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
3rd Parliament of King Charles I then turned its attention to Tonnage and Poundage, two onerous taxes on which the King was dependent and which Parliament considered illegal. The King brought the session to a rapid close. Over the summer the fleet to relieve La Rochelle was assembled, but the commander Buckingham was murdered by a disgruntled army officer. The fleet nevertheless sailed under a new commander but achieved little success. When Parliament reconvened in January 1629 it returned to the issue of Tonnage and Poundage, claiming that its continued imposition contradicted the Petition of Right. Matters got so heated that Charles dissolved Parliament by proclamation