When Henry VIII took Hampton Court from Cardinal Wolsey (formally presented in 1525, seized outright after Wolsey's fall in 1529–30), he inherited a palace already built for entertaining royalty—but he set about making it his own. The Council Chamber was one of the first rooms Henry built, constructed between 1528 and 1530, and the Great Hall followed in 1532. The apartments were arranged along the Tudor processional principle: a sequence of rooms through which courtiers advanced according to their rank and favour, from the public splendour of the Great Hall through the Watching Chamber, Presence Chamber, and Privy Chambers, toward the king's most private lodgings. Power was expressed in architecture itself—only top-ranking guests were admitted to the Watching Chamber, and access at every stage was controlled by the Yeomen of the Guard.
The apartments witnessed the greatest dramas of the reign. In the Queen's side of these rooms, Jane Seymour gave birth to the long-awaited heir, Prince Edward, in 1537—dying days later in the palace. In 1541, Catherine Howard, the king's fifth wife, discovered she was to be charged with adultery", "legend holds that the terrified queen broke free from her guards and ran along the processional route toward the Chapel Royal, where Henry was at prayer, screaming for mercy—she never reached him, and was executed at the Tower of London in 1542. Her ghost is said to run the Haunted Gallery still. In the Chapel Royal at the end of the route, Henry married his sixth and final wife, Kateryn Parr, in 1543", "in the Council Chamber, the king met his Privy Council and transacted the serious business of monarchy.
After Henry's death, the State Apartments remained in ceremonial use—Elizabeth I gave thanks in the Chapel after the Armada (1588), Shakespeare's King's Men performed in the Great Hall for James I, and the Hampton Court Conference of 1604 (commissioning the King James Bible) was held in these rooms. Tragically for historians, when William III and Mary II commissioned Sir Christopher Wren to rebuild the palace in the 1680s, Henry's Presence Chamber, Privy Chambers, bedrooms, and Secret Lodgings were altered or demolished—the once-magnificent Presence Chamber survives today reduced to a back room, and only fragments like the Wolsey Closet preserve his privy apartments. Yet what remains—the Great Hall, Great Watching Chamber, Council Chamber, Processional Route, Haunted Gallery, and Royal Pew—makes Henry VIII's Apartments the most complete surviving Tudor state apartment sequence in England, re-presented for the 500th anniversary of Henry's accession in 2009 and today furnished to help visitors understand what it was like to live at Henry's palace.
