Palace of Whitehall

• 1. Introduction

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  The Palace of Whitehall once held more than 1,500 rooms, making it the largest palace in Europe before the expanding Palace of Versailles overtook it. It stood at Westminster for over a century and a half, home to English monarchs from 1530 until a catastrophic fire in 1698 reduced almost everything to rubble. Today the street name Whitehall survives, still marking the heart of British government, but the palace itself is almost entirely gone. Only one building from the original complex remains intact: Inigo Jones's Banqueting House, completed in 1622. How did a palace of such scale come to exist, and how did it vanish so completely? The answers reach back to a disgraced cardinal, a king hungry for sport, and a servant who hung wet linen too close to a flame.

• 2. From York Place to Royal Seat

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  Walter de Grey, Archbishop of York, purchased a property near Westminster soon after 1240 and named it York Place. It became the Westminster residence of successive archbishops and was steadily expanded over the following centuries. Cardinal Wolsey pushed its renovation furthest, enlarging it so dramatically that only Lambeth Palace rivalled it among private houses in the capital, the king's own palaces included. When Henry VIII stripped Wolsey of power in 1530, he took York Place for himself, inspecting its treasures in the company of Anne Boleyn.

  Henry transformed York Place into something unprecedented. He hired the Flemish artist Anton van den Wyngaerde to redesign the complex, and drew inspiration from Richmond Palace when deciding what to add. The new palace gained a bowling green, an indoor real tennis court, a pit for cock fighting on the site that would later become the Cabinet Office at 70 Whitehall, and a tiltyard for jousting where Horse Guards Parade now stands. Estimates place Henry's spending on the palace during the 1540s at more than £30,000, a sum reckoned to be worth several million pounds in present-day terms. That figure was half again as much as the entire construction cost of Bridewell Palace. Henry decorated the gardens with carved heraldic beasts, including unicorns set on wooden posts. The Serjeant Painters Nicholas Lafore and Anthony Toto painted those posts.

  The name itself carries a minor historical irony. The white stone that gave Whitehall its name had originally been brought to England by Wolsey with the intention of building a college in Ipswich to feed Cardinal College, Oxford. When Wolsey fell, Henry seized the stone along with the other materials intended for that college and redirected them to his own expansion of York Place. The name was first recorded in 1532, two years after Henry took possession.

• 3. Royal Milestones Within its Walls

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  Henry VIII married Anne Boleyn at the palace in 1533 and Jane Seymour there in 1536. He died at Whitehall in January 1547. In March 1603, the body of Elizabeth I was brought by barge from Richmond Palace to lie in state at Whitehall before her burial.

  Under James VI and I the palace became a stage for cultural events. In 1611 the palace hosted the first known performance of William Shakespeare's The Tempest. In February 1613 it served as the venue for the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Frederick V of the Palatinate. A courtier named Gerrard Herbert recorded the entertainments arranged for a French ambassador on the 20th of May 1619. Guests moved through the Great Hall and the Queen's Privy Chamber, where the late Queen Anne of Denmark's French musicians performed. In the Queen's bedchamber, they listened to the Irish harp played by Donell Dubh O Cathail, a viol, and a Mr Lanier singing and playing the lute. The evening ended back in the Great Chamber with a performance of Shakespeare's Pericles.

  James VI and I also shaped the physical palace, most consequentially through the construction in 1622 of a new Banqueting House to a design by Inigo Jones, replacing earlier banqueting halls dating from the time of Elizabeth I. Peter Paul Rubens completed a painted ceiling for the building in 1634, commissioned by Charles I. That same Charles I was executed in front of the Banqueting House in 1649.

• 4. Life Inside a Small City

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  By 1650 Whitehall Palace was the largest complex of secular buildings in England. Its layout was irregular, its constituent parts ranging wildly in size and architectural style. Observers compared it to a small town rather than a single building. The irregularity grew partly because courtiers were permitted to add onto their assigned lodgings, either at their own expense or the crown's. Stephen Fox, Charles II's Clerk of the Green Cloth, obtained permission from the Office of Works in the 1660s to build additions to the three rooms he had been assigned. By the time he finished, Fox had constructed a grand mansion complete with a coach house, stables, and a view over the Thames, all woven into the palace network.

