“The Horse Guards Parade. The great open space at the end of St. James’s Park, you know. It was there that Queen Elizabeth with her Maids of Honour sat to watch one of the masques she liked so much. It was a sort of masque and tournament combined. The gallery in which she was seated, was called The Fortresse of Perfect Beauty, and a company of splendidly-dressed knights stormed it by shooting sweetly-scented powder and perfumes at it. Then another company of knights calling themselves ‘The Defenders of Beauty’ met the enemy in a mock fight, and defeated them.”
“That was when she was young and beautiful, I suppose?” Betty said. “She was quite old when we saw her.”
“Yes. She was young at the time of that particular masque, but she kept her love for acting and for dancing almost to the day of her death.”
“Did she die here?”
“She died at her palace at Richmond, but her body was borne on a funeral barge down the river there, and here in Whitehall it lay in state till she was buried in the Abbey yonder. Then came James the First, and not content with this great palace, he planned to build a new one! Do you remember I told you of an artist called Inigo Jones who designed beautiful scenery for the masques in this reign? Well, he was also an architect, and he made a plan for a wonderful new palace, and actually began to build it. There is the little bit he finished.” Godmother pointed to a stately house on the left.
“Why, I remember that! It’s in Whitehall now. Opposite the Horse Guards.”
“It is, and it’s all that’s left of Whitehall Palace in our own day. The dream of a new palace remained a dream, for that’s all of it that was ever built, and was only a tiny part of what Inigo Jones meant to do. But it remains to our day, and I never pass it without thinking of the tragedy that happened there.”
“What tragedy?”
“Don’t you remember that it was there on a scaffold put up outside that second window at this end, that James’s son, Charles the First, was executed?”
“I’d forgotten,” Betty said, looking with interest at the window Godmother pointed out. “James little thought he was having the very place built where his poor son was to die, did he?” she added after a moment. “Then did Oliver Cromwell come to live at Whitehall?” she asked presently.