2/13/12

Happy Monday!!! So this day was awesome!!! We went to Hampton Court!!! If you don't know what this is, don't worry I didn't know until we had class in the morning with Andrew. This is the house of Henry VIII. Well it didn't start as his house. Thomas Wolsey actually built it, and he worked for Henry but he also worked for the Catholic Church, eventually becoming Cardinal Wolsey and the main guy working between the King and the Pope. If you know your history you will know why this is bad for Wolsey since King Henry VIII and the Pope didn't see eye to eye on a few matters, such as the divorce he wanted to get from his wife, Catherine of Aragon, since she didn't seem to be able to pop out a boy who could rule after Henry died. [Though something you may not know is that she did give birth to a few boys by Henry, they just died at very young ages.] So Henry decided if his church wouldn't do what he wanted he would make his own church, and since Wolsey had sided with the Pope on this key issue Henry got angry and took away this big beautiful house he had built.

This building is so much different from the others we have been looking at that have been used for political matters. As you can see it was made of brick and had a lot of windows. Great for making a place look good but bad if some of your enemies get a little ticked at you and decided to hurl a cannon ball your way. Luckily this particular palace has never been under too terrible of attack and was created basically for beauty and well as you will see in other pictures, showing off!!

Just like when that cool old guy built Jurassic Park, when it came to the building of this house, he spared no expense! The best of everything was used and fancy designs were put in everywhere. Even the brick was made fantastic by using different colored bricks to make a patter in the wall...

You can see (behind the stupid tree that was in my way) that there is a nice box pattern on the bricks, which looks like it could be an addition over the brick but is actually made from using black bricks along with the others to create this design. So to go through every room that we saw and describe everything would take a very long time, so here is a few of the pictures of pretty stuff I saw.

The Great Hall where Henry VIII would have his big fancy banquets

Some of the tapestries Henry had made to impress his guests and show off his wealth

A display of guns in the armory room of Hampton Court

Yup those are all guns. Pretty cool I think.

One of the rooms used for political meetings

Pretty chandeliers

Haha, yea that's what you think it is, Henry's toilet. He actually had a man working for him whose job was to assist him while he used the bathroom.

Henry's bed

One of the beautiful gardens around the court

This one is so sad. This is a list of the children Henry had with his first wife and what happened to them. Only one survived, a daughter who would become Mary I (aka Bloody Mary)

Decoration put in by Molsey to give the place a classical style influenced by the Renaissance

This part of the Court obviously is not made out of brick and was actually put in later in the 17th century after the rule of the Tudors

Hampton Court was amazing and beautiful and I learned so much from being there!! We spent a few hours there and then headed home to relax and the upstairs family all had dinner together, this time it was hamburgers sponsored by Alex, who it turns out has never cooked before, but no worries, with the help of every girl here who does know how to cook, he will be making some more complex dishes in no time. Until then, the hamburgers were pretty darn good. The night finished with me putting off my blog once again to relax and waste time online. Oops.