During the reign of Queen Elizabeth, Whitehall was famous for its magnificent festivities, tournaments, and receptions of distinguished foreign princes. Especially was this the case in 1581, when the French commissioners came to urge the Queen's marriage with the Duke of Anjou. Here the Queen's corpse lay in state before the interment in March, 1603. James I. likewise entertained right royally at Whitehall, and here the Princess Elizabeth was married to the Elector Palatine on February 14, 1613. King James also employed that distinguished architect Inigo Jones to build the beautiful Banqueting House, which is all that now remains of Whitehall Palace, and is one of the finest architectural fragments in London. The proportions are most elegant, and the style perfect. Used as a chapel till 1890, it is now the United Service Museum, while the great painter Rubens decorated the ceiling for Charles I. in 1635. The whole plan of Inigo Jones remained unfinished, but Charles I. lived in regal splendour in the palace, entertaining on the most liberal scale, and forming the famous collection of pictures dispersed by the Parliament. Here it was that the masque of Comus was acted before the King, and other masques from time to time. After Charles's martyrdom, Oliver Cromwell came to live at Whitehall, and died there September 3, 1658. On his restoration, in May, 1660, King Charles II. returned to Whitehall, and kept his court there in great splendour. Balls rather than masques were now the fashion, and Pepys and Evelyn have preserved full descriptions of these elegant and luxurious festivities, and all the gaiety, frivolity, and dissoluteness connected with them, and the manner of life at Charles's court. The King died in the palace on February 6, 1685, and was succeeded by his austere brother James, who, during his brief reign, set up a Roman Catholic chapel within the precincts of the royal habitation, from which he fled to France in 1688. [Illustration: THE PALACE OF WHITEHALL.] King William III. preferred other places of residence, and two fires--one in 1691, the other in 1698--destroyed the greater part of Whitehall, which was never rebuilt. _Buckingham_ Palace is now the principal residence in London of His Majesty King Edward VII. Though a fine pile of building it is hardly worthy of its position as the town residence of the mighty Sovereign of the greatest Empire of the world, situated in the largest city on the face of the globe.