Our knowledge of the organs in Hampton Court’s Chapel appears to date from 1523 when ‘a grete paire of Organs’ was provided for Thomas Wolsey – in all probability for the Chapel itself, as well as two smaller pairs. When Henry VIII took Hampton Court Palace from Wolsey six years later, part of the work carried out for him in the Chapel in the following years included the provision of an organ by John Bytton (or Beton). It was brought upstream from Bridewell [near Blackfriars, London] in May 1538, and installed in the recently-constructed loft. Records of payments for repair and maintenance in the following years survive, but by 1636 the organ had to be rebuilt, and Edmund Norgate was paid £140 for alterations, repairs and for making a new ‘chair’ organ “conformable to those allreadie made in our Royall Chapell at Whitehall and Greenwich”. He may, as was then usual, have subcontracted the work, because John Burward was paid in 1638 for making the chair organ and “altering the great organ with the sound board and conveyances thereof”. By 1644 though, the organ was removed by the Puritan Sir Richard Harley.

Some time after 1654 during the Protectorate, Oliver Cromwell had what some writers describe as two organs installed in the Great Hall, or it may simply have been a double organ. Certainly, a double organ came from Magdalen College, Oxford, and was placed in the gallery of the Great Hall where it was reputedly played by John Milton. This organ, built by Robert Dallam in 1631, was re-acquired by the College in 1660 and re-erected there a year later. It was substantially re-modelled by Renatus Harris in 1690, and its great organ eventually sold to Tewkesbury Abbey in 1736, where the case of this division survives. This instrument has always been known at Tewkesbury as the Milton organ and, now considerably enlarged, was completely rebuilt by Kenneth Jones and Associates in 1997. In the same year as the removal of the great organ to Tewkesbury, the chair organ was acquired by the local squire of the Northamptonshire hamlet of Stanford on Avon, Sir Thomas Cave, and rebuilt in St Nicholas Church.

The Restoration saw the return of Charles II in 1660, and with Hampton Court being chosen as the venue for his marriage to Catherine of Braganza in 1662, preparations were soon under way. Simon Thurley writes that a new organ loft was built in the Chapel with steps up to it (for which John Hingston provided a crimson taffeta curtain), and part of an existing organ casing was re-used from the Great Hall to make its frontal. Hingston was certainly paid that same year “for erecting an Organ in the Banquetting house at Whitehall and afterwards removing it to the Chappell at Hampton Court”.

With the accession to the throne of William III and Mary II in 1689, Sir Christopher Wren was commissioned to rebuild Hampton Court. A year later, the Lord Chamberlain wrote the following to the Royal organ maker ‘Father’ Bernard Smith: “The Deane of His Mats Chappell Royall hath acquainted me that there is wanting a New Organ in the Chappell at Hampton Court. These are therefore to require you forthwith to cause a new organ to be made and put up there.” The organ was quickly built, but in view of the building work at the Palace, it was stored in the Roman Catholic chapel at Whitehall Palace for safekeeping. Unfortunately, it was destroyed in the fire there of 1698.

Bernard Smith died in 1708, so his son-in-law, Christopher Shrider, was commissioned in 1710 to build a new organ of two manuals and thirteen stops. He completed it two years later, and nearly all of its pipework forms a substantial part of the great and choir divisions of the instrument in the Chapel today – all still in the original case probably carved by Grinling Gibbons.

From the reign of George III onwards, Hampton Court ceased to be a royal residence and the Chapel was much neglected for around a hundred years. In 1840, William Hill, who had found the organ “very much out of tune & in bad order… not fit for service”, added a short-compass five-stop swell organ to Shrider’s instrument and made a new bellows. It is reported that he removed Shrider’s Cornet from the great, but as this division also had a Sesquialtera, it is possible that he merely combined two split-compass stops to form a full-compass mixture. By 1857 he had rebuilt the organ again, making further tonal additions to all three manual divisions and providing a pedal stop. From 1899 to 1901, this division was enlarged, the great and choir organs rebuilt, and a hydraulic engine to blow the instrument installed.

The organ appears to have survived unaltered for just over fifty years, though it was dismantled at the start of the Second World War by William Hill & Son and Norman & Beard Ltd and stored in the riding school of a Buckinghamshire mansion. It was reassembled at the beginning of 1946, and the completion of the work was marked by a concert on 27 March that year. Ten years later though, a number of tonal and mechanical issues had emerged, and Hill, Norman & Beard submitted a proposal to the Lord Chamberlain’s Office to attend to them. In the event, the work was entrusted to J W Walker in 1957 when the swell organ’s heavy and apparently troublesome tracker action was converted to tubular-pneumatic operation. Walker’s rebuilt the organ again in 1972, and the entire action was made electro-pneumatic.