Page:Hutton, William Holden - Hampton Court (1897).djvu/136

80 nearly all the rest of his life was passed. It was in the great hall that he would sit for hours listening to Milton as he played the organ which had been brought from Magdalen College at Oxford. It was in the chapel that his daughter Mary was married to Lord Falconberg. It was in this house that his daughter Elizabeth died. It was there that his own fatal sickness began. After his death it was again nearly being sold. Just before the Restoration it was voted to Monk, and Charles II., when he resumed the crown-lands, made him Ranger and Steward of the Honour.

VII With Charles's return the Palace became once more one of the most constant resorts of the English monarchy. Charles himself was fond of the place. It was there he spent his honeymoon with Catherine of Braganza. But he had other and much more congenial reasons for being happy there. Whatever his reasons, he made Hampton Court as much a home as any of his predecessors.

He rearranged the gardens; he redecorated and refurnished the Palace. But most of all was he interested in the tennis-court. "The King," said a newsletter in the beginning of 1681, "is in very good health, and goes to Hampton Court often, and back again the same day, but very private. Most of his exercise is in the tennis-court in the morning,