The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I Edited by Jason Peacey peacey/96689/crc 23/7/01 4:06 pm Page 1 The Re...

Author: Jason Peacey

11 downloads 505 Views 973KB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!

Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

DOWNLOAD .DOCX DOWNLOAD .PPTX

The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I Edited by Jason Peacey

peacey/96689/crc

23/7/01

4:06 pm

Page 1

The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

peacey/96689/crc

23/7/01

4:06 pm

Page 2

peacey/96689/crc

23/7/01

4:07 pm

Page 3

The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I Edited by

Jason Peacey Research Fellow History of Parliament London

peacey/96689/crc

23/7/01

4:07 pm

Page 4

Editorial matter and selection © Jason Peacey 2001 Chapter 1 © John Morrill and Philip Baker 2001 Chapter 2 © John Adamson 2001 Chapter 3 © Sean Kelsey 2001 Chapter 6 © David Scott 2001 Chapter 7 © Jason Peacey 2001 Chapters 4, 5 and 8–11 © Palgrave Publishers Ltd 2001 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2001 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 0–333–80259–4 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The regicides and the execution of Charles I / edited by Jason Peacey. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–333–80259–4 1. Charles I, King of England, 1600–1649—Death and burial. 2. Executions and executioners—Great Britain—History—17th century. 3. Regicides—Great Britain. I. Peacey, Jason. DA396.A22 .R44 2001 941.06’2’092—dc21 [B] 2001021608 10 10

9 09

8 08

7 07

6 06

5 05

4 04

3 03

2 02

1 01

Printed in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

RECPR 7/13/01 2:18 PM Page v

Contents Acknowledgements

Page vi

List of Abbreviations

vii

Notes on the Contributors

ix

Introduction Jason Peacey

1

1 Oliver Cromwell, the Regicide and the Sons of Zeruiah John Morrill and Philip Baker

14

2 The Frighted Junto: Perceptions of Ireland, and the Last Attempts at Settlement with Charles I John Adamson

36

3 Staging the Trial of Charles I Sean Kelsey

71

4 Belshazzar’s Feast: Regicide, Republicanism and the Metaphor of Balance Sarah Barber

94

5 The Juristic Foundation of Regicide D. Alan Orr

117

6 Motives for King-Killing David Scott

138

7 Reporting a Revolution: a Failed Propaganda Campaign Jason Peacey

161

8 The Levellers and the End of Charles I Andrew Sharp

181

9 The Quarrel of the Covenant: the London Presbyterians and the Regicide Elliot Vernon

202

10 Elegies and Commemorative Verse in Honour of Charles the Martyr, 1649–60 Andrew Lacey

225

v

RECPR 7/13/01 2:18 PM Page vi

vi The regicides and the Execution of Charles I

11 The European Reaction to the Trial and Execution of Charles I Richard Bonney Index

247 280

Acknowledgements This book originated from a two-day conference held at the Institute of Historical Research in London in January 1999, and the debts which I owe stem in large part from those who helped to make that occasion a success. I would like to thank the Institute for providing a forum for the event, and Bridget Taylor of the IHR for guiding me through the logistical processes involved in setting up a conference, and for offering reassurance at the moments when I was prone to panic. I would also like to extend my gratitude to those among the speakers who chaired sessions, and to Andrew Barclay, Patrick Little, and most especially Chris Kyle, for helping ensure not only that the proceedings went smoothly, but that we cleaned up afterwards. To the two speakers who were signiﬁcantly out of pocket as a result of the distance which they travelled in order to deliver papers, I offer profound thanks, and hereby issue a promise to repay the debt at some point and in some way. Finally I would also like to thank Valerie Cromwell for offering advice on conference funding, and to both the Royal Historical Society and Mr Robert Smith of the Institute for Constitutional Research, for making generous ﬁnancial donations. Finally, I would like to thank all of those who attended the conference, for helping to make it such a stimulating event.

vi

RECPR 7/13/01 2:18 PM Page vii

List of Abbreviations Abbott, Writings

BIHR BL Bodl. CCAM

CCC

CJ Clarendon, History

CP CSPD CSPV CUL CUP EHR Acts and Ordinances Gardiner, Civil War

Gardiner, Documents HJ HLQ HLRO HMC HPT HR

W.C. Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell (4 vols, Cambridge, MA, 1937–47, rep. Oxford, OUP, 1988) Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research British Library, London Bodleian Library, Oxford Calendar of the Proceedings of the Committee for Advance of Money, ed. M.A.E. Green (3 vols, London, HMSO, 1888) Calendar of the Proceedings of the Committee for Compounding, ed. M.A.E. Green (5 vols, London, HMSO, 1892) Commons Journals Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion, ed. W.D. Macray (6 vols, Oxford, OUP, 1888) The Clarke Papers, ed. C.H. Firth (4 vols, Camden Society, 1901) Calendar of State Papers Domestic Calendar of State Papers Venetian Cambridge University Library Cambridge University Press English Historical Review C.H. Firth and F. Rait, Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum (3 vols, London, HMSO, 1911) S.R. Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War 1642–1649 (4 vols, Adlestrop, Windrush Press, 1987) S.R. Gardiner, ed., Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution (Oxford, OUP, 1968) Historical Journal Huntington Library Quarterly House of Lords Record Ofﬁce Historical Manuscripts Commission History of Political Thought Historical Research vii

RECPR 7/13/01 2:18 PM Page viii

viii The regicides and the Execution of Charles I

JBS LJ LQR LSOC

OPH OS

OUP P&P P&R, STC

PH PRO Rushworth, Collections State Trials Wing, STC

Journal of British Studies Lords Journals Law Quarterly Review The Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, ed. T. Carlyle, rev. S.C. Lomas (3 vols, London, Methuen, 1904) The Parliamentary or Constitutional History of England (24 vols, London, 1761–3) Old style (dates): dates are given in old style except that the year is treated as beginning on 1 January. Continental dates are given in new style unless speciﬁed. Oxford University Press Past and Present A.W. Pollard and G.R. Redgrave, A Short Title Catalogue (3 vols, London, Bibliographical Society, 1986) Parliamentary History Public Record Ofﬁce, Kew, London J. Rushworth, Historical Collections of Private Passages of State (8 vols, 1721) T.B. Howell, ed., A Complete Collection of State Trials (33 vols, London, 1809–26) D. Wing, Short Title Catalogue . . . 1641–1700 (3 vols, New York, Modern Language Association of America, 1988)

All pre-1800 works were published in London unless otherwise stated. All contemporary pamphlets cited with ‘669’ or ‘E’ references are located in the Thomason Collection at the British Library

RECPR 7/13/01 2:18 PM Page ix

Notes on the Contributors John Adamson is Fellow in History at Peterhouse, Cambridge. He is the author of a number of articles on seventeenth-century politics, with special focus upon the Civil Wars, and editor of The Princely Courts of Europe: Rituals, Politics and Culture Under the Ancien Regime 1500–1700 (1999). Philip Baker is completing a Cambridge doctorate on the origins and early history of the Levellers, c.1636–47. He is currently research editor at the New Dictionary of National Biography. Sarah Barber is Lecturer in History at Lancaster University. She is the author of Regicide and Republicanism: Politics and Ethics in the English Revolution, 1646–1659 (1998) and A Revolutionary Rogue (2000), a biography of Henry Marten. Richard Bonney is Professor of Modern History and Head of Department at the University of Leicester. He is the author of a number of monographs on early modern France and on European ﬁscal history and state ﬁnance. Since 1987 he has also been editor of the journal French History. Sean Kelsey has taught at Cardiff and Bangor universities, and recently held a British Academy Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship at King’s College, London. He is the author of Inventing a Republic: the Political Culture of the English Commonwealth (1997). Andrew Lacey is Librarian at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He recently completed his PhD, at the University of Leicester, on the cult of King Charles the martyr. John Morrill is Professor of British and Irish History at Cambridge University and a proliﬁc author on many aspects of early modern history, especially on state formation and on religious ideas during the British and Irish revolutions of the 1640s and 1650s. D. Alan Orr completed his PhD at Cambridge University in 1997. His dissertation dealt with changing conceptions of treason during the ix

RECPR 7/13/01 2:18 PM Page x

x The regicides and the Execution of Charles I

English Civil War. This work is currently forthcoming with Cambridge University Press’s Studies in Early Modern British History series under the working title Treason and the State. He is also the author of ‘England, Ireland, Magna Carta, and the Common Law: the Case of Connor Lord Maguire, Second Baron of Enniskillen’, Journal of British Studies (2000). He has taught at Carleton University in Ottowa, Canada and at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. Jason Peacey is Research Fellow at the History of Parliament. He is the author of a number of articles on print, propaganda and politics in the Civil Wars and Interregnum, and is currently preparing a monograph on ‘Politicians, Pamphleteers and Propaganda in Early Modern England’, and co-editing a collection of essays on Parliament at Work, 1510–1670 (Boydell, 2001). David Scott is Senior Research Fellow at the History of Parliament, and as well as being the author of a number of articles on parliamentarian politics during the Civil Wars, is writing a book on The Wars of the Three Kingdoms, 1642–49 (Palgrave, forthcoming). Andrew Sharp is Professor of Political Studies at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. His publications include articles on radical ideas in the 1640s and two editions of seventeenth century English writings: The Political Ideas of the English Civil Wars 1641–49 (1983) and The English Levellers (1998). He has also written on New Zealand themes, including Justice and the Maori (1990) and an edited collection on the changing role of the state in New Zealand since 1984. Elliot Vernon is a barrister who received his doctorate from Cambridge University in 1999, entitled ‘The Sion College Conclave and London Presbyterianism during the English Revolution’, and is currently preparing a number of articles on related themes.

RECIN 7/13/01 2:26 PM Page 1

Introduction Jason Peacey

The year 1999 saw two important anniversaries for scholars of the civil wars and interregnum, as well as for the cultural heritage of Britain. The fact that the 400th anniversary of the birth of Oliver Cromwell received a great deal more attention than the 350th anniversary of the trial and execution of Charles I was perhaps strangely appropriate, given that Cromwell has long been a more popular subject for both popular and academic scrutiny than the proceedings in the High Court of Justice. However, the papers in this volume, ﬁrst delivered at a conference to mark the anniversary of the gruesome end to the life of Charles I, will I hope go some way towards rejuvenating the study of events which are probably the most dramatic in English history, as well as being of curiously contemporary resonance in an era when the future of the monarchy is once more on the political agenda. The trial of Charles I is an inexplicably understudied subject. Recent years have seen an improvement in this situation, not least in the appearance of articles by William Sachse and Howard Nenner,1 but despite the fact that civil war studies continue to ﬂourish, the trial is seriously under-represented in the literature. This is perplexing in the light of the observations made by Michael Walzer in his important article on ‘regicide and revolution’, which highlights the importance of the English king-killers in the wider historical context. As Walzer points out, many kings had been deposed and even killed, but this was the ﬁrst time that they had been executed in public after a public trial, rather than being ‘killed in corners’ by would-be kings or their agents.2 The dramatic appeal of Charles’ trial has been exploited both on ﬁlm and by various hues of ‘popular’ historians, from Hugh Ross Williamson at one extreme, through J.G. Muddiman, to the thoroughly respectable scholarship of Veronica Wedgwood.3 In terms of rigorous academic 1

RECIN 7/13/01 2:26 PM Page 2

2 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

scholarship, however, one suspects that the English-speaking world has never really come to terms with the fact that their ancestors could have undertaken such a thoroughly ‘un-English’ project as removing the head of their monarch. The pervasive attitude regarding the regicides is probably that they were earnest and committed, but essentially wrong-headed. Ultimately, perhaps, serious scholarship on the subject has been hampered by the weight of the opprobrium heaped upon the events and actors of January 1649 by those who were ‘victorious’ in 1660. Certainly, few contemporaries endeavoured to challenge the unﬂattering group portrait of the regicides which was bequeathed by historians and polemicists of the later seventeenth century. Beginning in 1660, there were plenty who were prepared to ‘analyse’ the backgrounds and motivations of the regicides, and later in the century the countervailing voices of men such as Edmund Ludlow were quickly rebutted.4 In the wake of the French revolution, and dedicated to the continental regicides, Mark Noble produced The Lives of the English Regicides, a work highly derivative of royalist works from the previous century, and in the entry on Noble in the old Dictionary of National Biography his works were described as ‘those of an imperfectly educated, vulgar-minded man’, and his ‘moral reﬂections’ were described as ‘puerile’.5 Nevertheless, the articles on the regicides in the DNB continued to suffer from uncritical acceptance of the words of seventeenth-century royalists. One of the last books written by A.L. Rowse has done little to further our knowledge of the men involved in the trial,6 and despite excellent recent studies of the politics of the period, we probably remain some way from fully overcoming the effects of the ‘genealogical invention’ undertaken by seventeenth-century royalists.7 The failure to study the trial and execution of Charles I is all the more perplexing in the light of the wealth of evidence available to historians. Even if thorough biographical investigation of the individual regicides has yet to be completed, we are fortunate to have detailed and accessible evidence relating to events in the court. One ofﬁcial version of the trial proceedings survives in the House of Lords Record Ofﬁce, and was used as the basis for John Nalson’s 1684 account although Nalson added many comments of his own.8 In addition, there is a version, known as ‘Bradshaw’s journal’, in the Public Record Ofﬁce.9 Furthermore, such texts have been readily available in a variety of modern editions,10 while the wealth of contemporary printed material – in the form of tracts, pamphlets and newspapers – are also readily available to scholars.

RECIN 7/13/01 2:26 PM Page 3

Introduction 3

The events of January 1649 and the personalities responsible have not, of course, been ignored. Rather, they have failed to receive the attention they deserve, and too many things have been assumed uncritically by generations of scholars. This brief introduction, therefore, offers a historiographical survey of the extant literature on the subject of the essays in this book, in order to illustrate its strengths and weaknesses. Having done so, it will be possible to demonstrate the areas which need greater attention, and the contributions made to the subject by the articles in this volume.

I How has the trial of Charles I been studied over the last hundred years? The ﬁrst, and most obvious, perspective is the narrative approach, found in S.R. Gardiner, Muddiman, and Wedgwood. Muddiman was more valuable as a historian of the seventeenth-century press than of the regicides, and in the latter role has more to offer as a scholar who made available the documents pertaining to the trial than as a commentator and analyst. Muddiman’s own prejudices, and his antipathy towards the trial, are too powerful to make his analysis of any serious value. The same cannot be said of Wedgwood, although her account focuses rather narrowly on the period 20 November 1648 to 30 January 1649. As such, it is almost a postscript to her two more famous works, The King’s Peace and The King’s War. Gardiner, on the other hand, is probably at his best when analysing the trial, and ought to be not just the ﬁrst point of call for those approaching the subject, but also a refresher course for more seasoned scholars. Nevertheless, Gardiner’s ‘whig’ analysis, like that of the Marxists, is heavily teleological in nature.11 Among more recent scholars, the trial and execution have also failed to receive adequate attention, albeit for different reasons. Although the events of January 1649 form the (chronological) heart of Ian Gentles’ study of the New Model Army,12 many others have been guided by other interests, and have made the trial either the conclusion of, or a starting point for, a broader analysis. David Underdown’s study of Pride’s Purge offers perhaps the most detailed analysis of events between December 1648 and January 1649, and his book remains probably the most satisfying account of the period.13 Both Blair Worden and Sean Kelsey have been concerned with the republic as a political/cultural regime,14 while other scholars have drawn their work to a close with Pride’s Purge in December 1648.15 In addition to the more-or-less broad historical

RECIN 7/13/01 2:26 PM Page 4

4 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

narratives, there have been a series of works on individual regicides, such as John Blakiston,16 Francis Hacker,17 Henry Marten18 and Thomas Andrewes,19 but these have not always been based on the most rigorous scholarship. Similarly, the interesting attempts by W.L.F. Nuttall to study regional groups of regicides, both in Yorkshire and the eastern counties, have failed to offer serious analysis.20 The subject of more detailed study than the trial of Charles I has been the tribulations of the regicides after the Restoration. The ﬂight of the king-killers to Europe, and the campaign to track them down, have provided stories with obvious dramatic appeal, and the memoirs of Edmund Ludlow offer a wonderful insight into the life of the exiles.21 The wealth of archival material in the United States has also been thoroughly exploited and reprinted in order to permit analysis of those three judges who escaped to, and died in, New England.22 Similarly, the trials of those who remained in England, either voluntarily or through coercion, have produced recent works of interest, particularly in the work of Howard Nenner.23 In part, the enthusiasm for such topics has been spearheaded by scholars of contemporary literature.24

II The ﬁrst aspect of the trial which is in need of greater attention centres on the reconstruction of events leading up to the trial. Firstly, this involves analysing how England came to consider trying her king, and the essay by John Morrill and Phil Baker (Chapter 1) considers Oliver Cromwell’s attitude towards Charles, and seeks to determine the moment at which he reached the stage of being prepared to remove the king. Morrill and Baker address the possibility that it was at the famous Putney Debates that the king’s trial, and perhaps his removal from power, became, if not inevitable, then certainly likely. Their conclusions offer important new insights into the character of one of the most prominent and perplexing characters of the period; and their analysis offers an extremely subtle reading of his thought processes, and an important reminder of the need to recognize the complex way in which contemporaries viewed the possible trial and removal of the king, whether by death or deposition. Beyond this, it is also necessary to reconsider the extent to which the trial and execution of the king were a foregone conclusion in the weeks and months before the establishment of the High Court of Justice, as well as to reinterpret the received wisdom about the identity of those who masterminded the trial.25 The article by John Adamson

RECIN 7/13/01 2:26 PM Page 5

Introduction 5

(Chapter 2) considers the attitudes of the political grandees who had hitherto been so important in political life at Westminster, but whose names are rarely mentioned in studies of events after Pride’s Purge. He, like Morrill and Baker, has returned to sources which are well known to historians, but which have been read with insufﬁcient care, caution and subtlety, in order to reach profoundly stimulating conclusions about the political events prior to the trial, the personalities involved, and the factors which inﬂuenced their debates, deliberations and decisions. It is also important, as Sean Kelsey demonstrates in Chapter 3, to reexamine the trial itself. This too has received little attention, and events in Westminster Hall ﬁgure only slightly in the most recent study of the trials of the civil war and interregnum period.26 A recent article has sought to examine the king’s strategy at his trial, and his awareness of his impending martyrdom, not to mention the obvious parallels with the trial and death of Jesus Christ.27 Nevertheless, a re-examination of the trial is necessary in order to discover what its staging can tell us about the way in which its contrivers perceived the process of trying their king, and about the extent to which events in the High Court of Justice played a part in determining the king’s fate. Beyond this, of course, it is essential to discover something more about the men who were involved in the trial, and their reasons, motivations, and justiﬁcations for involvement in the trial and execution. A recent article has sought to reconsider the assumptions about who constituted the regicides, and how many there were, by including those considered to be regicides at the time, on the grounds of their presence when sentence was passed, even though they did not sign the death warrant.28 In spite of this, the attempt by Sachse to re-examine the composition of the High Court of Justice,29 and McIntosh’s efforts to grapple with the issues surrounding the signing of the death warrant itself,30 it remains essential to come to terms with the factors motivating men to sign the death warrant. David Scott’s chapter (Chapter 6) does precisely this for a signiﬁcant group of the regicides who came from one region, albeit with different backgrounds, careers and beliefs. There are a number of excellent general surveys of political thought in the period, although, with the exception of the work of John Sanderson, these obviously touch, rather than focus upon, the theory of regicide.31 Some studies do not get beyond the mid 1640s,32 while recent scholarship has tended to focus upon the thought of the early Stuart period,33 as well as on the ‘Engagement’ controversy,34 and English republicanism.35 Few works have focused directly upon the jus-

RECIN 7/13/01 2:26 PM Page 6

6 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

tiﬁcations for the trial itself.36 Alan Orr’s piece (Chapter 5), therefore, provides an important analysis of the legal theory which underpinned the proceedings in the High Court of Justice, and locates the thinking behind the prosecution’s case in the larger context of English legal and constitutional thought. Sarah Barber’s contribution (Chapter 4) takes a very different approach, analysing one aspect of the contemporary language of republicanism and regicide, by developing ideas of English republican politics from her recent monograph, with the aim of demonstrating a link between the thinking which underlay the regicide and the establishment of the republic. She demonstrates that both events were discussed in the same language of politics and biblical exegesis, and that, as a result, the two events were regarded as being linked by at least some contemporaries, and at least after the fact.37 Another key area for research developed by the contributors to this volume is the reaction to the trial and execution on the part of contemporaries. In this area, C.V. Wedgwood has made one of the few contributions to the study of European reactions to the trial,38 while William Sachse and Lois Potter have offered analysis of royalist literature of the period which involved reactions to the trial.39 Contemporary reaction has also provided the focus for work by Nancy Klein Maguire.40 However, while there has been a study of the defence of the regicide offered by John Cotton in New England,41 we still await studies of the writings of men such as John Sadler, Robert Bennet and Francis Thorpe, who represent interesting examples of men who combined polemical support for regicide and political activity in 1649. In this volume, a series of essays explore the reaction to the trial on the part of different interest groups. My own contribution (Chapter 7) attempts to assess the extent to which the Rump regime’s propaganda campaign in support of the trial had an impact upon contemporaries. The essay by Andrew Sharp (Chapter 8) explores the long-misunderstood reaction of the Levellers, who had at one time been vocal against the king, while Elliot Vernon (Chapter 9) analyses the arguments marshalled by another group of former parliamentarians, the Presbyterians. Sharp and Vernon both draw attention to the fact that contemporaries questioned the legitimacy of a trial masterminded by the army, demonstrating how the Levellers opposed the idea of an army tyranny, and how the Presbyterians questioned the army’s self appointed position as judges of the king’s guilt. Where the two groups differed, of course, was in the Presbyterians’ insistence that the parliamentarian war aims had been defensive and preservative, rather than aimed at bringing a tyrannous king to justice. Andrew Lacey’s study of the royalist tributes to Charles

RECIN 7/13/01 2:26 PM Page 7

Introduction 7

I (Chapter 10) displays how those most traumatized by the death of the king dealt with their grief, how they created a cult of Charles the martyr, and how they avoided the potential logical entanglements and inconsistencies which this sometimes involved, while also stressing that the cult of Charles was something which was not necessarily destined to have a long shelf-life. Lastly, Richard Bonney in Chapter 11 undertakes a major re-evaluation of the ground covered by Wedgwood, in the light of more recent research and scholarship. By examining the European reaction to the trial in its broadest sense, he is able to offer an insight into the centrality of ‘reason of state’ in diplomatic relations of the 1650s, to assess the extent to which political principles played a part in European politics, and to stress the need to understand the reaction to events in 1649 by examining the way in which European powers interacted with each other in the decades either side of the regicide, as changes occurred both in Britain and elsewhere.

III A number of signiﬁcant themes run through the articles in this volume. The ﬁrst is the importance of recognizing the religious aspects to the politics of the period. Scott’s article, together with that by Morrill and Baker, contains reassessments of the religious motivations of the regicides, both in terms of Providence and ‘blood guilt’. An attempt has been made recently to reintroduce religion into the frame when discussing the regicide, although the work of Noel Mayﬁeld arguably focuses more upon religious differences between Presbyterians and Independents.42 The article on ‘blood guilt’ by Patricia Crawford was undoubtedly groundbreaking, but its author was the ﬁrst to admit that no attempt was made to assess ‘the relative importance of blood guilt in bringing about the king’s death’.43 The importance of religion in the minds of parliamentarian politicians has been a valuable element of recent research into the civil wars, and it is essential to adapt our understanding of the regicide accordingly. Religion played a signiﬁcant part in the thinking of men such as Cromwell. For him, Providence, and the need to interpret God’s wishes, were profound personal factors, and speciﬁc biblical stories exerted a profound inﬂuence, whether in regarding himself as a modern Gideon, or in worrying about the modern sons of Zeruiah. Among the regicides, Cromwell was far from being the only man inﬂuenced by religious views, or motivated to sign the death warrant by religious opinions. Many of those who justiﬁed the trial, the death of the king, and the abolition of monarchy can be shown to have

RECIN 7/13/01 2:26 PM Page 8

8 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

looked to biblical examples and precedents, to have used biblical imagery to explain their actions, and to have drawn parallels between Charles and doomed biblical kings. There are many for whom the writing was on the wall from an early stage. Furthermore, the extent to which religion played a part in the lives of contemporaries who opposed the trial and execution of Charles, in ways which we are apt to overlook, is demonstrated by an examination of royalist elegies, in which writers sought to draw parallels between biblical ﬁgures on the one hand, and both the king and his prosecutors on the other. Through analysis of the Presbyterians’ reaction to the trial, furthermore, we are given a long overdue appreciation of the seriousness with which contemporary Calvinists viewed the taking of covenants, and the profound binding force which they were conceived to have over the actions of men. The second theme is the need to recognize the importance of maintaining an open mind about the inevitability of the trial ending in a guilty verdict and the king’s execution. The trial of the king need no longer be conceived as simply the product of political radicals, or the army, despite what opponents of the trial sought, perhaps inevitably, to suggest. Rather, it should be conceived as a process which a variety of different interest groups could support, albeit for different reasons and with different desired outcomes. Some men probably entered the trial process expecting to pass a death sentence, but others may have anticipated that the king would enter a plea, and that he would be given the opportunity to defend himself, save himself, and perhaps preserve his throne. Peers, parliamentarians of various hues, and radicals of certain persuasions, supported the trial of Charles I, and to the extent that they had different aims they also had different justiﬁcations and motivations. Republicanism and religious enthusiasm may have motivated some of those involved in the trial and execution of the king, but others were able to justify the process on legalistic grounds, and by means of Roman law, albeit with a profound, yet ultimately simple modiﬁcation of old visions of monarchical republics, impersonal states and sovereign magistrates. Some were obviously torn between conﬂicting impulses, and between what they thought was just and what they considered practical. It is probably also the case that those involved in the proceedings of the High Court of Justice were, to some extent, ‘thinking on their feet’ in the face of rapidly changing developments. Furthermore, if it is accepted that the execution, or even the deposition of the king, was not inevitable before sometime in late January 1649, then we

RECIN 7/13/01 2:26 PM Page 9

Introduction 9

might be able to reassess our notions about Underdown’s taxonomy of ‘revolutionaries’, ‘conformists’ and ‘abstainers’.44 The third, and equally important, theme is the need to take into account the ‘three kingdoms context’, and the part which AngloScottish and Anglo-Irish relations played in the events leading up to the trial, and in the decision to bring the king to trial, and ﬁnd him guilty of treason. It is this British context of the trial on which the chapters in this volume by Scott, Morrill and Baker, and Adamson are particularly illuminating. Scott’s piece demonstrates the crucial impact of the second civil war and the complex nature of Anglo-Scottish relations, both for inﬂuencing the decision to submit the king to a trial, and the decision of at least some men to support his execution. Morrill and Baker stress that if Putney was important to Cromwell’s attitude to the king, so too was the news of his negotiations with the Scots in order to launch a renewed challenge to parliament. Adamson, meanwhile, alerts us to the fact that the context of the trial may not simply have been the second civil war which was over, but the third civil war which was felt to be imminent, or at least threatened, and in exploring this possibility he draws attention to the crucial Irish context of the events in Westminster in January 1649. Kelsey, furthermore, draws attention to the extent to which the trial became suffused with English imagery and language, a fact which probably made more of an impression on contemporaries than it has on subsequent commentators. The ﬁnal theme is the possibility that constitutional forms were considered by contemporaries to be less important than the way in which governments operated in practical terms. It certainly seems to be the case that the trial and execution of the king were not inextricably linked to the abolition of a monarchical constitution. The trial of Charles I could as easily have led to his deposition as to execution, and thereafter to his replacement by one of his sons as the abolition of monarchy. Understanding of ‘republicanism’ has undergone important changes in recent years, in terms of recognizing it as something not explicitly, or necessarily, opposed to monarchy. The essays in this volume indicate that those ‘republicans’ involved in bringing Charles I to justice may have been intent on transforming the nature of the English monarchy, but that in neither theoretical nor practical terms were they logically committed to the abolition of the monarchical element of the constitution. This conclusion is supported, moreover, by the European reaction to the events in January 1649. It was the behaviour of a government, not its form, which was of fundamental importance.

RECIN 7/13/01 2:26 PM Page 10

10

The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

In part, the development of these themes represents the application to our understanding of the regicide of themes which have been developed in relation to the civil war period in general over the last two decades. However, in addition, the contributions to this volume will, we hope, offer new impetus for a thorough re-evaluation of the events in and surrounding the High Court of Justice, in order to ensure that one of the most important episodes in English history receives the attention which it deserves.

Notes 1. W. Sachse, ‘England’s Black Tribunal’, JBS, XII (1973), 69–85; H. Nenner, ‘The Trial of Charles I and the Failed Search for a Bounded Monarchy’, in G.J. Schochet, ed., Restoration, Ideology and Restoration (Washington, Folger Institute, 1990), 1–21. 2. M. Walzer, ‘Regicide and Revolution’, Social Research, XL (1973), 617–42; Sachse, ‘England’s Black Tribunal’, pp. 70–1. 3. H.R. Williamson, The Day they Killed the King (London, Frederick Muller, 1957); C.V. Wedgwood, The Trial of Charles I (London, Collins, 1964); J.G. Muddiman, The Trial of King Charles I (London, W. Hodge & Co. 1928). 4. G. Bate, The Lives, Actions and Execution of the Prime Actors (1661); The True Characters of the Educations, Inclinations and Several Dispositions of All and Every One of Those Bloody Barbarous Persons (1661); W. Winstanley, The Loyall Martyrology (1665); Regicides No Saints Nor Martyrs, Freely Expostulated With the Publication of Ludlow’s Third Volume (1700); A. Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, ed. P. Bliss (4 vols, Oxford, 1848). 5. M. Noble, The Lives of the English Regicides (1798). 6. A.L. Rowse, The Regicides (London, Duckworth, 1994). 7. Sachse, ‘England’s Black Tribunal’. 8. HLRO, MS 3676; J. Nalson, A True Copy of the Journal of the High Court of Justice for the Tryal of K. Charles I (1684) 9. PRO, SP 16/517. 10. R. Lockyer, ed., The Trial of Charles I (London, Folio Society, 1959); Muddiman, Trial of King Charles I; D. Lagomarsino and C.J. Wood, eds, The Trial of Charles I, A Documentary History (London, University Press of New England, 1989). 11. Gardiner, Civil War, IV, pp. 254–330 ; B. Manning, 1649: The Crisis of the English Revolution (London, Bookmarks, 1992); Muddiman, Trial of King Charles; Wedgwood, Trial of Charles I. 12. I. Gentles, The New Model Army (Oxford, Blackwell, 1992), pp. 266–314. 13. D. Underdown, Pride’s Purge (Oxford, OUP, 1971), pp. 173–207. 14. B. Worden, The Rump Parliament (Cambridge, CUP, 1974), pp. 33–60; S. Kelsey, Inventing a Republic (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1997). 15. J.R. MacCormack, Revolutionary Politics in the Long Parliament (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1973). 16. R. Howell, ‘Newcastle’s Regicide: the Parliamentary Career of John Blakiston’, Archaeologia Aeliana, 4th series, XLII (1964), 207–30.

RECIN 7/13/01 2:26 PM Page 11

Introduction 11 17. H.L. Hubbard, ‘Colonel Francis Hacker, Parliamentarian and Regicide’, Transactions of the Thoroton Society, XLV (1941), 5–17. 18. C.M. Williams, ‘The Anatomy of a Radical Gentleman: Henry Marten’, in D.H. Pennington and K.V. Thomas, eds, Puritans and Revolutionaries (Oxford, OUP, 1978), 118–38; I. Waters, Henry Marten and the Long Parliament (Chepstow, Chepstow Society, 1973); J.C. Cole, ‘Some Notes on Henry Marten, the Regicide, and his Family’, Berkshire Archaeological Journal, XLIX (1949), 23–41. 19. J.C. Whitebrook, ‘Sir Thomas Andrewes, Lord Mayor and Regicide, and his Relations’, Transactions of the Congregational Historical Society, XIII (1939), 151–65. 20. W.L.F. Nuttall, ‘The Yorkshire Commissioners Appointed for the Trial of King Charles the First’, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, XLIII (1971), 147–57; W.L.F. Nuttall, ‘Commissioners for the Trial of Charles I’, Essex Journal, XIII (1978), 75–85. 21. E. Ludlow, Memoirs, ed. C.H. Firth (2 vols, Oxford, OUP, 1894); E. Ludlow, A Voyce from the Watchtower, ed. A.B. Worden (London, Camden Society, 1978); R.C.H. Catterall, ‘Sir George Downing and the Regicides’, American Historical Review, XVII (1912), pp. 268–89; G. de Lagrange-Ferregues, ‘Un Regicide Anglais a Nerac’, Revue de l’Agenais, XCI (1965); A. Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage in the Reign of Charles II, 1660–1685 (Cambridge, CUP, 1994). 22. D.C. Wilson, ‘Web of Secrecy: Goffe, Whalley and the Legend of Hadley’, New England Quarterly, LX (1987), pp. 515–48; E. Stiles, A History of Three of the Judges of King Charles I (1794); M.P. Schoﬁeld, ‘The Three Judges of New Haven’, History Today, XII (1962); L.A. Welles, The Regicides in Connecticut (New Haven, Connecticut Commission on Historical Publications, 1935); M.L. Sargent, ‘Thomas Hutchinson, Ezra Stiles and the Legend of the Regicides’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, XLIX (1992), 431–48; Hutchinson Papers II (Prince Society II, New York, 1865); ‘Letters and Papers Relating to the Regicides’, Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 4th series, VIII (Boston, 1868), pp. 122–225; ‘Dixwell Papers’, Papers of the New Haven Colony Historical Society, VI (1900), pp. 337–74; T. Hutchinson, The History of the Colony and Province of Massachussets Bay, ed. L.S. Mayo (3 vols, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1936). 23. V.L. Ruland, ‘A Royalist Account of Hugh Peters’ Arrest’, HLQ, XVIII (1955), pp. 178–82; J.M. Patrick, ‘The Arrest of Hugh Peters’, HLQ, XIX (1956), pp. 343–51; H. Nenner, ‘The Trial of the Regicides: Retribution and Treason in 1660’, in H. Nenner, ed., Politics and the Political Imagination in Later Stuart Britain (Rochester, University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 21–42. See also H. Nenner, The Right to be King (Basingstoke, Macmillan Press – now Palgrave, 1995). 24. L.L. Knoppers, ‘This So Horrid Spectacle: Samson Agonistes and the Execution of the Regicides’, English Literary Renaissance, XX (1990), pp. 487–504; N.K. Maguire, Regicide and Restoration (Cambridge, CUP, 1992). 25. In recent years there has been an attempt to counter some of the myths that have been allowed to survive unchallenged: S.M. Koenigsberg, ‘The Vote to Create the High Court of Justice: 26 to 20?’, Parliamentary History, XII (1993), pp. 281–6.

RECIN 7/13/01 2:26 PM Page 12

12

The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

26. A. Hast, ‘State Treason Trials During the Puritan Revolution, 1640–1660’, HJ, XV (1972), pp. 37–53. 27. Daniel P. Klein, ‘The Trial of Charles I’, Journal of Legal History, XVIII (1997), pp. 1–25. 28. A.W. McIntosh, ‘The Number of the English Regicides’, History, LXVII (1982), pp. 195–216. The men in question were: Francis Allen, Thomas Andrewes, Thomas Hammond, Edmund Harvey, William Heveningham, Cornelius Holland, John Lisle, Nicholas Love, Isaac Pennington, Matthew Thomlinson. 29. Sachse, ‘England’s Black Tribunal’. 30. A.W. McIntosh, The Death Warrant of King Charles I (London, House of Lords Record Ofﬁce, 1981). 31. J. Sanderson, ‘But the People’s Creatures’. The Philosophical Basis of the English Civil War (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1989), pp. 142–74; R. Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge, CUP, 1993), pp. 202–59; R. Tuck, Natural Rights Theories (Cambridge, CUP, 1979); W. Haller, Liberty and Reformation in the Puritan Revolution (London, Columbia University Press, 1955); P. Zagorin, A History of Political Thought in the English Revolution (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1954), pp. 62–86; J.A.W. Gunn, Politics and the Public Interest in the Seventeenth Century (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 1–54; C.C. Weston and J.R. Greenberg, Subjects and Sovereigns (Cambridge, CUP, 1981); M.A. Judson, From Tradition to Political Reality (Hamden, Archon Books, 1980). 32. M.A. Judson, The Crisis of the Constitution (London, Rutgers University Press, 1988); J.W. Allen, English Political Thought 1603–1644 (London, Methuen, 1938). 33. J.P. Sommerville, Politics and Ideology in England 1603–1640 (London, Longman, 1986); G. Burgess, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution (Basingstoke, Macmillan Press – now Palgrave, 1992). 34. J.M. Wallace, ‘The Engagement Controversy, 1649–1652’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, LXVIII (1964), pp. 384–405; Q Skinner, ‘The Ideological Context of Hobbes’s Political Thought, HJ, IX (1966), pp. 286–317; his ‘Conquest and Consent: Thomas Hobbes and the Engagement Controversy’, in G.E. Aylmer, ed., The Interregnum (London, Macmillan, 1972), pp. 79–98; G. Burgess, ‘Usurpation, Obligation and Obedience in the Thought of the Engagement Controversy’, HJ, XXIX (1986), pp. 515–36. 35. D. Armitage, A. Himy and Q. Skinner, eds, Milton and Republicanism (Cambridge, CUP, 1995); B. Worden, ‘Classical Republicanism and the Puritan Revolution’, in H. Lloyd Jones, V. Pearl and B. Worden, eds, History and Imagination: Essays in Honour of H.R. Trevor-Roper (London, Duckworth, 1981), pp. 182–200; Idem, ‘Marchamont Nedham and the Beginnings of English Republicanism, 1649–1656’, in D. Wootton, ed., Republicanism, Liberty and Commercial Society, 1649–1776 (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1994); Z. Fink, The Classical Republicans (Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1962). 36. J. Collins, ‘Treason and Tyranny: Some Thoughts on the Trial and Execution of Charles I’, Rice University Studies, LX (1974), pp. 23–31. 37. S. Barber, Regicide and Republicanism (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1998).

RECIN 7/13/01 2:26 PM Page 13

Introduction 13 38. C.V. Wedgwood, ‘European Reaction to the Death of Charles I’, American Scholar, XXXIV (1965), pp. 431–46. 39. W.L. Sachse, ‘English Pamphlet Support for Charles I, November 1648–January 1649’, in W.A. Aiken and B.D. Henning, eds, Conﬂict in Stuart England (New York, Cape, 1960), pp. 147–68; L. Potter, ‘Royal Actor as Royal Martyr: the Eikon Basilike and the Literary Scene in 1649’, in G.J. Schochet, ed., Restoration, Ideology and Restoration (Washington, 1990), pp. 217–40; L. Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing. Royalist Literature 1641–1660 (Cambridge, CUP, 1989). 40. N.K. Maguire, ‘The ‘Tragedy’ of Charles I: Distancing and Staging the Execution of a King’, in Schochet, ed., Restoration, Ideology and Restoration, pp. 45–66. 41. F.J. Bremer, ‘In Defense of Regicide: John Cotton on the Execution of Charles I’, William and Mary Quarterly, XXXVII (1980). 42. N.H. Mayﬁeld, Puritans and Regicides. Presbyterian-Independent Differences over the Trial and Execution of Charles (I) Stuart (London, University Press of America, 1988). 43. P. Crawford, ‘Charles Stuart, That Man of Blood’, JBS, XVI (1977), pp. 41–61: p. 46. 44. Underdown, Pride’s Purge, pp. 208–56.

REC1 7/13/01 2:23 PM Page 14

1 Oliver Cromwell, the Regicide and the Sons of Zeruiah1 John Morrill and Philip Baker

I In the middle of the night following Charles I’s execution, Oliver Cromwell stood over the cofﬁn, peering down at the body to which the severed head had been surgically reattached, and is reported to have muttered the words ‘cruel necessity’.2 Whether or not this report – from a very distraught and highly partial observer, with an uncertain oral history before it was written down – is true, these words are, we shall suggest, precisely the words that would have been passing through his mind. Cromwell was, we shall argue, at once a bitter opponent of Charles, a reluctant regicide, and a ﬁrm monarchist. To understand how this can be so, and how he attempted to square circles in his own mind and in the making of public policy, we need to look with renewed care at his recorded words and actions over a period of some 15 months from the time of the Putney Debates to the ﬁnal show trial. This paper argues that Oliver Cromwell ‘fell out of love’ with Charles I no later than 1 November 1647 but that it took him a lot longer to decide quite how and when he was to be removed from power and to decide what the implications of Charles’ deposition and/or execution were for the future of the monarchy. In doing so, it takes sides in perhaps the greatest single contention in modern scholarship about Cromwell. It does not question, but rather embraces, the near consensus that has acquitted him of the charges of hypocrisy, double-dealing and a craving for power levelled against him by almost all his contemporaries. His sincerity and his deep religious faith are now widely accepted. There may have been a strong capacity for self-deception in his make-up, but not a calculating policy of deceiving others. However, this paper does come up against a more sharply divided modern his14

REC1 7/13/01 2:23 PM Page 15

Oliver Cromwell, the Regicide and the Sons of Zeruiah 15

toriography about his actions and motives from the autumn of 1647 to 1 January 1649 than for any other period in his career. The interpretative difﬁculties are concentrated into that 15-month period. All students of these events agree that Cromwell was at the least a and probably the driving force sustaining the trial and execution of Charles I throughout January 1649.3 The evidence for this is plentiful but all of it unreliable. Cromwell himself falls silent as far as the historical record is concerned.4 In the weeks following Pride’s Purge, only one letter of his has survived, a request on 18 December 1648 written to the master and fellows of Trinity Hall that they allocate a room in Doctors’ Commons to Isaac Dorislaus.5 Indeed, between the act of regicide and Cromwell’s departure for Ireland in August 1649, in essence we only have letters relating to the marriage of his son Richard to Dorothy Maijor or routine military memoranda. We have to rely on what others report about him, or what they later recalled. So nothing is certain. It might be fruitful to wonder about this; but for the present we do not wish to disturb the existing consensus. His name does stand out on the death warrant. It would seem that he was a determined kingkiller in January 1649. There is an equal consensus that Cromwell had never voiced any thought of putting an end to Charles I’s rule before October 1647. We can see no reason to doubt Cromwell’s commitment to monarchy in some form before that date, and no evidence to suggest that he may have had regicide on his mind. But historians do not agree at all about Cromwell’s intentions in the intervening period. On one wing are those like Charles Firth, David Underdown, Blair Worden and Barry Coward6 who see him as a reluctant regicide, as a very late convert. They rely principally on his recorded words at Putney, on a speech in the Commons at the passage of the Vote of No Addresses (on 3 January 1648), on a sequence of letters to Robert Hammond throughout the year 1648, on royalist newsletters, and above all on his actions in the three weeks that followed his return to London on 6 December and ended with his meetings with those lawyers who had taken their seats in the Rump – especially the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of commonwealth jurisprudence, Whitlocke and Widdrington; and they paint a picture of a man desperate not to fall into a republican abyss, to move every which way to pressurize Charles into accepting the army’s bottom line. On the other side are historians such as Veronica Wedgwood, Ian Gentles, Peter Gaunt and Robert Paul,7 who interpret some of the same material (especially the letters to Hammond and those after the battle of Preston) differently;

REC1 7/13/01 2:23 PM Page 16

16

The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

who place less reliance on royalist newsletters as tainted by too much wishful-thinking; who rely more on tantalizing army documents and memoirs, which are often graphic but always tainted with the wisdom of hindsight; and who rummage around more in the events of the weeks immediately after the Putney debates. The resulting narrative sees Cromwell as steeling himself much earlier for a confrontation with Charles, and as someone willing to look at a variety of means of achieving that end. For these scholars, Cromwell’s manoeuvres after Pride’s Purge were intended not to prevent a trial but to ensure that it had the widest possible support and the best possible outcome. In the middle, inscrutable as he can be, stands the towering ﬁgure of Samuel Rawson Gardiner, reviewing the evidence with a care others have eschewed and with much still to teach us – and sitting inscrutably on the fence.8 We believe that it is possible to get closer to the truth; and we hope to demonstrate this by a more careful discrimination between several questions. We want to distinguish much more clearly between Cromwell’s attitude to Charles himself and his attitude to monarchy; and to assess his view of the role of that king and of the monarchy itself in the settlement of the nation. We want to focus most sharply on his own words, to subject them to a keener biblical hermeneutic than hitherto and to interrogate other sources as and when that process requires it. We are assisted by the fact that for the period from the meeting of the General Council of the army in Putney Church in late October 1647 to the purge of the parliament on 6 December 1648 we do possess plenty of Cromwell’s own words. We have 43 of his letters, several of them more than 1000 words long and many of them to close friends, what we can take to be fairly full transcripts of 28 speeches and signiﬁcant interventions during the recorded parts of the Putney debates, again several of them meaty and substantial contributions of several hundred words each. In addition, we have less full summaries of several speeches made in the House of Commons and written down by others. No similar period gives us such a balanced blend of Cromwell’s public and private utterance. However, beyond that we enter a quagmire of fragmentary material, all of a treacherous kind, too much of it subject to much wisdom of hindsight, and much else to deeply partisan perspective. Although so much of this contextual material contradicts other evidence, most historians (Gardiner apart) have chosen to decide what is reliable and what is not on more or less a priori grounds. This more than anything else explains the quite sharp range of interpretations of Cromwell’s part in events. We wish to suggest that a closer attention to his own words and tighter comparison of the contextual material can

REC1 7/13/01 2:23 PM Page 17

Oliver Cromwell, the Regicide and the Sons of Zeruiah 17

yield a projection of Cromwell’s ideas and intentions that is more convincing than any previous account. Most of the letters from 1647–48 investigated for this paper contain retrievable quotations or paraphrases from books Cromwell had read. We can see he had read 34 books – 21 of them from the Old Testament and 13 from the New. There is not a shred of evidence from this period that Cromwell read anything other than the Bible. His political theory derived exclusively from his understanding of God’s willingness to work with and through a variety of forms as recorded in the Old Testament. The nearest he ever came to a historical disquisition on the basis of government was at Putney: [Consider the case of the Jews]. They were ﬁrst [divided into] families where they lived, and had heads of families [to govern them], and they were [next] under Judges, and [then] they were under Kinges. When they came to desire a Kinge, they had a kinge; ﬁrst elective and secondly by succession. In all these kinds of government they were happy and contented. If you make the best of itt, if you would change the government to the best of it, it is but a moral thing. It is but as Paul says [Philippians 3.8] ‘dross and dung in comparison of Christ.’9 Nowhere does Cromwell draw in any comparable way on classical or modern historical reading or knowledge. If we are to understand Cromwell’s ruminations about what was possible and what was right to be done about the king in 1647–49 we must follow him through the Bible and the Bible alone.

II The story begins at Putney, and – from Cromwell’s point of view – it begins with the very last and longest of his 28 contributions. We need to begin by revisiting the conclusions of a separate joint paper published recently under the title The Case of the Armie Truly Restated.10 In that paper we concluded: First, that the franchise debate at Putney was important because of its later resonance not because it changed anything at the time or helps us to understand the dynamics of politics in the later 1640s or the failure of the Putney Debates and the subsequent political recriminations. After the fury of the debate on 29 October, agreement was

REC1 7/13/01 2:23 PM Page 18

18

The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

reached by all present – from Ireton on one wing to Rainsborough on the other – on a revision of the franchise, an agreement that was subsequently put out of mind by all present. Secondly, there was a running skirmish throughout the debates at Putney between the proponents of the Case of the Armie and the proponents of the Agreement of the People. The latter is far from a digest of the former and is not penned by the same hands, the Case being the work of Sexby and the Agreement of Wildman. This debate, we suggest, split ofﬁcer from ofﬁcer and adjutator from adjutator. Thirdly, the only ‘Levellers’ present at Putney were those spotted by historians. There were men present later associated with the name Leveller. Sexby, we have shown, was never a Leveller, and Wildman and Pettus were welcomed at Putney as men associated with the radicalisation of London politics not as the soulmates of Lilburne and Overton. Fourthly, the issue that really divided the General Council, and which led to its collapse amongst bitter recriminations of bad faith on all sides was not the franchise or even the detail of the Agreement; it was the Agreement’s eloquent silence – the future role of the monarchy. It was bitter disagreements about that which caused Clarke to stop reporting; that caused Ireton to storm out on 5 November of all days; and which dominates the subsequent recrimination. And again it was an issue that split the senior ofﬁcers amongst themselves, the ofﬁceradjutators and soldier-adjutators amongst themselves and the new agents amongst themselves. Three issues relating to the kingship came up at Putney. The ﬁrst was the allegation in The Case that the grandees had entered into a personal treaty with the king that would lead to the betrayal of the cause for which the soldiers had fought and many of them died. To this Ireton and Cromwell robustly replied that everything they had done was rooted in the express will of the General Council, and it was the agents who were at fault for seeking to undermine army unity. This issue was tersely discussed at the outset of two days’ debates, but in essence the agents withdrew the charge; and the grandees having protested their innocence dropped their complaint. The other debates related to the future settlement. Whether new arrangements for the making and administration of law, for civil government and for securing religious liberty for all sincere protestants were driven through the existing parliament or formed into a paper constitution approved by the people at large, there remained the question as to whether the king would have any role in that settlement, and if so, at what point he would

REC1 7/13/01 2:23 PM Page 19

Oliver Cromwell, the Regicide and the Sons of Zeruiah 19

be consulted or invited to consent to it. Was there to be any future personal treaty with the king and if so with whom? And behind that lay a further question: whether the king, that is King Charles I, should be so consulted and invited; or whether a king should be so consulted and invited. Hard things were said about Charles I at Putney; and Sexby for one spoke against monarchy itself.11 Captain Bishop and Colonel Harrison both called Charles ‘a man of bloud’,12 and Cromwell for one assumed that Harrison was calling for the king’s death, as we shall see.13 Personal animus against Charles was present from the beginning of the debates, with Sexby, in the ﬁrst substantive contribution on the ﬁrst day, saying that ‘we have labour’d to please a Kinge, and I thinke, except we goe about to cutt all our throats wee shall not please him.’14 Several speakers made clear their desire to ensure the outright abolition of the negative voice – something which had been a steady demand since the summer of 1646 of those soon to be called Levellers.15 However, the Case of the Armie itself had called for a settlement of the people’s rights and freedoms before there was any consideration of those of the king. It had not called for the abolition of monarchy.16 In the words of William Allen: the Case had allowed kings to be set up ‘as farre as may bee consistent with, and nott prejudiciall to the liberties of the Kingedome . . . which I thinke hee may and itt is not our judgement onely, butt of those set forth in the Case of the Army’.17 If we read the silence of the Agreement of the People in the light of Wildman’s A Cal to all the soldiers of the Armie of 29 October (which we can presume most of those present would have done), we would reach the same conclusion. For in A cal, Wildman exhibited an extreme hostility to Charles, demanded his impeachment and recommended that only a free parliament (in other words, one elected within a free constitution) should reach a settlement with the king.18 If monarchy were to be restored it would be by a free people conferring it onto a supplicant king – and not necessarily Charles I. This was a line of argument to which Wildman persisted in his heated exchanges with Ireton on 1 November,19 where he concluded quite baldly that his argument was not about the survival of monarchy but about the need to call this king to account and to prevent future abuse of royal power: ‘I onely afﬁrme that [our settlement] doth afﬁrme the Kinge’s and Lords’ interest surer than before.’20 Such a programme was close to that previously articulated by some future Leveller leaders, by some ofﬁcers and by some agents; but it was incompatible with what Lilburne had been urging most recently in print and in private, and with what many ofﬁcers – Rainsborough21 as much as Ireton – and some

REC1 7/13/01 2:23 PM Page 20

20

The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

adjutators had been saying. It split the General Council vertically and not horizontally. Beyond that, as the rhetorical temperature rose on 1 November, some people went further than they had previously. Thus Sexby asserted that ‘wee are going to sett uppe the power of Kinges, some part of itt, which God will destroy; and which will bee butt as a burthensome stone that whosoever shall fall upon itt, will destroy him.’22 But even this is compatible with a programme of extreme hostility to Charles and a delay in offering any role to some future monarch until every other aspect of the settlement was in place. This, then, is the context for Cromwell’s three major interventions in the debate on 1 November.23 The sequence is important. He began by arguing that this was not the time or the place for the army to decide on a negative voice in the king or in the Lords. That belonged either to a parliament chastened and made wiser by the army’s remonstrations or it belonged to a parliament elected under new and better electoral rules.24 In a part of the speech apparently not recorded by Clarke but quoted directly by Colonel Goffe, he added that the General Council must beware of ‘a lying spiritt in the mouth of Ahab’s Prophets. Hee speakes falselie to us in the name of the Lord’.25 Goffe rebuked Cromwell for cherry-picking the offerings of comrades from the Friday prayer meeting. Cromwell, clearly stung and hurt, responded by twice acknowledging his hastiness in running to judgement. Following Allen’s call for all to keep an open mind on the king’s future, and Sexby’s meditation on the words of Jeremiah: ‘we ﬁnd in the worde of God: “I would heal Babylon but shee would not be healed”. I thinke that wee have gone about to heale Babylon when shee would not’,26 Cromwell returns to Goffe’s rebuke and pleads for caution against the too-ready appropriation of Old Testament typologies. But he then goes into a dramatic and clearly extempore meditation on the series of testimonies given forth as a result of the day of prayer. Truly wee have heard many speaking to us; and I cannott butt thinke that in many of those thinges God hath spoken to us . . . I cannott see butt that wee all speake to the same end, and the mistakes are onely in the way. The end is to deliver this nation from oppression and slavery, to accomplish that worke that God hath carried on in us . . . We agree thus farre. He then makes a crucial admission: ‘wee all apprehend danger from the person of the kinge’.27 For several minutes he labours that point, reiter-

REC1 7/13/01 2:23 PM Page 21

Oliver Cromwell, the Regicide and the Sons of Zeruiah 21

ating that there is a problem with Charles himself – ‘[I] my self do concurre’ with those who held that ‘there can bee noe safetie in a consistencie with the person of the Kinge or the Lords, or their having the least interest in the publique affaires of the Kingedome’. But he argues that this does not mean that ‘God will destroy these persons [ie kings in general] or that power’. Furthermore, God has clearly shown that they must not ‘sett uppe’ or ‘preserve [kings]’ where it threatens the public interest. But God has not yet made plain, he says, whether it would be hazardous to the public interest to ‘goe about to destroy or take away’ king and Lords or whether it would be more hazardous to retain them.28 His plea is not to rush to judgment on this issue. The Council must not assume that even if God wills it, they are ipso facto the self-appointed instruments of God’s will: [let] those to whome this is not made cleare, though they do but thinke itt probable that God will destroy them, yett lett them make this rule to themselves, though God have a purpose to destroy them, and though I should ﬁnde a desire to destroy them . . . Therefore let those that are of that minde waite uppon God for such a way when the thinge maye bee done without sin and without scandall too.29 It is our contention that this gives us the key to Cromwell’s politics over the next 15 months: an ever-greater conviction that God intended Charles I to be struck down, and a continuing uncertainty about when and how that would be done and about the extent of his and the army’s agency. This anger against a king who was duplicitous and who willed the nation back into blood, the principal author and progenitor of the second civil war, can be seen to mount steadily; and Cromwell’s public and private letters are a chronicle of his introspective search for the connection between God’s actions in the history of His ﬁrst chosen people, the people of Israel, and of His new chosen people, the people of England. In a sense Goffe’s rebuke at Putney took 15 months to reach fruition.

III After 1 November, the generals reinforced the news blackout over events at Putney. The newspapers carried no reports, and Clarke and his team of stenographers laid down their quills. Fragmentary notes in his papers suggest that the mood got uglier by the day, but that the divisions remained vertical and not horizontal.30 The debates seem to have been

REC1 7/13/01 2:23 PM Page 22

22

The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

about whether the army should precipitate an immediate crisis by a confrontation with the parliament and king, or proceed more slowly, and this division underlay the bitter disputes about the nature of the rendezvous Fairfax had called, and whether the army as a whole would adopt the Agreement or the more orderly process laid out in what became the Remonstrance. According to a petition issued on 11 November by some – but not all – of the new agents, Ireton stormed out of the General Council, not to return, on 5 November when a vote was taken to send a letter to the Speaker declaring it was the army’s desire that no further propositions should be sent to the king.31 Signiﬁcantly, although parliamentary duties may have kept Cromwell away on 5 and 6 November,32 Cromwell remained active in the Council; and he was certainly present on 11 November, when Harrison called the king ‘a Man of Blood’ and demanded that ‘they were to prosecute him’. Cromwell responded by reminding him that as in the case of David’s refusal to try Joab for the slaying of Abner, there were pragmatic circumstances in which murder was not to be punished. The pragmatic circumstance was that ‘the sons of Zeruiah were too hard for him’.33 Zeruiah was David’s sister, and Joab was just one of her many sons. Cromwell is saying that Joab’s brothers were too powerful for him to proceed against Joab. Joab/Charles was guilty of murder; realpolitik alone prevented his trial. It is worth speculating – we can do no more – who was who in Cromwell’s application of this biblical passage. The difﬁculty of doing so does not detract from the shock. The reason for not proceeding against Charles was not that it would be unjust but they could not (yet) get away with it.

IV Cromwell crossed some sort of Rubicon on 1 November, and events quickly strengthened his resolve. The next three weeks saw the king’s escape from Hampton Court; the news reaching Cromwell from a variety of sources that Charles had initialled a treaty with the antiSolemn Leaguers in Scotland followed fast on its heels, but – in the view of a number of observers from across the political spectrum – he was most affected by reading intercepted correspondence between the king and the queen which rejoiced in the way the army grandees were being bamboozled.34 We do not have to believe the melodramatic tale of the letter containing Charles’ plan to doublecross the army allegedly cut from a saddle-bag in the Blue Boar in Holborn by Cromwell and Ireton dressed as troopers, although Gardiner’s careful analysis of its basis in

REC1 7/13/01 2:23 PM Page 23

Oliver Cromwell, the Regicide and the Sons of Zeruiah 23

fact is more impressive than the breezy dismissal of most modern scholars.35 Certainly something as signiﬁcant as this is needed to explain Ireton’s dramatic volte face between 5 and 21 November.36 Perhaps the most important supplementary testimony comes in Sir John Berkeley’s account of his encounter with Cromwell and Ireton on 28 November 1647 when Berkeley presented himself at Windsor with letters from the king. He found an army council meeting in progress: he records that ‘I look’d upon Cromwell and Ireton and the rest of my acquaintance. Who saluted me very coldly, and had their countenance very changed towards me’. Berkeley was then told by an unnamed ofﬁcer that at the afternoon meeting of the council, Ireton and Cromwell had called for the king to be transferred as a close prisoner to London ‘and then br[ought] to a tryal’; and that none be allowed to speak to him’ [ie negotiate with him] upon pain of death’.37 All this hangs together. A whole variety of separate and differently problematic sources see a transformation in Cromwell in the weekend of 19–21 October and the days that follow. Perhaps it was the escape of the king; but most of these accounts attribute it to the content of intercepted letters that revealed the king’s initialled agreement with the Scots and intention to string the army along as far as maybe.38 If Cromwell had had a regicidal epiphany at Putney, it became much ﬁrmer within the month. Reliable material becomes very sparse for the next few months. We can be sure that Cromwell spoke strongly in favour of the Vote of No Addresses on 3 January 1648, and in that speech and in the ﬁrst of a vital sequence of letters to Colonel Robert Hammond (a distant relation by marriage and the king’s gaoler) a hardening of attitudes is clear. Cromwell’s words as recorded by John Boys in his diary on 3 January are therefore important.39 They seem to represent very clearly his conversion to the trial of the king but not to republicanism. Supporting the Vote of No Addresses, he said that they ‘should not any longer expect safety and government from an obstinate man whose heart God had hardened’. This can only mean the end of Charles I. But it is perfectly compatible with his further statement that ‘we declared our intentions for Monarchy unless necessity enforce an alteration’. Some historians, including Barry Coward and David Underdown, interpret ‘necessity’ here in a secular sense – ‘the dictates of political reality’ as Coward glosses it – while others, including Gaunt, gloss it in a religious sense – until God reveals it to be his will.40 The latter is clearly the correct reading, as the incessant linkage of the words ‘providence’ and ‘necessity’ throughout 1648 and the speeches of the 1650s demonstrates.41

REC1 7/13/01 2:23 PM Page 24

24

The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

Furthermore, Cromwell’s reference in his letter to Hammond (written late on the evening of the same day) that the king’s ﬂight and subsequent developments represented ‘a mighty providence to this poor kingdom and to us all’ gives a rather chilling menace to his conluding words: ‘we shall (I hope) instantly go upon the business in relation to [the king], tending to prevent danger’ and his request that Hammond ‘search out’ any ‘juggling’ by the king.42 There is tantalizing but unreliable evidence that Cromwell was seriously considering, in late January 1648, direct negotiation with the Prince of Wales which could have led to Charles’ abdication or deposition. It consists principally of a letter of intelligence of the variably reliable Roman agent in London, written on 17 January, which names Cromwell and St John as the men behind the initiative.43 But it is supported by a report home by the French ambassador Grignon.44 He wrote on 31 January that there was a plan by people he does not name to send the earl of Denbigh to France with letters for the Prince of Wales, but that Denbigh was reluctant to go; and this in turn is conﬁrmed by a letter in the Hamilton papers (and Hamilton was Denbigh’s brother-inlaw), dated 1 February, that ‘the Earl of Denbigh is to go over with some overtures to her Majesty and the Prince.’45 It may be signiﬁcant for what was to happen at the end of the year that the person who was supposed to raise the matter with the Prince was the Earl of Denbigh.46 As the year wears on there is stronger evidence of Cromwell’s involvement in plans to depose Charles in favour ﬁrst of James Duke of York and then of Henry Duke of Gloucester. All this represents something more persuasive than the oft-quoted and more tainted evidence of the Ludlow manuscript that at that time Cromwell refused to join Ludlow in condemning monarchy, or to afﬁrm it (the quotation is too well known and too unreliable to be repeated here).47 In essence, there were lots of insubstantial straws blowing around in the wind, and they were all blowing in the same direction. Cromwell was exploring all kinds of ways of moving to a reckoning with Charles I, but had yet to satisfy himself of the natural justice of any of them. He then set off on campaign, and was too preoccupied with the hydra with its variety of cavalier and Presbyterian heads to formulate any immediate practical solution. But his letters leave us in no doubt that his mind was as full of Isaiah as it was of the sound of musket and cannon.

V The sweep of Cromwell’s writings throughout 1648 suggests a man who feels guided by God and clear of the end though not quite of the means.

REC1 7/13/01 2:23 PM Page 25

Oliver Cromwell, the Regicide and the Sons of Zeruiah 25

He never again discussed the king except as someone who had put himself outside the protection of God’s people. For the whole of 1648 Cromwell’s concern was not whether to remove the king but when and how. In the late spring, he set off on campaign ﬁrst in South Wales, then to head off the Scottish invasion, then to pursue the retreating Scots almost to the gates of Edinburgh, and ﬁnally to mop up royalist resistance in the north. At every stage he wrote letters which have survived, several of them public or semi-public letters to Speaker Lenthall or General Fairfax, others private and confessional, as to St John, Wharton and Hammond.48 His public rhetoric consistently calls for all (and all must include the king as principal author) responsible for the new war to be called to account for their treason and sacrilege; his private rhetoric adds to that a continuous engagement with the scripture and with very speciﬁc texts as he sought to discern the will for God for himself and for His people. It is, of course, the case that the army council committed itself to the trial of the king at the conclusion of the three-day prayer meeting at the end of April. Or so William Allen maintained in a pamphlet written in 1659.49 But we should not use this, as some have, as evidence of Cromwell’s position. Allen may be recalling things accurately; Cromwell may well have been present for part of the meeting.50 Even if both are true, it does not follow that this directly informed Cromwell’s thinking. Allen alleged that at Windsor Charles Stuart was branded ‘a man of blood’ who should atone for his shedding of innocent blood in accordance with the requirements of the Book of Numbers [35 v.33]: ‘So ye shall not deﬁle the land wherein you are: for blood it deﬁleth the land; and the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it.’ The army committed itself to putting the king on trial as soon as it was in a position to do so.51 The application of this text to that man of blood Charles Stuart sustained many in the months that followed. But Cromwell himself never endorsed it; nor did he ever cite from the Book of Numbers before, during or for eight years after 1648. His own thinking followed a different course. After each of the major episodes in the second war, unlike any of those in the ﬁrst, the leaders were put on trial – either before a court martial or by reference to the High Court of Justice.52 The ﬁrst war had been a struggle between two parties who believed that they were ﬁghting God’s cause. God had shown which side he was on from the moment of the formation of the New Model. Anyone seeking to overturn ‘so many evidences of a divine providence going along with it and prospering a just cause’53 were in

REC1 7/13/01 2:23 PM Page 26

26

The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

effect committing sacrilege, seeking to overturn the judgement of God. It was ‘the repetition of the same offence against all the witnesses that God hath borne’. But, in addition, ‘this is a more prodigious treason than any that hath been perfected before; because the former quarrel was that Englishmen might rule over one another, this is to vassalize us to a foreign nation.’54 This comes from a letter written from Yorkshire to Robert Jenner and John Ashe on 20 November, the very day that the army’s Remonstrance was being presented to parliament. That theme of the wickedness of the king in seeking foreign arms and giving undertakings to foreigners, starting with the Scots, was at the heart of the indictment of Charles in that Remonstrance and it was to reappear in the charge against him two months later.55 The clearest statement that the time had come for Charles to account for his crimes came in the coda to Cromwell’s long letter to Lenthall describing his victory over Hamilton at Preston on 20 August: Sir, this is nothing but the hand of God . . . You should take courage to do the work of the Lord in fulﬁlling the ends of your magistracy, in seeking the peace and welfare of the people of this land, that all who live quietly and peaceably may have countenance from you, and they that are implacable and will not leave troubling the land may speedily be destroyed out of the land.56 This cannot but be a reference to the king himself. We might note, however, that the phrase ‘destroyed out of the land’, for all its rhetorical strength, leaves open the possibility of exile rather than execution. A similar unambiguous if oblique reference to the king is to be found in a letter written to Fairfax which endorsed a petition from the ofﬁcers of the regiments in the north, itself supporting the Remonstrance: ‘I ﬁnd . . . in [all the ofﬁcers] a very great zeal to have impartial justice done upon all offenders; and I do from my heart concur with them.’57 Such language, sustained over six consecutive months, for judgement on all the authors of the war clearly extended to the king himself. The questions were when and how, not whether he should be tried and by implication deposed or executed. Cromwell spoke of providence throughout his life, but never with the persistence or conﬁdence of 1648. Letter after letter speak of providence and (connected to it) of necessity as linked aspects of God’s immanence and engagement with the affairs of men.58 And providence is more and more invoked as the guarantor of action against the king.

REC1 7/13/01 2:23 PM Page 27

Oliver Cromwell, the Regicide and the Sons of Zeruiah 27

Such were his musings on public events. But throughout the months of campaigning he was also clearly studying the Bible and looking for personal meaning in it. When we ﬁrst planned this paper we thought we had identiﬁed a simple and powerful biblical parallel that guided Cromwell through the year. On four occasions in 1648 Cromwell makes references to the story of Gideon and we became convinced that he had come to see himself as Gideon redivivus.59 Indeed his account of the battle of Preston written the day after the battle and sent to Speaker Lenthall, reads less like other accounts of the battle than it does of the biblical account of Gideon’s defeat of the Midianites at Ain Harod.60 Let us recall the story of Gideon. He was called from the plough to lead the army of Israel. He winnowed the army, reducing it to a small, compact force made of Israel’s russet-coated captains, and he destroyed the Midianites and harried their ﬂeeing army for 200 miles as Cromwell did after Preston. He then executed the kings of the Midianites, denying them quarter because they had shed innocent blood on Mount Tabor. He refused to take the crown himself and returned, loaded with honours, to his farm. It is not surprising that Cromwell found this a powerful story and suitable to his condition in 1648. And he drew powerfully on it, nowhere more than in an extraordinary outburst to Fairfax in the middle of a letter full of nitty-gritty military matters as he swept through South Wales in June 1648: I pray God teach this nation . . . what the mind of God may be in all this, and what our duty is. Surely it is not that the poor godly people of this Kingdom should still be the objects of wrath and anger, nor that our God would have our necks under a yoke of bondage; for these things that have lately come to pass have been the wonderful works of God; breaking the rod of the oppressor, as in the day of Midian, not with garments much rolled in blood but by the terror of the Lord.61 This passage draws on Galatians, Acts and 2 Corinthians, but the central image with its reference to the breaking of the Midianites is from Isaiah, and actually that turns out to be the crucial point. For Cromwell’s allusions to Gideon are all passing ones; there is no sustained meditation on his story. On the other hand he spent much time and space in several letters in extended meditation on Isaiah chapters 8 and 9. Indeed he wrote to Oliver St John on 1 September 1648, a week after the battle of Preston, telling him that ‘this scripture hath been of great stay with me, Isaiah eighth, 10. 11. 14. Read the whole chapter’.62 That chapter and

REC1 7/13/01 2:23 PM Page 28

28

The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

the next tell how most of the people have missed out on righteousness and that those who follow the idolatrous leaders of Judah and Israel will be destroyed. So Associate yourselves, o ye people, and ye shall be broken in pieces . . . gird yourselves and you shall be broken in pieces . . . And I will wait upon the Lord, that hideth his face from the house of Jacob, and I will look for him, Behold I and the children whom the Lord has given me are for signs and wonders in Israel. Cromwell was working out his own destiny in relation to God’s plan, and God was no democrat. He had worked through a godly remnant in the days of Isaiah and he could and would do so again. In November Cromwell wrote two letters to Hammond.63 We do not have time here to demonstrate the many misunderstandings of the letter of the 6th such as Underdown’s claim that it represents Cromwell’s willingness to acquiesce in a settlement between parliament and the king ‘if Charles accepted a permanent Presbyterian settlement’.64 For Cromwell makes it clear that such an agreement could be approved of only if one followed ‘carnal reasonings’ – human expediency rather than divine imperatives. Instead we rely on Gentles’ better reading of this letter: ‘peace is only good when we receive it from out of our father’s hands . . . War is good when we are led by our Father.’65 And peace with this king was not at God’s hand. Less enigmatic and more powerful was the follow-up letter Cromwell wrote on 25 November. It is a plea to Hammond to see how a critical mass of evidence points to God’s manifest will being encapsulated in what the army proposes in the Remonstrance. Seek to know the mind of God in all that chain of Providence, whereby God hath brought thee thither, and that person to thee . . . and then tell me whether there be not some glorious and high meaning in all this, above what thou hast yet attained.66 Nowhere was the clustering of biblical gobbets more dense than in this letter. The opening paragraphs alone – some 700 words – contain 24 citations from 11 biblical books,67 with especial focus on the Epistle of James [ch.1 vv 2–6] with its exhortation to Christians ‘to ask in faith, nothing wavering. For he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed’ and from Romans 8, with its great cry that, freed from the law, the true Christian must look beyond present depri-

