St James's Palace

Henry VIII commissioned the palace on the remote site of a former leper hospital dedicated to Saint James the Less, and had it built between 1531 and 1536 in red brick. He used it first as a hunting lodge for his newly enclosed deer park, St James's Park; secondary in his interest to Whitehall, it was somewhere to escape formal court life. The palace carries the initials H.A., for Henry and his second wife, Anne Boleyn.

The palace was remodelled in 1544, with ceilings painted by Hans Holbein, and was described then as a "pleasant royal house". Two of Henry's children died here: Henry FitzRoy, Duke of Richmond and Somerset, and Mary I. Elizabeth I often resided at the palace, and is said to have spent the night there while waiting for the Spanish Armada to sail up the Channel.

Prince Henry, eldest son of James and Anne of Denmark, lived at St James's until his death in 1612; a riding school, one of the first in England, was built for him between 1607 and 1609, along with a library decorated by Maximilian Colt. Charles II was born at the palace on 29 May 1630 to Charles I and Henrietta Maria, sister of Louis XIII of France, and his brother James II on 14 October 1633.

In 1638 Charles I gave the palace to Henrietta Maria's mother, Marie de Medici. She remained three years, but the residence of a Catholic former queen of France proved unpopular with parliament and she was asked to leave for Cologne. Charles spent his final night at the palace before his execution, and Oliver Cromwell then took it over and turned it into barracks during the Commonwealth.

Charles II restored the palace after the Commonwealth and landscaped St James's Park; Mary II and Queen Anne were both born here. After Whitehall Palace was destroyed by fire, St James's became the monarch's principal London residence in 1698, under William III, and the administrative centre of the monarchy, a role it retains in part.

The first two Hanoverian monarchs used it as their principal London residence, George I housing his mistress the Duchess of Kendal there and George II the Countess of Suffolk; in 1757 George II gave the palace library to the British Museum. George III found the palace unsuitable, and in 1762, shortly after his wedding, bought Buckingham House for his queen, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. A fire in 1809 destroyed the monarch's private apartments at the south-east corner; they were never replaced, leaving the Queen's Chapel cut off from the palace by the open ground where Marlborough Road now runs.

William IV was the last monarch to reside there, at least for part of the year. Queen Victoria formalised the move to Buckingham in 1837, ending St James's status as the monarch's primary residence and leaving it the venue for courts, levees and ceremonies. She married Prince Albert here in 1840, and eighteen years later their eldest child, Princess Victoria, married Prince Frederick of Prussia there.

In 1912–13 the palace hosted the conference that arranged the treaty between the Balkan states and the Ottoman Empire after the Balkan Wars, and from September to December 1931 the Second Round Table Conference on Indian independence. On 12 June 1941 representatives of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the Union of South Africa, eight exiled European governments and General Charles de Gaulle of France signed the Declaration of St James's Palace, the first of six treaties that established the United Nations and composed its Charter.

The palace has been Grade I listed since February 1970, and the royal court is still formally based there: every ambassador and high commissioner to the United Kingdom is accredited to the Court of St James's. On the death of a reigning monarch the Accession Council meets at the palace, and the Garter King of Arms proclaims the successor from the Proclamation Gallery overlooking Friary Court; that was last done on 10 September 2022, for Charles III.

St James's is the London residence of Princess Anne, Princess Beatrice and Princess Alexandra, and houses the offices of the Royal Collection Department and the Marshal of the Diplomatic Corps. The Queen's Chapel, built by Inigo Jones, is open to the public at selected times; the Chapel Royal within the palace is not, though both remain active places of worship. On 1 June 2007 the palace and the buildings within its curtilage were designated a protected site under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005, making trespass a specific criminal offence.