palace when Wolsey fell from grace in 1529. He spent £60,000 extending it over ten years: roughly equivalent to £19 million today. Among his additions were tennis courts, bowling alleys, a tiltyard (for jousting), the extraordinary Great Kitchens and his magnificent Great Hall with its spectacular hammer-beam ceiling. Of these, only the Great Kitchens and Great Hall survive today (although you can see some remaining towersfrom the tiltyard in the grounds, one of them emerging from the eponymously named Tiltyard Café).
The Great Hall was used for feasts, masques and revels, and twice-daily meals when the court was in residence. On the most lavish occasions, it would have been hung with the priceless tapestries that adorn it today. These Abraham Tapestries that Henry had woven in the Brussels workshop of Willem de Kempaneer at vast expense in the early 1540s, signify that, like Abraham, Henry saw himself a patriarch, making a new covenant with God and being granted, in return, a son and heir late in life. If you look closely at the tapestries on the Walls of Hampton Court’s Great Hall, now tarnished by age, you can still see they are woven with threads of real gold and silver and would have glittered dazzlingly in candlelight.
Although the Great Hall was built for Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, Anne was not alive to see it when it was finished in 1536. Indeed, the workmen had to quickly knock out the carvings of her heraldic beast, the falcon, and replace them with the panther of Henry’s new Queen, Jane Seymour; but they missed a couple, which can still be seen high in the rafters today.
There are, in fact, visual cues and lingering memories of all Henry’s wives in the palace. Look out for the pomegranate of Katherine of Aragon above the buttery door and the leather mâché badges on the ceiling of the Great Watching Chamber (completed in 1537), some of which feature Jane Seymour’s badge of a crowned phoenix rising from a castle between two rose bushes. Further down the Processional Gallery, Henry VIII’s Council Chamber (possibly one of two) was where a treaty of marriage between Henry VIII and Anne of Cleves was signed in 1539, and it was in the Royal Pew, or Holyday Closet, of the Chapel Royal that Henry reportedly found a letter left for him by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, detailing the infidelities of his fifth wife,Katherine Howard — the day after the kingdom had given thanks in prayer for his happy marriage [see P ONTEFRACT C ASTLE ]. Since her subsequent beheading, visitors have reported seeing Katherine’s ghost running screaming up and down the ‘Haunted Gallery’, attempting to plead with Henry for her life. There are also happier memories here: Henry married his last wife, Kateryn Parr on 12 July 1543 in the Queen’s Privy Closet at Hampton Court, before a select audience of only nineteen people.
The central story of Hampton Court, as the commissioning of the Abraham Tapestries reveals, is that this was the birthplace of Henry’s only legitimate son and heir, Edward, later King Edward VI. After an excruciating labour of two days and three nights, Jane gave birth to Edward on 12 October 1537. These glad tidings were long awaited, and one letter to Henry VIII expressed the mood of the kingdom when it congratulated him on ‘the most joyful news that has come to England these many years of the birth of a prince’. Prince Edward’s christening in the Chapel at Hampton Court on 15 October was an ostentatious and impressive affair. Under its gorgeous blue and gold-starred ceiling, with its baby-faced gilt cherubs, the great and good of Tudor England assembled for a ceremony that lasted for hours.
The apartments that were built for the new young prince are still standing, and you can see them on the left of Chapel Court. The Royal Collection paintings at Hampton Court also evoke this heritage. In the Processional Gallery, you can see a seventeenth-century copy of the Whitehall Mural by Remigius van
The Great Hall was used for feasts, masques and revels, and twice-daily meals when the court was in residence. On the most lavish occasions, it would have been hung with the priceless tapestries that adorn it today. These Abraham Tapestries that Henry had woven in the Brussels workshop of Willem de Kempaneer at vast expense in the early 1540s, signify that, like Abraham, Henry saw himself a patriarch, making a new covenant with God and being granted, in return, a son and heir late in life. If you look closely at the tapestries on the Walls of Hampton Court’s Great Hall, now tarnished by age, you can still see they are woven with threads of real gold and silver and would have glittered dazzlingly in candlelight.
Although the Great Hall was built for Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, Anne was not alive to see it when it was finished in 1536. Indeed, the workmen had to quickly knock out the carvings of her heraldic beast, the falcon, and replace them with the panther of Henry’s new Queen, Jane Seymour; but they missed a couple, which can still be seen high in the rafters today.
There are, in fact, visual cues and lingering memories of all Henry’s wives in the palace. Look out for the pomegranate of Katherine of Aragon above the buttery door and the leather mâché badges on the ceiling of the Great Watching Chamber (completed in 1537), some of which feature Jane Seymour’s badge of a crowned phoenix rising from a castle between two rose bushes. Further down the Processional Gallery, Henry VIII’s Council Chamber (possibly one of two) was where a treaty of marriage between Henry VIII and Anne of Cleves was signed in 1539, and it was in the Royal Pew, or Holyday Closet, of the Chapel Royal that Henry reportedly found a letter left for him by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, detailing the infidelities of his fifth wife,Katherine Howard — the day after the kingdom had given thanks in prayer for his happy marriage [see P ONTEFRACT C ASTLE ]. Since her subsequent beheading, visitors have reported seeing Katherine’s ghost running screaming up and down the ‘Haunted Gallery’, attempting to plead with Henry for her life. There are also happier memories here: Henry married his last wife, Kateryn Parr on 12 July 1543 in the Queen’s Privy Closet at Hampton Court, before a select audience of only nineteen people.
The central story of Hampton Court, as the commissioning of the Abraham Tapestries reveals, is that this was the birthplace of Henry’s only legitimate son and heir, Edward, later King Edward VI. After an excruciating labour of two days and three nights, Jane gave birth to Edward on 12 October 1537. These glad tidings were long awaited, and one letter to Henry VIII expressed the mood of the kingdom when it congratulated him on ‘the most joyful news that has come to England these many years of the birth of a prince’. Prince Edward’s christening in the Chapel at Hampton Court on 15 October was an ostentatious and impressive affair. Under its gorgeous blue and gold-starred ceiling, with its baby-faced gilt cherubs, the great and good of Tudor England assembled for a ceremony that lasted for hours.
The apartments that were built for the new young prince are still standing, and you can see them on the left of Chapel Court. The Royal Collection paintings at Hampton Court also evoke this heritage. In the Processional Gallery, you can see a seventeenth-century copy of the Whitehall Mural by Remigius van
Similar Books
