It is difficult to obtain a comprehensive view of the palace save from the river. Thence, however, the glimpses of the pile are very varied, the view of the western front being especially charming. The multitude of towers and mullions diversifies the façade, very greatly to the disadvantage of Wren’s monotonous eastern front; while the interlaced and arabesqued chimneys, the graceful clock-tower, and the high-pitched roof of the Great Hall break the sky-line with a cunning which, although apparently undesigned, is as effective as it well could be. There is something peculiarly appropriate in approaching Hampton Court from the Thames, for in the day of its pride, when the cardinal and his thousand retainers abode there, when Henry retired to it with one or other of his wives, or when his dour daughter Mary passed there her honeymoon with the darkling Philip, snatching a brief leisure from his “Acts of Faith” in Spain and the Netherlands, the river was the silent highway upon which all the world travelled, whether from the Tower or from Westminster. But the approach from Bushey Park, although its historical savour is small, is more attractive almost than that from the water. I never traverse the Chestnut Avenue without regretting that the venerable towers and turrets of the palace do not close in the vista. Such an avenue ought, for the sake of picturesque completeness, to have for objective an ancient country house, gabled, ruddy, and peopled with historic shades. The Diana water is very pretty in its way; but it is not the most effective climax. There are some beautiful avenues in the little park of Hampton Court itself; but there is a Dutch flavour about them which causes them to look less natural and spontaneous than the Chestnut Avenue, which is really only the central of a series of nine, four on each side. Bushey Park, like all other parks, is pretty, but flat; it happily still contains a good head of fallow deer. For nearly fifty years—since the palace was thrown open to the public—Bushey has been a spot of inexhaustible delight to myriads of Londoners, the great majority of whom choose the route through the park to Hampton Court. The novice in woodcraft might imagine that many of the trees had attained a good old age; but so far as those in the nine avenues are concerned, all were planted by William III., the tutelary genius of latter-day Hampton Court, and outside the avenues the timber is neither luxuriant nor remarkable.
By far the most interesting portion of either the new or the old palace is the Great Hall, which, save that it has a new floor and that the painted glass in the windows is modern, is little altered since Henry VIII. built it. This magnificent apartment ranks with Westminster Hall and the Hall of Christ Church, Oxford, as one of the finest open-timbered interiors in Europe. What relation it bears to Wolsey’s Hall, the site of which it is believed to occupy, we cannot tell, since no picture of the cardinal’s banqueting-chamber has been preserved. But “The Lord Thomas Wulsey, Cardinal, Legat de Latere, Archbishop of Yorke, and Chancellor of Englande,” had a nice taste in architecture; and it is tolerably safe to suppose that, beautiful though Henry’s hall be, the cardinal’s was better. Why the king saw fit to destroy what Wolsey had built there is no evidence to show; probably he was desirous that his own name rather than that of his upstart chancellor should be permanently associated with the place, and the lavishness with which his cypher, together with the rose and portcullis and other heraldic devices of the Tudors, are scattered about the palace, favours the idea. It is a little remarkable that the hall, with the adjoining withdrawing-room, should be disconnected from the other buildings, and that it should not be possible to reach it without passing into the open air. The best view of the hall is obtained, not from the sombre entrance beneath the Minstrel’s Gallery, but from the daïs at the upper end, where the high table for noble and princely guests was wont to stand. Its proportions are majestic—106 feet by 40, with a height of 60 feet. The open-timbered roof is elaborately carved and arcaded, and springs, as though naturally, from massive corbels between the windows. At the extremities, where the corbels join the roof timberings, are the graceful pendants characteristic of the Tudor time. The windows blaze with painted glass, all a mass of heraldry and kingly pedigree, while beneath the eye finds rest in the more subdued tones of King Hal’s tapestries of incidents in the life of Abraham. Who designed this arras and where it was woven are questions which have never been settled; but there is abundant internal evidence that it is either early Flemish or German work. In the gloomy vestibule beneath the gallery is a series of allegorical tapestries, the most curious of them representing the seven deadly sins in such guise as would suggest that the artist took the idea from the procession to the “Sinful House of Pride” in the “Faërie Queen.” Spenser makes Gluttony ride upon “a filthy swine”; in this tapestry it bestrides a goat. All this arras is in beautiful preservation, particularly that which deals with the life of Abraham, in which the high lights are worked in gold.
THE FIRST QUADRANGLE. / FOUNTAIN COURT.
