Hampton Court Palace plan with grand apartments on a raised piano nobile, all rendered with classical detailing. The historian Jonathan Foyle has suggested that it is likely that Wolsey had been inspired by Paolo Cortese's "De Cardinalatu", a manual for cardinals that included advice on palatial architecture, published in 1510. The architectural historian Sir John Summerson asserts that the palace shows "the essence of Wolsey—the plain English churchman who nevertheless made his sovereign the arbiter of Europe and who built and furnished Hampton Court to show foreign embassies that Henry VIII's chief minister knew how to live as graciously as any cardinal in
Hampton Court Palace by Grinling Gibbons during the reign of Queen Anne. Opposite the altar, at first-floor level, is the royal pew where the royal family would attend services apart from the general congregation seated below. The clergy, musicians and other ecclesiastical officers employed by the monarch at Hampton Court, as in other English royal premises, are known collectively as the Chapel Royal; properly used the term does not refer to a building. The grounds as they appear today were laid out in grand style in the late 17th century. There are no authentic remains of Henry VIII's gardens, merely a small knot