page_title: Banqueting House, Whitehall
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Banqueting House, Whitehall / History
caption_attribution_description: English: The view is from the west. Despite appearances this painting shows a single palace. The Banqueting House is on the left. Español: Esta vista es desde el oeste. A pesar de las apariencias, esta pintura de Hendrick Danckerts muestra un solo palacio de este conjunto. La Casa de los Banquetes (cuya construcción fue completada en 1622) es la que está a la izquierda. Français&#160;: Le palais de Whitehall par Hendrick Danckerts, vue de l'ouest. La Maison des banquets est à gauche.
context_page_description: The Banqueting House, Whitehall, is the grandest and best known survivor of the architectural genre of banqueting house, which were constructed for elaborate entertaining. It is the only remaining component of the Palace of Whitehall, the residence of English monarchs from 1530 to 1698. The building is important in the history of English architecture as the first structure to be completed in the neo-classical style, which was to transform English architecture.
  Begun in 1619 and designed by Inigo Jones in a style influenced by Andrea Palladio, the Banqueting House was completed in 1622 at a cost of £15,618, 27 years before King Charles I of England was beheaded on a scaffold in front of it in January 1649. The building was controversially re-faced in Portland stone in the 19th century, though the details of the original façade were faithfully preserved. Today, the Banqueting House is a national monument, open to the public and preserved as a Grade I listed building. It is cared for by an independent charity, Historic Royal Palaces, which receives no funding from the British Government or the Crown.
context_section_description: The Palace of Whitehall was the creation of King Henry VIII, expanding an earlier mansion that had belonged to Cardinal Wolsey, known as York Place. The King was determined that his new palace should be the "biggest palace in Christendom", a place befitting his newly created status as the Supreme Head of the Church of England. All evidence of the disgraced Wolsey was eliminated and the building rechristened the Palace of Whitehall.
  During Henry's reign, the palace had no designated banqueting house, the King preferring to banquet in a temporary structure purpose-built in the gardens. The Keeper of the Banqueting House was a position enhanced by Queen Mary I by designating it in relation to a building of the same name at Nonsuch Palace, near the south edge of Greater London, which has since been demolished and instead marks the site of a footpath junction of the London Loop. This house was used to entertain the French agent in London and ambassador Gilles de Noailles and his wife in 1556.
  The first permanent banqueting house at Whitehall had a short life. It was built for King James I, but was destroyed by fire in January 1619, when workmen, clearing up after New Year's festivities, decided to incinerate the rubbish inside the building. An immediate replacement was commissioned from the fashionable architect Inigo Jones. Jones had spent time in Italy studying the architecture evolving from the Renaissance and that of Andrea Palladio, and returned to England with what were, at the time, revolutionary ideas: to replace the eclectic style of the Jacobean English Renaissance with a more pure, classical design, which made no attempt to harmonise with the Tudor palace of which it was to be part.
caption: The old Palace of Whitehall, showing the Banqueting House to the left
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