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00:00Palaces, the most spectacular and lavish homes on earth.
00:12Luxuriously designed for the royals who wanted the biggest and the best.
00:18Behind the golden gates of these royal megastructures are incredible stories waiting to be discovered.
00:25Infamous monarchs from history and the artists, designers and engineers who turned their grand visions into a reality.
00:36These are the most opulent, flamboyant and innovative royal residences around the world.
00:44In this episode, Hampton Court Palace has history coursing through the complex brickwork.
00:51Famous for being the home of King Henry VIII, the magnificent rooms played host to some of the most celebrated royals in England.
00:59Decisions that were made here changed the course of British history, making Hampton Court one of the world's greatest palaces.
01:09In the borough of Richmond-upon-Thames, just south of London, lies Hampton Court.
01:21Now a major tourist attraction, it began life as a Tudor Palace before Sir Christopher Wren was commissioned to update it in 1689 to a European baroque design.
01:34The two styles combined to create a truly unique royal residence.
01:48Tracy Borman is the Joint Chief Curator here.
01:51I think Hampton Court is extraordinary for the atmosphere it has.
01:56And you certainly get that when you're walking around out of hours when there are no visitors.
02:02You almost sense that you're walking back into a former age.
02:07Particularly, I think, when you're in the heart of the Tudor Palace.
02:11You almost expect to turn around and see Henry VIII standing staring at you.
02:17Although Hampton Court is renowned for being the country retreat of many great kings and queens, most famously Henry VIII, the palace was initially the brainchild of the Archbishop of York, Thomas Wolsey.
02:33Hampton Court began its life with Cardinal Wolsey.
02:38He was the chief minister under Henry VIII.
02:41And he was lowly born, he was just the son of a butcher.
02:45But he loved to project his splendour, the splendour of his new position.
02:51And so he wanted a palace to reflect that.
02:54And in 1515, he acquired the manor of Hampton Court and began building this amazing palace.
03:02But the construction work would have been far from straightforward.
03:08Some of the challenge is the ground.
03:10So it's quite variable, it's quite unpredictable because it's in a river valley.
03:15So the river has deposited all different types of materials.
03:18You get quite fine silty clays.
03:20You get kind of gravels on top of it, which are slightly larger particles.
03:24And then you get a big strong layer of sand below it.
03:27The depths of these things vary quite dramatically.
03:30So the engineers would have really had to understand what the makeup of the ground was before they basically went in and put this kind of big heavy structure on top of it.
03:41This would have been one of the largest buildings for several hundreds of miles.
03:46This is the size of churches. It's the size of cathedrals.
03:49It's over five-storey building.
03:50And it's Wolsey really making a statement on the landscape here.
03:55Despite not having an architectural or engineering background, Wolsey came up with the designs for the palace himself.
04:02These days when we talk about architecture, we talk about who designed it, who's the architect of this, who's the architect of that.
04:09But this doesn't make any sense in this early period.
04:12There was no designer, no architect.
04:14The client, in this case Cardinal Wolsey, would have determined maybe what he wanted his building to look like, compared it to other buildings.
04:22And he'd have gone to a master mason, and they would have worked together both to design the building, as Wolsey pointed out, what he wanted, and actually build it.
04:32Cardinal Wolsey was a man of exquisite taste, and he particularly liked Italian styles.
04:39So he brought in Italian artists, architects, to help construct this incredible palace at Hampton Court.
04:47But you definitely get a sense of Wolsey's own personal stamp on it.
04:51And in particular, putting his name, his coat of arms, wherever he could.
04:55He wanted people to be aware this was very much his palace.
05:00Parts of Wolsey's design were inspired by his religious background.
05:06So one of the innovative things Wolsey does, taking a lead from the monastic architecture that he's been exposed to,
05:13is he adds this internal cloister all the way around the building.
05:17This means that rather than having individual access doors on the elevation that break up the flow of the windows,
05:23you can instead go through individual larger openings into the cloister, and then into your own apartment.
05:31So this creates a much more formal and flat elevation.
05:36To do this, he's not only creating that corridor, but he's burying the fireplaces and the guard robes on the interior of the property.
