The different accounts of Charles I.’s execution introduce us to several names of the rooms in the old palace.  We are able to follow him through the whole of the last scenes of the 30th of January, 1648.  When he arrived, having walked from St. James’s, “the King went up the stairs leading to the Long Gallery” of Henry VIII, and so to the west side of the palace.  In the “Horn Chamber” he was given up to the officers who held the warrant for his execution.  Then he passed on to the “Cabinet Chamber,” looking upon Privy Garden.  Here, the scaffold not being ready, he prayed and conversed with Bishop Juxon, ate some bread, and drank some claret.  Several of the Puritan clergy knocked at the door and offered to pray with him, but he said that they had prayed against him too often for him to wish to pray with them in his last moments.  Meanwhile, in a small distant room, Cromwell was signing the order to the executioner, and workmen were employed in breaking a passage through the west wall of the Banqueting House, that the warrant for the execution might be carried out which ordained it to be held “in the open street before Whitehall."....

Almost from the time of Charles’s execution Cromwell occupied rooms in the Cockpit, where the Treasury is now, but soon after he was installed “Lord Protector of the Commonwealth” (December 16, 1653), he took up his abode in the royal apartments, with his “Lady Protectress” and his family.  Cromwell’s puritanical tastes did not make him averse to the luxury he found there, and, when Evelyn visited Whitehall after a long interval in 1656, he found it “very glorious and well furnished.”  But the Protectress could not give up her habits of nimble housewifery, and “employed a surveyor to make her some little labyrinths and trap-stairs, by which she might, at all times, unseen, pass to and fro, and come unawares upon her servants, and keep them vigilant in their places and honest in the discharge thereof.”  With Cromwell in Whitehall lived Milton, as his Latin Secretary.  Here the Protector’s daughters, Mrs. Rich and Mrs. Claypole, were married, and here Oliver Cromwell died (September 3, 1658) while a great storm was raging which tore up the finest elms in the Park, and hurled them to the ground, beneath the northern windows of the palace.

In the words of Hume, Cromwell upon his deathbed “assumed more the character of a mediator, interceding for his people, than that of a criminal, whose atrocious violation of social duty had, from every tribunal, human and divine, merited the severest vengeance.”  Having inquired of Godwin, the divine who attended him, whether a person who had once been in a state of grace could afterward be damned, and being assured it was impossible, he said, “Then I am safe, for I am sure that I was once in a state of grace.”  Richard Cromwell continued to reside in Whitehall till his resignation of the Protectorate.