arative modernity of the beginning of the Hanoverian
era. It is not, perhaps, overfanciful to see something of the lavish
richness, the opulent homeliness, of the earlier period typified in the
varied buildings, courts, and gateways of the Tudor portion of the
Palace, and the more formal grandeur of the later time in the
symmetrical stateliness of the later part.

Hampton Court Palace was the centre of many of the bluff King Henry's
hunting parties--and the scene of some of his marital excitements, and
here, too, his long-hoped-for son was born; it was the scene of
Elizabethan pageantry, and of the attempt on the part of the Virgin
Queen's successor to force other men's religion into his own
particular groove; at Hampton Court Charles the First was seen at his
best in the domestic circle and--after the interregnum--where his son
was seen at his worst in anti-domestic intrigues. Here Cromwell sought
rest from cares greater than those of a king, and here he was
stricken with mortal illness; here William and Mary dwelt, and here
the former met with the seemingly trivial accident which cost him his
life. That the "story" of Hampton Court is, indeed, a full, splendid,
and varied one is shown in the three fine volumes in which it is set
forth by Mr. Ernest Law, a work to which no writer on the history of
the Palace can help feeling indebted. Those who would learn the
intimacies and details of the history of the place have Mr. Law's
history, and those who seek a "guide" are well provided for in the
official publications. Here, I am concerned with the history of the
place only in its broader and more salient points, and with the minor
details necessary in a guidebook not at all; I seek rather to give
something of an impression of the past and present of the Palace,
something that shall at once indicate the associations of the place,
indicate its story, and hint at what there is to see, and that shall
serve as souvenir and remembrancer of that which has been seen.

[Illustration: THE GREAT GATEHOUSE, WEST ENTRANCE]

II

It was just before he became a cardinal that Thomas Wolsey, on 11
January, 1515, took a ninety-nine years' lease of the manor of Hampton
Court from the Knights Hospitaller of St. John of Jerusalem, and at
once set about building the magnificent pile which remains his most
enduring monument. There appears to have been here an earlier manor
house or mansion, for there is a record of Henry the Seventh