That elegant white stone building on Whitehall is the Banqueting House. It looks like one nice building on a street of nice buildings. It is actually a survivor — the last standing piece of the biggest palace in Europe. Whitehall Palace once had more than fifteen hundred rooms. It sprawled across this entire area, bigger than Versailles for a while, the main home of English kings for two hundred years. And it's gone. All of it. Because in sixteen ninety-eight, a Dutch maidservant was drying some linen over a charcoal burner, the linen caught, and the fire burned for fifteen hours and took the whole palace down. Fifteen hundred rooms. One load of laundry. The Banqueting House survived only because someone bricked up a window to block the flames.
But the building matters for what happened just outside it. On a freezing January morning in sixteen forty-nine, they built a scaffold right out front, and they executed the King of England. Charles the First. His own Parliament had put him on
trial and sentenced him to death, which had simply never happened before — a country deciding, legally, to kill its own king.
And Charles knew exactly how the moment would look. It was bitterly cold, and he was worried he'd shiver. So he asked for two shirts. Two. His reasoning is recorded, and it will stay with you. He said the cold "may make me shake, which some observers may imagine proceeds f
