Cardinal Wolsey gave Hampton Court to Henry VIII hoping to survive
Thomas Wolsey spent seven years and 200,000 crowns making Hampton Court the finest palace in England. Then, in 1529, sensing that Henry VIII and his enemies were closing in, the cardinal handed the whole thing to the king as a gift. It bought little time; Wolsey died the following year, and Henry moved in.
The land originally belonged to the crusading Knights of St John, who leased it in 1494 to the statesman Giles Daubeney, whose Great Kitchens still survive in altered form. Wolsey took the lease in 1514 and aimed for a Renaissance cardinal's palace, symmetrical and richly detailed, perhaps modelled on a 1510 Italian manual for cardinals. The architectural historian John Summerson saw it as a display for foreign envoys that Henry's chief minister could live as grandly as any cardinal in Rome. Italian craftsmen such as Giovanni da Maiano set terracotta busts of Roman emperors into the Tudor brick.
Henry's court numbered over a thousand people, so within months he began expanding. The kitchens were quadrupled so he could feed everyone free food and drink, a perk called bouche of court. Between 1532 and 1535 he added a real tennis court and the Great Hall, beneath a carved hammerbeam roof, the last medieval great hall built for an English monarch; so impatient was the king that masons worked through the night by candlelight. An astronomical clock installed in 1540 still shows the moon's phases, star signs and high water at London Bridge, crucial for travellers arriving by barge. Its gateway is named after Anne Boleyn, whose rooms above it were unfinished when she was executed.
In the early 1690s William III tore down much of the Tudor palace to build something to rival Versailles. His work stopped in 1703, leaving two clashing styles, domestic Tudor and Baroque, loosely unified by pink brick. George II was the last monarch to live there.
Today Historic Royal Palaces runs the Grade I listed site, 12 miles upstream from central London. Its gardens hold the famous maze and a grape vine judged the world's largest as of 2005.
Source: Hampton Court Palace
