Museums

Banqueting House, Whitehall

Inigo Jones's hall of 1622, with a ceiling by Rubens that Charles I walked under on his way to the scaffold.

Also in Power & Politics.

This is the one piece of Whitehall Palace left standing; the rest burned down in 1698. Inigo Jones built it for James I between 1619 and 1622, and it was the first building in England done properly in the classical manner, a plain box of exact proportions at a time when everyone else was still putting up gables and turrets. Inside is a single room, twice as long as it is wide and high, where the court held its receptions and its masques: evenings of verse, music and stage machinery in which the royal family themselves took the parts.

Charles I, who inherited it, was the most extravagant collector ever to sit on the English throne. He bought the Gonzaga family's collection out of Mantua for some £18,000 — over a hundred paintings and hundreds of ancient sculptures, gathered across two centuries — kept Van Dyck and Rubens at his court, and ended with well over a thousand pictures. He also governed for eleven years without calling Parliament, raising money by means many of his subjects thought illegal. The two facts belong together: a king spending on that scale who would not ask the Commons for the money was picking the quarrel that became the civil war.

The ceiling is the argument in paint. Charles had Rubens show his father James I carried up into heaven, which is to say that kings are appointed by God and answer to him alone. It went up in 1636, and the masques were moved elsewhere afterwards so that the candle smoke would not spoil it. On 30 January 1649 Charles walked the length of this room, under his father's ascent, and out through an opening cut in the wall onto a scaffold in the street, where he was beheaded by his own subjects. Parliament then sold the pictures to pay its debts, which is why so many of them hang in the Prado and the Louvre.

Where

Whitehall, SW1A 2ER

Nearest station

Charing Cross · 4 min walk

Hours

NearbyMuseums

• Household Cavalry Museum1 min walk
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