The Execution of Charles I and Scottish Support for Charles II: Martyrdom, Monarchy, and the Scottish Reckoning
On a bitterly cold January morning in 1649, in the courtyard of Whitehall Palace in London, a scaffold was erected. Draped in black, the structure stood as the final theatre for the tragedy of Charles Stuart, King of England and Scotland. He emerged calmly from the Banqueting House, clad in two shirts—so the crowd would not think he trembled from fear. Before the executioner’s axe fell, he declared himself “the martyr of the people,” a king not guilty of tyranny, but the victim of an unlawful tribunal. And then it was done. The blade fell. A gasp rippled through the crowd. The monarchy was dead—decapitated by the revolution it had failed to contain.
In England, the execution of Charles I was a seismic rupture. In Scotland, it was an abomination.
The Scots had spent the better part of two decades resisting Charles I’s religious policies. They had defied his attempts to impose Anglicanism, had fought wars in defense of Presbyterianism, and had even taken up arms against him. But they had never sought his death. The Scottish Parliament, as late as 1648, had opposed the trial. The Kirk may have denounced his policies, but it had not renounced monarchy itself. “The execution,” wrote historian Michael Lynch, “was received in Scotland not as a necessary political resolution but as a sacrilege against the divine order of kingship” (Lynch, 1992, p. 253).
In the weeks following the execution, Scottish leaders convened in Edinburgh and declared allegiance not to the English republic that had emerged from the ashes of the monarchy, but to the king’s surviving son—Charles II. He was young, unproven, and in exile, but he bore the sacred bloodline. The Scots were not prepared to embrace republicanism or the military dictatorship taking shape under Oliver Cromwell. They sought to restore the monarchy—but on terms favorable to the Kirk. As historian David Stevenson observed, “The Scots had not fought the king in order to destroy monarchy. They had fought to define it, to place it in a constitutional and religious framework acceptable to the nation’s conscience” (Stevenson, 1973, p. 282).
Negotiations with Charles II began in earnest in 1650. The exiled prince, then twenty years old and living in the Dutch Republic, was desperate. Cut off from allies, stripped of resources, and watched closely by Cromwellian agents, he had little room to maneuver. The Scots offered him a throne—conditional on his full subscription to the National Covenant and Solemn League and Covenant, the twin pillars of Scottish Presbyterian identity. Reluctantly, Charles agreed. In the Treaty of Breda, he pledged to uphold Presbyterianism, renounce his father’s religious policies, and govern under the guidance of the Scottish Parliament and Kirk. He did so with fingers crossed behind his back. “Charles II,” writes Ronald Hutton, “was never truly committed to the Covenanters’ cause. His acceptance of their terms was a masterclass in opportunism” (Hutton, 2003, p. 178).
Nevertheless, Charles landed in Scotland in June 1650, greeted with both ceremony and suspicion. He was placed under constant supervision. His chapel services were monitored. His personal servants were replaced with pious Scots. Ministers lectured him on the sins of his father and the need for moral reform. For a time, Charles lived not as a monarch but as a political hostage, enduring sermons instead of coronations.
That changed in January 1651. In a frigid ceremony at Scone—the ancient seat of Scottish kings—Charles II was crowned King of Scots. It was the first and only coronation he would receive during the Interregnum. For the Covenanters, it was a vindication: the monarchy had been rescued, but redefined. Presbyterianism had triumphed. Or so they believed.
Cromwell, watching from England, saw something else entirely. The coronation was a provocation. The Scots had allied themselves with the son of the man he had just helped to execute. It was a threat not only to the English republic but to the Puritan vision of divine authority vested in the elect—not in kings. In response, Cromwell invaded Scotland in the summer of 1650. At the Battle of Dunbar in September, his smaller army crushed the Scots, forcing Charles and his supporters to retreat north. Yet the young king did not abandon his claim. In a bold maneuver, he marched south into England in 1651, hoping to rally Royalist sympathizers along the way.
It was a gamble—ill-prepared, underfunded, and undercut by the religious divisions between Scottish Presbyterians and English Royalists. At Worcester, on September 3, 1651, Cromwell met Charles’s army and annihilated it. It was the last pitched battle of the English Civil Wars. Charles fled the battlefield and began a six-week odyssey of escape, hiding in priest holes and oak trees, ultimately reaching the coast disguised as a servant and sailing to safety in France. He would remain in exile for another nine years.
The Scots paid a heavy price for their defiance. Cromwell occupied Scotland, disbanded the Parliament, and imposed military rule. Presbyterian ministers were harassed; churches placed under surveillance. Though Cromwell respected aspects of Scottish moral discipline, he had no patience for their politics. The Kirk was split between the Resolutioners, who had supported Charles, and the Protesters, who denounced any accommodation with monarchy. The unity that had once animated the Covenanting movement was gone, replaced by bitterness and internal division. “Scotland,” writes Allan Macinnes, “was now a conquered country—its experiment in godly government crushed under the heel of English republicanism” (Macinnes, 2007, p. 203).
Yet even in defeat, the symbolism of the coronation at Scone lingered. The Scots had tried to create a monarchy governed by faith, law, and national conscience. They had attempted to save the institution of kingship by purifying it. And though their hopes were dashed at Worcester, the ideals of constitutional monarchy and church governance would echo into the next century—into the Revolution Settlement of 1689, and into the Act of Union of 1707.
In retrospect, Michael Lynch offers a sober assessment: “The execution of Charles I radicalized the Scottish position—but also trapped it. In seeking to restore monarchy on their own terms, the Covenanters undermined the very cause they hoped to preserve” (Lynch, 1992, p. 258). The crown they placed upon Charles II’s head was both a triumph and a tragedy—a moment of national affirmation, and the beginning of Scotland’s long and painful submission to the tides of British revolution.
References
- Lynch, Michael. Scotland: A New History. London: Pimlico, 1992.
- Macinnes, Allan I. Charles I and the Making of the Covenanting Movement, 1625–1641. Edinburgh: John Donald, 2007.
- Stevenson, David. Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Scotland, 1644–1651. London: Royal Historical Society, 1977.
- Hutton, Ronald. The British Republic, 1649–1660. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
- Coward, Barry. The Cromwellian Protectorate. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002.