I'm Brett Dolman, curator collections for historic Royal Palaces.

I'm also a 16th and 17th century historian and art historian, and today I'm going to be talking about our new permanent exhibition at Hampton Court Palace, the Tudor World in the Walsy Rooms.

While I'm standing in Clock Court at the heart of Hampton Court the Tudor World in the Walsy Rooms.

While I'm standing in Clock Court at the heart of Hampton Court Palace with a view of Henry the 8th's Great Hall, across the other side of the courtyard, hidden behind the later stone

colonnade of the Baroque Palace built for William III and Mary the 2nd, is part of the palace that we're

really excited about opening again, permanently for our visitors, for the first time since 2019.

These are the Walsy rooms, built for Thomas Walsy, who I'm sure everyone listening will know,

was Henry VIII's right-hand man through the early part of his reign,

his chief minister, his friend, an enormously powerful statesman and cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church,

and the owner of Hampton Court in the 1520s, when this place was transformed from a relatively

modest manor house into a palace.

Now not much of Walsy's original residences left.

Henry VIII took over Hampton Corton and rebuilt it, expanded it further into a great royal palace.

And much of Henry's palace was also demolished by the rebuilding and modernisation programmes of later monarchs.

But we do have a set of rooms, Walsy's private apartment, in this rather secret corner of the palace which still survive.

The Walsy rooms themselves are evocative Tudor spaces, but most of their furnishings and furniture have long since disappeared.

So rather than try to recreate them, we have reopened them this year as a home for some of the

most important surviving artworks in the Royal Collection from this early period of Henry VIII's reign.

These are paintings that tell not just Henry and Woolsey's story, but also provide our wonderful gateway into the lives of some of the ordinary men and women who lived and worked here at Hampton Court and enabled the Tudor Court to exist and to flourish.

Well, we really hope that our new exhibition, the Tudor World and the Walsy Rooms, will give everyone a sense of

what the whole world looked like across the entirety of the 1500s, including but going beyond

Wolvesy's brief period in charge. And this is a really fitting time to tell this story, as we

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