2. When Charles’s son took the throne in 1660, he took bloody revenge on his father’s enemies.
Oliver Cromwell was succeeded by his ineffectual son, Richard, in 1658, but he lasted only 8 months before the Rump Parliament was reassembled to end the Lord Protectorate. Realising that the country needed a figurehead of authority, and having no other suitable candidate, it was decided that Charles’s son, also called Charles, should be retrieved from exile and crowned king. He came back to great rejoicing in 1660. Charles II was a decadent and flamboyant man, and he set about restoring all the fun (and wild royal expenditure) to England. Under his rule, the English theatre blossomed again.
Though he was something of a playboy, Charles II hadn’t forgotten what happened to his father. He went to the extreme measure of having Oliver Cromwell, Henry Ireton (general of the Parliamentarian army and Cromwell’s son-in-law), and John Bradshaw (President of the High Court of Justice during Charles I’s trial), exhumed, tried for treason and regicide (king-killing), and hanged. This took place on the 12th anniversary of the execution of Charles I, and the three bodies were then beheaded and flung in an unmarked pit. Their heads were left on spikes in Westminster Hall as a warning to MPs. Touché.
