Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
1
CHARLES I
Stranded on a tra
c island to the south of Nelson's Column, on the site of the medieval
Charing Cross
(see p.136), an equestrian statue of
Charles I
gazes down Whitehall to the
place of his execution in 1649, outside the Banqueting House. The king wore two shirts in
case he shivered in the cold, which the crowd would take to be fear, and once his head was
chopped off, it was then sewn back on again for burial in Windsor - a very British touch.
The statue itself was sculpted in 1633 and was originally intended for a site in Roehampton,
but was sold off during the Commonwealth to a local brazier, John Rivett, with strict
instructions to melt it down. Rivett made a small fortune selling bronze mementoes,
allegedly from the metal, while all the time concealing the statue in the vaults of St Paul's,
Covent Garden. After the Restoration, in 1675, the statue was erected on the very spot
where eight of those implicated in the king's death were disembowelled in 1660. Until
1859, “King Charles the Martyr” Holy Day (Jan 30) was a day of fasting, and his execution is
still commemorated here on the last Sunday in January with a parade by the royalist wing
of the Civil War Society.
Westminster Palace forced the king to find alternative accommodation; it was here
that he celebrated his marriage to Anne Boleyn in 1533, and here that he died
fourteen years later. Described by one contemporary chronicler as nothing but “a heap
of houses erected at diverse times and of different models, made continuous”, it
boasted some two thousand rooms and stretched for half a mile along the Thames.
Very little survived the fire of 1698 and, subsequently, the royal residence shifted to
St James's and Kensington.
Since then, all the key governmental ministries and o
ces have migrated here,
rehousing themselves on an ever-increasing scale. The
Foreign & Commonwealth
O
ce
, for example, occupies a palatial Italianate building, built by George Gilbert
Scott in 1868, and well worth a visit on Open House weekend (see p.26). The process
reached its apogee with the grimly bland
Ministry of Defence (MoD)
building,
completed in 1957, underneath which is Britain's most expensive military bunker, the
£125 million Pindar.
Banqueting House
Whitehall • Mon-Sat 10am-5pm • £5 •
T
020 3166 6000,
W
hrp.org.uk •
!
Charing Cross
The only sections of Whitehall Palace to survive the 1698 fire were Cardinal Wolsey's
wine cellars (now beneath the Ministry of Defence) and Inigo Jones's
Banqueting
House
, the first Palladian (or Neoclassical) building to be built in central London.
Opened in 1622 with a performance of Ben Jonson's
Masque of Angers
, the
Banqueting House is still used for state occasions (and, therefore, may be closed at
short notice). The one room open to the public - the main hall upstairs - is well
worth seeing for the superlative ceiling paintings, commissioned by Charles I from
Rubens
and installed in 1635. A glorification of the divine right of kings, the panels
depict the union of England and Scotland, the peaceful reign of Charles's father,
James I and, finally, his apotheosis.
Given the subject of the paintings, it's ironic that it was through the Banqueting
House that
Charles I
walked in 1649 before stepping onto the executioner's scaffold
from one of its windows.
Oliver Cromwell
moved into Whitehall Palace in 1654,
having declared himself Lord Protector, and kept open table in the Banqueting
House for the of
cers of his New Model Army; he died here in 1658. Two years
later
Charles II
celebrated the Restoration here, and kept open house for his adoring
public - Samuel Pepys recalls seeing the underwear of one of his mistresses, Lady
Castlemaine, hanging out to dry in the palace's Privy Garden. (Charles housed two
mistresses and his wife here, with a back entrance onto the river for courtesans.) To
appreciate the place fully, it's worth getting hold of one of the free audioguides.
