When attendants undressed the body of King William III at Kensington Palace on the morning of March 8, 1702, they found something he had hidden for nearly eight years. Tied to his left arm with a black ribbon were a lock of golden hair and a gold wedding ring, kept beneath his shirt against his skin. The hair belonged to his wife, Queen Mary II, who had died in a bedchamber just down the corridor. The palace that visitors know today as a cheerful royal museum has a far darker history.
Behind its red brick walls lies a pattern stretching across more than three centuries: it is the residence where kings went to die and where queens went to suffer. William III bought the property in June 1689 in a desperate attempt to save his own lungs. Newly crowned and suffering from chronic asthma since childhood, he could not breathe at Whitehall Palace, which sat directly on the polluted Thames. The river stank of sewage in summer, and thick yellow fog pressed against the windows in winter.
For a man with weak lungs, it was a slow execution. Two miles west of Whitehall, in the village of Kensington, stood a modest Jacobean mansion owned by Daniel Finch, the Second Earl of Nottingham. It sat on a gentle rise above the fog line, with clean air coming across the fields from the west. William offered Finch £20,000, a considerable fortune at a time when a skilled craftsman earned perhaps £30 a year.
Finch accepted, and Nottingham House quietly became crown property. William had landed in England in late 1688 with a Dutch army of some 40,000 men. His Catholic father-in-law, James II, had fled to France, and Parliament had offered the throne jointly to William and his wife Mary, James’s Protestant daughter. That became known as the Glorious Revolution.
By summer of 1689, the new king could not breathe in his own capital. Sir Christopher Wren was given an impossible deadline: transform the private country mansion into a working royal palace by Christmas. He had roughly six months. Work began immediately, with hundreds of laborers hired from surrounding villages.
The cost ran past the original £20,000 and kept climbing. By the time everything was finished, it reached £60,000, three times the original budget. On one of Queen Mary’s inspections that November, a section of newly laid brickwork collapsed shortly after she left. A workman beneath it was crushed and died.
Others were hurt. Mary wrote about it in a surviving letter, describing it as a sign from God reminding a sovereign of the cost of pride and haste. The first death at Kensington came before the palace had housed a single royal night. William and Mary moved in on Christmas Eve of 1689.
The palace had been raised in six months, a refuge secured for the asthmatic king. But beneath the fresh plaster was the memory of a workman who had come to Kensington to earn his wages and never gone home. Smallpox came to Kensington in December 1694. Mary had been ill for several days before anyone named the disease.
At first they thought it was a cold. Then the rash darkened into purple spots, and the physicians recognized hemorrhagic smallpox, the worst form of the disease, almost always fatal. Mary did not panic. She asked her ladies to bring her private correspondence and a small brass fire dish, and she began to burn her letters: love notes from William, girlhood letters from her sister, private reflections on her father, the deposed king living in exile.
She gave strict instructions that no one who had not already survived smallpox was to come near her, including her sister Anne, who arrived at the gate pregnant and begged to be allowed upstairs. The doors were closed against her. William had survived smallpox as a boy. He moved a small camp bed into Mary’s room and refused to leave it.
Courtiers found the cold, controlled Dutch king changed, a man who could not stop crying. Mary died on December 28, 1694. She was 32 years old. William never recovered.
He grew thinner, coughed more, and stopped laughing. He kept a small miniature of Mary on his person at all times. And, hidden beneath his shirt sleeve tied with a black silk ribbon, he wore a lock of her hair and her gold wedding ring. Nobody saw.
Nobody was meant to. In late February 1702, William was riding at Hampton Court when his horse stumbled in a mole hole. He was thrown and broke his collarbone. A chill set in, became pneumonia, and the thin asthmatic king struggled for breath as he had as a child.
He was carried back to Kensington. The room in which Mary had died was just down the corridor. William died on March 8, 1702, at age 51. When his attendants undressed the body, they found what he had carried hidden for nearly eight years: the lock of golden hair, the gold ring, the black ribbon.
Across the Thames, his political enemies raised a toast to “the little gentleman in the black velvet waistcoat,” meaning the mole whose hill had tripped the horse. Queen Anne came to Kensington in the spring of 1702, weeks after William’s burial. She was 37 years old, the last Protestant Stuart left on the throne. She walked with a slow, painful limp, her joints swollen with gout.
