Inside Kensington Palace: Explore the Royal Family’s Storied Home (2024)

Within Kensington Palace’s 500+ rooms, Queen Victoria was born, Queen Anne died, Princess Margaret raged, newlyweds Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip loved, and Prince William and Prince Harry were raised. Although the estate’s famed gardens have been beloved by the public for generations, it is the private melodramas of the royal family, their staff, and courtiers—the backstairs gossip and that of the grand galleries—that make this surprisingly intimate London palace so intriguing.

Read on to learn more about the notable events that have taken place at Kensington Palace, where intrigue and majesty go hand and hand.

The Origins of Kensington Palace

The story of Kensington Palace begins in 1605, when Sir George Coppin, a social climbing upstart, built a stately country home in the rural outskirts of London, in a suburban settlement known as Kensington. According to The Story of Kensington Palace by Tracy Borman, the original villa, which came to be known as Nottingham House, was a summer home intended to be used for relaxation and recreation.

The estate passed through several aristocratic hands before ending up in the possession of the Earl of Nottingham in 1619. Though close enough to London to conduct business, its meadows and grasslands proved to be a place that kept the capital’s mucky whirlwind at bay—until the royal family came calling.

The First Royal Residents of Kensington Palace

In 1688, King James II was deposed in the bloodless “glorious revolution.” His daughter Mary and her husband, William of Orange, were offered the throne in February 1689. On the hunt for a home surrounded by fresh air to help William’s severe asthma, the royal couple toured Nottingham House and immediately fell in love with it. They paid the second earl of Nottingham $20,000 for the estate and then hired famed architect Sir Christopher Wren to build new wings and pavilions onto the relatively modest, genteel villa.

According to Kensington Palace by Tom Quinn, Wren chose to build the new additions in brick instead of stone to signal William and Mary’s commitment to austerity. The intelligent, tasteful Queen Mary supervised the work, and only six weeks after construction began, William, Mary, and their court moved into the newly christened Kensington Palace on Christmas Eve 1689.

But Queen Mary II would not have long to enjoy her new home. On December 28, 1694, she died of smallpox at the palace. Her coffin, lined in lead to keep the infection away from mourners, was so heavy it damaged the grand Queen’s Staircase. A devastated William soldiered on before also dying at Kensington Palace in 1702. By the time of his death, King William III had spent tens of millions on Kensington Palace’s interiors and exteriors.

In 1702, Queen Anne, younger sister of Queen Mary, became the new mistress of Kensington Palace. She adored the palace, especially its famed gardens, and hired Nicholas Hawksmoor to design the Orangery, where she entertained guests surrounded by flora and fauna.

During Queen Anne’s reign, Kensington Palace was the center of the power struggles between Sarah, duch*ess of Marlborough, and her cousin Abigail, Baroness Masham (portrayed in the film The Favourite). Both were fighting for supremacy over the queen, but in the end, Abigail won and the duch*ess of Marlborough was banished from Kensington Palace.

In her later years, Queen Anne retreated into her private apartments in Kensington Palace. “Few houses in England belonging to persons of quality were kept in a more private way,” one visitor noted, per Quinn. In those years, Kensington Palace was an achingly dull place, with “nothing but ceremony” and “no manner of conversation.”

In 1714, Queen Anne died in her room at Kensington Palace. With her went the Stuart dynasty, and the Hanoverians, the most quarrelsome and lampooned dynasty in British royal history, were the new monarchs in town. Kensington Palace was their designated home.

The Reign of the Georges

The grumpy King George I, a stoic Hanoverian who proudly spoke his native German, took the throne in 1714. He quickly established Kensington Palace as his primary home and began a lavish refurbishing of the palace, hoping to give it an almost theatrical air of grandeur.

He hired a then little-known painter named William Kent to design and decorate a series of rooms. The most famous Kent-crafted Kensington Palace spaces include the Italianate Cupola Room, the Great Drawing Room, and the famed King’s Staircase.

The curious wonder of the King’s Staircase is the mural Kent painted on its walls, which features 45 contemporary members of the Kensington Palace household. Those portrayed include King George I’s two Turkish servants, Mehemet and Mustapha; Ulric, a person with dwarfism who served the king; and Peter “the Wild Boy,” a feral child brought from Germany to live in Kensington Palace.

