Henry VIII. seems to have been at first as much attached to the Richmond Palace as his father had been. He spent the first Christmas after his accession there, and it was in it, on New Year's Day 1511, that his wife, Katharine of Aragon, gave birth to a son, whose advent was celebrated throughout the kingdom with extraordinary rejoicings. The infant on whom so much depended lived, however, but for six weeks, and his father is said to have looked upon his untimely death as a judgment on himself for having married his brother's widow. After the tragic event the king paid but a few short visits to Richmond, lending the palace there between whiles to distinguished guests, amongst whom was the Emperor Charles V. of Germany, who had come to England, in 1533, for his betrothal to the Princess Mary, then only four years old. That same year Henry leased the Richmond estate to Massey Villiard and Thomas Brampton for a term of thirty years at an annual rental of £25, 8s., but he evidently considered it still his own private property, for he made use of the palace whenever it suited his convenience. In 1526, for instance, when he had compelled Wolsey to give up to him the newly {234} completed mansion at Hampton Court, he told the chagrined donor that he could live in his house at Richmond instead, a privilege of which the cardinal availed himself but seldom, so great was his unpopularity in the neighbourhood, the common people, especially those who had been in the service of Henry VII., bitterly resenting that what they irreverently called 'a bocher's dogge should be in the royall manor of Richmond.' For all that, however, Wolsey received Henry VIII. as his guest in it in 1528, when the feast of the patron-saint of England was celebrated with great solemnity in the chapel, all the companions of the Order of the Garter having been present. After his final disgrace the broken-hearted minister paid a last visit to Richmond, taking up his abode on his arrival as usual at the palace, but he soon received a peremptory message from his angry master telling him to withdraw to the Lodge in the Old Deer Park, the history of which is related below. In 1535 Anne Boleyn, whose doom was already practically sealed, was for a short time at Richmond Palace, and, according to some authorities, it was in a house near by, then owned by Sir George and Lady Carew, that her successor in the king's affection, Jane Seymour, awaited, on the fatal 19th of May 1536, the arrival of her royal lover, to whom she had been married the day before. [Illustration: THE OLD PALACE, RICHMOND]