Lucy Worsley's Royal Palace Secrets

(regal music) Henry's improvements didn't end with the kitchens. And for much of his reign, Hampton Court was a building site. The King treated it as a fabulous stage set, but he changed the scenery as often as he changed his wives. When Henry took over the palace, he was still married to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Catherine of Aragon was known for wearing the gable hood with its pointed gable like the gable of a house. And her personal badge, was the pomegranate. And here is one of Catherine's personal pomegranates carved into the stone archway. It's one of the few traces of Henry's first wife to survive at Hampton Court. Now the tragic irony is, that Catherine's pomegranate was the ancient symbol of fertility. All those little seeds inside it. But it was her infertility, in the sense that she wasn't able to bear Henry the son he wanted, that in 1533 meant that he divorced her. After that, like Catherine herself, the gable hoods and the pomegranates were banished from court. In 1533, Henry married his second wife, the doomed Anne Boleyn. In the same year, he started work on Hampton Court's spectacular Great Hall. Now Anne Boleyn by contrast, she wore the glamorous French Hood. It's quite sexy, it shows a bit more hair. And her badge was the aggressive falcon. (growls) Now there was once a time when if you'd have come into this room, you would have found Ann's falcons and the letter A and H for Henry intertwined all over the place. But when Henry and Anne's relationship soured, he had all of these symbols taken down. Up here in the paneling, you'll see some strangely blank areas. The Workman who had to do this job of removing Anne's symbols had to do it so quickly under such pressure that the accounts tell us they were eligible to claim overtime. And they did it in such a rush that they made mistakes. If you know the palace really well, you can find an A and an H for Anne and Henry that they missed.