Over the course of her marriage to Prince George of Denmark, she had been pregnant 17 times: seven miscarriages, five stillborn children, four children who drew breath and lived briefly, and one small bright boy named William, Duke of Gloucester, who lived to age 11 before a fever took him in 1700. Not one of those 17 children survived their mother. Wren adjusted the house for her, building a second, gentler staircase with a handrail set at a precise height for a woman who needed to take her weight on her arm. She ordered the first true orangery in England, finished in 1704 at a cost of about £6,000, where she held small summer parties.
Prince George died in October 1708 in Anne’s arms at Kensington. Witnesses said her scream could be heard through several rooms. She would not leave his body for hours. For the last six years of her reign, she lived mostly as a widow, suffering a series of small strokes.
Anne died on August 1, 1714, at age 49. Her death ended the Stuart line, which had ruled England in one form or another since James I in 1603. Parliament had already passed the Act of Settlement in 1701, passing the crown to the Protestant House of Hanover. A courier rode to the continent, and a 64-year-old German prince who barely spoke English was informed he was now George I, King of Great Britain.
The arrival of the Hanoverians changed the tone of the house. George I arrived in London in September 1714, preferring the company of his horses and his two German mistresses to that of his English ministers. He commissioned William Kent to transform the state apartments. Between 1722 and 1727, Kent created the Cupola Room with trompe l’oeil coffering and a gilded statue of Mars, and the King’s Grand Staircase, its walls covered with 45 life-sized figures in real court dress looking down over the banisters.
Set among them was a small barefoot boy with matted hair. He was a wild child discovered in the forest near Hamelin in 1725, walking on all fours, unable to speak, eating grass and nuts. Sent to the English court as a curiosity, he became an instant sensation. Caroline of Ansbach, the Princess of Wales, ordered him washed, dressed, and taught to walk upright.
Her physician tried and failed to teach him to speak. He was given a brass collar engraved with the words “Peter the Wild Man from Hanover. ” He lived out his long life in the English countryside, dying in 1785 at the age of perhaps 72. George II, who became king in 1727, adored and depended on his wife Caroline completely.
Caroline died agonizingly in 1737 at St. James’s, of a hernia she had concealed for years. George II, bereft, never remarried. On the morning of October 25, 1760, the old, deaf, lonely king waited in vain for the mail.
At 6:00 a. m. , no courier had arrived. He muttered in German, “Why won’t they come?
” He walked to his private water closet, was heard to cry out once, and was found on the floor, his head bleeding. An autopsy showed his aorta had split apart inside his chest. He was dead within minutes. His last words had been a mild complaint about the post.
His grandson, George III, succeeded him and did not like Kensington. He would not live there, hold court there, or sleep there again. The state rooms went dark, the kitchens scaled back, and William Kent’s painted ceilings began to crack quietly in the cold. Kensington did not fall into ruin.
It became a royal warehouse, subdivided into apartments for the inconvenient: younger sons, spinster aunts, widowed sisters-in-law, princes who had quarreled with their fathers, princesses who could not be married off. Through nearly 140 years, no reigning British monarch lived at Kensington. The palace housed at various times more than 30 minor royals. The house that once held kings now held the unmarriageable daughter, the profligate younger son, the widow nobody knew what to do with.
Kensington had been built for a particular kind of confinement when William bought it for his lungs. Now that confinement had become its official function. In the gloomy northeast corner, inside a suite of poorly heated rooms, a middle-aged German princess had recently arrived. Her husband, the king’s fourth son, was in heavy debt.
She was pregnant with her first child. Their daughter was about to be born. The child was Princess Alexandrina Victoria, born in a first-floor bedroom at Kensington Palace on May 24, 1819. Her father, Edward, Duke of Kent, died within eight months.
A baby girl still in her cradle was now fifth in line to the British throne, and within a few years, as her royal uncles failed to produce living legitimate heirs, she became first in line. Her mother, the Duchess of Kent, was deeply dependent on the advice of Sir John Conroy, an Irish cavalry officer of considerable ambition. He moved into Kensington with his own family, looked at the baby, and devised a plan to control her. It came to be called the Kensington System.
