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
Bust of King Charles I (Bernini) no longer exists; it was most likely destroyed in the Palace of Whitehall fire of 1698. Numerous copies of the image exist in other forms (e.g. engravings, bronze sculptures). For a while in 19th and early 20th centuries, there was a belief in England and elsewhere that Bernini had also created a bust of Oliver Cromwell, the victor over Charles I in the English Civil War. However, the attribution was refuted in 1922. Bust of King Charles I (Bernini) The Bust of Charles I was a sculptural bust produced by the Italian artist Gianlorenzo Bernini which according to one historian,