Hampton Court: The Lost Palace

A superlative palace

Hampton Court Palace was England's most significant palace of the Tudor age. From 1515-c.1521, the Lord Chancellor of England and soon-to-be Cardinal, Thomas Wolsey, transformed a medieval manor (situated 13 miles southwest of London on the north bank of the River Thames) into a palace deemed superlative by contemporary observers.

The poet John Skelton knew it well and wrote that 'the king's court should have the excellence... But Hampton Court hath pre-eminence!' Skelton offers us a tantalising first-hand glimpse of the magnificence of Wolsey's new palace, for there are no drawings of it and few written records of its construction remain. What's more, only four years after its initial completion, Henry VIII assumed occupancy.

By 1529, the king had begun a process of rebuilding and remodelling which lasted at least ten years. As the Cardinal fell from favour and died, Henry transformed Wolsey's palace beyond recognition. Then William III and Mary II managed to rebuild half of the Tudor palace from 1689-94. Consequently, throughout the almost 500 years since Wolsey's occupation, it has enjoyed a long history of development which has heavily obscured its original form.

Until recently, historians had little idea as to how much of Wolsey's original palace survived amongst Henry VIII's renovations, and so Wolsey's Hampton Court became the missing link of English architectural history. Since the 19th-century, the famous Great Hall, which is the best surviving room of the Tudor state apartments, has been explained as the last medieval great hall of the English monarchy, one of Henry VIII's upgrades which suited the ultimate magnificence of a royal palace. But this modern view doesn't agree with Skelton's impression that it was 'pre-eminent' in Wolsey's day. So, what did Wolsey's palace look like? Was it as extraordinary as its contemporaries tell us? And was it England's last 'medieval' palace?

The first breakthrough

Studying a plan of Hampton Court Palace  © In 1997 I began to study the palace's brick and stone walls in detail, comparing records and drawings to find out whether any clues may have been missed that would help to recreate Wolsey's lost palace. With an architect's eye, it became clear that some parts of the building were misaligned, suggesting they were built at different dates. On the other hand, there were some consistencies, notably the way most of the Tudor walls were built either in parallel or at right angles. There seemed to be a discipline at work in the planning, but the exact meaning and shape of this proved elusive.

A breakthrough came at Christmas 2000 - thanks to the antisocial habit of taking work home - this time, playing with compasses and a rule on a large plan of Hampton Court. As New Year approached, I suddenly realised that the outside wall of Wolsey's surviving western courtyard (called 'Base Court') was perfectly square. Scribing a circle around its corners, I found it to be part of a geometrical scheme of two giant squares side by side, each of which measures 327 feet. In each giant square was a series of rotated squares, like a nest, one within the next. This geometry was used to plan all the walls of the palace, and explained exactly why they were all parallel.

The use of different geometries permeates the designs of medieval churches, and some castles, but not English great houses and palaces, which were concoctions of ranges and blocks around irregular courtyards. Besides, this geometry was doubly different, for it didn't stop at the buildings. The two squares were repeated out into the gardens, setting out the banks of the moat that originally surrounded the palace.

This precise means of organising an entire complex of buildings cannot be found in any English site before this time, but there are clear parallels for it in the designs of Italian Renaissance architects such as Filarete and Wolsey's contemporary, Leonardo da Vinci.

The dig begins

On the verge of discovering the kitchen  © I needed to do some archaeological excavations because, if I could fill in the gaps in the plan by predicting lost parts of the palace, that would seal it: the original form of Wolsey's Hampton Court would be confirmed by hard evidence. So digs were planned to span two weeks and the pressure was on.

I predicted we'd find the remains of Wolsey's original Great Hall, which I calculated would have been larger than Henry VIII's present one. Some scholars had suggested the oriel window might not be part of Henry VIII's work, but a remnant from an earlier hall. I agreed.

In the first week, we found one of the buttresses of Wolsey's hall, which confirmed the theory beyond doubt, and provided the basis for a precise reconstruction. I also suspected there was a lost cloister between the hall and chapel, and there was just enough space for a site where we could search for one of its walls. This turned out to be hopelessly disturbed: a total mess of drainpipes and culverts.

