A cult of martyrdom began forming around Charles Stuart—who, as reigning monarch of England, Scotland and Ireland, was known as King Charles I—almost immediately after his execution for high treason on Jan. 30, 1649.
The unprecedented beheading of a king during the English Civil War, also known as the English Revolution, sent shockwaves through the country. Royalist supporters of Charles, who defended absolute monarchy and the divine right of kings, reacted with horror. Meanwhile, the opposing parliamentarians, who sought to give Parliament supreme executive control over England’s government, defended his execution.
Royalists and high-church Anglicans—church members who emphasize ritual, priestly authority, sacraments, a fixed liturgy and historic continuity with Roman Catholic traditions—soon transformed Charles into a martyr. The term “cult” used to describe their veneration of Charles did not have the negative connotations the word often carries today but simply referred to religious devotional practices around a particular figure.
Following the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the Church of England added the date of Charles’ execution into its liturgical calendar, describing him as “Charles, King and Martyr”. To this day, the Anglican calendar of saints, including that of the Anglican Church of Canada, commemorates Charles as a martyr on Jan. 30. However, Anglican scholars say that it is now primarily conservative parishes, individuals and groups such as the Society of King Charles the Martyr (SKCM) who celebrate the feast day of Charles.
Canon Mark Chapman, professor of the history of theology at the University of Oxford, says members of groups such as the SKCM “tend to be very old-fashioned Tories, not always particularly Anglo-Catholic in their orientation, but very old-fashioned and [Book of Common Prayer (BCP)] users … who I think probably have a very high view of the importance of monarchies. They have a probably very high regard for King Charles [III] and Queen Camilla as well in the present day.”
In 2019 Chapman delivered the annual King Charles Lecture, given annually on a topic related to Charles I and his era, at King Charles the Martyr Church in Royal Tunbridge Wells, England, entitling his lecture, “The cult of King Charles – the Tyrant King?”
Debate over church identity and relationship to state
The profile of Charles’ martyrdom cult among Anglicans has waxed and waned in the centuries after Charles’ execution.
A major early influence was the Eikon Basilike (Greek for “Royal Portrait”), a spiritual memoir attributed to Charles. John Gauden, bishop of Worcester, later claimed to have written it. But Thomas Power, professor emeritus of church history at Wycliffe College, says whoever wrote the book drew upon genuine materials written by Charles.
“There’s no doubt about the impact of that Eikon Basilike book,” Power says. “It really helped to establish the cult of Charles.” Multiple English-language editions were published in 1649 alone, he notes, followed by translations into Latin, Dutch, French and German.
“What’s most famous about the icon is the front cover … It shows Charles kneeling down in a Christ-like posture with robes, and it shows him in this saintly deferential position before God. That evoked an emotional response among readers at the time, and it certainly helped to promote Charles and his martyrdom.
“The impact of it was so great that it even helped the King’s cause, the royalist cause, after his death.” It undermined the rule of the parliamentarians and their Puritan leader Oliver Cromwell, Power says, and raised hopes for the restoration of the monarchy, which eventually transpired with the accession of King Charles II to the throne.”
Subsequent history, Chapman says, saw the cult of King Charles the Martyr used to express a high-church view of Anglicanism and the church’s relationship to the state.
During the reign of Charles I, a major controversy had involved the king using his supremacy over the church to mandate that churches use the 1604 edition of the BCP. Puritans—whom Chapman describes as “probably the dominant party in quite large swathes of the country” at the time—opposed Charles’ imposition of the prayer book, as did the Scottish Presbyterians with whom they held many views in common. Each believed, as Scottish theologian George Gillespie argued, that the 1604 BCP contained too many remnants of Roman Catholicism and human inventions not justified by the Bible.
In 1645, Parliament therefore banned the 1604 edition of the prayer book. Chapman says the late 1640s and 1650s saw efforts to “try and create a different version of the Church of England, which would’ve been more Presbyterian. But because Cromwell is what we would now call a congregationalist and independent, he refuses to have a single religious policy on the whole country … He may have been a bit of a dictator, but he also allowed for quite a wide variety of religious views.”
In 1662, two years after the restoration of the monarchy, the Church of England published a new edition of the BCP. The Act of Uniformity 1662, a law that Parliament passed under Charles II, required all parishes to use the 1662 prayer book. It was largely unchanged from the previous edition—“effectively an imposition on a country that was not completely willing or desirous to use that prayer book,” Chapman says. It also included a feast day for Charles I as martyr. In 1675, a statue of Charles I was placed in Central London.
The effect, Chapman says, was to create “this kind of myth of a man who dies for the Church of England, and dies for the prayer book, effectively.” The cult of Charles, he adds, came to stand for a high-church vision of the Church of England united behind the BCP, rather than allowing for diversity of belief and practices. It also became identified with a union between the church and monarchy in which each institution has a responsibility to maintain and uphold the other, he says.
