History
The Palace of Whitehall was largely the creation of King Henry VIII, expanding an earlier mansion that had belonged to Cardinal Wolsey, originally known as York Place. The King was determined that his new palace should be the "biggest palace in Christendom", a place befitting his newly created status as the Supreme Head of the Church of England. All evidence of the disgraced Wolsey was eliminated and the building rechristened the Palace of Whitehall.
During Henry's reign, the palace had no designated banqueting house, the King preferring to banquet in a temporary structure purpose-built in the gardens. The first permanent banqueting house at Whitehall had a short life. It was built for James I but was destroyed by fire in January 1619, when workmen, clearing up after New Year's festivities, decided to incinerate the rubbish inside the building.
An immediate replacement was commissioned from the fashionable architect Inigo Jones. Jones had spent time in Italy studying the architecture evolving from the Renaissance and that of Palladio, and returned to England with what at the time were revolutionary ideas: to replace the complicated and confused style of the Jacobean English Renaissance with a simpler, classically inspired design. His new banqueting house at Whitehall was to be a prime example of this. Jones made no attempt to harmonise his design with the Tudor palace of which it was to be part.
Read more about this topic: Banqueting House, Whitehall
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