A great crowd had assembled to witness, as Sir Thomas Herbert, the King's devoted friend, records, "the saddest sight that England ever saw." With calm dignity Charles performed the last actions of his life, asking his executioners whether his hair would hinder them, taking off his cloak, handing the "George" worn by the Knights of the Garter to Bishop Juxon, who remained by the side of his fallen monarch to the end, and then, after making a short speech declaring his innocence, kneeling down and laying his head upon the block. When Bishop Juxon reminded him that he had but one stage more, which would carry him from earth to heaven, the King replied: "I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown."
Directly the painful scene was over every sign of it was removed at once; soldiers dispersed the crowd, and the scaffold was immediately taken down. The King's body was embalmed, after which it was shown to the public, that there should be no doubt of his death. A week later his faithful friends carried him to his last resting-place in St. George's Chapel, Windsor. And so was cut short the life of Charles Stuart, who, had his youth been spent under wiser guidance than that of his father, might have been one of England's noblest rulers.
The Execution of Charles I., outside
Whitehall Palace.
From the painting by Ernest Crofts, R.A.
Cromwell, conscious of his own integrity and free from superstitious fears, did not hesitate to occupy the palace outside which his late monarch had been executed. Though he refused the crown offered to him in 1657, his residence in Whitehall began to assume more and more the aspect of a court, he himself gradually acquiring a dignified and stately manner, as we are assured by the contemporary royalist writer, Sir Philip Warwick. "And yet I lived to see this very gentleman," he writes, "when for six weeks together I was a prisoner in his sergeant's hands, and daily waited at Whitehall, appear of a great and majestic deportment and comely presence." After six years of almost autocratic power as Protector of England, during which period he had shown his capacity as a statesman, Cromwell breathed his last in the palace of his royal predecessors, relinquishing his hold upon life, in spite of his strong religious faith, with obvious reluctance. Worn out with anxieties and domestic grief, especially over the death of his much-beloved daughter, Elizabeth Claypole, the great Protector died at the age of fifty-nine, on September 3, 1658, a day which he had always accounted as peculiarly fortunate, having been the occasion of his victories at Dunbar and Worcester. A tremendous storm, one of the most violent ever known, was raging over England when Oliver Cromwell's spirit passed into the great Unknown.
On his arrival in London after his restoration, Charles II. proceeded to Whitehall, where he confirmed all the great charters of English liberty, such as Magna Carta, and the Petition of Right. Two years later, Charles brought his unhappy young bride by river in state to Whitehall, after their honeymoon at Hampton Court. Samuel Pepys watched the pageant from the top of the banqueting hall, which he describes as "a most pleasant place as any I could have got." The whole river was covered with boats and barges, "so that we could see no water for them," some boats representing the mimic court of a King and Queen, until the actual royal pair appeared, who were greeted with guns on their arrival at Whitehall Bridge.
Whitehall, so intimately connected with the Tudors, fell with the Stuarts. A fire, which raged furiously all one night, destroyed for ever, in 1698, the old rambling palace known to Wolsey and his royal master, leaving no fragment to remind us of its existence. Only the graceful banqueting hall escaped the general conflagration. Plans were drawn up by Sir Christopher Wren for a new palace, but William III., who, suffering from habitual asthma, found the smoke of Whitehall almost intolerable, was not likely to be anxious to restore a palace in which he could not live. As he wrote to one of his friends, "the loss is less to me than it would be to another person, for I cannot live there." But though he made little effort to rebuild the palace, being already busy at altering Hampton Court, there is no truth in the statement of his enemies, that William had partly inspired the fire.
George I. altered the banqueting-hall into a Chapel Royal, for which purpose it continued to be used until 1890, when Queen Victoria gave permission for the building to be used for the United Service Museum.