It’s 1649 and a group of men are gathered at the Palace of Westminster. Their monumental task: to decide the fate of a king. Historian Anna Keay sets the scene…

There could hardly have been a more apposite place in which to make the decision to execute Charles I than the Painted Chamber at Westminster. When the clouds broke during the numerous morning meetings here in January 1649, elongated lancets of sunlight streamed through the tall Gothic windows onto the matted floor and down the table where the men who brought the King to trial gathered.

Created for Henry III four centuries before, this was once the Great Chamber of the medieval Palace of Westminster. Outside, a terrace of royal gardens lay between the massive stone building and the wide River Thames, while inside, the high walls had once been painted with the vivid royal and biblical scenes to which it owed its name.

This was the chamber where medieval kings had slept and dined, and where they had taken counsel. The building works had been completed just in time for the meeting of Henry III’s Great Council of January 1237. Here the Plantagenet king had secured agreement to the taxes he wished to levy by promising various concessions to his subjects.

During this, the first gathering in English history to be called a “parliament”, he had pledged to reissue the famous undertaking which his father King John had signed, and then repudiated, Magna Carta. With it was established the principle that everybody, even the King, was subject to the law.

Whether the men who milled about the Painted Chamber on the morning of 20 January 1649 spared much thought for the room’s significance is doubtful. They had the future, not the past, in their sights. In their intense preoccupation none of them noticed the slight figure concealed behind one of the tapestries that now covered the wall paintings – a young royalist interloper, Purbeck Temple, who would later bear witness to what he heard.

The discussion was of the final arrangements for the trial of Charles I, which was to commence that afternoon. The tension was almost suffocating. Deliberations turned to prayer, earnest invoking of God’s support for the momentous task they had taken upon themselves.

Then came a messenger with the news. The King had arrived. One of their number, Lieutenant General Oliver Cromwell, dashed to the window. Here he watched the small, cloaked figure of Charles I disembark from a boat and walk steadily across the wintry garden into the adjacent building.

Cromwell’s nerve suddenly faltered. When he turned away from the window he was “as white as the wall”. Speaking only to his closest colleagues he asked them wildly “how … they had concluded on such a business”.

But almost as quickly as it had risen, his doubt subsided. When he addressed the table a minute or two later he radiated confidence: “My masters, he is come, he is come and now we are doing that great work that the whole nation will be full of.”

Extracted from The Restless Republic: Britain Without a Crown  by Anna Keay. The book was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford award and won the Duff Cooper Prize for Nonfiction.

Or buy a copy from Blackwell’s here.

Anna Keay is a historian, writer and curator. She is currently Director of the Landmark Trust, and previously worked in senior curatorial roles for English Heritage and Historic Royal Palaces. Her other books include The Magnificent Monarch: Charles II and the Ceremonies of Power and The Last Royal Rebel: The Life and Death of James, Duke of Monmouth.

A regular presenter on history and historic buildings on TV, she is a Trustee of the Royal Collection Trust, a Visiting Professor at Birmingham City University and received an OBE in 2019 for services to history and heritage.  

Anna is also our guest on “A Drink with the Idler” this week: 6pm Thursday 16 November 2023. Free to subscribers.

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