The love of Charles for the fine arts was shared by many of his court. Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, caused not only the marbles which still bear his name, but many other fine relics of antiquity, to be brought to England. Inigo Jones was frequently employed by the nobility to purchase pictures and other treasures, and to see them suitably displayed in the houses they were to adorn. John Webb made it one of his claims to consideration that he had been commissioned by the “great nobility and eminent gentry” to acquire for them medals, statues, and other works of art. Meanwhile, in the country generally, and outside the circle influenced by Inigo Jones, the old habits still prevailed, and many houses were built, including such important buildings as Aston Hall, in Warwickshire, already mentioned, in which the old arrangements of plan were retained, and all the old devices for obtaining architectural effect were used--mullioned windows, steep or curved gables, large and lofty chimney-stacks, turrets and bay-windows, with a strong infusion of Italian detail in the form of cornices and pilasters; just such devices indeed as had been employed by John Smithson and his contemporaries. When this is borne in mind, when it is remembered what Smithson stands for, and that he lived until 1634; that Aston Hall, where Jacobean methods were still paramount, was not completed until 1635; it will be easier to grasp the significance of Inigo Jones’s Banqueting House at Whitehall (Fig. 22), designed in 1619 and finished in 1622, in which there is no trace of traditional English design, which in fact approaches nearer to Italian models than any building of the seventeenth century. No wonder, considering the goal at which all designers were more or less aiming, that it was quoted as a masterpiece, as the finest flower of modern architecture in England. This position it held all through the century, and indeed still holds in the opinion of many competent judges. At the time it was built it was unique, and for thirty years afterwards travellers might have searched England in vain for anything so thoroughly Italian in treatment, unless they happened to see the Queen’s House at Greenwich, or one or two other buildings by the same architect, such as Sherborne, in Gloucestershire, between Northleach and Burford, which was described in 1634 as a “stately, rich, compacted Building all of Free-stone, flat, and couer’d with Lead, with Strong Battlements about, not much unlike to that goodly, and magnificent Building the Banquetting House at Whitehall.”[6] [Illustration: FIG. 22.--The Banqueting House, Whitehall, 1619–22.] The Banqueting House must not be regarded as a step in the normal development of English design; it was something outside, the work of a specially trained and exceptionally gifted man, who achieved in 1619 what less learned and less skilful men were striving after, consciously or unconsciously, for nearly half a century afterwards.