The whole district containing all that collection of streets and
houses, which extends from Scotland Yard to Parliament Street, and
from the river side, with its wharfs, to St. James’s Park, and which
is still known by the general appellation of Whitehall, was formerly
occupied by a sumptuous palace and its appurtenances, the only relics
of which, perhaps the noblest specimen, is the beautiful edifice built
by Inigo Jones, and retaining its old name of the Banqueting-House.
As this palace was the abode of a series of English sovereigns,
beginning with Henry the Eighth, who took it from Wolsey, and
terminating with James the Second, on whose downfall it was destroyed
by fire, we are now in the very thick of the air of royalty.
[Illustration: WHITEHALL PALACE, ENGLAND.]
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. De Burgh bequeathed it to the brotherhood of the Black
Friars, near “Oldborne,” in whose church he was buried; the Brotherhood
sold it to Walter Gray, Archbishop of York, who left it to his
successors in that see as the archiepiscopal residence, which procured
it the name of York Place; and under that name, two centuries and a
half afterwards, it became celebrated for the pomp and splendour of the
“full-blown” priest, Wolsey, the magnificent butcher’s son. Wolsey, on
highly probable evidence, is thought to have so improved and enlarged
the mansion of his predecessors, as to have in a manner rebuilt it, and
given it its first royalty of aspect: but, as we shall see by and by,
it was not called Whitehall, nor occupied anything like the space it
did afterwards, till its seizure by the Cardinal’s master.
On the Cardinal’s downfall, Henry seized his house and goods, and
converted York Place into a royal residence, under the title of
Westminster Place, then, for the first time, called also Whitehall.
“It is not impossible,” says Mr. Brayley (Londiniana Vol. II., p. 27),
“that the Whitehall, properly so called, was erected by Wolsey, and
obtained its name from the newness and freshness of its appearance,
when compared with the ancient buildings of York Place. Shakespeare in
his play of _King Henry VIII._, makes one of the interlocutors
say, in describing the coronation of Queen Anne Boleyn:--
‘So she parted,
And with the same full state paced back again
To York Place, where the feast is held.’