Whitehall attained its greatest splendor in the reign of Charles I. The
mask of Comus was one of the plays acted here before the king; but Charles
was so afraid of the pictures in the Banqueting-House being injured by the
number of wax lights which were used, that he built for the purpose a
boarded room called the "King's Masking-House," afterward destroyed by the
Parliament. The gallery toward Privy Garden was used for the king's
collection of pictures, afterward either sold or burned. The
Banqueting-House was the scene of hospitalities almost boundless.

The different accounts of Charles I.'s execution introduce us to several
names of the rooms in the old palace. We are able to follow him through
the whole of the last scenes of the 30th of January, 1648. When he
arrived, having walked from St. James's, "the King went up the stairs
leading to the Long Gallery" of Henry VIII, and so to the west side of the
palace. In the "Horn Chamber" he was given up to the officers who held the
warrant for his execution. Then he passed on to the "Cabinet Chamber,"
looking upon Privy Garden. Here, the scaffold not being ready, he prayed
and conversed with Bishop Juxon, ate some bread, and drank some claret.
Several of the Puritan clergy knocked at the door and offered to pray with
him, but he said that they had prayed against him too often for him to
wish to pray with them in his last moments. Meanwhile, in a small distant
room, Cromwell was signing the order to the executioner, and workmen were
employed in breaking a passage through the west wall of the Banqueting
House, that the warrant for the execution might be carried out which
ordained it to be held "in the open street before Whitehall."....

Almost from the time of Charles's execution Cromwell occupied rooms in the
Cockpit, where the Treasury is now, but soon after he was installed "Lord
Protector of the Commonwealth" (December 16, 1653), he took up his abode