Inside Kensington Palace: Explore the Royal Family’s Storied Home

Much of this intrigue was due to the fact that George I hated his son, the future George II, and their feud played out in the halls of Kensington Palace. When the old king died in 1727, the spoiled, emotional King George II and his brilliant, savvy wife, Queen Caroline, continued the family tradition and feuded with their eldest son, Frederick, Prince of Wales.

During the reign of George II, life at Kensington Palace was akin to the set of a posh soap opera. “Show me some good person about that court; find me, among those selfish courtiers, those dissolute gay people,” Sir Robert Walpole wrote, per Quinn, “someone I can love and regard.”

It was also packed with people, since Queen Caroline opened the Kensington Palace gardens, which she greatly improved, to the masses every Sunday. Anyone who dressed well enough could come to jockey for a position or patronage or simply gawk at the royals themselves.

“Court dinners could be boisterous and rowdy,” Worsley writes. “Once, so many people came ‘to see their majesties dine, that the rail surrounding the table broke.’ The people who had been leaning upon it all fell over and ‘made a diverting scramble for hats and wigs, at which their Majesties laugh’d heartily.’”

But despite Kensington Palace’s importance during this time, it was already beginning to rot. According to Worsley, George II’s mistress, Henrietta Howard, found that her Kensington Palace apartment was so damp that crops of mushrooms sprouted from the floor.

Kensington Palace: the Birthplace of Queens

The “mad” King George III hated the antics of his Hanoverian ancestors, and when he became king in 1760, he left the drama of Kensington Palace for Buckingham Palace, three miles away.

Now that the monarch was no longer in residence, Kensington Palace became a rundown warehouse for excess royals. “The magnificent state rooms were slowly allowed to decay until they became a dilapidated store for coal, broken furniture and old pictures,” Quinn writes. “Meanwhile, the rest of the palace began a long cyclical period during which various apartments were updated and modernized, then left to fall apart before being renovated once more.”

One of the most famous royal family members to call Kensington Palace home was the colorful, bombastic Caroline of Brunswick, the estranged wife of the future King George IV, who established a rival court to her husband in her apartments and was known to wander Kensington Gardens and talk to strangers. Another resident was Prince Augustus Frederick, Duke of Sussex, the eccentric ninth child of King George III, who filled his Kensington Palace apartment with his collection of rare books, medicines, and dozens of clocks.

“On the hour,” Quinn writes, “his apartment was filled with bells and gongs striking, musical tunes, national anthems, and martial airs.”