The royal house on the Thames where Edward III died in 1377 and Anne of Bohemia in 1394 — pulled down by a grieving Richard II, rebuilt by Henry V, and renamed Richmond after a fire in 1497.
Sheen Palace (later Richmond Palace) on the Thames in Surrey was a significant English royal residence. Richard II ordered it demolished after the death of his queen, Anne of Bohemia, there in 1394; it was later rebuilt by Henry V.
Its attraction was the river. Sheen lay a day’s easy barge journey upstream from Westminster, far enough for clean air and hunting, close enough that the government could follow the king there — the same calculation that put Windsor, Hampton Court and Greenwich on the same water.
A manor house stood at Sheen by 1125, on land granted by Henry I to a Norman knight, and the crown took it into its own hands under Edward I in 1299. For most of the fourteenth century it was one royal house among many.
Edward III changed that. He rebuilt the manor into a palace substantial enough to be his principal residence in old age, and he died there on 21 June 1377, in his sixty-fifth year and fiftieth as king, after a last decade in which the French war he had won at Crécy had gone steadily against him.
Richard II made Sheen his favourite house from 1383 and spent much of his reign there with his queen, Anne of Bohemia, whom he had married the year before. The court at Sheen became the setting for the cultivated, ceremonious style of kingship that his enemies later held against him.
Anne died of plague at Sheen on 7 June 1394. Richard’s reaction was extreme and is well recorded: he could not bear the house where it had happened, and ordered the buildings thrown down and defaced. The palace of Edward III was destroyed by the grief of his grandson, and the site lay in ruins for twenty years.
Henry V began rebuilding at Sheen in 1414, in the same burst of activity that produced his religious foundations: the Carthusian house of Jesus of Bethlehem was established beside the palace, and the Bridgettine abbey of Syon across the river.
The pairing was deliberate. A king who was about to invade France surrounded his own residence with houses of the two strictest orders in England, endowed to pray for him, and the arrangement survived him by more than a century.
A fire on 23 December 1497 destroyed most of the timber buildings while Henry VII was keeping Christmas there. He rebuilt the palace from 1498 on a grander plan and renamed it Richmond, after the Yorkshire earldom he had held before he was king.
Richmond Palace was one of the great houses of Tudor England and the place where Elizabeth I died in 1603. It was sold and largely demolished after the civil wars, and only fragments of the gatehouse and wardrobe survive; the medieval palace beneath it has left nothing above ground at all.