Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Palace of Whitehall served as the main residence of English monarchs from 1530 until 1698. Henry VIII moved the royal household there after acquiring York Place from Cardinal Wolsey in 1530, and the palace remained the primary royal seat until fire destroyed most of its buildings in 1698.
The Palace of Whitehall had more than 1,500 rooms and covered roughly 23 acres, making it at one time the largest palace in Europe. It extended from Northumberland Avenue in the north to near Derby Gate in the south, and from Horse Guards Road in the west to the then banks of the River Thames in the east.
A fire that broke out on the 4th of January 1698 destroyed most of the palace. A servant in an upper room had hung wet linen around a burning charcoal brazier to dry; the linen caught fire and the flames spread through the complex, burning for 15 hours. The following day, wind re-ignited the blaze further north.
The Banqueting House, designed by Inigo Jones and completed in 1622, is the only integral building of the Palace of Whitehall complex still standing. Its painted ceiling was completed in 1634 by Peter Paul Rubens, commissioned by Charles I.
The 1698 fire probably destroyed Michelangelo's Cupid, a sculpture acquired as part of the Gonzaga collections in the seventeenth century. Also lost were Hans Holbein the Younger's Whitehall Mural, including his Portrait of Henry VIII, and Gian Lorenzo Bernini's marble portrait bust of King Charles I.
Henry VIII married Anne Boleyn at the palace in 1533 and Jane Seymour there in 1536, and died there in January 1547. The palace hosted the first known performance of Shakespeare's The Tempest in 1611 and the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Frederick V of the Palatinate in February 1613. Charles I was executed in front of the Banqueting House in 1649.