Page:Hutton, William Holden - Hampton Court (1897).djvu/218

142 the chapel from that of his great minister, but it is at least clear that the situation, general design, and proportions were Wolsey's, and that the King, here as elsewhere, showed very little originality in his work.

One of the most interesting features of the chapel is the large royal pew, which forms the west gallery, and closely resembles the pew found in so many domestic chapels of great houses. It is approached through the "haunted gallery," down which it is said that Catherine Howard's ghost still wanders, trying to intercept the King as he goes to the devotions which had so small an effect on his life.

Henry VIII. put painted glass in all the windows, and then or later a picture of the Crucifixion was hung over the high altar.

The chapel, owing to a recent restoration which has opened several of the Perpendicular windows, long disguised by a semi-classical barbarism, now resembles in some measure what it was when Henry VIII. had completed the roof. The fan tracery, with long pendants gorgeously decorated with angels, and gilded bosses, makes one of the most splendid Tudor roofs still in existence. Evelyn in 1662 speaks of it as "excellently fretted and gilt." Restoration here, too, has been at work, and the figures that support the corbels on the walls are evidently of Wren's design. But the general effect is that of a not unharmonious blending of late Tudor gorgeousness with the solid comfort in pews, and pillars, and panels of the age of Wren and his followers.