It was a web of rules governing every hour of the princess’s waking life. She slept in her mother’s bedroom every single night, never alone. She was never permitted to walk down the palace stairs without someone holding her hand. She was never permitted to be in a room by herself.
Her friendships were curated and mostly limited to Conroy’s own daughters. Her moods were recorded daily in a small bound notebook called the behavior book, reviewed by her mother and by Conroy. Her much older half-sister, Feodora, later wrote to Victoria, looking back, that her own years at Kensington had been an imprisonment. She used exactly that word.
The apartments were gloomy, funds were scarce, wallpaper was faded, coal was rationed. The first future queen of a great empire grew up in rooms that smelt of damp. She did not know she was heir to the throne officially until she was about 11, when she is said to have opened a genealogical chart and promised, “I will be good. ” Conroy watched.
The older she got, the more nervous he became. She disliked him. He wanted her to sign a document once she came of age, appointing him her private secretary for life, which would give him control of her correspondence, her appointments, her money, and her political decisions. She understood she had only one weapon: time.
If she could reach her 18th birthday before her uncle the king died, she could rule alone. If she did not, her mother would become regent and Conroy, through her mother, would rule the country. The calendar became a weapon. And then, at the worst possible moment, she fell ill with typhoid.
In October 1835, at a seaside lodging at Ramsgate, the 16-year-old lay half-conscious, her hair falling out in handfuls. Conroy came to the sick room with a document and a pen, asking the fevered teenage princess to sign a letter of intent appointing him her private secretary for life upon her accession. She refused. She turned her face away.
She pushed the paper. She said no, again and again. Her governess, Baroness Lehzen, watching from the corner, made clear by her presence that she would not leave the room. Conroy tried again over the following days.
The Duchess joined him in tears, pleading with her daughter to sign. The answer remained the same. The old king, William IV, despised Conroy. At his 71st birthday dinner in August 1836, he rose and made a speech of astonishing frankness, saying he hoped he would live another nine months so he would not die before his niece came of age.
He said he did not trust the personage near him, meaning the Duchess, to exercise a regency. Victoria began to cry. A race began between Victoria’s 18th birthday, fixed at May 24, 1837, and the king’s failing health. She turned 18 on May 24, 1837, with a small celebration at Kensington.
The king held on for less than a month more. At 2:12 a. m. on June 20, 1837, he stopped breathing at Windsor.
A carriage set out through the dark countryside toward Kensington, carrying the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Chamberlain. At 6:00 that morning, a young woman came down a staircase alone for the first time in her life. She got out of bed, put on a dressing gown and slippers, did not wake her mother, and walked alone down the stairs. The two men at the bottom bowed deeply.
The Lord Chamberlain told her that her uncle was dead. She was now queen. She asked the Archbishop to pray with her. Then, over the following hours, she issued instructions.
She asked for an hour alone, the first she had ever had. She asked for her bed to be moved out of her mother’s room. She asked that Sir John Conroy not come near her, ever. He was informed that he would not hold any position in the queen’s household, not now, not ever.
She called her first Privy Council for late that morning, meeting in the Red Saloon at Kensington. She walked into the room at 11:00, so small that her feet did not easily touch the floor from the chair. She read her accession speech in a clear, unbroken voice. The Duke of Wellington, who had defeated Napoleon, wrote afterwards that she had behaved as if she had been trained for the role for years.
The Kensington System had ended in a single morning. Conroy, who had staked his entire adult life on controlling this girl, never held royal office again. He died in relative obscurity in 1854. Victoria stayed at Kensington for just over three weeks, then left for Buckingham Palace on July 13, 1837.
She never lived at Kensington again. She preferred, she said, not to think about those rooms. Nearly three centuries after William bought it to breathe, another resident called Kensington Palace her fortress. Her name was Diana Frances Spencer.
She was 20 years old in July 1981 when she married the Prince of Wales in front of a television audience estimated at 750 million people worldwide. Three weeks before the wedding, she had been moved into Apartments 8 and 9 at Kensington Palace, renovated at a cost of around £900,000. She told friends, repeatedly over the years, that she thought of the building as a fortress, and she said the word with a small, bitter smile. It protected her from the press.
It protected her from strangers. It also, she came to realize, held her in place. Her sons William and Harry were born in 1982 and 1984. She adored them, drove them to school personally, took them to amusement parks.
