and when she tried to get to him in the chapel she was borne shrieking away by the attendants along what is now known as the Haunted Gallery. There her wraith has since been seen and heard!

The bluff King seems to have been little troubled by his various pasts, nor to have been worried at all by earlier associations, for in the summer of 1543 he was married here at Hampton Court, to the last of his queens, Katherine Parr, in the presence of the daughters of Katherine of Arragon and Anne Boleyn, the Princesses Mary and Elizabeth. Thus the Palace has associations with all of the six queens of King Henry, the one of whom Hampton Court has least memory being Anne of Cleves, the Queen who appears never to have had even the briefest place in the roving affections of the King, and who enjoyed little of the Court splendour beyond the magnificence of her reception at Greenwich. Anne was at Hampton while awaiting the decree of divorce which followed close upon the ceremony of her marriage; and it was the neighbouring Palace of Richmond that became the home of this Queen, who was promptly removed from the position of the King’s wife to that of his “sister”.

Edward the Sixth during his short reign appears to have been but little associated with the place of his birth, though he was here when the Protector Somerset was nearing his fall, and hence were sent out frantic appeals to the people to come armed to the defence of their youthful sovereign. Here King Edward splendidly entertained Mary of Guise, Queen-Dowager of Scotland, on her journey through England. The most notable association of Hampton Court with the boy-king’s reign is, however, that it was then that the aggrieved people of the surrounding afforested area dared to give voice to their feelings and petition against that oppression before which they had had to bow under Henry. The petition was successful, and the district was dechased, the palings and deer being removed.

King Edward’s dour sister-successor Queen Mary and her sombre spouse Philip of Spain were scarcely the people to make the place bright on their occasional visits, and when they were here shortly after their marriage it was said “the hall door within the Court was continually shut, so that no man might enter unless his errand were first known: which seemed strange to Englishmen, that had not been used thereto”. The most gorgeous association of the depressing couple with Hampton Court was the Christmas feast of 1554, when the Great Hall was illuminated “with a thousand lamps curiously disposed”.

When Elizabeth came to the throne the Palace became again the centre of much Court splendour. It is a curious fact that although magnificence and pomp are generally more associated with Roman Catholic than with Protestant Courts, the Tudors were exceptions to the rule. Under Queen Elizabeth, Hampton Court saw again something of the brilliancy and pageantry in which her father had delighted. Here Her Majesty held high revel at Christmas on more than one occasion—“if ye would know what we do here,” wrote one in attendance to a friend, in 1592, “we play at tables, dance—and keep Christmas”. Elizabeth had been brought to Hampton Court shortly after the marriage of her sister with Philip, in the hope that she might be turned to their way of religion, but though she was for a time a sort of semi-prisoner in the Palace it became one of her favoured places of residence after her accession. Here she toyed with the idea of matrimony and entertained wooers or their ambassadors, and here she held high state and gorgeous pageantry of which many records have been kept. Elizabeth appears, indeed, to have had something of her father’s love for the place and to have added to it or embellished it from time to time. On the south side of the Palace, Wren’s reconstruction stops short at beautiful bayed windows doubly decorated with the monogram E. R. and the date 1568.

A foreign Duke visiting Hampton Court during Elizabeth’s reign described it as the most splendid, most magnificent royal palace of any to be found in England or any other kingdom, and the details which he gives seems to bear this out. More especially was he struck by what a later verse writer described as “that most pompous room called Paradise”, a room which, according to the ducal description, “captivates the eyes of all who enter by the dazzling of pearls of all kinds”, and “in particular there is one apartment belonging to the Queen, in which she is accustomed to sit in state, costly beyond everything; the tapestries are garnished with gold, pearls, and precious stones—one table-cover alone is valued at above fifty thousand crowns—not to mention the royal throne, which is studded with very large diamonds, rubies, sapphires and the like that glitter among other precious stones and pearls as the sun among the stars”.

See larger image

ANNE BOLEYN’S GATEWAY, CLOCK COURT

III

If under the Tudors—more especially the pleasure-loving Henry and the display-loving Elizabeth—Hampton Court was the scene of much splendid pageantry, under the Stuart monarchs it was the scene of more varied happenings, even as it was the home of yet more varied rulers. The Stuart regime began, however, quite in the spirit of the Palace traditions, for here, during the first Christmas after James had ascended the English throne, there were grand festivities including the presentation of some of those masques then coming into vogue. Indeed, Daniel’s Vision of the Twelve Goddesses, presented in the Great Hall here by the Queen and her Ladies of Honour on 8 January, 1604, has been described as the first true masque in the literary sense. Many contemporary letters throw light on this Christmas celebration, when, if one letter writer is to be believed, as many as thirty masques and interludes were presented, when all the Court, the foreign ambassadors and their attendants thronged to Hampton Court. The twelve hundred rooms of the Palace did not suffice, many people had to put up in the outbuildings, while tents were erected in the park for a number of the servants—the fact that three or four people died daily in these tents from the plague (then ravaging London) does not appear to have been allowed to interfere with the festivities. There was tilting and running at the ring in the park and other diversions, but the masquings seem to have formed the most important part of the celebration, and of these, of course, the chief was that “Vision” in which the Queen took part in the Great Hall. King James sat in state on the dais by the great oriel window, spectators were presumably ranged in tiers along either side of the hall, and from a “heaven” above the Minstrels’ Gallery the goddesses descended to their dancing on the floor of the hall. The “scenes” at either end of the hall were designed by no less notable a craftsman than Inigo Jones.[1]

That same month of January, 1604, which saw here such magnificent masquings saw also in Hampton Court a gathering of a very different kind—a gathering which, although it proved abortive so far as its particular purpose was concerned, yet had one remarkable consequence. Says Carlyle in his survey