WHITEHALL
History and
Architecture Notes

By

W. J. LOFTIE B.A.; F.S.A.

LONDON
SEELEY AND CO. LIMITED,
ESSEX STREET, STRAND

NEW YORK: MACMILLAN AND CO.
1895

Site of Whitehall in the Twelfth Century—Part of Westminster—Hubert de Burgh—York House— Wolsey—Hentzner—Henry VIII.—His Honour of Westminster—Holbein’s Gate—Anne of Cleves— Funeral of Henry VIII.

When Abbot Laurence, of Westminster, looked out to the northward or north-eastward, he could see no land—as far as the wall of London—which did not belong to him and his house. This was the Abbot who first had leave to assume the mitre, and in 1163 he obtained from Pope Alexander II. the canonisation of Edward the Confessor. When worshippers wished to kneel at the new saint’s shrine they had to reach Westminster as best they could. Some, especially those who lived at Charing, or further up the hill, in what was afterwards Hedge Lane, would make their way to the Thames, the best highway in those days. In some seasons, perhaps, the water-courses, which had their origin in the Tyburn, might be dry enough to let them pass, but there were as yet no regular roads and no bridges. One of these water-courses supplied the Abbey, and one ran out where Richmond Terrace is now. We have two documents from which to draw a picture of the ground which was not yet Whitehall. First, we have the evidence afforded by the geographical features of the locality; and, secondly, we have the report of a trial which took place some sixty years ago, when, no doubt, all possible charters and grants and leases and demises were cited. The trial was between the people of Westminster and the people who lived in Richmond [Pg 6] Terrace. Westminster claimed that the Terrace was within the boundaries of St. Margaret. The Terrace claimed that it was extra-parochial, as being on part of the site of the palace of Whitehall. The counsel for Westminster was able to show that Whitehall had been private property before the reign of Henry VIII., and that neither he nor any one else had made it extra-parochial. The verdict, therefore, was in favour of the parishioners of St. Margaret.

We may return to this interesting and instructive report, with its wealth of ancient evidence, and interrogate that much more ancient document, the face of the country. Strange to say, a great deal of that country remains as it was in, say, the reign of Henry III. The green fields and the water-courses are there, though the Abbot in 1250 could no longer look across his own land all the way from Westminster. The divided Tyburn wandered over the green expanse, untroubled with bridges. Two or three small brooks formed here a kind of delta. On the south, one of them ran through Westminster Abbey and divided Thorney Island from Tot Hill. Another ran through the district we call Whitehall. The land between was low and marshy, and even at the present day, when there has been so much levelling up, the statue of Charles I. is upon ground ten feet higher than Parliament Street. If, standing on the future site of Whitehall we looked to the westward, we saw nothing but a vast tract of low green meadow-land. If we looked to the south, we might have seen the new buildings of Westminster Abbey, unless when the Danes had been on the warpath. If we looked to the eastward, we found that the Thames washed up close to our feet.

At this early period, and down to the reign of King Edward I., there were no houses in sight, except those which clustered about the Abbey, those which constituted the village of Charing, and in the far distance the grim walls, the red-tiled roofs, and the church towers of the City. London was more plainly visible than it is now, and on account of a curious bend in the course of the Thames, was nearly as visible from Westminster. By the thirteenth century a great change had come over all the district. The Thames was better confined within its proper limits; [Pg 7] some measure of embanking had been carried out, and a great many alterations in City life, in Church arrangements, and in the King’s policy have been detailed in the histories of London. We need not go far into them here. Before 1200, all the land between the Abbot and London belonged to him. By 1222 all was changed, or about to be changed, and the Abbot owned nothing except the advowson of the far-off St. Bride’s. St. Bride’s belongs to Westminster even now. The King laid claim to certain foreshores on the banks of the Thames. Undoubtedly, they belonged by an ancient grant to the Abbot, but we must take into consideration that what had been only occasionally dry land in the eleventh century was permanently dry in the thirteenth; and the King had conferred, and was conferring, too many benefits on the Abbot and his monks and their church to permit them to dispute his royal, if illegal, pleasure. The Bishop of Exeter formed a little estate of the Outer Temple. From his precincts westward the constant embanking, and especially the formation of the roadway of the Strand, left a wide strip now permanently dry. This strip the King erected into a manor, and bestowed upon his wife’s uncle, Count Peter. Peter became Count of Savoy in 1263, and the manor has ever since been called after him. The next of these reclamations was Whitehall. In the lawsuit already mentioned, a document was produced which threw great light on the early history of the district. It relates to the sale by Roger de Ware and Maud, his mother, to Hubert de Burgh, of their land here. Another document was a similar sale by Odo, the King’s goldsmith, of an adjoining plot, identified as stretching from the highway to the Thames.

Hubert’s choice of a residence was determined, no doubt, because it placed him within easy reach of the city on one side, and of the King’s palace on the other. He probably seldom used the road through the newly-constructed King Street, or the other road through the Strand—a road famous for ruts and mud. He went either to Westminster or to London by water, as did his great neighbours in the Savoy, and the bishops who had palaces outside the Bar of the Temple. We often wonder why our ancestors preferred these low-lying places for their houses. The answer is the difficulty they experienced in locomotion by land. [Pg 8] The “silent highway” of the Thames was such a convenience that all who could possibly afford it preferred to be within easy reach of water.

Hubert had no easy part to play. From 1227 he had to do daily battle with the young King, who already, though still a boy, showed signs of the combined obstinacy and incompetence which characterised him through life. Hubert saw the impolicy of yielding to the papal claims. He followed, as Bishop Stubbs remarks, in the footsteps of William Marshall, taking a middle path between the feudal designs of the great nobles and the despotic theories of the late King. In both these particulars he was in opposition to Henry, who was bound to the Pope by his education, and to the retrograde party by his personal prejudices. Hubert served the King too well to please the people, and spared the people too much to satisfy Henry. In 1232 he was dismissed, and his ungrateful master, not content with his dismissal, trumped up a series of charges against him, just as Henry’s descendant, Henry VIII., did with regard to Cardinal Wolsey. Hubert had been made Earl of Kent in 1227, and Constable of the Tower of London just before his disgrace—in fact, only a few days before—and during the same month was himself lodged in the Tower as a prisoner. Eventually his lands were restored, but he was not allowed to leave his castle at Devizes; he survived till 1243, when he died, as Matthew Paris relates, “full of days.” He had been five times married, and reckoned among his wives the widow of King John, and the sister of Alexander III., king of Scotland; but he left only two children, John, his son, and Margaret, his daughter. The subsequent history of the land now called Whitehall, so far as Hubert was interested in it, may be briefly detailed. Hubert had made a vow to go to the Holy Land and fight the infidel, being himself, as Roger of Wendover says, Miles strenuus; but not being able to fulfil his vow, he gave his land at Whitehall, which he describes as being in the parish of St. Margaret’s, into the hands of trustees to be sold in aid of an expedition to the Holy Land. The trustees promptly sold it to Walter Grey, archbishop of York, who annexed it to his See. Walter died in 1255, and was succeeded by Sewall Bovill, who had been Dean of York. Thirty archbishops in all held this house, beginning with Walter Grey [Pg 9] and ending with Thomas Wolsey. It is curious to remark that no trace now exists of their occasional residence. It was uniformly called York House, and we may be sure that Wolsey improved it, and built a hall and a chapel similar to those at Hampton Court. One or two old views show us stately and lofty buildings in the half-Gothic, half-Italian style, which is so familiar at Christ Church at Oxford, and at King’s College at Cambridge. A large hall was in King Street; that is, outside Holbein’s Gate. We see it beyond the gate in Silvestre’s view; and it stands up dark and heavy, with its strong buttresses on the left hand, in T. Sandby’s view. In the last century, when it had been part of the Treasury buildings for generations, it was newly fronted in stone, and the buttresses turned into pilasters. Since then it has been refronted twice—by Soane in 1824, and by Barry in 1846. Barry greatly increased the length. It would be interesting, but almost impossible, to ascertain if any of the masonry of Wolsey’s building still remains within the new walls.

This is, of course, a digression. No part of the Treasury is in Whitehall; but the reason for mentioning it is that its inclusion in the two engravings I have named shows us what, in all probability, Wolsey’s other buildings were like. Paul Hentzner, writing in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, says that they were “truly royal.” Very little building of any importance went on under Henry VIII. or his three immediate successors, so that Hentzner’s allusion must be to what Wolsey left. It is true, as we shall see, that Henry proposed to improve and extend it; but we may rest certain that he added nothing to its magnificence, if we except the gates; as the anonymous author of Dodsley remarks, he had a greater taste for pleasure than for elegance of building, and immediately on entering upon possession he ordered a tennis court, a cockpit, and a series of bowling-greens.

But we are going too fast. In the beginning of 1530 Cardinal Wolsey was still in possession, and there are various accounts of how he transferred the palace of his predecessors to the King. Henry was not very scrupulous in matters of this kind. He was much given to breaking the tenth commandment, and especially to coveting his neighbour’s house. He had already helped himself to Hampton Court, and a curious anecdote will be found in Thorne’s Environs. Lord Windsor was [Pg 10] much attached to his place at Stanwell, which had descended to him from a long line of ancestors. The house, no doubt, was in what agents nowadays call ornamental repair. He entertained the King royally, and Henry, with the kind of gratitude peculiar to him, promptly commanded him to hand it over. He gave in exchange the Manor of Bordesley and the Abbey, which Henry had taken from the monks. Windsor had just laid in a stock of provisions for his Christmas festivities, but he refused to remove them, saying that the King should not find it bare Stanwell when he came to take possession. The curious part of the story is that Henry does not seem ever to have visited it again, and we know that he soon afterwards leased it away. At the time of Wolsey’s fall, Henry had been for several years almost without a home in London; his apartments at Westminster were burnt in 1512, and after twenty years, in 1532, he bought the hospital of St. James’s-in-the-Fields. Between these dates he would have been without a London palace, except the Tower or Bridewell, but on the fall of Cardinal Wolsey certain illegal formalities were complied with, and Henry became possessed of Whitehall. The gates north and south of the royal precincts were needful on account of the old right of way between Charing—now become Charing Cross—and Westminster; and in 1535 Henry built the church of St. Martin, near to where the royal mews had been from time immemorial, with a view to prevent the constant passage of funerals from the northern to the southern part of St. Margaret’s.

