1649: Charles I

ExecutedToday.com ^ | January 30, 2008 | Headsman

[CheshireTheCat]

On this date in 1649, the struggle between parliament and crown cost the Stuart monarch Charles I his head.

Charles‘ political clumsiness and unreconstructed authoritarianism had seen the realm whose unitary sovereignty he insisted upon blunder from disaster to disaster: into bankruptcy, military defeat, religious conflict and the English Civil War.

The assignation of cause and consequence in that war’s genesis has much exercised historians.

What is beyond dispute is that the confrontation between monarch and subject, pitting against each other political and economic epochs, theories of state and power, rates as one of history’s most captivating courtroom dramas.

Charles refused to answer the court’s charge of treason, occasioned most particularly by the king’s fomenting the Second Civil War while already a defeated prisoner of parliament following the first Civil War. He rested firmly on royal prerogatives against what some interlocutors take to be an almost desperate plea by his judges for some hint of acknowledgment that could open the door to compromise...

[Bigg Red]

Thanks for posting.

[crz]

I got two ancestors who’s names are on the death warrant.

Did not work out to well for them later on when his kids gained the throne.

[fruser1]

Can't say I'm a big Cromwell fan, but I always liked this painting.

[mass55th]

"I got two ancestors who’s names are on the death warrant."

I haven't found any ancestors involved in that yet, but I do have quite a few Cromwells, but they are back in the thirteen and fourteen hundreds. I downloaded a 3-part British series on the trial of Charles I ("Charles I: Killing a King"). I couldn't help but make comparisons between his trial, and the Democrats first impeachment of President Trump. While looking for used books on Amazon, I came across a decent one about the trial and execution of the King. It's titled: "O Horrible Murder: The Trial, Execution and Burial of King Charles I" by Robert B. Partridge.

[SES1066]

I find it instructive to see how people are portrayed by in-life portraitists.

King Charles I [age 35], of England, Scotland and Ireland, by Anthony van Dyck (1635)

-----

Oliver Cromwell [56], Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland, by Samuel Cooper (1656).

[Sirius Lee]

Oliver Cromwell lay buried and dead, Hee-haw, buried and dead, There grew an old apple-tree over his head, Hee-haw, over his head.

Somewhere in there is a Chippety Chop.

[kiltie65]

There was a Vaudevillian song when I attended the Palladium (not the fancy one in London, the more scruffy one in Edinburgh) in Britain as a child...the first line was, “One of the relics that Cromwell knocked about a bit.” Ever after, for years, if your furniture was a bit the worse for wear, or your ensemble was put together in a ratty way, that was the comment you would hear. Always good for a laugh.

[SES1066]

FYI: After “The Restoration” brought Charles II (son) to the throne, the Royalists disinterred Cromwell’s body from Westminster Abbey, on this day, 3 years after his death and 12 years following Charles I’s execution. They gave it the traitor’s treatment of being hung in chains on Tyburn, beheaded with the head stuck on a pole outside Westminster for 24 years. Thereafter it was sold and displayed until 1960 when it was buried at the antechapel at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.

However, the lesson was there and the Stuart Line of Monarchs was much more in check than Charles I. When James II, brother to Charles II, inherited the throne in 1685, he lasted 3 short years before being deposed by Parliament and popular revolt. Openly Roman Catholic, and emulating his father in imperious tendencies, he was replaced by his daughter Mary and her husband, William of Orange (Netherlands) as co-Monarchs. From there, Parliament started taking increasing power over the Monarchy.