Whitehall

by W. J. Loftie

The new King must have looked on Whitehall as but a poor lodging. The Queen had Somerset House, between the Strand and the Thames, for her separate residence, and the Prince of Wales had St. James’s. To be more accurate, we may quote Mr. Sheppard to the effect that, though St. James’s was granted to Prince Henry the year after the King’s accession, he did not go into residence there for six years. Two years later he died. It is worth while to go into these things, because, among the four hundred persons and personages who composed the Prince’s train, was a “surveyor,” or, as we should say, an architect, named Inigo Jones, reputed to be a great traveller, but more in vogue at Court as a “devyser of maskes.” He had three shillings a day for his pay, and the Prince gave him as much as thirty pounds on one occasion (which, as Cunningham, his biographer, remarks, was equal to one hundred and twenty pounds of our money), and sixteen pounds on another. When the Prince died, Jones, who had a promise of the Royal Surveyorship at the next vacancy, went to Italy, no doubt to study, having probably saved something during his two years at St. James’s.

There are many notices of masks performed before the King’s Majesty at Whitehall in the early years of the new dynasty. These plays took place in the Hall, which, as we have seen, was near the Chapel in the eastern part of the palace. It must have been small and inconvenient for such purposes, but Inigo, who on many occasions is mentioned as having looked after the arrangements, was fertile in resource, and made the most of the space at his disposal. He was destined to furnish the palace with an adequate hall, which is now the sole relic of the old royal residence existing. It is quite worth while to quote (from Cunningham) Jones’s account of one of these plays. It was written by Chapman, and was acted by the gentlemen of the Middle Temple and Lincoln’s Inn at the time of the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth with the Palsgrave, afterwards King of Bohemia. First, a procession started from the Rolls House in Chancery Lane, and rode on horseback along the Strand, past Charing Cross, to the Tilt-Yard at Whitehall, where they made one turn before the King, and then dismounted. The performance took place in the Hall. It is described as having for scenery an artificial rock, nearly as high as the roof. The rock was honeycombed with caves, and there were two winding stairs. The rock turned a golden colour, and “was run quite through with veins of gold.” On one side was a silver edifice labelled in Latin, “The Temple of Honour” (Honoris Fanum). There were various allusive devices, and after Plutus, the God of Riches, had made a speech, the rock split in pieces with a great crack, and Capriccio stepped out to make his speech while the broken rock vanished. Next appeared a cloud. Then a gold mine, in which the twelve masquers were triumphantly seated. Over the gold mine was an evening sky, and the red sun was seen to set. There were white cliffs in the background, and from them rose a bank of clouds, which hid everything. The mask cost Lincoln’s Inn alone more than a thousand pounds. Of course, scenery of the kind described must have been extremely costly, the designer having neither the appliances nor the skilled workmen who carry out such marvellous scenic effects in our modern theatres.

One more example of Inigo’s powers as a “devyser” may be quoted from Cunningham. In 1611, in January, the Prince, then nearly at the end of his short life, presented a mask at Court, that is, at Whitehall. It was written by Ben Jonson, and called “Oberon, the Fairy Prince.” It cost 289l. 8s. 5d. for mercery, 298l. 15s. 6d. for silk, and 143l. 13s. 6d. for tailor’s work; in all, the Prince had to pay 1092l. 6s. 10d. The interest of these details lies in the fact that it was by making stage scenery that Inigo Jones was taught how to extract the greatest amount of effect from the smallest amount of material or means. It let him into the secret of proportion, and the marvellous amount of influence proportion alone, without ornament or expense, can be brought to exercise. Other men at that time also understood stage scenery, but stage scenery was to them nothing more. The information so gained fell on fertile soil in the mind of Inigo, and brought forth eventually those splendid architectural designs for which he can never be too much praised.

Inigo Jones carried the information and experience thus obtained with him on this his second visit to Italy. He enquired why such a building had such an effect. He made careful measurements, and compared and combined the figures so arrived at until he wrung the secret of the old Roman builder from the ruins. Cunningham dwells at some length on this subject. There can be no doubt that, like Wren’s, the genius of Jones consisted mainly in his extraordinary power of taking pains. Where one man was content to observe the completeness and harmony of some palace or church, Jones must find out to what cause that harmony was due. Thus he went about making measurements. For instance, he always carried a copy of the great work of Andrea Palladio with him wherever he went. On the fly-leaves he constantly wrote such notes as this:—“The length of the great courte at Windsour is 350ᶠᵒ, the breadth is 260; this I measured by paces the 5 of December, 1690. The great court at Theobalds is 159ᶠᵒ, the second court is 110ᶠᵒ square, the thirde courte is 88ᶠᵒ—the 20 of June, 1621.” The book is now at Worcester College, Oxford. One of his notes is very curious as showing his subtle analysis of proportion. He had a great admiration for the Temple of Jupiter at Rome, and set seriously to work to find out the reason for its satisfactory effect. In the result he came to the conclusion that its design was based on a series of circles, and that its proportions were fixed by dividing the largest diameter into six parts, and then recombining them. In June, 1639, he noted of this temple that it had just been destroyed by the Pope’s permission for the sake of the marble built into the walls. The Bishops of London have here ancient precedent for their treatment of Wren’s City churches, and what Inigo would have thought of some recent doings may be gathered from the next two notes:—“This was the noblest thing which was in Rome in my time. So as all the good of the ancients will be ruined ere long.”

