ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the nuances of these changes in the nature and function of private prayer through the lens of a single text: Charles I's posthumous self-defence, Eikon basilike (1649). Prayer was one of the key areas of life that operated across this boundary, part of official public life in parish worship, fast days and prayers for special occasions, but also the core of an individual's personal experience of faith. Charles kneels inside a contemporary neo-classical barrel-vaulted church or chapel, but his heel rests in the open doorway, on the top of a flight of steps that leads down into a dark and chaotic world, which the king has turned his back on but from which he is still clearly visible. The English reformers' greater ambivalence towards prayer alone was in keeping with a general suspicion of solitude and secrecy that persisted in English culture even into the seventeenth century.
