Ten things you didn’t know about King Charles I

• He wasn’t supposed to be king but his elder brother Henry died of typhoid when Charles was 11;
• Charles spoke with a Scottish accent and a stammer;
• When he was 23, he travelled incognito to Spain in a failed bid to woo Princess Maria Anna;
• His French wife Henrietta Maria was 15 when they married. He wanted her to be known as Queen Mary but she refused to use the English name;
• Charles wrote to her brother King Louis XII complaining about her behaviour;
• He published “The Book of Sports” encouraging archery, dancing, leaping, vaulting and similar activities on Sundays;
• In 1649, Charles was executed outside the Banqueting House in Westminster having walked beneath the ceiling painting by Rubens which he commissioned to celebrate the divine right of kings;
• His best-selling posthumous autobiography “Eikon Basilike” or “The King’s Book” went through 36 editions in 1649 alone;
• Marchamont Nedham, accused Charles of being ‘ruled wholly by his wife’, and said: ‘No man of Conscience or Honesty but must condemn him for he rejoiced in the ruin of his faithful Subjects’;
• Charles I later employed Marchamont Nedham.

Ten things you didn’t know about
Oliver Cromwell

1. He cried when he saw King Charles re-united with his children at a pub in Hertford;
2. His physician turned him upside down three times, saying that is what Oliver had done to the country;
3. His daughter Elizabeth married a Royalist and told him he should not have executed the King;
4. He played bowls at Hampton Court Palace as Charles I used to;
5. He liked music and theatre and had his own court musician, John Hingston;
6. He gave permission to Sir William Davenant, a Royalist, to stage “The Siege of Rhodes”, the first opera in English;
7. His navy conquered Jamaica and gave Britons our love of sugar;
8. As children, Charles I and Oliver Cromwell once played together. Cromwell punched the prince on the nose and made it bleed.
9. Marchamont Nedham once threatened to hang Cromwell, writing: ‘Now Nol have at thy nose, I have shot nothing but paper bullets all this while. Therefore Snout look about thee, for if thou be catched we’ll put thy neck (in stead of thy nose) in a noose.’
10. Oliver Cromwell later employed Marchamont Nedham.

Ten things you didn’t know about
King Charles II

1. On his escape after the Battle of Worcester, he disguised himself as a servant called William;
2. ‘William’ was recognised by a butler who was sworn to secrecy;
3. A sea captain found to ferry Charles away from the Dorset coast never reached the rendezvous – his wife locked him in their bedroom fearing he was up to no-good;
4. The ship that brought him back to England at the Restoration in 1660 was hastily re-named “The Royal Charles”. It had been called “Naseby” after one of the battles his father lost;
5. He reached London on his 30^th birthday, riding a white stallion. The fountains flowed with wine;
6. The ‘merry monarch’ had at least 14 illegitimate children by seven mistresses. He had no children with his wife Catherine of Braganza;
7. After a London crowd mistook her for another royal mistress – Louise de Keroualle, a French Catholic – Nell Gwynne drew cheers when she said: ‘Pray good people be civil, I am the Protestant whore’;
8. Nell and Charles called their first son the Earl of Burford because he was conceived there when they visited the Oxfordshire town for the horse-racing;
9. Marchamont Nedham said of him: ‘This is Dad’s own Son, two faces under one hood, being an Hereditary Posture.’ An entire book was published listing the insults Nedham hurled at him;
10. Charles II later employed Marchamont Nedham.