Just opposite to the palace is Marlborough House, the residence of the Prince and Princess of Wales. The house was built in 1709 at the public expense, as a national compliment to the Duke of Marlborough. Sir Christopher Wren was the architect. After the death of the third Duke it was sublet to Leopold, subsequently King of the Belgians. Queen Adelaide lived in it after the death of King William IV. The building was afterwards used as a gallery for the pictures known as the Vernon Collection. But in 1850 it was settled on King Edward VII., then Prince of Wales, when he should attain his eighteenth year, which he did nine years later. The interior is decorated with beautiful mural paintings executed by La Guerre; many of these represent the battles of the famous Duke of Marlborough. On the removal of the King to Buckingham Palace the present Prince of Wales comes in his turn to Marlborough House. Carlton House Terrace owes its name to Carlton House, built by Henry Boyle, Baron Carlton, in Queen Anne's reign. It was afterwards sold to Frederick, Prince of Wales, and was occupied subsequently by George IV. before he succeeded to the throne. J. T. Smith says: "Many a saturnalia did those walls witness in the days of his hot youth." Princess Charlotte was born here. In 1811 the ceremony of conferring the regency upon Prince George was enacted at Carlton House, and in the June following the Prince gave a magnificent supper to 2,000 guests. In 1827 the house was pulled down. It stood right across the end of the present Waterloo Place, where now a flight of steps lead into the park. At the head of the steps is the York Column of granite, 124 feet high, designed by Wyatt, and surmounted by a figure of the Duke of York, son of George III. One of the sights of London in the seventeenth century, was the garden which lay between St. James's Park and Charing Cross, called Spring Gardens. The place was laid out as a bowling-green; it had also butts, a bathing-pond, a spring made to scatter water all around by turning a wheel. There was also an ordinary, which charged 6s. for a dinner--then an enormous price--and a tavern where drinking of wine was carried on all day long. In the "Character of England," 1659, attributed to Evelyn, the following account of Spring Gardens is found: