ueen 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.

The birth of Prince Edward in the Palace seems to have increased King
Henry's liking for his Thames-side pleasaunce, and in 1540 he caused
the Honour of Hampton Court to be created by Act of Parliament--the
Honour including a number of manors on both sides of the Thames. But
the King further showed his liking for the place--and his scant
regard for his subjects--by making it the centre of a Chase, having a
large extent of the land on either side of the river afforested and
enclosed with palings so that, though growing corpulent and unwieldy,
he might yet be able to indulge in his favourite pastime of hunting.

At the end of July, 1540, King Henry quietly married Katherine Howard,
and in August she was openly shown at Hampton Court as his fifth
queen. Little more than a year later and the Palace saw the beginning
of the slow drama which ended with her execution on Tower Hill in
February, 1543; for it was while Henry was at Mass in the chapel here
that Cranmer put into his hands the beginning of the evidence which
was to prove a fatal net for the entangling of Queen Katherine. The
story runs that the Queen sought to have a personal explanation with
King Henry, but he would not see her after once the charges were made,
and when she tried to get to him in the chapel she was borne shrieking
away by the attendants along what is now known as the Haunted Gallery.
There her wraith has since been seen and heard!

The bluff King seems to have been little troubled by his various
pasts, nor to have been worried at all by earlier associations, for in
the summer of 1543 he was married here at Hampton Court, to the last
of his queens, Katherine Parr, in the presence of the daught