ENGLISH HOMES OLD & NEW

English Home part V Each month of this 125th anniversary year, COUNTRY LIFE illustrates a period in the development of the English great house. In the fifth of this 12-part series, John Goodall looks at developments through an age of revolution

- John Goodall

ON the afternoon of January 30, 1649, Charles I stepped onto the executioner’s scaffold from the Banqueting House of his principal palace at Whitehall, Westminster. In the bitter cold, he wore a thick shirt, concerned that, if he shivered, it might be thought that he trembled in fear. He addressed the crowd briefly and, having laid his head on the block, signalled to the heavily disguised executioner to proceed. The King’s neck was severed at a single blow and, according to one witness of royalist sympathy, Philip Henry: ‘There was such a groan by the thousands then present as I never heard before and desire I may never hear again.’

The groan might well have been the dying gasp of the English Middle Ages, for the axe that hewed the sinews of the King also overthrew the social order he represented. The full significance of that overthrow, moreover, was physically reflected across the full extent of the kingdom. During the course of bitter fighting since 1642, the inherited architectural landscape of Britain—many of its cities, towns, castles, country houses and churches —had suffered devastating damage.

Indeed, it could be that the Banqueting House was deliberately chosen as the backdrop to Charles I’s execution to make a political point. Both by function—as a chamber for extravagant Court entertainments—and by its Classical form, this building summed up in architecture what was to the regicides the discredited life, fashions and character of the Stuart Court. If this was the case, they would not have appreciated the irony that, in an architectural sense, it also represented the future.