Hampton Court Palace

Hampton Court Palace stands on the River Thames in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, upstream of the centre of London. It is a royal palace held by Charles III in right of the Crown. The building and its grounds are cared for by an independent charity and are open to the public. What a visitor sees is two palaces joined together.

The western ranges are Tudor brick. The eastern ranges are baroque, in pink brick with pale stone dressings. That split was not a single design. It is what remained when a late seventeenth-century rebuilding stopped before the older palace had been entirely replaced.

George II of Great Britain was the last monarch to live in the palace.

The ground under the courts is older than either of those buildings. The place appears in the survey of 1086 as an agricultural holding, a centre for a large flock of sheep and for pasture and woodland. The exact date of the first house is not fixed. One account gives the Knights Hospitaller of the Order of Saint John a holding here from 1236, when a grange was built.

Another places the first known house of that order sometime before 1338. In the middle of the fifteenth century the property was leased to John Wode. In 1494 the lease passed to Sir Giles Daubeney, a soldier, courtier, and diplomat who had backed Henry VII and served him as Lord Chamberlain. Daubeney turned the old farm buildings into a moated manor.

The central court stood where Clock Court stands now. Henry VII and Elizabeth of York visited more than once. Different coloured bricks set in the cobbles of Clock Court mark walls that were likely raised between 1495 and 1500. No plan or picture of Daubeney’s house survives, and the written descriptions are slight.

What is known of the plan comes from excavation.

Archaeologists working in the 1960s and 1970s opened the southern half of that courtyard. Some trenches were more than two metres deep. They found that the range on this side was the main way into the manor, built over the revetment of an earlier medieval moat. The range was asymmetrical.

Its gatehouse sat off centre and projected both into the moat and into the inner court. The dig recorded two large chimney stacks and three five-sided garderobe turrets. Waste from those closets dropped straight into the moat. One turret still shows above ground, built into a wall that Thomas Wolsey raised in the 1520s.

The excavators could not say exactly how the range was used. It may have held high-status rooms, perhaps even private rooms for Daubeney or for his royal guests. Daubeney also built the Great Kitchens, much altered since, which one account places in the late fifteenth century beside the hall. He died in 1508.

His son Henry Daubeney was fourteen and did not inherit until 1514. A month later the boy gave up the lease, and the order leased Hampton Court to Thomas Wolsey.

Thomas Wolsey was born in Ipswich around March 1473, the son of Robert Wolsey and Joan Daundy. A later tradition called his father a butcher. His father in fact owned several businesses, and his mother was connected to the Wingfield and Daundy families. An uncle, Edmund Daundy, helped his education.

Wolsey went to Ipswich School and Magdalen College School, then studied theology at Magdalen College, Oxford. He was ordained priest at Marlborough on 10 March 1498, stayed in Oxford as master of the college school and then dean of divinity, and from 1500 to 1509 was rector of Limington in Somerset. He served Henry Deane, archbishop of Canterbury, then Sir Richard Nanfan, and after Nanfan’s death in 1507 he entered the service of Henry VII. The old king preferred able men who were not great nobles.

He made Wolsey a royal chaplain. Richard Foxe used him as a secretary and valued his industry. In April 1508 Wolsey was sent to James IV of Scotland to discuss rumours that the Auld Alliance might be renewed.

When Henry VIII became king in April 1509 he made Wolsey his almoner, which gave Wolsey a seat on the Privy Council. The young king had less taste than his father for the daily work of government, and Wolsey filled that space. By 1514 Wolsey was the controlling figure in nearly every matter of state. He was Archbishop of York, the second office in the English church, and papal legate.

In 1515 Pope Leo X made him a cardinal, which set him above the other clergy in England. As Lord Chancellor he was the king’s chief adviser, often described as another king. It was in that ascent, in 1514, that he took Hampton Court. He meant to turn a country manor into a house where he could receive Henry VIII, the English court, and princes from abroad.

Over about seven years he spent a sum given as 200,000 crowns. Little of his fabric is unchanged, but the bones of his plan remain. The first courtyard, Base Court, was his, with lodgings for guests. One account counts forty-four of those lodgings.

