For the next few years the name of Whitehall is chiefly to be found in the delightful pages of Pepys, and those of that sanctimonious prig, Evelyn. Mr. Wheatly, who has made a special study of Pepys, tells us, in his London, Past and Present, that the chief apartments of Whitehall mentioned in the Diary are as follows:—The Matted Gallery, the Gallery of Henry VIII., the Boarded Gallery, the Shield Gallery, the Stone Gallery, and the Vane Room. We may identify some of these. The Gallery of Henry VIII. was probably that which led over [Holbein’s Gate] to the park. The Shield Gallery must be that spoken of by Manningham, about the end of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, as being decorated with scutcheons. There was a Guardroom, mentioned by Lilly, the astrologer. The Adam and Eve Gallery was so called from a picture attributed to Mabuse, now at Hampton Court. The Stone Gallery looked on the Sundial Lawn in the [Privy Garden]. Pepys also mentions the Banqueting House, where in April, 1661, he “saw the King create my Lord Chancellor, and several others, Earls, and Mr. Crew, and several others, Barons: the first being led up by Heralds and five old Earls to the King, and there the patent is read, and the King puts on his vest, and sword and coronet, and gives him the patent. And then he kisseth the King’s hand, and rises and stands covered before the King. And the same for the Barons, only he is led up but by three of the old Barons, and are girt with swords before they go to the King.” In the Banqueting House, also, the King touched “people for the King’s evil” (June 23, 1660). There was a service “At the Healing” in Books of Common Prayer. It was omitted, I think, about 1709. There was a “balcone” in the Shield Gallery. In this room Pepys saw the King bid farewell to Montagu, who was going to sea. “I saw with what kindness the King did hug my lord at his parting.” We have a topographical note in July, 1660. Pepys walked all the afternoon in Whitehall Court. We know where the Court was, and now we learn that the Council Chamber looked into it. “It was strange to see how all the people flocked together bare, to see the King looking out of the Council window.” There are many references to the Chapel. It stood near the river, in the eastern part of the palace, and had two vestries. Inigo Jones designed a beautiful reredos of coloured marbles for it. This reredos was saved when the palace was burnt, and was given by Queen Anne to Westminster Abbey. There is a view in Dart’s Westminster Abbey which shows it—the only representation of it I have met with. It was destroyed in the early days of the so-called Gothic revival, and a piece of stucco-work by Bernasconi took its place. That again was “restored” away in favour of a very poverty-stricken piece of mosaic, which by some blunder was made too small for its place, and had to be eked out with a meaningless border. A small fragment of Inigo’s altar-piece is in the triforium.
Pyramidal Dial in Privy Garden,
set up in 1669.
From an Engraving by H. Steel, 1673.
Pepys was much pleased (8th July, 1660) to hear the organ in Whitehall Chapel. The old organs had been destroyed under the Commonwealth all over the country, but now the diarist writes:—“Here I heard very good music, the first time that ever I remember to have heard the organs and singing men in surplices in my life.” There are many other mentions of the chapel, and, on one occasion, Mr. Hill took him up to the King’s Closet, a kind of gallery looking into the chapel, the King being away—“and there we did stay all service-time, which I did think a great honour.”
He has something to say about the works of art at Whitehall. On one occasion he admired “a great many fine antique heads of marble that my lord Northumberland had given the King.” Next he inspected the pictures. They consisted (1) of those sold by the Commonwealth and recovered; (2) those retained by Cromwell; and (3) a collection which, having been bought by a Dutchman from Whitehall, was obtained by the States of Holland from his widow, and presented to Charles II. on his restoration. The gallery which, as we shall see, is mentioned by Evelyn, appears to have been used as a kind of drawing-room in the evening.
Pepys and his wife were present on one occasion when the Queen dined at Whitehall. This Queen was Henrietta Maria, the widow of Charles I. He describes her as in her Presence Chamber, and says she was a very little, plain old woman, and nothing in her presence or her garb different from any ordinary person. He goes on: “The Princess of Orange I had often seen before. The Princess Henrietta is very pretty, but much below my expectation; and her dressing of herself with her hair frizzed short up to her ears, did make her seem so much the less to me.” A little further on he tells of being locked by accident into “Henry the Eighth’s Gallery,” and being unable to get into the Boarded Gallery. In 1666, he mentions a dining-room, but where it was he does not tell us. There are many other notices of Whitehall in the Diary, but the foregoing are probably the most important.
Whitehall in 1724.
When we look at Vertue’s plan already mentioned, nothing is more striking than the number of separate residences the palace contained. The plan purports to have been made in the reign of Charles II., and is dated 1680. There are, however, apparently, two or three anachronisms. At least a score of dukes and other nobles had their quarters in the palace, including Monk, now Duke of Albemarle, who, with his awful Duchess, has the pleasant house by the Cockpit, occupied by Cromwell before he became Protector. It is said to have been from this house that the Princess Anne set off on her famous ride with the Bishop of London, to meet William of Orange, in 1688. Lady Castlemaine, the Duke of Monmouth, the Duke of Ormonde, and Captain Cooke, of whom Pepys sometimes speaks in disparaging terms, and who was master of the singing boys in the King’s Chapel, or something of the kind—all these were close to the Cockpit. In the other part of Whitehall—east, that is, of the “street”—were apartments for the King himself, the Queen, the Maids of Honour, for Lord Bath, Lord Peterborough, the Duke of Richmond, a Mrs. Kirk, a Lady Sears, and a vast number of people of whom history has recorded but little, including “Mr. Chiffinch.” There are, besides, a number of officials, such as the Cofferer, the Queen’s Secretary and Waiters, the Treasurer, the Chamberlain, the Doctor, and the pages of the back-stairs. A few years later an apartment adjoining the Stone Gallery was granted to Louise Renée de Penancoet de Keroualle, duchess of Portsmouth, whom Evelyn describes as having “a childish, simple, and baby face.”