The Trial of Charles I
Dan Snow's History Hit
History Hit
4.7 • 13.7K Ratings
🗓️ 23 February 2026
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
More than 350 years ago, something unprecedented happened in Britain: a reigning king was arrested, put on trial, and executed. You may have seen many news outlets refer to this historic event, given the current news agenda regarding Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. We want to give you the history behind those headlines: what really happened in 1649, and how the English parliament came to pursue capital punishment for a reigning monarch?
This episode from our archive dives into the extraordinary chain of events from Charles I's arrest to the moment of his execution. Dan is joined by Dr Rebecca Warren from the University of Kent for a day by day account of the trial and this dramatic case that still echoes through history to the present day.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey folks, welcome to Dan Snow's history. As always, as you know, we take the responsibility very seriously on this show. |
| 0:05.1 | We like to give people the history, the context behind things that are going on, the wild ride that we're all living through at the moment. |
| 0:11.4 | We want to make sure that we all know whether they are unprecedented, as journalists would have us believe, or whether they are in fact very precedented indeed. |
| 0:19.7 | Now, you may have seen last week that a gentleman called |
| 0:22.2 | Andrew Mountbatten Windsor was arrested here in the UK. And we do, of course, have to say that |
| 0:29.3 | Andrew is innocent until proven guilty. He strenuously denies any wrongdoing. I was obviously triggered because headlines all over the world |
| 0:41.4 | pointed out that the last time a member of the British Royal Family was arrested was apparently |
| 0:45.9 | 350 years ago with the arrest trial and execution of Charles I. Now that actually wasn't true. |
| 0:51.5 | If you listened to our podcast last week, you'll know that after Charles, |
| 0:55.6 | his grandson, albeit illegitimate, James Duke of Monmouth, was arrested and tried. And in fact, |
| 1:03.0 | in fact, William IV as a young man was briefly arrested after a fight, a brawl in Gibraltar. |
| 1:07.7 | But anyway, I'm on my one-man mission to school the world's media about those |
| 1:11.2 | important events. So I just go and listen to that episode. It's sitting there right in your feed, folks. You can get the real history. But since everyone is talking about Charles First, I felt it was right to share this episode from our archive. We're going to go in depth and look at that extraordinary moment in English history that is suddenly back in the spotlight. Let me set the scene. |
| 1:35.7 | It was a cold January day in 1649. Charles I, Charles Stewart, stepped out of banqueting house in Whitehall, the building that he had constructed himself, a truly magnificent, |
| 1:41.1 | ultra-fancy ballroom, if you like. And he walked out of the window to a |
| 1:46.3 | scaffold that had been specially erected on the street in Whitehall. In front of a big London crowd, |
| 1:53.4 | he then knelt on the block and a reigning king was beheaded. The first time in world history, |
| 2:02.8 | that a reigning monarch had put on trial and judicially killed. |
| 2:06.8 | It was a moment that stunned those who witnessed it. |
| 2:09.9 | It's a moment that has echoed through British history ever since. |
| 2:12.6 | How did they come to kill the king? |
| 2:15.4 | It did not happen overnight. |
... |
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