Palace of Whitehall - Demise

Demise

By 1691, the palace had become the largest and most complex in Europe. On 10 April, a fire broke out in the much-renovated apartment of the Duchess of Portsmouth that damaged the older palace structures, though apparently not the state apartments. This actually gave a greater cohesiveness to the remaining complex. At the end of 1694 Mary II died in Kensington Palace of smallpox, and on the 24th of the following January lay in state at Whitehall; William and Mary had avoided Whitehall in favour of their palace at Kensington. However a second fire on 4 January 1698 destroyed most of the remaining residential and government buildings; the diarist John Evelyn noted succinctly the next day, "Whitehall burnt! nothing but walls and ruins left." Beside the Banqueting House, some buildings survived in Scotland Yard and some facing the Park, along with the so-called Holbein Gate, eventually demolished in 1769. Despite some rebuilding, financial constraints prevented large scale reconstruction. In the second half of the 18th century, much of the site was leased for the construction of town houses.

During the fire many works of art were destroyed, probably including Michelangelo's Cupid, a famous sculpture bought as part of the Gonzaga collections in the seventeenth century. Also lost were Hans Holbein the Younger's iconic Portrait of Henry VIII and Gian Lorernzo Bernini's marble portrait bust of King Charles I.