biographer, who was gentleman-usher to the Cardinal, and thus well situated for giving an authoritative record of things, was also an admirable narrator, and from his description we may get a good idea of Tudor prodigality and splendour. Not only were there the fourscore French nobles, but there were also their trains and the many home visitors who must have been invited to accompany them; so that two hundred and eighty beds had to be arranged. We are told how the best cooks were brought together, and wrought day and night in the preparing of “divers subtleties and many crafty devices”, how the purveyors “brought and sent in such plenty of costly provisions as ye would wonder at the same”, and further:

Cavendish goes on to tell of the sumptuousness and wonder of the entertainment which the Cardinal gave to his guests before speeding them on their way to Windsor on the following day. Of the furnishing of the chambers for the “fourteen score beds” prepared for the guests, he gives details which suggest an extraordinary display of gold and silver; but the whole account should be read in the biography of Wolsey, where it gives us a peculiarly full and detailed description of the splendour of banqueting in Tudor days. And it must be added, that though “the Frenchmen, as it seemed, were rapt into paradise”, yet this feast at Hampton Court was but as “silver is compared to gold” when contrasted with that which the King gave at Greenwich a little later to speed his parting guests on their homeward journey. In the full account which Cavendish gives of the feasting at Hampton Court and in his description of the furnishings of York House, Westminster, when Wolsey left it on his last unhappy journey, we have glimpses of the richness and magnificence to which the great men of the sixteenth century had attained in the heyday of Henry the Eighth. King Henry was at Hampton Court, engaged in practising archery in the park when George Cavendish arrived with the news of Wolsey’s death, and the bluff King paid his old and too loyal servant the tribute of saying that he would rather have given £20,000 than he had died. The King did not, however, let any sentiment about the builder of Hampton Court trouble him long or interfere with his plans.

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A CORNER OF WOLSEY’S KITCHEN

When the monarch came into full possession of Hampton Court he soon converted the lease into freehold by arrangements with the Knights Hospitaller, and at once set about having it made yet more magnificent than before. Among his improvements was the erection of the Great Hall—one of the finest buildings of the kind belonging to the Tudor period that remain to us; he rebuilt, or at any rate considerably altered, the Chapel, and made many other changes in the Palace. His additions and alterations may sometimes be recognized by the working of his monogram and those of his wives into the decoration, as in the roof of Anne Boleyn’s Gateway, where that unhappy lady’s initial is to be seen. For though this roof is a modern restoration, it is a restoration believed to be in accordance with the original design. Such evidence is not therefore always conclusive, for sometimes the monograms are not contemporary records—as in the windows of the Great Hall where the stained glass, full of such personal allusions, is all modern, having been put in between sixty and seventy years ago. Those responsible for the replacing, after a long interval, of the glass that had been destroyed when all concerning royalty was out of favour, worked in monograms and devices in a way that misleads many visitors, some of whom seeing “H” and “J” in the glass, too rashly assume that it dates from the time when Jane Seymour was the much married monarch’s queen.

When Anne Boleyn’s ambition was gratified and she was made Henry’s second queen—vice Katherine of Arragon, divorced—Hampton Court became for a time a scene of royal revelling. It was not so for long, however, for already the King’s passion was cooling. It was at Hampton Court that King Henry’s hopes of a son and heir were disappointed for the third time, when, early in 1536, Anne there gave birth to a still-born child. In the following May the unhappy Queen’s brief triumph was brought to a tragic close by the sword of the executioner on Tower Hill, and on the very next day King Henry was formally betrothed to Jane Seymour. In October of the following year Queen Jane gave birth in this Palace, presumably in that part of the buildings demolished more than a century and a half later, to a son who afterwards became King Edward the Sixth. The arrival of a male heir was no doubt a matter of great gratification to King Henry, and served to lessen any sorrow that his easily salved affections might otherwise have felt from the fact that the Queen only survived the child’s birth but a brief while. When he was but three days old the infant prince was christened here in great state. The Princess Mary held her tiny brother, twenty years her junior, during the ceremony at the solid silver font, while the child Princess Elizabeth, herself carried, bore the chrysm. Nine days after the christening of her son Queen Jane died.

The birth of Prince Edward in the Palace seems to have increased King Henry’s liking for his Thames-side pleasaunce, and in 1540 he caused the Honour of Hampton Court to be created by Act of Parliament—the Honour including a number of manors on both sides of the Thames. But the King further showed his liking for the place—and his scant regard for his subjects—by making it the centre of a Chase, having a large extent of the land on either side of the river afforested and enclosed with palings so that, though growing corpulent and unwieldy, he might yet be able to indulge in his favourite pastime of hunting.

At the end of July, 1540, King Henry quietly married Katherine Howard, and in August she was openly shown at Hampton Court as his fifth queen. Little more than a year later and the Palace saw the beginning of the slow drama which ended with her execution on Tower Hill in February, 1543; for it was while Henry was at Mass in the chapel here that Cranmer put into his hands the beginning of the evidence which was to prove a fatal net for the entangling of Queen Katherine. The story runs that the Queen sought to have a personal explanation with King Henry, but he would not see her after once the charges were made,