Banqueting House

The term Banqueting House was something of a misnomer. The hall within the house was, in fact, used not only for banqueting, but also royal receptions, ceremonies, and the performance of masques.[24] The entertainments given there would have been among the finest in Europe, for, during this period, England was considered the area's leading musical country. On 5 January 1617, Pocahontas and Tomocomo were brought before the king at the Banqueting House, at a performance of Ben Jonson's masque The Vision of Delight. According to John Smith, James I was so unprepossessing, neither Pocahontas nor Tomocomo realized whom they had met until it was explained to them afterward. Such masques were later augmented with French musicians, whom Queen Henrietta Maria, the wife of Charles I, brought to the court.[25] The masques began a slow decline, however, after the death in 1625 of Orlando Gibbons, who ironically died on a trip to meet the newly married Henrietta Maria and her musicians.

Inside the building is a single two-storey, double-cube room. The double-cube, in which the length of the room is twice its equal width and height,[26] is another Palladianism, where all proportions are mathematically related. At the upper level, the room is surrounded by what is sometimes mistakenly referred to as a minstrels' gallery. While musicians may have played from this vantage point, its true purpose was to admit an audience; at the time of the Banqueting House's construction, kings still lived in "splendour and state", or publicly. The less exalted and the general public would be permitted to crowd the gallery in order to watch the king dine. The lower status of those in the gallery was emphasised by the lack of an internal staircase, the gallery only being accessible by an external staircase. The building was, however, later extended to accommodate an internal staircase.

The Apotheosis of James I, the central panel of the ceiling, by Peter Paul Rubens

James I, for whom the Banqueting House was created, died in 1625 and was succeeded by his son, Charles I. The accession of Charles I heralded a new era in the cultural history of England. The new king was a great patron of the arts. He added to the Royal Collection and encouraged the great painters of Europe to come to England. In 1623 he visited Spain where he was impressed by Titian, Rubens, and Velázquez.[27] It became his ambition to find a comparable painter for his own court. Rubens while in England as a diplomat was asked to design and paint the Banqueting House ceiling which was sketched in London but completed at his studio in Antwerp due to the scale of the job. It was probably commissioned in 1629–30, and finally installed in 1636, the ceiling having been completely remodelled to frame the various sections. The subject, commissioned by the king, was the glorification of his father, titled The Apotheosis of James I, and was an allegory of his own birth.[28] To the king's chagrin, Rubens took his knighthood and decamped back to Antwerp, leaving Anthony van Dyck, lured not only with a knighthood but also a pension and a house, to remain in England as the court painter.[28] The panels for the ceiling were all painted in Rubens' atelier in Antwerp and sent to London by ship. Inigo Jones later designed another double-cube room at Wilton House, to display Van Dyck's portraits of the aristocratic Pembroke family.

Given the attention and effort which were lavished by Charles I on the Banqueting House, his end was not without irony. On the afternoon of 30 January 1649, he stepped out of a first-floor window of Banqueting House onto the scaffold that had been erected outside for the purpose of his own execution.[29] The actual window no longer exists, as it was not in the main hall but just outside it in an adjacent part of the building which has now gone. Seen from the outside, it would have been the next window along at the north end, roughly above the current visitors' entrance.[30]

Unlike the architecture of the more southern European countries, English architecture went through no period of evolution to classicism. Through Jones it arrived suddenly and fully formed. Before this, English architecture had still been based on the styles of the Middle Ages, if for the previous century influenced by Netherlandish and French renaissance classicism, which had resulted in an English renaissance style during the late Elizabethan and Jacobean periods.[31] However, as can be seen at prodigy houses like Hatfield House, one of England's first purpose-built "Renaissance" houses, even during this era, English domestic architecture never quite lost its "castle air".

Although English architecture had been influenced, mostly indirectly, by Italian classicism for a century or so, resulting in the use of classical forms and motifs in late Tudor, Elizabethan and Jacobean buildings, on his return from Italy Jones brought with him far more thorough and up to date understanding of the underlying principles of late Renaissance classicism. With his work at the Queen's House in Greenwich, and the Banqueting House, Jones transformed English architecture.

The overthrow of the monarch and establishment of the puritanical Commonwealth caused the style to be seen as Royalist, which delayed its spread; but within a few years of the Restoration almost every English county was to have some buildings in the classical style. The Banqueting House and its features became much copied. A much-favoured motif was the placing of pediments above not only the focal point of a façade but also its windows. The use of alternating segmental and triangular pediments, an arrangement employed by Vasari as early as 1550 at the Medicis' Palazzo Uffizi in Florence,[32] was a particular favourite. Provincial architects began to recreate the motifs of the Banqueting House throughout England, with varying degrees of competence. Examples of the style's popularity can be found throughout England; the then-remote county of Somerset alone contains three 17th-century versions of the Banqueting House: Brympton d'Evercy, Hinton House, and Ashton Court.[33] Following the fall of the monarchy, Jones' career was effectively ended, his style seen as royalist. He died in 1652, never having seen the popularity of the architectural concepts he introduced.

James II was the last monarch to live at Whitehall; William III and Mary II preferred to live elsewhere and eventually reconstructed Hampton Court Palace. Following the fire which destroyed Whitehall Palace, the Banqueting Hall became redundant for the purpose for which it was designed, and it was converted to a chapel to replace the Chapel Royal of Whitehall, which had been destroyed in the fire and was used to host concerts. It remained a chapel before being given to the Royal United Services Institute by Queen Victoria in 1893.[19] Highly controversial plans to partition the large mansion house space in the service of offices for the Institution were quickly dropped in favour of the creation of a museum which displayed personal items of famous commanders and included the skeleton of Napoleon's horse. The museum closed in 1962, and the great south window, closed up by the RUSI, was restored.[34]

Today, the banqueting hall is open for tours and use as a venue space.