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whatsoever become of others’. Here was a Puritan opposed to an easy settlement, and the Engagers” cause, but he was not reassured by the regicide a few months later: ‘I was much troubled with the black providence of putting the King to death, my tears were not restrained at the passages about his death, the lord in mercy lay it not as sin to the charge of the kingdom, but in mercy do us good by the same’. His diary is not clear, but his tears for Charles seem to have been personal sympathy as much as settled hostility to the act: ‘the death of the king talked much of, very many men of the weaker sort of Christians in divers places passionate concerning it, but so ungroundedly, that it would make any to bleed to observe it’. Even for those anxious about the Treaty of Newport and an easy settlement the regicide did not appear an easy answer; but neither did the immediate hostility of the ungodly to the act, either. In the face of these difficulties Josselin was in the hands of God: ‘the lord has some great thing to do, fear and tremble at it oh England’.74

Some at least clearly approved. When soldiers in Yorkshire mistook a relative of Fairfax for his wife, Lady Fairfax, the vociferous dissenter at the trial, they held a pistol at her breast in her coach.75 Samuel Pepys, then fifteen and at school at St Paul’s, remembered celebrating the execution – if invited to preach on that day his text would have been ‘And the memory of the wicked shall rot’.76 This transgressive thrill was also felt by others. The identity of the executioners was not known – later rumours suggested that it might have been Cromwell and Fairfax, William Walker or Hugh Peter – suggesting fear of reprisal. But after the Restoration, when a concerted effort was made to identify them, it emerged that pretending to have been an executioner had been a promising way for one Phineas Payne to impress countrymen in London shops on the day of the execution. A number of others got in trouble for such boasting eleven years later.77

Charles was buried on 8 February at Windsor, not Westminster, and the ceremony was conducted in silence because the military governor had refused permission to use the Book of Common Prayer.78

The purged parliamentary regime and its friends in the army had been unsure about regicide, and most reactions to the execution suggest that they were not political winners as a result of having carried it out. Charles, on the other hand, clearly did secure a political victory, for the day of his death was also the day of his rebirth, or at least reinvention. During the 1630s two dominant images of Charles had been projected – the austere and distant patriarch of the Van Dyck portraits and the dispeller of discord celebrated in court masques. From the mid-1640s these were increasingly abandoned in favour of the suffering king, protecting sacred monarchy from the passions of malicious spirits. An identity was created between the sufferings of the King and of his subjects. This transformation was epitomized in the Eikon Basilike, the supposedly autobiographical account of his travails and martyrdom. Charles had probably approved the text at Newport, during his close captivity. In any case the book, advance copies of which were available on the morning of the execution, was an instant publishing success, enjoying thirty-five editions in 1649 alone. Over the following decade it was translated into Latin, French, German, Dutch and Danish. It was also set in verse and to music. It created, in the words of one historian, ‘the King Charles experience’. It was by far the greatest propaganda success following the regicide, calling forth anxious, and ineffective, rival histories. Those facing execution, as we have seen, could accept their death but deny the justice of it by appealing to the ideal of martyrdom. This Charles did with tremendous, and immediate, effect. His opponents were irritated by this success and by the partiality of the account – after his cabinet was opened at Naseby, Charles can hardly have hoped to be so read, or so believed. As history