There was an interesting trench of broken-up Tudor bricks running exactly along the line we were investigating, but this had to remain a tantalising sum of evidence. The proof of the geometry and other remains had to suffice. I also thought there would be the remains of a long-demolished kitchen to the north of the hall. Though its eastern kitchen wall turned out to have been destroyed by a later drain, we found the western wall with a floor of yellow and green tiles inside and a Tudor lead water-pipe beneath, which had once supplied Wolsey's cooks.

Renaissance design?

We had good evidence to back up the shape of the original palace and to confirm the presence of its unusual geometry. This was not going to reattribute the design of Hampton Court to an Italian architect; after all, its 'Gothic' windows look typically English and their details relate them to other contemporary buildings in Westminster by royal master masons. So the design must have been drawn up by one of them. Received wisdom says that these men designed 'Gothic' and 'medieval' buildings, largely on the basis of the style of pointed windows. 'Renaissance' architecture in England, with full classical ornament, isn't supposed to appear until the late 1540s.

To test this, it's worth asking three questions: do we classify Tudor architecture in the same way its creators understood it; does enough remain for such a conclusion to be thorough and reliable; and what if we haven't been looking in the right places for clues to their methods and beliefs?

As I continued to read and research, I wondered if an English designer could have been guided by Renaissance design theories from as early as 1515. It became clear that with a patron like Wolsey, the answer lies somewhere between 'more than probably' and 'yes'. As a precocious scholar who was fluent in Latin and international affairs, he was recognised and first promoted as a churchman of European stature in 1513 by Pope Leo X. Leo was a member of the Medici family from Florence who fostered the classical learning that formed the basis for Renaissance artistic thought. Leo X employed the great artists of the High Renaissance: Raphael, Leonardo, Michelangelo, who were all working to emphasise the power of the Catholic church through their philosophical artworks. Whilst there is no evidence that Wolsey ever went to Rome, there was a steady stream of Roman messengers, ambassadors and papal representatives coming to Wolsey in England. There were Italian sculptors coming to Wolsey, too.

Looking at Wolsey's terracotta busts of Roman emperors in the central courtyard by Giovanni da Maiano, I wondered whether some advice from Rome was given to Wolsey to guide - not just the ornament - but the whole design of his palace. I couldn't prove it. I needed to look closely at the Italian palaces, to see if they were similar in planning, accommodation and decoration. Ideally, I'd need to find a document that could have offered Wolsey instruction.

The second breakthrough

I made a trip to Florence and Rome, and found a number of parallels for the revised Hampton Court: rectilinear planning, elevated apartments, Roman sculptural subjects, classical ornament.

Then, another breakthrough: in a library in Florence I read an original copy of Paolo Cortese's 'De Cardinalatu', published in 1510. It is a compendium of how to be a cardinal of the High Renaissance, and chapter two describes how to design the ideal cardinal's palace. It explained all of Hampton Court's idiosyncrasies in one fell swoop, including the Roman emperors in the central courtyard. If Wolsey had created the same unprecedented series of motifs at Hampton Court by accident, the coincidence would be even more remarkable.

We decided it would be wonderful to reconstruct Wolsey's palace using computer graphics. One week later, I'd produced a 25ft-roll of line drawings to send to the graphics company. The end product was more than worth all the hard work, as the sequences brilliantly recreated a long-lost experience and revealed exactly why Wolsey's contemporaries thought the palace was so amazing.

Today, Hampton Court retains the capacity to amaze: with six acres of buildings spanning 500 years, there's always so much more to learn, explain and enjoy about the palace. Hampton Court is still one of the 'pre-eminent' wonders of Europe, half a millennium after its initial construction.

Find out more

Books

The History of the King's Works: The Middle Ages, vol.1 by R A Brown, H M Colvin and A J Taylor, edited by H M Colvin (1963)

Architecture of the Renaissance by Bertrand Jestaz (Thames & Hudson, 1996)

Medieval Palaces by Graham Keevil (Tempus Publishing, 2000)

Hampton Court Palace by Matthew Sturgis (Channel 4 Books, 2001)

The English Medieval House by M Wood (1965)

About the author

Jonathan Foyle is assistant curator of historic buildings at Historic Royal Palaces. He has worked at Canterbury Cathedral and teaches architectural and cultural history at Cambridge University's Department for Continuing Education and the university's International Summer Schools.