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Cardinal Wolsey's palace, taken by Henry VIII and half rebuilt by Wren: Tudor kitchens on one side, a baroque court on the other.
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Hampton Court began in 1514 as the country house of Cardinal Wolsey, Henry VIII's chief minister, who spent 200,000 crowns making it the finest palace in England. In 1529, with his fall coming, he gave it to the king to save himself, and failed. Henry quadrupled the kitchens the same year so that the whole court could eat at his expense, added the Great Hall with its carved hammerbeam roof between 1532 and 1535, and built the tennis court that is still played on. It was in the chapel here that he was told of Catherine Howard's adultery; the story that she broke free of her guards and ran down the gallery to beg for her life has given the Haunted Gallery its name.
A century and a half later William III and Mary II hired Christopher Wren to pull the Tudor palace down and build a Versailles. Mary died in 1694, William in 1702, and the work stopped in 1703, leaving two palaces joined at the middle: Tudor courts on the west, Wren's baroque apartments on the east, in the same pink brick. George II was the last king to live here, and Queen Victoria opened it to the public in 1838. The rooms hold works from the Royal Collection, above all Mantegna's nine canvases of the Triumphs of Caesar in the Lower Orangery. Outside are the Maze, the Great Vine planted in the 1760s and still the largest in the world, and the formal gardens running down to the river.
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