What happened to Charles I's head?
Well, it was chopped off on 30 January 1649. The king had lost the Civil Wars, and had been sentenced to be executed for the rather unlikely crime of high treason. After the unknown executioner carried out the deed with a single strike of his axe, several people approached the scaffold at Banqueting House and dipped their handkerchiefs into Charles’s blood to make gory souvenirs. As for the head, Oliver Cromwell allowed it to be sewn back on to the body, which was then buried quietly at Windsor Castle. So quietly, in fact, that everyone forgot exactly where it lay. Then, in 1813, a team of workmen found the lead coffin by chance, and King George III’s physician successfully identified the body as that of Charles I. The head, noted the doctor, was “loose, and, without any difficulty, was taken up and held
