When the convulsions under which the country groaned had ceased, and on the arrival of the Restoration, the nobility, though not encouraged by the reigning monarch, introduced the custom of adorning their country seats with paintings. “But the pure and elevated taste,” as Dr. Waagen expresses it, “of Charles I. had degenerated; the names of famous masters were indeed to be found, but not their works.”[166] Footnote 166: Walpole, p. 188. Architecture and sculpture were also arts which owe infinitely to the judicious patronage of Charles, assisted by Buckingham. Among the Mantua collection was a whole army “of old foreign emperors, captains, and senators,” whom Charles I., as Walpole tells us, “caused to land on his coasts, to come and do him homage, and attend him in his palace of St. James’s and Somerset House.”[167] But the King also discerned and rewarded native genius; and when he planned the noblest palace in the world at Whitehall, sent for no foreign architect, but summoned Inigo Jones to his service. Footnote 167: Walpole, p. 203. “England,” says Walpole, “adopted Holbein and Vandyck; she borrowed Rubens; she produced Inigo Jones.” Originally a joiner, Jones was brought out of obscurity, according to many accounts, by the patron who first extended a hand to assist George Villiers in his struggles in life. William Earl of Pembroke was the friend alike of the young courtier and of the son of the clothworker--the immortal Inigo. Either by the Earl of Arundel or by Pembroke--it is not certain which--Inigo was sent to Italy to learn landscape-painting; but at Rome he soon discovered the inclination and bent of his genius. It is of no use to stop the pure and flowing stream, and thus to make it turbid. Inigo “laid down his pencil, and conceived Whitehall.” Nature had not, he felt, destined him to decorate cabinets; his vocation was to build palaces. He was, however, still in danger of living in remote splendour. Christian III. enticed him to Copenhagen, whence James I. sent for him, and whence he was brought to be the Queen’s architect in Scotland. Patronized by Prince Henry, he was in despair at the death of that royal youth, and went again to Italy. It was in the interval between his two journeys to Rome that he perpetrated some buildings in bad taste; to which the appellation of “King James’s Gothic” was affixed. His first task, as Surveyor of the Works, to which office James appointed him, was to build, for twenty pounds, a scaffolding, when the Earl and Countess of Somerset were arraigned; his next, to discover, by King James’s pedantic mandate, who were the founders of Stonehenge. In 1619, he was entrusted with the direction of the Banqueting-house at Whitehall, which was finished in two years, and ordered to draw up a plan for the whole structure.