A routine maintenance job at Hampton Court palace has uncovered the lost foundations of the splendid royal apartments of two ill-fated queens, Anne Boleyn and Jane Seymour.

Just before Christmas, the squeaky floorboards in one of the Georgian rooms, used by the Royal School of Needlework at the time, had become positively bouncy. When the builders looked under them, they saw a maze of battered Tudor brickwork , realised they had stumbled on something exceptional, and called in the archaeologists.

“It was the best possible Christmas present,” said Dan Jackson, curator of buildings at Hampton Court. “It is really interesting and important evidence for a part of the building of which we know very little.”

Although Hampton Court is riddled with blocked-up doors and windows, secret staircases and corridors that lead nowhere, these foundations had never been recorded before. The evidence of their hasty building and repeated repairs trace tumultuous years in the history of the palace.

The foundations were built in what was once the palace’s moat, the towers and tall windows evidence of the handsome rooms built for Henry’s new favourites.

In the 1530s, the new apartments were built at top speed as regime change approached. The first queen’s apartments at the palace were built by Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, who signed the building contract 500 years ago today, for Catherine of Aragon when she came to visit.

They survive only as one magnificent doorway in what is now a shabby corridor well off the visitor’s route. It now leads to the room where the costumed interpreters who work at the palace change into their Tudor robes, but once opened on to a suite of rooms so magnificent – more splendid than Wolsey’s own – that it contributed to the cardinal’s downfall when Henry VIII coveted his palace and raged at Wolsey’s failure to get the marriage to his first wife annulled. Catherine kept the rooms when Wolsey lost first his palace and then his life in 1530.

Anne had her own rooms at the palace from 1529, but was going to need grand new apartments as queen, since Catherine still wore her shaky crown when they were planned. Jackson said 45 workers were brought in from the surrounding villages to work on the new rooms, before Henry and Anne were married in January 1533 – with the new queen almost certainly already pregnant.

She did not have long to enjoy her fine apartments. Her fate was sealed when she gave birth to a daughter, the future Elizabeth I, in September 1533, and then suffered several miscarriages.



By 1536, the builders were discovering as many flaws in the new building as Henry was in his marriage: the foundations, supporting three tall storeys of Tudor brick and stone, were slumping into the moat. A new inner wall was added to help support an even more imposing new bay window.

Henry married Jane Seymour – formerly a lady in waiting to both Anne and Catherine – in May 1536, 10 days after Anne’s execution. In October 1537, the longed for son was born at last. Within a fortnight Jane was dead, and the motherless boy lived on in the splendid new rooms.



The apartments were eventually flattened in the late 17th century by Christopher Wren when he created a spanking modern baroque palace for William and Mary, and their foundations remained covered until now.

Objects found in the foundations included chicken bones discarded by builders and an early 17th-century clay pipe made in nearby Kingston.



When Hampton Court was abandoned by the royal family by the early 19th century, the rooms became an apartment for one of the pensioners rewarded for royal or state service, and then a work area for the Royal School of Needlework.



New supports are being added to keep the joists off the Tudor bricks and to solve the problem of the squeaky floorboards for good. “It’s taken far longer, and cost a lot more, than originally expected, but it’s been worth it,” Jackson said.



As Hampton Court prepares for a year of special events marking the 500th anniversary, the archaeology is being painstakingly recorded before the rooms are returned to the needlework school. Visitors peering through the window from the gardens should just be able to glimpse the floorboards and imagine what lies beneath.