The Privy Garden of the Palace of Whitehall was a large enclosed space in Westminster, London, that was originally a pleasure garden used by the late Tudor and Stuart monarchs of England. It was created under Henry VIII and was expanded and improved under his successors, but lost its royal patronage after the Palace of Whitehall was almost totally destroyed by fire in 1698.
From the start of the 18th century onwards, the garden went through major changes as it fell into neglect. It was painted in 1747 by Canaletto during a period of transition, as Westminster was being transformed by the construction of new buildings and roads. By the start of the 19th century it had been redeveloped as the site for a row of townhouses, some of which were occupied by prime ministers seeking homes near the government buildings nearby. The last remnants of the Privy Garden were destroyed in 1938 during the construction of government offices on the site of the present Ministry of Defence Main Building.
Origins and layout
The Privy Garden originated in the 16th century as part of the estate of York Place; Cardinal Wolsey's London residence. The estate already had a privy, or private, garden that was located behind what is now the Banqueting House. An orchard, which was part of the estate, adjoined it to the south. When Henry VIII seized York Place, he bought more land to the south of the orchard to expand the estate. The old privy garden was cobbled over and later became known as the Pebble Court, while the orchard was converted into a new and much larger Privy Garden, known at first as the "great garden". At the time, Westminster was not heavily built up as it is now, and York Place – later renamed Whitehall Palace – lay within a suburban area dominated by parks and gardens. St. James's Park, across the other side of Whitehall, was a royal hunting ground.
Henry's garden was very ornately decorated, as 16th-century visitors noted. The Spanish 3rd Duke of Nájera wrote of a visit in 1544 in which he saw "a very pleasant garden with great walks and avenues in all directions, containing many sculptures of men and women, children and birds and monsters, and other strange figures in low and high relief." Von Wedel recorded in 1584 that in the garden were "thirty-four high columns, covered with various fine paintings; also different animals carved in wood, with their horns gilt, are set on the top of the columns, together with flags bearing the queen's arms. In the middle of the garden is a nice fountain with a remarkable sun-dial, showing the time in thirty different ways. Between the spaces that are planted in the garden there are fine walks grown with grass, and the spaces are planted very artistically, surrounded by plants in the shape of seats."
The earliest surviving depiction of the garden, from 1670, shows a very different layout. By this time the garden had been redesigned in a grid pattern with sixteen squares of grass separated by paths. The relentless expansion of the Palace of Whitehall, which was by now a sprawling jumble of structures, had hemmed in the Privy Garden behind walls and buildings on all sides. A high wall to the west separated it from The Street, the main thoroughfare at the south end of Whitehall that bisected the palace in a north-south direction. To the north, a range of buildings occupied by high-ranking courtiers separated it from the Pebble Court that lay behind the Banqueting House, while to the east the Stone Gallery and state apartments, used by the king's closest courtiers, blocked it off from the River Thames. The royal apartments were off the Stone Gallery and had a view of the Privy Garden, with a screen in place to prevent passers-by from seeing the naked king in his bathtub. A row of trees on the south side screened it from the Bowling Green, which had been an orchard in Henry VIII's time but was converted for leisure use after the Restoration. A terrace also separated the Privy Garden from the Bowling Green, but this was removed in 1673–4 and part of the Bowling Green was added to the garden.