Oliver Cromwell’s posthumous execution

On January 30, 1649, the morning of his execution, Charles I was given permission to take exercise in St. James’s Park with his toy spaniel named Rogue. He was later escorted to Whitehall, where he spent some time in prayer in Banqueting House, where a huge throng was gathered outside to witness the beheading of their king.

Charles was said to have worn an extra shirt under his pale blue silk waistcoat that morning. He didn’t want to shiver in the sharp cold lest the assembled crowd believe he was trembling from fear. He was also wearing his teardrop-shaped pearl earring embedded in a gold crown and cross, hanging from his left ear. When he stepped out of a first-floor window onto the scaffold erected in front of Banqueting House, the crowd stared in expectant silence.

“I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible Crown, where no disturbance can be,” declared the king.

Portrait of Charles I by Van Dyck

Charles turned toward a bishop and removed the George medallion from his neck. He began to pray, his eyes open, as he put his head down on the block. When he stretched out his arms, the executioner brought down the axe and severed his head with one blow.

The crowd let out a horrible groan and fell into a heavy silence. Some approached the scaffold and dipped their handkerchiefs in the king’s blood. Others took away pieces of the boards stained with blood as morbid relics. The soldiers present were ordered to scatter and disperse the crowd to avoid disturbances. Charles’s severed head was sewn back onto his body so his corpse could be put on display in a room in Whitehall and viewed by the public for several days. Nobody could claim that the king was not dead.

The king was dead. After nearly a decade of civil war, the monarchy in Britain was abolished. Oliver Cromwell was the new republic’s Lord Protector.

Deposing and executing a sacred monarch was an extraordinary event that, throughout England, was immediately felt as a tremendous shock. The principle of divine-right kingship had been decapitated. The king’s adversaries understood, however, that the republic still needed to be accepted as legitimate. To achieve that, the monarch’s image had to be thoroughly discredited and his execution received as a liberation. The king was dead, but there was still a public relations war to win. This was accomplished by a concerted propaganda campaign in newspapers and pamphlets whose purpose was to transform the image of Charles I from sacred monarch into detestable tyrant.

Charles, it turned out, had written his own pamphlet in the final days of his life. Titled Eikon Basilike, the king’s memoir was published in early February 1649, only ten days after his execution. The title in Greek translated as “royal portrait,” the word eikon signifying “icon” or “image.” It was Charles I’s final self-portrait, the image he was leaving to posterity. Part confession and part self-justification, Eikon Basilike revealed a king who admitted his failings as a man but stubbornly insisted on his sacred right as a monarch. Above all, Charles portrayed himself as a martyr. A remarkable document, Eikon Basilike was perhaps the first literary attempt by a monarch to establish a posthumous cult of royal veneration.

The execution of Charles I in Whitehall, London.

Eikon Basilike became an instant bestseller, going through at least twenty printings in one year. It is doubtful, however, that Charles I was its author. It was royalist propaganda written inside the king’s inner circle. Its impact on the English public was so powerful, however, that Cromwell’s regime grew worried about a monarchist backlash.

The poet John Milton, famous for his epic Paradise Lost, was hastily commissioned to write a response to the “King’s Book,” as Eikon Basilike was called. Milton’s rebuttal, titled Eikonoklastes (Greek for “iconoclast”), was published nine months later in October 1649. In the tract, addressed to “the seduced people of England,” Milton attempted to smash apart the image of Charles I as a martyr by portraying him as a tyrant. Milton’s Puritan counter-propaganda, by the semantics of its title, was playing out the old icon-versus-icon-smashing battles. Puritan iconoclasm was assailing the king’s icon. But the Eikonoklastes riposte backfired. The English were too shocked by the execution of their monarch to countenance the defiling of his name.

Britain’s republican experiment did not survive its Puritan leader. When Oliver Cromwell died in 1658, the republic fell into chaos. The executed monarch’s heir, Charles II, returned triumphantly from exile in the French court of Louis XIV. Following the Restoration in 1660, the new royalist parliament ordered the arrest of those responsible for Charles I’s trial and public beheading. Twelve regicides were apprehended, sentenced to death, hanged, drawn and quartered, disemboweled, decapitated, and dismembered.

Oliver Cromwell was already dead — he had died in 1658 — so his corpse was disinterred so he could be tried and sentenced posthumously. Exhuming Cromwell’s corpse was a delicate matter, for he had been buried in Westminster Abbey. His body was entombed next to the crypt of the Tudor king, Henry VII.

Statue of Oliver Cromwell in front of parliament, London.

On January 30, 1661 — the anniversary of Charles I’s execution — the English monarchy orchestrated a macabre spectacle of royal vengeance. Cromwell’s body was exhumed from Westminster Abbey and publicly dragged through the streets of London to the Tyburn gallows at present-day Marble Arch. His corpse was strung up in chains until four o’clock that afternoon, then struck down and decapitated. Cromwell’s head was impaled on a twenty-foot pole and displayed in front of Westminster Hall, the place of Charles I’s trial and death sentence. Rumors circulated for years that the body disinterred and decapitated had not been the corpse of Oliver Cromwell — and, if not, his body was still enshrined in Westminster Abbey. An even more horrible thought was that, if the mutilated corpse was not Cromwell’s, it had possibly belonged to a king of England entombed nearby in Westminster Abbey. There were even claims that Cromwell was still alive.

All these rumors were false. Cromwell’s head remained gruesomely displayed on a pike for about twenty years, until one day a storm blew it off. The grotesque skull fell into the hands of private collectors, who sold it as a macabre relic that passed through successive generations as an object of curiosity. It was finally buried, this time for good, at Sydney Sussex College, Cambridge, in 1960. In London a statue of Cromwell, erected in front of parliament in 1899, still stands.

The above is a revised extract from Matthew Fraser’s book, In Truth: A History of Lies from Ancient Rome to Modern America.