Hampton Court Palace

The manor belonged to the Order of St John of Jerusalem, leased in 1494 to Sir Giles Daubeney, who enlarged the buildings and put up the Great Kitchens that survive, much altered, today. His heir gave up the lease in 1514, and the Order re-leased Hampton Court to Thomas Wolsey, Archbishop of York and Henry VIII's chief minister.

Wolsey spent 200,000 crowns over seven years to build the finest palace in England here, construction beginning on 12 February 1515. The state apartments in the inner court, today the Clock Court, were reserved for the king, and Henry VIII stayed in them as Wolsey's guest in 1525. In 1529, knowing that the King and his enemies were engineering his downfall, Wolsey passed the palace to Henry as a gift. He died the following year.

Within six months of taking ownership the King began rebuilding. His court ran to over a thousand people, and in 1529 the kitchens were quadrupled in size so that he could provide bouche of court, free food and drink, for the household. Between 1532 and 1535 he added the Royal Tennis Court and the Great Hall, the last medieval great hall built for the English monarchy; so impatient was the King for it that the masons were made to work through the night by candlelight. The inner gatehouse was given a pre-Copernican astronomical clock in 1540, still working, showing high water at London Bridge for visitors arriving by barge.

That gatehouse is known today as Anne Boleyn's gate; work on her apartments above it was still under way when she was beheaded. The future Edward VI was born at the palace in 1537, and his mother Jane Seymour died there two weeks later. Four years afterwards, at Mass in the chapel, Henry was told of the adultery of his fifth wife Catherine Howard, who was sent from here to Syon House and then the Tower. Mary I chose the palace for the birth of her first child, which proved the first of two phantom pregnancies, and left after more than five months, the building by then uninhabitable.

In 1604 the palace hosted James I's meeting with representatives of the English Puritans, the Hampton Court Conference; no agreement was reached, but the meeting led to the King's commissioning of the King James Version of the Bible. Hampton Court was both palace and prison to his son Charles I. After the King's execution in 1649 it passed to the Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell: the government auctioned much of the contents, but the building was ignored.

In 1689, within months of the accession of the joint monarchs William III and Mary II, they began a rebuilding intended to demolish the Tudor palace a section at a time and replace it with a modern Baroque one, keeping only Henry VIII's Great Hall. Sir Christopher Wren drew the plans, William Talman was master of works, and Antonio Verrio painted the King's staircase. Half the Tudor palace went, Henry VIII's state rooms and private apartments with it, replaced by two suites of equal value for the King and Queen as joint sovereigns.

After Mary's death William lost interest and the work stopped in 1694, leaving the building in two contrasting styles, domestic Tudor and Baroque. In 1702 William fell from his horse in Hampton Court Park, dying of his injuries at Kensington Palace. Queen Anne carried on the decoration of the state apartments until her death in 1714 ended Stuart rule.

George II was the last monarch to live here. George III never set foot in the palace after his accession, associating the state apartments with a humiliating scene in which his grandfather had struck him. From the 1760s rooms became grace-and-favour apartments, rent-free and allocated by the Lord Chamberlain to reward past services to the Crown. Michael Faraday lived in one from 1862 until his death in 1867; the last new residents were admitted in the 1980s.

The Great Hall was restored from 1796, the work finishing in 1838 when the palace opened to the public; by 1881 over ten million visits had been recorded. The palace was Grade I listed on 2 September 1952. A major fire in 1986 spread to the King's Apartments and killed Lady Daphne Gale, widow of General Sir Richard Gale, who lived in a grace-and-favour apartment; she was in the habit of taking a lighted candle to her bedroom at night, which is thought to have started the fire. Restoration was completed in 1990. The palace and grounds are cared for by Historic Royal Palaces, the independent charity whose headquarters they house, and are open to the public, showing works from the Royal Collection.