The Susie Zone - Exploring the Banqueting House (June 2018)
Exploring the Banqueting House
by Susie J. Briscoe
This is #6 in my series, in which we explore places where I have personal experience. This time we will be going to the Banqueting House within the Palace of Whitehall.
When we traverse London today, it is hard to imagine it some 500 years ago being a much more countrified place in which to live (not as much as Kensington Palace, but that is for another time).
My connection with the Banqueting House is once again connected with a charity event I chaired on behalf of Action Medical Research. It took place quite a long time ago now, in 1991 and was geared around showcasing the “Royal College of Art Gala Preview,” which we decided to hold in the Banqueting House of the Palace of Whitehall.
As I said, my responsibility was that of Chair, and my role included formulating the committee and liaising between the charity, Royal College of Art, and the committee itself.
This was mainly viewed as a showcase for both the charity and the RCA, structured to raise charity’s profile, broaden base line of contacts, and enhance public relations image. In fact, we raised the fairly modest (by London fundraising standards) sum of approximately £15,000 even in those days.
It was great fun, as well as being exciting and an insight into the College, to work with the RCA and the talented rising stars of fashion at that time, and to blend the venue’s historic rooms within this magnificent building with the students very ‘avant garde’ fabrics and designs. The picture above shows the main banqueting room in which we staged our gala dinner and the runway on which the fashions were modeled.
When we were selecting the venue, I took my colleague (who was representing our sponsor, L’Oréal) to view with me. We were both blown away - quite literally - by the breathtaking ceiling which had been painted by Sir Peter Paul Rubens, who had been originally commissioned by Charles I. (Here's a side note for you... Charles I was, unfortunately, beheaded just in front of the building, although I had always believed the act was committed from a window on the first floor.)
Now, on to the historical facts...
Palace of Whitehall
(From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)
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 Location of the Palace of Whitehall in Central London |
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The Palace of Whitehall (or Palace of White Hall) at Westminster, Middlesex, was the main residence of the English monarchs from 1530 until 1698, when most of its structures, except for Inigo Jones's Banqueting House of 1622, were destroyed by fire. It had, at one time, been the largest palace in Europe, with more than 1,500 rooms, overtaking the Vatican, before itself being overtaken by the expanding Palace of Versailles, which was to reach 2,400 rooms.
The palace gives its name, Whitehall, to the street on which many of the current administrative buildings of the present-day British government are situated, and hence metonymically to the central government itself.
Location
At its most expansive, the palace extended over much of the area bordered by Northumberland Avenue in the north; to Downing Street and nearly to Derby Gate in the south; and from roughly the elevations of the current buildings facing Horse Guards Road in the west, to the then banks of the River Thames in the east (the construction of Victoria Embankment has since reclaimed more land from the Thames)—a total of about 23 acres (93,000 m2). It was about 710 yards (650 m) from Westminster Abbey.
History
By the 13th century the Palace of Westminster had become the centre of government in England and had been the main London residence of the king since 1049. The surrounding area became a popular and expensive location. The Archbishop of York, Walter de Grey, bought a nearby property as his London residence soon after 1240, calling it York Place.
King Edward I stayed at York Place on several occasions while work was carried out at Westminster and enlarged it to accommodate his entourage. York Place was rebuilt during the 15th century and expanded so much by Cardinal Wolsey that it was rivaled by only Lambeth Palace as the greatest house in London, the King's London palaces included. Consequently, when King Henry VIII remove the cardinal from power in 1530, he acquired York Place to replace Westminster (the royal residential, or 'privy' area of which had been gutted by fire in 1512) as his main London residence, inspecting its possessions in the company of Anne Boleyn. The name Whitehall or White Hall was first recorded in 1532; it had its origins in the white stone used for the buildings.
A sketch of Whitehall Palace in 1544, by Anton van den Wyngaerde.
King Henry VIII hired the Flemish artist Anton van den Wyngaerde to redesign York Place, and he extended it during his lifetime. Inspired by Richmond Palace, he included sporting facilities, with a bowling green, indoor real tennis court, a pit for cock fighting (on the site of the Cabinet Office, 70 Whitehall), and a tiltyard for jousting (now the site of Horse Guards Parade).
