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By Root 1328 0

The ceiling under which he passed was decorated with Rubens’s Apotheosis of James I – a giant portrait of his father and a powerful representation of Stuart aspirations for the English monarchy. There were fears that he would make a scene on the scaffold and his execution was delayed to allow the Houses to pass an ordinance forbidding the naming of a successor. In anticipation that he might not co-operate the scaffold had been prepared to allow for the King to be roped down, but they need not have worried. Charles gave, literally, the performance of his life. Dressed in an extra shirt in order to avoid shivering and thereby giving the appearance of fear, he finally delivered his answer to the charges laid against him in the high court. Predictably, given the weakness of the charges, his response was ringing and effective. Two days earlier it would have saved his neck, but not perhaps the monarchy in a form he could accept. Unusually, his executioners were disguised and, equally unusually, he did not forgive them for what they were about to do.70

The response of the crowd was horrified, and two troops of horse were set to patrol the streets in anticipation of trouble. The fatal blow was said to have been greeted with a groan: ‘such a groan as I never heard before, and desire I may never hear again’, remembered one witness who was seventeen on the day that the axe fell.71 But quite what the groan meant is not clear – regret at the cruel necessity which Cromwell was later said to bemoan? Shock at the rupture of the divine order or more prosaic fears for the future? A late outpouring of love and loyalty to the monarch? The most famous image of the execution, complete with swooning woman in the foreground, was produced in Holland two years after the fact and has to be distrusted – such images were clearly of political importance at that point, and may have been intended as political interventions. Nonetheless, shock at the execution clearly did resonate, and is easy to reconcile with the reservations of those who actually orchestrated these events.

The execution of Charles I

Royalists of course were clear what the groan had meant: ‘None of the Kings, no not one,… ever left the world with more sorrow: women miscarried, men fell into melancholy, some with consternations expired; men women and children then, and yet unborn, suffering in him and for him’. But a provincial Puritan who noted the shock at news of the execution – ‘There was such a consternation among the common people throughout the nation, that one neighbour durst scarcely speak to another when they met in the streets’ – thought it did not denote disapproval – ‘not from any abhorrence at the action, but in surprise at the rarity and infrequency of it’.72 William Simpson, drinking in the Dolphin at Bishopsgate, London, in March 1649, ‘drank a health to Charles II and confusion to the parliament’, but was denounced to a parliamentary committee a month later as ‘a malignant spirit’ who had ‘several times vented his malice against the parliament by evil speaking’. In Stratford-upon-Avon around the same time Thomas Sharpe, a parliamentary soldier with seven years” service behind him, was assaulted by William Greene, an ‘inveterate malignant who has several times raised the rabble people of the said town against the parliament soldiers’. Hearing that Sharpe had arrived in town he came out of his house ‘with a great club in his hand and unexpectedly… without any provocation’ attacked Sharpe. Opinion in the provinces was probably no less complex and divided about the regicide than about any of the other major political turning points of the decade.73

Ralph Josselin, an Essex Puritan who set much store by providence, had in August interpreted another impending harvest failure as a judgement on the divisions among the righteous: ‘the nations sins are many and sad, Lord let public ones be pardoned’, he wrote, noting as causes of the Lord’s anger ‘the war in the nation, the divisions among ourselves; our cryings out after peace on any terms to save our skins, and estates