Europe's largest palace burned down because of drying laundry
With more than 1,500 rooms, Whitehall was once the biggest palace in Europe and home to English monarchs for almost 170 years. In January 1698 a servant hung wet linen around a charcoal brazier, and within days almost everything except Inigo Jones's Banqueting House had gone up in flames.
The site began as York Place, the London home bought by Archbishop Walter de Grey soon after 1240. Cardinal Wolsey expanded it until only Lambeth Palace could rival it as the grandest house in the capital. When Henry VIII brought Wolsey down in 1530, he took the property for himself, since his private rooms at Westminster had burned in 1512. He even seized the white stone Wolsey had gathered for a college in Ipswich, which may explain the name Whitehall, first recorded in 1532.
Henry filled it with pleasures: a bowling green, an indoor real tennis court, a cockpit and a jousting tiltyard where Horse Guards Parade now stands, spending over £30,000 in the 1540s. Two of his weddings took place there, to Anne Boleyn in 1533 and to Jane Seymour three years later, and the king breathed his last in the palace in 1547. Under James VI and I, the palace saw the first known performance of Shakespeare's The Tempest in 1611, and in 1622 Inigo Jones's Banqueting House rose, later crowned with a Rubens ceiling. Charles I was executed in front of it in 1649.
By 1650 the complex sprawled like a small town, irregular because courtiers kept extending their lodgings; one official, Stephen Fox, turned three rooms into a mansion with stables. Christopher Wren built James II a Catholic chapel in 1686 gleaming with 8,132 pieces of gold leaf. A fire in 1691 damaged older sections, and the great blaze of 4 January 1698 raged for 15 hours before flaring again the next day. Wren had the Banqueting House's south window bricked up and saved it, but works by Holbein and Bernini were lost. John Evelyn wrote that only walls and ruins remained.
Fragments survive. Henry VIII's tennis courts are built into the Cabinet Office, and Wolsey's brick-vaulted wine cellar was encased in steel and concrete and shifted sideways and deeper in 1949 to make way for the Ministry of Defence. The street still bears the palace's name and remains the heart of British government.
Source: Palace of Whitehall
