Power & Politics

A political history of Britain in the places where it happened: parliament and palace, courts and counting houses, and the streets where people pushed back.

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Charles I at Charing Cross

The king Parliament executed, put back on his horse and pointed at the place where it happened.

MonarchyIdeas & memoryFree to enter

Photo by Flickr: L'habitant / Tony, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Also in Art and Monuments & Ruins.

Hubert Le Sueur cast it in about 1633, while Charles I was still on the throne. After the civil war Parliament sold it to John Rivet, a Holborn metalsmith, with instructions to break it up; he hid it instead, produced some broken brass as proof that he had obeyed, and handed the statue over intact at the Restoration. In 1675 it was set up here - on the site of the Eleanor Cross that Parliament had pulled down in 1647 - facing down Whitehall towards the Banqueting House where the king was beheaded. In October 1660 several of the men who had signed his death warrant were hanged, drawn and quartered on this same ground, and Pepys walked over to watch one of them die. Restoration politics is rarely as literal as this: a king put back on his horse, looking at both.

Where
Trafalgar Square, WC2N 5DS
Nearest station
Charing Cross · 1 min walk

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