As Lucy Worsley deftly and delightfully illustrated in The Courtiers: Splendor and Intrigue in the Georgian Court at Kensington Palace, the court was filled with intrigue. As one courtier noted, Worsley writes, Kensington Palace was filled with “dealers in mysteries,” a place where “sycophants and agents of the Court spread millions of falsities.”

Much of this intrigue was due to the fact that George I hated his son, the future George II, and their feud played out in the halls of Kensington Palace. When the old king died in 1727, the spoiled, emotional King George II and his brilliant, savvy wife, Queen Caroline, continued the family tradition and feuded with their eldest son, Frederick, Prince of Wales.

During the reign of George II, life at Kensington Palace was akin to the set of a posh soap opera. “Show me some good person about that court; find me, among those selfish courtiers, those dissolute gay people,” Sir Robert Walpole wrote, per Quinn, “someone I can love and regard.”

It was also packed with people, since Queen Caroline opened the Kensington Palace gardens, which she greatly improved, to the masses every Sunday. Anyone who dressed well enough could come to jockey for a position or patronage or simply gawk at the royals themselves.

“Court dinners could be boisterous and rowdy,” Worsley writes. “Once, so many people came ‘to see their majesties dine, that the rail surrounding the table broke.’ The people who had been leaning upon it all fell over and ‘made a diverting scramble for hats and wigs, at which their Majesties laugh’d heartily.’”

But despite Kensington Palace’s importance during this time, it was already beginning to rot. According to Worsley, George II’s mistress, Henrietta Howard, found that her Kensington Palace apartment was so damp that crops of mushrooms sprouted from the floor.

Kensington Palace: the Birthplace of Queens

The “mad” King George III hated the antics of his Hanoverian ancestors, and when he became king in 1760, he left the drama of Kensington Palace for Buckingham Palace, three miles away.

Now that the monarch was no longer in residence, Kensington Palace became a rundown warehouse for excess royals. “The magnificent state rooms were slowly allowed to decay until they became a dilapidated store for coal, broken furniture and old pictures,” Quinn writes. “Meanwhile, the rest of the palace began a long cyclical period during which various apartments were updated and modernized, then left to fall apart before being renovated once more.”

One of the most famous royal family members to call Kensington Palace home was the colorful, bombastic Caroline of Brunswick, the estranged wife of the future King George IV, who established a rival court to her husband in her apartments and was known to wander Kensington Gardens and talk to strangers. Another resident was Prince Augustus Frederick, Duke of Sussex, the eccentric ninth child of King George III, who filled his Kensington Palace apartment with his collection of rare books, medicines, and dozens of clocks.

“On the hour,” Quinn writes, “his apartment was filled with bells and gongs striking, musical tunes, national anthems, and martial airs.”

Nearby were the Kensington Palace apartments of his older brother Prince Edward, Duke of Kent. On May 24, 1819, his wife Victoria, duch*ess of Kent, gave birth to their daughter Victoria in a bedroom of Kensington Palace. The little girl, heiress to the throne, was baptized in the Cupola room. After her father’s death, Victoria’s mother strictly controlled her life under what was known as the “Kensington system.” She was never allowed a moment alone, even when quietly playing with her large collection of dolls and aptly caged birds.

But Kensington Palace would hold a special place in Queen Victoria’s heart, for it is there where she first met her beloved husband, Prince Albert. It is also where she was informed that she was now queen in June 1837. Upon leaving for Buckingham Palace, she reflected upon her complicated feelings for her childhood home. “I have gone through painful and disagreeable scenes here, ‘tis true,” she wrote. “But I am still fond of this poor old palace.”

In fact, it was Queen Victoria who would save Kensington Palace from destruction as it fell further into disrepair in the late 19th century. Instead, Kensington became what King Edward VII called “the aunt heap,” and one royal wag referred to it as the “house of hangers-on.”

Queen Victoria’s daughters Beatrice and Louise would spend their adult lives in separate apartments in Kensington Palace, their feuds often heard by titillated courtiers. It is where Louise, a talented artist and chain-smoking free spirit, worked on her famous golden jubilee sculpture of her mother, which is now in the gardens east of the palace.

