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 visiting it a few years before the lease was granted; but probably Wolsey did away entirely with the older building and planned the whole place anew. Rapidly rising in royal favour the Cardinal designed a lordly pleasure house on the banks of the Thames, where he could worthily entertain his pleasure-loving sovereign, and where he could hold state in a manner that should prove impressive in the eyes of ambassadors and other important visitors from foreign Courts.