Thousands of pubs are called the King’s Head. In 1649 the country removed one, and nobody changed the signs.
The Kings Head holds a 4.4 from fifteen hundred and sixty-three people, and it is one of the most common pub names in England.
And there is a joke buried in it that nobody makes any more, because everybody has forgotten it was ever a joke.
January 1649
Charles I was beheaded outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall on a cold Tuesday afternoon, in front of an enormous crowd.
An eyewitness recorded that when the axe fell there came from the crowd a groan – not a cheer, a groan – such as he had never heard before and hoped never to hear again.
The King’s head was held up. That is the whole ritual, and it is the origin of the phrase, and it is the reason the executioner does it: to show that the man is dead.
And there were, at that moment, hundreds of pubs across England already called the King’s Head.
Nobody changed the signs
That is the thing.
England executed its monarch, abolished the monarchy, ran a republic for eleven years, restored the monarchy, and throughout the whole convulsion the pubs called the King’s Head simply carried on being called the King’s Head.
Some landlords, during the Commonwealth, quietly took the sign down. Most did not. The name was already too old and too useful, and everybody knew where they meant.
We argued at the Castle that a pub name is not a claim, it is a handle – it exists so that one person can tell another where to meet – and the King’s Head is the proof. The country decapitated the referent and the name did not budge.
Which king
The honest answer is: whichever one was on the throne when the sign was painted, and after that, none of them.
The signs get repainted. The face changes, or it does not, and the crown stays, and after a couple of centuries the head on the board is simply a head – generic, royal, unspecific, and answerable to nobody.
It is the same trick as the Princess of Wales in Covent Garden and the Prince of Wales up the road: name yourself after the institution rather than the man, and you can never be embarrassed and you never have to change the sign.
The pub
A 4.4 across a real sample, well-kept beer, decent room, and no interest whatsoever in the seventeenth century.
Verdict
The Banqueting House
Go and look at it, because it is the detail that finishes the story.
Charles I stepped out of a first-floor window of the Banqueting House onto the scaffold. It is the only surviving part of the old Whitehall Palace.
And on the ceiling of the room he walked through – the last room he was ever in – is a vast painted allegory by Rubens, commissioned by Charles himself, celebrating the divine right of kings and the apotheosis of his father.
He commissioned the ceiling. He walked underneath it. And then he went through the window and they cut his head off.
Verdict
Good pub. Go, have a pint under the head, and consider that England once actually removed one and did not bother to update the paperwork.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
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