Another counts thirty suites around Base Court for the grandest visitors. The inner gatehouse led to Clock Court, where his own rooms lay, and his badge can still be seen over the arch of the clock tower. The best rooms, the state apartments, were kept for the king and his family. Henry VIII stayed in them as Wolsey’s guest once they were finished in 1525.

Wolsey filled the old moat and pulled down the western range of Daubeney’s manor to make room for Base Court. The part of the older house now marked in the floor of Clock Court was taken into the new work. That survival was brief. Henry VIII took the palace in 1529 and had Daubeney’s old range demolished in 1536.

The house Wolsey wanted was a Renaissance cardinal’s palace: a regular plan, grand rooms on a raised principal floor, and classical detail on English brick. It has been suggested that he knew Paolo Cortese’s De Cardinalatu, a manual for cardinals published in 1510 that included advice on palaces. The result belongs to a short period when English building moved from perpendicular Gothic toward Italian classical ornament without dropping the older manner. A small group of Italian craftsmen at the English court did that work by adding Renaissance carving to otherwise straightforward Tudor buildings.

One of them, Giovanni da Maiano, made a set of eight relief busts of Roman emperors and set them in the brick. The architectural judgement passed on the whole is that it shows Wolsey himself: an English churchman of ordinary birth who nevertheless made his sovereign a decisive figure in Europe, and who built and furnished Hampton Court so that foreign embassies would see that the king’s minister knew how to live as graciously as any cardinal in Rome.

In January 1527 Henry VIII and his courtiers came to Hampton Court in masque dress, disguised as shepherds, to gamble at mumchance and to dance. The same year the palace was ready for an embassy from France, part of talks toward a peace that Henry wanted while he sought to end his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Wolsey could not persuade the pope to annul that marriage. In 1529, knowing that his enemies and the king were arranging his fall, he gave the palace to Henry.

He was stripped of his offices of state and went north to York, the archbishopric he had long held and long neglected. He was summoned back to London to face a charge of treason, a charge the king used against ministers who had lost favour, and he died of natural causes on the journey, on 29 November 1530.

Henry VIII had been born on 28 June 1491 at Greenwich, the second son of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York. His elder brother Arthur, Prince of Wales, died in 1502, and Henry became heir. He was king from 22 April 1509 until his death on 28 January 1547. A papal dispensation let him marry Arthur’s widow, Catherine of Aragon.

He came to want that marriage ended so that he could marry again and pursue a son. Pope Clement VII refused an annulment. In 1533 Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury, declared the marriage void in the new Church of England. Clement excommunicated Henry.

The Acts of Supremacy made Henry supreme head of the Church of England. Monasteries were dissolved and their wealth taken. Two of his wives, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, were beheaded. By the end of his life he was immobile and dangerously heavy, with a leg wound from a joust in 1536 that would not heal.

He was buried at Windsor, and his only surviving son, Edward VI, succeeded him.

Within six months of taking Hampton Court, Henry began his own building. His court numbered, in one account, more than a thousand people, and he owned more than sixty houses, few of them large enough for the whole court. Another account says that as many as eight hundred courtiers might come with him, all of whom had to be fed, and that the kitchens came to serve sixteen hundred meals a day. The kitchens Daubeney had begun were quadrupled in 1529 so the king could give free food and drink to the entire court.

The new work kept Wolsey’s manner: Tudor Gothic with restrained Renaissance ornament. That mixture lasted until Inigo Jones brought a stronger classical architecture to the London palaces of the early Stuart kings.

Between 1532 and 1535 Henry added the Great Hall, the last great hall of medieval type built for the English monarchy, and the royal tennis court. The hall has a carved hammerbeam roof. In the Tudor palace it was the most important room. The king dined in state at a table on a raised dais.

The hall took five years, and the king was so impatient that the masons worked through the night by candlelight. By the 1530s the palace worked as a house, a lodging for a huge household, a place of shows, and a leisure court, used to display power through banquets, ceremony, and costly art. Around the king’s and the queen’s rooms were lodgings for courtiers, graded by rank.

