James I (James VI of Scotland) was born a king and, from his earliest youth, knew he potentially stood to gain a second crown in England. His Scottish rule was not characterised by major building projects, although his wife, Queen Anna of Denmark, was responsible for rebuilding her residence at Dunfermline. When he inherited the English throne in 1603 he also came into Elizabeth I’s collection of magnificent palaces, too many to properly maintain, and most which were not to the Scots king’s taste.
As a result, from 1605, James began to redraw the royal geography of England shutting down the houses he disliked, adding five new residences and bringing back into regular use a few more. The king explained that for reasons of health he would not be residing in London for much of the year but living in the ‘open air’ far from places that were ‘commodious for the ordinary residence’ of the council. He wanted to be ‘lodged, though not in state, yet sufficient to serve for the enjoying of his pleasures of hunting and hawking by the attendance of all such necessary officers and no more as are requisite for his royal person to have’.
James shunned Whitehall, the principal residence of state, except when absolutely required. The modest new town houses he commissioned at Royston, Newmarket and Thetford were his houses of necessity where he could be free from the pressures of the court. Meanwhile the much larger houses of Holdenby and Theobalds, which he purchased from courtiers, were his country houses of state for pomp and gravity.
James was intensely aware that he was the first king of Britain and wanted London to be a capital that expressed his, and the nation’s, new state. He proclaimed ‘’As it was said by the first emperor of Rome, that he had found the city of Rome of brick, and left it of marble, so We, whom God hath honoured to be the first King of Great Britain, might be able to say in some proportion, that we found our city and suburbs of London of sticks, and left them of bricks’.
James, as always precise in instructions, explained that the buildings he admired were: Sutton’s Hospital (now the Charterhouse); the New Exchange in the Strand; Hick’s Hall, the Clerkenwell law courts and the new city gate at Aldersgate. None was particularly architecturally distinguished or ambitious, but all were well-built in brick and stone and represented the standard the king felt appropriate to this new capital of Great Britain.
James’s pride in London had an underlying purpose. He wanted it to be a place which foreign ambassadors admired. As a family man with both princes and princesses to marry off he intended to host diplomats of many nations in marriage negotiations. Key to this was a building of state at Whitehall where these could take place.
This is the background to the most famous building of the reign, Inigo Jones’s Banqueting House. It was the expression in stone of James’s ambitions as King of Great Britain. Inside on a tablet was inscribed ‘I[acobus] R[ex] M[agna] B[ritannia] a shortened version of the originally intended plaque that was to explain the purpose of the building as being for ‘festive occasions, for formal spectacles, and for the ceremonials of the British court’, in short a great hall of state. Because it had this specific stately purpose its style was not imitated elsewhere during the king’s lifetime.
While James had a strong conceptual grasp of how architecture could enhance his rule, he was not a great architectural patron. It was his queen, Anna of Denmark, was the greatest of all early Stuart royal builders. Her reconstruction of Somerset House (re-named Denmark House) and the start of her new pavilion at Greenwich (The Queen’s House) were major commissions which eclipsed anything done by James I or Charles I.