Other Kensington Palace residents during the Victorian era were the Duke and duch*ess of Cambridge. On May 26, 1867, Mary Adelaide, duch*ess of Cambridge, gave birth to another future queen of England in her Kensington apartment, little Victoria Mary of Teck, who would one day reign as Queen Mary alongside her husband, King George V.

Royal Rebels: Princess Margaret and Princess Diana at Kensington Palace

Kensington Palace was damaged during the Blitz, and the damaged portions were rebuilt after World War II. But parts of the palace still frequently fell apart, much to the confusion of pampered royal residents. “I remember when a large part of the window glass in one room cracked and then fell out in a room occupied by Princess Alice of Athlone [the last surviving grandchild of Queen Victoria],” one Kensington Palace servant told Quinn. “It was winter, but Alice just sat there with the freezing wind whistling around her ears until someone turned up to fix it.”

But new life and scandal were breathed into Kensington Palace when Princess Margaret and her husband, Antony Armstrong-Jones, moved into Apartment 1A, the most lavish in the palace. Armstrong-Jones, Lord Snowdon, set about modernizing the apartment, making it into a Formica-covered midcentury home, complete with a state-of-the-art projection room. Lady Sarah Chatto, the couple’s youngest, was born in apartment 1A.

Famous for their A-list parties and top-grade feuds, the couple set the other stolid residents of Kensington Palace on edge. “[Margaret] would shriek the most terrible things,” one Kensington Palace insider told Quinn. “She didn’t give a damn if the windows and doors were open and everyone could hear. Quite a shock, I can tell you, to hear the queen’s sister shout the word ‘c*nt’ at the top of her voice.”

Princess Margaret also feuded with other Kensington Palace residents, spitting in the direction of retired courtier Tommy Lascelles (who she blamed for the demise of her relationship with Peter Townsend) whenever she passed him, and sending her friend Lady Anne Glenconner to chase Princess Michael of Kent’s cats with a hose. Margaret lived at Kensington Palace until her death in 2002.

But Kensington Palace’s most famous residents of the late 20th century were Charles, then Prince of Wales, and his first wife, Princess Diana, who moved into Apartments 8 and 9 after their marriage in 1981. The apartments were designed in a cozy high-English fashion by interior designer Dudley Poplak. Prince Charles moved out after their separation in 1992, but Princess Diana stayed, and for her, Kensington Palace became a refuge, a place where she sunbathed naked on her private roof, sneaked lovers past palace gates, escaped her security guards to talk with strangers in the park, and recorded her infamous interviews with Andrew Morton, which would be the basis for the best-selling tell-all Diana: Her True Story.

“What she loved above all at Kensington was to walk round the park while hiding her identity in drab clothes,” one insider told Quinn. “She’d set off on her own, wearing dark glasses and sit on a bench by the Round Pond, just watching passers-by.”

Another rebellious royal, Meghan, duch*ess of Sussex, would also live on the grounds of Kensington Palace with her husband, Prince Harry, at Nottingham Cottage before moving to Frogmore Cottage in Windsor. She and Prince Harry stepped down as senior royals in 2020 and moved to California.

Who Lives at Kensington Palace Now?

Kensington Palace is currently a popular tourist attraction and the longtime home of the Duke and duch*ess of Gloucester, the Duke and duch*ess of Kent, and Prince and Princess Michael of Kent. Prince William and Princess Catherine lived in the 20-room apartment 1A, formerly the home of Princess Margaret, from 2014 to 2023, before moving to Adelaide Cottage on the grounds of Windsor Castle. However, the Prince and Princess of Wales still have offices at Kensington Palace.

In 2021, Prince William and Prince Harry came together to unveil a statue of their mother by Ian Rank-Broadley in the Sunken Garden of Kensington Palace, said to be one of Princess Diana’s favorite places. Kensington Palace is also reportedly the eternal home of a number of ghosts, including one of longtime 19th-century resident Princess Sophia, daughter of George III, who forever spins at her spinning wheel. Other ghosts supposedly include Queen Mary II, a crying King George II, and the irascible Queen Caroline. Fittingly, it is said the former nursery of Prince Louis is occupied by Peter “the Wild Boy.”

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