state rooms were now entirely vestigial, George in fact ordered both Sir Edward Lovett Pearce and William Kent to design him a new palace at Kew that would replace Hampton Court. Although neither were built Windsor was to become the western country seat of the Crown instead of Hampton Court; a distinction that it retains to this day.
First opened to the public by Queen Victoria in the 1830s, Hampton Court Palace is now run by Historic Royal Palaces (who have their headquarters there) and is famed for its 60 acres of formal gardens.