Richmond Palace

Henry I divided the manor of Shene from the royal manor of Kingston and granted it to a Norman knight, and a manor-house stood at Sheen by at least 1125. In 1299 Edward I brought his whole court to the house by the riverside, and in 1305 he received there the Commissioners from Scotland who came to arrange the Scottish civil government. The house returned to royal hands in the reign of Edward II, and after his deposition it was held by his wife, Queen Isabella. When the boy-king Edward III came to the throne in 1327 he gave the manor to his mother; after her death he extended and embellished the house and turned it into the first Shene Palace. Geoffrey Chaucer served there as a yeoman in 1368, and Edward III died at Shene on 21 June 1377.

Richard II was the first English king to make Sheen his main residence, in 1383, and he took his bride Anne of Bohemia there. Twelve years later he was so distraught at Anne's death at the age of 28 that, in Holinshed's account, he caused the manor to be "thrown down and defaced", where earlier kings, wearied of the city, had customarily resorted to it as a place of pleasure and recreation. It lay in ruins for almost twenty years until Henry V undertook rebuilding work in 1414 and founded a Carthusian house, Sheen Priory, immediately to the north of the royal residence. Henry VI carried the rebuilding on so that the palace might be worthy of receiving his queen, Margaret of Anjou, and Edward IV granted it to his queen, Elizabeth Woodville, for life. The pre-Tudor palace stood between Richmond Green and the river, on ground now within the garden of Trumpeters' House.

Henry VII held a great tournament at the palace in 1492. On 23 December 1497 fire broke out in the king's private chambers and destroyed most of the wooden buildings. It burned for three hours and drove hundreds out in panic; much of the tapestry work of earlier ages was reduced to cinders, and the losses included crown jewels and a great part of the royal wardrobe, among it a large quantity of cloth of gold, at that date a luxury only royalty could wear and at Sheen a feature even of the bedding. Accounts describe Henry VII, his mother Margaret Beaufort and his wife Elizabeth of York running for their lives, the king barely getting out in time as a corridor came close to collapsing on him, and all but one of the royal children, none of them yet ten years old, carried out in the arms of their nursemaids: Margaret, Mary and the six-year-old future Henry VIII. The Milanese ambassador Raimondo Soncino, who watched the blaze, put the damage at 60,000 ducats and reported that the king "does not attach much importance to this loss. He purposes to build the chapel all in stone, and much finer than before."

Construction of the replacement began in 1498, and in 1500 Henry VII commanded that the town of Sheen, which had grown up around the royal manor, be renamed Richmond. The king named it after the title he had held before acceding to the throne and had inherited from his father, Earl of Richmond, an earldom seated at Richmond Castle in Yorkshire. It was built largely of brick and white stone, and although it kept the layout of Sheen Palace it took on features that marked the Renaissance, among them long galleries for sculpture and portraiture; Henry VII also established a library and a richly appointed chapel. The palace covered ten acres, with inner courtyards laid out for leisure, its own orchards and walled gardens, and lodgings for the royal family overlooking a large green.

Henry decorated the house with gifts he accepted from Italian bankers in Venice, and commissioned new tapestries to replace those lost in the fire; both are recorded in a seventeenth-century inventory of the palace now held in The National Archives. In 1502 the new palace saw the betrothal of the king's daughter Princess Margaret to James IV of Scotland, the match from which the House of Stuart eventually came. Henry VII died at Richmond Palace in 1509.

Later that same year Henry VIII kept Christmas through to Twelfth Night at Richmond with the first of his six wives, Catherine of Aragon, festivities recorded in Edward Hall's Chronicle. On the night of the Epiphany in 1510, by the account Mrs A. T. Thomson gives in her Memoirs of the Court of Henry the Eighth, a pageant was brought into the hall representing a hill studded with gold and precious stones, with a golden tree at its summit hung with roses and pomegranates, and down its slope came a richly attired lady to dance a morris before the king with the children of honour. On another occasion, in the presence of the court, an artificial forest was drawn in by a lion and an antelope harnessed with chains of gold, with a gilded tower at its centre and a youth holding a garland of roses as the prize of valour in the tournament that followed. Henry's son Henry, Duke of Cornwall, was born at the palace on New Year's Day 1511 and died on 22 February.