05:45Cloisters typically are covered walkways that lead to the outside, to the atriums or to the open-air gardens that you see in these large palaces.
05:55But what he did was to actually put them inside the palace.
05:58And the reason I think he did that was because he wanted to stop the warmer air from rising too rapidly up into the high ceiling portions of the palace.
06:11So by having these kind of internal covered walkways, he basically restricted air flow.
06:17And so when people walked underneath it, they had a little pocket of nice warm air that they could walk in,
06:23which made it a much more comfortable experience.
06:25One of the standout features of Wolsey's original palace is the incredible brickwork.
06:31Hamilton Court is almost your classic Tudor building.
06:36So in the materials particularly that you're seeing here, you're seeing the archetype of Tudor building in the 15-teens, 15-20s.
06:44You have these small thin red bricks, the lime mortar, the detailing picked out in stone.
06:50Here you can actually see evidence of the diapa work that's expressed in the building.
06:55Now these are a mix of vitrified bricks, so bricks that have been overburnt in the kiln and have turned black,
07:01that are used to create these wonderful artistic patterns on the brickwork.
07:06There has been lots of historical debate about whether this is doing something structural
07:10or whether it's a way that the bricklayers work out where they're at or sort of mark progress in some way.
07:16I think it's probably just pretty.
07:19In some ways, construction in the 15th, 16th century was very similar to today
07:25and would have been recognizable in the same way that modern bricklayers lay every brick by hand.
07:29Bricklayers in the 15th and 16th century laid every brick by hand.
07:33They weren't using modern cement, but they were using lime mortars, which looks very much the same.
07:40Wolsey was very much King Henry VIII's right-hand man.
07:45But just as the Catholic cardinal was putting the finishing touches to his magnificent home,
07:51the king was being influenced by a new religious movement sweeping across Europe.
07:57The Protestant Reformation is kicked off by a German friar named Martin Luther
08:05who makes a protest against the fundraising techniques being used by his local archbishop in 1517.
08:14So this, to begin with, just looks like a local academic spat.
08:20But for him, there's some deeper principles at stake underneath this.
08:27Almost by accident, within a few years, before anybody has quite realized what's going on,
08:32this little local dispute has blown up into a continent-wide division.
08:39When Luther's new Protestant movement reached England, the Catholic Church did its best to stamp it out.
08:48And it looks as if that's how it would end, until in 1527,
08:54Henry VIII stumbles into an argument with the papacy.
08:59He wants his marriage to Catherine of Aragon to be annulled so that he can remarry,
09:05which leads him onto thinking,
09:07well, what power does this pope have over England anyway?
09:11Why should I, God's anointed King of England,
09:14listen to what this Italian bishop has to say?
09:18And by around 1529, he's really moved on from looking at this as a quarrel about his marriage
09:27to thinking that this is something much more fundamental.
09:29It's about his own authority.
09:33The woman who had accelerated Henry's need for an annulment of his first marriage
09:38was a member of his court named Anne Boleyn.
09:42Henry's courtship with Anne Boleyn took place here at Hampton Court.
09:47And I get the sense that Anne must have had her eye on the palace.
09:50She certainly had her eye on the prize of being queen.
09:53She refused to be Henry's mistress.
09:56She held out for the much greater prospect of being his wife.
10:01Henry turned to his right-hand man to find a way out of the predicament.
10:06Wolsey is one of the first people to be consumed by Henry's quarrel with the pope.
10:14Wolsey is effectively given the brief when this dispute first blows up.
10:20Find a way of resolving the marriage, which is difficult.
10:24But Wolsey's a formidable operator.
10:26And had he been left to do it on his own,
10:29well, he probably had a better chance of extracting a favorable result from Rome
10:34than anybody else would have done.
10:36But Wolsey didn't really try very hard for once because he didn't like Anne.
10:41He didn't think that she would last.
10:43He thought Henry would soon go on to the next woman.
10:46But of course, he was wrong.
10:47For once, this very clever statesman gravely miscalculated.
10:52And it would be his downfall.
10:54In 1529, by way of punishment for failing to get the annulment he so badly wanted,
11:01Henry turned on Wolsey.
11:05He strips him of many of his offices and his properties,
11:10in particular of Hampton Court Palace.