In 1540 the inner gatehouse received the Hampton Court astronomical clock, an early clock of the kind made before Copernicus changed the model of the heavens. It still runs. It shows the hour, the phase of the moon, the month, the quarter of the year, the date, the place of the sun in the zodiac, and the time of high water at London Bridge. That last reading mattered because visitors from London came by barge, and at low water the bridge threw up dangerous rapids.

The gate is known as Anne Boleyn’s gate. Work on her rooms over the gate was still going on when she was beheaded. She never lived in the new queen’s lodgings that had been planned for her.

Anne Boleyn was queen of England from 1533 to 1536, the second wife of Henry VIII. Her birth is placed either around 1501 or around 1507. She was the daughter of Thomas Boleyn, later Earl of Wiltshire, and Elizabeth Howard. She was educated in the Netherlands and in France and returned to England early in 1522.

A planned marriage to her cousin James Butler, Earl of Ormond, was dropped, and she became a maid of honour to Catherine of Aragon. Early in 1523 she was secretly betrothed to Henry Percy, heir of the Earl of Northumberland. His father would not support the match, and in January 1524 Thomas Wolsey refused it. In February or March 1526 Henry began to pursue Anne.

She would not become his mistress, as her sister Mary had been. Henry turned to ending his marriage to Catherine so that he could marry Anne. A secret wedding is dated to 14 November 1532, and a formal marriage to 25 January 1533. On 23 May 1533 Cranmer declared the marriage to Catherine null.

Five days later he declared the marriage to Anne valid. She was crowned on 1 June 1533. On 7 September she gave birth to the future Elizabeth I. Henry was disappointed that the child was a girl.

Anne later had three miscarriages. By March 1536 he was courting Jane Seymour. In April 1536 Anne was investigated for treason. She was arrested on 2 May and taken to the Tower.

The jury included Henry Percy, her former betrothed, and her uncle Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk. She was convicted on 15 May and beheaded on 19 May. The charges included adultery, incest with her brother George, and a plot to kill the king. Most historians reject those charges.

Her fall, and the break with Rome that the marriage had forced, made her a central figure of the English Reformation. When her daughter became queen in 1558, Anne was honoured by some writers as a martyr of that change.

The palace then became a place of births, deaths, and repudiations. In 1537 Jane Seymour gave birth there to the boy who became Edward VI, and she died at the palace two weeks later. The boy was baptised in the chapel. A later tradition says a pale figure of Jane appears on the anniversary of her death.

After her death, Henry’s great building campaign soon ended. It was at Hampton Court that he divorced Anne of Cleves after a very short marriage. It was here, too, that the infidelity of Catherine Howard was brought to him. One account says he was told while he was at Mass in the chapel.

Another says the Archbishop of Canterbury reported it to him in his chamber. She was kept in her room for a few days, then sent to Syon House and on to the Tower, and later executed. A legend says she slipped her guards and ran through the gallery now called haunted, to beg Henry for her life, and was caught again. In 1543 Henry married Katherine Parr at the palace.

Edward VI was nine when he became king in 1547, under the direction of his uncle, the Duke of Somerset, as Lord Protector. Mary I, Henry’s elder daughter, accepted the offer of marriage from Philip II of Spain at Hampton Court. After their wedding at Winchester she came here for the honeymoon. She chose the palace for the birth of a child she believed she was carrying, the first of two pregnancies in which no child was born.

She had thought of Windsor as safer, because she still feared rebellion, but Hampton Court was larger and could hold the whole court and more. She waited more than five months and left only because the palace had become unfit after so long an occupation. The court moved to the smaller house at Oatlands. During that waiting, her half-sister Elizabeth was kept at Hampton Court under suspicion of a part in a rebellion.

Mary died in 1558. Elizabeth I, who reigned from 1558 to 1603, had little affection for the palace. She did add the eastern, or privy, kitchen, which is now the public tea room. On 22 September 1562 a treaty associated with the palace, also called the Treaty of Richmond, was made between Elizabeth and the Huguenot leader Louis I, Prince of Condé.