In addition, Henry acquired all the land between Charing Cross and an outlying suburb of Westminster known as Little Cales, or Calais. More than this, he annexed all the green to the westward, which I have already mentioned. Abbot Islip had, in fact, nothing left of the great manor which after the Conquest had belonged to Westminster Abbey. The City of London had acquired the great ward of Farringdon Without. The lawyers had the Inner and Middle Temples. The King had inherited from the wife of John of Gaunt all the manor of the Savoy. And now Henry VIII. helped himself to the remainder. [Pg 11]

[Pg 12] It will be interesting to see the document by which the Abbot conveyed the inheritance of his house to the King. I am tempted to quote it nearly whole, but recommend the reader who is not interested in such things to skip on. No more quotations of the kind occur in this little book, but some readers may find the numerous landmarks enumerated worth making a note of, as most of them have long been obliterated:—

“To all Christ’s faithful people to whom this present writing indented shall come: John Aslyp, abbot of the monastery of St. Peter, Westminster, and the Prior and Convent of the same monastery, Greeting in the Lord everlasting: Know ye that we, the aforesaid Abbot, Prior, and Convent, with the unanimous assent, consent, and will of our whole Chapter, in our full Chapter assembled, have given, granted, and by this our present charter indented, confirmed to Sir Robert Norwich, Knight, our Lord the King’s Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, Sir Richard Lyster, Knight, Chief Baron of the Exchequer, Sir William Pawlett, Knight, Thomas Audeley, serjeant-at-law of the Lord the King, and Baldwin Malet, solicitor of the Lord the King: a certain great messuage or tenement commonly called Pety Caley’s, and all messuages, houses, barns, stables, dove-houses, orchards, gardens, ponds, fisheries, waters, ditches, lands, meadows, and pastures, with all and singular their appurtenances in any manner belonging to the said great messuage or tenement called Pety Calais, or to the same messuage adjoining, or with the same messuage heretofore to farm, let, or occupied; situate, lying, and being within the said town of Westminster, in the county of Middlesex. And also all those messuages, cottages, tenements, and gardens situate, lying, and being on the east side of the street, commonly called the Kynge’s Strete, within the said town of Westminster, in the aforesaid county of Middlesex, extending from a certain alley or lane, there called Lamb Alley, otherwise called Lamb Lane, unto the bars situate in the aforesaid Kings Street, near the manor of the Lord the King there, called York Place. And also all other messuages, cottages, tenements, gardens, lands, and water, late in the tenure of John Henburye, situate, lying, and being on the said east side of the highway aforesaid, leading from a certain croft or piece of land commonly called Scotlande, to the Chapel of St. Mary de [Pg 13] Rouncedevall, near the cross called Charyng Crosse. And also all those messuages, cottages, tenements, gardens, lands, and wastes, lying and being on the west side of the aforesaid street, called the Kynges Strete, extending from a certain great messuage or brewhouse, commonly called the Axe, along the aforesaid west, side, unto and beyond the said cross called Charyng Crosse. And also all other lands, tenements, and wastes, lying on the south side of the highway leading from the aforesaid cross called Charyng Crosse, unto the hospital of St. James in the Field. And also all those other lands and meadows lying near and between lands lately belonging to the aforesaid hospital of St. James on the south side of the said hospital, and so from the aforesaid hospital on the south side of the highway extending towards the west unto the cross called Cycrosse, and turning from the same cross extending towards the south by the highway leading towards the town of Westminster, unto the stone bridge called Eybridge, and from thence along the aforesaid highway leading towards and to the aforesaid town of Westminster, unto the south side of the land there called Rosamundis, and so from thence along the aforesaid south part of the aforesaid land called Rosamundis, towards the east, directly unto the land, late parcel of the aforesaid great messuage or tenement called Pety Calais, and to the same great messuage or tenement belonging, containing in the whole by estimation, eighty acres of land more or less, and one close late in the tenure of John Pomfrett, now deceased, containing by estimation twenty-two acres of land, lying in the parish of St. Margaret’s, Westminster, in the aforesaid county of Middlesex, except always and so as the aforesaid Abbot, Prior, and Convent, our successors and assigns, wholly reserved as well as the aqueduct coming and running to our aforesaid monastery.” [Pg 14]

[Pg 15] Had Henry foreseen the course which his policy of confiscation would lead him into, he might have waited till 1539, when all the monastic estates became his. However, there is much to interest us is this strange document. We see that when Henry had annexed Whitehall to Westminster in such a way as to call the two by the same name—that is, “our palace of Westminster;” and when he had annexed the whole expanse of St. James’s Park, to both, and had made of St. James’s a kind of lodge to Whitehall—when from St. James’s he could look up the green hills towards Hyde Park, which he had also taken from the Abbot of Westminster, and beyond that again towards Hampstead Hill—the intervening country being all open and void—he took special leave from a subservient Parliament to make the whole into “an honour.” “Forasmuch as the King’s most royal Majesty is most desirous to have the games of hare, partridge, pheasant, and heron preserved in and about his honour at his palace of Westminster, for his own disport and pastime to St. Giles’s-in-the-Fields, to our Lady of the Oak, to Highgate; to Hornsey Park; to Hampstead Heath; and from thence to his said palace of Westminster, to be preserved and kept for his own disport, pleasure and recreation; his highness therefore straightly chargeth and commandeth all and singular his subjects, of what estate, degree or condition soever they be, that they, nor any of them, do presume or attempt to hunt, or to hawk, or in any means to take, or kill, any of the said games, within the precincts aforesaid, as they tender his favour and will eschew the imprisonment of their bodies, and further punishment, at his Majesties will and pleasure.”

Henry spent considerable sums of money in making an orchard, probably where the so-called Whitehall Gardens are now. Two thousand five hundred loads of stone were used in this work and in enclosing St. James’s Park. But the only additions to Wolsey’s building seem to have been a long gallery which ran northward towards Charing Cross; there was also a passage, but of what kind we do not know, “through a certain ground named Scotland.”

There are numerous engravings extant of the northern gateway. It was in the most florid taste of the day. Perhaps we can best realise its appearance by a visit to Hampton Court. The great gate there is made of ornamental brickwork and decorated with terra-cotta statues or busts. Thomas Sandby’s drawing shows the view from King Street very well. On our left are the buildings of the Treasury. To the right beyond the gate is the Banqueting House. Apparently when this view was taken the gate had become wholly detached from what remained of the palace after the fire of 1697. Wilkinson’s view (I. 143), from a drawing by Hollar, taken in the early part of the reign of Charles I., shows a line of [Pg 16] four gables connecting the gate and the Banqueting House, and we know that a gallery or passage led from the park, through the first floor of the gate to the palace. By this circuitous route it was that Charles reached the place of his death. In Hollar’s view the arch of the gate contains a flat ceiling and a window, which greatly spoils its appearance. At the park end of the passage there was a staircase. Adjoining this end of the passage, and very near where Downing Street stands now, was a tilt-yard, and close to it a small barrack for the Foot Guards. Beyond it, further to the north, was the yard of the Horse Guards, very much as it is still. Behind the spot where James I. built the Banqueting House, to the eastward, was the court, a very irregular space, divided by a passage passing over an archway. This passage led to the great hall and the chapel, which last was close to the river’s bank. The King’s lodgings also looked on the Thames, but between them and the chapel there was a labyrinth of small chambers and sets of chambers. To the westward of these small and inconvenient apartments, some of which were appropriated for the Queen and her maids of honour, was the great Stone Gallery, which looked on the garden and the bowling green. How far these arrangements were due to Cardinal Wolsey and how far to Henry VIII. we cannot say. Undoubtedly, the whole palace was most inconvenient, even at that day, when men’s ideas of comfort were so different from ours. There was not, if we except the so-called Great Hall, a very small building compared with that of Hampton Court, a single large or handsome chamber in the whole place. Room was, however, found for a library, and Paul Hentzner mentions it with praise. In it he saw a book in French written by the Princess, afterwards Queen, Elizabeth, with her own hand, and inscribed to her father: Elizabeth sa très humble fille rend salut et obédience. “All these books,” continues Hentzner, “are bound in velvet of different colours, though chiefly red, with clasps of gold and silver; some have pearls and precious stones set in their bindings.” There are probably a few representatives of this library among the books which belonged to Henry VIII., and have his name or arms, in the British Museum. Hentzner also notices the furniture of inlaid woods, some stained glass representing the Passion, and a gallery of portraits and other pictures. He visited Whitehall in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, when the place must have been very much as it was left by Henry VIII. He mentions, among other things, the Queen’s bed, “ingeniously composed of woods of different colours, with quilts of silk, velvet, gold, silver, and embroidery.” Among the portraits is one, the description of which puzzles me: “A picture of King Edward VI., representing at first sight something quite deformed, till by looking through a small hole in the cover, which is put over it, you see it in its true proportions.” Can this have been a device of the same sort as the distorted skull in Holbein’s picture of “The Ambassadors” in the National Gallery? [Pg 17]

[Pg 18] Henry VIII. continued to date documents of all kinds at “Westminster,” meaning Whitehall. It is possible that St. James’s was similarly included in Westminster. In or about 1537 the King’s house there was greatly improved and beautified, it is said by Cromwell, in anticipation of Henry’s marriage with Anne of Cleves. The initials “H. A.” on some of the fireplaces and ceilings were probably put up in allusion to the same marriage, and have nothing to do with Anne Boleyn. It was intended that Henry and Anne (of Cleves) should pass their honeymoon at this remote corner of the park as it was then, there being no buildings whatever visible from the gate. The result we all know; and Henry, long before the honeymoon had waned, was back at “Westminster.” Events travelled rapidly in those days. Anne Boleyn was beheaded in May, 1536. In the same month Henry was married to Jane Seymour. She died in October, 1537. In January, 1539, Henry married Anne of Cleves, and divorced her in July. In April following Cromwell became Earl of Essex, and was beheaded in July of the same year. No doubt Whitehall was the principal scene of the long tragedy indicated by this dry list of dates. At “Westminster” Henry conferred a peerage on Cromwell’s son, Gregory; and there, too, he issued letters of naturalisation to the Lady Anne of Cleves, and gave her several manors. One more tragedy and we have done with Henry VIII. On a day unknown, in January, 1547, the King lay dying at Whitehall. So weak had he become that he was obliged to leave it to others to execute his cruel and relentless orders. He died at Whitehall on the 28th, the last act of his life having been to send the poet Surrey to the scaffold, and to prepare a similar fate for Surrey’s father, the Duke of Norfolk. The Duke being a peer, the process for obtaining an act of attainder was slower. A commission had been issued by the tyrant to Wriothesley, St. John, Russell, and Hertford to give the King’s consent to the Bill. But death stepped in and the Duke’s life was saved. [Pg 19]

[Pg 20] Sandford gives a very circumstantial account of the funeral ceremonies at the burial of Henry VIII. It is chiefly interesting because he names several apartments of Whitehall Palace. At first the body lay in the King’s private chamber, and there received some embalming treatment, and was wrapped in lead. The chapel, the cloister, the hall, and the King’s chamber were all hung with black. On the 2nd of February the coffin was taken into the chapel. We read of cloth of gold and a pall of tissue. The altar was covered with velvet, adorned with scutcheons of the Royal arms. Twelve lords, mourners, sat or knelt within the rail. Watchers likewise took turns of duty, and, as the people passed by, a herald cried to them, saying, “You shall of your charity pray for the soul of the most famous prince, King Henry VIII., our late most gracious king and master.” The body was not to lie in the sumptuous but despoiled chapel Henry had raised for his father and mother. On the 14th of February the wax effigy was ready, and a procession, which Sandford says was four miles long, started for Windsor. Henry had desired to be buried beside Jane Seymour. Syon was reached the first night, and the journey was ended at one o’clock the next day.

There is nothing to connect Edward VI. with Whitehall during his short reign. But Mary, his successor, was constantly there. She is said to have preferred St. James’s, and the first separate mention we have of it in a State paper is in December, 1556. She died there in November, 1558.

Elizabeth made much use of Whitehall, but her buildings and improvements at Windsor must have proved a powerful attraction. She went about a good deal, and her State papers are signed in a great variety of places. She left no mark on Whitehall, although, at the very [Pg 21] end of her reign, instead of Henry the Eighth’s “palace of Westminster,” we have “Whitehall,” pure and simple, one or twice. We have seen how York Place became the Palace of Westminster. How it again changed its name, and became Whitehall, we do not know. The change seems to have been made by Elizabeth shortly before her death, and the name may have already been in popular use. After her death, at Richmond, in March, 1603, her body lay in state at Whitehall, and was buried in the Chapel of Henry VII.

With the Stuarts we have a new epoch in the history of Whitehall.

Accession of the Stuarts—Wallingford House—Henry, Prince of Wales—Masks at Court—Inigo Jones—The Banqueting House—The Great Design of 1619.

