Kew Palace

Beneath the building that survives at Kew is the undercroft of a 16th-century house, raised on land owned by John Dudley and restored in 1558 to his son Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester, childhood friend and court favourite of Elizabeth I. It belonged to a west-facing brick building that may be identifiable with a house at Kew in which Dudley entertained Elizabeth in 1563; one of the queen's main palaces at that time was Richmond Palace, close by. In 1619 the building standing on the undercroft was leased by Samuel Fortrey, who in 1631 demolished all of it but the undercroft and put up a larger south-facing manor house in its place. That house is the main survivor of what was originally a much larger complex.

Fortrey senior, father of the author Samuel Fortrey, was a merchant descended from a family originating near Lille, and later confusion over his ancestry gave the building the name by which it is still known, the Dutch House. The name also drew on its supposedly Dutch style, the Artisan Mannerist manner dominated by Dutch gables, which was in fact more prevalent in London, East Anglia and East Kent at the time than in the Netherlands. In 1697 Fortrey's descendants leased the house to Sir Richard Levett, a powerful merchant and former Lord Mayor of London, who later left it to his daughter Mary.

Facing the 1631 house stood another mansion, possibly of Tudor origin and often visited by the diarist John Evelyn. It passed from Richard Bennett to his daughter Dorothy, wife of Henry Capel; Dorothy and Henry remained childless, and the house went next to Dorothy's great-niece Elizabeth, wife of the Prince of Wales's secretary Samuel Molyneux, and then to Molyneux's physician Nathaniel St André. This was the site of James Bradley's observations of 1725, which led to his discovery of the aberration of light. William IV marked the spot in 1832 with a Thomas Tompion sundial brought from Hampton Court Palace, replaced by a replica in 1959.

Queen Caroline and George II came to the British throne in 1727, by which time six of their children were living with them at their summer residence at Richmond Lodge. In 1728 Caroline leased the Dutch House to accommodate her three eldest daughters, Anne, Amelia and Caroline, together with another nearby building that became known as the 'Queen's House', although its intended occupant may have been her son William rather than the queen herself. Her two youngest daughters, Mary and Louise, stayed with her at Richmond Lodge.

George and Caroline had come to Britain in 1714, when George's father took the throne as George I, leaving their eldest son Frederick behind in Hanover at the age of seven. On his father's accession Frederick became Prince of Wales and was at last allowed to come to Britain, arriving in December 1728, less than a year after his mother had taken the lease on the Dutch House. Now aged 21, knowing little of his sisters and possibly hoping for a family rapprochement, he soon took a long lease on the old Capel house at Kew and in 1731 bought its contents from St André. He then remodelled it with the assistance of William Kent, after which its plastered exterior earned it the name of the White House. Frederick also added a large separate kitchen block, open to the public since 2012 as the Royal Kitchens; a stable block of unknown date stood a short distance to the north-east until its demolition in the late 19th century.

A musical portrait of 1733 by Frederick's librarian and art agent Philip Mercier shows the prince and his three eldest sisters playing mandolin, harpsichord and cello, with the Dutch House behind them in two of its three variants. Anne married and left England the year after the portrait was painted, and Caroline left Kew in 1743 for St James's Palace, where she died in 1757. Along with Cliveden, the White House became Frederick's main family country home, where he entertained poets including James Thomson, author of The Seasons, and Alexander Pope, who had moved into the area in 1719 and built his villa at Twickenham. In 1738 Pope gave the prince a dog, with a verse inscribed on its collar: 'I am His Highness' dog at Kew. Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?'

In 1751, after staying all day in the garden until night, 'in the damp rain and hail to look at his workmen', Frederick caught a chill which, combined with a pulmonary embolism, proved fatal. His widow Augusta went on living at the White House with their children and continued his remodelling of the gardens, advised by her husband's friend John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute, and assisted by Sir William Chambers, one of the greatest masters of ornamental English gardening.

Frederick's sister Amelia was probably still in the Dutch House through the 1730s and 1740s, but seems to have moved out in 1751 on being made ranger of Richmond Park, a post that came with a residence at White Lodge. The Dutch House could then become a schoolhouse for Augusta's two eldest sons, George, the future George III, and Edward, who were taught there by Bute and Chambers. George took the throne in 1760 and a year later married Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, moving into Richmond Lodge as his summer residence as his family grew; the couple had fifteen children between 1762 and 1783. Chambers built the Orangery and the Great Pagoda at Kew for Augusta in 1761–62, though later in that decade she lived mainly at Carlton House. She nominally retained both the Dutch House and the White House until her death in 1772, when they passed to George, who demolished Richmond Lodge and moved his summer residence to the White House. He also used that building to house part of his art collection, including a number of works by Canaletto and The Tribuna of the Uffizi by Zoffany, who lived nearby and is buried at St Anne's Church.

George continued the Dutch House's use as a schoolhouse, now for his own two eldest sons, George and Frederick, which gave it the names 'the Prince of Wales's House' and 'the House Late the Prince of Wales's', although the future George IV never lived in it after his childhood. Small households of royal children were lodged in houses on Kew Green, and the royal governess Lady Charlotte Finch also lived locally; a watercolour of about 1771 or 1772 shows her in the grounds of the Dutch House with some of the children. A map of 1771 still delineated the land between the house and the river as belonging to the Lincoln's Inn barrister Levett Blackborne, grandson of Sir Richard Levett. The buildings and grounds were only leased by the royal family right up until 13 October 1781, when George III purchased the freehold from the Levetts for £20,000.

