Construction began in 1538 and ran for years. Two courtyards rose from the chalky Surrey ground: an outer court of stone, fortified in the heavy medieval style of older English palaces, and an inner court that was something else entirely. Italian stuccoists and woodcarvers had been imported to dress the inner walls. Tall octagonal towers anchored the southern face. Between the timber framing, plaster panels in high relief showed the Heathen Gods - emblems and figures and mezzo-relievos as big as life. John Evelyn, visiting in 1666, marvelled that the slate facing fastened to the timber 'in pretty figures, that has, like a coat of armour, preserved it from rotting.' The whole thing cost at least 24,000 pounds, an extraordinary sum, and is now considered the building that first brought Renaissance design seriously into England.

Henry never quite finished it. After his death in 1547 the palace passed through complicated hands. Mary I sold it in 1556 to Henry FitzAlan, 19th Earl of Arundel, who completed the work by 1559. In 1585 Elizabeth I came to Nonsuch to sign the Treaty of Nonsuch with the Dutch Republic - a pact that committed English troops to the Dutch revolt against Spain, and helped precipitate the Armada three years later. Arundel's son-in-law, Lord Lumley, sold it back to Elizabeth around 1590 in exchange for lands valued at 534 pounds. Tradition holds that within one of the great octagonal towers, Thomas Tallis's masterwork Spem in alium - the forty-part motet that still astonishes listeners - may have received its first performance. The thought is irresistible: forty voices weaving inside that stuccoed Renaissance shell, with the rest of the court listening through the timber walls.

James I and Charles I both visited Nonsuch for hunting and racing. Anne of Denmark held it as her jointure - widow's portion - though she rarely went, except for one well-attended visit in July 1617 with the Earl of Southampton and others. When the English Civil War swept the Crown's properties into Parliament's hands, Nonsuch was lent out to a succession of Parliamentarians: the republican Algernon Sidney, then Colonel Robert Lilburne, then Major-General John Lambert, then General Thomas Pride - the same Pride who had purged Parliament of MPs unfriendly to the regicide. Pride held the palace until his death in 1658. With the Restoration in 1660, the building came back to the Crown.

In 1670, Charles II gave Nonsuch to his mistress Barbara, Countess of Castlemaine, along with the title Baroness Nonsuch. She liked card games more than country houses. Around 1682 to 1683 she had the entire palace - all those stucco panels, those octagonal towers, that Renaissance experiment - pulled down. The building materials were sold off to pay her debts. Some panelling survived: you can still see it today in the Great Hall at Loseley Park near Guildford. A few fragments live in the British Museum. Two faint rises in the ground along the avenue in Nonsuch Park mark, very gently, where the gatehouses once stood. Otherwise the boast is gone. There was no such palace, and now there is none such.

For most of the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Nonsuch existed mainly as a few engravings, a watercolour from 1568, a corner of John Speed's 1610 map of Surrey, and the meticulous Lumley inventory of 1590. Then in 1959 a young archaeologist named Martin Biddle - just twenty-two years old - led an excavation of the site. The dig ran for two seasons and drew more than 75,000 visitors over the course of the work. It became one of the first serious post-medieval archaeological projects in Britain and transformed how the country thought about excavating buildings of the relatively recent past. The plan that emerged matched the old drawings: simple twin courtyards, the inner one once dazzlingly faced with stucco gods, the outer one plain and defensive. Today the site sits quietly on the edge of Epsom and Ewell. Walkers in Nonsuch Park cross the footprint of Henry VIII's unmatchable palace without always knowing it. The grass remembers what the brochures sometimes don't.