The accession of the Stuarts marks a new epoch in the history of Whitehall. In spite of edicts against building, Charing Cross had become a populous place, and one of James’s first acts had been to build new stabling and a barn in the Mews on the site now occupied by Trafalgar Square. North-east of Whitehall, the Strand had become a continuous street, which ended with what we remember as Northumberland House, then called Northampton House, and subsequently Suffolk House. South of the palace, King Street had also been completed, and in a house there Edmund Spenser, the poet, died “for lake of bread,” as Ben Jonson reports. He “refused 20 pieces sent to him by my lord of Essex, and said he was sorrie he had no time to spend them.” East of King Street, where now we see Mr. Norman Shaw’s fine police office and Richmond Terrace, were green fields and gardens sloping to the Thames. The curious old Gothic gate made an entrance to King Street, and stood just at right angles to where we see the chief entrance to the Foreign and India Offices. The Palace garden, with its sun-dial lawn, was separated from the King Street slopes by the Bowling Green, where is now the house of the Duke of Buccleuch. On the other side of the roadway of Whitehall, beyond, that is to the northward of, the Tilt Yard and Horse Guards, Sir William Knollys, who was Treasurer of the Household to Queen Elizabeth, built himself a house to be near the Court. James I. made him a peer, as Lord Knollys, in 1603. In 1616 he became Viscount Wallingford, and his house long bore this name. Ten [Pg 23] years later he was advanced to the earldom of Banbury, and died in 1632. There were complications as to his marriage, in 1606, with Lady Elizabeth Howard, and his titles have been claimed unsuccessfully, at intervals ever since, by his reputed descendants. We shall have more to say about Wallingford House presently.

[Pg 24] The new King must have looked on Whitehall as but a poor lodging. The Queen had Somerset House, between the Strand and the Thames, for her separate residence, and the Prince of Wales had St. James’s. To be more accurate, we may quote Mr. Sheppard to the effect that, though St. James’s was granted to Prince Henry the year after the King’s accession, he did not go into residence there for six years. Two years later he died. It is worth while to go into these things, because, among the four hundred persons and personages who composed the Prince’s train, was a “surveyor,” or, as we should say, an architect, named Inigo Jones, reputed to be a great traveller, but more in vogue at Court as a “devyser of maskes.” He had three shillings a day for his pay, and the Prince gave him as much as thirty pounds on one occasion (which, as Cunningham, his biographer, remarks, was equal to one hundred and twenty pounds of our money), and sixteen pounds on another. When the Prince died, Jones, who had a promise of the Royal Surveyorship at the next vacancy, went to Italy, no doubt to study, having probably saved something during his two years at St. James’s.

There are many notices of masks performed before the King’s Majesty at Whitehall in the early years of the new dynasty. These plays took place in the Hall, which, as we have seen, was near the Chapel in the eastern part of the palace. It must have been small and inconvenient for such purposes, but Inigo, who on many occasions is mentioned as having looked after the arrangements, was fertile in resource, and made the most of the space at his disposal. He was destined to furnish the palace with an adequate hall, which is now the sole relic of the old royal residence existing. It is quite worth while to quote (from Cunningham) Jones’s account of one of these plays. It was written by Chapman, and was acted by the gentlemen of the Middle Temple and Lincoln’s Inn at the time of the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth with the Palsgrave, afterwards King of Bohemia. First, a procession started from the Rolls House in Chancery Lane, and rode on horseback along the Strand, past Charing Cross, to the Tilt-Yard at Whitehall, where they made one turn before the King, and then dismounted. The performance took place in the Hall. It is described as having for [Pg 25] scenery an artificial rock, nearly as high as the roof. The rock was honeycombed with caves, and there were two winding stairs. The rock turned a golden colour, and “was run quite through with veins of gold.” On one side was a silver edifice labelled in Latin, “The Temple of Honour” (Honoris Fanum). There were various allusive devices, and after Plutus, the God of Riches, had made a speech, the rock split in pieces with a great crack, and Capriccio stepped out to make his speech while the broken rock vanished. Next appeared a cloud. Then a gold mine, in which the twelve masquers were triumphantly seated. Over the gold mine was an evening sky, and the red sun was seen to set. There were white cliffs in the background, and from them rose a bank of clouds, which hid everything. The mask cost Lincoln’s Inn alone more than a thousand pounds. Of course, scenery of the kind described must have been extremely costly, the designer having neither the appliances nor the skilled workmen who carry out such marvellous scenic effects in our modern theatres.

One more example of Inigo’s powers as a “devyser” may be quoted from Cunningham. In 1611, in January, the Prince, then nearly at the end of his short life, presented a mask at Court, that is, at Whitehall. It was written by Ben Jonson, and called “Oberon, the Fairy Prince.” It cost 289l. 8s. 5d. for mercery, 298l. 15s. 6d. for silk, and 143l. 13s. 6d. for tailor’s work; in all, the Prince had to pay 1092l. 6s. 10d. The interest of these details lies in the fact that it was by making stage scenery that Inigo Jones was taught how to extract the greatest amount of effect from the smallest amount of material or means. It let him into the secret of proportion, and the marvellous amount of influence proportion alone, without ornament or expense, can be brought to exercise. Other men at that time also understood stage scenery, but stage scenery was to them nothing more. The information so gained fell on fertile soil in the mind of Inigo, and brought forth eventually those splendid architectural designs for which he can never be too much praised.

Inigo Jones carried the information and experience thus obtained with him on this his second visit to Italy. He enquired why such a building had such an effect. He made careful measurements, and compared and [Pg 26] combined the figures so arrived at until he wrung the secret of the old Roman builder from the ruins. Cunningham dwells at some length on this subject. There can be no doubt that, like Wren’s, the genius of Jones consisted mainly in his extraordinary power of taking pains. Where one man was content to observe the completeness and harmony of some palace or church, Jones must find out to what cause that harmony was due. Thus he went about making measurements. For instance, he always carried a copy of the great work of Andrea Palladio with him wherever he went. On the fly-leaves he constantly wrote such notes as this:—“The length of the great courte at Windsour is 350ᶠᵒ, the breadth is 260; this I measured by paces the 5 of December, 1690. The great court at Theobalds is 159ᶠᵒ, the second court is 110ᶠᵒ square, the thirde courte is 88ᶠᵒ—the 20 of June, 1621.” The book is now at Worcester College, Oxford. One of his notes is very curious as showing his subtle analysis of proportion. He had a great admiration for the Temple of Jupiter at Rome, and set seriously to work to find out the reason for its satisfactory effect. In the result he came to the conclusion that its design was based on a series of circles, and that its proportions were fixed by dividing the largest diameter into six parts, and then recombining them. In June, 1639, he noted of this temple that it had just been destroyed by the Pope’s permission for the sake of the marble built into the walls. The Bishops of London have here ancient precedent for their treatment of Wren’s City churches, and what Inigo would have thought of some recent doings may be gathered from the next two notes:—“This was the noblest thing which was in Rome in my time. So as all the good of the ancients will be ruined ere long.”

On the 1st of October, 1615, he was put in possession of the office of Surveyor to the King, which had been promised him before he left England. His predecessor, Simon Basil, had died in that year, and we cannot doubt that he immediately commenced the series of designs by which it was intended to transform the shabby rabbit-warren, that, as we have seen, the so-called Palace of Whitehall had become. Otherwise, it is impossible to believe that when, in 1619, the old hall of which I have so often spoken, was destroyed by fire, he was ready within six [Pg 27] months to begin the building of the Banqueting House. We must remember that this house, which is so familiar to all Londoners, was part of a design intended to cover a space of 1152 feet by 874. It was expected to rival the great palaces of the continental kings. The Vatican may be said to have been completed in 1588, and the smaller palace of the Lateran in 1586. At that time the largest of these palaces was the Escurial in Spain, which had been completed late in the previous century. The front is more than 680 feet in length. Versailles had not been begun, and neither had the largest of all, the palace of Mafra, on the west coast of Portugal, not far from Lisbon.

Mafra is 760 feet in width, east and west. It forms at the present day a conspicuous, but not beautiful, object from the deck of the passing steamer, but is seldom visited, as it has nothing except its vast size to recommend it. But the palace of Whitehall was designed by Inigo Jones to be both larger than any other, and also so beautiful that even the little fragment with which we are familiar has challenged the admiration of every one who has any architectural taste for more than two hundred and fifty years.

When the fire in Whitehall Palace took place, it did not require that the King should summon Jones to repair the damage. Any work of that kind was part of his daily round: but two interesting points should be mentioned here. Inigo made no attempt to restore the burnt building, nor did he undertake, as a modern architect would have done, to make a new hall, and persuade his employers that it was exactly as Cardinal Wolsey had left it. On the contrary, he offered the King plans of which the Banqueting House was but a small part. Evidently he had carefully examined the site, and found that there was ample room for a building on the greatest possible scale. The palace as it then was, reached from the very bank of the Thames to the roadway of Whitehall; and, on the western side, looking into the park, there was a kind of village of buildings attached to the palace more or less slightly. The whole space available was about 4000 feet from north to south, and 1300 from east to west. On the side of the park the space was practically inexhaustible; the King could take as much as he pleased in that direction. We shall give some description of the whole design presently. [Pg 28] Jones within six months was ready to begin upon his new Banqueting House, and on the 1st of June, 1619, the first stone was laid, the architect having submitted a model to the King. The building was finished at the end of March, 1622, the expenditure having been 14,940l. 4s. 1d. It is remarkable that the account was not finally settled until long after the death of King James, namely, in 1633. It may be well here to give the technical account of the new building, probably written by Jones himself. It was described as 110 feet in length, and 55 in width within. The wall of the foundation is 14 feet in thickness. The first storey to the height of 16 feet was of Oxfordshire stone, rusticated on the outside and bricked on the inside. The Banqueting Hall was 55 feet in height to the roof, the walls being 5 feet thick, made of Northamptonshire stone, with two [Pg 29] orders of columns and pilasters, the lower Ionic and the higher Composite, with their architrave, frieze, cornice, and other ornaments of the kind; also rails and “balustres” round about the top of the building, all of Portland stone, with fourteen windows on each side; one great window at the upper end, and five doors of stone with frontispieces and cartouches; the inside brought up with brick, finished over with two orders of columns and pilasters, part of stone and part of brick, with their architectural frieze and cornice, with a gallery upon the two sides, and the lower end borne upon great cartouches of timber carved, with rails and “balustres” of timber, and the floor laid with spruce deals; a strong timber roof covered with lead, and under it a ceiling divided into a fret made of great cornices enriched with carving; with painting, glazing, &c. The master-mason was the famous Nicholas Stone, who sculptured the water-gate at the foot of [Pg 30] Buckingham Street, and to whom Cunningham attributes the monument of Sir Francis Vere in Westminster Abbey. If the beautiful wreaths and the capitals of the pilasters are still as he left them, they show exactly that kind of reticence which is one of the most charming characteristics of really high art. Inigo was too good an architect to leave anything like this to a workman in whom he could not thoroughly confide, but it is evident that what Gibbons did for Wren, Stone did for Jones.

