Professor Kerry McCarthy, a visitor from the New World, witnessed events at Hampton Court Palace when Cardinal Wolsey hosted the royal and imperial courts.
On Sunday 22 June 2025, the Henry on Tour project concluded its three-year series of major public events with a procession and service of Vespers in the Chapel Royal at Hampton Court Palace. This was an experimental re-imagining of one afternoon in the lives of King Henry VIII and Emperor Charles V, in June 1522, during their exceptionally grand joint progress around the south of England. They visited Hampton Court as guests of Cardinal Wolsey (who could hardly have imagined how things would unfold in the following decade), together with Queen Katherine, young Princess Mary, and the full royal and imperial entourages. The present-day Gentlemen and Choristers of HM Chapel Royal took the role of the singers of the combined chapels. Four members of His Majesty’s Sackbuts and Cornetts were the trumpeters and ‘phiffers’ who travelled with Charles and Henry.
The modern audience at Hampton Court that day had the chance to experience one of the events of Henry’s great progresses from inside. We did not experience it from the private confines of the king’s closet, or even from within the king’s immediate orbit. We were part of the multitude of courtiers and hangers-on who crowded in, looking for an opportunity to get closer to the centres of power. Skelton described Wolsey’s palace (he was writing just a few months after this memorable event in 1522) as a maelstrom of ‘Sutys and supplycacyons / Embassades of all nacyons’. That atmosphere could be felt as we followed the king and his music through a series of narrow doorways.
As the procession left Clock Court and wound its way through courtyards and corridors, the sound of the Te Deum faded in and out. Trumpet fanfares were heard but rarely seen. Most of the audience got no further than the ante-chapel. The visual magnificence of the combined courts was not always easy to catch from that perspective, but the sonic magnificence was on full display. It was a more dynamic (and frankly much more interesting) experience than listening to Tudor music while sitting passively in a concert venue with good modern sightlines.
This was not a service of Cranmerian brevity and austerity. (It was also not in the style of some early-Tudor singers who galloped through their liturgical duties at top speed, as noted in 1529 by the sceptical interlocutor in Thomas More’s Dyaloge: ‘the matens I tell you be in some placys songen faster than I can say them.’) There was plenty of leisurely Latin psalmody, and a splendid votive antiphon by Fayrfax (O Albane Deo grate, in honour of St Alban’s day on 22 June) that was long even by the standards of its genre. Almost all of the audience seemed to be genuinely rapt by the singing. Something about the event had suddenly gifted us with Tudor attention spans.
For more information on the research that went into recreating the procession and service of Vespers in the Chapel Royal at Hampton Court Palace, see our earlier blog post Hampton Court welcomes Henry VIII and Charles V.
For more information on the background and research leading up to the event at Hampton Court Palace, see our blog post Hampton Court welcomes Henry VIII and Charles V.