Whitehall

“ To-day Whitehall had been transformed; it would be the turn of Regent Street to-morrow. And month by month the roads smelt more strongly of petrol, and were more difficult to cross, and human beings heard each other speak with greater difficulty, breathed less of the air, and saw less of the sky. Nature withdrew; the leaves were falling by midsummer; the sun shone through dirt with an admired obscurity.
To speak against London is no longer fashionable. ”

“ In those silent, narrow City streets not an Englishman was to be seen. Every one save the Lord Mayor and his official attendants had fled.
The Government Offices in Whitehall were all in the hands of the enemy. In the Foreign Office, the India Office, the War Office, the Colonial Office, the Admiralty, and other minor offices were German guards. Sentries stood at the shattered door of the famous No. 10, Downing Street, and all up Whitehall was lined with infantry. ”

“ Why Evelyn visited Whitehall that particular Sunday we do not know. His description of the scene at Whitehall the last Sunday but one of the life of Charles II. is not new to any one, but must come in here: “I can never forget,” he says, “the inexpressible luxury and profaneness, gaming and all dissoluteness, and as it were total forgetfulness of God (it being Sunday evening) which this day [Pg 71] se’nnight I was witness of, the King sitting and toying with his concubines, Portsmouth, Cleveland, and Mazarine, etc. ”

“ Over two years passed, and the Schlegel household continued to lead its life of cultured but not ignoble ease, still swimming gracefully on the grey tides of London. Concerts and plays swept past them, money had been spent and renewed, reputations won and lost, and the city herself, emblematic of their lives, rose and fell in a continual flux, while her shallows washed more widely against the hills of Surrey and over the fields of Hertfordshire. This famous building had arisen, that was doomed. Today Whitehall had been transformed: it would be the turn of Regent Street tomorrow. ”

“ Beyond, the white beach glistens in the sun. And to the left, the road curves on past farmhouses and “cottages of gentility.” Away on the valley slope, the slow sails of a windmill revolve and flash, casting a flying shadow over the grass. A mile farther, and the road, making a turn, is joined to the right by what seems to be a farm-lane shut off by gates. This is the entrance to Whitehall. The house can be dimly made out from the road—a low, square building with a lean-to and a long, steep pitch of roof, fronting on a small garden overgrown with fruit-trees. ”

“ I can't keep up with them, Peter Walsh thought, as they marched up Whitehall, and sure enough, on they marched, past him, past every one, in their steady way, as if one will worked legs and arms uniformly, and life, with its varieties, its irreticences, had been laid under a pavement of monuments and wreaths and drugged into a stiff yet staring corpse by discipline. ”

“ To us it would appear just darkness visible; and vast tracts of population were destitute of even this feeble glimmer. Whitefriars still continued the haunt of thieves, bullies, desperate debtors, and abandoned women, who rushed out and defended themselves from any visitations of duns or constables. The neighbourhood of Whitehall itself was little better, from the resort of the bully-mob of those who called themselves gentlemen. These young men, often belonging to good families, or the sons of wealthy citizens, assembled for noise and mischief in theatres and in the streets. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Whether it be happy or not, or enviable by the least peasant who can pay his way and sleep heartily, will be left to the judgment of the reader.
The site of Whitehall was originally occupied by a mansion built by Hubert de Burgh, Earl of Kent, and Chief Justice of England in the reign of Henry the Third, one of the ancestors of the present Marquess of Clanricarde. ”

“ Nothing but the absence of the five members and the calm dignity of the Commons had prevented the king's outrage from ending in bloodshed. "It was believed," says Whitelock, who was present at the scene, "that if the king had found them there, and called in his guards to have seized them, the members of the House would have endeavoured the defence of them, which might have proved a very unhappy and sad business." Five hundred gentlemen of the best blood in England would hardly have stood tamely by while the bravoes of Whitehall laid hands on their leaders in the midst of the Parliament. ”

“ To them the road to power by means of one who appeared to have as little ambition as she had experience, was infinitely more attractive than by means of such a woman as my Lady Castlemaine, whose terms staggered even the Cabal, and who was quite capable of bringing every one of them to the scaffold. The Duke of Buckingham, whose genius was as universal as it was the subtlest of the unprincipled gang of self-seekers at Whitehall, lost no time in cultivating the new favourite. ”

“ James’s to Whitehall as a residence during his brief and stormy reign. All his children were born there, and there is an account of his Queen, Mary of Modena, hastening from Whitehall just before the birth of the prince who became subsequently the Old Pretender. [Pg 72]
William and Mary were hardly settled at Whitehall when they began to look about for a house which would suit the King’s health. At Whitehall he was constantly ill. The low, foggy, damp situation was not calculated for a man who suffered daily from asthma and often from ague or low fever. ”

“ The court of the merry monarch and that of the queen mother being now settled in town, a period of vast brilliancy ensued, during which great festivity and much scandal obtained, by reason of intrigues in which the king and his friends indulged. Whitehall, the scene of so much gaiety and gallantry, was a palace by no means befitting the luxurious Charles. ”

“ This was originally the residence of the Archbishops of York, and here lived Cardinal Wolsey in great splendor until his downfall, when Henry VIII. took Whitehall for his palace and made large additions to the buildings, entering it as a residence with his queen, Anne Boleyn. The sovereigns of England lived in Whitehall for nearly two centuries, and in Charles I.'s reign it contained the finest picture-gallery in the kingdom. This unhappy king was beheaded in front of the Banqueting [Pg 197] House, being led to the scaffold out of one of the windows. ”

