The eyes of the world were on St James’s Palace on 10 September 2022 when David White, Garter King of Arms, read the Accession Proclamation formally announcing the succession of King Charles III following the death of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II. If royal palace expert Simon Thurley had been watching or listening, he might well have been frustrated to hear the BBC commentators say repeatedly that ‘very little is known about the history of the palace’. In fact, Simon and his two co-authors, Rufus Bird and Michael Turner, had completed a new history of the palace based on primary sources and a study of the surviving building fabric, some three years previously.
Following on from the monograph on Windsor Castle (see CA 341), this was intended to be the second of a series of comprehensive new histories of the occupied royal palaces to be published by the Royal Collection Trust (RCT). The Trust, however, is entirely dependent on the income from visitors to the palaces, and when the pandemic struck, the book had to be put on ice. Now Yale University Press has stepped in to publish the work in association with the RCT. We can at last make sense of what Simon Thurley calls ‘a mysterious and confusing place’ and which HRH The Prince of Wales (now King Charles III) describes in the foreword to the new history as ‘the least well-known of all the official royal residences’.
Leprosy to luxury
The palace has its origins in the Hospital of St James, which was possibly established in the late 12th or early 13th century to house up to 16 women with leprosy, one of whom served as the prioress. They, and the Augustinian priests who ministered to the community, dedicated their lives to saying prayers for the souls of the hospital’s wealthy benefactors. Such communities had to remain isolated from the rest of the population, and the site for the new hospital was chosen with that in mind. It was built on the lower of two gravel terraces (Piccadilly now runs along the upper terrace, with Pall Mall on the lower one) in an undeveloped and rural part of the lower Thames Valley. A branch of the River Tyburn flowed through the site, providing a source of water needed for the relief of skin conditions.
