[1] Begun in 1619 and designed by Inigo Jones in a style influenced by Andrea Palladio,[2] the Banqueting House was completed in 1622 at a cost of £15,618, 27 years before Charles I was beheaded on a scaffold in front of it in January 1649.

[5] The Palace of Whitehall was the creation of Henry VIII, expanding an earlier mansion that had belonged to Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, known as York Place.

[10] The ceiling of this Elizabethan banqueting house, inherited by James I at the Union of the Crowns, was painted with clouds by Leonard Fryer in 1604.

[17] A Venetian diplomat, Orazio Busino, praised the proportions of the space, and the decoration and carving of the wooden columns (in two Classical orders) which supported viewing galleries on three sides.

[18] The new banqueting house was the venue for The Masque of Beauty in January 1608,[19] the Venetian ambassador, Zorzi Giustinian, wrote that "the apparatus and the cunning of the stage machinery was a miracle".

[27] The banqueting house was destroyed by fire in January 1619,[28] when workmen, clearing up after New Year's festivities, decided to incinerate the rubbish or oil rags inside the building.

Jones had spent time in Italy studying the architecture evolving from the Renaissance and that of Andrea Palladio, and returned to England with what were, at the time, revolutionary ideas: to replace the eclectic style of the Jacobean English Renaissance with a more pure, classical design, which made no attempt to harmonise with the Tudor palace of which it was to be part.

On the street façade, the engaged columns, of the Corinthian and Ionic orders, the former above the latter, stand atop a high, rusticated basement and divide the seven bays of windows.

Under the upper frieze, festoons and masks suggest the feasting and revelry associated with the concept of a royal banqueting hall.

It has been said that, until this time, English sculpture resembled that described by the Duchess of Malfi: "the figure cut in alabaster kneels at my husband's tomb.

"[33] Like Inigo Jones, Stone was well aware of Florentine art and introduced to England a more delicate classical form of sculpture inspired by Michelangelo's Medici tombs.

This is evident in his swags on the street façade of the Banqueting House, similar to that which adorns the plinth of his Francis Holles memorial.

It has been said that the widowed William III never cared for the area, but, had his wife, Mary II, been alive, with her appreciation of the historical significance of Whitehall, he would have insisted on the rebuilding.

On 5 January 1617, Pocahontas and Tomocomo were brought before the King at the Banqueting House, at a performance of Ben Jonson's masque The Vision of Delight.

[38] The masques began a slow decline, however, after the death in 1625 of Orlando Gibbons, who died on a trip to meet the newly married Henrietta Maria and her musicians.

While musicians may have played from this vantage point, its true purpose was to admit an audience; at the time of the Banqueting House's construction, kings still lived in "splendour and state", or publicly.

Rubens while in England as a diplomat was asked to design and paint the Banqueting House ceiling which was sketched in London but completed at his studio in Antwerp due to the scale of the job.

Inigo Jones later designed another double-cube room at Wilton House, to display van Dyck's portraits of the aristocratic Pembroke family.

On the afternoon of 30 January 1649, he stepped out of a first-floor window of Banqueting House onto the scaffold that had been erected outside for the purpose of his own execution.

The use of alternating segmental and triangular pediments, an arrangement employed by Giorgio Vasari as early as 1550 at the Medicis' Palazzo Uffizi in Florence,[45] was a particular favourite.

Provincial architects began to recreate the motifs of the Banqueting House throughout England, with varying degrees of competence.

[31] Highly controversial plans to partition the large mansion house space in the service of offices for the Institution were quickly dropped in favour of the creation of a museum which displayed personal items of famous commanders and included the skeleton of Napoleon's horse.