• Introduction
• Scotland Office
• Past Secretaries
• Dover House
• - The Site
• - The Building
• - Sir Matthew Featherstonehaugh
    and others 1756-1788
• - Frederick, Duke of York 1788-1792
• - The Melbourne family 1793-1830
• - The Dover Family 1830-1885
• - The Scottish Office 1885-1999
• - The Scotland Office 1999-Present

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The property is a freehold of the Crown with a lease which extends until the year 2013. In 1670 most of the site was covered by lodgings of James, 1st Duke of Ormonde, who was Lord Steward to the Household, and Colonel Darcy a gentleman usher of His Majesty's Privy Chamber. Prior to that, part of the site may have been occupied by an open real tennis court. The site was near a cluster of houses known as the "Cockpit". A Scot might wish to remember that it was nearby that the Commissioners for the Union between Scotland and England met to conduct their historic negotiations which resulted in the Parliaments coming together in 1707. (It is perhaps ironic that in 1998 the then Secretary of State for Scotland the late Right Honourable Donald Dewar MP announced his candidature as First Minister of the new Scottish Parliament from the entrance of Dover House!) On the other hand an Englishman might call to mind King Charles I being marched past the Cockpit one frosty January morning in 1649 on his way from St James' Palace to execution in front of the Banqueting House on the other side of the street now known as Whitehall.

In 1689 the Darcy lodgings were ordered to be delivered to Richard Hampden, who in 1690 became Chancellor of the Exchequer (this was adjacent to the HM Treasury building). After his resignation in 1694 an order was given, "to marke ye roomes under ye Great Staires going in St James's Park for ye Rt Hon Charles Montague Esquire, Chancellor of Exchequer, which do belong to his office".

From 1710 to 1715 rate books show that the Earl of Arran, the brother of the 1st Duke of Ormonde, was in occupation. In the latter years Ormonde joined the Old Pretender in the first of the Jacobite rebellions and the grant to him became forfeit, thus ending the second Scottish connection with the site.

In 1716 His Majesty had "been pleased to give lease to the Rt Hon Mr Boscowen (later Viscount Falmouth) to fit up the lodgings appointed him at the Cockpit at his own expense". In 1754, on the death of the Dowager Lady Falmouth, the house was to be sold for the benefit of her younger children. This was how the property came into the possession of Sir Matthew Featherstonehaugh Bt MP, who was described in the Annual Register of the London County Council as "a member on the last and present Parliament for Portsmouth, and before for Morpeth in Northumberland; a governor of St Thomas's and the Middlesex Hospital; and FRS". Sir Matthew petitioned for a lease to the effect that the property was in so ruinous a condition that he proposed to pull the whole lot down and rebuild. On 20 March 1755 a lease of 50 years was granted, and Sir Matthew began to build a house on the site from the designs of James Paine.