WHITEHALL PALACE
Inigo Jones, 1622–38
A Grand Palace for an Absolute Monarch
The Scottish king James VI, who became James I of England, had the grandest architectural plans of any British monarch, but the building that was to be his most magnificent home did not start out as a royal palace at all. Its story began in the thirteenth century, when the Archbishop of York acquired a plot of land in Westminster, on the site of the present Whitehall, and built himself a town house called York Place. York Place continued as the residence of high-ranking churchmen, and by the time of Henry VIII it had passed into the hands of the most powerful prelate of the period, Cardinal Wolsey, who hugely extended it, turning it into one of the largest houses in London. In the late 1520s, Wolsey and Henry clashed and Wolsey fell from power. Henry seized his properties, so both his vast house at Hampton Court and York Place became royal palaces. It was in Henry’s time that York Place became known as Whitehall, on account of the pale stone of which it was built.
Henry enlarged and extended Whitehall still further, adding a host of facilities to accommodate his various enthusiasms, such as a tiltyard for jousting, a court for his favourite game – ‘real’ tennis – and a bowling green. The few contemporary images of the complex show an agglomeration of courtyards, gables, towers, turrets, chimneys and gatehouses – it was a typical Tudor great house, probably looking rather like the older parts of Hampton Court.
This irregular hotchpotch did not suit the first Stuart monarch. In 1614, James hired Inigo Jones as Surveyor to the King’s Works, and, a few years later, Jones was given the task of rebuilding Whitehall to make a residence fit for a seventeenth-century king with very grand ideas. Jones was the ideal man for this job, being a follower of the latest Italian architectural fashion. As a young man he had visited Italy twice. He studied drawing there, and examined many new buildings in the Classical style as well as looking at ancient ruins. In Venice he met Vincenzo Scamozzi, the pupil and colleague of the great Italian architect Andrea Palladio, seizing the opportunity to buy many of Palladio’s drawings, which were in Scamozzi’s possession. In addition, Jones studied the works of the Roman writer on architecture, Vitruvius, and the books of modern Italian architects and architectural writers such as Sebastiano Serlio. Jones was thus the one British person with a clear, informed knowledge of the Classical architecture of Palladio – a style featuring strict symmetry, flat roofs and Classical columns.
The only part of the new palace of Whitehall to be built – the Banqueting House – showed off this new style to perfection. A plain street front with regular rows of windows beneath an apparently flat roof and displaying only very restrained decoration conceals a much more elaborate and richly decorative interior. This opulent room was intended both for banquets and for performances of court masques, which were elaborate theatrical entertainments that presented thinly disguised royal propaganda, for which Jones designed the sets and costumes. But the Banqueting House was intended to be only a small part of a vast rebuilt Whitehall Palace, in the Classical Palladian style. The new palace that Jones conceived occupied a site between the River Thames and today’s St James’s Park, with the modern street of Whitehall running somewhere through the middle.
The proposed building is an enormous structure, arranged around seven main courtyards – six rectangular and one circular – all in the Classical style. It has vast facades to the river and the park sides, and slightly shorter ones to the other two sides. The Banqueting House was to be one tiny part of this structure – its grand facade is just seven windows wide, whereas the plans for the palace show fronts with forty or fifty windows on each main floor.
The Scottish writer Charles Mackay, in his 1840 book The Thames and its Tributaries, provides a brief description of the layout of the vast building: ‘The palace was to have consisted of four fronts, each with an entrance between two towers. Within these were to have been one large central court and five smaller ones, and between two of the latter a handsome circus [circular courtyard], with an arcade below, supported by pillars in the form of caryatides. The whole length of the palace was to have been 1,152ft [351m], and its depth 872ft [266m].’ The overall impression was one of grandeur, symmetry, order and repetition – long rows of windows relieved by the occasional tower. It was the total antithesis of the old Whitehall, with its apparently random collection of structures.
It is hard to exaggerate how shockingly new and different this building would have looked in the middle of seventeenth-century London. Most of the city consisted of narrow streets of timber-framed buildings, with a little brick and stone here and there; the architecture was a mixture of English traditional styles, with a generous sprinkling of Gothic medieval churches. People had been building in this way for centuries, but Whitehall Palace signalled the arrival of a new, Palladian style that was totally different, even alien, in its order and hard-edged symmetry.
After the accession of James’s son, Charles I, came the English Civil War. All royal building came to a halt and the Banqueting House remained the only part of the scheme to be built. The vast Stuart palace was almost forgotten. The old hotchpotch remained, with alterations by Sir Christopher Wren in the 1680s, when James II and VII was on the throne. However, his successors, William and Mary, preferred the smaller Kensington Palace to Whitehall, so the old building fell out of favour. In 1691, it was damaged in a fire and further fire in 1698 destroyed most of the remaining palace except for the Banqueting House and one or two other buildings.
Since the late seventeenth century, the British monarchy followed William and Mary’s lead and shunned vast palaces. Many of the rulers of the past three centuries have preferred life on a domestic scale, and, although Windsor Castle is large, it is another architectural hotchpotch, like Whitehall Palace once was. The country’s two longest-lived rulers, Victoria and Elizabeth II, have both expressed a preference for smaller houses such as Balmoral, Sandringham or Victoria and Albert’s Italianate ‘villa’ Osborne on the Isle of Wight. As a result, Britain has no royal palace on the scale of France’s Versailles or Spain’s Escorial. Some historians have believed that this penchant for a low-key royal family, with plenty of pomp and ceremony but without the lavish architectural indulgence of kings such as France’s Louis XIV, has helped Britain keep its monarchy and avoid revolutions. It may be that the loss of the architectural grandeur that James I craved has been to the benefit of his successors.
