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In 1515, Henry made Thomas Wolsey his main advisor. Wolsey was a Cardinal. A Cardinal is a leading member of the Roman
Catholic Church. Cardinals are nominated by the Pope and they form the Sacred College which elects future popes. Wolsey also looked after the royal money. In
the same year Henry started to build what would become his favourite palace at Hampton Court. Originally this was actually built for Cardinal Wolsey but once
he had been removed from office, see 1527, Henry began to use the palace.
By the end of his reign, Henry owned over 50 palaces, which I'm sure you agree is more than enough for one man although to be fair he did have a
court, or staff, of over 1,000 people. Henry also liked to tour the country and so these palaces were all over the place not just in London. In one case Henry
even had a complete village knocked down so he could have a palace built.
The picture below is Hampton Court Palace today. You can visit and also try the maze.
Another thing Henry did around this time, 1512 to be exact, was to create what is now the royal mail. At that time it was actually known as the King's Posts because it really was the Royal mail as it was only there to carry letters sent from the Royal court. All towns always had to have a fresh horse available to carry mail from the Tudor court. This system was made available to the general public in 1635 by Charles I.
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