Execution of Charles I

A Lively Representation of the Manner how his late Majesty was Beheaded upon the Scaffold, a Restoration print of Charles making his speech upon the scaffold.[9]

The execution was set to be carried out on 30 January 1649. On 28 January, the king was moved from the Palace of Whitehall to St James's Palace, likely to avoid the noise of the scaffold being set up outside the Banqueting House (at its rear side on the street of Whitehall).[10] Charles spent the day praying with the Bishop of London, William Juxon.[10]

On 29 January, Charles burnt his personal papers and ciphered correspondence.[11] He had not seen his children for 15 months, so the parliamentarians allowed him to talk to his two youngest children, Elizabeth and Henry, for one last time.[12] He instructed the 14-year-old Elizabeth to be faithful to "true Protestant religion" and to tell her mother that "his thoughts had never strayed from her".[13] He instructed the 10-year-old Henry to "not be made a king" by the Parliamentarians, being that many suspected they would install Henry as a puppet king.[14] Charles divided his jewels among the children, leaving him with only his George[15] (an enameled figure of St. George, worn as a part of the ceremonial dress of the Order of the Garter).[16] Charles spent his last night restless, only going to sleep at 2 a.m.[17]

Charles awoke early on the day of his execution. He began dressing at 5 a.m. in fine clothes, all black, and his blue Garter sash.[18] His preparation lasted until dawn.[19] He instructed the Gentleman of the Bedchamber, Thomas Herbert, on what would be done with the few possessions he had left.[20] He requested one extra shirt from Herbert, so that the crowd gathered would not see him shiver from the cold and mistake it for cowardice.[21] Before leaving, Juxon gave Charles the Blessed Sacrament, so that Charles would not faint out of hunger on the scaffold.[22] At 10 a.m., Colonel Francis Hacker instructed Charles to go to Whitehall, ready for his execution.[23] At noon, Charles drank a glass of claret wine and ate a piece of bread.[24]

A large crowd had amassed outside the Banqueting House, where the platform for Charles' execution was set up.[25] The platform was draped in black and staples had been driven into the wood for ropes to be run through if Charles needed to be restrained.[26] The execution block was so low that the king would have had to prostrate himself to place his head on the block, a submissive pose as compared to kneeling before the block.[27] The executioners of Charles were hidden behind face masks and wigs to prevent identification.[28]

Just before 2 p.m., Colonel Hacker called Charles to the scaffold.[30] Charles came through the window of the Banqueting Hall[lower-alpha 4] to the scaffold in what Herbert described as "the saddest sight England ever saw".[32][33] Charles saw the crowd and realised that the barrier of guards prevented the crowd from hearing any speech he would make, so he addressed his speech to Juxon and the regicide Matthew Thomlinson—the former of whom recorded the speech in shorthand. He declared his innocence from the crimes parliament accused him of, his faithfulness to Christianity and that Parliament had been the cause of all the wars before him. He called himself "a martyr of the people"—claiming he would be killed for their rights.[34][29]

Charles asked Juxon for his silk nightcap to put on, so that the executioner would not be troubled by his hair.[35] He turned to Juxon and declared he "would go from a corruptible crown to an incorruptible crown"[29]—claiming his perceived righteous place in Heaven.[36] Charles gave Juxon his George, sash, and cloak—uttering one cryptic word: "remember".[37] Charles laid his neck out on the block and asked the executioner to wait for his signal to behead him. A moment passed and Charles gave the signal; the executioner beheaded him in one clean blow.[38]

The executioner silently held up Charles' head to the spectators. He did not utter the customary cry of "Behold the head of a traitor!" either from inexperience or fear of identification.[39] According to the royalist Philip Henry, the crowd let out a loud groan[40]—a 17-year-old Henry writing of "such a groan [...] as I never heard before and I desire I may never hear again"[41]—though such a groan is not reported by any other contemporary account of the execution.[42] The executioner dropped the king's head into the crowd and the soldiers swarmed around it, dipping their handkerchiefs in his blood and cutting off locks of his hair.[43] The body was then put in a coffin and covered with black velvet. It was temporarily placed in the king's former 'lodging chamber' within Whitehall.[44]

