It was famously the scene of Charles and Diana’s nightmare marriage and Charles’s serial adulteries. But then Kensington Palace has a long history of royal philandering. George II installed his wife and mistress in the palace, for example, and made his mistress sleep in a room so damp there were said to be mushrooms growing on the walls. And then there were the eccentrics. George III’s sixth son, Augustus, Duke of Sussex, became a virtual recluse at the palace. He collected hundreds of clocks and mechanical toys, thousands of early Bibles and dozens of songbirds that were allowed to fly freely through the royal apartments. Today, the palace is home to the future King William and his wife Catherine, and until recently home to the newly married Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Harry and Meghan. Tom Quinn takes the reader behind the official version of palace history to discover intriguing, sometimes wild, often scandalous, but frequently heart-warming stories.