Seven years after that purchase, George was kept in the White House during his first bout of 'madness', from November 1788 to March 1789, with his wife Charlotte and their daughters living on the upper floors and the Grooms of the Bedchamber in the Dutch House. The White House was then allowed to fall into disrepair, though it still proved possible to house him there during the second bout in 1801, while Charlotte and her daughters moved into the Dutch House to await news of his recovery. The White House was finally demolished in 1802, and so at the onset of the third bout in 1804 the king was housed in an upgraded single-storey service wing of the Dutch House, and possibly also on the ground floor of the house itself, with Charlotte and the princesses on the first and second floors. That service wing originally connected directly onto the west side of the Dutch House and was mainly demolished in 1881.

Another reason for the demolition of the White House and the decreasing use of the Dutch House was the Castellated Palace, whose planning and design began around 1800. The king's chosen architect was James Wyatt, whom he had taken on for works at Windsor Castle at around the same time. The new building became known as the New Palace or New Kew Palace, and between 1800 and 1828 the Dutch House was often called the Old Palace or the Old Red House. George created a site for it by demolishing the old Queen's House, and construction began around 1802. Neo-Gothic in style and described by some historians as 'a late Georgian Nonsuch', it represented a late conversion for the king, who wrote to his daughter Charlotte in 1803 that he had 'never thought I should have adopted Gothic instead of Grecian architecture', having taken to it 'from thinking Wyatt perfect in that style'. He had possibly been influenced by nearby Strawberry Hill House, by his earlier work on Windsor Castle, and by his visits to Hartlebury Castle and Worcester Cathedral in 1788 and to Lulworth Castle and Sherborne Castle in 1789. Wyatt led the design, but contributions were probably made by the king himself, who had been trained in architectural drawing as a boy at Kew by William Chambers; that royal involvement and interference may have contributed to repeated delays and overspend in construction, thanks to his illnesses of 1801 and 1804. The result was widely criticised. In 'A Morning's Walk from London to Kew' of 1817, Sir Richard Phillips nicknamed it 'the Bastile palace, from its resemblance to that building, so obnoxious to freedom and freemen', and John Bew's tourists' guide of 1820 called the unfinished structure 'an abortive production, at once illustrative of bad taste and defective judgment'.

The king stopped off at the Dutch House in August 1805 to meet his daughter-in-law Caroline and his granddaughter Charlotte, and his family moved back into it that October until renovation work on the princesses' rooms at Windsor was complete. He made a final visit to Kew in 1806 to view works on the Castellated Palace and never returned. The Dutch House was refitted in 1809 for his youngest daughter, Princess Amelia, who had expressed a wish to move into it to convalesce from her tuberculosis, but her parents vetoed the plan and she remained at Windsor, where her death in 1810 probably triggered the king's fourth and final bout of 'madness'. That bout also brought work on the Castellated Palace to a permanent halt, leaving only a mostly roofed shell, and it lasted ten years, all of which the king spent confined at Windsor rather than Kew. In 1818 Queen Charlotte set out from London for Windsor to see him and to attend the double wedding of her sons William and Edward; en route she decided to spend a few days at the Dutch House, but, ill with dropsy, she was unable to continue her journey, and the weddings took place in the drawing room there on 11 July 1818. Later that year, on 17 November, she died in her bedroom on the first floor of the building. George died at Windsor in 1820, and his eldest son and successor George IV decided to demolish the Castellated Palace, whose total costs had risen to £500,000 by 1811 against an initial allocation of £40,000 in 1800. After studying the accounts, Parliament approved that decision and ordered that the few fixtures and fittings already installed be removed and sent to other royal residences; its staircase was later used at Buckingham Palace.

George IV also planned to demolish the Dutch House, but that did not come to fruition. His brother William IV, possibly influenced by having been married there in 1818, commissioned plans for adding a west wing and bringing the house back into use, and this too came to nothing. William did offer it to his sister-in-law Victoria, Duchess of Kent, for herself and her daughter, the future Queen Victoria, but she turned it down as 'an old house quite unfit for the princess and me to occupy'. Queen Victoria briefly sent three of her own children there in the summer of 1844, a last short-lived occupation; the following year she and Prince Albert began remodelling Osborne House on the Isle of Wight as their summer residence.

The Dutch House then remained unoccupied until 1898, when Victoria transferred it and Queen Charlotte's Cottage to Kew Gardens to mark her Diamond Jubilee. By that time the palace's stables and most of the Dutch House's service wing had been demolished, probably in 1881. A replica 17th-century Dutch garden was added at the rear in 1969. The house stayed open to the public until 1996, when a major restoration project began, covering not only the fabric of the building but also the weaving of period draperies and other fabric decor by the master weaver Ian Dale of Scotland; an external lift shaft was added on the west wing for disabled access, in the place of a privy shaft demolished in the 1880s.

Charles, Prince of Wales hosted a dinner in the building on 21 April 2006 to celebrate the 80th birthday of Queen Elizabeth II, and a few days later it reopened as a visitor attraction; that year it featured in the BBC television documentary series Tales from the Palaces. The house remains in the ownership of the House of Windsor, was designated a Grade I listed building on 10 January 1950 and is also a scheduled monument. It is cared for by the independent charity Historic Royal Palaces, which receives no funding from the government or the Crown and which has also taken on the Royal Kitchens, reopened to the public in 2012, Queen Charlotte's Cottage and the Great Pagoda, reopened in 2018.