Execution of Charles I

On 30 January 1649, Charles I was beheaded on a scaffold erected outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall — the only English king ever publicly executed by his own subjects. Defeated in two civil wars, refused parliamentary compromise, and convicted of high treason by a tribunal of fifty-nine commissioners (the Rump Parliament had voted away the House of Lords specifically to bring him to trial), he wore two shirts to avoid shivering on the cold morning lest the crowd mistake it for fear.