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The best of political London: a history of Britain in the places where it happened, from parliament and palace to courts and counting houses and the streets where people pushed back.
A lead head of the beheaded king on a church wall, put there in 1956 to stare across the road at Cromwell.
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Between 1642 and 1651 England fought a civil war over who ruled it. Charles I held that his authority came from God and had governed for eleven years without calling Parliament at all; Parliament disagreed. Parliament won, tried the king and beheaded him outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall in January 1649, and for eleven years England had no monarchy.
This is the king's head in lead, above the east end of St Margaret's - the parish church of the House of Commons since 1614 - looking straight across the road at the statue of Oliver Cromwell outside Westminster Hall. The arrangement is deliberate, and much more recent than it looks. Around 1945 Hedley Hope-Nicholson, secretary of the Society of King Charles the Martyr, came across two lead busts of the king in a Fulham salvage yard. He gave one to the church in 1950, and it was put up in 1956 once a niche had been cut for it; the other is at the Banqueting House, where the king was beheaded.
That spoils the story usually told about the pair. The popular version is that Cromwell bows his head to avoid the king's gaze, and he cannot be doing that: Thornycroft's Cromwell was put up in 1899, fifty-seven years before there was anything of Charles on that wall, by a sculptor who admired him. What happened instead is that a society devoted to the beheaded king waited half a century and then answered from the other side of the road.
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