Some years later the king received Hampton Court as a present from Cardinal Wolsey, and in return Wolsey was given permission to live at the royal manor of Richmond, where he kept up so much state that the ill-feeling growing against him increased. When he fell into disfavour he moved to the Lodge in the great park and afterwards to the Priory. George Cavendish, Wolsey's biographer, described the carved and painted royal heraldic beasts in a garden at Richmond, and Wolsey observed that the dun cow among them, a beast of the Earldom of Richmond, was also found in the heraldry of Thomas Boleyn, taking it as a portent of the relationship of Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII.

In August 1531 Richmond became the principal residence of the king's daughter Mary, after Henry separated her from her mother, Catherine of Aragon. She remained there until December 1533, when she was ordered to Hatfield House to wait on the newly born Princess Elizabeth. In 1540 Henry gave the palace to his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, as part of her annulment settlement, and in 1546 Anne appointed David Vincent keeper of "Shene alias Richemonde" and of the New Park of Richmond. Mary I married Philip of Spain in 1554 and the pair spent their honeymoon at Richmond and at Hampton Court, forty-five years after her mother had kept Christmas in the same house; later that year Mary's sister Elizabeth was brought to Richmond as a prisoner on her way to Woodstock Palace.

Elizabeth I became queen in 1558 and spent much of her time at Richmond, where she hunted stags in the "Newe Parke of Richmonde", now the Old Deer Park. The palace was one of the first buildings in history to be fitted with a flushing lavatory, the invention of the queen's godson Sir John Harington, though Henry VIII had installed flushing latrines at Hampton Court earlier. Elizabeth died at Richmond on 24 March 1603, and her body was carried by barge to lie in state at Whitehall Palace.

James I, who came to the English throne in 1603, preferred the Palace of Whitehall, but his eldest son Prince Henry was able to commission water-works for the garden, designed by the French Huguenot Salomon de Caus and the Florentine Costantini de' Servi, shortly before the prince's death in 1612. Charles I owned Richmond before he became king and began building his art collection while living there. He gave the palace and the manor to Queen Henrietta Maria, probably in 1626, and it became the home of the royal children. Like Elizabeth, Charles hunted stags, and in 1637 he created for the purpose the new ground now known as Richmond Park, at which point Elizabeth's "Newe Parke" took the name of the Old Deer Park.

Richmond remained a residence of the kings and queens of England until the death of Charles I in 1649. Within months of his execution the palace was surveyed by order of the Parliament of England to establish what it would fetch as raw materials, and it was sold for £13,000. Over the following ten years it was largely demolished, its stones and timbers taken away for building elsewhere. When the monarchy was restored in 1660 the palace and manor were returned to Queen Henrietta Maria, mother of Charles II and widow of the beheaded king, who had lived in exile in France during the Civil War; she found it dismantled and much dilapidated by the years of the interregnum, and it was never rebuilt. She died in 1669.

The survey of 1649 preserves a minute description of what was sold. The great hall measured 100 ft by 40 ft and the chapel 96 ft by 40 ft, fitted with cathedral-seats and pews; the prince's lodgings were a freestone building three storeys high with fourteen lead-covered turrets, a round tower called the Canted Tower held a staircase of 124 steps, and beside the prince's garden ran an open gallery 200 ft long with a close gallery of the same length above it and a royal library. Water reached the palace through three pipes, from the white conduit in the new park, the conduit in the town fields and a conduit near the alms-houses in Richmond.

Only vestigial traces of the palace now survive. The Wardrobe, the Trumpeters' House and the Gate House all stand, and all three are Grade I listed, a designation the site has carried since 10 January 1950; the Gate House, built in 1501, was let by the Crown Estate Commissioners on a 65-year lease in 1986. The ground the palace occupied lies between Richmond Green and the Thames, and street names such as Old Palace Lane and Old Palace Yard still mark it. In July 1997 the site was investigated by the Channel 4 programme Time Team, in an excavation broadcast in January 1998. Drawings and descriptions of the palace survive, as does the documentation of a 1970s excavation of the grounds, so a fairly accurate idea of the building and its contents can still be had.