Page:Hutton, William Holden - Hampton Court (1897).djvu/108

56 looking on the park and gardens, lay the Queen's lodgings, her long gallery, her private rooms, her bed-chamber. On Friday, October 12, 1537, Edward, Prince of Wales, was born. One of the fascinating riddles which still employ the leisure of the residents in the Palace, which perplex antiquaries, and set up all the bitterness of party division between Dryasdusts and Croftangrys, is to find the room in which the little prince first saw the light. Was he born in the Queen's lodgings, far from the noise of the road and by the quiet garden? or was it in the inner court,—the "fountain court," as it is now,—in those rooms, so handsome, and now so greatly changed from what they were in Henry's days, that are high up in the south-west corner, and adjoin the' rooms of Wolsey that looked upon the pond-garden? Or are they those quaint, delightful chambers, with their different levels, their beautiful windows, and the old panels here and there as Wolsey left them, that you mount to by the Clock-tower, and that hear all the clamours of the reverberating hours? Poor Queen Jane must have suffered greatly if it was among these noises that her child was born; and perhaps, too, such a beginning might have accounted for the callousness of the boy-king's unattractive character. The surmise is natural but unfounded. The clock was not set up till 1540.

On the 15th of October 1537 the boy was christened in the chapel, which the King had just finished. On the 24th the Queen died.