HAMPTON COURT PALACE

 

Hampton Court is a Tudor palace, magnificently developed by Cardinal Wolsey and later Henry VIII, alongside a baroque palace built by William III and Mary II.  Today, as well as a major tourist attraction, it also houses 'grace & favour' apartments for retired Royal staff. The grounds are magnificent and include a maze.

Entry is through this magnificent gatehouse into a great courtyard. The palace is huge, and the gardens immense. It really would take too long to fit it all in in a day, so it's best to work out which are your 'must sees'. Mind, they do give you a free map when you arrive!

The base courtyard is where the royal courtiers and guests were accommodated. There were around 1,000 people at court during Henry's reign, so things got a bit crowded!

These have been converted into 'grace and favour' apartments, so are not open to  the public.

The 16th. century astronomical clock 

Henry VIII took possession of the palace in the 1520s, from Thomas Wolsey, his then Lord Chancellor. Henry much enlarged the palace during his reign. However, little was done in the century or so between his death and1689, when William III and Mary II hired Christopher Wren to transform the palace into an alternative to the disliked Whitehall Palace.

Much of the Tudor Royal apartments were pulled down, to be replaced by State Apartments based around the new Fountain Court.

Hampton Court, obviously, has been home to many notable people, but this is the story of one who has skipped through most folks' nets - Princess Sophia Duleep Singh.

The daughter of a deposed Maharaja, she stood outside the gates of Hampton Court Palace, selling copies of The Suffragette to passers-by.

She lived as a palace insider, in a grace-and-favour house on the Hampton Court estate given to her by her godmother, Queen Victoria. And yet there she is — outside the gates, campaigning for change. Sophia's campaigning attracted the attention of both the press and the government.

These days, Sophia tends to pop up quite a lot in cheerful, sanitised ‘go-girl’ accounts of the suffrage movement. In short, she’s the Indian princess who wanted votes for women. But her story is much less tidy than that.

She was a daughter of Maharaja Duleep Singh, whose kingdom in the Punjab was annexed by the East India Company in 1849, and who was forced to surrender the Koh-i-Noor diamond. He was brought to England, installed at Elveden Hall in Suffolk, and remade — at least on the surface — into an English gentleman.

Sophia grew up moving easily through English high society. And yet she wasn’t satisfied with what she found. Becoming a Suffragette, she found herself at the violent ‘Black Friday’ protest in 1910. Along with her sisters Catherine and Bamba, Sophia inherited a rich but complex heritage from both sides of her family. When she travelled to India, the contrast between the different worlds she inhabited became sharper still, and she never entirely knew where she belonged.

Sophia's philanthropy extended far beyond women's rights, and she supported many individuals and causes, particularly those affecting Indians wherever she encountered them.