11:15There had been whispers about how it was grander than any of the royal palaces during the 1520s,
11:23which could have been calculated to get Henry's goat.
11:27And so Hampton Court, as with much of the rest of Wolsey's establishment,
11:31moved sideways from being the cardinal's palace to being the king's.
11:38Wolsey, you might say, had a lucky escape.
11:41Because Henry had decided at last to decisively act against him,
11:46to have him tried for treason.
11:49So he summoned Wolsey down from York.
11:52But actually, by then, Wolsey was a very sick man.
11:55And he only made it halfway down to London.
11:58And he died of natural causes.
12:03Henry went against Rome and married Anne Boleyn in January 1533.
12:09It was a monumental decision that was made within the four walls of Hampton Court Palace.
12:19Hampton Court played a pivotal role in Henry VIII's Reformation,
12:23because it's from here that Henry first put pen to paper.
12:27He wrote a letter with some instruction or some decision about breaking from Rome.
12:35Breaking from the Pope.
12:37And that letter was signed here at Hampton Court.
12:40I think it's hard to see a more significant moment in this nation's history
12:46than when Henry broke from Rome,
12:49when he established his own Church of England
12:53and made himself, as sovereign, head of that church.
12:57During his disagreements with Rome,
13:04Henry VIII had begun to turn Hampton Court into a palace fit for a king.
13:10In typical Henry VIII style,
13:13what you do when you inherit a palace bigger than any other in the kingdom,
13:17you extend it.
13:18And so he builds the Great Hall.
13:21He extends his own apartments, those of Anne Boleyn.
13:25And he tries to eradicate any trace of his old favourite, Cardinal Wolsey.
13:31A huge team of masons, carpenters and bricklayers built the Great Hall for Henry.
13:40Measuring 106 feet long, 40 feet wide and 60 feet tall,
13:46it is by far the biggest room in the palace.
13:50So this is Henry VIII's Great Hall,
13:56his showpiece really of the whole palace.
13:59And what you have to imagine is the colour and the gold and the jewels
14:04that would have sparkled all over this magnificent space.
14:09Here at the top of the room, we have the raised dais,
14:14which is where the king and his family would have sat on great occasions.
14:19And then the rest of the courts, up to a thousand,
14:23would have been seated along the rest of the hall.
14:27To create that open space,
14:29there was a really clever technique used to create the roof.
14:34You know, if you go in there today and you look up,
14:36it's absolutely beautiful.
14:37But from an engineering point of view as well, it's really innovative.
14:41If you're going to make a very big room, the problem is how to span it,
14:44how to go from one wall to the other with a roof.
14:47And in this period, the solution was to make huge exposed arch-braced or hammer beams roof trusses,
14:55which are very dramatic structures.
14:57So starting from the walls, we have a slightly morbid term, gallows brackets.
15:03They look like a hangman's frame, really.
15:07So it's, you know, a triangle shape with a diagonal across it.
15:11And that's a nice, strong shape.
15:13So you've now attached those to the walls.
15:15And now you've got a slightly shorter span that you need to work with.
15:18Then on top of that, you can create arches and different shapes with these wooden beams
15:24in order to create this amazing roof over this very, very long span.
15:29The hammer beams are an opportunity for decoration.
15:32So one looks up and sees this magnificent timber roof above, which is very tall.
15:37But most importantly, it gave us space for the smoke to escape.
15:40Because these halls were typically heated by braziers or fires, which produce lots of smoke.
15:46It was a dazzling showpiece, really.
15:49This is Henry VIII making a great statement about how magnificent his new palace is.
15:56Hampton Court almost immediately became a bustling, busy palace.
16:01And it really is and was Henry VIII Wonderland.
16:05It's Henry VIII Disneyland, because everything is about Henry VIII there.
16:08It's a big palace all about him.
16:11And within six months, major rebuilding of Hampton Court had started.
16:15Essentially, because Henry VIII had this gigantic court.
16:19So one of the first things Henry did was to start expanding the kitchens.
16:24Because those thousand people in his court have to be fed.
16:27Henry's kitchens were the largest in England and employed 200 cooks who had to produce over 800 meals every day.
