The secret historical past of Hampton Court: Host to essentially the most dramatic occasions

Growing up at Hampton Court, younger Prince George was totally depressing. When his father died, he had change into the cost of his grandfather, George II – a person of reasonable intelligence, minimal attraction, and most mood.

One day, flying right into a violent rage for causes unrecorded, he beat his teenage grandson so brutally the teen swore he would by no means dwell on the sprawling red-brick palace.

In 1761, a 12 months after turning into King George III, he purchased Buckingham House, in central London, and set to work turning it into the palace that endures to today.

From then on, Hampton Court, simply 12 miles from central London, ceased for use by the Royal Family as a house. Instead, its splendid gardens have been opened to the general public and its empty rooms subdivided into flats which George III gave to retired servants and royal cousins fleeing revolutions on the Continent.

Fortunately for future generations, he ensured conservators preserved the palace’s architectural treasures. But this represented the primary quiet section in Hampton Court’s historical past for years.

Situated on a bend within the River Thames, it had all the time been a fascinating place and, because of its rich, titled residents, the stage for hundreds of years of drama.

Excavations have proved there was a villa on the positioning way back to Roman occasions and, within the Middle Ages, the property belonged to Lady Godiva’s son, Aelfgar.

It then grew to become the property of a gaggle of warrior monks who made a tidy sum renting the small manor they constructed there to rich Londoners wanting summer time breaks from the capital when the plague was at its top.

The final particular person to lease Hampton Court from the warrior monks was Henry VIII’s chief minister, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, who used his fortune to show the manor right into a palace grand sufficient to host the Hapsburg emperor when he visited England.

Despite his vow of celibacy as a Catholic priest, Wolsey additionally introduced his two illegitimate youngsters, Dorothy and Thomas, to go to him at Hampton Court. Their mom was his confessor’s sister, which will need to have made journeys to church awkward. However, it was the King’s messy personal life, not Wolsey’s, that introduced Hampton Court into the royals’ possession.

Henry VIII’s makes an attempt to divorce his first spouse, the Spanish princess Katherine of Aragon, changed into a six-year-long diplomatic fiasco that destroyed many careers, together with Cardinal Wolsey’s, who died in shame after the King blamed him for failing to influence the Pope to grant the divorce.

Encouraged by the brand new Protestant faith, Henry VIII broke with the Roman Catholic Church in 1533, the identical 12 months his new spouse, Anne Boleyn, was topped queen. Property belonging to the Catholic Church was seized, together with Hampton Court, which was taken from its monastic house owners and have become a royal palace.

Interested within the arts and structure, Anne had grand plans for Hampton Court, which included almost doubling it in measurement and constructing a brand new wing for the queen’s flats. But in 1536, Anne was accused of a number of acts of adultery and beheaded.

Her enemies claimed she had performed an affair with the Anglo-Welsh landowner William Brereton whereas they have been each at Hampton Court in 1533. Both Anne and her co-accused protested their innocence to no avail. The majority believed them on the time – even a lot of her enemies.

Five years later, irony or karma got here knocking at Hampton Court when Henry’s fifth spouse, the 18-year-old Queen Catherine Howard was arrested at Hampton Court.

Servants’ rooms have been searched and, in a single, a handwritten love letter was discovered from the Queen to her husband’s attendant, Thomas Culpepper.

Both Thomas and the Queen have been later executed and one of many corridors at Hampton Court is now referred to as “the Haunted Gallery”, because it’s mentioned Catherine’s ghost can nonetheless be heard screaming there, begging her husband for mercy.

With its lavish rooms and gardens, Hampton Court remained a favorite royal dwelling for the remainder of the sixteenth century. Henry VIII’s daughter, Queen Mary I, spent her honeymoon there and her sister, Elizabeth I, celebrated surviving smallpox at Hampton Court in 1562.

When Elizabeth I died with out youngsters in 1603, her crowns handed to her Scottish godson, King James VI, who grew to become King James I in England, Wales, and Ireland.

He selected Hampton Court to host his household’s first Christmas in England and, protected to say, occasions have been moderately raucous. During 12 days of just about continuous events on the palace, William Shakespeare premiered a few of his performs. The tipsy Spanish ambassador tried to punch the French ambassador within the face after they ran into one another throughout a dance within the Great Hall.

Several aristocrats grew to become so spectacularly drunk that they fell over, taking a few buffet tables with them.

And King James’s alleged lover – the good-looking however stunningly dim Lord Philip Herbert (by his personal admission, he knew of nothing besides canine, horses and revelry) – almost collapsed mid-dance, weighed down by all of the jewels sewn into his costume.

Per week later, whereas all people else trembled and groaned by way of hangovers of epic proportions, James I bought again to work by internet hosting a church convention on the palace at which he commissioned his well-known English translation of the Bible.

It later grew to become one of the beloved books within the English-speaking world. James I’s grandson Charles II spent his honeymoon at Hampton Court in 1662, however his light Portuguese spouse, Princess Catherine of Braganza, was horrified to find he had invited his mistress Barbara Palmer to affix them.

The Queen was so upset by her husband’s infidelity that she suffered a nosebleed, however Charles wouldn’t again down and gave Barbara her personal wing to dwell in on the palace.

There, Barbara raised their six illegitimate youngsters and feuded with Charles’s different mistresses – together with the cross-dressing Italian socialite Hortense Mancini, who ended her personal relationship with the King when she slept together with his recently-married daughter – and Cockney actress Nell Gwyn, who despatched sweets to a rival mistress as a peace providing however failed to say she had dosed them with a really robust laxative.

Barbara bought her personal again on Charles II by having a number of affairs of her personal: with a circus acrobat, a London theatre actor, a duel-fighting baron and a future normal.

After George III ended royal residency at Hampton Court, his granddaughter Queen Victoria and her husband Prince Albert put the palace to good use by allocating flats there to widows left destitute by their husbands.

Other rooms later went to distinguished public figures resembling Lady Baden-Powell, widow of the Scouts’ founder, and the sensible mathematician Michael Faraday, who had suffered a nervous breakdown.

A century later, Elizabeth II’s coronation ball was held within the palace.

The final Tsar of Russia’s sister, Grand Duchess Xenia, additionally lived there, shielded from potential kidnapping by the Communist KGB.

In 1920, King George V insisted that an oak from the palace grounds be used to make the coffin of the Unknown Warrior, to commemorate all those that had died within the First World War who had no recognized graves.

The King’s determination was particularly shifting to Hampton Court employees member Thomas Abnett, a lamp-lighter who had misplaced two of his sons on the Western Front. The Hampton Court oak coffin now lies on the coronary heart of Westminster Abbey, the place the Unknown Warrior was buried, with the King as chief mourner, on Remembrance Day 1920.

With its cocktail of surprising, scandalous and infrequently shifting occasions, Hampton Court has stood on the coronary heart of British historical past for the final 500 years.

George III might have been depressing there, however modern-day guests will love strolling by way of its beautiful gardens, creeping alongside its haunted corridors, and even shedding themselves in its well-known hedge maze.

• The Palace: From the Tudors to the Windsors, 500 Years of History at Hampton Court by Gareth Russell (HarperCollins, £25) is out now. For free UK P&P, go to expressbookshop.com or name 020 3176 3832