It is estimated that more than £30,000 (several million at present-day valued, or several billion when compared to share of GDP) were spent during the 1540s, half as much again as the construction of the entire Bridewell Palace. Henry VIII married two of his wives at the palace—Anne Boleyn in 1533 and Jane Seymour in 1536 and died there in January 1547. In 1611, the palace hosted the first known performance of William Shakespeare's play The Tempest.
James VI and I made significant changes to the buildings, notably the construction in 1622 of a new Banqueting House built to a design by Inigo Jones to replace a series of previous banqueting houses dating from the time of Elizabeth I. Its decoration was finished in 1634 with the completion of a ceiling by Sir Peter Paul Rubens, commissioned by Charles I (who was to be executed in front of the building in 1649).
By 1650 Whitehall Palace was the largest complex of secular buildings in England, with more than 1,500 rooms. Its layout was irregular, and its constituent parts were of many different sizes and in several different architectural styles, making it look more like a small town than a single building.
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Charles II commissioned minor works. Like his father, he died at the palace - but from a stroke. James II ordered various changes by Sir Christopher Wren, including a chapel finished in 1687, rebuilding of the queen's apartments (c. 1688), and the queen's private lodgings (1689).
Demise
By 1691 the palace had become the largest and most complex in Europe. On 10 April, a fire broke out in the much-renovated apartment previously used by the Duchess of Portsmouth that damaged the older palace structures, though apparently not the state apartments. This actually gave a greater cohesiveness to the remaining complex.
At the end of 1694, Mary II died in Kensington Palace of smallpox, and on the following 24 January lay in state at Whitehall; William and Mary had avoided Whitehall in favour of their palace at Kensington. However, a second fire on 4 January 1698 destroyed most of the remaining residential and government buildings; the diarist John Evelyn noted succinctly the next day: "Whitehall burnt! nothing but walls and ruins left."
Beside the Banqueting House, some buildings survived in Scotland Yard and some facing the park, along with the so-called Holbein Gate, eventually demolished in 1769. Despite some rebuilding, financial constraints prevented large scale reconstruction. In the second half of the 18th century, much of the site was leased for the construction of town houses.
During the fire, many works of art were destroyed, probably including Michelangelo's Cupid, a famous sculpture bought as part of the Gonzaga collections in the seventeenth century. Also lost were Hans Holbein the Younger's iconic mural Portrait of Henry VIII and Gian Lorenzo Bernini's marble portrait bust of King Charles I.
Present Day
The Banqueting House is the only integral building of the complex now standing, although it has been somewhat modified. Various other parts of the old palace still exist, often incorporated into new buildings in the Whitehall government complex. These include a tower and other parts of the former covered tennis courts from the time of Henry VIII, built into the Old Treasury and Cabinet Office at 70 Whitehall.
Banqueting House | by Steve Cadman
Henry VIII's Wine Cellar
Beginning in 1938, the east side of the site was redeveloped with the building now housing the Ministry of Defence (MOD), now known as MOD Main Building. An undercroft from Wolsey's Great Chamber, now known as Henry VIII's Wine Cellar, a fine example of a Tudor brick-vaulted roof some 70 feet (21 m) long and 30 feet (9 m) wide, was found to interfere not just with the plan for the new building but also with the proposed route for Horse Guards Avenue.
Following a request from Queen Mary in 1938 and a promise in Parliament, provision was made for the preservation of the cellar. Accordingly, it was encased in steel and concrete and relocated nine feet to the west and nearly 19 feet (5.8 m) deeper in 1949, when building was resumed at the site after the Second World War. This was carried out without any significant damage to the structure and it now rests within the basement of the building.
A number of marble carvings from the former chapel at Whitehall (which was built for James II) can now be seen in St. Andrew's Church, Burnham-on-Sea, in Somerset, to where they were moved in 1820 after having originally been removed to Westminster Abbey in 1706.
Source: Wikipedia, with additional material by SJB
Don’t forget to share with me what you discovered during this month and let me know if I may share it within this newsletter next month.