REC1 7/13/01 2:23 PM Page 29

Oliver Cromwell, the Regicide and the Sons of Zeruiah 29

vations to the presence of the Holy Spirit. So Cromwell is pleading with Hammond to trust in providential reason and not in worldly, ﬂeshly reasoning. By the time he wrote that letter Cromwell had seen the army Remonstrance approved by the army council on the 16th and presented to the parliament on the 20th and he knew that Hammond would have seen it. The letter is in fact begging Hammond to go along with the Remonstrance. Thus he told Hammond that while ‘we could perhaps have wished the stay of it till after the treaty’, in the end could the people of God expect any good from ‘this man against whom the Lord hath witnessed’? The Remonstrance demanded unambiguously that ‘the King should be brought to Justice, as the Capital cause of all’.68

VI Space precludes any further exegesis. We hope that if our analysis of the development of Cromwell’s thinking up to 25 November is convincing, then it provides the safe guide through the treacherous and incomplete shards of evidence for the month of December. It means that we can agree wholeheartedly with but recontextualize Ian Gentles’ reading (itself pre-echoed in the work of Veronica Wedgwood and Robert Paul).69 The key to understanding Cromwell’s actions over the seven weeks separating his return to London and the king’s execution is to keep several questions separate. Did Cromwell want to see the king put on trial? Yes. Did he know what form the trial should take? Yes and it was not the way it actually happened. Did he want Charles to cease to be king? Yes, either by deposition or abdication. Did he want to see the king dead? Yes and no – yes in that he deserved it, no in that it might shipwreck the very civil and religious liberties it was intended to safeguard. Did he want to see monarchy abolished? Almost certainly not. And underlying all his hesitancy was a dread that if the army pushed heedless on to regicide and a king-less commonwealth, the sons of Zeruiah would be too strong for him. Let us remember that on 7 December, as Cromwell took his seat in parliament, the position was as follows. Even the purged Rump of the House of Commons had refused to take any action to reverse the decisions that had provoked Pride’s Purge until Fairfax answered their demand for the release of the imprisoned members; the House of Lords was totally opposed to the Purge. The Presbyterian clergy were gargling in preparation for thunderous denunciations from their pulpits.70 The Levellers were utterly opposed to trial of the king by parliament.71 Lord

REC1 7/13/01 2:23 PM Page 30

30

The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

General Fairfax was utterly opposed to the king’s trial and as recently as 16 November all but six of the army council had voted that if the king agreed to the ‘fundamentals’ they would add to the Newport articles that he should be reinstated. His rejection of these terms outright had swung the majority behind the demands of the Remonstrance for his trial, but the army remained unpredictable. Cromwell was well aware that this was not an irrevocable conversion to regicide, rather it was evidence of volatility. Let us not forget that as late as 21 December 1648 the army council voted by a simple majority against the king’s execution and even on 25 December, it voted by 6 : 1 that if the king accepted the terms put to him by Denbigh his life should be spared. An unco-operative parliament, a divided and volatile army, a resentful, hostile and hungry populace, all of Scotland and 90 per cent of Ireland in the hands of men implacably opposed to the king’s trial and deposition, and two of Charles’ nephews ruling France and the Netherlands – all this must have made David’s problems with the sons of Zeruiah look small beer indeed. No wonder Cromwell urged caution in moving to the desired end. We have no shred of evidence from Cromwell’s own lips or pen that he was keen to prevent the trial of the king, or that he doubted that the king deserved death, or that he believed he should remain on the throne. Indeed every piece of surviving strictly contemporary evidence – newspapers from across the spectrum, secret royalist intelligence reports, and German, French and Italian ambassadorial reports72 support the following claims about his behaviour in December 1648. 1. Cromwell attempted to bring back anyone willing to accept the new situation created by the purge (to ﬂatter and tame some of Zeruiah’s sons). 2. He pushed on with a new paper constitution that might be brought in prior to a trial. 3. He attempted a private negotiation with Hamilton on 14/15 December. 4. He simultaneously worked to transfer the king to the custody of his most bitter and determined enemies, especially Thomas Harrison who had demanded his death as early as 11 November 1647. 5. He demonstrated a preference for the trial to be deferred until after the introduction of the new constitution and the holding of fresh elections on the new more equitable system and until after the trial of the other incendiaries who had shed innocent blood in the second civil war (trials which would demonstrate the depths of the king’s duplicity).

REC1 7/13/01 2:23 PM Page 31

Oliver Cromwell, the Regicide and the Sons of Zeruiah 31

We can go a step further. In January 1648, Cromwell had tried to persuade Denbigh to travel to France in order to persuade the Prince of Wales to accept the throne upon his father’s deposition.73 The army Remonstrance of November 1648 demanded that the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York surrender themselves for trial or stand debarred from the throne; which (in the absence of any statement in the Remonstrance against monarchy) would make Gloucester the heir to the throne. Cromwell was close to Isaac Dorislaus and wrote in December 1648 to the master of Trinity Hall asking him to use his position as master of Doctors’ Commons to provide rooms for Dorislaus.74 It was Dorislaus who co-authored the charges against the king, charges which speciﬁcally indicted the Princes Charles and James but not Henry in their father’s treasons.75 It was Denbigh who was sent to see Hamilton and the king at Windsor on 27 December with a secret offer which seems likely to have included an offer to the king: abdicate in favour of Henry and your life will be spared; refuse and you will die and the destruction of your House and of monarchy will be laid at your door. This is certainly the view of the French ambassador in his report on 21 December, and he was more precise and accurate than most in his reporting throughout that month.76 Our argument is then that by 25 November Cromwell was resolved to see Charles I put on public trial. No more than Ireton had he committed himself to the abolition of monarchy. As the phrase in that letter to Hammond (‘we could perhaps have wished the stay of it until after the treaty’)77 makes clear, Cromwell still preferred a different sequence of events: a breaking-off of the treaty; the purge or dissolution of parliament; an interim council on the model of the Scottish Commission of Estates; a high court or a commission of oyer and terminer consisting of Lords, Commons and military men; a trial of major royalist incendiaries culminating in the king; a conviction and then an ultimatum – abdicate in favour of your son and live, or refuse to abdicate and die. Prudence made him linger over the ﬁrst; justice always pointed to the second. His return to London was timed to assist that process. He – like everyone else – was thrown off balance by the events of 5 and 6 December. Now the issue was whether to wait until the original sequence was re-established or whether to proceed straight to a trial. Ireton was drawn more to the latter, Cromwell to the former. Eventually, after the failure of the Denbigh mission, Cromwell fell into line. Whitelocke’s teasing testimony that Cromwell invited Widdrington and himself to a meeting that presupposed the removal of Charles I, but for ‘settling the Kingdom by Parliament, and not to leave all to the Sword’ is perhaps the

REC1 7/13/01 2:23 PM Page 32

32

The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

clincher.78 The delays had little to do with cold feet over Charles. They represented the hesitations of a man who had a master plan at the end of November and was trying to work out how he could restore an orderly sequence to necessary events in the wake of the unplanned purge of 6 December. But events took on a momentum of their own, and Cromwell found that a ﬂash ﬂood required him to shoot the rapids in a raging torrent. When he muttered ‘cruel necessity’ over the corpse of Charles I, perhaps it was a reﬂection on the fact that it was not just the king who had experienced the harshness of divine decrees. As Cromwell said his prayers on 31 January 1649, perhaps he prayed: ‘help me against the sons of Zeruiah who are everywhere.’ Or to put it another way: ‘help us in this time of cruel necessity.’

Notes 1. This essay is based on extensive discussion between the two authors. It was fully written by John Morrill on the basis of these discussions and then subjected to revision and redraft after further debate between the authors. 2. The words were later recalled by the Earl of Southampton and are printed in Joseph Spence, Anecdotes (London, 1820), p. 275. See the full text and context in R.S. Paul, The Lord Protector: Religion and Politics in the Life of Oliver Cromwell (London, Lutterworth Press, 1955), p. 195. 3. A cross-section of recent writing can be found below, note 6. 4. There is probably no great signiﬁcance in this. It is probably a function of the fact that he had now returned to London and was in daily oral communication with all the principals with whom he had been in regular contact by letter over previous months (Lenthall, Fairfax, St John, Hammond, etc.). 5. LSOC, I, letter lxxxvi. For its signiﬁcance see p. 31. 6. C.H. Firth, Oliver Cromwell and the Rule of the Puritans in England (Oxford, OUP, 1900), pp. 156, 168, 172–80, 185, 206–12; D.E. Underdown, Pride’s Purge: Politics in the Puritan Revolution (Oxford, OUP, 1971), pp. 76–89, 119, 167–8, 183–5; A.B. Worden, The Rump Parliament 1648–1653 (Cambridge, CUP, 1974), pp. 47–9, 67–9, 77, 179–81; B. Coward, Cromwell (London, Longman, 1991), pp. 58–68. 7. C.V. Wedgwood, The Trial of Charles I (London, Collins, 1964) pp. 25–6, 321, 77–80, 232n30; I. Gentles, The New Model Army in England, Ireland and Scotland 1645–1653 (Oxford, Blackwell, 1992), pp. 283–307; P. Gaunt, Oliver Cromwell (Oxford, Blackwell, 1996), pp. 85–91; Paul, Lord Protector, pp. 158–60, 168–9, 175–6, 183–4. 8. Gardiner, Civil War, IV, pp. 27, 31, 56–9, 175–6, 191–2, 232–9, 281–97. 9. CP, I, pp. 369–70. 10. Morrill and Baker, ‘The Case of the Armie Truly Restated’ in M. Mendle, ed., The Putney Debates (Cambridge, CUP, forthcoming). 11. CP, I, p. 377.

REC1 7/13/01 2:23 PM Page 33

Oliver Cromwell, the Regicide and the Sons of Zeruiah 33 12. CP, I, pp. 383, 417. For the signiﬁcance of this phrase, see P. Crawford, ‘ “Charles Stuart. That Man of Blood” ’, JBS, XVI (1977), pp. 41–61. 13. CP, I, p. 417 and below, p. 22. 14. CP, I, pp. 227–8. 15. See the comments of Captain Allen (CP, I, p. 367), Col. Hewson (CP, I, p. 390) and Colonel Titchborne (CP, I, pp. 396, 405) and of the civilians Pettus (CP, I, pp. 351–2) and Wildman (CP, I, p. 386). Appearing in July 1646, The Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens was the ﬁrst ‘Leveller’ pamphlet to manifest hostility to monarchy and the negative voice of the king: see D.M. Wolfe, ed., Leveller Manifestoes of the Puritan Revolution (New York, Humanities Press, 1967), pp. 109–15. 16. Ibid, p. 214. See also Morrill and Baker, ‘Case of the Armie Truly Restated’. 17. CP, I, p. 377. 18. [John Wildman?] A cal to all the Souldiers of the Armie ([29 Oct.] 1647, E412/10), pp. 2, 3, 5, 6, 8 [all second pagination]. 19. CP, I, pp. 386–94. 20. CP, I, p. 394. 21. ‘Mr Rainsborough tooke occasion to take notice as if what Mr Allen spoke did reﬂect upon himself or some other there, as if they were against the name of Kinge and Lords’: CP, I, p. 377. 22. Ibid. 23. For his views on kingship on the opening day see summary in Firth, Oliver Cromwell, pp. 177–8. 24. CP, I, pp. 368–71. 25. CP, I, p. 374. 26. CP, I, pp. 376–8. 27. CP, I, p. 379 [emphasis added]. 28. CP, I, pp. 382, 380. 29. CP, I, p. 382. 30. Morrill and Baker, ‘Case of the Armie Truly Restated’. 31. A.S.P. Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty (London, J.M. Dent & Sons, 1938), pp. 452–4. For the vote itself, see: CP, I, pp. 440–1. 32. CP, I, p. 440 discusses his absence on 5 and 6 November. 33. CP, I, p. 417. 34. Robert Ashton, Counter Revolution: the Second Civil War and its Origins (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 30–6; Austin Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen: the General Council of the Army and its Debates 1647–1648 (Oxford, OUP, 1987), pp. 268–76; Gardiner, Civil War, IV, pp. 27–31. 35. See Gardiner, Civil War, IV, pp. 27–31, and especially p. 27n3, 28n2. A strong piece of supporting evidence is the postscript in Ireton’s letter to Hammond on 21 November which speaks of Cromwell being gone from headquarters up to London ‘on scout I know not where’ (ibid., p. 27). On the other hand, Patrick Little who has recently completed a thesis on the Boyle family and the politics of Britain and Ireland, tells us that the source of the story – Orrery’s secretary Morrice recording a conversation he had with Orrery about a conversation Orrery had with Cromwell – is not to be trusted. So we will not pursue it.