Elizabeth’s death in 1603 brought her cousin James VI of Scotland to the English throne as James I, the union of the crowns. In January 1604 two shows were staged in the Great Hall for the Stuart court: The Masque of Indian and China Knights, and The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses. On 6 January, Scottish courtiers danced a sword dance for Anne of Denmark, likened at the time to a Spanish matachin. One account of the palace says that in 1603 the King’s Men first performed Hamlet and Macbeth here for James.

Later in 1604 James met representatives of the English Puritans at the Hampton Court Conference. No agreement was reached, but the meeting led him to commission the English Bible that was published in 1611.

James was succeeded in 1625 by his son Charles I. Hampton Court was both a palace and a prison for him. It was the setting of his honeymoon with Henrietta Maria, then fifteen. He kept a great part of his picture collection here, including the Triumphs of Caesar by Andrea Mantegna.

After his defeat in the civil war he was held in the palace in 1647. He escaped through the Privy Garden, was recaptured, and was executed in 1649. The palace then passed to the Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell. One account says the contents were auctioned and the building itself was left alone, and that it escaped more lightly than some other royal houses.

Another says Cromwell saved it from destruction by living in it, and that, for all his Puritan severity, he valued the tapestries and the life of a great house.

After the Restoration, Charles II and his successor James II came to Hampton Court but preferred to live elsewhere. By the standard of the French court the palace looked out of date. Charles II had the Long Water dug in 1662, the canal that forms the middle line of the eastward view, in preparation for his bride Catherine of Braganza. The couple spent their honeymoon at the palace, and boats made in the shape of swans were rowed up the canal.

His mistress Barbara Villiers, Countess of Castlemaine, and their children were also housed here. She turned what had been Henry VIII’s orchard into the planted ground called the Wilderness. From a semicircular parterre on the east front, three avenues run out in a goose-foot. That plan was radical in England and is the recognisable mark of the French formal garden.

It was laid out by pupils of André Le Nôtre, the gardener of Louis XIV, not by Le Nôtre himself.

André Le Nôtre was born in Paris on 12 March 1613 into a family of gardeners and died on 15 September 1700. His father, Jean, had charge of parts of the Tuileries. André learned mathematics, painting, and architecture, worked with the painter Charles Le Brun, and studied under the architect François Mansart. In 1635 he was principal gardener to Gaston, Duke of Orléans.

On 26 June 1637 he became head gardener at the Tuileries. He was later given all the royal gardens of France, and in 1657 he was Controller-General of the Royal Buildings. He rarely wrote down his method. In 1675 Louis XIV ennobled him.

His first great design was the park at Vaux-le-Vicomte for Nicolas Fouquet, with Louis Le Vau and Le Brun: parterres, pools, and gravel walks set on a single axis. He then made the gardens of Versailles, the model that every later sovereign had in mind. His other gardens included Fontainebleau, Chantilly, Saint-Cloud, and Saint-Germain, and at the Tuileries he lengthened the westward view that became the Champs-Élysées. Hampton Court’s canal and avenues are the local consequence of that fame.

The pupils brought the manner. The master did not lay out this ground.

In 1689, soon after Louis XIV’s court had settled at Versailles, England had joint sovereigns, William III of England and Mary II. William had been born in The Hague on 4 November 1650, eight days after his father died of smallpox, so he was Prince of Orange from birth. His mother was Mary, daughter of Charles I. In 1677 he married his cousin Mary, elder daughter of James, Duke of York, later James II.

When Louis XIV attacked the Dutch Republic in 1672, William became Louis’s most determined opponent and rebuilt the Dutch army after that disastrous year. In November 1688 he landed at Brixham with a Dutch force, James fled, and William and Mary were offered the crown together. That settlement is the Glorious Revolution, followed by the Bill of Rights. In the early years of the reign William was often abroad in the Nine Years’ War, and Mary governed.

She died in 1694. In 1696 a Jacobite plot to kill him and restore James failed. He had no children. The Act of Settlement 1701 placed the Protestant house of Hanover in the succession after Mary’s sister Anne.

