Kew Palace and Gardens – The story of a house that became a palace

The story of a house that became a palace…

In the summer I spent a couple of nights in London, staying near Kew Palace and Gardens, just on the other side of what was once the green of Kew village. I have wanted to visit Kew for years. Even though I don’t write regency romance now I have been fascinated by history since my childhood and I will never rid myself of my amateur historian, the draw of wanting to know how people lived historically, what happened and why will never leave me. I love research and investigating, looking for clues of the things that aren’t generally known. Many of the things I discovered would have once upon a time crept into my regency stories because I do love hiding true aspects and moments within my fiction, and you never know there maybe a time-slip thriller in the future to incorporate some of the things I found out so I will keep some things to myself.

I was very surprised by the size of Kew Palace, the home of King George III and Queen Charlotte (now of Bridgerton storytelling fame). The palace is more like a Manor House in size and nature. Not at all palatial, and yet the park around the house that is now Kew Gardens, is palatial. That is because the main house at Kew that was originnaly used by the Royal family, known as The White House, was rented as a holiday home. A little like the royal family use Balmoral now, the Royal family would spend their summers at Kew escaping London life for the summer season. The White House fell out of use and became derelict, but the property ‘little kew’ continued to be used by the Royal family.

What became Kew Palace, once the land had been purchased by the Royal family, was a much smaller house that had stood in the grounds of The White House. Kew Palace was King George III’s childhood school house, and also where he sent his sons to learn after they were seven years. The following article about the governess King George III and Queen Charlotte employed mentions that from the age of seven a separate household was established for young princes.

As a child, King George III, with his brother, was taught by a tutor in the house for long days from 7 a.m. until 10 p.m. But as heirs to the throne they had to be knowledgable, capable and wise in numerous subjects.

Kew Palace gardens, as with all the older palaces, in or around London, run up to the bank of the Thames. It was the position along the river which probably made the Royal family decide to rent a property in Kew. It was a popular, a fashionable, area for the wealthy from the 1600s. Allowing them to escape the sickness harboured in the narrow London streets. And, of course, in the 1500s and 1600s rivers were like motorways. Rowing boats were the quickest form of travel over longer distances, because narrow and often muddy roads were slower to navigate for carriages and carts and even on horseback. Officials and family could easily travel up the river and then return to the City of London, to Westminster, or continue upriver to Hampton Court Palace or Windsor Castle. and yet be close enough should they need to return to parliament or to undertake business.

You can see in this image below, on the opposite bank, older houses still have their steps leading down to the river where they would have called over one of the many ferrymen who rowed boats on The Thames in river in the same taxis now operate on the roads.

There are some images of historic paintings on this site where you can see just how many boats were on the river on a daily basis even in the 1700s.

I was very lucky when I visited Kew Palace to have a one to one tour of the areas of the building people don’t usually see. The historians know very little about the history of the property, other than it was previously developed as a Silk Merchant’s home in 1631, a man who would have also valued access to the river. This was the house King George II and Queen Caroline rented, they turned it into a more modern property for the time and later purchased the land. It became a palace when it became the property of the crown. But In the attic and the basement you can see hints of the house that became a palace and clues that a house stood here before 1631.

This paint work was found beneath other layers of paint in the attic, in the position where a Tudor staircase must have been removed during the 1700s renovations.

I have seen this approach in somewhere much closer to where I live and in a much more humble abode. The Merchant’s House in Marlborough Hight Street was built after the English Civil War, and when you walk around that house you will see that they painted everything at that time, one room has the walls and even the door painted in a striped pattern that matches the fabric on the chairs.

On the wall there, opposite the staircase, is also a painted stair rail. It is not as glamorous as the one painted in Kew Palace above, though, so perhaps that is a hint that the London silk merchant had more wealth to make a greater impression with.

The image below is of the house in Marlborough, which was also owned by a silk merchant, who did travel to Venice for his silks so he was not poor. He may well have known the London merchant as there would have only been a few trading routes for silk. The staircase leads from the shop up to the drawing room and dinning room above, and then up to the bedrooms. I can only imagine then, if the house at Kew was grander how much grander would it have been, if not a palace, nor to the standard of a stately home then what was the middle ground.

There was a further mystery in the cellar, which I was told was not used for storage during the period the Royal family lived there, and has very unusual architecture that was described as earlier than 1631. Even though historians know a Tudor property was updated in the Georgian period, they have not identified when a well was incorporated into the house and in use. There is no access to the well from the house above. Nor do they know why the arches are so unevenly built, and crossed. They only thing people do know is that an old iron door means there was something or someone owners of the house wanted to keep safe down here.

I have a couple more stories to share about Kew Palace, so more next week.