  At its greatest extent the palace covered roughly 23 acres, stretching from Northumberland Avenue in the north to Downing Street and nearly to Derby Gate in the south, and from the line of the current buildings facing Horse Guards Road in the west to the then banks of the River Thames in the east. That eastern boundary has since been pushed further by the reclamation of land during the construction of the Victoria Embankment. The palace stood about 710 yards from Westminster Abbey.

  The lodgings provided to Robert Carr, 1st Earl of Somerset and King James's favourite, occupied forty rooms and included a picture gallery converted from a bowling alley. James II ordered Christopher Wren to carry out various changes, including a chapel finished in 1687, a rebuilding of the queen's apartments around 1688, and new private lodgings for the queen in 1689. The Roman Catholic chapel, built during a period of intense anti-Catholic feeling in England, generated both criticism and awe. Its ceiling was adorned with 8,132 pieces of gold leaf, and at the east end of the nave stood an enormous marble altarpiece 40 feet high and 25 feet wide, designed by Wren and carved by Grinling Gibbons.

• 5. Two Fires, One Erasure

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  On the 10th of April 1691 a fire broke out in apartments previously used by the Duchess of Portsmouth, damaging older sections of the palace but leaving the state apartments intact. By an odd turn, the destruction actually gave a greater coherence to the remaining complex by clearing some of its most disorganised buildings.

  Mary II died of smallpox at Kensington Palace at the end of 1694, and on the 24th of January following she lay in state at Whitehall. William and Mary had generally avoided Whitehall in favour of Kensington, a preference that would leave the older palace without regular royal attention or maintenance.

  The fatal blow came on the 4th of January 1698. A servant in an upper room hung wet linen around a burning charcoal brazier to dry; the linen caught and the fire spread rapidly through the palace complex, burning for 15 hours before firefighters could extinguish it. The following day, wind picked up and re-ignited the blaze further north. Christopher Wren, then serving as the King's Surveyor of Works, was ordered expressly by William III to concentrate all manpower on saving the Banqueting House. Wren directed bricklayers to block up the main window on the building's south side to stop the flames from entering. Around 20 buildings were pulled down to create a firebreak, but this did little to halt the fire's westward spread.

  John Evelyn wrote on the 5th of January: "Whitehall burnt! nothing but walls and ruins left." Among the losses were almost certainly Michelangelo's Cupid, acquired as part of the Gonzaga collections in the seventeenth century; Hans Holbein the Younger's iconic Whitehall Mural, which included his Portrait of Henry VIII; and Gian Lorenzo Bernini's marble portrait bust of King Charles I. A few structures survived in Scotland Yard and facing the park, along with the Holbein Gate, which was eventually demolished in 1769.

• 6. What the Rubble Left Behind

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  The Banqueting House remains the only integral building of the original complex still standing, though it has been modified over time. Parts of the old palace were absorbed into newer government buildings in the Whitehall district rather than being entirely cleared away. A tower and portions of Henry VIII's covered tennis courts survive, built into the Old Treasury and Cabinet Office at 70 Whitehall.

  An undercroft from Wolsey's Great Chamber, long known as Henry VIII's Wine Cellar, presented a particular engineering challenge when the east side of the site was redeveloped beginning in 1938 for what is now the Ministry of Defence Main Building. The cellar, a fine example of a Tudor brick-vaulted roof roughly 70 feet long and 30 feet wide, sat directly in the way of both the new building plan and the proposed route for Horse Guards Avenue. Following a request from Queen Mary in 1938 and a promise made in Parliament, the cellar was preserved. Workers encased it in steel and concrete, then relocated the entire structure 9 feet to the west and nearly 19 feet deeper in 1949, after construction on the site had been paused by the Second World War. The relocation was accomplished without significant damage to the structure, and the cellar now rests within the basement of the Ministry of Defence building.

  A number of marble carvings from James II's chapel at Whitehall were removed to Westminster Abbey in 1706. In 1820 they were moved again, to St Andrew's Church in Burnham-on-Sea in Somerset, where they remain today.