Banqueting House

The Banqueting House is the one grand room left of Whitehall Palace, once the sprawling London home of English kings, most of which burned in 1698. Inigo Jones finished it in 1622 for James I in a severe classical style Londoners had never seen, modelled on the buildings he had studied in Italy.

Look up and you see why people still come. Nine canvases by Peter Paul Rubens, installed in 1636, fill the ceiling with the glorification of James I rising toward heaven. It is the largest Rubens still hanging where it was meant to hang, and Charles I, who commissioned it, paid a fortune for it.

That same Charles walked the length of this room on 30 January 1649, on his way to a scaffold built against its outside wall, and was beheaded before the crowd. He is the only English king put to death by his own subjects. The window his procession is thought to have passed through is still pointed out today.