Behind the Palace Doors (15 page)

Confronting what historian Michael B. Young described as
a “makeshift court … assembled to engineer his execution,” Charles I managed to shine. He refused to legitimize the charade by offering a defense. Instead, he challenged the court’s legitimacy. “I would know by what power I am called hither,” the king said in refusing to answer the charges against him, as had been demanded.

For once the king was taking a worthy stand. He knew he was doomed, but by emphasizing the illegality of the proceedings against him, he made a much broader appeal to the rule of law. If a small, unrepresentative group of men could grab power and subvert all legal authority to try him, then ultimately no one was safe. Or, as Charles said it, “if power without law may make laws, may alter the fundamental laws of the Kingdom, I do not know what subject he is in England, that can be sure of his life, or anything that he calls his own.”

The king concluded:

Charles’s eloquent arguments flustered the commission but did not deter it from its mission to kill him. Less than a week after convening, the court pronounced Charles guilty and condemned him to death. He tried to make a statement after the sentence was delivered but was silenced. “I am not suffered for to speak,” he said as he was led away. “Expect what justice other people will have.”

Some of the soldiers present in the hall spat on the king as he passed; others blew tobacco smoke in his face. “Execution!” they cried. “Justice! Execution!” Three days later they would be satisfied.

On the eve of his death, Charles met with two of his younger children, Elizabeth and Henry, who were essentially prisoners of Parliament.
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The king sat the young ones on his lap and, in a highly emotional scene, gently counseled them. “You are not to grieve or torment yourself for me,” he told his
thirteen-year-old daughter, “for it will be a glorious death I shall die, for it is for the laws and liberties of this land. I have forgiven all my enemies and I hope God will forgive them also. And you and all the rest of your brothers and sisters must forgive them. Tell your mother that my thoughts have never strayed from her and my love for her will be the same to the last.”

Turning to his eight-year-old son, Charles explained what was going to happen the next day and quietly admonished the boy not to become a pawn of the forces aligned against the royal family. “They are going to cut off your father’s head,” he told Henry. “Mark, child, what I say, they will cut off my head and perhaps make you a king. But you must never be king while your brothers Charles and James are alive. For they will cut off your brothers’ heads, when they catch them; and cut off your head too, at the last. And so I charge you: You must never let them make you King.”

“I will be torn to pieces first,” young Henry replied, trying hard to be brave.

Satisfied, Charles gave what little treasure he had left to the tearful children, kissed and blessed them, then finally bid them farewell.

The next day, the appointed day, was bitterly cold. The king asked for an extra shirt to wear, loath to be seen shivering on the scaffold and have that mistaken for fear. “I would have no such imputation,” he said. “Death is not terrible to me; I bless my God I am prepared.” A knock on the door signaled that it was time to leave St. James’s Palace, where Charles had been confined during his final days, and walk the short distance to the execution site at Whitehall Palace.

The scaffold had been erected just outside the palace’s Banqueting House, a superb edifice designed by Inigo Jones (and all that remains of the original palace). Walking through that grand structure, Charles passed under the ornate ceiling paintings
by Rubens glorifying the Stuart dynasty. How poignant the irony, then, that the king who commissioned this vibrant celebration of monarchy, and long held court beneath it, was about to actually lay his head upon a chopping block just outside.

The day had become brilliantly sunny when Charles stepped through a window of the Banqueting House and onto the black-draped scaffold. There, in the center, he saw the block, with chains nearby to bind him in the event that he struggled and refused to submit to the axe. A cheap coffin was off to one side, ready to receive his remains. The king remained composed, but the low height of the block seemed to disconcert him. “It can be no higher, sir,” one of the two hooded executioners said without explanation.

Charles was permitted to speak, but the large crowd gathered to witness the grisly spectacle was kept so far back from the scaffold that he realized he would not be heard. He opted instead to address the people directly around him. Removing a small piece of paper from his pocket that contained some brief notes, he remarked that he would have been happy to remain silent, “but I think it is my duty, to God first, and to my country, to clear myself both as an honest man, a good King, and a good Christian.”

He went on to insist that he was not responsible for the civil wars that had ravished the country, and that the sentence he received was illegal. Nevertheless, he acknowledged that the injustice of his fate was proper punishment from God for having shamefully submitted earlier in his reign to Parliament’s demand for the head of his loyal servant Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Stafford.
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“God forbid that I should be so ill a Christian as not to say God’s judgments are just upon me,” the king said. “Many times He does pay justice by an unjust sentence. That is ordinary.
I will only say that an unjust sentence that I suffered for to take effect is punished now by an unjust sentence upon me.”

Though he professed to forgive his enemies, Charles still emphasized what he saw as their dangerous lawlessness and defended his own view of the proper order. “For the people, truly I desire their liberty and freedom as much as anybody whatsoever,” he maintained. “But I must tell you their liberty and freedom consists in having government—those laws by which their life and their goods may be most their own.” And that government, he reasserted, was maintained by the monarch, as it had been for centuries.

