John Webb has hardly received his due as an architect, either from his contemporaries or from posterity. Evelyn spoke of him as “Inigo Jones’s man.” Most modern writers have regarded him as merely a pale shadow of his master. But from what has just been said about his share in the “Inigo Jones” drawings, this estimate of his position ought to be revised, for there can be no doubt that he was the actual draughtsman of the designs for the palace at Whitehall; of nearly all those in the second volume of Kent inscribed “Inigo Jones, architectus”; and of King Charles’s block at Greenwich (Fig. 45). It may be said, indeed it has been said, that even if that be so, he was only carrying out ideas which had been already devised in the rough by the older man. To which the reply is that there is no evidence of this among the drawings themselves, and that the evidence of contemporary documents, preserved among the State Papers, confirms the presumption that Webb was the designer of the Whitehall Palace and of the Greenwich block. With regard to the series of house designs in Kent’s second volume, no extraneous evidence is likely to be found, for they can only be regarded as exercises in design; to transfer these works from Jones’s account to Webb’s is to do no injustice to the former’s reputation, it is rather to enhance it. It relieves a first-rate artist from the weight of work which is not quite first-rate: and the same may be said, as already pointed out, of the Whitehall drawings. With regard to the Greenwich design, it has, with justice, been highly extolled; but this is the less surprising when it is remembered that it is a clever adaptation of an excellent Italian design to be found in the pages of Palladio.[36]