31/10/2026
💀 The Dead King’s Earring
A gruesome Halloween tale from The Portland Collection Museum
Behind the glass lies a pale, drop-shaped pearl. It looks harmless enough. But this small jewel once hung from the ear of a doomed king—and remained there as he walked through the bitter cold to meet the ex*****oner’s axe. Worn by Charles I on the scaffold on 30 January 1649, the earring is now one of the most chilling treasures in The Portland Collection.
🪦 A pearl marked for death
Made around 1616, the earring consists of a large pearl suspended from a gold mount. In the candlelit splendour of the Stuart court, a pearl of such size and lustre proclaimed wealth, rank and royal taste. Fashionable men sometimes wore a single earring, and Charles wore his in his left ear. It can be seen shining beneath his dark curls in portraits by Sir Anthony van Dyck—as though quietly waiting for the grim place it would occupy in history.
The jewel followed him from youthful magnificence to civil war, defeat and imprisonment. Crowns could be taken, palaces abandoned and loyal supporters scattered, but the pearl remained. By the winter of 1649, it was no longer simply an ornament. It had become a silent witness to the downfall of a king.
⚰️ Footsteps to the scaffold
Outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall, a crowd waited in the freezing January air. Charles had dressed with care and put on extra clothing so that no shiver would be mistaken for fear. Then came the walk to the scaffold, the last words and the block. At the fall of the axe, the reign of Charles I ended in a single dreadful moment.
The pearl was still hanging from the King’s ear when he was beheaded. According to the history preserved with the jewel, it was removed from his body after his death. Imagine the scene: the roar of the crowd fading, the scaffold stained by what had happened, and someone reaching towards the severed king to unfasten the gleaming pearl. From that moment, a piece of courtly finery became a relic of ex*****on.
☠️ The relic passes from hand to hand
A handwritten note records the earring’s journey after the ex*****on. It passed to Charles’s daughter, Mary, Princess Royal and Princess of Orange, and then to her son, William III. The new king later gave it to his trusted friend and adviser, Hans Willem Bentinck, 1st Earl of Portland. Thus, the dead king’s pearl entered the collection of the Portland family.
Royalists came to remember Charles I as a martyr, and possessions linked to his death took on an almost sacred power. Yet this object carries an especially macabre intimacy. It was not merely owned by Charles, nor simply present in a royal chamber. It accompanied him beyond the palace walls, up the scaffold steps and to the instant of his death.
🪟 The pearl behind the glass
Today, the earring is displayed at The Portland Collection Museum. Among the paintings, sculptures, silver, and precious objects assembled by the Dukes of Portland and their families, the pearl has a presence all its own. It is beautiful, delicate—and inseparable from the violence of the scaffold.
Look closely this Halloween. Its surface still catches the light just as it did in Van Dyck’s portraits and on that bleak morning in 1649. The man who wore it is long dead, the ex*****oner is nameless, and the crowd has vanished—but the pearl remains. A tiny, ghostly survivor from the moment England killed its king.