William died on 8 March 1702 and was succeeded in his kingdoms by Anne.

Within months of their accession, William and Mary began a rebuilding at Hampton Court meant to stand beside Versailles. The first intention was to demolish the Tudor palace piece by piece and replace it with a vast baroque palace, keeping Henry VIII’s Great Hall. Christopher Wren drew the plans. William Talman was master of the works.

Wren’s scheme for a domed palace has been compared with the work of Jules Hardouin-Mansart and Louis Le Vau at Versailles. One reading is that the likeness was too slight to satisfy a king who could only imagine a palace in Versailles’s long, repeating form. What was built is still clearly of that family. The east and south fronts run in a steady rhythm under a flat skyline, the pink brick broken by pale Portland stone at the corners, the frames, and the bands, with round windows on a mezzanine.

Fountain Court repeats the rhythm faster, and there the windows have pointed pediments. Half of the Tudor palace was replaced. Henry’s state rooms and private apartments were lost. Another account says Wren set aside a plan to demolish everything and built Fountain Court while leaving much of the Tudor palace standing.

The two descriptions meet in the building that exists: a new baroque court and new apartments on the east, and the older courts still on the west.

The new wings held a set of state rooms and private rooms for the king and a set of equal rank for the queen, because William and Mary were joint sovereigns. Each set was reached by a state stair. The king’s rooms face south over the Privy Garden. The queen’s face east over the Fountain Garden.

A gallery along the east front joins them, a quieter version of the gallery that joins the king’s and queen’s rooms at Versailles. Antonio Verrio painted the king’s stair, and Jean Tijou made its ironwork. Grinling Gibbons, James Thornhill, and Jacques Rousseau were among the artists, and Daniel Marot designed furnishings. The Great Fountain Garden is Marot’s as well.

After Mary died, William lost interest and the work stopped. One account dates the end of his building to 1703. In 1702 he was thrown from his horse in the park at Hampton Court and later died of the injury at Kensington.

Queen Anne carried on the finishing of the state rooms. In 1710 she had Wren remodel the chapel. The east end had once held a great double window of stained glass showing Henry VIII, Catherine of Aragon, and Thomas Wolsey. That glass was destroyed in the Commonwealth and the opening was bricked up.

Wren set a large timber reredos over the brickwork, added boxed pews, an organ, and a stair down from the royal pew. The oak reredos is plain and heavy, with garlands by Grinling Gibbons. The Tudor timber and plaster ceiling survived the later redecoration and has been called the most important and magnificent ceiling of its kind in Britain. Opposite the altar, at first-floor level, is the royal pew, where the family sat apart from the congregation below.

The priests, musicians, and officers who serve the monarch here are called the Chapel Royal, a name for that household rather than for the room alone.

On Anne’s death in 1714 the Stuart line on the throne ended. George I and his son, George II of Great Britain, were the last monarchs to reside at Hampton Court. George II was born in Hanover on 30 October 1683, or 9 November in the new calendar, and died on 25 October 1760. He was the most recent British monarch born outside Great Britain.

His father was George Louis, later George I, and his mother was Sophia Dorothea of Celle. Their marriage was dissolved in 1694, and Sophia Dorothea was shut up at Ahlden and kept from her children. George spoke French until he was four, then learned German, English, and Italian, and studied military history with particular care. The Act of Settlement and the union of 1707 put his grandmother Sophia and her Protestant descendants in line to the British throne.

He was naturalised as an English subject in 1705. In 1705 he married Caroline of Ansbach, and they had eight children. He became king on 11 June 1727. Parliament controlled most domestic government.

As elector he spent twelve summers in Hanover, where his own power was more direct. He led an army at the Battle of Dettingen in the War of the Austrian Succession and was the most recent British monarch to command in battle. In 1745 the Jacobite rising led by Charles Edward Stuart failed to unseat him. His eldest son, Frederick, died in 1751, and George was succeeded by Frederick’s son, George III.