It will have been perceived that the proportions of the interior were those which all but the modern anomalous architects have found to be the best. The room is formed of a double cube, the height being equal to the width, and the length double the height. A gallery was supported on engaged columns of the Ionic order. An upper order was of Corinthian pilasters. The roof was flat and divided into nine compartments, with very handsome mouldings between. The central compartment was oval, and contained Rubens’s principal picture of the “Apotheosis of James I.” This beautiful chamber was never designed for a chapel. We shall have occasion to describe further on what Jones designed for that purpose. It is reported that Rubens was assisted in these pictures by Jordaens. He received three thousand pounds for them, and they have been cleaned and restored several times at considerable expense. The figures are colossal, the children being more than nine feet high. The Banqueting House, though never consecrated, was made a Royal Chapel in 1724. Two years ago it was handed over to the United Service Institution, who have added to the south side a building which, in my opinion, forms a serious eyesore. It is curious that with all the wealth of design left by Inigo Jones, and ready to the hands of the Institution, they could not find something better than that by which they have disfigured every view of the Banqueting House. A great French architect named Azout, who visited England about 1685, is said to have declared that this “was the most finished of the modern buildings on this side the Alps.” To a sincere lover of beauty in architecture, this opinion will commend itself. It is sometimes said that the famous cartoons of Raphael were brought to England as designs for the tapestry for the Banqueting House. [Pg 31] After the death of King Charles, they were sold, and were purchased by the Spanish Ambassador, Alonso de Cardanas. This is likely enough, as also that he sent them into Spain. Some hangings, said to be the same, but of this there could be no proof, were brought to London and exhibited at the Egyptian Hall, in Piccadilly, in 1825. They represented passages in the Acts of the Apostles. What became of them we do not know. I have only seen them mentioned in Tymms’s account of Whitehall in the second volume of Britton’s Edifices.

[Pg 32] A curious question arises, which is not very easily answered: Where would this building have stood in the complete palace? The visitor entering the great court would have found three other buildings resembling this one. Two were to be at the northern end on either side, and two more at the southern end. Connecting them were two buildings of much greater beauty and of large size, the whole court being no less than 378 feet wide and 728 feet long. If, as Fergusson and others have asserted, the Banqueting House was at the north-eastern corner, it would be on the visitor’s left, while a chapel would have been on his right. At the centre of the façade on the right was the entrance to the royal apartments, which were thus arranged to be on the western side and to look out on the park, to the south of the Treasury. On the opposite side of the great court access was to be obtained to a noble hall, suitable for state occasions, and, in fact, the buildings on this side, which were to look on the river, were of a public character as distinguished from the private apartments of the King and the royal family. If, as seems probable, the Banqueting House stood at the north-east corner, and if we look at the plan of Whitehall which George Vertue engraved for the Society of Antiquaries, we find that Inigo’s building is nearly in the middle of the palace. If we measure 728 feet to the southward, it takes us all that distance towards Westminster, and overwhelms in building-stone the whole of the Privy Garden and part of the Bowling Green. All the great ranges of buildings to the northward—the kitchen court, the wood-yard, the small beer-buttery, and the two Scotland Yards—would have had to go. We can but conjecture that Inigo wished to have a grand open space before his Charing Cross façade—what the French call a “place d’armes.” On the Westminster side there could not have been much space beyond the Bowling Green. The park, of course, was open, and so was the river. Much thought accordingly was spent on these fronts, and perhaps that to the Thames shows Jones at his very best. No description can do it any kind of justice; but it may be worth while to mention the principal points. The centre was of three storeys, the lowest with rusticated pilasters. The next storey has features common to much of the design, but two flanking buildings only two storeys high are marked by a studied plainness, flat pilasters being between the windows. At either end of the front we find three-storey pavilions—we can hardly call them towers. They, like the centre, have engaged columns standing well out. The most beautiful thing on this front is a projecting portico in the centre, three arches wide and one deep. This beautiful balcony—the most elegant little bit in the whole design—is of the Corinthian order, two storeys high, the lower rusticated, and on a balustrade above are the statues with which Inigo always liked to relieve his sky-line.

[Pg 33]

[Pg 34] The Westminster side had an archway “for the street of Whitehall” and the right of way. It is open through the ground storey and an entresol, and is flanked by two massive towers of four storeys, crowned by small cupolas.

The Charing Cross front being to the north was kept studiously plain. It was not until our own day that an architect put lavish decorations on that side of a building. Wren knew as well as Jones that mass, not ornament, is appropriate to this aspect, and we used to be able to admire his taste in the north transept of Westminster Abbey, now altered. The delicate proportions, the fine central archway, and the arcade at the western end of the façade, make up a very pleasing composition, and, viewed across a wide parade-ground, would have produced a marvellously picturesque effect.

On the King’s side—that is, to the westward of the street—was to be a circular court, which most architectural critics have highly praised. It has always been known as the Persian Court. Caryatides, we may remark, are female figures, Persians male. It consisted of a kind of circular corridor, two storeys high. Kent gives several views with sections of this Persian Court. Instead of pillars or pilasters were Caryatides in the upper range, and Persians in the lower. Those in the lower range had Tuscan capitals above their heads; those in the upper had Composite or Corinthian capitals. Here Inigo departed from his usual rule, and covered the wall with the most elaborate ornament. The court looks very well in Müller’s bird’s-eye view, but not so well in Kent’s elevations and sections. The plan shows that the circular corridor would have formed a most convenient passage connecting the King’s and Queen’s private apartments with those of their attendants. Two wide square courts were to north and south. [Pg 35]

[Pg 36] The other wing, so called, of the palace had also three courts, the interior architecture of which we may judge of by looking at the back, or east, side of the Banqueting House, which was built to form part of the north-eastern court on one side, and to look on the street of Whitehall on the other. The Chapel was to have corresponded in the north-western corner. Jones left elaborate plans for this building, and a section in Kent is one of the most beautiful things in a beautiful book. It was a double cube, of course, but the roof was vaulted, or, at least, coved. Elaborate symbolical carving and angelic figures are on the wall. The chapel has a narrow gallery above, and the order, which is Ionic, fluted, below, is Corinthian above. Wide-arched openings are in the view in Kent, but he does not show us what the other, or chancel, end was to be like. It may be worth noting that, like Wren, Jones was very free in his use of the orders, and it is not always possible in the prints to distinguish Corinthian from Composite; but, of course, where the lower storey was Ionic, the upper would not be Composite.

As to the merits of this design for a palace, critics have been very well agreed—except, unfortunately, during the madness of the supposed Gothic revival. Had Barry been desired to use, or adapt, Jones’s design, or part of it, for the new Houses of Parliament, what a noble river-front we might have had! But it is useless to pursue such thoughts. The opportunity was lost, and, for certainly the past thirty years, there have been very few people in England who were really able to judge of the Houses of Parliament apart from their ornamentation. Inigo Jones’s design would have been the better of any ornament that could have been bestowed on it, but ornament was not necessary. Marble columns and gilt capitals would have looked well, but plain stone would have been enough. [Pg 37]

Fergusson well remarks that the greatest error in Jones’s design for Whitehall was the vastness of its scale. It was as far beyond the means as beyond the wants of James I. It is not, he continues, in a long passage from which I only take a few sentences, so much in dimensions as in beauty of design that this proposal surpassed other European palaces. Externally, it would have surpassed the Louvre, Versailles, or any other building of the kind, “by the happy manner in which the angles are accentuated, by the boldness of the centre masses in each façade, and by the play of light and shade, and the variety of sky-line, which is obtained without ever interfering with the simplicity of the design or the harmony of the whole.”

[Pg 38] Sir William Chambers, the last of the Inigo Jones and Wren succession, speaks especially of the circular court described above. There are few nobler thoughts, he observes, in the remains of antiquity. The effect of the building, properly carried out, would have been surprising and great in the highest degree. The diameter of the court was to be 210 feet, the ground floor being an open arcade or cloister.

Jones wholly misapprehended the depth of the King’s purse when he made a design of so costly a character. Otherwise, we must conclude that he made these beautiful drawings for his own pleasure—a kind of vision which he knew could never be realised. That this is not a correct statement of the case seems to be proved by what followed. Let us take the Banqueting House as a unit. It cost, roughly speaking, 20,000l., of which sum 15,000l. was for the mere building. Three similar buildings in the same court would have cost at least 60,000l., the chapel more than the rest. This foots up at once to 80,000l. The Persian Court could not have cost less than 50,000l. Add to this the two magnificent halls, and we have 80,000l. more. Yet we have only accounted for two of the seven courts, and have said nothing of the four fronts. We feel tempted to think that Inigo, like the person mentioned by Tennyson, built his soul “a lordly pleasure-house, wherein at ease for aye to dwell,” and that he neither intended nor expected that King James should carry it out. That this is not the case we can judge by the design he made for Charles I. in 1639. It was to be of only half the dimensions, and was to be studiously plain. Whereas the Banqueting House was one of the plainest and least costly features of the 1619 design, it would appear in the new view as one of the most elaborately ornamented. But he [Pg 39] misjudged the purse of the son, as he had misjudged that of the father. Not a stone was ever laid, and when, a few years later, the war broke out, it was hopeless to think that Charles, though sorely in need of a commodious and really royal residence, could ever build, even after the new and modified design presented to him by his Surveyor. [Pg 40]

[Pg 41]

[Pg 42] The chief points of this design may be briefly indicated here, as the next chapter will be filled with matters of a very different character. The western front was to be towards the street of Whitehall; that is to say, the palace was to be less than half the size of that designed for James I. No archways were needed across the road. In the middle of this façade was a fine arch, opening between the Banqueting House toward the north and the Chapel, the corresponding building toward the south. The wall between was very simple, only containing three rows of square-headed windows. What would have been a beautiful and picturesque [Pg 43] feature were the domed towers which formed the ends of the front, each containing a triple Venetian window. The side to the river was to have a kind of arcade or cloister; but the Persians and the Caryatides have disappeared, with most of the reception-rooms and public halls. This design was brought forward again after the fire in 1698; but William III. was too busy with the Continental war, and probably also too poor to do anything. It is worth more than a passing glance, and includes some of Jones’s most matured work. Campbell obtained it in 1717 from an “ingenious gentleman,” probably an architect, and possibly the architect whom William proposed to employ in rebuilding the palace. It will be found in the second volume of the Vitruvius Britannicus.

Accession of Charles I.—Unfavourable Omens—“The White King”—Henrietta Maria—Her French Followers—The Royal Pictures—Their Partial Sale—The King and Queen at Dinner—Death of Strafford and Laud—Charles at Westminster—Place of the Scaffold—Last Scene.

James I. died in 1625, at Theobalds, having removed thither from Whitehall shortly before. His son Charles I. succeeded him, and for the first years of his reign lived in the old royal apartments on the Thames’ bank. The omens observed at the time were all against the new King. Had his reign been prosperous we should have heard nothing about them. First of all, it was remarked that the breath was hardly out of King James’s body when the Knight Marshal, in proclaiming his successor at the gate of Theobalds, made a bad blunder. He said Charles was the late King’s rightful and dubitable heir. He meant to have said “indubitable.” When the news came to Whitehall, Bishop Laud was in the middle of his sermon, for it was a Sunday, and broke off in order to let Charles be proclaimed, nor did he afterwards conclude, so that the new King and the congregation went away without a blessing. At the coronation, in February, 1626, it was similarly noticed that no procession through the City from the Tower to Westminster could take place, because the plague was raging. Several still more ominous accidents marked the day. The wing broke off the golden dove which formed part of the regalia. The Bishop of Carlisle, Richard Senhouse, by an inexcusable blunder, took for the text of his coronation sermon, “Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life,” from the Revelation. This was much remarked upon then and afterwards, and it is very possible that Charles alluded to the sermon in the last words he ever uttered. But another circumstance was most remarked upon that dark February day in the gloom of the old Abbey. For some unexplained reason, Charles was dressed, not in purple, like the kings before him, but in white satin. Later on this gained for Charles the name of “The White King,” and at his burial, in February, 1649, at Windsor, in a snow-storm, as the flakes fell upon the coffin, there were some present who remembered the omen of twenty-three years before. Finally, as if to crown all, that day was marked in the memories of many by a shock of earthquake.