How a novel begins …

I’ve said it before here, and in other places, that I love how a whole novel can unfold in a moment from seeing something that inspires you, and I’m fascintated by other people’s inspirations. You may remember my previous blog on Inspirations: From J. R. R. Tolkien, Jane Austen, Arthur Ransome, Beatrix Potter, John Fowles to The Brontë sisters and me .

As I said last week, I didn’t share the inspirations behind Entangled, the historical novel I released at the beginning of the summer, because I wasn’t well at the time. So, I thought this weekend I’ll do some catching up.

A little like The French Lieutenant’s Woman, the setting for the last book in the Wickedly Romantic Poets series is a windswept coastal town. The first encounter with the characters is on a deserted beach. I always intended from book one that Clio would end up moving to Hartlepool to hideaway, and that James would encounter her on the beach there several years later. As readers know, there’s a long prologue in book one that starts their story and then through the series you read about the years of their seperation through the lives of others. In book four, their story picks back up when they meet unexpectedly on Hartlepool beach, with the wind whiping up the sand around them. Clio is flying a kite with her son and James walks across the otherwise empty beach with his daughter.

My Nanna and Grandad were born and grew up in Hartlepool, on the northeast coast of England. They left Hartlepool when they were in their twenties. I didn’t visit there until after they’d both passed away. I wish I had. I wish I’d visited with them so I could ask them the stories of life there.

After Nanna died we were staying in Yorkshire, near Whitby, I was researching settings for The Marlow Family Secrets, and I decided to visit Hartlepool in a sort of pilgrimage to explore where she’d come from. I walked through the town to find the street and the house on the Headland (a dairy in the late 1800s and early 1900s) where Nanna grew up. I’d seen pictures of the house, but it was a suprise when I reached it to discover it was only a hundred meters from the harbour wall. We walked down to the harbour and then walked on around the historic Headland. People who know something but not much about Hartlepool will think it’s industrial, and relatively modern, and very large. They are right, but, at the heart of that is a settlement on the Headland that dates back centuries. A monastry was built on the Headland in AD640. That is the area where Nanna and Granded grew up.

When my husband and I went to Hartlepool it was a cold, windy, autumn afternoon. There wasn’t much to do, so, we carried on walking and came across a Headland Story Trail board. We followed the Headland Story Trail boards around the Headland to a long windswept beach. I didn’t know my Nanna grew up so near an amazingly, dramatic, beach. It was a bigger surprise than the harbour. I didn’t even know Hartlepool had beaches. And, in my opinion, beaches are more interesting when there’s a storm 😀 I might not be normal, I love watching a wild sea more than lying on a sunbed. I don’t have a copyright free picture to share but if you follow the Headland link you’ll see it. The waves were rolling up the sand and crashing down in a froth of angry foam, and the wind rushed at us with a strength that made sure you knew you needed to be suitablely in awe of the force of nature; the few trees along the edge of the beach grew with a lean that said the wind was fairly constant too. It was a very Brontë setting.

I’m one of those people who always finds those classic, harsh, Brontë, Wuthering Heights like, environments inspirational. No one was on the beach that day. No one else was on the headland path looking down at the beach. It drew the emotions of someone who needed to isolate (of course that was years ago, so put COVID-19 thoughts aside) they were hiding for some reason. The Wickedly Romantic Poets series began in that moment.

The Brontë family, in their real lives, lead me to take the step from there to the tragic lives of the romantic poets. In the same trip, we visited the parsonage in Haworth, where they used to live. It was another stormy day. The clouds above were a dark steel grey at the edges. It wasn’t raining but it was very windy. The moor began a couple of hundred yards from the parsonage front door, so they would have looked out at the windswept landscape constantly. It is a very macabre setting on a stormy day. Which probably put me in a macabre mood. In the Parsonage Museum I then learned not just about the sisters but their brother, Branwell. Another creative person, who fell in with the wrong gathering of men and lived a hedonistic life – as many of the artists and poets did. He ended his life tortured by addiction as a result.

So the Wickedly Romatic Poets inspirations began by putting together those two things – Hartlepool beach and the tragic life of Branwell Brontë. I then went off, and as you know from all my previous inspiration blogs about the series, read diaries, letters and biographies, visited the homes of the romatic poets (and other period properties), and added lots of realistic details and settings into the lives of my poets. But I thought today I would share where it all began and why.

My Nanna and Grandad. Edith Smith nee Copeman and John Smith.

This picture was taken on Scarborough beach. They used to travel to Scarborough when they were courting even though there were beaches just up the road. It’s no wonder I didn’t realise there was a beach in Hartlepool. They probably travelled there because Scarborough was a place with lots of entertainments, like Brighton.

Here’s the links to the other blogs on the inspirations behind this series: