According to a story attached to Daventry's own history, King Charles I stayed at what is now the Wheatsheaf the night before the Battle of Naseby in June 1645, and was visited there by the apparition of Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford, his own former minister, beheaded by Parliament in 1641 with the King's own reluctant consent, a betrayal Charles was said to have regretted for the rest of his life. The ghost is said to have urged Charles not to give battle where he intended, though the surviving accounts do not agree on exactly what alternative course of action the apparition proposed instead.
Charles did not heed the warning, whatever form it actually took, and the following day's battle proved genuinely decisive, crushing the Royalist field army and setting in motion the chain of events that ultimately ended with Charles's own execution some four years later, an eerie symmetry between the ghost's own fate and the fate that eventually befell the king who ignored his warning.
A rival claim locates the very same appearance at a building in Northampton rather than Daventry, so the story should be read honestly as an uncertain piece of Civil War folklore rather than a fixed local fact, attached to whichever old inn happens to be telling it at any given time rather than settled firmly in one location.
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