beheading king charles--1/28/25

28 Jan 2025

beheading king charles--1/28/25

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Today's selection -- from The Blazing World by Jonathan Healey. On January 30, 1649, after saying goodbye to his children, King Charles I was beheaded:

“There then followed days of silence. Rumours passed around. Would Charles Stuart be saved? Perhaps by an insurrection, or perhaps by Fairfax. At St James's, the radical army chaplain Hugh Peter preached brimstone to the soldiers. At Whitehall, Charles was ministered to by William Juxon, the loyal former Bishop of London. On the 29th, he was allowed to see those two of his children still in England: Princess Elizabeth, the elder of the two, just thirteen years old, and Henry, Duke of Gloucester, five years younger. 'Sweetheart you will forget this,' he reassured the inconsolable Elizabeth. 'I shall never forget it whilst I live,' she replied. To little Henry, Charles warned: 'they will cut off my head, and perhaps make thee a king: but mark what I say you must not be a king so long as your brothers Charles and James do live: for they will cut off your brothers' heads (when they catch them) and cut off thy head too, at last; and therefore I charge you, do not be made a king by them.' 'I will be torn in pieces first,' the eight-year-old replied.

“From morning the next day, a huddled crowd gathered outside the grand Banqueting House at Whitehall, where a scaffold had been hastily thrown up, draped in black and surrounded by troops and their horses.

“But there was a delay. Why? Nobody in the crowd knew.

“At last, at around two in the afternoon, there was movement. As the crowd watched, Charles Stuart appeared, accompanied by Juxon. After a short speech, and a few formalities, he lay his head down on the low block in front of him, gave a signal and the executioner cut off his head. As the axe fell, a terrible groan came forth from the assembled crowd.

“Within half an hour, the troops had cleared them all away.

Contemporary German print of Charles I's beheading outside the Banqueting House, Whitehall

“A week later, the Commons abolished the monarchy. The 'office of a king,' they declared, 'is unnecessary, burdensome, and dangerous to the liberty, safety, and public interest of the people of this nation; and therefore ought to be abolished'. The reason it took a week to abolish the monarchy was that the Rump was busy with another matter — what to do with the House of Lords. In the end, they plumped for abolition of this, too: declaring it 'useless and dangerous', although not before a debate in which Henry Marten quipped that it was 'useless, but not dangerous'.

“News of the king's execution filtered out to a stunned nation. The first Sunday after the execution, the ultra-Royalist former Bishop of Rochester gave a sermon likening the execution of King Charles to the killing of Jesus. He later published it, with its anti-Semitism blazoned in the title, as The Devilish Conspiracy, Hellish Treason, Heathenish Condemnation, and Damnable Murder, Committed, and Executed by the Jews against the Anointed of their Lords, Christ their King. When Oliver Cromwell's sister, Catherine Whitstone, found out, she was utterly shocked. 'I was very troubled at that stroke which took the head of this poor kingdom from us,' she wrote to a cousin, 'and truly had I been able to have purchased his life, I am confident I could with all willingness have laid down mine.' Some Royalists simply preferred not to talk about it: the regicide was, said the Countess of Derby, a 'fatal stroke which I cannot name without horror'.

“Was this what the wars had been fought for? Virtually no one, in 1642, let alone 1640, had envisaged the execution of the king and the abolition of the kingly office. To get this far, events had taken on a life of their own, driven by political accidents and unfathomable decisions. Charles himself must carry much of the blame: he had been a stuffy authoritarian, but never ruthless enough to be a successful tyrant. He had emerged as a competent — even charismatic — leader, though we must take care to separate the charisma of the man from that of his office. But he was only ever successful at inspiring those who already agreed with him, and his pathological inability to understand his opponents' position would cost him dear. His great opportunity had been in 1647, when he could have accepted Ireton's Heads, and marched into London, garlanded by a grateful New Model Army. Parliament would surely have fallen in line, and a new, tolerant Church could have been created, with room for both Independent prayer meetings and the old Book of Common Prayer. It would have left a balanced constitution with regular parliaments. But instead Charles tried to hold out for a better deal, costing him his own head and — much more importantly — the blood of countless thousands of innocent people.”