16:37For more than 200 years, different kings and queens dined on food prepared in England.
16:44Right up until 1737.
16:48Still in working condition today, the 36,000 square foot kitchens are managed by Richard Fitch.
16:57You can see these arched entrances.
17:00Two on this side.
17:01One on the other side of the building.
17:03And then three further fireplaces as we would move down through towards the end.
17:09Each one of the large fireplaces has the capacity to roast enough meat for 400 people in.
17:14So it gives you an indication of this excess capacity that's built into the space for working.
17:20And if we look right the way up to the top, it's about 11 meters all the way up to the apex of the roof.
17:25It's part of the air conditioning to try and move the heat from this ground level, where it would be really unpleasant to work,
17:31and try and shift it out through the roof out into the rest of the world.
17:361.3 million logs per year would have been used in the kitchen's ovens.
17:42The fires here would have been burning almost constantly to cook for the 1,000 courtiers who worked for the king.
17:50So the king at the top gets two 14-dish courses per meal.
17:57The people right at the very bottom get one course that contains two selections of beef, some bread, and some beer.
18:04But it's still more than normal people in the rest of the Tudor world would be getting.
18:09The whole point of the meal isn't sustenance.
18:12It's to show the power of the monarch and the value that he puts on his staff.
18:17This was a busy, hard-drinking, hard-eating, hard-working palace.
18:22And if you were a Tudor of influence and power, that's where you wanted to be.
18:28You wanted to be at Hampton Court.
18:30Work continued throughout the palace as Henry turned Hampton Court into one of the most magnificent royal residences in Europe.
18:40But by 1536, it became clear that Queen Anne Boleyn would not live to see the renovations.
18:49Even before Henry had married Anne Boleyn, he started rebuilding the apartments here for her so that they would be ready for when she was his wife and she could live in splendor.
19:00Well, in fact, poor old Anne didn't quite live to see their completion.
19:05She's known as Anne of a Thousand Days. She was queen for less than three years.
19:09And then she went to the block, the first of Henry's wives to be executed.
19:15Found guilty of adultery, incest and treason, Anne was beheaded at the Tower of London on the 19th of May, 1536.
19:28But her memory lives on at Hampton Court.
19:32One of the things I love most about the Great Hall is that you see the personalities come through.
19:38It's not just about the grand architecture and the great events.
19:42And probably my favourite feature in the whole of the Great Hall is something you could easily miss.
19:48It's in that central panel there. In the top right-hand corner, you might just make out an intertwined H and A.
19:57Now that stands for Henry, Henry VIII, and Anne, Anne Boleyn, his second wife.
20:03That shouldn't be there at all because Henry always decorated his palaces to reflect the latest wife.
20:11But once she'd gone, her initials were replaced with the new wife.
20:15But obviously, his overworked carpenters managed to miss one.
20:20The day after the execution of Anne Boleyn, Henry married for a third time.
20:26But the new queen's apartments remained incomplete.
20:30So he does start the new apartments for Anne Boleyn, but it takes such a while to complete them.
20:35By the time they are finished, she's lost her head.
20:38And they are taken over by his next queen, Jane Seymour.
20:42And this is where Edward VI is born.
20:44Henry had been desperate for a male heir since his first marriage in 1509.
20:50And now, 28 years later, his dynasty was finally secured.
20:59You might imagine Henry VIII rides over here when he hears the news.
21:02He is transported with joy.
21:05At last he has a son.
21:07But that joy soon turns to grief.
21:10Because Jane Seymour has contracted an infection after the birth.
21:15And she dies just a few days later.
21:18Henry was devastated.
21:21The woman who had finally bestowed a son upon him was gone.
21:26The grieving king became increasingly paranoid and wary of those around him.
21:32A rather hidden feature of the great hall, you really have to look carefully for them, are up in the ceiling.
21:42Tiny little faces peering down at us from the eaves.
21:47And they are eavesdroppers.
21:49That's where the word comes from.
21:51These little faces were to remind the courtiers sitting below that everything they said was heard by the king.
22:02Throughout his life, Henry continued to improve Hampton Court, adding an astronomical clock in 1540.
