The History of Leeds Castle
Leeds Castle has been a Norman stronghold, a queen's dower, a Tudor palace, a prison, a private house and a conference venue that helped shape the Camp David Accords. The rooms you walk through today are mostly from the last of those.
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1086 | Domesday records the manor of Esledes, held by Odo, Bishop of Bayeux |
| 1119 | Robert de Crevecoeur builds the first stone castle on two islands in the River Len |
| 1139 | King Stephen besieges it; the family keeps it |
| 1278–1290 | Eleanor of Castile builds the revetment wall and the Gloriette |
| 1321 | Edward II besieges the castle and beheads Bartholomew de Badlesmere |
| 1517–1523 | Henry VIII turns a fortress into a royal palace |
| 1665 | Dutch prisoners of war set fire to their quarters |
| 1821–1823 | Fiennes Wykeham Martin demolishes the main house and builds the New Castle |
| 1974 | Lady Baillie dies and leaves the castle to a charitable foundation |
| 1978 | The Middle East talks that preceded the Camp David Accords are held here |
1119: a stone castle on two islands in the River Len
The Domesday survey of 1086 records the manor of Esledes — a name meaning slope — in the hands of Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, half-brother to William the Conqueror. A few years later William II granted the estate to Hamo de Crevecoeur, whose family held it for the next 175 years.
In 1119 Hamo's grandson Robert built the first stone castle, and he built it on two natural rocky outcrops that formed islands in the River Len. That decision is the whole character of the place: the water is not decoration added later, it is the reason the castle is where it is. King Stephen besieged it in 1139 and the family kept it anyway.
Eleanor of Castile and the Gloriette, 1278–1290
Edward I's queen took the castle in 1278 and turned a Norman motte-and-bailey into something closer to a palace. The revetment wall around the larger island dates from her time, and the building on the smaller island became known as the Gloriette — the name it still carries and the oldest thing a visitor walks through.
Edward inherited it on her death in 1290 and kept improving it, including a bathhouse made for him because he liked to bathe regularly. The 2026 exhibition ‘Pilgrimage of Love’ is built around Eleanor; the events page carries its dates.
The queens' castle: six women and a dower, 1299–1437
When Edward I married Margaret of France in 1299 he granted her Leeds Castle, and the practice stuck. For the next 140 years the castle passed from queen to queen as part of the royal dower: Margaret of France, then Isabella of France, then Anne of Bohemia, then Joan of Navarre, then Catherine de Valois.
Two of those tenures are worth the detour. In 1321 Bartholomew de Badlesmere refused Queen Isabella entry; Edward II besieged the castle, took it, and had him beheaded. Isabella held it herself from 1327 until her death in 1358. And Joan of Navarre, Henry IV's widow, was accused of witchcraft by her stepson Henry V and imprisoned in the castle she owned until her release in March 1422.
Froissart's ‘beautiful Palace in Kent’
Richard II granted the castle to Anne of Bohemia in 1382. After her death from plague in 1394 the chronicler Jean Froissart visited the English court while it was in residence here and wrote of ‘the beautiful Palace in Kent called Leeds Castle’. The word he chose — palace, not castle — was already accurate a century before Henry VIII made it official.
Henry VIII turns a fortress into a palace, 1517–1523
Henry VIII made the largest single change to the building. Between 1517 and 1523 he ran major alterations that converted a fortified stronghold into a royal palace, and he stayed here with Katherine of Aragon. This is why a castle founded in 1119 reads as Tudor from the lawn.
It left royal hands in 1552, when Edward VI granted it to Anthony St Leger for services to his father. The St Legers sold it in 1618 to finance a voyage with Sir Walter Raleigh.
Dutch prisoners and a fire, 1665
Sir Richard Smythe demolished the north end and built a Jacobean house in its place. Sir Thomas Culpeper bought the castle in 1632 — the family whose name the Culpeper Garden still carries — and in 1665 it was leased as a detention centre during the war with the Dutch. The prisoners set fire to their accommodation, and the damage was not repaired until the nineteenth century.
The Fairfaxes, Virginia and a pauper's grave
Catherine Culpeper married Thomas, 5th Lord Fairfax, and the castle passed to a new family. In 1746 the 6th Lord Fairfax sailed for Virginia to manage his estates and settled there for life — the only British peer to move permanently to colonial America. His brother Robert held the castle for 46 years, improved the parkland and commissioned Thomas Hogben's estate map of 1748. George III and Queen Charlotte spent a night here in 1778. Robert died in 1793 having spent everything, and is buried in a pauper's grave at Broomfield, a mile from the castle he owned.
The New Castle, 1821–1823
Fiennes Wykeham Martin commissioned the architect William Baskett to survey the building in 1821. The report was bleak enough that Martin demolished the main house and replaced it with one in the Tudor style; the resulting New Castle was finished by 1823. When the family bought land at Hollingbourne in 1895, Leeds became one of the largest private estates in Kent.
Lady Baillie and the 1930s house party
By 1925 the Wykeham Martins were forced to sell, and the castle passed to the Anglo-American heiress Olive Paget — then Mrs Wilson-Filmer, later Olive, Lady Baillie. She engaged the architect Owen Little, then Armand-Albert Rateau (1882–1938), who made a Gothic interior: the Banqueting Hall restored to full size, the chapel turned into a music room. From 1932 Stephane Boudin (1888–1967) of Maison Jansen redesigned the interiors in the French taste.
Through the 1930s the castle was one of the great country houses of England, with the Maiden's Tower converted into bachelor apartments and a cinema, and tennis courts, a squash court and a swimming pool with a wave machine added outside. During the war the New Castle served as a hospital, and men repatriated after Dunkirk were treated here.
1974: a charity, and the castle opens
Lady Baillie died in 1974 and left the castle and grounds to a specially created charity, the Leeds Castle Foundation, with her friend Lord Geoffrey-Lloyd as its first chairman. An endowment of £1.4 million was invested and a further £400,000 raised from the sale of furniture. The gardens opened to the public in 1975 and the castle in 1976.
1978: the talks before Camp David
Four years after it opened, Leeds Castle was chosen as the venue for the Middle East peace talks that preceded the Camp David Accords of the same year. It now takes over 600,000 visitors a year, and a Leeds Castle tour from London is one of the more common ways they arrive.
See the rooms this history left behind
The 1930s interiors, the Gloriette and the gardens the Culpepers named are all inside the same ticket, and the coach days from London include entry.
Frequently asked questions
Who built it, and when?
Why is it called the queens' castle?
Did Henry VIII stay here?
What is actually inside the castle building?
Is Leeds Castle in Leeds?
What survives of all this, and where to find it on the ground, is set out in things to do at Leeds Castle. Leeds Castle Tours lists the ways in.
Sources
Checked on 5 September 2026. This chronology follows Leeds Castle's own published history. One date is inconsistent in that source: its history page dates the family's sale to 1925 and its Lady Baillie page dates her purchase to 1926.