The Golden Age Restored, a masque, written by Ben Jonson and designed by Inigo Jones, is first performed on January 1, 1616, almost certainly at Whitehall Palace, the largest palace in Europe, with over fifyeen hundred rooms (at one time it is the largest building in the world).

The twelve gentleman masquers are styled "Sons of Phoebus," and take he parts of great English poets of the past—Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, Edmund Spenser, and others.

The corresponding figures in the anti-masque are twelve "Evils," ambition, pride, avarice, etc.

The speeches are "presented" by the mythological figures standard in the masque form—in this case, Pallas Athena and Astraea are the primaries.

Pallas banishes the personified Iron Age, thus allowing the return of Astraea, goddess of Justice, and the restoration of the Golden Age.

A major theme of Jonson's text is the reform of a corrupt court—relevant at the time because the Stewart Court is suffering the aftermath of the scandal over the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury.

King James's favorite, Robert Carr, 1st Earl of Somerset, is still awaiting trial for his role in the murder when the masque is presented, and his successor as royal favorite, George Villiers, is moving into prominence as Carr's replacement.

The King is so pleased with the masque that he has a repeat performance scheduled for the evening of Twelfth Night, a few days after the initial presentation.

Inigo Jones is the architect for the Queen's House, Greenwich, a royal residence built for Anne of Denmark, the queen of King James I of England, between 1614-1617 in Greenwich, a few miles downriver from London.

One of the most important buildings in British architectural history, being the first consciously classical building to have been constructed in Britain, it is Jones's first major commission after returning from his 1613-1615 grand tour of Roman, Renaissance and Palladian architecture in Italy.

Some earlier English buildings, such as Longleat, had made borrowings from the classical style; but these were restricted to small details and were not applied in a systematic way.

Nor was the form of these buildings informed by an understanding of classical precedents.

The Queen's House would have appeared revolutionary to English eyes in its day.

Jones is credited with the introduction of Palladianism with the construction of the Queen's House.

Although it diverges from the mathematical constraints of Palladio and it is likely that the immediate precedent for the H-shaped plan, straddling a road, is the Villa Medici at Poggio a Caiano by Giuliano da Sangallo.

The Palace of Whitehall had had no designated banqueting house during the reign (1509-47) of Henry VIII of England, the King preferring to banquet in a temporary structure purpose-built in the gardens.

The first permanent banqueting house at Whitehall, built for James I, had been destroyed by fire in January 1619, when workmen, clearing up after New Year's festivities, decided to incinerate the rubbish inside the building.

Its replacement, the Banqueting House, begun in 1619 and designed by Inigo Jones in a style influenced by Palladio, is completed in 1622 at a cost of fifteen thousand six hundred and eighteen pounds.

The grandest and best known survivor of the architectural genre of banqueting house, and the only remaining component of the Palace of Whitehall, the building, classical in concept, introduces a refined Italianate Renaissance style that is unparalleled in the free and picturesque Jacobean architecture of England, where Renaissance motifs are still filtered through the engravings of Flemish Mannerist designers.

The new style will transform English architecture.

Unlike the architecture of the more southern European countries, English architecture has passed through no period of evolution to classicism.

Through Jones, it has arrived suddenly and fully formed.