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, Cheam Nonsuch Palace, built nearby by King Henry VIII and pulled down in the 1680s. In the garden there is a medieval well which served an earlier building on the site. It is said once to have been called "The Council House," owing to its use by Queen Elizabeth I, for holding an impromptu council meeting for signing papers while on a hunting expedition from Nonsuch Palace. The oldest private school in the country, The Cheam School, was founded at Whitehall in Cheam in 1645. It is believed that the house was the residence of the merchant, lawyer and philosopher, James