22:11Designed by Bavarian mathematician Nicholas Kratzer and built by clockmaker Nicholas Orsian,
22:18it is over nine feet in diameter and overlooks the inner court at Hampton.
22:23This clock is also a technological marvel.
22:28This is your iPhone of the 16th century.
22:30Not only is it telling you the minute, the hour, the day, the day since the start of the year, the sign of the zodiac.
22:37It's also giving you crucial information, just like you might get on your app today, which is the high tide at the Thames.
22:44So if you're traveling between royal palaces in the 16th century, as Henry did frequently, one of the crucial things you need to know is the tides,
22:53because the Thames at this stage isn't embanked.
22:55It's actually very dangerous in places.
22:57There are rapids.
22:58There's very fast moving water.
23:00And so if you're going to leave here and arrive safely in Whitehall, you need to know the time of the Thames and this clock tells you that.
23:09Henry VIII married six times during his 38 years on the English throne, and he will forever be linked to Hampton Court.
23:18Henry died in January 1547, and it was rather a sad ending to what had been a glorious reign.
23:27By then, Henry was plagued by ill health, by an ulcerated leg caused by an old jousting injury.
23:36He had gained a colossal amount of weight.
23:39He was such a far cry from the Adonis that he was described as being when he first came to the throne.
23:48After Henry died, Hampton Court passed to his son, Edward VI.
23:52But Edward VI didn't use the court an awful lot.
23:56He tended to be in London rather more because he was much more focused on the religious reformation,
24:03and he was less interested in hunting, in feasting.
24:06He was a much more serious boy king.
24:09So Hampton Court, to a degree, fell into a little bit of a quiet period, I think we might say, under Edward VI.
24:17Henry VIII's son, Edward VI, spent much of his short life establishing the Church of England.
24:24But after six years as king, the lack of an heir caused a major problem.
24:30King Edward dies of tuberculosis at the age of 15.
24:34He tries to fix the succession in favor of his Protestant cousin, Jane Grey, before he dies.
24:42It's a rather badly thought out and certainly a badly executed plan.
24:48And the upshot is that the crown passes very quickly instead not to his Protestant cousin,
24:54but to his Catholic sister, who becomes Queen Mary, Queen Mary I,
24:58who rapidly undoes everything that her father and brother had done, restores Catholic obedience.
25:06And she then enforces that vigorously.
25:09Something like 300 people are executed for their refusal to conform to her new settlement.
25:15The new Catholic queen needed an heir to her throne if she was going to keep her Protestant sister Elizabeth from succeeding her.
25:25The most tragic thing about Mary is something that was played out here at Hampton Court,
25:31and that was her desperation to have a child.
25:36She believed herself very soon in her marriage to be pregnant,
25:39and she displayed the signs of that.
25:41Her stomach started to swell.
25:43She was nauseous.
25:45She came here for the birth, when by then she thought she was in her eighth month.
25:50And in fact, it turned out to be nothing more than a phantom pregnancy.
25:55So poor Mary was eventually forced to admit that it had all been for nothing.
26:02So this tragedy was not only a personal tragedy for Mary, the phantom pregnancy.
26:07Also, it was very painful for her because if she didn't have a child,
26:10then Elizabeth, the Protestant, would take the throne,
26:13and all Mary's Catholic hard work of Reformation would be undone.
26:17In November 1558, the inevitable occurred.
26:24Mary dies after being queen for just five years.
26:28And somewhat against her will, she's obliged to leave her throne to her half-sister Elizabeth.
26:34But everybody else rejoices at Elizabeth's accession.
26:38She's much more popular than her elder sister.
26:42She looks every inch the Tudor princess with her flame-red hair.
26:47And she has that same charisma that her father, Henry VIII, had enjoyed.
26:52Elizabeth I, daughter of Anne Boleyn, was Queen of England for almost 45 years,
26:59but rarely visited her father's palace.
27:02It wasn't until the turn of the 17th century that Hampton Court came back to life.
27:09With the death of Elizabeth in 1603, the Tudor dynasty also died out.
27:15She was, of course, the virgin queen.
27:17She had no children.
27:18So the throne passed the closest relative, James VI of Scotland, James Stuart.
27:24It's the beginning of the Stuart era here in England.
