The story of Hamilton Palace in 13 pictures: How one aristocratic Lanarkshire family lost the grandest manor in Britain

The story of Hamilton Palace is one of aristocracy, greed and hubris - a tale of one family digging too deep, and paying the price.

Hamilton Palace was the seat of the Hamilton family - the not-quite-royal upper class family from which the town of Hamilton in South Lanarkshire derives its name.

The lore of the Hamilton family lineage is intertwined with that of Scottish history - they remained at the very top of the class system from feudalism and serfdom right up until the Great War at the beginning of the 20th century. For some 800 years the Hamiltons were at the top of their game, making ties through marriage to British royalty and manoeuvring in the political sphere through the ages. It was all very Game of Thrones.

The palace itself serves as a pretty good analogy for the state of the Hamilton family. It was the grandest non-royal residence in Britain for the 300-some years it stood, a testament to the power they held. Built around the 1820s, the palace was a veritable treasure trove, with walls and mantlepieces lined with some of the rarest, most opulent, and without a doubt the most expensive artefacts the British Empire had to offer.

The grounds and the palace itself was massive, decadent doesn’t do it justice. So just how did the Hamilton’s manage to fall so fast from grace, that their palace quite literally sank into the earth?

There have been 16 Duke’s of Hamilton so far - with the lineage and peerage still existing today - all of varying amounts of financial and political competency. After 300 years on the top, all it took was one son’s love of yachting and horses to put the aristocratic family into dire straits.

The 12th Duke was William-Douglas-Hamilton, who became Duke of Hamilton at the ripe old age of 18. He wasn’t left much, considering his own father had married a princess and frittered a lot of the Hamilton family fortune on courting, while his grandfather had spent much of the fortune beyond that on architecture and building the families art collection.

Like his father, William loved the high life and the good times that came with being born in the upper-class - he loved betting on the ponies and jetting about on yachts, two very expensive habits. So expensive in fact that the family fortune was mostly lost on the horses, and with the Hamilton lands decreasing in value and profitability, the family began to incur debts in the hundreds of thousands.

Desperate for funds, as much of the property owned by the Hamilton’s had been lost by this point, the twelfth Duke of Hamilton leased out the coal rights underneath the nearby Low Parks in Hamilton in a bid to generate extra funds, this was the beginning of the end for the palace.

One lucky bet at the 1867 meant that William could keep afloat in his final years, but by the time of his death in 1895, the 13th Duke had inherited a debt of £1.5m - despite having made around £400,000 in an auction selling off much the Hamilton’s private art gallery and museum in 1882.

In 1915, the 13th Duke furthered the coal rights, allowing the mining of coal directly underneath Hamilton Palace itself. At this point, the palace was used as a Royal Navy hospital during the First World War, with plans for its demolition immediately afterwards.

The upkeep could no longer be afforded, and it was only a matter of time before the grounds were swallowed by the undermining anyway - by 1921, all of the palace’s contents were stripped and sold at auction.

Much of Hamilton Palace can be found in private and public collections around the world today, the Old State Dining Room is on display in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, while the fireplace wall from the Drawing Room is the centrepiece in the Art of Living gallery.

Now the grounds are home to a retail and leisure park, with several sports facilities like football pitches dotted around. Nearby coal mines have long since shut, most of them being sealed up in the mid-20th century. The palace grounds have returned to the people, after 300 years as the plaything of nobility.

For more of the history of coal mining in the area, and how an entire coal mining village near Hamilton Palace was sacrificed to make a man-made loch - check out our article on the lost town of Bothwellhaugh here.

If you want to read more about the history of the Hamiltons, read this magnificent piece- The Rise and Fall of Hamilton Palace - by the National Museums of Scotland, or to see what the palace looked like in its prime, check out The Virtual Hamilton Palace.

For a peek at the interiors of Hamilton Palace, take a look at the photos below.