In 1618 Rubens traded Daniel in the Lions' Den, along with eight other paintings and some money, to Sir Dudley Carleton, the British ambassador at The Hague, in exchange for Carleton's large collection of Classical sculpture.

Carleton, who became Viscount Dorchester in 1628 and died in 1632, either gave or bequeathed the painting to King Charles I, an insatiable collector of great works of art.

Abraham Van der Doort, the Surveyor of the King's Pictures, records Daniel in the Lions' Den hanging in the Bear Gallery in the Palace of Whitehall in the late 1630s and certainly by 1639 (the date on the covers of the original inventory and the three copies). Van der Doort's handwriting is very bad and this illustration is taken from Sir Oliver Millar's composite edition of the inventories now in the Royal Library, the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and the British Library.