On the 1st of October, 1615, he was put in possession of the office of Surveyor to the King, which had been promised him before he left England. His predecessor, Simon Basil, had died in that year, and we cannot doubt that he immediately commenced the series of designs by which it was intended to transform the shabby rabbit-warren, that, as we have seen, the so-called Palace of Whitehall had become. Otherwise, it is impossible to believe that when, in 1619, the old hall of which I have so often spoken, was destroyed by fire, he was ready within six months to begin the building of the Banqueting House. We must remember that this house, which is so familiar to all Londoners, was part of a design intended to cover a space of 1152 feet by 874. It was expected to rival the great palaces of the continental kings. The Vatican may be said to have been completed in 1588, and the smaller palace of the Lateran in 1586. At that time the largest of these palaces was the Escurial in Spain, which had been completed late in the previous century. The front is more than 680 feet in length. Versailles had not been begun, and neither had the largest of all, the palace of Mafra, on the west coast of Portugal, not far from Lisbon.

Mafra is 760 feet in width, east and west. It forms at the present day a conspicuous, but not beautiful, object from the deck of the passing steamer, but is seldom visited, as it has nothing except its vast size to recommend it. But the palace of Whitehall was designed by Inigo Jones to be both larger than any other, and also so beautiful that even the little fragment with which we are familiar has challenged the admiration of every one who has any architectural taste for more than two hundred and fifty years.

Detail of Banqueting House.

From Kent’s “Inigo Jones.”

When the fire in Whitehall Palace took place, it did not require that the King should summon Jones to repair the damage. Any work of that kind was part of his daily round: but two interesting points should be mentioned here. Inigo made no attempt to restore the burnt building, nor did he undertake, as a modern architect would have done, to make a new hall, and persuade his employers that it was exactly as Cardinal Wolsey had left it. On the contrary, he offered the King plans of which the Banqueting House was but a small part. Evidently he had carefully examined the site, and found that there was ample room for a building on the greatest possible scale. The palace as it then was, reached from the very bank of the Thames to the roadway of Whitehall; and, on the western side, looking into the park, there was a kind of village of buildings attached to the palace more or less slightly. The whole space available was about 4000 feet from north to south, and 1300 from east to west. On the side of the park the space was practically inexhaustible; the King could take as much as he pleased in that direction. We shall give some description of the whole design presently. Jones within six months was ready to begin upon his new Banqueting House, and on the 1st of June, 1619, the first stone was laid, the architect having submitted a model to the King. The building was finished at the end of March, 1622, the expenditure having been 14,940l. 4s. 1d. It is remarkable that the account was not finally settled until long after the death of King James, namely, in 1633. It may be well here to give the technical account of the new building, probably written by Jones himself. It was described as 110 feet in length, and 55 in width within. The wall of the foundation is 14 feet in thickness. The first storey to the height of 16 feet was of Oxfordshire stone, rusticated on the outside and bricked on the inside. The [Banqueting Hall] was 55 feet in height to the roof, the walls being 5 feet thick, made of Northamptonshire stone, with two orders of columns and pilasters, the lower Ionic and the higher Composite, with their architrave, frieze, cornice, and other ornaments of the kind; also rails and “balustres” round about the top of the building, all of Portland stone, with fourteen windows on each side; one great window at the upper end, and five doors of stone with frontispieces and cartouches; the inside brought up with brick, finished over with two orders of columns and pilasters, part of stone and part of brick, with their architectural frieze and cornice, with a gallery upon the two sides, and the lower end borne upon great cartouches of timber carved, with rails and “balustres” of timber, and the floor laid with spruce deals; a strong timber roof covered with lead, and under it a ceiling divided into a fret made of great cornices enriched with carving; with painting, glazing, &c. The master-mason was the famous Nicholas Stone, who sculptured the water-gate at the foot of Buckingham Street, and to whom Cunningham attributes the monument of Sir Francis Vere in Westminster Abbey. If the beautiful wreaths and the capitals of the pilasters are still as he left them, they show exactly that kind of reticence which is one of the most charming characteristics of really high art. Inigo was too good an architect to leave anything like this to a workman in whom he could not thoroughly confide, but it is evident that what Gibbons did for Wren, Stone did for Jones.