1. Staunch monarchists dismembered Charles’s body to keep as relics.
Being tried and executed by his own people made Charles I a royal martyr. At the scaffold in 1649, people in the front row fought their way past Parliamentarian soldiers to dip their handkerchiefs in the king’s royal blood, to keep as a sacred memento. Someone even swiped the handkerchief the king was carrying with him at the time of his death, and locks of his hair were cut off before anyone could intervene. Either by merit of some well-placed bribes or simple grave-robbing, other pieces of Charles’s clothing also surfaced, including the tunic he wore at Whitehall (above).
Most grisly of all is a vertebra from Charles’s neck, uncovered in 1813 by George IV, the Prince Regent. The coffin was found by mistake in the vaults of St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, and the Prince Regent decided that he and his friends might as well have a look inside. They examined the bones, then had the coffin re-soldered. But it transpired (rather suspiciously) that the very neck vertebra severed by the executioner’s axe had not been re-interred! George would not allow the coffin to be opened again, and presented the grim relic to his friend, Sir Henry Halford.
Where did we find this stuff? Here are our sources:
Carlton, Charles. Charles I: The Personal Monarch. London: Routledge, 1995.
Coward, Barry. The Stuart Age: England, 1603-1714. London: Longman, 1994.
Cust, Richard. The English Civil War. London: Arnold, 1997.
Gregg, Pauline. King Charles I. London: Dent, 1981.
Hutton, Ronald. Charles II: King of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Oxford: Clarendon, 1989.
Jenkins, Simon. A Short History of England. London: Profile, 2011.
Kenyon, J.P. Stuart England. London: Penguin, 1978.
Lee, Christopher. This Sceptred Isle 55BC-1901. London: BBC Books, 1997.
Russell, Conrad. The Causes of the English Civil War. Oxford: Clarendon, 1990.
