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By Root 1442 0

consternation at the regicide did not necessarily imply support for Charles Stuart’s politics or behaviour, or a commitment to the brand of royalism that he had championed. But it remains the case that Charles’s killers did not have a message with the clarity of Charles’s royal martyrdom. John Milton identified the main point, titling his response Eikonoklastes: the transformation of Charles’s life and death into an ornament of the church called forth the demand for further breaking of images. Milton’s work appears to have enjoyed far less success than its target: there seem to have been only two editions in England before 1690, in 1649 and 1650, and one French one in 1652.9 It was not just the textual image of the King that was attacked. In 1649 and 1650 Parliament issued a series of orders against Stuart images and it was these, increasingly, that were to be cleansed, rather than the churches themselves. Statues of James I and Charles I at the west end of St Paul’s were demolished and the inscriptions erased. The statue of Charles at the Royal Exchange was beheaded, its sceptre removed and the legend inscribed: ‘Death of the last royal tyrant in the first year of England’s liberty restored, 1648’. Two weeks later the remnants of the statue were removed, leaving only the inscription.10 This was a political erasure rather than a revolution in aesthetics: the people responsible for this cleansing were quite willing to buy items from the King’s art collection, and images of Cromwell during the 1650s owed a lot to the same iconography from which the Stuart monarchs had drawn.11

The erasure was only partially successful. There was a market for some of the more impressive portraits, which were sold rather than destroyed. A large bronze equestrian statue of Charles I, commissioned by the Earl of Portland before the troubles broke out, was acquired by residents of Covent Garden in 1644. It was by then inadvisable to erect a new monument and the statue was put in the churchyard of Covent Garden for the time being. Despite an instruction ‘to break the said statue in pieces to the end that nothing might remain in memory of [Charles I]’ the statue survived, buried in the ground, until the Restoration. It now stands in Whitehall, on the site of Charing Cross, close to the spot where Charles was executed. The greater success was in attempts after the Restoration to erase the memory of the republic. Cromwell, who came to embody the authority of the new regime, adopted monarchical trappings, but had to wait until 1899 for a public statue outside Parliament.12

Many of the most important legacies of the 1650s were unintended or at least unforeseen consequences of the conflicts, or means to some other end. The defence and security of the new regime were established using the machine created in civil war. Decisive campaigns against pro-Stuart forces in Ireland (1649) and Scotland (1650–51) were marked by crushing, perhaps pitiless, victories at Rathmines, Drogheda and Wexford (1649) and at Dunbar (1650). Defeat of a final Scottish incursion into England at Worcester in 1651 effectively ended the cycle of wars in the three kingdoms (see Map 5). There followed successful naval campaigns against the Dutch and in the Caribbean. Forced to defend themselves against internal and external threats, the nation’s governors created military resources unprecedented in English history, achieving military dominance within Britain and Ireland and laying the foundations of a powerful maritime empire. And although Eikon Basilike was more successful than its rebuttals, the 1650s were a lean time for active royalism – defeated in arms, and reduced to a rump of ineffectual plotters for most of the decade. In exile the heir to the throne enjoyed a thin time of it, he and his court frequently an embarrassment to their hosts. Barbados and Virginia were made to submit to the authority of the Free State, and the military means created to achieve this became also the means to regulate and direct the trade of the colonies. The foundation of the navigation system was