When the great plague of 1665 spread westward in the Metropolis, the ’merry monarch’ and his suite again retired to Hampton Court, where, like Boccaccio’s Florentines under a similar calamity, they sought oblivion of fear in a continual succession of festivities. Persons who are curious on such matters will find an amusing account of those doings in the autobiography of Sir Ralph Esher, edited by Leigh Hunt.
Pepys, it appears, paid frequent visits to Hampton Court, but was, it seems, not always well treated. Thus, on July 23, 1665, he writes: ’To Hampton Court, where I followed the King to chapel and heard a good sermon.... I was not invited any whither to dinner, though a stranger, which did also trouble me; but’ (he adds philosophically) ’I must remember it is a Court.... However, Cutler carried me to Mr. Marriott’s, the housekeeper, and there we had a very good dinner and good company, among others Lilly, the painter.’ Pepys was easily consoled for the snub the ’quality’ treated him to.
James II. also occasionally visited Hampton Court, but the palace was neglected, and did not actually again become a royal residence till the accession of William III. and Queen Mary. He, as we have already mentioned on a former occasion, made the palace what it now is by pulling down the buildings erected by Henry VIII., and covering the site with the present Fountain Court and the State apartments surrounding it. According to a drawing by Hollar, showing Hampton Court as furnished by Henry VIII., the eastern front was really picturesque, and agreed perfectly with the architectural features of Wolsey’s building. Still, according to the notions of the seventeenth century, the apartments were not suitable for a royal residence, especially as William intended to make it a permanent and not a merely temporary one. Moreover, the King took a personal pleasure in building and planting and decorating his residence. He determined to create another Loo on the banks of the Thames. A wide extent of ground was laid out in formal walks and parterres; limes, thirty years old, were transplanted from neighbouring woods to make shady alleys. The new court rose under the direction of Wren, and with it the grand eastern and southern fronts. It is said that the King once entertained the idea of erecting an entirely new palace at the west end of the town of Hampton on an elevation distant about half a mile from the river Thames, but the design was abandoned from a consideration of the length of time necessary for such an undertaking. Horace Walpole informs us that Sir Christopher Wren submitted another design for the alterations of the ancient palace in a better taste, which Queen Mary wished to have executed; but she was overruled. The same authority says: ’This palace of King William seems erected in emulation of what is intended to imitate the pompous edifices of the French monarch.’