“Sirs,” he continued, “it is for this that I am now come here. If I would have given way to an arbitrary power, for to have all laws changed according to the power of the sword, I need not have come here. And therefore I tell you—and I pray God it not be laid to your charge—that I am a martyr of the people.”

Having concluded his speech with an affirmation of his Christian principles, Charles prepared for death. “I go from a corruptible to an uncorruptible crown,” he said to his confessor, “where no disturbance can be, no disturbance in the world.” The king then proceeded to distribute the last of his possessions, after which he stood silently for a moment in prayer. Finally he removed his cloak, lowered himself down to the block, and, after a few seconds, stretched out his arms as a signal to the headsman. In a flash his head was severed and held up to the crowd. With that, one witness reported, the gathered people gave “such a groan as I have never heard before, and I desire I may never hear again.”

The execution of King Charles I in 1649 was one of the most momentous events in British history. The monarchy was abolished and replaced by a republic, led by Oliver Cromwell. The Commonwealth, as the new regime came to be called, lasted until 1660. The postmortem ordeal of Charles I endured for much longer
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Even Charles I’s most inveterate enemies were forced to admit that he died with admirable grace. But with the king’s last breath came the end of anything that even remotely resembled dignity. His corpse was subjected to a ghastly series of ordeals, perpetrated over two centuries, that made the trial and execution preceding them seem almost sublime by comparison.

Right after raising the king’s head to the moaning crowd that cold January day in 1649, the executioner slammed it down on the scaffold, bruising the face. Then, one witness wrote, “his hair was cut off. Soldiers dipped their swords in his blood. Base language upon his dead body.” For a price, onlookers were invited to take ghoulish souvenirs of the execution. “His hair and blood were sold by parcels,” reported Sir Roger Manley. “Their hands and sticks were tinged with his blood
and the block, now cut into chips, as also the sand, sprinkled with his sacred gore, were exposed for sale.”

The king’s head and body were reunited in the cheap coffin that had been waiting on the scaffold to receive them, after which soldiers allowed paying members of the public to view the corpse. It was apparently a lucrative enough enterprise to prompt one soldier to remark, “I wish we had two or three more Majesties to behead, if we could but make such use of them.”

When the unseemly show on the scaffold was at last concluded, Charles’s body was brought back into the Banqueting House, through the same window the king had stepped out of to meet his doom. For several days the corpse was exposed to further view at Whitehall, during which time Oliver Cromwell, the leader of the revolution against the king, is said to have secretly visited it one night. “Cruel necessity!” he reportedly muttered before quietly slipping away.

Some believed they were looking upon the remains of a saint. Sir Purback Temple wrote of a companion who, “in a scoffing manner took me by the hand and said, ‘If thou thinkest there is any sanctity or holiness in [the corpse] look here,’ where I saw the head of the blessed martyr’d King, lie in a coffin with his body, which smiled as perfectly as if it had been alive.”

On February 1 the body was finally embalmed. The surgeon retained for the task, Thomas Trapham, reattached the head with some thread and, with a true professional’s respect for the dead, was later heard to remark that he had “sewed on the head of a goose.” After being disemboweled and cleaned, the corpse was sealed in its coffin and transported to St. James’s Palace, there to await burial instructions from Parliament.

Westminster Abbey—the resting place of many of Charles’s relatives, including his parents—was rejected because it was deemed too close to Parliament’s front door and apt to become an unwelcome shrine for Royalist pilgrims. They settled instead
on St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle—far enough away and fortified to keep the late king’s supporters at bay.

The body, it was decreed, “should be privately carried to Windsor without pomp or noise.” And so it was. The exact location for burial within the chapel was left unspecified, however. To find an available vault, those charged with the interment were forced to tap around the floor of St. George’s with sticks until they found a hollow sound. They stumbled upon the burial chamber of King Henry VIII and his third wife, Jane Seymour, which, curiously, had been left unmarked. There Charles I would rest in anonymity next to his mighty predecessor (a bone of whose one participant in Charles’s burial secretly snatched away as a souvenir). The king’s sleep was not destined to be restful.

Charles II always intended to properly memorialize his father after being restored to the throne in 1660. “He spoke of it often,” wrote the king’s chief minister, Lord Clarendon, “as if it were deferred till some circumstances and ceremonies in the doing it might be adjusted.” Charles even had the famed architect Sir Christopher Wren design a magnificent mausoleum. In the end, though, other priorities always interfered and Charles I’s grave remained unmarked. It was only briefly disturbed in 1696 when one of Queen Anne’s many stillborn children was added to the vault, the tiny coffin resting right on top of the child’s great-grandfather.