27:28And it was very clear from the start that James was of a very different mould to his Tudor predecessors.
27:35There were masks, plays, entertainments, often descended into drunkenness and debauchery.
27:42So it was quite shocking after the Tudor courts.
27:45But one of the most famous entertainments here in the Great Hall was a performance by none other than Shakespeare and the King's Men, the players of his troupe.
27:57And they performed various plays in the Great Hall, including Macbeth in 1604 or thereabouts.
28:06And it's just amazing to imagine the halls thronged with courtiers, Shakespeare himself performing right here where I'm standing in front of the new king.
28:17After a 22-year reign, James I died in 1625.
28:24His successor at Hampton Court was his son, Charles.
28:29Things soon went very wrong for Charles I.
28:32His relationship with Parliament was very fractious, in the end culminating in civil war.
28:41And having been here as a king, Charles I ended up here as a captive, a prisoner of Oliver Cromwell and the parliamentarians.
28:53After the Civil War, Oliver Cromwell became Lord Protector of the Commonwealth.
28:58But despite his part in crushing the monarchy, Cromwell very much played the role of king at Hampton Court Palace.
29:08Although playing a very bloody part in the Civil War, Oliver Cromwell can actually be seen as a saviour of Hampton Court Palace.
29:16So at the time that Parliament takes over the palace, their first plan is to knock it all down and sell it off as scrap.
29:23Very luckily, Oliver Cromwell has visited the palace, he's visited Charles as he was a prisoner here, and he really likes it.
29:30So eventually a deal is worked out between him and Parliament and a sort of trade happens with one of Cromwell's properties being traded
29:37and he takes control and sort of ownership of Hampton Court and starts using the palace as his family retreat, his sort of weekend country pad.
29:47In 1660, the restoration of the monarchy saw Charles II crowned King of England.
29:54But his hedonistic lifestyle at Hampton Court eventually led to another threat to his Protestant country.
30:00Charles II has no legitimate children, he has plenty of illegitimate children, but none who are able to succeed him.
30:07So his heir is his brother, James the Duke of York.
30:12And James in the 1670s converts openly to Catholicism.
30:18So suddenly Protestant England is faced again with the existential threat of a Catholic succeeding to the English throne.
30:29And so finally, when Charles dies in 1685, the crown does indeed pass to his brother, who becomes King James II,
30:38and England once again has a Catholic monarch.
30:43Once his son is born in 1688, then the possibility arises that this won't simply be a short-lived Catholic interlude that will die with him,
30:55but will instead be a permanent Catholic dynasty.
30:59And that more than anything else is what precipitates the plotters and grumblers to mobilize a couple of Stuart relatives.
31:10The King's sister, Mary, and her husband, William of Orange, the stadtholder of the Dutch Republic, who's half English.
31:18In what has since been dubbed the glorious revolution, William and Mary took the throne in 1689.
31:28The new monarchs enjoyed the country air at Hampton Court and had plans to renovate the 170-year-old palace.
31:38William and Mary had incredibly ambitious plans for Hampton Court.
31:43They commissioned their favorite architect, Sir Christopher Wren, to get to work.
31:47And his original design envisaged destroying the entire Tudor Palace, keeping only the Great Hall as some kind of relic to be used still for entertainments.
31:59Luckily for us, as a 21st century audience, but not so much the people of Europe at the time, William is spending most of his money fighting people,
32:09and so doesn't have the funds to support Wren's grand plan.
32:13The plan is boiled down into one large courtyard in Fountain Court, and also some clever architectural tricks,
32:19like this colonnade used to disguise the fact that most of the palace is still a couple of hundred years old.
32:27This colonnade is one of the finest expressions of that English Baroque style.
32:32So now as you approach Hampton Court, on the west front it looks like you're entering a Tudor Palace,
32:38on the east front it looks like a Baroque one.
32:42The new look palace was inspired by a design that was popular across all of Europe.
32:47What we now call the Baroque style, which they wouldn't have used that word at the time of William and Mary,
32:53it was the sort of classical architecture.
32:55Its roots are really in Italy, and more importantly that its roots are in ancient Rome.
