William of Orange spent his political life fighting Louis XIV's continental ambitions. Louis ruled by absolute decree. William led a republic - one of the strangest creatures in 17th-century Europe, the Dutch Republic, with its merchants and its tolerated religions and its constitutional limits on power. When William became King of England in 1689, he held two titles at once: King in London, Stadtholder in The Hague. Het Loo was built before the English crown arrived, in his stadtholder period, and its architecture is the architecture of that office. The Versailles axis runs to the horizon, claiming the land. Het Loo's main garden is enclosed by raised walks, tucked into the surrounding woods - private, not territorial. The garden of a stadtholder, the source notes, not a king. The orange trees set out in wooden boxes and brought into the orangery every winter did double duty: they were a Baroque garden convention, and they were a quiet pun on the House of Orange-Nassau.

Claude Desgotz, nephew of Versailles' designer Andre Le Notre, drew the Het Loo gardens. The basic Baroque grammar is identical: symmetrical axes, gravel walks, parterres, basins, fountains. But Desgotz worked smaller and tighter. The main garden uses simple rectangular beds instead of the elaborate scrollwork at Versailles. The central fountain at Het Loo actually shoots higher than any at Versailles, which would have pleased William - a small, specific victory. But where Louis chose Apollo as the patron of his gardens and Peter the Great later chose Samson springing the jaws of Sweden's heraldic lion, William chose Hercules. A doer, not a sun-god. In the 18th century the formal garden was destroyed and replaced with the English landscape style then fashionable, and Het Loo's original Baroque layout was lost for nearly two centuries. The restoration began in 1970, working from Desgotz's surviving engraving, and finished in time for the building's 1984 tercentenary. The brickwork and latticework are still new and raw. They will mellow.

William III died in 1702 without heirs, ending the elder line of Orange-Nassau. He had left his Dutch estates to a Frisian cousin, Johan Willem Friso of the House of Nassau-Dietz. Frederick I of Prussia disagreed: he descended from the Orange family too, and there was an inheritance contract between the houses. The Hohenzollerns ended up with most of the older properties - though notably not Het Loo - and never lived in any of them. Johan Willem Friso's son, William IV, eventually pulled Het Loo back into the Orange-Nassau fold along with Soestdijk and Huis ten Bosch. King William I loved the palace and lived there even after he abdicated in 1840. He had reinstated falconry on the grounds; his grandsons founded the Royal Loo Hawking Club, which drew British noblemen including the 7th Duke of Leeds every spring for the hunting season. The club faded after Prince Alexander's death in 1848 and was abolished in 1855. William III of the Netherlands - confusingly named after his ancestor - kept paying a private falconer to keep the practice alive, and died at Het Loo of a kidney ailment in 1890.

Queen Wilhelmina spent her final years at Het Loo and died there in 1962. She had declared in 1960 that on her death the estate should pass to the Dutch state - with the request that it return to her family if the Netherlands ever abolished the monarchy. The Crown Domain became state property. Her daughter Queen Juliana never lived there. Princess Margriet and her husband Pieter van Vollenhoven occupied the right wing of the palace until 1975, when a separate modern home, Het Loo House, was built for them in the grounds. The main palace was renovated between 1976 and 1982 and opened as a state museum in 1984. Visitors walk through interiors furnished with original Orange-Nassau pieces. A library specializes in the dynasty's history. A separate museum inside catalogs the medals and decorations of the Netherlands' orders of knighthood.

In 2016, an international architectural competition asked how to bring a 17th-century palace into the 21st century without rearranging its bones. KAAN Architecten won. Their proposal added more than 5,000 square meters of new visitor facilities - all of it placed underground or hidden inside existing wings. The grass-and-gravel forecourt was replaced with a large central fountain that doubles as a skylight illuminating a new 'Grand Foyer' beneath. From this underground hall, new grand staircases bring visitors up into the historical rooms and into new temporary exhibition galleries. The renovation opened in April 2023. Het Loo is now the 8th-most-visited museum in the Netherlands, drawing more than 400,000 people a year - the same gentleman's residence William built, still pretending it isn't a palace, still hiding the cleverness in the back.