Carlton House, sometimes Carlton Palace, was a mansion in Westminster, best known as the town residence of George IV, during the regency era and his time as prince regent, before he took the throne as king. It faced the south side of Pall Mall, and its gardens abutted St James's Park in the St James's district of London. The location of the house, now replaced by Carlton House Terrace, was a main reason for the creation of John Nash's ceremonial route from St James's to Regent's Park via Regent Street, Portland Place and Park Square: Lower Regent Street and Waterloo Place were originally laid out to form the approach to its front entrance.
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History
An existing house was rebuilt in 1709 for Henry Boyle, created Baron Carleton in 1714, who bequeathed it to his nephew, the architect Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington. Burlington sold it in 1732 to Frederick, Prince of Wales, for whom William Kent laid out the garden. Frederick's widow Augusta, Princess of Wales, enlarged the house.
In 1783, Frederick's grandson George, Prince of Wales, was granted possession of Carlton House and £60,000 (equivalent to £7.8 million in 2025) to refurbish it. The Prince had the house substantially rebuilt by the architect Henry Holland between 1783 and 1796. By the time the Prince of Wales and Henry Holland parted company in 1802, Carlton House was a spacious and opulent residence, which would have been designated a palace in many countries. From the 1780s it was the centre of a glittering alternative court to that of the Prince's parents at St James's and Buckingham House. After he became Prince Regent the house was altered and redecorated to suit its increasing use as a palace in all but name. On 19 June 1811 the Regent hosted a grand reception ostensibly to honour Louis XVIII and the exiled French royal family, but largely to celebrate the establishment of his own regency.
The summer of 1814 saw Carlton House at the centre of celebrations marking the allied victory over Napoleon. In June, the Regent entertained the Allied Sovereigns including Tsar Alexander I and King Frederick William III of Prussia. For these occasions, John Nash erected temporary structures in the gardens, including a large polygonal ballroom known as the "tent room", which employed innovative laminated timber construction. The principal occasion was the Wellington Fête on 21 July honouring the Duke of Wellington, attended by some 2,000 guests. The gardens were used again on 1 August for the Grand Jubilee of 1814. After the celebrations ended, Nash's polygon room was dismantled in 1818 and re-erected on Woolwich Common as a museum for the Royal Artillery; it survives today as the Rotunda, Woolwich.
One of the most splendid apartments in the palace was the crimson drawing-room, in which Princess Charlotte was married, in 1816, to Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg.
In 1820, on the death of his father, George III, the Prince Regent became King George IV. The first proclamation of the accession was made on the steps of Carlton House.
George IV deemed that Carlton House, the official royal residence of St. James's Palace, and his parents' Buckingham House were all inadequate for his needs. Some consideration was given to rebuilding Carlton House on a far larger scale, but in the end Buckingham House was rebuilt as Buckingham Palace instead. Carlton House was demolished in 1826 and replaced with two grand white stuccoed terraces of expensive houses known as Carlton House Terrace. The proceeds of the leases were put towards the cost of Buckingham Palace.
Architecture
When the Prince of Wales took possession in August 1783, Sir William Chambers was appointed as architect, but after a first survey, he was quickly replaced by Henry Holland. Both Chambers and Holland were proponents of the French neoclassical style of architecture, and Carlton House would be extremely influential in introducing the Louis XVI style to England.
Holland began working first on the State Apartments along the garden front, the principal reception rooms of the house. Construction commenced in 1784; when these rooms were visited in September 1785 by the usually critical Horace Walpole, he was impressed, writing that when completed, Carlton House would be "the most perfect in Europe".
There is an august simplicity that astonished me. You cannot call it magnificent; it is the taste and propriety that strike. Every ornament is at a proper distance, and not one too large, but all delicate and new, with more freedom and variety than Greek ornaments; and, though probably borrowed from the Hotel de Condé and other new Palaces, not one that is not rather classic than French.
The chimney-pieces were added 1783 to 1785 by the London sculptor Thomas Carter the Younger.
Construction at Carlton House came to a halt at the end of 1785 due to the Prince of Wales's mounting debts. His unpaid bills, following his secret morganatic marriage to Maria Fitzherbert amounted to £250,000. Parliament appointed a commission to investigate the huge cost overruns at Carlton House, and to draw up estimates on how much would be needed to complete the project. In May 1787, the Prince of Wales contritely approached his father, King George III, and persuaded him to provide the money to finish the house. When work resumed in the summer of 1787, with a budget of £60,000, it was with the assistance of many of France's leading furniture makers and craftsmen, under the design supervision of the Parisian marchand-mercier Dominique Daguerre, Marie Antoinette's former interior decorator, who acted as the agent through whom furniture by Adam Weisweiler was imported.
A stained glass window was supplied by William Raphael Eginton. Circa 1816, he described it thus:
Demolition
Following the death of his father, the new King George IV turned his attention from Carlton House to renovating and greatly enlarging Buckingham House as his primary London residence. This coincided with alterations to the planning of Regent Street, and in order to link Regent Street with the Mall, Carlton House was, notwithstanding the huge and controversial expenditure on it, entirely demolished. The Duke of York Steps and the twin Carlton House Terraces stand on its site.
Most of the furniture, carpets, and artworks in the house were moved to the re-named Buckingham Palace or to other royal residences. Many architectural features were reused since several royal residences were being built or remodelled at the time, including Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle, although Royal Lodge and possibly the Brighton Pavilion may have received items. Chimney pieces installed at Buckingham Palace are identifiable as having come from Carlton House, as are many doors at Windsor Castle. To save costs in the construction of the new National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, the bases and capitals of exterior columns at Carlton House were reused for the porticos at the east and west entrances, the columns themselves having deteriorated where they were stored in St James' Park.
The house's name persists in the form of the Carlton House desk, which has straight legs with drawers in the frieze and a superstructure that wraps round the back, fitted with tiers of drawers. The name is contemporary and in 1797 was recorded in the in-house cost books of the cabinet-making firm of Gillow, with a sketch. The original, made for the Prince Regent's use at Carlton House, has not been identified.
Cultural references
Oscar Wilde makes reference to Carlton House in his 1890 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. In chapter 11, as the protagonist looks over portraits of his ancestors, he writes, "What of the second Lord Beckenham, the companion of the Prince Regent in his wildest days... [t]he world had looked upon him as infamous. He had led the orgies at Carlton House."
Carlton House is referenced in the first episode of the 1979 television miniseries Prince Regent, in which George IV, then-Prince of Wales (portrayed by Peter Egan), commissions Henry Holland to refurbish it. When King George III refuses to allow the Prince to go to Germany for his desired military education, he demands Holland refurbish Carlton House with lavish extravagance with neither regard of cost nor his father's wishes.
In the novel Sharpe's Regiment by Bernard Cornwell, the titular character is presented to the Prince Regent inside Carlton House.