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

2
HAMPTON COURT
which is unique. No English palace that still remains
has borne, at least until quite our own day, so homely
an air. Whitehall, Oatlands, Nonsuch are gone.
Buckingham Palace, Saint James's, andKensington have
the inevitable defects of all royal dwellings in a great
metropolis. Windsor Castle is a rival; but in historical
association it is certainly inferior. Earlier
sovereigns lived at Windsor, later monarchs since
George III. have made it a home; but it has not
been, like Hampton Court, for more than two centuries
the almost continuous residence of the rulers
of England. There Wolsey rested and gave feasts;
Henry spent honeymoons; Mary sat wearily waiting
for the babe that never came; Elizabeth hunted and
intrigued; James talked theology; Charles collected
pictures, and slipped secretly through his guards' hands;
Cromwell listened to the organ as Milton played it;
Charles II.made love, and William III.made gardens;
and so the English rulers went on living at their ease
in the most comfortable of their houses, till the day
when the boy who was to be George III. had his ears
boxed by his grandfather, and vowed he would never
live in the place where he had received such an
indignity.
Hampton Court possesses in a striking degree the
interest of a continuous connection with English
history and an association with the domestic lives
of English sovereigns. With these two thoughts
in mind it is that we pass through its courts and
examine its architectural features. Each bit of build-