IN 1644, the Royal Mint struck a unique silver crown coin. It showed Charles I mounted on a warhorse bestriding a detailed panorama of the City of Oxford (Fig 3). Never before had an English city been depicted on the coinage of the land. This accolade was awarded because, for 3½ years between October 1642 and its surrender to Parliamentarian forces in April 1646, Oxford was England’s capital city. Charles I had left London in 1642, abandoning it to Parliamentarian forces and, after his humiliating defeat at the battle of Edgehill, he decided to regroup in Oxford, a defensible city with a long history of loyalty to the Crown and a place he regarded suitably magnificent to host the Court.
When the war-battered monarch, with his army and Court, arrived at the gates of the city, he was no stranger to it. He had been lavishly entertained there in 1636 by Archbishop Laud, who was then vice-chancellor of the university, and he had lodged in the Dean’s lodgings at Christ Church. Statues of the King and Queendignified Laud’s new Canterbury
