Concealing and Revealing the Face of Charles the Martyr King

Abstract

On the afternoon of 30 January 1649, King Charles I of England (r. 1625–1649) was publicly executed on a scaffold that had been erected the previous day in front of his Banqueting House in Westminster.1 The most popularly reproduced seventeenth-century print of this event depicts a densely packed crowd surrounding the central scaffold, upon which a masked executioner holds aloft the decapitated head of the king (Fig. 1). The executioner and his four attendants face the crowd from behind the still-kneeling body of Charles, positioned like actors on a stage and standing in a way that allows for maximum visibility of their bodies and poses. In this print, the death of Charles is rendered as though it were a carefully staged and highly visible affair. The large crowd of spectators, who not only occupy the base of the scaffold but have populated all viewable galleries and rooftops, seems to heighten this impression of a theatrical spectacle unfolding in the engraving. It makes the death of Charles I discernible to the viewer, while certain details, like the king’s face, are crudely rendered and made difficult to see. The central action of displaying the king’s head is frustrated by the depiction of his face, which is reduced to a series of black dots and lines. The inventive, highly staged nature of this print brings to the fore a common theme found in representations of the executed Stuart monarch in the decade following his death: portraying while simultaneously concealing the likeness of the dead king.