To come back to the United Services Museum—a thing that far too few people do, for it is one of London’s many buried treasures—don’t be misled by any optimistic guide-book that tells you the admission is sixpence. That is only true on Saturday afternoon; at other times you part with a shilling unless you are a soldier or sailor in uniform, or one of the many troops of schoolchildren that are admitted free every week.
There are myriads of things to delight any childish heart—cunningly contrived models of ships, plans of battles, the actual walking-stick and snuff-box of Sir Francis Drake, Oliver Cromwell’s sword, the very bugle that sounded the Charge of the Light Brigade, a room devoted to souvenirs of Lord Wolseley, and rows of other treasures with heroic stories of brave men.
I have yet to find a museum without a Napoleonic souvenir, and here there is a startling one—“Marengo’s” skeleton. You are so engrossed by the relics of General Wolfe and Nelson and Wellington and other heroes, that you almost forget what you came to see—the Old Banqueting Hall where they are lodged, the beautiful Palladian structure that Inigo Jones built in 1622—all that is now left of the old palace of Whitehall.
The nine ceiling paintings that Rubens did at Charles I.’s request look as fresh as if they had been painted yesterday, having been restored too many times. Rubens got £3000 for them, while Wren only received £100 a year for rebuilding all the City churches and £200 a year for rebuilding St. Paul’s—but Wren was an Englishman and Rubens a foreigner.
The Banqueting Hall was all that James I. accomplished of the great palace he meant to let Inigo Jones build for him in Whitehall, and just outside the hall Charles I. met his death, a short distance from the statue where
Comely and calm he rides
Hard by his own Whitehall.
A little crowd clusters every morning at
UNITED SERVICES MUSEUM