Hampton Court ... Illustrated with forty-three drawings by Herbert ...

80 HAMPTON COURT
hall nearly all the rest of his life was passed. It was in
the great hall that he would sit for hours listening to
Milton as he played the organ which had been brought
from Magdalen College at Oxford. It was in the
chapel that his daughter Mary was married to Lord
Falconberg. It was in this house that his daughter
Elizabeth died. It was there that his own fatal sickness
began. After his deathit was again nearly being
sold. Just before the Restoration it was voted to
Monk, and Charles II.,when he resumed the crownlands,
made him Ranger and Steward of the Honour.
VII
With Charles's return the Palace became once more
one of the most constant resorts of the English monarchy.
Charles himself was fond of the place. It
was there he spent his honeymoon with Catherine of
Braganza. But he had other and much more congenial
reasons for being happy there. Whatever his
reasons, he made Hampton Court as much a home as
any of his predecessors.
He rearranged the gardens; he redecorated and
refurnished the Palace. But most of all was he interested
in the tennis-court. "The King," said a
newsletter in the beginning of 168 1, "is in very
good health, and goes to Hampton Court often, and
back again the same day, but very private. Most of
his exercise is in the tennis-court in the morning,