Leicester House, Westminster

Built by the Earl of Leicester and completed in 1635, it was later occupied by Elizabeth Stuart, a British princess and former Queen of Bohemia, and in the 1700s by the two successive Hanoverian princes of Wales.

[1][2] In August 1631, King Charles I ordered his Attorney General, Sir Robert Heath, to prepare a licence for Leicester to build a house "with necessary outhouses buildinges and gardens", but this stipulated that the outer walls must be wholly of brick or stone and added also "the forefronts to bee made in that uniforme sort and order as may best bewtifie the place".

A map of 1658 by Richard Newcourt and William Faithorne shows it as an asymmetrical group of buildings around a courtyard, with a huge gatehouse taking up most of the southern range.

[1] To build the house and its outbuildings, Lord Leicester had had to enclose some of his four acres, all of which was common land in the parish of St Martin in the Fields.

[1] From April to August 1640, the new house was occupied by Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford, soon after his return from meetings in Dublin as Lord Deputy of Ireland.

[3] For a short time in 1662, Leicester House was occupied by Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia, the eldest daughter of James VI and I and the mother of Prince Rupert of the Rhine and Electress Sophia of Hanover; Elizabeth Stuart died in the house on 13 February 1662, Thomas Allen later noting that she "ended her unfortunate life" there.

In July 1743 Jocelyn Sidney, 7th Earl of Leicester, died without a successor, and the house was inherited by two sisters, Lady Sherard and Elizabeth Perry.