Gareth Russell's The Palace
Not since the 1800s has there been a history of Hampton Court Palace. Richard Nye talks to Gareth Russell, the man who has put that right...
If there is one thing about Hampton Court Palace that most of us think we know, it is that Cardinal Thomas Wolsey – successively fixer and fall guy for the colossus that was Henry VIII – was the man who started it. And most of us would be wildly wrong.
By the time the upwardly mobile cleric began leasing from the Knights Hospitaller in 1515, converting the existing property into a state-of-the-art Tudor palace, the manor of Hampton had been going for more than 500 years.
“Not only did he not build it, but he didn’t even own it,” quips historian Gareth Russell, whose rip-roaring tour of the building’s multilayered history, The Palace, hit the bookshelves this year with the thud of a Henrician axe. “You could call him the world’s most spectacular tenant.” Nor was Wolsey the catalyst for Russell’s palatial tour de force.
That honour goes to Catherine Howard, fifth wife of Henry VIII and one of those upon whom the axe fell. Accused of adultery and treason, she it was who reportedly ran screaming for mercy down the gallery to where Henry was hearing Mass and whose traumatized ghost is said to linger in the place of her despair. “I didn’t go to Hampton Court as a child, but it was while researching my biography of Catherine that I really got to know it,” says Gareth, an Ulsterman whose past work includes volumes on the Titanic and the late Queen Mother.
“One day I showed my agent round, and she said: ‘I think there is a book here.’ I’d been immersed in the events of 1540-42, but it’s a very different love when you start to see the palace as a whole.” And so the narrative begins in the dying days of Catholic England, a spectral world of indulgences, astrology and Angelus bells on the eve of the Reformation.
The world that the Tudor century inherited and cast aside. “We tend to see Catholic England as a slightly silly prologue to the glorious logic of the Protestant and Enlightenment eras,” reflects Gareth. “I wanted to portray it more respectfully, this world on the brink of annihilation.” Hitting its stride, the book charts a colourful course through the heart of English history.
We see Wolsey pacing the palace with Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, the most powerful man of his age. We see Anne Boleyn, oblivious to the imminence of her fate, dreaming up home improvements like a participant in Grand Designs. A Danish king lies drunk on the floor while Shakespeare unveils Macbeth; Charles I flees the palace, reignites the Civil War and ends up losing his head; a guilt-wracked Mary II is kind to the families of builders killed working on her new apartments – the handsome renovation which swept away much of the old Tudor palace and ushered in the beauty of the baroque.
We see a 20th-century axeman, not lopping off heads but chopping down an oak for the coffin of the Unknown Warrior. And finally, in the era of rock and roll, we find the sister of the last Russian Tsar – murdered with his family by the Bolsheviks in 1918 – living out her final days in a house within the palace grounds. The European imperial age reduced to this: a shy, nervous old lady surrounded by tourists and cowering from the KGB. “It’s remarkable,” reflects Gareth.
“You start out with Wolsey and Charles V riding the waves of history, and you end with one of the very last Romanovs washed up by the tide. No novelist could have made it up.” Some chapters read like novellas of their own. The fall of Anne Boleyn, from coronation to scaffold in a thousand much-documented days, still exerts an irresistible pull.
Russell lists the domestic items for which payment was left owing at her untimely death: Venetian gold for a nightgown, green silk for her Fool, ribbons for her long hair. The painfully irrelevant debris of a destiny is unfulfilled. And with it, the gnawing questions about why she was brought down.
For Russell, all roads lead to Henry VIII.
“I think it was simply a narcissistic rage attack by an enormous but fragile ego determined to destroy what it no longer wanted. Thomas Cromwell is often blamed for framing Anne, and he was indeed Machiavellianism personified, but he was neither a gambler nor stupid. He would not have acted without a blank cheque from the king.”
As for Catherine Howard, Henry’s other beheaded bride, Russell insists that the tale of her desperate dash is almost certainly a myth. “The broad consensus is that it didn’t happen.
On the timing, it’s not impossible, but there is no surviving contemporary source – we just can’t find out how the story got started.” But what about the ghost? The pervasive sense of misery visitors claim to experience in the gallery down which she supposedly fled?
“Hampton Court has witnessed a lot of unhappiness, and maybe that comes through. But I don’t believe it’s souls trapped in some endless Groundhog Day. Having said that, I have experienced flickering lights in the Haunted Gallery when no one else was present. I wasn’t sufficiently unbelieving to stay up there!”
It hasn’t all been gloom. In the 1660s, when the louche, licentious court of Charles II, was partying at the palace, Hampton Court was Love Island on Thames. With the austerity of Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate behind them, royal mistresses like the exuberantly unprincipled Barbara Villiers were ready to let down their hair – and pretty much everything else.
“Social media would have had a field day with Barbara,” says Gareth. “She was every inch the horror that she is portrayed. The whole scene was scintillatingly ridiculous, but these were the children of the Civil War, and they would all have been affected by that.” Rather like the 1920s generation? “Absolutely. The Restoration period and the flapper era really are spiritual twins.”
However, Hampton Court is not a house of fun but a graveyard of dreams, a poignant memorial to the impermanence of power and the brevity of life itself. Look up at the ceiling of the Queen’s Drawing Room. Here, Antonio Verrio’s Apotheosis of Queen Anne gazes down on visitors, depicting the last Stuart monarch in exaggerated pomp being crowned by Neptune and Britannia. “The Drawing Room Anne,” writes Russell, “did not deal with the fluctuating weight, deteriorating eyesight, a series of strokes and declining mobility that devastated her wellbeing [before] her death in 1714.”
Instead, it “memorialised her at the peak of good health”, staring back at the fading queen like the picture of Dorian Gray in reverse. “Sic transit gloria mundi,” reflects Gareth. “The Queen’s Drawing Room may be over the top, but it would take a heart of stone not to be moved by what happened to Anne’s body. I wanted to celebrate the joy, as well as the pain, of life at Hampton Court. But sometimes you just stand there and say: ‘One day all this will still be here, but I will be gone – as all those who have lived here are gone.’” Even if their ghosts remain.
The Palace, by Gareth Russell, is published by William Collins (£25).
