Now that Charles III is King – he takes over the royal palaces and that includes an impressive Tudor spread just outside London called Hampton Court Palace. A royal residence seized from its original owner Cardinal Wolsey by his boss, King Henry VIII. He expanded it into the incredible series of structures you see today.
I visited in April 2022 – fifty-two years after I went as a child (see my film below). It’s as magical today as it was in 1970. Though the way it’s presented has changed a bit. But all the main features are still very much in evidence. The cavernous kitchens that served jumbo-sized meals to courtiers and the king twice a day. The manicured gardens with the maze that delights children. And the great vine for gardening enthusiasts.
DISCOVER: England’s long lost royal palaces
The palace is closely associated with three of Henry’s wives. The intertwined letters A and H you can see carved at certain points refers to the thousand days in which Henry took Anne Boleyn to be his second queen. After arranging for Anne to be beheaded with a sword on charges of treason, the overbearing monarch married Jane Seymour but she died in childbirth at Hampton Court.
Wife number five was the teenage Catherine Howard who was put under effective house arrest at this palace after being accused of adultery. She would also lose her head. As a child I remember a guide at Hampton Court telling us that her ghost could still be heard imploring the king in high pitched screams to forgive her indiscretions. He didn’t.
A century later, and King Charles the first was imprisoned in his own palace at the end of a civil war that had pitched royalists against parliamentarians. The king managed to escape as he knew his own palace and its various exit points. But was recaptured and executed outside the Banqueting House in London. The Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell – who headed up Britain’s first and only period as a republic of sorts – lived at Hampton Court enjoying its regal splendour.
But as you’ll see in the film below, that splendour wore thin by the end of the 1600s with King William III setting out to demolish the entire palace and rebuild it in the baroque style. He got half way there. So today, you have the remains of a Tudor palace bolted on to a grand Versailles-style edifice. It’s a curious stylistic jumble.
In 1737, King George II gave up on the place preferring Kensington Palace while George III developed what would become Buckingham Palace. It remains a royal palace and part of the new king’s palatial portfolio but it’s managed to be passed on as opposed to Charles III having any power to change it in any way.