[Pg 45] There is little at first to connect Charles with Whitehall, but towards the end of the coronation year a curious scene took place there. The King, weary of the young Bishop and his twenty-nine priests who had come over with Henrietta Maria, decreed that they must return home. This they were very unwilling to do. With them were also to go an immense crew of attendants, whose vagaries disturbed both Whitehall and St. James’s. They exceeded in numbers even the four hundred who had formed the household of Henry, prince of Wales. Contemporary letters are full of their arrogance and greed. With the French priests came a crowd of English Jesuits and the like, whose position, as the law stood then, was wholly illegal. The story that Henrietta Maria had to do penance at the instance of her French confessor, by going barefoot to Tyburn to glorify the memory of the Gunpowder Conspirators, rests on very slight evidence. One thing is certain: if she went, it was at the instance of one of the English priests. Even at the present day few Frenchmen know anything of English history thirty years old. It was, however, one thing to resolve, another actually to get rid of these intruders. At first the King wrote to Buckingham, who was then at Paris, to try to persuade the queen-mother of the necessity of the step he contemplated, and, moreover, to ask her to “find a means to make themselves suitors to be gone.” Whether she complied or not, the [Pg 46] Queen’s servants were far too well off to think of moving. Marshal Bassompierre came over in order to arrange matters, but without avail. His report of a stormy interview with Charles is a mass of bombast. The King, coming to Whitehall, and entering the Queen’s apartments to [Pg 47] inform her that he must be obeyed—that he had put the matter into the hands of that stern soldier, Lord Conway, who had arranged everything—found “a number of her domestics irreverently dancing and curvetting in her presence.” He took her by the hand, led her into an adjoining chamber, and locked himself in with her.

Meanwhile, Conway took the French Bishop and his priests into St. James’s Park, and informed them briefly of the King’s unquestionable causes of complaint, and of the arrangements made for their immediate departure. The Bishop refused to move, saying he regarded himself as an ambassador. Conway replied that he might regard himself as he pleased, but that if he did not depart peacefully he would be turned out by force. [Pg 48]

Next, Lord Conway entered Whitehall, where he firmly but politely informed the French servants of the Queen of his errand. They were to go first to Somerset House in the Strand, where he proposed to make separate arrangements for each of them. The women screamed and stormed, and after Conway had given them reasonable time, he summoned the yeomen of the guard, who thrust them out forcibly and locked the doors after them. They went to Somerset House, where Charles himself visited them the same afternoon.

More than a month later they were still at Somerset House, when Lord Conway was again called in; but, what with the obstinacy of the Bishop, and the clamour of the women, it took four days and forty carriages to transport them to Dover. The whole story is in Ellis’s Letters, and in D’Israeli’s Curiosities of Literature, and is well summarised by Jesse in his Court of England under the Stuarts, to which I may refer a reader interested in the subject; my own concern having, of course, been only with that part which related to Whitehall.

That Charles should have been forced into war, and, above all, a civil war, was a great misfortune to the progress of civilisation, as shown in the arts and sciences. Painting, music, architecture flourished at his Court, together with poetry and science. He probably brought more fine pictures into England than all the kings put together since his time. Walpole says, “As there was no art which Charles did not countenance, the chasers and embossers of plate were among the number of the protected at Court.” Casting in bronze was a favourite art, and Fanelli, who made the statues of Charles and his Queen at St. John’s College, Oxford, should be named, as well as Le Sœur, who made the King’s equestrian statue which is now at Charing Cross, but which was originally made for Lord Portland and set up at Roehampton. The King’s cabinet pictures were lodged at Whitehall in a chamber expressly built for them by Inigo Jones. Undoubtedly the pictures were, of all his works of art, those which Charles chiefly loved. He contrived to acquire a magnificent collection, and it is evident from one or two entries that Jones had a general commission not to let anything slip [Pg 49] which would prove a desirable addition to the royal gallery. Although his taste lay chiefly in ancient pictures, Charles largely patronised Van Dyck, and Van Dyck’s principal pupils and contemporaries, such as Janssen, Walker, and Dobson. Moreover, he bought on occasion lavishly. The collection of the Duke of Mantua came into the market, and was bought whole by the agents of King Charles. He hung it on the walls of the Banqueting House, but intended to have embellished that building with paintings by Van Dyck, representing ceremonials of the Order of the Garter. These would naturally have comprised portraits of most of the great men of the day. There was also a scheme on foot for establishing a school of art somewhat on the lines of our Royal Academy, but more distinctly intended for teaching. This, of course, fell through, like all other schemes of the kind, during the civil war. Before his death the leaders of the Commonwealth endeavoured to sell off or otherwise make away with the treasures of art which Charles had gathered. Their animosity against pictures containing representations of the second person of the Holy Trinity or of the Virgin Mary induced them to order their destruction. That very few of these orders were carried out is plain from the list preserved by Walpole. We are anticipating the order of events if we pause here to describe the gradual dispersal of the great royal collection. The sale went on at intervals from 1648 to 1653, but many pieces remained in England. Some did not even leave Whitehall, and there are now many in the National Gallery which once belonged to the unfortunate Charles.

The best account of the sale is that written by Horace Walpole, who used for his purpose the notes of George Vertue, the engraver. The prices were fixed, but the highest bidder, if more was offered, was adjudged the buyer. We cannot do better than take some items from Walpole’s list. The cartoons of Raphael were bought in by Cromwell for the insignificant sum of 300l. The other cartoons, those representing the triumphs of Cæsar, by Andrea Mantegna, went for 1000l., and were also reserved for Cromwell. They had formed part of the Mantua Gallery already referred to. Apparently they had been removed from Whitehall to Hampton Court, where they have ever [Pg 50] since remained. We read of many Madonnas; one, said to be by Raphael, fetching 800l.; but another Raphael, afterwards estimated much more highly, was the celebrated “St. George and the Dragon,” sometimes called “St. Michael,” now in the Louvre. A Venus, called “Del Pardo,” by Titian, sold for 600l. The “Mercury teaching Cupid, with Venus standing by,” painted by Correggio, which is now in the National Gallery, went for 800l. This had also formed an item in the great Mantua Collection. The picture had many adventures. The Duke of Alva took it to Spain and subsequently it became the property of the famous Prince of the Peace, in whose collection it remained until 1808, when it fell into the hands of Murat. It thus found its way back into Italy. Lord Castlereagh bought it and the “Ecce Homo,” which hangs near it, from the ex-Queen of Naples at Vienna, and in 1834 it was purchased from Lord Londonderry for the National Gallery. Rubens’ “Peace and War” was presented to Charles by the painter in 1630. It now only fetched 100l., and went to the Doria Gallery at Genoa, whence it was sold, brought back to England, and presented to the National Gallery in 1828 by the first Duke of Sutherland. After the Restoration, strong efforts were made to gather the dispersed pictures again. The States of Holland bought the whole collection of Gerard Reyntz and presented them to Charles II. on his restoration. The Government went to law with Van Leemput, who had bought a great portrait of King Charles I., by Van Dyck, for 150l. There were various negotiations, in which Van Leemput was offered a fair compensation. As he refused, the law was put in force, and Van Leemput got nothing. This must not be confused with the Marlborough Van Dyck which is now in the National Gallery. It is plain, remarks Walpole, from a catalogue made for James II., that a large number of pictures remained at Whitehall unsold, and it is very possible that Oliver Cromwell intervened, when he had the power, to prevent their sale. We must always thank his taste for having rescued the two great sets of Mantegna’s and Raphael’s cartoons. It will be observed that though the store was by no means exhausted, the sales ceased in 1653, the year of his inauguration as Protector. In 1660 Cromwell’s widow tried in vain to retain possession of some pictures and other treasures. [Pg 51]

Before we go on to speak of the great tragedy which gave Whitehall a world-wide celebrity, we may make a note from a passage quoted by Mr. Law in his catalogue of the pictures at Hampton Court. One of these pictures represents Charles I. and his Queen dining in public. The picture is by Van Bassen, who also painted the King and Queen of Bohemia similarly employed. Mr. Law’s account of the first-named picture is very interesting, and relates mainly to life at Whitehall. The King and Queen are being “served by gentlemen-in-waiting with dishes, more of which are being brought in from the door opposite them by attendants. In the right corner is a sideboard, and wine cooling in brass bowls on the floor. Several dogs are running about. At the end of the hall is a raised and recessed daïs, where spectators are looking on through some columns. The decoration of the hall is in the classic taste, and is very fine and elaborate. On the walls hang several pictures.” Though this doubtless belonged to Charles I., it is not found catalogued among his pictures; but in the catalogue of James II. we find No. 937: “A large piece, where King Charles the First and Queen, and the Prince are at dinner.” It is dated over the door, on the right, 1637. It is engraved in Jesse’s Memoirs of the Stuarts, and is chiefly valuable for the architecture and decoration, and as exhibiting the manners of the time, and the prevalent custom in that age of royalty dining in public. “There were daily at Charles I.’s Court, 86 tables, well furnished each meal; whereof the King’s table had 28 dishes; the Queen’s, 24; 4 other tables, 16 dishes each, and so on. In all about 500 dishes each meal, with bread, beer, wine and all things necessary. There was spent yearly in the King’s house, of gross meat, 1500 oxen; 7000 sheep, 1200 calves; 300 porkers, 400 young beefs, 6800 lambs, 300 flitches of bacon; and 26 boars. Also 140 dozen geese, 250 dozen of capons, 470 dozen of hens, 750 dozen of pullets, 1470 dozen of chickens; for bread, 364,000 bushels of wheat; and for drink, 600 tuns of wine and 1700 tuns of beer; together with fish and fowl, fruit and spice, proportionately.” (Present State of London, 1681.)

As to Henrietta Maria at dinner, an anecdote is reported by Jesse: “Notwithstanding her conciliating manners on her first arrival in [Pg 52] England, it soon became evident that the spirit of Henry IV. was not entirely dormant in the bosom of his daughter. A singular scene, which took place at Court, shortly after her marriage, is thus described by an eye-witness. ‘The Queen, howsoever very little of stature, is yet of a pleasing countenance, if she be pleased, but full of spirit and vigour, and seems of a more than ordinary resolution. With one frown, diverse of us being at Whitehall to see her, being at dinner, and the room somewhat over-heated with the fire and company, she drove us all out of the chamber. I suppose none but a Queen could have cast such a scowl.’” (See Jesse’s Court of England under the Stuarts, ii. 16.)

The whole sad history of the Great Rebellion has been told at full length in divers places, and only incidentally concerns us here. We see that Charles was shifty and wanting in straightforwardness. None of his political opponents could trust even his promises. No one could deny him both courage and coolness in the hour of danger. We might dwell on what might have happened if he had saved Strafford; but the bold policy in which that would have landed him—the policy Strafford himself described as “thorough”—though it might have rid him of his enemies, would have cost a tremendous price to the nation. When Charles promised Strafford to save his life, he had scarcely power to make his promise true. He gained nothing by Strafford’s death, and only lost one of the two or three really able advisers he had. It is not possible to believe that he thought the savage fanatics who clamoured for the great minister’s blood would pause and ask no more. “Moderation” was a word that did not exist in their vocabulary, and it is rather melancholy to see John Milton made the mouthpiece of a series of foul scandals on a King whose private life seems to have been absolutely pure, as Milton must have known. But politics were up to boiling point in those days. It was not enough to defeat an opponent in the House or at the poll; he must be put to death. So far the traditions of the Tudor times survived. Having stimulated their appetite by the death of Strafford, under legal forms and with the unwilling consent of the King, they proceeded to murder, by the travesty of a judicial process, the highest [Pg 53] they could find in the country. Archbishop Laud was brought to trial, or rather to condemnation, in March, 1644, and in January, 1645, he was beheaded. There was only left to quench their thirst for the best blood in the land a few nobles—the Duke of Hamilton, the Earl of Holland, and others; but there was one victim, the highest of all, and they had no notion of sparing him, though, by compassing his death, they ruined their own cause.

