Royal support—as Whig Edmund Ludlow put it—up until the 18th-century. Early Whig historians such as James Wellwood and Roger Coke, even as they criticised and mocked the Stuarts, were hesitant to criticise Charles and quick to condemn the execution as an abomination. The memory of Charles' execution remained uncomfortable for many Whigs in Britain. To delegitimise this cult, later Whigs spread the view of Charles as a tyrant, and his execution as a step towards constitutional government in Britain. In opposition, British Tory literary and political figures, including Isaac D'Israeli and Walter Scott, attempted to rejuvenate the cult with romanticised tales of Charles' execution—emphasising the same tropes of martyrdom the royalists had done before them. D'Israeli narrated the execution of Charles I in his Commentaries on the Life and Reign of Charles the First (1828), in which Charles dies "having received the axe with the same collectedness of thought and died with the majesty with which he had lived". For D'Israeli, "the martyrdom of Charles was a civil and political one", which "seems an expiation of the errors and infirmities of the early years of his reign." However, by the Victorian era, the view of the Whig historians had prevailed in British historiography and the public consciousness. The observance of 30 January as the "martyrdom" of Charles was officially removed from the services of the Church of England with the Anniversary Days Observance Act 1859, and the number of sermons given upon the death of Charles I of dwindled. This Whig view was exemplified by the Victorian historian Samuel Rawson Gardiner as he closed his late 19th-century History of the Great Civil War: Charles I's life and his execution has often been a subject of popular representations in the modern day. Popular historians, such as Samuel Rawson Gardiner, Veronica Wedgwood and J.G. Muddiman, have retold the tale of Charles I's decline and fall, through his trial and to his execution, in narrative histories. Films and television have exploited the dramatic tension and shock of the execution for many purposes: from comedy as in Blackadder: The Cavalier Years, to period drama as in To Kill a King. The subject of the execution, though, has suffered from a notable lack of serious scholarship throughout the modern era; perhaps partly out of what Jason Peacey, a leading figure in the scholarship of Charles I's execution, has called a discomfort at "such a thoroughly