Gareth Russell on the Secrets of Hampton Court's Great Hall

The Great Hall at Hampton Court

In the winter of 1533, builders working on the new Great Hall at Hampton Court were offered overtime if they completed the palace’s largest room for a last-minute inspection by King Henry VIII and his second wife, Anne Boleyn. The workmen scuttled about with braziers, holding them up to dry the paint on the King’s heraldic carved lions and unicorns and the Queen’s falcons and leopards. Henry – who had seized the palace from its previous inhabitant, his disgraced chief minister Cardinal Thomas Wolsey – was pleased and it inspired him to spend another small fortune on turning Hampton Court into one of the most impressive palaces in Europe. As part of this policy of tactical grandiosity, Henry had the floor of the Great Hall paved with bright tiles, all of them in the Tudor dynastic colours.

The 1533 visit set the tone for the Great Hall’s history – splendour on the surface, frantic work behind the scenes. Although Henry VIII had wanted a grand space that recalled the days of hearth and hall, he hardly ever used it, preferring the more modern wing designed by his second wife, gutted by his third, and lived in by his fifth. Instead, the colossal Great Hall – which looms over the second of Hampton Court’s three courtyards – became the palace cafeteria, with long trestle tables set-up at mealtimes to feed the staff who were entitled to what officials called ‘bouche of the court’ – their meals from the palace kitchens. 

Henry’s children made more use of the enormous hall. His son and successor – the boy-king Edward VI, who was killed by bronchopneumonia aged fifteen – held a banquet there for Scotland’s Queen Mother, Mary of Guise, when she came for a state visit in 1551. However, it was under the next dynasty – the House of Stuart, who ruled England from 1603 to 1714 – that the Hall became more than just the architectural heart of the palace.

The Stuarts set the Hall aside for William Shakespeare’s use when he came to court for the Christmas celebrations of 1603. There, he rehearsed and performed his plays Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Troilus and Cressida, Henry V, Hamlet and both parts of Henry IV – in front of a delighted Queen Anna and a bored King James. During a performance of Macbeth, Queen Anna’s visiting brother, King Christian IV of Denmark, got so stupendously drunk that he fell off his throne long before the on-stage Macbeth lost his. He was carried out, snoring, by servants.

During a Christmas ball in the Great Hall, King James’s alleged lover, Sir Philip Herbert, nearly fell over because there were so many jewels sewn onto his costume that he struggled to stay upright. Handsome Herbert – who, by his own cheerful admission, did not know much about anything except dogs, horses, and how to have a good time – had attention pulled from his lumbering jewel-stifled dancing by a row between the French and Spanish ambassadors. They both wanted the honour of joining the same dance circle as the Prince of Wales and tried to elbow the other one out of the way. 

After the monarchy collapsed in 1649, England’s republican head of state, Oliver Cromwell, designated Hampton Court as his weekend house. When his daughter Mary was married at the palace, Cromwell organised her reception in the Great Hall, where he read aloud verses, in Latin, in praise of Godly government. 

The monarchy was restored, but the Great Hall was not. Its damaged floor tiles were replaced by timber and it fell out of fashion again. In the 1710s, King George I had it transformed into a private theatre. When Queen Victoria opened the palace to the public in the 1840s, the Great Hall was in such a dilapidated state that it was closed to visitors, until a letter-writing campaign had it restored and reopened. It was hosted Elizabeth II’s coronation ball in 1953 and, since then, it has become a tourist favourite. Henry VIII’s tapestries depicting the life of the Biblical patriarch Abraham decorate its walls, while a long surviving carved falcon from Anne Boleyn’s apartments – recently re-discovered – nestles in a display case, with its brazier-dried paid still intact after 490 years. I love the Great Hall. It is a truly magnificent place that captures Hampton Court’s synthesis of the grand and the intimate.