We can easily see that a Prime Minister like Strafford had done many things to make himself hated. We can see that Laud was also hated, mainly for being an archbishop. Another minister or another archbishop would be appointed in course of time, and both would be hated, and that, too, by a great many people who were, on the whole, loyal to the Crown, if not to the person of Charles. The death of Charles at Whitehall changed the feelings of this whole class. They may have groaned, as we hear they did. Some groaned because their King was killed, even though they may have thought he deserved his fate; but the great majority saw that all the good the popular party might have carried out for the people was annihilated at that one blow. Murderers are seldom moderate and beneficent reformers, though Agathocles did [Pg 54] contrive to succeed in both these rôles in Sicily. But that was a long time ago and a long way off, and few of the truer patriots of 1649 looked at these violent proceedings without both apprehension and horror—apprehension lest a murder of such huge dimensions should only mean anarchy in the Government and oppression of the people—as, in effect, it did—and horror at the perpetration of such an irrevocable crime without any reference to the people, either at the hustings or by a direct vote. But it appeared as if the Parliament, though, with the help of the army, it could kill the King, could not dissolve itself. The soldiers, however, without the Parliament, could, and did, force a dissolution, and in our next chapter we shall see the chief leader of the rebels residing in the old palace of Whitehall as a sovereign prince.

The greatest of all these changes was simply this. If we allow, as many of the so-called Puritans did, that the King had strictly forfeited his life, imprisonment, like that inflicted on Henry VI. for many years, or exile, like that which James II. afterwards underwent, would have been a sufficient penalty. France would not have gone to war to reinstate a Protestant dynasty, as it did not half a century later go to war to reinstate a Romanist, and the longer Charles I. lived the more improbable the return of his son became. But that scaffold at Whitehall altered the state of affairs. Instead of a King who certainly had not deserved well of his people, it gave them a young and, so far as they knew, an innocent and blameless King, whose coming they were forced, by the violence of the dominant faction, to hope for as for the salvation of their country.

Very little of the history of the Great Rebellion concerns Whitehall, at least until Oliver Cromwell assumes possession, and apes royalty in the old halls; but in Rymer’s Fœdera we may observe that, from the beginning of the reign of James I., “Whitehall” gradually and more and more becomes the official designation of the palace. Charles naturally was not there during a long term of years. He was marching and counter-marching in the north, and so mismanaging all his affairs successively that, regarded as a game, the Civil War consisted of a series of alternate military and diplomatic defeats. The inevitable consequence was the utter ruin of the royal cause. In January, 1649 [Pg 55] (then reckoned 1648), the King, a prisoner, was brought from Windsor Castle and lodged at St. James’s. On Saturday, the 20th, he walked, strongly guarded, across the park to Whitehall. He probably entered his old palace by the stairs near the tilt-yard, and traversed the passage which led to his former apartments. Here was a “bridge,” or floating pier on the water’s edge, and he was put into a boat and rowed up to Westminster, where he was placed in Sir Robert Cotton’s house. The King was then brought into Westminster Hall and allowed a seat. Bradshaw was president of the Court, and there were some eighty commissioners. The King attended the Court four times in all, sometimes going in a Sedan chair, sometimes, as we have seen, by boat. We need not detail the proceedings of Bradshaw and his assessors; but there is one thing which must be noted, namely, the dignity and tact of the King’s behaviour when brought up to receive sentence. Green, who had but little sympathy with him, observes, quoting Marvel, “Whatever had been the faults and follies of his life—

This fact—for it is not merely an opinion—seems to answer a question that is often asked: Did the coolness of Charles on that last day at Westminster Hall, and again on the scaffold at Whitehall, betray any feeling, any certainty that he would be respited or rescued? A moment’s [Pg 56] thought dispels the idea. Charles was manly, dignified, truthful before Bradshaw and before the crowds which had assembled to see him die, because he recognised that all the finessing, the double meanings, the secret understandings, and the thousand miserable subterfuges which he imagined to be “statesmanship,” and with which he had endeavoured to impose on the Scots and on the authorities of Carisbrooke and of Hampton Court, had done nothing for him, and if renewed now would have ensured that the fate which he foresaw had at last overtaken him would be justified by a large section of his contemporaries. He rose to the occasion. During those few hours at St. James’s he saw that all he could do would be to save the throne for his son, and he succeeded, but it was by a line of conduct wholly different from that by which he had lost it for himself.

The place of execution was most carefully chosen. Though called “the open street of Whitehall,” it was far from being really open. On the south were buildings pierced by the narrow archway of Holbein’s Gate. On the west were the walled tilt-yard and the barracks and other buildings, ending with Wallingford House. On the north was the comparatively open roadway to Charing Cross. On the eastern side were long rows of gabled buildings already described, with, just south of an archway into the old courts of the palace, the Banqueting House. It was sworn at the trials of the Regicides, a few years later, that Oliver Cromwell superintended the arrangements. The evidence is not well supported, but, owing to Cromwell’s great military reputation and to his subsequent elevation to the Protectorate, everything at this conjuncture was attributed to him. It is not very easy to reconcile the conflicting details of different stories. It neither adds to nor detracts from Oliver’s guilt, neither adds to nor detracts from his fame, whether he was at Westminster or at Whitehall on that fatal day.

The crowd coming into the narrow court from Charing Cross saw an empty space in front of the hall. The palace and the barracks, and the innumerable passages and lodgings, were lined with “the sour-visaged saints” of the various Roundhead regiments—men to whom the death of [Pg 57] Charles would be a latter-day miracle, a sign from Heaven that their cause was won—that the Millennium, the Fifth Monarchy, was about to begin. Even when their own turn came such men believed, till they were actually “dancing on air,” that they would be supernaturally rescued. The crowd which swarmed into the street saw only a few soldiers round the black scaffold which, at the height of the first floor, stood in front of the hall, a little to the northward. The better sort of spectators were on the roof of Wallingford House, not directly fronting the scaffold, but near enough to see. Here was stationed the venerable Archbishop Ussher of Armagh, who is reported to have fainted as he saw the King led forth. Below was a man whose account of the scene would have been invaluable now. He only alludes to it in a note written in October, 1660, This was Samuel Pepys; and he remarks, after witnessing the death of General Harrison, “thus it was my chance to see the King beheaded at White Hall, and to see the first blood shed in revenge for the blood of the King at Charing Cross.”

The Banqueting House is clearly described for us in a note, probably by Inigo Jones, which was printed a few pages back. It answers most of the questions raised in a long correspondence in the papers a few years ago. The situation, the problem to be solved, was briefly this. The scaffold was before the two windows next to Charing Cross. A hole was broken through the wall to admit of a passage to the platform direct from the interior. The regicides saw that there would be great danger in taking the King out by the only door, which was at the back or east side of the hall. They would have had to conduct him by a narrow open-air passage northward to the palace gate. After passing through the gate he would have had to go several yards through the crowd before he could reach the scaffold, wherever it was placed.

But many asked, in the correspondence just mentioned, Why did they break through the wall? Why did they not go through the window? Simply because there was at that time no glazed window on the western front of the hall. A great window was at the “upper end,” probably that toward Westminster. There was, also, it is probable, a central window looking into the palace court on the eastern side. But toward “the street of [Pg 58] Whitehall” there were no open windows, all being built up—as, indeed, the lowest tier remained until a couple of years ago. It is unlikely, though some have asserted it, that the upper tier had been opened and glazed at this time. In any case, these upper windows, if they existed, which is unlikely, would have been of no use to the contrivers of the King’s death. They were too high up and inaccessible except through a narrow balcony within the hall, where one man might have successfully resisted hundreds. The window “at the upper end” may have given light enough, as the hall was not built for use in daylight. It remained in this twilight condition until George I. opened it as a chapel about 1724. Then windows on the first floor became necessary. At first, as on the eastern side, only the centre window was opened. As late as 1761, the third and fifth were still built up. It was probably not until 1830, when the hall was “thoroughly restored” by Sir John Soane, that all the windows on the western side were opened, except those on the ground floor. The ground floor windows were opened first for the United Service Institution. It was asserted in the daily papers that they were re-opened, but, as a fact, they never were opened before.

If we schedule these notes we may safely conclude that the lowest tier of windows was only glazed in our own day; that those of the middle—the Ionic storey—were still unglazed in 1649; and that in Silvestre’s view, taken about fifty years after the great tragedy, there was not a single glazed window on this, the western, front. All the apparent openings were filled with masonry.

We now understand why the wall had to be broken through, and perhaps why the middle window was chosen. The scaffold stretched from the opening to the north-west corner of the hall, both it and the short passage leading to it being parallel with, and possibly close against, the face of the blank wall with its closed and built-up windows. The reason for this arrangement is obvious. Had the passage and the scaffold jutted out at right angles they would have reached far into the surging and probably angry crowd, and the number and daring of the soldiers must have been quadrupled at least. Again, had the scaffold stretched toward the southern extremity of the Banqueting House, it [Pg 59] would have been close to the gallery by which Charles had entered the palace that morning. This gallery, in fact, touched the southern corner of the hall. The military eye of the officer who made and carried out the arrangements must have seen dangers of rescue and other possibilities which it was needful to guard against. Knowing all these things and others of the kind, we see that some of the contemporary views—they are chiefly Dutch—which show the northward position of the scaffold are correct, and not those—chiefly English—which adorn prayer-books printed after the Restoration, and place the scaffold before the middle window.

When Charles was brought out, he showed that, as he himself had said to Lord Digby, if he could not live like a King, he could die like a gentleman. Juxon, at that time Bishop of London, had the courage to attend him, as well as Herbert, his long-tried servant. The King’s last devotions in his old chapel were interrupted by the impertinences of some of the unauthorised ministers, whose nonconformist consciences probably justified their interference. There was some unexpected delay in the preparations. If the carpenters employed were not Roundheads or Fifth Monarchy fanatics, it is easy to understand that they hesitated over a task which would make them marked men among their fellows for years to come. [Pg 60]

[Pg 61] The King had reached Whitehall at ten. It was now past noon, the dinner-hour of that day. Some dishes were provided for his use, but he would not eat. He had received the Holy Communion, and would eat no more in this world. Meanwhile, he retired to the apartments he had occupied in happier days, and gave himself up to private meditation and prayer. As the afternoon wore on, Bishop Juxon persuaded him, lest his strength should fail him at the last, to eat a piece of bread and drink a glass of wine. Then he went with the soldiers to where in the western wall of the Banqueting House the masonry had been pierced to give access to the scaffold. Jesse, writing just after Soane’s operations in 1830, reports that he had seen traces of the opening in the brickwork. He does not say clearly where it was, nor does it now greatly matter, as we know where it must have been. Charles very soon reached the scaffold and made ready for the end. Meanwhile, Juxon spoke to him of the future life. It was far off, he said, but the passage short. The King replied as if grateful for the good Bishop’s dry and dull remarks. If we contrast them with the “Son of Saint Louis, ascend to Heaven!” of another ecclesiastic, they seem all the more tame. But to the King’s ear they brought a different echo. He remembered that he had once been crowned. The applauding congregation had crowded round him in the old Abbey close by; and the words of Bishop Senhouse, so distasteful then, so truly prophetic now, came into his mind: “Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.” He turned to Juxon and answered, “I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown.” The Bishop, who was not at the coronation, probably wondered. Then followed the gift of his jewel of St. George, with the still unexplained charge: “Remember!” The block was low, it seemed too low. But after a moment’s hesitation—to quote the words of Marvell once more—

and in a few moments more the White King had set out on his last journey, “faithful unto death.”

Legendary Anecdote of Cromwell and the Body of Charles I.—The Funeral—Cromwell at the Cockpit—Removes to Whitehall—Great State—Illness and Death—Richard Cromwell—Pepys on Whitehall—Lodgings in the Palace—Evelyn—St. George’s Eve—Death of Charles II.—William and Mary—Royal Apartments Burnt—Conclusion.