Under George I, six rooms at Hampton Court were finished in 1717 to designs by John Vanbrugh. He also had a suite made for his son George, Prince of Wales, and for Princess Caroline, and a new kitchen, now called the Georgian House. When the king went back to Hanover for the summer he left the prince and princess to represent him, reluctantly. They entertained so splendidly that their court outshone his.

In 1718, trying to answer that rivalry, he had the Tudor tennis court refitted as an assembly room and the Great Hall turned into a theatre. Under George II and Caroline the palace had its last years as a working royal house. William Kent designed new furnishings, including the Queen’s Staircase in 1733 and the Cumberland Suite in 1737. In 1734 Caroline asked Kent to paint the plain walls of the Queen’s Stair in a Roman manner, with a figure of her as Britannia.

The queen’s private apartments can be visited today. By 1737 George II no longer wished to use Hampton Court as a royal palace.

George III, from the day he became king, never entered it. He connected the state rooms with a humiliation in which his grandfather, George II of Great Britain, had struck him after a harmless remark. He did have the Great Vine planted in the grounds. One account dates that planting to 1763 and another to 1769.

The vine grows in a conservatory near the river. By 1968 its trunk was given as 81 inches thick and its length as 100 feet, and it still bears a crop of grapes. One account says that in 1773 George III had the top two storeys of the Great Gatehouse taken down. Another places that reduction, and the loss of the lead cupolas on the four towers, in the heavy restoration around the time the palace was opened to visitors.

From the 1760s the palace was used for grace-and-favour lodging. Rooms were turned into apartments given without rent. The Lord Chamberlain assigned empty ones to people whose service to the Crown was being rewarded. The apartments were grand and often uncomfortable.

Residents complained of severe cold and damp, and some had no hot water. Grants continued as late as the 1960s, though new admissions declined from that decade and the last new resident was admitted in the 1980s. People already living there could stay. Three remained in 2005, and none by 2017.

Among them, Michael Faraday, the scientist who pioneered the study of electricity, lived in the palace from 1862 until his death in 1867. From his exile in 1795 until his return to Europe in 1802, William V had the Cumberland Suite, the Queen’s Guard Chamber, and the Queen’s Presence Chamber. In 1896 Princess Sophia Duleep Singh was given Faraday’s old rooms, by then called Faraday House, and she lived there until her death in 1948. Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna of Russia lived in Wilderness House, in the gardens, from 1937 to 1960.

The Great Hall was restored in 1796. In 1838, under Queen Victoria, the restoration was finished and she ordered the gates thrown open to all her subjects. Visitors came for the buildings, the maze, and the gardens. By 1881 more than ten million visits had been counted.

They came by boat from London and, from February 1849, by the railway to Hampton Court. For a time the palace was one of the few attractions open on a Sunday, the day when working people could come. The grace-and-favour residents, who had had the gardens to themselves, complained that the gardens became unbearable, that people arrived drunk, and that Sunday in the grounds was beyond description. The numbers still rose.

In 1911 bedding displays marked the coronation of George V. In the 1920s a car park was laid on the west front, tea was served at the Tiltyard café, and visitors could putt or play tennis.

On 2 September 1952 the palace was given statutory protection as a Grade I listed building. Other structures in the grounds are listed in their own right, among them the early sixteenth-century tower of the tilt yard, the only one left of five, the Lion Gate that Wren built for Anne and George I, and the Tudor and seventeenth-century perimeter walls. The formal gardens and the park are also listed at the highest grade on the register of historic parks and gardens. In 1986 a fire spread through the king’s apartments.

Lady Daphne Gale, widow of General Sir Richard Gale, who lived in a grace-and-favour apartment, died in it. She was in the habit of taking a lighted candle to her bedroom, and that candle is thought to have started the fire. The restoration that followed was finished in 1990. In 1987 the Royal School of Needlework moved into the palace from Princes Gate in Kensington.

The charity that cares for the palace has its headquarters in the building.

