This miniature portrait of Charles I is one of the most technically accomplished examples of professional seventeenth-century needlework. In addition to this miniature, other examples include: two in the Victoria and Albert Museum, one in the Wallace Collection in London, one in Rosenborg Castle in Copenhagen, and one in the collection of John H. Bryan, which is housed in a silver-gilt frame engraved with the royal armorial and date of Charles’s execution, 30 January 1648 (old calendar). Like a painting in silk thread, this miniature represents the merging of two English artistic traditions—a naturalistic rendering of faces using fine techniques such as split stitch, which had been in use in England since the twelfth century, and the painted miniature portrait, a courtly fashion that began during the reign of Henry VIII.The king’s likeness has been taken with great fidelity from a 1641 etching by Wenceslaus Hollar, which was itself ultimately derived from a chain of different prints based on a painted portrait by Anthony van Dyck of Charles I and his consort, Henrietta Maria, painted in 1632. Oliver Millar has noted that van Dyck’s painting is in itself a reworking of the original composition by Daniel Mytens of ca. 1630-32, in the Royal Collection, Hampton Court Palace.The embroidery is contained within a glazed silver frame with molded edges and a suspension loop at the top, flanked on either side by a spiral ribbon cresting. The glass has beveled edges, and its various imperfections and minute air bubbles suggest that it is original to the period. An example of what Daphne Foskett calls a "cabinet miniature," it was intended to be mounted in a cabinet or placed on a table.The bust of Charles is slightly raised from the flat gray-green satin background, an effect produced by the portrait’s having been stitched on satin. The king’s characteristic hairstyle, pointed beard, and upturned moustache are convincingly shaded in various tones of brown, brown-red, and light blond threads. Strands of hair are worked directly on the satin, with the raised portion skillfully merged into the background. The cheeks and jawline are also enhanced by shadowy tones that suggest both stubble and facial bone structure. Each thread is worked in a virtuoso technique that varies the stitch length, tension, and twist in such a way as to manipulate the play of light over the silk fibers. The intensity of detail can be grasped in a number of passages, such as Charles’s right eye, which is created from an amalgam of minute stitches. One can see under magnification that the lower lid is outlined by a minute pink thread, couched down, and worked over by a mass of flesh-toned silk. The iris is laid down in several shades of blue thread, separated from the black pupil by a lighter couching thread, which not only suggests depth by pulling the other threads around the pupil, but also creates the catch-light that defines Charles’s expression.The extraordinarily developed detail of this and the other, similar miniature portraits of the king led at one time to their being dated to the later eighteenth century, when interest in the cult of the martyred king was still strong. J.L. Nevinson, however, demonstrated the use of such techniques in other works that can be firmly placed in the period between 1650 and the end of the seventeenth century, including an embroidered bookbinding with a detailed portrait of a youth now in the Houghton Library at Harvard University that contains a copy of Hopkins’s Psalms dated 1648. It is likely then that the miniature was produced in the second half of the seventeenth century, either before or, as Nevinson posited, in the years immediately following the Restoration and is thus part of the imagery associated with the cult of the Royal Martyr.The link with the cult of Charles the Martyr is made explicit by the embroidered inscription, a quotation from Psalm 18, which associates Charles directly with the Old Testament patriarch King David: "Deus meus est Rvpis mea Psa: 18." The reference is to Psalm 18:2–3, which invokes God’s protection against his enemies: "The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer; my God, my strength in whom I will trust; my buckler, and the horn of my salvation, and my high tower. I will call upon the lord, who is worthy to be praised: so shall I be saved from mine enemies." Although the connection between contemporary monarchs and King David was a commonplace one, the specific association made here, of Charles I with the Psalms of King David, assumed a central importance in his posthumous cult. It drew from that most popular of all commemorative works, the literary "self-portrait" of the martyred king, the Eikon Basilike, a book notionally containing Charles Stuart’s own apologia for his life and reign, which, with its inclusion of the king’s favorite prayers and psalms, offered a kind of spiritual autobiography. Both the prayers and the meditations of the Eikon Basilike explicitly echo the Psalms of David. Indeed, the embroidered image is taken directly from a print that serves as the frontispiece of the Reliquiae Sacrae Carolinae of 1651, an expanded edition of the king’s works with a bound-in 1649 version of the Eikon Basilike. As Elizabeth Wheeler has shown, the "repeated evocation of the Psalms, the emphasis on conscience, the insistence on the depth and sorrow of his sufferings" found in this work all presented a figure intimately accessible to ordinary laymen and women.This intimacy was reflected in small-scale portraits like the present example and other small commemorative objects that were made in the years immediately after the king’s execution. They reflect, too, the peculiarly private aspect of mourning for the king that characterized the ten-year period before the Restoration, during which time there were few permitted outlets for public grief. As Lois Potter has suggested, this circumstance conditioned the nature of the ensuing cult of the martyred king and in particular stimulated the production of such small, intimate kinds of memorial art. The inclusion of the scriptural inscription explicitly offered up the image of the martyred king as a spiritual model. The tradition that the monarch’s own hair was worked into the image would have further emphasized the character of a relic. A number of such objects are recorded in the former collection of Percival D. Griffiths. A poem by Jeremiah Wells (1646–1679), written in reaction to an analogous small-scale portrait of Charles drawn in ink on parchment, which he saw in the library of St. John’s College, Oxford, in 1665, vividly conveys the ecstatic emotions such portraits could summon up. In the latter portrait, the identification of Charles with King David is made literally indelible, for the lines of the face and hair are rendered in minute script that supposedly contain the whole Book of Psalms, or at least the Penitential Psalms. In a manuscript draft of the poem (later amended), Wells begins: "Wash thy impure feet, and trembling trace / With wary steps this more than sacred place." The first stanza of the published version continues in similarly hyperbolic fashion, mystically equating the king’s body with the divine word:"With double reverence we approach to lookOn what’s at once a picture and a book:Nor think it Superstition to adoreA king made now more sacred then before . . .The object here’s Majestick and divine,Divinity does Majesty enshrine . . ."A portrait of the playwright Thomas Killigrew, painted by William Shephard one year after the king’s execution, when Killigrew was in Venice as the political agent of the exiled Charles II, provides visual evidence, similarly rhetorical, as to how such images of the king were used. Killigrew sits at his desk with a (somewhat larger) portrait of Charles I on the wall behind him. He adopts a classic attitude of melancholy, which in other circumstances might have signified merely his own creative temperament, but which in this context may be taken to connote a stoical, philosophical grief for the executed king. His loyalty to the Stuart cause is further underlined by the copy of the Eikon Basilike that lies beneath the pile of his own plays. It is easy to imagine the embroidered portrait miniature eliciting similar kinds of response.[Jonathan Tavares and Andrew Morrall, adapted from English Embroidery from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1580-1700: 'Twixt Art and Nature / Andrew Morrall and Melinda Watt ; New Haven ; London : Published for The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York [by] Yale University Press, 2008.]