Hampton Court Palace History

Hampton Court Palace is really two palaces wearing one name: the red-brick Tudor court Cardinal Wolsey began in 1514, and the Baroque palace Christopher Wren built for William III and Mary II behind it. Five hundred years of English power politics happened between those two building sites.

Wolsey builds it, 1514 to 1528

Thomas Wolsey — butcher’s son, cardinal, Lord Chancellor — took the lease on the riverside manor in 1514 and built the grandest private house in England: brick courts, gilded ceilings, lodgings fit for visiting royalty. It was too grand. As Wolsey fell from favour over the king’s divorce, the palace passed to Henry VIII in the late 1520s, and Wolsey died in 1530 on his way to face treason charges.

Henry VIII’s palace, 1528 to 1547

Henry made Hampton Court the most lavish court in Tudor England. He built the Great Hall with its hammerbeam roof, enlarged the kitchens to feed a household of around 600 twice a day, and brought five of his six wives here in turn. The palace watched the marriage story unfold at close range: Jane Seymour gave birth to the future Edward VI here in October 1537 and died within days; Catherine Howard was arrested here in 1541, and the legend of her screaming apparition in the Haunted Gallery has attached to the palace ever since — the full story is on the Hampton Court ghost tours page.

The Stuarts: a Bible and a prisoner

In January 1604 James I chaired the Hampton Court Conference in the palace, the meeting of bishops and Puritan divines that commissioned the King James Bible — arguably the most influential book ever set in motion in a single English room. Four decades later the palace held his son: Charles I was imprisoned at Hampton Court by the New Model Army in 1647, escaped briefly, and went to the scaffold in 1649.

Wren’s rebuild, 1689 onwards

William III and Mary II commissioned Christopher Wren to replace the Tudor palace with a Baroque one to rival Versailles. Money and Mary’s death in 1694 stopped the plan halfway — which is the palace’s good luck. Wren’s south and east fronts and the King’s and Queen’s State Apartments stand joined to Henry’s surviving Tudor courts, and the seam between the two is the most interesting walk in the building. The what to see guide follows it room by room.

Georgians, grace and favour, and the public

George II was the last monarch to keep court here; the royal household left in 1737. The apartments were parcelled out as grace-and-favour lodgings for servants of the Crown, and in 1838 the young Queen Victoria opened the palace to the public, free of charge. It has been visited ever since — today under the care of Historic Royal Palaces, the self-funding charity that maintains it.

The 1986 fire

A fire in March 1986 gutted part of the King’s Apartments. The restoration that followed returned the rooms to their William III appearance and drove a wider re-presentation of the palace — much of what you walk through today reflects that scholarship.

See the buildings this history left behind in What to See at Hampton Court Palace, test yourself on the Hampton Court Palace facts, or go straight to the Hampton Court Palace Tours comparison and book the tour that tells it best.