The rooms hold works from the Royal Collection, mostly of the two main building periods, the early Tudor and the late Stuart to early Georgian. In September 2015 the collection recorded 542 works with images at Hampton Court, chiefly paintings and furniture, with ceramics and sculpture as well. The single most important is the Triumphs of Caesar by Andrea Mantegna, hung in the Lower Orangery. Andrea Mantegna was born about 1431 at Isola di Carturo, near Padua, the second son of a carpenter, Biagio, and he died on 13 September 1506.

At eleven he was apprenticed to Francesco Squarcione, a former tailor who collected antique sculpture and made his pupils study it. Padua then drew in Florentine artists, among them Paolo Uccello, Filippo Lippi, and Donatello. Mantegna left Squarcione’s shop at seventeen, saying the master had profited from his work without fair pay. He lowered horizons to make figures more monumental, and his landscapes and bodies have a hard, sculptural look.

His workshop was the leading maker of prints in Venice before 1500. Charles I housed the Triumphs here. The palace once also held the Raphael cartoons, which are now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Their old room, the Cartoon Gallery on the south side of Fountain Court, was designed by Wren.

Copies painted in the 1690s by Henry Cooke hang there instead. Mary II collected blue and white porcelain, both Chinese pieces and Delftware, and a large group of it is shown. Furniture of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries includes tables by Jean Pelletier, walnut chairs with India backs by Thomas Roberts, and clocks and a barometer by Thomas Tompion. Several state beds remain where they were placed.

The throne canopy still stands in the King’s Privy Chamber, which also has a crystal chandelier of about 1700, possibly the first of its kind in the country. The King’s Guard Chamber is hung with muskets, pistols, swords, daggers, powder horns, and pieces of armour in patterns. Bills of 1699 pay John Harris for an arrangement believed to be the one still there. The palace holds most of the Royal Ceremonial Dress Collection, more than ten thousand items of clothing, drawings, letters, prints, photographs, diaries, and scrapbooks.

A smaller part of that collection is shown at Kensington Palace. The dress collection has a national designated status.

The gardens a visitor walks now were laid out at a grand scale in the late seventeenth century. Nothing authentic survives of Henry VIII’s gardens except the hint of a small knot garden planted in 1924. On the south, the Privy Garden is closed by semicircular iron gates by Jean Tijou. It was William’s private garden and was replanted in 1992 in a period manner, with clipped hollies and yews and a geometric net of paths.

A small banqueting house of about 1700 stands on a rise above the river, for informal meals in the garden rather than for state dinners indoors. The yews of the Great Fountain Garden, once kept small, were later allowed to grow to their present height by Capability Brown, who was head gardener in the middle of the eighteenth century. The maze was planted in the 1690s by George London and Henry Wise for William III, originally in hornbeam, though the origins have also been called uncertain and merely thought to belong to the end of that century. It was repaired with many sorts of hedge, replanted in the 1960s with yew, and hornbeam is being put back.

When the gates opened in 1838 the maze quickly became one of the most popular parts of a visit, and it has remained so.

Ten heraldic statues, the King’s Beasts, stand on the bridge over the moat in front of the great gatehouse. They stand for the ancestry of Henry VIII and Jane Seymour: the lion of England, the Seymour lion, the royal dragon, the black bull of Clarence, the yale of Beaufort, the white lion of Mortimer, the white greyhound of Richmond, the Tudor dragon, the Seymour panther, and the Seymour unicorn. In 2009, for the five-hundredth anniversary of Henry’s accession, a new garden in a Tudor manner was made in Chapel Court, on the site of the old chapel-court garden. The designer was Todd Longstaffe-Gowan.

It was planted with sixteenth-century flowers and herbs and finished with gilded heraldic beasts and green and white fences. The idea came from narrow views of a Tudor garden seen through doorways in the painting The Family of Henry VIII, which hangs in the gallery called haunted. Eight small wooden beasts, different in design from the stone set on the bridge and based on drawings in the College of Arms, were carved by Ben Harms and Ray Gonzalez and painted in colours established by Patrick Baty. They include the golden lion of England, the white greyhound of Richmond, the red dragon of Wales, and the white hart of Richard II.

