Images: main gatehouse, view of St. James from street, east courtyard (photos: C.A. Stanford)
Acquired: 1531
In 1531, Henry VIII began to acquire the lands that now comprise the site of St. James’s Palace and adjoining park. The property consolidation (and pensioning off former residents of a leper hospital, which gave its name to the new palace) was to take approximately five years. Construction continued until ca. 1541 and was organized by the building workshop at neighboring Whitehall, although St. James’s was considerably more sequestered by parkland than it is now.
Henry’s builders apparently repurposed some of the medieval hospital structures, which may explain why the chapel has a northern orientation. The palace is mostly of red brick. The gatehouse with several adjoining courtyard walls retains its Tudor character; the Chapel Royal is at core also Henry’s construction. The initials “H.A.” decorate the doorways to the turrets of the gatehouse, standing for Anne Boleyn, Henry’s second wife. Other heraldry (notably on the Chapel Royal ceiling) celebrates Henry’s marriage to Anne of Cleves, his fourth wife.
The palace apparently was planned as a residence for ancillary members of the royal family (probably Henry’s illegitimate son, the Duke of Richmond). It continued as a secondary residence for the Crown until Whitehall was badly damaged by fire in 1698; after this St. James’s became a more mainstream royal house. It is still used for Crown offices at the present day, and therefore has undergone so many campaigns of addition and alteration that it is difficult to reconstruct the original Henrician appearance of the whole.