32:59And they were looking to the architects of Italy, who got their inspiration from the ruins of ancient Rome,
33:05and archaeological digs that were happening at the early 17th century,
33:09and books were being circulated around Europe about this style.
33:12Wren used an ingenious way of building the new wing.
33:15Wren produced a structure which had never been seen before.
33:20It's one where the roof trusses, which span over a long distance,
33:24are then used to support lots of rooms in the floor below.
33:27And to support those small rooms, he had iron rods coming down from the roof trusses, suspending the floors.
33:36This would be completely impossible in any other material.
33:39And it was complete innovation, which is never copied.
33:42In fact, only rediscovered in the 20th century, when a fire burnt out those rooms and the rods were revealed.
33:49The Baroque style was a very self-confident style of architecture.
33:53A very magnificent, highly decorative kind of design.
33:59And it really helped to express the national identity of Great Britain at this time.
34:06William and Mary were the new hope of the nation.
34:09And that was played out in this very grand style of architecture that they loved so much.
34:17But in December 1694, the 32-year-old queen succumbed to smallpox.
34:24Very sadly, Mary dies before she really gets to enjoy the palace.
34:29So the main structure is built, but by the time of her death, none of the interiors have been fitted out.
34:35They haven't even spent a single night here.
34:37And she doesn't really get to see the end of the project that she's really been driving forward.
34:45The 66-acre gardens at Hampton Court are a testament to William and Mary's passion for the palace.
34:54Terry Gough is the member of a very historic and exclusive group.
35:00Well, there's around 17 head gardeners.
35:03And I have a board by my office with all their names on it.
35:06Mine's the last one.
35:08What that tells me is that really I'm standing on the shoulders of giants.
35:12And that a job like this is a contribution of many people's efforts over many, many years.
35:19Garden designer George London and his apprentice, Henry Wise,
35:22were in charge of the grounds at Hampton Court at the turn of the 18th century.
35:28We were actually in the restored King William III's privy garden.
35:33And privy garden meant private garden.
35:35And there is a very interesting story.
35:37When the gardeners of the time, George London and Henry Wise, finished this garden,
35:41they were standing on the first floor of the king's apartments with the king, all excited because the garden was finished.
35:48And the king is said to have said, I cannot see the river.
35:52And that resulted in poor old George London and Henry Wise having to lower this end of the garden by eight feet.
36:00In the days when it was all handwork with wheelbarrows, no JCBs or mechanical aids in those days.
36:07But William III didn't get to enjoy the view for long.
36:11He died in 1702, almost eight years after his wife Mary.
36:16So this probably would have been one of the last things that William III saw before he died.
36:24He actually died in a home park or the house park, which adjoins the gardens here.
36:29He was hunting and he fell off his horse.
36:31His horse was called Sorrel.
36:33And he broke his collarbone and he died of those complications.
36:37When he and Mary don't have children, then the crown passes to the last of Charles I's children, Queen Anne.
36:48She has a great many children, all of whom predecease her.
36:51When she dies childless, then they've run out of stewards apart from James II's Catholic family in exile.
36:59But rather than go to those legitimate English rulers who are Catholics,
37:04England's political establishment turns to a German royal family,
37:09the descendants of James I's daughter Elizabeth.
37:15So when King George I is brought over, the decision at that stage has been made that they would rather have a German king who speaks no English
37:26than risk bringing in a Catholic.
37:29And the act of settlement that's passed in 1701, which is still in force,
37:32precludes any Roman Catholic from holding the English throne.
37:39The new Royal House of Hanover used Hampton Court as a place to relax.
37:44King George II made changes to the palace that were inspired by the Tudors some 200 years previously.
37:51So our architectural journey now takes us to a building that on the face of it, you might be forgiven for thinking is original Tudor, but is in fact a 1730s building.
38:03And this is the Cumberland range, a range built by William Kent, a very famous, very fashionable 18th century architect for the Duke of Cumberland, who is George II's favourite son.
38:13What George II creates for him here at Hampton Court is one of the first neo-Gothic buildings in the country.
38:22The Cumberland range would be the final amendment to Hampton Court.
38:26Hampton Court suited those who preferred the quiet life and the cleaner air, but not all monarchs did.
38:33They often liked to be more central, closer to the heart of power.
