The Man With Two Shirts

I know that some of you over the pond like a bit of British history now and again, and to be honest, I'm ready for a few minutes of distraction from other events. So here it is. And it's to do with 30 January.

Some years ago I was at a publisher's party at The Banqueting House in London, not far from Trafalgar Square. It's a very beautiful building with baroque painted ceilings, and is all that is left of Whitehall Palace, but we all knew that on 30 January 1649, a scaffold was erected outside it.

Charles I was always on a hiding to nothing. He wasn't supposed to be king. He had an older brother, Prince Henry, who was clever, athletic, gifted and popular until his death at the age of eighteen after swimming in the Thames. (David Walliams got off lightly, then.) Suddenly twelve year old Charles Stuart was the heir to the thrones of England and Scotland. He was a little chap who looked as if he'd blow away in a high wind, stammered, and may have had rickets at some point. At the age of 25, his embarrassing father died and Charles Stuart had to start kinging. He'd become good at all the royalty stuff like riding horses and fencing, and he seems to have been an elegant man and very devoted to his wife, Henrietta Maria, but it wasn't enough.

Unfortunately, Charles had a high view of kingship. He believed in the Divine Right of Kings, ie, God had made him king, which meant that he was a kind of proxy for God and couldn't be argued with. When his Divine Right extended to the Divine Right to raise taxes and adjourn Parliament, the House of Commons got thoroughly upset, and Mr Oliver Cromwell wasn't a bit pleased.

Another mistake Charles made was to try to impose the English Prayer Book on the Scottish Church (the Kirk.) An Englishman giving orders to a Scot is never going to go down well (if he'd been to Glasgow he would have got that in five minutes), and this was the Kirk, for heaven's sake! Before long he'd alienated the Scots and had a Civil War on his hands. He sent for his dashing young cousin Prince Rupert, who was a very good soldier and did lots of dashing around battlefields with his poodle. Yes, really, he had a little white poodle called Boy. Anyway, in spite of Rupert and his poodle, Charles 1 lost the war and was imprisoned.

Finally, Parliament decided that they couldn't let the king live. There would always be conspiracies to put him back on the throne. So on 30 January King Charles walked out from the Banqueting House to the scaffold where the axeman waited. He asked for two shirts to wear that morning because it was bitterly cold and he didn't want to shiver and make people think he was afraid. He died bravely, and with dignity.

The Stuarts didn't often do well as monarchs. But they make great stories.