REC1 7/13/01 2:23 PM Page 34

34

The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

36. Of course, the escape of the king and the immediate panic that he might have ﬂed to the Scots (as the prioritizing of letters to Lambert in the North suggest) may be sufﬁcient reason. This was the view of the bilious Robert Huntingdon in his unreliable Sundry Reasons (1648, E458/3), p. 11; see the comments of Gardiner, Civil War, IV, pp. 26–7 and 26n.2. 37. The Memoirs of Sir John Berkeley (1699), pp. 70–4. 38. Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, pp. 305–6. 39. D.E. Underdown, ‘The Parliamentary Diary of John Boys, 1647–8’ BIHR, XXXIX (1966), pp. 156–7, 145–6. 40. Coward, Cromwell, p. 58; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, pp. 88–9; Gaunt, Oliver Cromwell, pp. 89–91. 41. A.B. Worden, ‘Providence and Politics in Cromwellian England’, Past and Present, CIX (1985), pp. 55–99. See also Cromwell’s charge to the Nominated Assembly in 1653 that their authority came to them ‘by the way of necessity, by the way of the wise Providence of God (LSOC, II, p. 290), and his linking of providence and necessity (in having destroyed the name and title of king in 1649) when he declined the kingship in 1657 (ibid., III, pp. 56, 58, 70). 42. LSOC, I, pp. 289–91 and top p. 290. Peter Gaunt, Oliver Cromwell, p. 90 makes more sense of the events of 3 January than any other recent historian. 43. Gardiner, Civil War, IV, p. 56, n.4. 44. Ibid., p. 57, n.1. 45. All the evidence is presented and weighed by Gardiner, Civil War, V, pp. 56–7 and pp. 56 n.4, and evidence that St John ‘hath made Cromwell his bedfellow’ is in p. 57, n.1. 46. See the discussion of this in John Adamson’s essay below, pp. 36–70. 47. The Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, ed. C.H. Firth (2 vols, Oxford, OUP, 1894), I, pp. 184–6. For three slightly contrasting commentaries on this meeting see: S.R. Gardiner, Oliver Cromwell (1900), p. 133; Firth, Oliver Cromwell and the Rule of the Puritans, p. 185; and Coward, Cromwell, p. 59. 48. LSOC, I, pp. 350–1, 353–4, 393–400. 49. W. Allen, A Faithfull Memorial in Somers Tracts (16 vols, 1748–52), VI, pp. 500–1. 50. Gentles, New Model Army, pp. 245–6; Gaunt, Cromwell, pp. 92–3. 51. Allen, Faithfull Memorial, pp. 500–1. At a less-well-remembered prayer meeting also at Windsor on 26 November this commitment was renewed: Gardiner, Civil War, IV, p. 235. 52. Gardiner, Civil War, IV, pp. 202–6; S.R. Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate (4 vols, London, Longman, 1903), I, pp. 10–11, 41; Ashton, Counter Revolution, pp. 421–2; Gentles, New Model Army, pp. 255–7. 53. Cromwell to Lenthall, announcing the fall of Pembroke, 11 July 1648 (LSOC, I, pp. 324–5). Cromwell had the three principals of the South Wales revolt – Laugharne, Powell and Poyer tried and convicted. They were sent up to London to draw lots as to which of them was to be shot. Poyer (literally) drew the short straw and was executed by ﬁring squad in the Piazza of Covent Garden. 54. LSOC, I, p. 387 (cf the comments of Firth, Oliver Cromwell, p. 206). 55. This is a point which is made all the clearer by the evidence of AngloScottish dislikes presented in David Scott’s paper below, pp. 138–60.

REC1 7/13/01 2:23 PM Page 35

Oliver Cromwell, the Regicide and the Sons of Zeruiah 35 56. LSOC, I, pp. 333–4 (emphasis added). 57. LSOC, I, p. 391 (emphasis added). 58. See John Morrill, ‘King Killing no Murder’, Cromwelliana (1998), pp. 12–22, an early and much cruder version of this paper, but with a fuller analysis of the 1648 letters (printed as an appendix to the article in ibid., pp. 22–38). 59. Ibid. 60. LSOC, I, pp. 331–45. 61. LSOC, I, p. 321. 62. LSOC, I, p. 350. 63. LSOC, I, pp. 393–400; and III, pp. 389–92. 64. CP, II, pp. 49–50, with a commentary by Firth and an attribution to Cromwell. This attribution is probable but not quite as secure as Firth maintains. Why was Clarke (in London) in possession of a letter of such a private nature written by a senior ofﬁcer stationed in Yorkshire to a colonel stationed on the Isle of Wight? Could the letter have been by another senior ofﬁcer who had been in Scotland with Cromwell? This is the only letter of Cromwell’s for this period without any biblical allusions in it. 65. Gentles, New Model Army, p. 283. 66. LSOC, I, pp. 393–403. 67. As identiﬁed by Paul, Lord Protector, appendix V, p. 406, nn.1–9, p. 407, nn.1–11. 68. A Remonstrance of his Excellency Sir Thomas Fairfax . . . and of the General Council of Ofﬁcers ([16 Nov.] 1648, E473/11), reprinted in OPH, XVIII, pp. 161–238. 69. Wedgwood, Trial of Charles I, pp. 25–31; Paul, Lord Protector, pp. 183–4; Gentles, New Model Army, pp. 297–314. 70. See the argument and evidence presented below by Eliot Vernon, pp. 202–24. 71. As demonstrated by Andrew Sharp in his essay below, see pp. 181–201. 72. All this material is discussed by Gardiner, Civil War, IV, pp. 276–92. 73. Above, p. 24. 74. LSOC, I, pp. 403–4. 75. Gardiner, Documents, p. 373. 76. Gardiner, Civil War, IV, p. 282. 77. LSOC, III, pp. 389–92. 78. The Diary of Bulstrode Whitelocke, 1605–1675, ed. Ruth Spalding (Oxford, OUP, 1990), pp. 226–7. See the important gloss on this by Wedgwood, Trial, pp. 78–80.

REC2 7/13/01 2:29 PM Page 36

2 The Frighted Junto: Perceptions of Ireland, and the Last Attempts at Settlement with Charles I John Adamson

When the New Model Army marched on London to begin its coup d’état in the ﬁrst days of December 1648, it seemed as though the trial of Charles I would not be long in coming.1 With Pride’s Purge of 6 and 7 December, the chief obstacle to a trial, the Presbyterian majority in the House of Commons, was removed within a matter of days. The House of Lords, which contained the most vociferous enthusiasts for the Newport Treaty, the most recent attempt to negotiate with the king, seemed set for political extinction. ‘I believe [the army] will level the Lords’ house to the other’, concluded Sir Roger Burgoyne on hearing the army’s agenda for radical change, its Remonstrance of November 1648, read in the House of Commons.2 Once the Lords were out of the way, nothing would stand between the army and its prime objective, ‘justice against the grand delinquent, Charles Stuart’. Yet none of this went according to plan. Once the army leadership found itself masters of the parliament, the clarity of purpose that had shone through its public manifestos in November was clouded by indecision.3 It was more than ﬁve weeks before legislation for the king’s trial passed what was supposed to have been a quiescent parliament. Even then, it took another fortnight of further debate and backroom dealmaking before public sessions of the trial began. Most anomalous of all, perhaps, was the attitude of the army leadership towards the House of Lords. Reduced to an almost farcical rump of less than a dozen active members – ‘who sit and tell Tales by the Fire-side . . . in the hope of some more Lords to drive away the time’ – the public role of the peerage had seemed after the Purge the most vulnerable aspect of the ancient constitution.4 Yet, far from ‘levelling the Lords’ as Burgoyne had feared, the army leadership made considerable efforts to win over their support. Despite the army’s wrathful denunciations of the Newport Treaty and 36

REC2 7/13/01 2:29 PM Page 37

The Frighted Junto 37

its promoters, there were persistent reports, during December and even into the ﬁrst weeks of January, of new approaches to the king being made by the army ‘grandees’, often in association with its small caucus of aristocratic allies. Each of these initiatives was a ﬂagrant breach of the Vote of No Addresses, the resolution of both Houses, agreed in January 1648 and re-imposed as recently as 13 December, forbidding on pain of treason any attempt to treat with Charles I.5 Each blatantly contradicted the army’s publicly declared aim of bringing the king speedily to trial, supposedly the prime motive for the Purge. This essay seeks to investigate these apparent contradictions in the army leadership’s actions in the immediate aftermath of its coup: its attempts to achieve one last brokered settlement with the king, and its preparedness to work with the old nobility – in many cases the same men who had been doughty advocates of the Newport Treaty – in order to make that settlement happen. Of these various attempts to reach a settlement, real and rumoured, one stands out, both for the seriousness with which it was regarded by contemporaries, and for its broader implications for our understanding of the period between the Purge and the regicide as a whole: the proposal sent to Charles I via the Earl of Denbigh in the last week of December 1648. The ‘Denbigh mission’, as it has come to be known, enjoyed the support not only of the Independent Lords, but also of Fairfax and Cromwell, at least, and possibly others in the New Model’s policy-forming body, the Council of Ofﬁcers. It was probably the last time Charles was offered terms for a settlement, which, if accepted, would have saved his crown as well as his life. Neither Denbigh nor his eponymous mission has fared well at the hands of historians. Denbigh himself has been regarded as a triﬂing ﬁgure – in David Underdown’s dismissive phrase, ‘one of the feetdragging aristocratic generals of the ﬁrst civil war’; certainly one who was hardly likely to enjoy much credibility with the battle-hardened ofﬁcers of the New Model.6 Unsurprisingly, therefore, his mission has been seen as an ‘odd little episode’: at best as a quixotic bid to avert Charles’ unavoidable march to the scaffold; at worst, as an opportunistic attempt by a group of peers to salvage something of their rapidly eroding power.7 Yet neither reading sits well with the contemporary evidence of the army grandees’ efforts after the Purge to conciliate the small but inﬂuential group of Independent peers who were the mission’s advocates, or with the political and diplomatic realities within which the Council of Ofﬁcers’ policies evolved. A detailed reappraisal of this ﬁnal attempt to reach a settlement with Charles I also highlights a broader problem in the current

REC2 7/13/01 2:29 PM Page 38

38

The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

historiography of the ‘revolution’: a tendency, virtually ubiquitous since S.R. Gardiner, to explain the crisis of December 1648 and January 1649 in almost exclusively English terms. After Pride’s Purge, narratives of politics tend to be mesmerized by a drama that is centred on the narrow world between Windsor and Whitehall.8 The result, as I hope to argue, has been a version of events that not only leaves out of account one of the critical issues of disagreement between the army and the king, but which also writes out of the script one of the most important ﬁgures in the dramatis personae. If the personalities and inﬂuences that shaped the events of December 1648 and January 1649 are to be seen in their true perspective, we must raise our sights – as Charles I habitually did – beyond the immediate horizon of Westminster to the larger conﬁgurations of power within the Stuart kingdoms, and in particular to the royalist resurgence, during the winter of 1648–49, in Ireland.

I Of all the groups to inﬂuence the king’s fate during the last months of his life, probably the unlikeliest is the parliamentarian peers. ‘Esau [Jacob’s murderous son] was the ﬁrst father of Dukes, Lords, [and] Nobles’, William Erbery warned the nobility shortly after the Purge, ‘. . . [and] these also shall be judged by God in the saints.’ Erbery’s stridency may be extreme; but he typiﬁes a strain of anti-aristocratic sentiment that found expression in manifold forms – in sermons, pamphlets and newsbooks – throughout the course of 1648.9 For the army, the most recent grievance was the Lords’ vigorous advocacy of the Newport Treaty; but there were many others, not least the Lords’ refusal during the summer of 1648 to condemn as treasonous the Duke of Hamilton’s invasion of England. To many within the army and outside it, the Lords by 1648 were little better than a royalist ﬁfth-column. Yet the New Model’s senior ofﬁcers, many of whom were themselves members of parliament, had a more sophisticated knowledge of the political peerage than these stock caricatures. They knew that there was a relatively large caucus – some ten to a dozen lords – who had loyally backed the New Model since the debates on its creation; and that there were peers who had publicly distanced themselves during 1648 from the more provocative grandstanding of their pro-royalist colleagues.10 So it was natural that the army leadership should have worked hard to mend fences with these aristocratic allies once the Purge had been effected and the immediate threat of a royalist coup had passed.

REC2 7/13/01 2:29 PM Page 39

The Frighted Junto 39

This was partly, no doubt, a matter of friendships and obligations. But it was also a shrewd calculation. Figures such as the Earls of Northumberland, Salisbury, Denbigh, even the much-ridiculed Pembroke, men who had been prominent in public life for the best part of two decades, continued to wield substantial personal authority within Westminster, despite the erosion of the House of Lords’ institutional prestige.11 At the time of the Purge it was not hard to see that their combination of personal kudos and inﬂuence might be used to the army’s advantage in the weeks ahead. Moreover, however battered the peers’ institutional authority may have been by December 1648, the formal assent of the House of Lords to a new settlement – even one that required some kind of trial of the king – continued to be a thing worth courting. The army leadership’s desire to continue to integrate senior members of the peerage into the most radical of political processes was also conditioned, perhaps, by that peculiarly English preoccupation with the maintenance of traditional legal forms and procedures; something that mattered to Fairfax and Cromwell, if not to less legally fastidious ﬁgures such as Colonels Hewson and Rich. Cromwell – who was clearly one of the two or three most inﬂuential ﬁgures in the course of the trial – was emphatic that the peers should retain their accustomed place in the political ﬁrmament. Hence his consistent opposition to any attempt to abolish the Lords, even in January 1649, when his erstwhile aristocratic collaborators had rejected the creation of a High Court of Justice on the terms then proposed.12 The more radical were the courses that the army leadership wished to set in train, the more important it became to him to retain what vestiges could be salvaged of the pre-1642 constitution. From the perspective of the Independent peers, too, there was much to be gained. Involvement in the legislative process afforded them the chance to slow the pace of the revolutionary change; perhaps even to change its course. Of course, the vast majority of the peerage – not only the royalists, but also their Presbyterian fellow travellers – was excluded from power. Even so, those that continued to be involved in parliamentarian politics comprised some of the most distinguished members of the ‘old nobility’: the second Earl of Warwick, the current Lord Admiral of the parliamentarian ﬂeet; the tenth Earl of Northumberland, another former Lord Admiral and the Lord General in the 1640 Bishops’ War; the second Earl of Salisbury, one of the key ﬁgures in parliament’s ﬁnancial bureaucracy and a former Caroline Privy Councillor; the fourth Earl of Pembroke, the former Lord Chamberlain of the Household, and an ex-Privy Councillor; the tenth Earl of Kent, the head of the Grey

