Banqueting House, Whitehall room at Wilton House, to display Van Dyck's portraits of the aristocratic Pembroke family. Given the attention and effort which were lavished by Charles I on the Banqueting House, his end was not without irony. On the afternoon of 30 January 1649 he stepped out of a first floor window of Banqueting House onto the scaffold which had been erected outside for the purpose of his execution. The actual window no longer exists as it was not in the main hall but just outside it in an adjacent part of the building which has now gone and, pictured from the
Whitehall and was the first Renaissance building in London. It later became a museum to the Royal United Services Institute and has been opened to the public since 1963. Oliver Cromwell moved to the street in 1647, taking up residence in Wallingford House. Two years later, Charles I was carried through Whitehall on the way to his trial at Westminster Hall. Whitehall itself was a wide street and had sufficient space for a scaffold to be erected for the King's execution at Banqueting House. He made a brief speech there before being beheaded. Cromwell died at the Palace of Whitehall in