Footnotes

• The present lot is based upon Van Dyck's full-scale oil portraits of the king (c.1638) that reside in the Hermitage, St. Petersburg and at Althorp (Catalogue of the Pictures at Althorp House in the County of Northampton, p.27, no.340). The miniature was loaned to the South Kensington Museum by John Poyntz, 5th Earl Spencer in 1865.
  
  On 22 August 1642, Charles raised the royal standard at Nottingham, marking the beginning of the First English Civil War. The Royal court decamped to Oxford, which became the nucleus for the Royalist cause and the centre of power for the 'cavalier' territories of the Midlands, the West Country and the North. It was two years before Parliamentary forces arrested control at the Battle of Naseby and Charles himself was handed over to his enemies by the Scottish Presbyterian army. The Stuart king spent the remainder of his life imprisoned in a succession of Norman castles, including the former royal residence of Windsor, from which vantage point he illicitly instructed his supporters into inciting the Second Civil War. As a result of his covert encouragement of the dampened Royalist cause, an Act of Parliament was passed enabling the public trial of a monarch, which the king unsurprisingly refused to accept as lawful, maintaining instead his unswerving belief in the 'divine right of kings'. On 27 January 1649, Charles was found guilty for the 'protecting of himself and his adherents in his and their wicked practices' and sentenced to death. The monarch was led from St James's Palace to Whitehall where he was beheaded on a scaffold erected before Inigo Jones' Banqueting House. In accordance with custom, the king's severed head was held aloft by the executioner, although Oliver Cromwell defied tradition by later authorising its reattachment to Charles' body so that the erstwhile king might be buried in tact.