Royal Liaison

George IV built his fantastical pleasure-palace at Brighton while conducting his relationship with Maria Fitzherbert, whom he had secretly and illegally married in 1785 — 'the wife of my heart and soul'. Brighton, then and now, is a hot spot of romance and scandal.

The country retreat where the King's affair with the twice-divorced Wallis Simpson deepened, and where he signed the Instrument of Abdication in December 1936 — love versus the crown.

It was at Wemyss Castle that the 22-year-old Mary was reunited with the tall, lute-playing Darnley and, per ambassador Sir James Melville, was instantly captivated — a whirlwind courtship that led to marriage five months later. (We feature only the love-at-first-sight romance.)

Henry VIII's pleasure palace, where he honeymooned with Anne Boleyn, married Jane Seymour's successor rites and learned — at Mass, by letter — of Catherine Howard's alleged adultery. Her ghost is said to run shrieking down the Haunted Gallery towards the chapel where her husband prayed.

Anne Boleyn's girlhood home, where Henry VIII rode out to press a courtship that would break England from Rome. The castle keeps his love letters' story alive — 'I would you were in mine arms, or I in yours' — the correspondence of a king undone by a woman who knew the value of waiting.

The house Charles II gave his best-loved mistress — the orange-seller turned actress Nell Gwyn — and the only freehold on the south side of Pall Mall not owned by the Crown, because Nell reputedly refused to live in a house she did not own. John Evelyn's diary records the King chatting to 'Mrs Nelly' over her garden wall in 1671.

The last standing fragment of Whitehall Palace, the sprawling warren where the Merry Monarch kept his court and his mistresses — Barbara Villiers chief among them — sometimes within corridors of the Queen's own apartments. The palace burned in 1698; the gossip proved more durable.

The widowed Queen's Highland retreat, where her devotion to her blunt-spoken ghillie John Brown scandalised the court — courtiers called her 'Mrs Brown'. Documented: profound intimacy, shared whisky, a ring buried with her

The seaside palace Albert built so the royal couple could be, in Victoria's word, 'snug' — a marriage of genuine passion the Queen recorded with un-Victorian candour. Her bathing machine survives; so do the nine children as evidence of the idyll.

Five months after the lightning-strike meeting at Wemyss, Mary married her tall lute-player in the chapel royal at Holyrood — against her advisers, her cousin Elizabeth and, soon enough, her own better judgement. The passion was real; the marriage was a catastrophe conducted in a palace.