The first house on this site of which we have any reliable detail is that built by Sir Heneage Finch, the second of the name, who was Lord Chancellor under Charles I. and was created Earl of Nottingham in 1681, though it is probable that there had been some building on or near the same place before, possibly the manor-house of the Abbot. The first Earl of Nottingham had bought the estate from his younger brother, Sir John, and it was from his successor, the second earl, that William III. bought Nottingham House, as it was then called. William suffered much from asthma, and the gravel pits of Kensington were then considered very healthy, and combined the advantages of not being very far from town with the pure air of the country. Of course, the house had to be enlarged in order to be suitable for a royal residence, but it was not altogether demolished, and there are parts of the original Nottingham House still standing, probably the south side of the courtyard, where the brick is of a deeper shade than the rest. King William's taste in the matter of architecture knew no deviation; his model was Versailles, and as he had commissioned Wren to transform the Tudor building of Hampton into a palace resembling Versailles, so he directed him to repeat the experiment here. The long, low red walls, with their neat exactitude, speak still of William's orders; a building of heterogeneous growth, with a tower here and an angle there, would have disgusted him: his ideal would have found its fulfilment in a modern barrack. Wren's taste, later aided by the lapse of time, softened down the hard angularity of the building, but it can in no sense be considered admirable. Thus Kensington Palace was built, and its walls and its park like gardens were to be as closely associated with the Hanoverian Sovereigns as the building and park of St. James's had been associated with the Stuarts whom William had supplanted.