But the marriage was failing from the beginning. She understood her husband was in love with someone else. Her suffering became physical. She developed bulimia, which she later spoke about openly.
Inside the walls of the palace, she was alone with it. By 1995, she had decided to break the silence. She chose Martin Bashir of the BBC’s Panorama program and chose her own apartments at Kensington as the location. To keep the royal household from finding out, the BBC crew smuggled their cameras into the palace in hi-fi cases.
The interview was filmed on November 5, 1995, and broadcast on November 20. In Britain, 23 million people watched live. Grid engineers recorded a sudden surge of roughly 1,000 megawatts when the program ended, as millions of households switched on their kettles. She had said there were three of us in this marriage.
She had said she wanted to be a queen of people’s hearts. One month later, Queen Elizabeth II wrote a private letter advising them to divorce. The palace agreed. By August 1996, Diana was no longer Her Royal Highness.
She kept her apartments at Kensington, and she began, for the first time in more than a decade, to imagine what she might become next. She had about a year. On the night of September 5, 1997, Diana’s coffin returned to the building she had called home for one last night. The news had broken in the early hours of Sunday, August 31.
Diana had been traveling with Dodi Fayed in a black Mercedes in Paris when the car struck a concrete pillar in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel, pursued by paparazzi on motorcycles. She died at Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital at around 4:00 in the morning, French time. She was 36 years old. Britain stopped.
People in the tens of thousands began to walk towards Kensington Palace, carrying bouquets, candles, and photographs. By the time the flowers were cleared, estimates suggested around 60 million blooms had been left there, the carpet of wrappings and petals lying five feet deep against the railings. Some 136,000 people signed the official book of condolence inside the palace. Diana’s coffin arrived at Kensington on the evening of Friday, September 5.
Her ex-husband, her sons, and her brother accompanied it. Prince William, 15, and Prince Harry, 12, spent part of that evening alone with their mother for the last time. The next morning, the coffin was carried out to the gun carriage. The tenor bell in the clock tower of Kensington Palace tolled as the procession began, a single deep note every minute across two miles and two hours of walking, heard by a silent crowd of around a million people.
Around 2 billion people around the world watched some portion of the funeral. Elton John sang a rewritten version of “Candle in the Wind. ” Diana’s body was driven north to Althorp and buried on a small island in a lake. Back at Kensington, the flowers began to rot, taking weeks to remove by lorry.
Her apartments were stripped, the pastel walls painted over, the children’s garden on the roof dismantled. For 10 years, the apartment stood empty. Kensington Palace is now managed by Historic Royal Palaces, reporting total income of around £138. 6 million in a recent financial year, most of it earned through ticket sales.
Around half a million paying visitors pass through its rooms each year. In 2011, Apartment 1A was renovated at a reported cost of £4. 5 million for William and Catherine, now Prince and Princess of Wales, and their young family. Staff talk quietly about sounds in rooms that should be empty: footsteps on the backstairs late at night, a cold draft that moves against the direction of the wind, doors that close a moment after you pass through them.
Some have reported seeing a small, stocky figure in an old-fashioned coat, a boy with tangled hair, watching from the corner of a room. Others speak of a tall, thin man at the windows of the rooms once used by George II, or a cold that settles into the southeast bedroom where Mary II died and will not lift even with the radiators on. None of this has been captured on camera. None of it has been verified.
Skeptics point to pareidolia, the way the human brain fills in patterns from vague sensory data. What is not open to doubt is the pattern. Consider the scale of what the palace has absorbed: 337 years since William bought Nottingham House to save his lungs. Two kings and two queens dead within its walls.
Seventeen lost pregnancies walked off in its corridors by one childless monarch. One small girl raised under a system named after the building itself. One pen refused at a sickbed. One nightdress staircase descent that ended the Kensington System in an hour.
Sixty million blooms piled five feet deep at the gate. It was bought to let a king breathe. It has spent three centuries taking the air out of everyone placed inside it. It does not do this cruelly.
It simply sits, red brick and careful symmetry, and waits, and receives what is sent to it. Beauty did not save William. Privilege did not save Anne. Gold did not save the Hanoverian court.
Rank did not save Victoria’s childhood. Global fame did not save Diana. Each of them came in believing that the walls would be theirs.
Each of them found that the walls already belonged to the walls.