Ebb and flow of veneration
After the 1688 deposition of the Roman Catholic King James II and his replacement by the Protestant William III, Chapman says, the cult of Charles subsided for the next century in favour of the “cult of Protestantism”.
However, it experienced a dramatic resurgence amid the French Revolution, with the execution of King Louis XVI of France, and Britain’s participation in the Napoleonic Wars. In that context, the cult of Charles the martyred king became a useful justification for the British government in its war against France as opposing “the terrible regicides across the water,” Chapman says.
The 19th century saw tension between opposing visions of Anglicanism, he says. The rise of the Oxford movement involved high-church Anglicans calling for the return of some older Christian traditions, a trend that later developed into Anglo-Catholicism. Priest John Keble, one of the leaders of the movement, wrote a poem for Charles I in one of his collects. An opposing trend emphasized the Protestant aspects of the church and instead focused on martyrs of the English Reformation such as Thomas Cranmer.
What Power calls “the final nail in the coffin” for popular veneration of Charles as a martyr came in 1859. Parliament repealed several laws that had mandated the Church of England and Church of Ireland to observe what were known as “political” or “state” services, marking the anniversaries of 17th-century political events. The change took place amid continuing controversy over Charles’ memory, the rise of the evangelical movement, and the repeal of laws discriminating against Roman Catholics and Jews.
Along with the feast day of King Charles the Martyr on Jan. 30, Parliament repealed mandatory observation of services commemorating the restoration of the monarchy on May 29 as well as Guy Fawkes Night on Nov. 5. The latter offered thanks for the failure of the Gunpowder Plot and attempted regicide of King James I in 1605. A new service replaced them that celebrated the accession of the current monarch to the throne.
“After 1859, it was more optional,” Power says of Charles’ feast day. “Those who felt they needed to observe that tradition did, but there was no compulsion on them. But it wasn’t forbidden, on the other hand. If churches decided they wanted to observe the anniversary, they could do so. But it no longer had the state mandate that it had in the 17th century.”
Charles’ legacy today
The cult of Charles thereafter became a focus of groups such as the SKCM, which formed in London in 1894. In a section on its website headlined “Why We Honour King Charles I as a Saint,” the SKCM calls Charles “a martyr for the doctrine of episcopacy and apostolic succession.”
“King Charles the Martyr was the last saint to be canonised by the Church of England,” it says. “He is honoured as a martyr because he died for the Church. He was offered his life if he would abandon episcopacy but he refused, for this would have taken the Church of England away from being part of ‘the one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church’ and change Her into a sect. So we venerate him for his sacrifice and see in it inspiration for us today.”
Charles did strive to maintain the order of the Church of England and the episcopacy, Power says, describing the bishops as the king’s “lieutenants” whom he relied upon to rule in their dioceses as representatives of royal authority. But Power disputes the idea that Charles died specifically for his religious beliefs.
“A martyr is a person who willingly accepts death rather than do or say anything contrary to conscience or belief,” Power says. “If that is the definition of what a martyr is, does Charles qualify? … Well, at his trial, he was charged with high treason and being responsible for various crimes like murder, burnings and so on during the civil war.
“But actually, he was never asked at his trial about his religious beliefs. He was never allowed the opportunity to renounce his religious convictions in order to save his life. It wasn’t that at all. He wasn’t put on trial for his religious conviction.”
Nevertheless, Power says, “even if he wasn’t allowed to be charged with religious deviations, he does qualify as a martyr because he is refusing to recant anything that he did as king. That was the way that it was viewed at the time.”
The feast day of King Charles the Martyr is “undoubtedly an ideological feast,” Chapman says, one that raises questions about the relationship between the church and the monarchy. “I don’t think anybody would’ve ever denied that it was being used for a particular political purpose.”
Chapman surmises that most Anglicans today are “pretty indifferent” to the monarchy. But recent polls have shown declining public support for the institution.
In Britain, a 2025 Savanta poll found that 46 per cent support keeping the royal family, the first time support for the monarchy has fallen below 50 per cent. In Canada, an Angus Reid poll the same year, published during a visit by King Charles III, found that just 30 per cent supported maintaining Canada “as a constitutional monarchy for generations to come”, compared to 46 per cent who opposed keeping the monarchy.
While not widely observed among Anglicans, commemorations such as Charles’ feast day serve as a way to remember aspects of the past, Chapman says. Charles specifically provides an example of “somebody who’s prepared to stand up for his ideals,” he says, while the historical context surrounding his cult offers a point for reflection on the kind of uniformity, coherence and identity desired within the church.
On a personal level, Charles was a “deeply religious monarch” who was personally pious and devout, Power says.
“He is certainly a model for anyone in any age of personal piety and religious observance. I think in many ways he was prepared to die for that. That’s really, I think, a model for anyone wanting to know about the seriousness of religious observance and the need to be deliberate about it.”
