Ironies of the Banqueting House.

The painted ceiling at the Banqueting House in Whitehall has witnessed a remarkable history (Image credit below)

He stepped out through the window on to the scaffold.  Whitehall was crowded.  It was a January afternoon and bitterly cold.  He said goodbye to his daughter.  He lay full length with his head on the low block; he lifted his hands to give the signal.  A single blow of the axe took off his head.

Charles I was beheaded on January 30th, 1649, and his death marked the end of a golden period in English art and architecture.

Nothing would be the same again.  Under Charles, foreign artists had been brought to London, English noblemen had started collecting antiquities and paintings on the Continent and the culture of the Renaissance had finally chased out the last shreds and patches of Gothic style.

Ironically, the Banqueting House, from one of the windows of which he stepped on to the scaffold, was one of his and his father James I’s greatest works of patronage; the first truly neo-classical building in the country.  It was also one of architect Inigo Jones’s greatest works.

James I hired Jones to build the Banqueting House as an addition to the ramshackle, medieval Whitehall Palace (Jones created plans for an entirely new palace, in fact, but only this part of it was ever built).

The elegant facade is clearly Renaissance in style, with huge windows, its classical vocabularly of pediments, columns, balustrade, its flat roof (not the steeply pitched roof common in England up to that date), its firm rectangular outline.  Everything is precise, poised and a little understated.

Inside, that feeling of classical proportion continues; the main room is a double-cube; even if you don’t know that, the geometrical form creates a feeling of calm and monumentality.  It’s not too tall, wide or long but just right – a perfection of proportions.  Charles added the crowning touch.  To this restrained Renaissance interior he added a full-on baroque touch – the painted ceiling.

Charles was a connoisseur and admirer of Spanish and Netherlandish painting of his time and had determined to be more than just a collector.

He wanted to be a patron; but first needed to lure one of the great artists to England.  Rubens took the bait; and the Banqueting House was decorated with a Stuart mythology – the divine right of kings, illustrated by the apotheosis of James I.

It’s an amazing work.  What’s more amazing is that it shows James I exactly as a Catholic saint would be shown, being taken up to heaven.  And by waving his infant son Charles on to the throne, the figure of James is passing on that spiritual authority.

This was not a message calculated to appeal to English parliamentarians – and it was not expressed in a way that would appeal to many Protestants.  In short, this was Charles throwing down the gauntlet.

So I wonder whether the choice of the Banqueting House as the venue for Charles’s execution was deliberately, defiantly planned to show how all these values had been overthrown – to show that this was not only the death of a king, but the end of the entire political, religious and artistic programme of the Stuart monarchy?

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Photo credits: Rev Stan’s photostream.