38:38So Hampton Court, I'm afraid, simply fell out of fashion.
38:41George III then makes the decision to stop bringing the court to Hampton Court.
38:46So in 1737, the doors are closed, the state apartments are locked up, and the court is a formal body, so the king being in residence here, never happens again after that point.
38:57Although George III never stepped foot in the palace, he did commission the Great Vine.
39:13This is the famous Hampton Court Great Vine that was planted in 1768 by Lancelot Capability Brown, the great gardener of that period.
39:23And here it is, 251 years later, it's still embellishing this wonderful greenhouse.
39:31This is a huge vine, and it all derives from that very old gnarled stem in the corner, which is a girth of 3.8 metres.
39:42And the longest rod, we call these branches rods when we're referring to grapes, is a staggering 33 metres long.
39:50So that makes it the largest grapevine in the world.
39:59Almost exactly 100 years after George III had abandoned Hampton Court Palace, Britain's newest monarch found a use for it.
40:08Queen Victoria opened the doors of Hampton Court to the nation in 1838, just a year after becoming Queen.
40:15Well, there was huge interest and visitor numbers rose at a staggering rate.
40:24In the first few years alone, Hampton Court received no fewer than 10 million visitors.
40:30It became the number one tourist attraction.
40:35So really, Victoria begins this idea of going out to a beautiful palace at the weekend, and the Victorians were absolutely thrilled.
40:43They loved the idea that they could walk round this incredible place where so many kings, so many queens had lived, so much history took place.
40:51One of the star attractions at Hampton was the maze that dates back to the time of William and Mary.
41:01So this is the famous Hampton Court maze, which is the oldest hedge-planted maze in the world.
41:08It was actually planted in 1690 by the famous gardeners George London and Henry Wise.
41:14Designing a maze might seem difficult, but actually it's relatively straightforward.
41:19You start off with a drawing of the maze, and then one has to lay it out on the ground with pegs and string,
41:26exactly as one would lay out the foundations of a building.
41:29And then, of course, one has to plant the hedges, and then one has to wait.
41:34It wasn't a symbolic maze. It was a maze designed for entertainment.
41:38And the entertainment was you found your way to the center, or the goal of the maze, and then you navigated your way out again.
41:46So let's have a wander through now, and let's go straight to the goal of the maze.
41:55The trapezoid-shaped maze covers half an acre with a total path length of over two and a half thousand feet.
42:02It takes, on average, twenty minutes to navigate to the center.
42:09Conquering this labyrinth is no mean feat.
42:13And here we are, the goal or the center of the maze.
42:17I think that element of getting lost and finding your way out and navigating your way around this great puzzle maze
42:25is as popular today as it was three hundred years ago.
42:29So that element has, I think, stood the test of time really, really well.
42:39The palace and its grounds remain open to the public and attract over a million visitors every year.
42:46Each one hoping to learn more about the beauty and intrigue of Henry VIII's magnificent home.
42:53You can step through the front door and be in the 16th century, be in Henry's world.
42:58And by the time you're exiting into the gardens, you're in the 18th century with William and Mary looking at an incredible Baroque landscape.
43:06And we can take you on that journey through the palace, connecting to these crucial moments in British history.
43:12And that's what really creates the magic for me.
43:14So many of our great Tudor palaces, Tudor aristocratic homes, they've all been lost.
43:21And Henry VIII survives, Hampton Court survives and gives us such an incredible insight into Henry VIII, the man and the monarch.
43:29As a Tudor historian, you don't get any better than this.
43:34It's the greatest surviving Tudor palace in the world.
43:38But it's the atmosphere that makes it so special.
43:41You really do feel like you're stepping back into centuries of history.
43:46You really do feel like you're stepping back into centuries of history.
43:47You really do feel like you're stepping back into centuries of history.
44:16There's aلقي block of the diluous There's a sign of intertwined sacred operands, which are just everything you do for events.
44:17By the time you're standing there, stop while travelling through those s mistakes.
44:18You really do feel like you're getting another newérer of a car to so much.
44:19There's an07 going separated by earth.
44:20You really do feel like you're stepping back into Streethouse or something you do.
44:21Where did that mark