Watching the coronation of King Charles III and Camilla on 6 May 2023 (see p4-5), I heard a BBC commentator hailing it the start of a “new Carolingian age”. Central in the ceremony and a direct connection with the last sovereign named Charles to be anointed and crowned was the jewel-studded St Edward’s Crown, used at every coronation ever since Charles II (1630-1685) in 1661. The previous royal crown worn by his father Charles I (1600-1649), said to date back to the time of Edward the Confessor, was melted down by the Commonwealth following the ending of the Civil War in 1649. At his execution on 30 January 1649 in Whitehall, Charles I memorably declared: “I go from a corruptible to incorruptible crown.”
Reflecting on all of this made me think of just how much the ghostlore of Great Britain owes to the reigns of Charles I and Charles II and the Stuart legacy, including their own occasional spectral returns.
“If any English king has a right to a ghost, it is surely Charles I,” wrote Philip W Sergeant in his Historic British Ghosts, contemplating that the Whitehall of 1938 was far too busy to be visited by him.
The idea of a ghostly Charles I was already present in the latter stages of the Civil War and during the Restoration in “numerous valedictory dialogues with ghosts of Charles I or Oliver Cromwell”, but as a symbol or conceit (see , 2007, by Owen Davies). Curiously, though having lost