It is very probable that, among the colonels and generals who lodged themselves, or were lodged, in Whitehall after the death of Charles I., Oliver Cromwell was one. Five years elapsed before he came into residence as Lord Protector, but, whether as a military commander or as a minister of state, there were several capacities in which he could have claimed chambers in the great straggling congeries of separate sets of apartments which were comprised in the palace. The amount of his guilt in the King’s murder it is difficult to assess. He may have been no more involved than any other member of the Regicide party, except, of course, Bradshaw. Cromwell’s subsequent prominence made him the subject of every rumour, every fable. When any one heard a story against a member of Parliament or an officer of the Roundheads, if no name was put to it, that of Cromwell was ready to hand. Jesse reports one which is more than usually improbable:—

After the decapitation of Charles, he is said to have paid a visit to the corpse, and, putting his finger to the neck, to have made some remarks on the soundness of the body and the promise which it presented of longevity. According to another account, on entering the chamber, he found the coffin closed, and, being unable to raise the lid with his staff, he took the sword of one Bowtell, a private soldier, who was [Pg 63] standing by, and opened it with the hilt. Bowtell, asking him what government they should have now, he said the same that then was.

How an officer, even though he may have been on duty, could penetrate to the chamber of death in such a way must remain a mystery. The body of Charles was conveyed from the scaffold by the faithful Herbert, with Juxon’s assistance. It was placed in one of the King’s apartments, that nearest, we learn, to the back-stairs. Topham, private surgeon to Fairfax, was employed to sew on the head and to embalm the body. Permission was asked to bury it in the chapel of Henry VII., but this the republican authorities refused, though they provided five hundred pounds for the funeral expenses. A coffin covered with black velvet had been ready on the scaffold. In this the body was removed to St. James’s Palace, and placed in a leaden coffin. There it remained more than a week, and was seen by many visitors. The execution had taken place on Tuesday, the 30th of January. On Wednesday, the 7th of February, a little procession was formed, consisting, besides the hearse, of four mourning coaches, in which were Bishop Juxon, the Duke of Richmond, Lords Hertford, Southampton and Lindsay, with Mildmay and Herbert. At Windsor the first halt was at the Deanery, but the coffin was afterwards removed to the King’s apartments in the Upper Ward. Meanwhile a search was made in St. George’s Chapel for a suitable vault, and, that which contained the remains of Henry VIII. and Jane Seymour having been discovered, the body of King Charles was carried by the Roundhead soldiers to the chapel, the snow falling thick on the coffin of the White King.

Many believed that his burial really took place within the precincts of Whitehall, but an examination of the grave of Henry VIII. in the reign of George III. revealed the decapitated corpse of Charles I., which, after a careful examination by Sir Henry Halford, was restored once more to its resting-place.

Oliver Cromwell appears to have had lodgings within the precincts of the palace, but at a great distance from the state apartments. A kind of village clustered round the Tennis Court, a little to the southward of the tilt-yard and the Horse Guards. A green lawn, and perhaps a garden, existed here, and here General Monk subsequently had his [Pg 64] lodgings. A narrow passage or lane, known as the “Entrance to the Cockpit,” led to them. It is as nearly as possible the modern Downing Street.

It was almost five years after the King’s death before Cromwell was formally installed Protector. This was in December, 1653, a few days only before the end of the year, as we should reckon it, because in those days 1653 went on till the 25th of March, 1654. About one o’clock “his Highness” left the Cockpit in a coach of state. Before him went the judges, the members of the Council, the Lord Mayor, and the aldermen. The procession passed through King Street to Westminster Hall. There he accepted the articles which had been prepared, and the procession returned. In the Banqueting House a minister made an exhortation to the new Lord Protector, the Lord Mayor sitting by, and so the proceedings concluded.

Cromwell apparently returned for the time being to his lodgings in the Cockpit, and the state apartments were got ready for him. He went over to the Banqueting House to receive foreign ambassadors, which he did seated on something very like a royal throne. The whole palace was granted to him, and, as we have seen, it was at about this date when the sale of the royal collection of pictures ceased.

As the spring drew on he thought it was time to move. Jesse supplies us with the following notes on this event. The contemporary notices of the removal of the Protector to the stately apartments of Whitehall are not without interest:—

“April 13, 1654. This day the bed-chamber, and the rest of the lodgings and rooms appointed for the Lord Protector in Whitehall, were prepared for his Highness to remove from the Cockpit on the morrow.”—“His Highness the Lord Protector, with his lady and family, this day (April 14) dined at Whitehall, whither his Highness and family are removed, and did this night lie there, and do there continue.”—“April 15. His Highness went this day to Hampton Court, and returned again at night.”

Hampton Court and Windsor Castle had been granted to him as well as Whitehall. Poor Mrs. Cromwell, who seems to have been of a simple and [Pg 65] unostentatious character, can hardly have relished the change. She became “Her Highness the Protectress,” and had more servants and attendants than she can have known what to do with. The exact part of the palace in which the new state apartments were placed is unknown. It was probably not where the late King lived, nor, on the other hand, can it have been far from the Banqueting House and the picture gallery. In addition to the Lord Protector and the Lady Protectress, room had to be found for their august family and for sons-in-law and children. It is not uninteresting to read this contemporary notice from the Weekly Intelligencer:—

“The Privy Lodgings for his Highness the Lord Protector in Whitehall are now in readiness, as also the lodgings for his Lady Protectress; and likewise the privy kitchen, and other kitchens, butteries and offices; and it is conceived the whole family will be settled there before Easter. The tables for diet prepared are these:—

Nothing can be more curious than to observe the change which seems to have come over the plain Huntingdonshire squire. He arrogated to himself and received all the deference previously paid to a sovereign. He allowed nothing to be omitted, and many of his contemporaries, English as well as foreign, have noticed the magnificence and stateliness of the ceremonious observances at his court. Jesse has summarised a few of these notes, and it is well worth while to quote some of his expressions. A few weeks after his elevation, we find the Protector entertained by the citizens of London with all the honours which, for centuries, they had been accustomed to pay to their sovereigns on their accession. Monsieur De Bordeaux writes to De Brienne, 23rd of February, 1654:—“On his solemn entry into the City he was received like a king: the Mayor went before him with the sword in [Pg 66] his hand about him nothing but officers, who do not trouble themselves much as to fineness of apparel; behind him the members of the Council in State coaches, furnished by certain lords. The concourse of people was great; wheresoever Cromwell came a great silence; the greater part did not even move their hats. At the Guildhall was a great feast prepared for him, and at the table sat the Mayor, the Councillors, the Deputies of the Army, as well as Cromwell’s son and son-in-law. Towards the Foreign Ambassadors, the Protector deports himself as a king, for the power of kings is not greater than his.”

Again, De Bordeaux writes a few weeks afterwards:—“Some say he will assume the title and prerogatives of a Roman emperor. In order to strengthen his party, he deals out promises to all parties. It is here, however, as everywhere else; no government was or is right in the people’s eyes, and Cromwell, once their idol, is now the object of their blame, perhaps their hate.”

There is a record of May Day in the same year, 1654. The writer is much shocked at the licence that prevailed. There was “much sin committed by wicked meetings, with fiddlers, drunkenness, ribaldry, and the like.” Cromwell kept open house at Whitehall on Mondays. In 1657, the Speaker announced to the House of Commons that the Lord Protector invited the whole House to dinner in the Banqueting House, and he had similarly received them the year before.

Cromwell’s last illness seized him at Hampton Court. He was removed to Whitehall. There, while a tremendous tempest howled round the old walls, he breathed his last on the afternoon of the 3rd of September, 1658. The concourse of fanatical preachers which disturbed his last moments seems to have been doubled at his death, and Tillotson, the future Archbishop, describes Richard Cromwell as seated at one side of a table with six divines at the other. Cromwell’s funeral took place from Somerset House, not from Whitehall, so it does not specially concern us. Suffice it to say here, that no king or queen has ever been interred at so much cost or so magnificently.

There is little except Tillotson’s note quoted above to connect Richard [Pg 67] Cromwell with Whitehall; but a meeting of discontented officers which he permitted at Wallingford House, over the way, precipitated his fall. It has always been asserted, apparently with truth, that Oliver’s wife had been inclined to Royalism, and that she pressed her husband to bring in the late King’s son. This did not, however, prevent her from an endeavour to secure some of the royal effects at Whitehall, when she, in her turn, received notice to quit. Early in 1660 they were taken possession of by a Commission.

For the next few years the name of Whitehall is chiefly to be found in the delightful pages of Pepys, and those of that sanctimonious prig, Evelyn. Mr. Wheatly, who has made a special study of Pepys, tells us, in his London, Past and Present, that the chief apartments of Whitehall mentioned in the Diary are as follows:—The Matted Gallery, the Gallery of Henry VIII., the Boarded Gallery, the Shield Gallery, the Stone Gallery, and the Vane Room. We may identify some of these. The Gallery of Henry VIII. was probably that which led over Holbein’s Gate to the park. The Shield Gallery must be that spoken of by Manningham, about the end of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, as being decorated with scutcheons. There was a Guardroom, mentioned by Lilly, the astrologer. The Adam and Eve Gallery was so called from a picture attributed to Mabuse, now at Hampton Court. The Stone Gallery looked on the Sundial Lawn in the Privy Garden. Pepys also mentions the Banqueting House, where in April, 1661, he “saw the King create my Lord Chancellor, and several others, Earls, and Mr. Crew, and several others, Barons: the first being led up by Heralds and five old Earls to the King, and there the patent is read, and the King puts on his vest, and sword and coronet, and gives him the patent. And then he kisseth the King’s hand, and rises and stands covered before the King. And the same for the Barons, only he is led up but by three of the old Barons, and are girt with swords before they go to the King.” In the Banqueting House, also, the King touched “people for the King’s evil” (June 23, 1660). There was a service “At the Healing” in Books of Common Prayer. It was omitted, I think, about 1709. There was a “balcone” in the Shield Gallery. In this room Pepys saw the King bid farewell to [Pg 68] Montagu, who was going to sea. “I saw with what kindness the King did hug my lord at his parting.” We have a topographical note in July, 1660. Pepys walked all the afternoon in Whitehall Court. We know where the Court was, and now we learn that the Council Chamber looked into it. “It was strange to see how all the people flocked together bare, to see the King looking out of the Council window.” There are many references to the Chapel. It stood near the river, in the eastern part of the palace, and had two vestries. Inigo Jones designed a beautiful reredos of coloured marbles for it. This reredos was saved when the palace was burnt, and was given by Queen Anne to Westminster Abbey. There is a view in Dart’s Westminster Abbey which shows it—the [Pg 69] only representation of it I have met with. It was destroyed in the early days of the so-called Gothic revival, and a piece of stucco-work by Bernasconi took its place. That again was “restored” away in favour of a very poverty-stricken piece of mosaic, which by some blunder was made too small for its place, and had to be eked out with a meaningless border. A small fragment of Inigo’s altar-piece is in the triforium.

Pepys was much pleased (8th July, 1660) to hear the organ in Whitehall Chapel. The old organs had been destroyed under the Commonwealth all over the country, but now the diarist writes:—“Here I heard very good music, the first time that ever I remember to have heard the organs and singing men in surplices in my life.” There are many other mentions of the chapel, and, on one occasion, Mr. Hill took him up to the King’s Closet, a kind of gallery looking into the chapel, the King being away—“and there we did stay all service-time, which I did think a great honour.”

