The estate was acquired around 1200. The chapel, dating from about 1230, is the oldest surviving part, in Early English Gothic. The Lollards' Tower of Kentish ragstone was built in 1434 and 1435. Cardinal John Morton completed the five-storey brick gatehouse, Morton's Tower, in 1495. Parliamentarian forces ransacked the palace in the 1640s.
Archbishop William Juxon rebuilt the Great Hall in 1663 with a late Gothic hammerbeam roof. Scholars debate whether it is Gothic survival or early Gothic Revival, and Pepys called it a new old-fashioned hall. Edward Blore added a neo-Gothic east range from 1829 to 1834. The article also gives the end date as 1833.
The chapel was bombed in World War II, leaving only walls, and restored in 1954 and 1955. A library founded in 1610 has a new repository by Wright & Wright, opened in 2021. The article does not say whether the palace is open to visitors.
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