[1] The sculpture was of the then king Charles I of England, who wrote to Bernini that the artist's name was "exalted above those of all men of talent who have exercised your profession.".

Despite not meeting Charles I face-to-face, Bernini's bust was considered a success at the time, and the English king rewarded Bernini with jewellery worth over 4,000 Roman scudi (a figure over 60 times the average yearly salary of a worker in Rome).

Queen Henrietta Maria commissioned Bernini to make a companion bust of her, but the English Civil War intervened and it was never made.

The bust of Charles was sold at the end of the English Civil War but recovered for the Royal Collection on the Restoration, only to be destroyed by a fire in Whitehall Palace in January 1698.

[5] For a time in the 19th and early 20th centuries, there was a belief in England and elsewhere that Bernini had also created a bust of Oliver Cromwell, the victor over Charles I in the English Civil War.