ABSTRACT
Royalist presses had started templating ‘King Charles the Martyr’ long before the axe fell on the afternoon of the 30 January 1649. As the King’s chaplain, Juxon was there to provide reassurance and consolation. Later that night he refined his draft of their final conversation and sent it to the publisher John Rushworth. The execution of Charles I was an extraordinary moment in English history, not just because of what happened, but because of how it was imagined. Charles Stuart was not just misguided or badly counselled. He was a bloodthirsty, papist zealot, a ‘Tyrant’ whose ‘deepest policy’ had ‘bin ever to counterfeit Religion.’ Charles Stuart as actor and martyr. Almost certainly inspired by the passage in Horace’s ‘Actium’ Ode, in which the audience is drawn away from Octavian’s brilliance to the tragedy of the defeated Cleopatra.
