Banqueting House, Whitehall room at Wilton House, to display Van Dyck's portraits of the aristocratic Pembroke family. Given the attention and effort which were lavished by Charles I on the Banqueting House, his end was not without irony. On the afternoon of 30 January 1649 he stepped out of a first floor window of Banqueting House onto the scaffold which had been erected outside for the purpose of his execution. The actual window no longer exists as it was not in the main hall but just outside it in an adjacent part of the building which has now gone and, pictured from the
History of the Puritans under King Charles I and he was subsequently beheaded on 30 January 1649. The execution of Charles I would be the lens through which the Puritan movement was viewed for generations. For its opponents, the outcome confirmed that Puritanism ultimately led to violent rebellion, and that there was a straight line from religious fanaticism to regicide. The largest single group of Puritans, the Presbyterians, had in fact opposed the regicide, but to the supporters of the king and of episcopacy, this seemed like too fine a distinction. On the other hand, for many Independents, the regicide was entirely justified: Charles was a man who