Executioner of Charles I

The title page of The Confession of Richard Brandon, a 1649 pamphlet claiming to reveal Richard Brandon as Charles I's executioner.[45]

The identities of the executioner of Charles I and his assistant were never revealed to the public, with crude face masks and wigs hiding them at the execution,[46] and they were probably only known to Oliver Cromwell and a few of his colleagues.[47] The clean cut on Charles' head and the fact the executioner held up Charles' head after the execution suggests the executioner was experienced in the use of an axe,[48] though the fact the executioner did not call out "Behold the head of a traitor!" could suggest that he was inexperienced in the public execution of traitors, or that he simply feared identification from his voice.[39]

There was much speculation among the public on the identity of the executioner, with several contradictory identifications appearing in the popular press.[49] These included Richard Brandon, William Hulet, William Walker, Hugh Peter, George Joyce, John Bigg, Gregory Brandon and even—as one French report alleged—Cromwell and Fairfax themselves.[50] Though many of these proved to be unfounded rumours (the accusations of Gregory Brandon, Cromwell, and Fairfax were entirely ahistorical), some may have been accurate.[51]

Colonel John Hewson was given the task of finding an executioner and he offered 40 soldiers the position of executioner or assistant in exchange for £100 and quick promotion, though none came forward immediately.[52] It has been suggested that one of these soldiers later accepted the job, the most probable candidate among the men being Hulet. Shortly after the execution Hulet received a prominent and swift promotion and he was not seen to be present on the day of Charles' execution. His alibi consisted of the claim he was imprisoned on the day for refusing the position, though this seems to conflict with his promotion soon after.[53] William Hulet was tried as the executioner in October 1660, upon the Restoration, and he was sentenced to death for his supposed part in the execution. This sentence was soon overturned and Hulet was pardoned after some exculpatory evidence was presented to the judge.[54]

Overall, the most likely candidate for the executioner was Richard Brandon, the common hangman at the time of Charles' execution.[55] He would have been experienced, explaining the clean cut, and he is reported to have received £30 around the time of the execution.[56] He was also the executioner of other royalists before, and after, Charles' execution—including William Laud and Lord Capel.[57] Despite this, Brandon denied being the executioner throughout his life, and a contemporary letter claims that he refused a parliamentarian offer of £200 to perform the execution.[58] A tract published shortly after Brandon's death, The Confession of Richard Brandon, claims to contain a deathbed confession of Brandon to the execution of Charles, though it attracted little attention in its time and is now regarded as a forgery.[59][60]

Of the other suggested candidates: Peter had prominently advocated for Charles' death but was absent from his execution, though he was reported to have been kept at home through illness.[61] Joyce was a loyal fanatic of Cromwell and had, earlier in the war, captured the king from Holdenby House.[62] William Walker was a parliamentarian soldier who, according to local tradition, had confessed to the regicide several times.[63] Bigg was a clerk of the regicide Simon Mayne and later hermit who, according to local tradition, became a hermit shortly after the Restoration out of fear for being tried as the executioner.[64]

The Apotheosis, or, Death of the King, a 1728 engraving depicting Charles I ascending to heaven after his execution.[89]

The image of Charles' execution was central to the cult of St. Charles the Martyr, a major theme in English royalism of this period. Shortly after Charles' death, relics of Charles' execution were reported to perform miracles—with handkerchiefs of Charles' blood supposedly curing the King's Evil among peasants.[90] Many elegies and works of devotion were produced to glorify the dead Charles and his cause.[91] After the Restoration of the English monarchy in 1660, this private devotion was transformed into official worship; in 1661, the Church of England declared 30 January a solemn fast for the martyrdom of Charles and Charles occupied a saint-like status in contemporary prayer books.[92] In Charles II's reign, (as estimated by Francis Turner) around 3000 sermons were given annually to commemorate the martyrdom of Charles.[93] Much Restoration historiography of the Civil War emphasised the regicide as a grand and theatrical tragedy, depicting the last days of Charles' life in a hagiographical fashion. Few saw the executed king's character as fallible.[94] Britain's Lord Chancellor after the Restoration, Edward Hyde, for example, in his monumental History of the Rebellion (1702–1704), was one of the few sometimes critical of Charles's actions and perceived his flaws as a king,[94] but his account the year of Charles' execution ended with a passionate condemnation of:

