[Illustration: A CORNER OF WOLSEY'S KITCHEN]
When the monarch came into full possession of Hampton Court he soon converted the lease into freehold by arrangements with the Knights Hospitaller, and at once set about having it made yet more magnificent than before. Among his improvements was the erection of the Great Hall--one of the finest buildings of the kind belonging to the Tudor period that remain to us; he rebuilt, or at any rate considerably altered, the Chapel, and made many other changes in the Palace. His additions and alterations may sometimes be recognized by the working of his monogram and those of his wives into the decoration, as in the roof of Anne Boleyn's Gateway, where that unhappy lady's initial is to be seen. For though this roof is a modern restoration, it is a restoration believed to be in accordance with the original design. Such evidence is not therefore always conclusive, for sometimes the monograms are not contemporary records--as in the windows of the Great Hall where the stained glass, full of such personal allusions, is all modern, having been put in between sixty and seventy years ago. Those responsible for the replacing, after a long interval, of the glass that had been destroyed when all concerning royalty was out of favour, worked in monograms and devices in a way that misleads many visitors, some of whom seeing "H" and "J" in the glass, too rashly assume that it dates from the time when Jane Seymour was the much married monarch's queen.
When Anne Boleyn's ambition was gratified and she was made Henry's second queen--vice Katherine of Arragon, divorced--Hampton Court became for a time a scene of royal revelling. It was not so for long, however, for already the King's passion was cooling. It was at Hampton Court that King Henry's hopes of a son and heir were disappointed for the third time, when, early in 1536, Anne there gave birth to a still-born child. In the following May the unhappy Queen's brief triumph was brought to a tragic close by the sword of the executioner on Tower Hill, and on the very next day King Henry was formally betrothed to Jane Seymour. In October of the following year Queen Jane gave birth in this Palace, presumably in that part of the buildings demolished more than a century and a half later, to a son who afterwards became King Edward the Sixth. The arrival of a male heir was no doubt a matter of great gratification to King Henry, and served to lessen any sorrow that his easily salved affections might otherwise have felt from the fact that the Queen only survived the child's birth but a brief while. When he was but three days old the infant prince was christened here in great state. The Princess Mary held her tiny brother, twenty years her junior, during the ceremony at the solid silver font, while the child Princess Elizabeth, herself carried, bore the chrysm. Nine days after the christening of her son Queen Jane died.