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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 of the beginnings of the seventeenth-century prefatory to the Cromwell letters:

“In January, 1603-4, was held at Hampton Court a kind of Theological Convention of intense interest all over England ... now very dimly known, if at all known, as the ‘Hampton Court Conference’. It was a meeting for the settlement of some dissentient humours in religion.... Four world-famous Doctors from Oxford and Cambridge represented the pious straitened class, now beginning to be generally conspicuous under the nickname Puritans. The Archbishop, the Bishop of London, also world-famous men, with a considerable reserve of other bishops, deans, and dignitaries, appeared for the Church by itself Church.”

The one great consequence of the Conference was the undertaking of the Authorized Translation of the Bible; for the rest, the King eloquently “scouted to the wind” the Puritans, and threatened that if they did not conform he would hurry them out of the country. Thus early in the years of the Stuart rule may be said to have begun at Hampton Court that struggle between conformity and nonconformity which was to have momentous results later on in the same century.

When Charles the First succeeded his father as King, Hampton Court continued a favourite royal residence. This monarch appears to have had something of the same dread of the plague as inspired Henry the Eighth and Elizabeth, and when it broke out in London he hurriedly removed the Court to this Palace and issued a proclamation prohibiting all communication with the capital during the continuance of the visitation. He and his queen seem to have particularly favoured this one of their palaces, and not only made frequent stays here but continually added to the works of art and furnishings of the rooms.

Hampton Court was also to have its part in those later chapters of the life of the vacillating king which led up to the tragic finish at Whitehall. On 10 January, 1642, King Charles journeyed from London to Hampton and arrived here for the last time as a free king. The inevitable breaking-point had come, and hence he set forth to the early scenes of civil war. He was not at Hampton Court again until the August of 1647, and then it was virtually as a prisoner “in the power of those execrable villains”, who had the courage to regard the welfare of the people before that of their titular ruler. Leaving his cloak in the gallery by way of diverting suspicion, on 11 November, 1647, the King “passed by the backstairs and vault to the waterside” and so made good his escape, and fled in a fashion that made any reconciliation of the opposing parties impossible.