Charles I., during the earlier years of his reign, often lived there. There occurred the quarrel as to the Queen's French suite, and thence it was that the King finally despatched the "monsers," as he called them. There, as in his other palaces, he amassed his splendid collection of pictures. In 1639 he had over three hundred pictures there, not least the "Triumph" of Mantegna and the cartoons of Raffaelle.
The chief political figures of the reign can be seen by the State Papers to have been often with the King at Hampton. It was there that Laud, then Bishop of Bath and Wells, was made Dean of the Chapel Royal, and there that he made the protest on behalf of an orderly attendance of the King at divine service. "The most religious King not only assented, but also gave me thanks," as he writes in his diary. More than ten years later, it was he who dissuaded Charles from making a great forest between Hampton Court and Richmond, which would have dispossessed many gentle and poor folk. Buckingham, whose portrait, and that of his family, is still in the Palace, Henry Carey, Lord Falkland, whose portrait is also there, and many others, have still some memorial at Hampton Court.
One memorable work did Charles himself: he gave a new and sweet water-supply by the "New" or "Longford" river. Political troubles found the King in his Thames-side Palace. It was there that the Grand Remonstrance was presented, and his leaving the Palace in December 1641 for Whitehall was a
