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There were of course ideological motivations. Charles and his Catholic wife, Henrietta Maria, had been keen patrons of the arts and selling off their collection would help dispel the whiff of papism that lingered in the king's galleries. But there were also more practical reasons. One thing was as clear to the puritans in 1649 as it is to Charles Saatchi today: pictures can make money. It was recognised from the first that the sale would be more profitable if foreign purchasers were invited to participate.
Among them were Philip IV of Spain, Cardinal Mazarin, Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of the Austrian Netherlands and the wealthy German banker Everard Jabach. With the help of his ambassador in London, the Spanish king secured some of the best works on offer. A sizeable portion of Charles I's collection became the basis for the Prado museum, including such gems as The Virgin and St Elizabeth with Jesus and the Infant St John the Baptist by Raphael, and Titian's Emperor Charles V with a Hound.
But were the puritans really enemies of the arts? Certainly, as part of achieving the nation's spiritual regeneration, Cromwell's government came up wih a legislative programme that withdrew traditional and popular pastimes (Maying, bear-baiting and morris dancing) and also - in part because it had been sponsored by the now defunct Stuart court - the stage. The new cultural prohibitions gave rise to one of the most powerful myths of the Interregnum, that which contrasted Stuart mirth with puritan sourness. But the Commonwealth was not without artistic aspirations. Oliver Cromwell may not have been a patron on a scale to rival Charles I, but neither was he a frenzied iconoclast.
They were certainly united in their belief that works of art were necessary adjuncts of political greatness. Cromwell's love of music illustrates the contradictions of his regime. Music in places of worship was anathema to the puritans, so the organ was removed from Magdalen chapel in Oxford - but only so that it could be transferred to Hampton Court for the Protector's delectation.
Indeed, it was in the domain of music that the puritan era made one of its greatest contributions to the arts in Britain: the staging of the first public operas. An important aspect of Cromwell's court was the regal splendour of the feasts given not only for visiting ambassadors but also to celebrate the weddings of Cromwell's daughters, who both married into the old nobility. At the 1657 wedding of Lady Mary Cromwell, the poet Andrew Marvell staged a pastoral entertainment in which, surprisingly, Oliver Cromwell himself is thought to have played the non-vocal part of a benevolent Jove.
Not that that's ever going to be the first thing mentioned about the Puritan legacy in the United States. If there's a group that's popular to scapegoat for all of the character flaws that may be observed in the United States up to this very moment the Puritans are the go-to scapegoat. There's more than just a few things about the American Puritans I have issues with but some of the best writing I've read in my life was written by English Puritans. There was another piece in The Guardian by an author who was musing upon how while the Puritans have their reputation for a kind of power-wielding in formal power few people did more to promote the power of individual conscious as a guide to ethical life, so that the Puritan legacy should on balance be regarded as mixed rather than uniformly bad.
My own impression over the last twenty odd years is that some of the worst traits of Americans that might be imputed to the Puritan legacy are probably more likely to be the fruit of either unmitigated American Transcendentalism or of the legacy Ayn Rand, since basically every Disney princess since Ariel might as well be named Jane Galt.
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The puritans' objections to the theatre were rooted in a dislike of sham, sensuous spectacle that could distract one from God and in a horror of imposture, of pretending to be someone you weren't.
Puritan attitudes challenged the very basis of any theatrical representation, and in many respects this dislike of "pretending" or impersonation and mistrust of seductive images has been appropriated by theatrical radicals. Whenevever dramatists have wanted to reform the stage, they have invariably used the language of the 17th-century iconoclasts. For instance, at the end of the 19th century, declaring himself "a Puritan in my attitude towards Art... as fond of fine music and handsome building as Milton was, or Cromwell, or Bunyan", George Bernard Shaw announced his intention of curing the contemporary theatre of its empty sensuousness in order to concentrate on ideas and emotional truth.
Similarly, the ascetic puritan aesthetic returned with the experimental British playwrights of the 1950s at a time when the theatre was liable to decorate itself and use the stage - predominantly picture-frame stages - as a picture, lovingly reproducing conventional everyday settings, shamming "reality". In contrast, Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett provided the sparest of stage directions - in Waiting for Godot "a tree, a stone".
Less was now more. They were interested first and foremost in the dramatic power of language. Puritanism was the religion of text, the obsessional scrutiny of the scriptures and of divine providence which, since the Fall, we may only see "through a glass darkly". Overall, the legacy of the puritans is perhaps a radical questioning of the uncertainty of language and images, and of the dangers of interpretation. In this way, the puritans have furnished us with our critical gaze - a questioning outlook on the arts, what the French would call un certain regard.
Not that articles like the one quoted above will change the minds of all the Americans determined to blame the Puritans for all of America's evils. :)
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