In 2015 the palace marked five hundred years from a groundbreaking dated to 12 February 1515, with acted scenes each day. The lease and the start of Wolsey’s transformation are otherwise dated to 1514, so the two anniversaries are not the same year.

Excavation has continued whenever the ground has to be opened. Ahead of an electrical renewal, the first since the 1960s, work in the kitchens and hall in 2017 found the foundations of the original medieval hall, the large extension Henry VIII built after he took the palace from Wolsey, and a late medieval hearth and bread oven most likely from the kitchen Daubeney added at the end of the fifteenth century. Elegant floor tiles lay against those features, in a service area where such a floor would not have been seen by the owners. The remains were left in place and covered with fine sand.

New cables were routed clear of them. Much of the 1960s wiring had cut through older structures. A watching brief in 2019, during conservation of the railings around the garden of Apartment 39 on the west front, found two well-preserved brick buildings. Architectural detail, the layers, and the objects in them date their construction to the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, and their demolition to the middle of the sixteenth.

Later pits, probably garden features from the early grace-and-favour years in the middle of the eighteenth century, cut into the Tudor walls and the rubble over them. The footings of the railings themselves showed three phases of build. A small test pit the same year against the late seventeenth-century wall on Barge Walk, by Apartment 58, found a nineteenth-century threshold set into a mid-eighteenth-century doorway, and a number of service pipes.

In late 2024, during a ten-year replacement of the main electrical cables, archaeologists from the Museum of London Archaeology uncovered the foundations of a large Tudor building under the King’s Staircase, the stair that leads to the apartments of William III of England. The trench was kept small so that the buried remains would be disturbed as little as possible. The foundations are badly cut about, but they are substantial and would have carried a significant range. They are likely to belong to a sixteenth-century range that linked the private apartments of Henry VIII with the rooms of Thomas Wolsey and the long gallery.

At least one arch, and possibly two, survives in the brick almost a metre below the present ground, and these may be culverts that carried waste from the royal private rooms. They appear to line up with a cistern house found under the King’s Privy Dining Room in digs of the 1980s. This range was probably demolished in 1689 when the new palace for William and Mary was begun. The painted walls and ceiling of the stair make digging there difficult, which is one reason the foundations were a surprise.

The same trenches also held seventeenth-century fireplaces, buried floors, and a sequence of water, sewage, and heating pipes, together with two earlier generations of electrical cable. The new cables have been designed to leave the Tudor brick where it is.

On 9 February 2016 Vincent Nichols, the Catholic archbishop of Westminster, sang vespers in the Chapel Royal. It was the first Catholic service in the palace for four hundred and fifty years, and the first since the Elizabethan settlement had made Protestantism the national form of worship. The grounds were used for the road cycling time trial of the 2012 Olympic Games, with temporary thrones for the medal positions set up outside. On 11 June 2023 Charles III, with the queen, attended a reception at the palace for a literary festival.

On 12 March 2026 he attended a Sustainable Markets Initiative exhibition and reception there. In July 2026 a gold signet ring of the 1570s, found by a metal detectorist at Ampthill in a former royal hunting ground that had belonged to Henry VIII, and not found at Hampton Court itself, went on display in the palace. It is engraved with a phoenix rising from flames. A poem of 1575 had compared Anne Boleyn to a phoenix and said that Elizabeth had risen from her ashes as a worthy queen.

Elizabeth took the phoenix as her own emblem in her mother’s memory, and courtiers wore it as a sign of loyalty. The ring was found near the site of Ampthill Castle, where Catherine of Aragon was detained during the divorce. It is shown beside another ring linked to the family of Anne Boleyn. The chief historian of the charity that cares for the palace said that finds of this kind rarely survive, and that the ring raises questions about the person who wore it, perhaps within the queen’s own circle.

The palace is still a working historic house, a gallery, a garden, and a place where the ground keeps producing earlier plans. The Tudor west and the baroque east remain side by side because William’s rebuilding stopped. The moat, the kitchens, the hall, the clock, the stair, and the canal each belong to a different reign, and each reign used the house to show who held power in that decade.