“ Very little of the history of the Great Rebellion concerns Whitehall, at least until Oliver Cromwell assumes possession, and apes royalty in the old halls; but in Rymer’s Fœdera we may observe that, from the beginning of the reign of James I., “Whitehall” gradually and more and more becomes the official designation of the palace. Charles naturally was not there during a long term of years. He was marching and counter-marching in the north, and so mismanaging all his affairs successively that, regarded as a game, the Civil War consisted of a series of alternate military and diplomatic defeats. ”

“ The land between was low and marshy, and even at the present day, when there has been so much levelling up, the statue of Charles I. is upon ground ten feet higher than Parliament Street. If, standing on the future site of Whitehall we looked to the westward, we saw nothing but a vast tract of low green meadow-land. If we looked to the south, we might have seen the new buildings of Westminster Abbey, unless when the Danes had been on the warpath. If we looked to the eastward, we found that the Thames washed up close to our feet. ”

“ This fact—for it is not merely an opinion—seems to answer a question that is often asked: Did the coolness of Charles on that last day at Westminster Hall, and again on the scaffold at Whitehall, betray any feeling, any certainty that he would be respited or rescued? A moment’s [Pg 56] thought dispels the idea. ”

“ On turning from the political history of London to look at the manners and morals of society during the latter part of the seventeenth century, our attention is immediately arrested by the scenes at Whitehall during the reign of Charles II. There the monarch fixed his court, gathering around him some of the most profligate persons of the age, and freely indulging in the most criminal pleasures. ”

“ Whitehall covers a large area, but it is only a fine banqueting hall and a labyrinth of lodgings, without suite or stateliness. The pictures in the late King’s cabinet are said to be the finest in the world, but they are a kind of pieces for which I care very little—Flemish and Dutch chiefly—with a series of cartoons by Raphael, which connoisseurs affect to admire, but which, did they belong to me, I would gladly exchange for a set of Mortlake tapestries. ”

“ Whitehall had been, during thirty years, a seminary of every public and private vice, and swarmed with low-minded, double-dealing, self-seeking politicians. The politicians now acted as it was natural that men profoundly immoral should act at a crisis of which none could predict the issue. ”

“ Last year, before we began our walk from London to Lancashire, we visited Whitehall and saw the window in the Banqueting-hall through which, on January 30th, 1649, about two months before Pontefract Castle surrendered, he passed on his way to the scaffold outside. ”

“ Westward from Whitehall, just after one had left behind the streets and lanes of the fashionable westerly portion of London town, and emerged into a fair region of smiling meadows, blossoming fruit-trees, orchards, and woodlands, were in those days to be found many pleasant and stately houses, varying in size and splendour according to the condition of the owner, but fair mansions for the most part, and inhabited by persons of quality, many of whom held posts at Court, and found this proximity to Whitehall a matter of no small convenience. ”

“ He hath the vices of both his father and his grandfather. He will lie and deceive like Charles his father, and he will turn his Court into a pigsty, like his grandfather James. In six months from now Whitehall will be filled with swashbucklers and wine-bibbers. Bad men and worse women will rule the country. God only knows what will become of the Puritans, in spite of his fair promises. ”

“ A country newspaper rarely makes its mark in the journalistic world, and especially a paper printed in such an obscure village as is Whitehall, New York. The Whitehall Times, however, is one of the few exceptions, and, although a country newspaper, has been quoted in every paper of any note in the land.
William Albert Wilkins, the editor and proprietor of the Times, and the one man who has made that journal famous, was born on the 26th day of March, 1840, in the village of Cherry Valley, Otsego county, New York. ”

“ The hall, a fine specimen of Palladian architecture, 111 feet in length and 551⁄2 feet in breadth and height, has ceiling paintings by Rubens representing the apotheosis of James I. and scenes from the career of Charles I. Whitehall was the scene of Wolsey's disgrace, Henry VIII.'s death, the execution of Charles I., who was led to the scaffold from the banqueting hall, and the deaths of Cromwell and Charles II. The hall was converted by George I. into a royal chapel. The street leading from Trafalgar Square to Westminster, in which the palace stood, is known as Whitehall. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Servants on the other hand or apprentices wore the hair closely cropped to the head. The crowds who flocked to Westminster were chiefly made up of London apprentices; and their opponents taunted them as "Roundheads." They replied by branding the courtiers about Whitehall as soldiers of fortune or "Cavaliers." The gentlemen who gathered round the king in the coming struggle were as far from being military adventurers as the gentlemen who fought for the Parliament were from being London apprentices; but the words soon passed into nicknames for the whole mass of royalists and patriots. ”

“ Hitherto the general officers had been divided between Whitehall and Wallingford House, the residences of Richard and of Fleetwood. At Whitehall, the Lord Falconberg, brother-in-law to the protector, Charles Howard, whom Oliver had created a viscount, [1] Ingoldsby, Whalley, Goffe, and a few others, formed a military council for the purpose of maintaining the ascendancy of Richard in the army. ”

“ Nevertheless, and in spite of the blamelessness of her conduct, the satisfaction which had greeted the marriage was on the wane. A hard task would have awaited Queen or courtier who should have attempted to minister to the contentment of all the rival parties striving for predominance in the State and at Court, and to be adjudged the friend of the one was practically equivalent to a pledge of distrust from the other. Whitehall, like the country at large, was divided against itself by theological strife ”