The painted windows of the Great Hall deserve something more than a passing mention. Six alternate windows are filled with the arms and descents of the wives of Henry VIII.; and it is worth noting, as some indication of the commonness of a Plantagenet ancestry, that each of these ladies was descended from Edward I. The probabilities are, indeed, that even now a large proportion of the English people, above the lower middle class, have in their veins the blood of Longshanks. The seven intermediate windows are emblazoned with the badges of Henry VIII.—the lion, the portcullis, the fleur-de-lis, the rose, the red dragon of York, and the white greyhound of Lancaster. Upon each are his cyphers and the mottoes “Dieu et mon Droit,” and “Dne. Salvum Fac Reg.” The great eastern and western windows are likewise full of badges, quarterings, and impalements. At the upper end of the south side of the hall is yet another window more beautiful from its pendant fan-tracery than any of the others, and emblazoned with the arms and cyphers of Henry and Jane Seymour, and the arms and cardinal’s hat of Wolsey. The daïs characteristic of old time, when distinctions of rank were very palpable, still remains; but the beautiful old flooring of these painted tiles so much used by Tudor builders has gone, although there is reason to suppose that it still existed eighty years ago. A finer apartment for a regal banquet or a stately pageant could hardly be conceived. One would like to believe the legend of Shakespeare representing, in this very hall, before Elizabeth and her somewhat flighty court, the story of the fall of Wolsey; but there is not a tittle of real evidence in its favour. The Withdrawing Room, or Presence Chamber, as it is sometimes called, entered from the Great Hall, is a large, oblong apartment which has apparently been little touched since Tudor times. It has a fine painted oriel, a moulded plaster ceiling, and an ancient oak chimney-piece, into which is let a portrait of the unlucky presiding genius of the place. This chimney-piece is a modern importation from an old house at Hampton Wick. The roughly-plastered walls are covered with tapestries of a wildly allegorical character, considerably older than those in the Great Hall, and less carefully preserved. Above them are Carlo Cignani’s cartoons for the frescoes in the Ducal Palace at Parma.
IN THE REACH BELOW HAMPTON COURT.
Beyond the Great Hall, the apartments which are shown to the public have little architectural or personal interest. The rooms in which Henry, Elizabeth, and Charles I. lived are all in the Tudor portion of the palace; the series which has been converted into one great picture gallery is in Wren’s building, and runs round the Fountain Court and along the eastern front. What this front lacks architecturally it gains to some extent scenically, since it overlooks the geometrical flower-beds, the straight avenues, the long and narrow Dutch canals, beloved of the Stadtholder, the like of which one may still see in the gardens of old world casteelen in Holland. Some of the avenues, seen from these upper windows, are very charming and effective, notably that which is closed in by the red mass of Kingston Church. This is not the place to discuss the pictures with which the palace abounds. I shall not perhaps be committing treason if I suggest that they are remarkable more for their quantity than for their quality. There is a sprinkling of pictures of which any gallery might be proud, and some of the portraits, of no artistic importance, are valuable by reason of their personality. Kneller’s “Hampton Court Beauties” have acquired a factitious fame, for whatever may have been the charms of the originals, they are assuredly not very obvious here. Poor, indiscreet Queen Mary got herself well hated by the other ladies of the Court whom she considered insufficiently attractive to be numbered among the elect. Perhaps the most famous of all the pictures at Hampton Court is Vandyke’s equestrian portrait of Charles I., of which there is a replica at Windsor. Many of the paintings are true memorials of the old palace, and formerly hung in the ancient state apartments. They have the savour of old associations which the rooms in which they are hung lack—memories of times when life was more fitful, more spectacular, and, as it seems to us in this distant age, more romantic than it had become when Dutch William sowed Je maintiendrai about the old place, as Henry had scattered his roses and greyhounds and fleurs-de-lis, and all the other heraldic bravery of a century when heraldry was a fine art. Hampton Court is rich in personal history, and many a romantic shade must haunt its Great Hall, there to recall the vanished banquet, when the wine-cup gleamed so red, and bright eyes danced more intoxicatingly than any vintage of Spain or France. Many, too, there be that must still weep out their historic sorrows, and the visionary axe must flash before many a ghostly eye. Here lived Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, as well as Bluebeard’s more fortunate wives. Edward VI. was born, and Jane Seymour died here. Elizabeth kept her Christmases merrily indeed at Hampton Court; tradition says that she was here dining off a goose when the news came of the defeat of the Armada. It was a favourite residence of Charles I., who passed here some of his happiest and most miserable moments, and hence he fled to Carisbrooke. Both Cromwell and Charles II., who once played a renowned game of hide-and-seek, were fond of the water-side palace; William III. had a passion for it, and in its park met with his fatal accident. The first two Georges stayed here occasionally, but since 1760 it has not been a royal residence. William IV. and his unimportant Queen liked the neighbourhood, and spent much time in the heavy but doubtless comfortable red-brick house at the Teddington entrance to Bushey Park. So long as it endures, Hampton Court will be one of the most interesting of English houses. Attractive in every aspect, in some it is unique, and if it had no other claim to distinction it would always be remarkable as perhaps the very first country house built in England without a moat and drawbridge.