He has something to say about the works of art at Whitehall. On one occasion he admired “a great many fine antique heads of marble that my lord Northumberland had given the King.” Next he inspected the pictures. They consisted (1) of those sold by the Commonwealth and recovered; (2) those retained by Cromwell; and (3) a collection which, having been bought by a Dutchman from Whitehall, was obtained by the States of Holland from his widow, and presented to Charles II. on his restoration. The gallery which, as we shall see, is mentioned by Evelyn, appears to have been used as a kind of drawing-room in the evening.

Pepys and his wife were present on one occasion when the Queen dined at Whitehall. This Queen was Henrietta Maria, the widow of Charles I. He describes her as in her Presence Chamber, and says she was a very little, plain old woman, and nothing in her presence or her garb different from any ordinary person. He goes on: “The Princess of Orange I had often seen before. The Princess Henrietta is very pretty, but much below my expectation; and her dressing of herself with her hair frizzed short up to her ears, did make her seem so much the less to me.” A little further on he tells of being locked by accident into “Henry the Eighth’s Gallery,” and being unable to get into the Boarded Gallery. In 1666, he mentions a dining-room, but where it was he does not tell us. There are many other notices of Whitehall in the Diary, but the foregoing are probably the most important.

When we look at Vertue’s plan already mentioned, nothing is more striking than the number of separate residences the palace contained. The plan purports to have been made in the reign of Charles II., and is dated 1680. There are, however, apparently, two or three anachronisms. At least a score of dukes and other nobles had their quarters in the palace, including Monk, now Duke of Albemarle, who, with his awful Duchess, has the pleasant house by the Cockpit, occupied by Cromwell before he became Protector. It is said to have been from this house that the Princess Anne set off on her famous ride with the Bishop of London, to meet William of Orange, in 1688. Lady Castlemaine, the Duke of Monmouth, the Duke of Ormonde, and Captain Cooke, of whom Pepys sometimes speaks in disparaging terms, and who was master of the singing boys in the King’s Chapel, or something of the kind—all these were close to the Cockpit. In the other part of Whitehall—east, that is, of the “street”—were apartments for the King himself, the Queen, the Maids of Honour, for Lord Bath, Lord Peterborough, the Duke of Richmond, a Mrs. Kirk, a Lady Sears, and a vast number of people of whom history has recorded but little, including “Mr. Chiffinch.” There are, besides, a number of officials, such as the Cofferer, the Queen’s Secretary and Waiters, the Treasurer, the Chamberlain, the Doctor, and the pages of the back-stairs. A few years later an apartment adjoining the Stone Gallery was granted to Louise Renée de Penancoet de Keroualle, duchess of Portsmouth, whom Evelyn describes as having “a childish, simple, and baby face.”

Evelyn, like Pepys, makes occasional mention of Whitehall Chapel and of the other buildings. We need not quote more than one or two. In April, 1667, he writes:—

“22nd.—Saw the sumptuous supper in the banqueting house at Whitehall, on the eve of St. George’s Day, where were all the companions of the Order of the Garter.

“23rd.—In the morning, his Majesty went to chapel with the Knights of [Pg 70] the Garter, all in their habits and robes, ushered by the heralds; after the first service, they went in procession, the youngest first, the Sovereign last, with the Prelate of the Order and Dean, who had about his neck the book of the Statutes of the Order; and then the Chancellor of the Order (old Sir Henry de Vic), who wore the purse about his neck; then the Heralds and Garter-King-at-Arms, Clarencieux, Black Rod. But before the Prelate and Dean of Windsor went the gentlemen of the chapel and choristers, singing as they marched; behind them two doctors of music in damask robes; this procession was about the courts at Whitehall. Then, returning to their stalls and seats in the chapel, placed under each knight’s coat-armour and titles, the second service began. Then, the King offered at the altar, an anthem was sung; then, the rest of the Knights offered, and lastly proceeded to the banqueting house to a great feast. The King sat on an elevated throne at the upper end at a table alone; the Knights at a table on the right hand, reaching all the length of the room; over-against them a cupboard of rich gilded plate; at the lower end, the music; on the balusters above, wind music, trumpets, and kettle-drums. The King was served by the lords and pensioners who brought up the dishes. About the middle of the dinner, the Knights drank the King’s health, then the King theirs, when the trumpets and music played and sounded, the guns going off at the Tower. At the Banquet, came in the Queen, and stood by the King’s left hand, but did not sit. Then was the banqueting-stuff flung about the room profusely. In truth, the crowd was so great, that though I stayed all the supper the day before, I now stayed no longer than this sport began, for fear of disorder. The cheer was extraordinary, each Knight having forty dishes to his mess, piled up five or six high; the room hung with the richest tapestry.”

Then comes the end in a well-known and oft-quoted passage. It was in the winter of 1685. Why Evelyn visited Whitehall that particular Sunday we do not know. His description of the scene at Whitehall the last Sunday but one of the life of Charles II. is not new to any one, but must come in here: “I can never forget,” he says, “the inexpressible luxury and profaneness, gaming and all dissoluteness, and as it were total forgetfulness of God (it being Sunday evening) which this day [Pg 71] se’nnight I was witness of, the King sitting and toying with his concubines, Portsmouth, Cleveland, and Mazarine, etc.; a French boy singing love-songs in that glorious gallery, whilst about twenty of the great courtiers and other dissolute persons were at Basset round a large table, a bank of at least 2000 in gold before them; upon which two gentlemen who were with me made reflections with astonishment. Six days after was all in the dust.”

James II. seems to have preferred St. James’s to Whitehall as a residence during his brief and stormy reign. All his children were born there, and there is an account of his Queen, Mary of Modena, hastening from Whitehall just before the birth of the prince who became subsequently the Old Pretender. [Pg 72]

William and Mary were hardly settled at Whitehall when they began to look about for a house which would suit the King’s health. At Whitehall he was constantly ill. The low, foggy, damp situation was not calculated for a man who suffered daily from asthma and often from ague or low fever. One day he looked at Holland House, and we read in the Kensington parochial accounts of the church bells being rung as he went through the suburban village. Holland House was perhaps too far away; but William next visited what was really the old manor house of Neyte, in Westminster, which was then called Nottingham House. It was purchased for him, and renamed Kensington Palace, and henceforth neither Whitehall nor St. James’s saw much of him or of Queen Mary, except on state occasions. We gather from Evelyn that Charles II. had given suites of apartments to the Duchess of Portsmouth, whom the people called Madam Carwell, and others. The Duchess of Cleveland had a house near St. James’s, and afterwards lived in Arlington Street. Nell Gwynne lived in Pall Mall: so that of all those “curses of the nation,” as Evelyn calls them, only this Frenchwoman remained. If we look at Vertue’s map, though we shall not see any mention of the lodgings of the Duchess, we do see an entry which, as it turns out, is more important. It points out the room of the King’s laundress.

She was a Dutchwoman at this time, and made a charcoal fire to dry a shirt belonging to a Colonel Stanley. The situation of the room, if it was the same as that of the laundress of King Charles, is precisely that in which a fire, once set going, might spread in all directions, as it was surrounded with small chambers, probably with wooden partitions, and then again by chapels, libraries, galleries, halls, and other inflammable buildings. The unhappy Dutchwoman set her room on fire and perished in the flames. “The tapestry, bedding, the wainscotes were soon in a blaze,” says Macaulay. “Before midnight, the King’s apartments, the Queen’s apartments, the wardrobe, the treasury, the office of the Privy Council, the office of the Secretary of State, had been destroyed.” Evelyn mentions a second chapel as having been fitted up for James II.: both perished. The guardroom also, and the glorious gallery of which Evelyn speaks. The Banqueting House was saved, but some pictures by Holbein in the Matted Gallery were burnt out, and there was said to be considerable loss of life. We shall see presently why so many valuable pieces of furniture and pictures were saved. Some of them found their way across the park to St. James’s. Others went as far out as Kensington, and are now to be found partly at Windsor and partly at Hampton Court.

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The fire occurred on the night of the 4th January, 1698, and the King returning from one of his expeditions to Holland, found his palace, as he came up the river, in ruins. William himself acknowledges in a letter to a foreign friend that the accident, as he calls it, affected [Pg 74] him less than it might another, because Whitehall was a place in which he could not live. Several fires had occurred within a short time at Whitehall, the most destructive being that by which in April, 1691, the Duchess of Portsmouth was burnt out, after having had her house three times rebuilt, a subject on which Evelyn enlarges in his usual pious manner. The Duchess went to live in Kensington, and survived until far on in the reign of George II. All these fires did damage, but that of the 4th January, 1698, seems to have been almost or altogether confined to the royal apartments. Macaulay’s account of the fire is enormously exaggerated. The whole palace, on both sides of the “street of Whitehall” was mainly intact still—a vast region stretching up beyond Scotland Yard, and almost to Charing Cross. Abundant remains of the Tudor period were still to be seen twenty years ago by those who sought for them. I remember a pointed window in a basement as lately as [Pg 75] 1877. The fact is, this part of the palace was never destroyed by fire, but perished gradually, being pulled down piecemeal, to make way for other buildings, or falling into decay.

The first fire destroyed the Stone Gallery and the rooms between it and the river. This Stone Gallery, as already mentioned, ran along the east side of the Privy Garden. It was not rebuilt, and the Duchess of Portsmouth lost her house. After the second fire the ground was leased out, and Pembroke House was built on it. I think it is now part of the Board of Trade. The rest of the row is now called Whitehall Gardens, a place in which many eminent people have lived, including Sir Robert Peel, one of the Queen’s Premiers. Beyond, further south, was the Bowling Green. Here Montagu House now stands. We may feel sure, when we see how little was burnt, that William and Mary, if they had liked the place, might easily have reinstated the royal lodgings.

There is a curious print in Smith’s Sixty-two Additional Plates, which seems to have puzzled some people. It represents Whitehall in a bird’s-eye view in outline, and must have been drawn after the second fire, as Pembroke House has been built. The original drawing was in Crowle’s collection. Smith stumbles over it when he says, “The dotted lines show the parts that were not penned in ‘by the artist.’” He does not perceive that they mark places which had been burnt and had not been rebuilt. For us this print is interesting, as showing what a comparatively small part of the whole perished in the fire of 1698, and it shows us also what is the true answer to a question often asked: Why were not the pictures consumed? We can see now that they may have been taken down, all but the Holbeins, which were painted on the walls and ceiling of a chamber, and leisurely stored, probably in the Banqueting House, to be removed to St. James’s and Kensington as convenient. In the same way there was time to remove anything of value from the chapel, including Inigo’s great marble reredos. Indeed, it may be doubted if the chapel was burnt. [Pg 76]

At the beginning of the last century there remained the two gates. The queer old Gothic King Street Gate was taken down in 1723. In 1759, Holbein’s Gate was also removed, including, of course, the stairs and gallery by which Charles I. entered the palace on that fatal 30th January. The terra-cotta heads of the Cæsars eventually went to Hampton Court. They are said to have been made by an Italian named Maiano. The brick and stone-work were removed by the Duke of Cumberland to make a triumphal arch at Windsor. They form now a green mound near the Long Walk. Toby Rustat’s leaden statue of James II. still stands behind the hall, and is popularly supposed to point to the spot on which James’s father was beheaded. We have seen that this tragedy took place at the other side of the hall. There was an immediate talk of a new palace on this site, but it never came to anything. The second plan of Inigo Jones, that of 1639, is sometimes said to have been consulted by the authorities. Colen Campbell obtained it for his Vitruvius Britannicus, as he says, “from that ingenious gentleman, William Emmet, of Bromley, in the county of Kent, Esq., from whose original drawings the following five plates are published, whereby he has made a most valuable present to the sons of Art.” Was Mr. Emmet, that ingenious gentleman, who seems otherwise unknown to fame, the architect consulted by William’s Government? [Pg 77]

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