High Court of Justice for the trial of King Charles I This was eventually signed by 59 of the Commissioners, including two who had not been present when the sentence was passed. King Charles was beheaded in front of the Banqueting House of the Palace of Whitehall on 30 January 1649. He declared that he had desired the liberty and freedom of the people as much as any; "but I must tell you that their liberty and freedom consists in having government... It is not their having a share in the government; that is nothing appertaining unto them. A subject and a sovereign are clean different things." Francis Allen arranged payments
Whitehall 1658. During the Great Plague of London in 1665, people boarded coaches at Whitehall, then at the edge of urban London, in an attempt to escape. The King and court temporarily moved to Oxford to avoid the plague, while Samuel Pepys remarked in his diary on 29 June, "By water to Whitehall, where the Court is full of waggons and people ready to go out of town. This end of town every day grows very bad with plague". By the 18th century, traffic was struggling along the narrow streets south of Holbein Gate, which led to King Street Gate being