a year of reproach and infamy above all years which had passed before it; a year of the highest dissimulation and hypocrisy, of the deepest villainy and most bloody treasons that any nation was ever cursed with or under; a year in which the memory of all transactions ought to be rased out of all records, lest, by the success of it, atheism, infidelity, and rebellion should be propagated in the world: a year of which we may say, as the historian [Tacitus] said in the time of Domitian, et sicut vetus aetas vidit quid ultimum in libertate esset, ita nos quid in servitute [and just as the former age witnessed how far freedom can go, so we have witnessed how far slavery can][3]

After the Glorious Revolution, even as royalism declined, the cult continued to enjoy support; the anniversaries of Charles' execution created an annual "general madding-day" of Royal support—as Whig Edmund Ludlow put it—up until the 18th-century.[95] Early Whig historians such as James Wellwood and Roger Coke, even as they criticised and mocked the Stuarts, were hesitant to criticise Charles and quick to condemn the execution as an abomination.[96] The memory of Charles' execution remained uncomfortable for many Whigs in Britain.[97] To delegitimise this cult, later Whigs spread the view of Charles as a tyrant, and his execution as a step towards constitutional government in Britain. In opposition, British Tory literary and political figures, including Isaac D'Israeli and Walter Scott, attempted to rejuvenate the cult with romanticised tales of Charles' execution—emphasising the same tropes of martyrdom the royalists had done before them.[98] D'Israeli narrated the execution of Charles I in his Commentaries on the Life and Reign of Charles the First (1828), in which Charles dies "having received the axe with the same collectedness of thought and died with the majesty with which he had lived".[4] For D'Israeli, "the martyrdom of Charles was a civil and political one", which "seems an expiation of the errors and infirmities of the early years of his reign."[5] However, by the Victorian era, the view of the Whig historians had prevailed in British historiography and the public consciousness.[99] The observance of 30 January as the "martyrdom" of Charles was officially removed from the services of the Church of England with the Anniversary Days Observance Act 1859, and the number of sermons given upon the death of Charles I of dwindled.[100] This Whig view was exemplified by the Victorian historian Samuel Rawson Gardiner[101] as he closed his late 19th-century History of the Great Civil War:

Whether the necessity really existed or was but the tyrant's plea is a question upon the answer to which men have long there a differed, and will probably continue to differ. All can perceive that with Charles's death the main obstacle to the establishment of a constitutional system was removed. Personal rulers might indeed reappear, and Parliament had not yet so displayed its superiority as a governing power to make Englishmen anxious to dispense with monarchy in some form or other. The monarchy, as Charles understood it, had disappeared for ever. Insecurity of tenure would make it impossible for future rulers long to set public opinion at naught, as Charles had done. The scaffold at Whitehall accomplished that which neither the eloquence of Eliot and Pym nor the Statutes and Ordinances of the Long Parliament had been capable of effecting.[102]

Charles I's life and his execution has often been a subject of popular representations in the modern day. Popular historians, such as Samuel Rawson Gardiner, Veronica Wedgwood and J.G. Muddiman, have retold the tale of Charles I's decline and fall, through his trial and to his execution, in narrative histories. Films and television have exploited the dramatic tension and shock of the execution for many purposes: from comedy as in Blackadder: The Cavalier Years, to period drama as in To Kill a King.[103] The subject of the execution, though, has suffered from a notable lack of serious scholarship throughout the modern era; perhaps partly out of what Jason Peacey, a leading figure in the scholarship of Charles I's execution, has called a discomfort at "such a thoroughly 'un-English' project as removing the head of their monarch". This stigma has slowly been lifted, as academic interest has risen into the late 20th century; eliciting much interest in 1999, upon the 350th anniversary of the trial and execution of Charles I.[104]

• Execution of Louis XVI
• Execution of the Romanov family
• King Charles the Martyr
• Fifth Monarchists
• Charles I Insulted by Cromwell's Soldiers
• Calves' Head Club

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