Banqueting House, Whitehall Whitehall in which his banqueting house was to be incorporated as one wing enclosing a series of seven courtyards, visible on the monumental main façade as only a small flanking wing. These revealed the ideas behind Jones' concept of Palladianism. However, King Charles I, who commissioned the plans, never amassed the resources to execute them; his lack of funds and the tensions that eventually led to the Civil War intervened and the plans were permanently shelved. In January 1698, the Tudor Palace was razed by fire that raged for 17 hours. All that remained was the Banqueting House, Whitehall Gate,
Whitehall 1658. During the Great Plague of London in 1665, people boarded coaches at Whitehall, then at the edge of urban London, in an attempt to escape. The King and court temporarily moved to Oxford to avoid the plague, while Samuel Pepys remarked in his diary on 29 June, "By water to Whitehall, where the Court is full of waggons and people ready to go out of town. This end of town every day grows very bad with plague". By the 18th century, traffic was struggling along the narrow streets south of Holbein Gate, which led to King Street Gate being