The Lost Palace of Whitehall
On the tercentenary of the fire that destroyed it, Simon Thurley describes the significance of the royal Palace of Whitehall to the Tudor and Stuart monarchs who lived there.
Three hundred years ago this month news from London reached Versailles that the royal palace of Whitehall had burnt down. Soon after, the Duc de Saint-Simon noted in his memoirs ‘a fire destroyed Whitehall, the largest and ugliest palace in Europe’.
Saint-Simon’s scathing description of the principal seat of English kings was not unusual: a French visitor in the 1660s had described it as a ‘heap of houses’ and those who could bring themselves to praise it did so not for its beauty but for its size. In 1617 Horatio Busino noted in his diary ‘The palace is not remarkable in itself except for its size, as in case of need it could accommodate more than 600 persons’. Whitehall was indeed the largest royal palace in Europe: it covered twenty-three acres compared with Versailles’ seven and a half, the Escorial’s eight and a half, and Hampton Court’s modest six.
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