REC2 7/13/01 2:29 PM Page 40

40

The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

dynasty; the third Earl of Nottingham, a Howard and descendant of the Elizabethan Lord Admiral who had defeated the Spanish Armada; as well as the second Earl of Mulgrave, who added familial to political links with the army, as a cousin of the Lord General. Their inﬂuence, postPurge, was of course heavily circumscribed. But they enjoyed generally cordial relations with the army grandees, and in a world that had not yet fully relinquished its veneration of lineage and rank, they possessed a social eminence and, in the House of Lords, a public platform that gave them a disproportionate inﬂuence in politics, even in the very different Westminster that existed after Pride’s Purge. Well before the proposal of a joint approach to the king, the practical consequences of this cordiality took a variety of forms. There was no attempt by the army to prevent peers who had supported the Newport Treaty from attending the House. The purged House of Commons made no attempt to curtail the Lords’ rights to introduce and amend legislation. The Lord General still declared himself willing to comply with the ‘commands’ he received from the upper House.13 Most important of all, there was a clear attempt to involve the peers in responsibility for the custody of the king. Thus, on 19 December, the Commons – almost certainly acting at Fairfax’s behest – passed an ordinance appointing the Earl of Pembroke as Constable of Windsor Castle.14 In normal circumstances this would have been a mildly lucrative sinecure. In the context of December 1648, however, it had acquired a highly topical signiﬁcance. Fairfax had recently issued instructions for Charles’ removal from Hurst Castle to Windsor, where the king was to be held until his future was decided. Windsor was also being mentioned as a possible venue for his trial. For an army leadership concerned to give its actions the simulacrum of respectability, it was an obvious boon to have Charles’ former Lord Chamberlain publicly complicit in the process of ‘bringing the king to account’.15 Yet the most unequivocal gesture of amity towards a member of the House of Lords came with the return to London of the Earl of Warwick, the Lord Admiral, on 15 December, a week after the Purge, at the conclusion of his most recent campaign against the royalist ﬂeet. The delegation from the army that attended the earl at Warwick House in Holborn – to ‘bid welcome to his return from sea’ – included Fairfax, Cromwell and (according to one report) Ireton as well.16 In the rankconscious world of mid-seventeenth-century England, such visits were more than idle courtesies; they also had an important symbolic aspect. For ‘giving attendance’ was also an act of deference, usually the action of a social inferior to his superior, and almost invariably accompanied

REC2 7/13/01 2:29 PM Page 41

The Frighted Junto 41

by the formal kissing of hands. On this occasion the army leadership had more than usually good reason to greet the returned Lord Admiral with ostentatious politeness. In 1648 Warwick was the single most inﬂuential ﬁgure in the politics of the navy, a service that had been plagued, throughout that year, by the activities of mutineers and royalist defectors. Lord Admiral from 1643 until his removal from ofﬁce under the terms of the 1645 SelfDenying Ordinance, Warwick had been reappointed to command of the navy in May 1648 in order to deal with the crisis caused by the proroyalist mutiny in the parliamentarian ﬂeet.17 This revolt saw the loss of 11 parliamentarian warships including its ﬂagship, the Constant Reformation, and had the effect of creating the core of a new royalist navy, a force that was soon augmented by merchantmen and privateers operating under the Prince of Wales’s letters of marque. Operating out of the Dutch ports – where it enjoyed the tacit protection of the Stadholder, Prince Willem II of Orange-Nassau – the royalist ﬂeet posed a threat to the security of the parliamentarian régime that was far from extinguished by the time of Pride’s Purge.18 Warwick’s recent campaign had been a success, though paradoxically his singular achievement as naval commander in 1648 was not in inﬂicting any major defeat on the royalist ﬂeet, but in avoiding the twin dangers that threatened him throughout: the risk that the parliamentarian navy would be defeated if it engaged with the ‘revolted ships’ or – another real possibility in 1648 – that it would provoke a naval war with the Dutch. Either would have had disastrous consequences for parliament. What Warwick had done was to buy the new regime time; for with winter now set in, the threat to the parliamentarian ﬂeet was temporarily reduced.19 Even so, the presence of a royalist ﬂeet within two days’ sailing of London continued to be an important factor in political calculations at Westminster, up to and during the period of the king’s trial. Warwick’s reaction to the army’s coup d’état was anxiously awaited by all parties in the days immediately after the Purge. Had Warwick and his Council of Naval Ofﬁcers decided to throw in their lot with the Prince of Wales – an outcome that many Royalists conﬁdently predicted – the navy might well have been in a position to mount a serious military challenge to the new regime during the ﬁrst weeks of December 1648.20 The response was several days in coming, but on 13 December, Warwick issued a carefully worded endorsement of the army’s actions and intentions. ‘The principles whereon the Army have ﬁxed their resolutions’, Warwick declared, ‘may prove a soveraign cordiall to heal the diseased and corrupted Ulcers of this bleeding Kingdome.’ In a

REC2 7/13/01 2:29 PM Page 42

42

The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

phrase of no doubt studied ambiguity, he later added that he and his ofﬁcers were ‘resolved to joyn with his Excellency [Fairfax] and the Army for the impartiall executing of Justice’.21 Royalists cursed him for squandering his opportunity to check the army’s power; as the versifying author of Mercurius Melancholicus put it: Thou might’st have tryumph’d still upon the sea, To the disturbance of their promis’d ease: But thou ignobly left’st that gallant ﬂeet, And fell downe at a cursed Rebels feet.22 Thus when Warwick returned to Westminster on the evening of Friday 15 December, he did so as a publicly professed supporter of the Purge.23 Another bridge had been built between the old political order and the new, and the decision of Fairfax and Cromwell to ‘give attendance’ at Warwick House was probably an expression not only of gratitude, but also of relief.

II The days following Warwick’s return presented the caucus of peers still attending the House of Lords with an opportunity – perhaps the ﬁrst since the Purge – not merely to react to events, but to try to shape them. Warwick was one of their number whom the army had to take seriously and, despite his endorsement of the Purge, no one expected that he would be an uncritical supporter of the new military regime. Warwick did not disappoint. He returned to London with some form of counterproposal to offer to the army, and their subsequent dealings illustrate the uneasy mutuality of interest that subsisted between the parties.24 On the one hand was the army grandees’ desire for legitimacy and political support; on the other, the realization by Warwick and the remaining politically active peers that nothing they proposed was viable unless it could be sold to the generals and the Council of Ofﬁcers. The newsbooks refer to the counter-proposal obliquely as ‘something to offer from the Councell of Sea Ofﬁcers in reference to the King and the peace and tranquility of this Nation’.25 But there are other clues. When the admiral met the generals at Warwick House on Monday 18 December, it is also clear that there was ‘a Conference’ to discuss the settlement of the kingdom.26 Whatever the exact content of Warwick’s scheme, it was reported that this conference did not go entirely smoothly, for ‘some disputation hapned, in reference to the King and

REC2 7/13/01 2:29 PM Page 43

The Frighted Junto 43

settling of the Kingdom’. The fact that their meeting aroused controversy offers some indication as to the substance of the Sea Ofﬁcers’ original proposal. Given that the army was committed by its November Remonstrance to trying the king (even if the date of the trial was as yet undetermined), it seems reasonable to infer that Warwick’s proposal, in line with his earlier declaration, concurred with the principle of ‘executing justice’ in general, but with important qualiﬁcations. It almost certainly stopped well short of approving a sentence that resulted in the king’s execution; and, to judge from reported reactions to Warwick in the army during December, may well have stopped short of countenancing any form of royal trial.27 If Warwick remained true to his own declaration that he would join with the army ‘for the impartiall executing of Justice’, then the implication of his argument on the 18th seems to have been that it was the leading royalists, not Charles I, who were expected to expiate the sins of the second civil war.28 Whatever reservations Fairfax and Cromwell might have had about Warwick’s proposals, they could ill afford to risk alienating either the navy or its patrician commander. Publicly, at least, the meeting seems to have been used as a demonstration of unity between the two services, naval and military; Lord General and Lord Admiral were at one. Likewise, the Commons, taking its cue from Fairfax, was more than usually appreciative of the recently returned Lord Admiral. When it met on 19 December, the day after the generals’ call at Warwick House, it was reported that MPs gave a sympathetic hearing to Warwick’s demands for the improved funding and expansion of the navy. Even that stalwart radical, Tom Chaloner, who had advocated the abolition of the Lords since at least the autumn of 1647, was at his most ingratiating. Since ‘his lordship has given assurance of his fealty to the public interest’, Chaloner was reported to have argued, ‘let us proceed to accommodate him speedily’. With the Prince of Wales’ ﬂeet posing an immediate threat, it was hardly surprising, as Nedham put it in his report of that day, that ‘the frighted Junto of Members at Westminster . . . considered which way to gratiﬁe the Admirall as their own Creature, in providing for and augmenting the Navy’.29 The junto had good cause to be frighted. Reports reaching London on 18 December of a royalist resurgence in Ireland so alarmed the Commons that they sent a delegation of their own to ‘the Lord Admirall to consult with him what is necessary to be done’.30 Moreover, coinciding with Warwick’s return to Westminster came news of a diplomatic failure that had potentially disastrous consequences for the new regime, and transformed the political context within which Warwick’s

REC2 7/13/01 2:29 PM Page 44

44

The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

controversial proposal for the settlement of the kingdom was considered. For Monday 18 December also saw the return of Dr Isaac Dorisla, who, with Walter Strickland, had been serving as one of parliament’s two representatives in The Hague. Dorisla returned with news of a treaty which the States General, the Dutch republic’s highest legislative body, had concluded for ‘mutual trade and commerce’ with the Kilkenny Confederation, the ‘rebel’ government of Catholic Ireland that was currently offering its support to the king.31 Dorisla and Strickland had been sent to The Hague to try to prevent the treaty being signed or, failing that, to have it rescinded. The news brought by Dorisla was that their efforts to effect a revocation of the treaty had met with total failure. Trade and commerce may at ﬁrst sight seem relatively innocuous subjects. The impact of the Dutch-Irish treaty, however, extended well beyond mercantile matters. Trade in this context was sea-borne trade, and to the worried members of the Derby House Committee who heard Dorisla’s report on 18 and 19 December, it had obvious naval and strategic implications. Under the terms of the new treaty, rebel-held Ireland was allied defensively with what was probably the world’s greatest maritime power. Encouraged by the Stadholder, Prince Willem II of OrangeNassau, Charles I’s forceful and politically ambitious son-in-law, the States General was already providing a base for royalist naval activity against the parliamentarian regime.32 It was also expected, in the event of a ﬁnal treaty being concluded between Kilkenny and the Irish royalists, that the Confederacy would use its own shipping to reinforce the royalist ﬂeet; so the failure of Dorisla’s mission confronted parliament with an almost certain alliance of Irish, royalist, and Dutch naval forces, effectively encircling southern England from the Irish Sea to the northern approaches to the Channel. As The Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer noted in the issue published on the very day the Derby House Committee heard Dorisla’s report, ‘the Irish grow very strong at Sea’; in fact, the Confederates’ naval resources now stood at a ﬂeet of some thirty ships, augmented by a further ten Bordeaux merchantmen captured in early December.33 With the ratiﬁcation by treaty of a ‘The HagueKilkenny’ axis’, any attack on Confederate shipping (which by December was almost tantamount to being royalist shipping) threatened to trigger a full-scale war with the Dutch, with potentially disastrous consequences for the fragile regime at Westminster. To whom Dorisla reported ﬁrst after his return to London is unknown. However, the probable sequence of events is that, properly observing protocol, he reported ﬁrst to the Speaker of the House of Lords, the Earl of Denbigh, himself a former ambassador, and, by virtue of his

REC2 7/13/01 2:29 PM Page 45

The Frighted Junto 45

ofﬁce as Speaker, the senior member of the Derby House Committee, the executive body with responsibility for foreign affairs. Denbigh, in turn, seems to have convoked the Derby House Committee, which had been in abeyance since the army’s coup, with the result that the committee met, for its ﬁrst (and only) meetings after the Purge, on Monday 18 December and again at 3 p.m. the following day, Tuesday the 19th. Dorisla’s report was the principal item of business. If this reconstruction is correct, it explains why the peers who were members of the committee made up the bulk of Dorisla’s audience on both days, while representation from the Commons was relatively small. At Derby House on the 18th, besides Denbigh himself, there were the Earls of Pembroke and Mulgrave, Sir John Danvers (the younger brother of the 2nd Earl of Danby and a future regicide), and Philip Skippon, an important ﬁgure as a major-general of infantry in the New Model and almost certainly an opponent of the proposals to bring the king to trial.34 On the 19th – the second day that the committee considered Dorisla’s report – this group of ﬁve was joined by an expert on Irish affairs, Viscount Lisle, the former Lord Lieutenant of Ireland of 1646–47, and by Lisle’s father-in-law, the Earl of Salisbury, another stalwart political Independent.35 The preponderance of peers attending the two meetings (notwithstanding that they constituted only one-third of the committee’s theoretical total membership) is striking, and raises the possibility that they had spotted in Dorisla’s report not only a crisis, but also an opportunity that they could exploit in the days ahead. The seriousness of their conundrum was obvious. Although the Derby House Committee attempted to put a brave face on the news when forwarding Dorisla’s report to the two Houses, there was no disguising that this was a major diplomatic reverse, with implications that were potentially dire.36 The newsbooks did not notice the two meetings at Derby House. However, with this extensive network of informants, one newsbookwriter, Marchamont Nedham, noted another meeting that same day, which also involved Denbigh and a group of Independent peers. According to Nedham, Denbigh – accompanied by Pembroke, Salisbury and a fourth peer, possibly Northumberland – visited army headquarters to consult with Fairfax and Cromwell and to make a series of offers relating to the future settlement of the kingdom; this was the meeting that ultimately produced the Denbigh mission to the king later in the month.37 Although the two events have not before been associated, the contingent of peers attending Derby House on 19 December and the

REC2 7/13/01 2:29 PM Page 46

46

The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

contingent reported to have visited Fairfax that same day is almost identical.38 All three of the earls who can be deﬁnitely identiﬁed as visiting Fairfax and the army leadership – Denbigh, Pembroke, and Salisbury – had been present to hear Dorisla’s brieﬁng. So it looks as though the party that attended Fairfax can no longer be regarded, as Nedham took it to be, as a random grouping of eirenically disposed peers. Rather, it seems to have been a semi-ofﬁcial delegation from Derby House to brief the army’s senior ofﬁcers on the failure of Dorisla’s diplomacy and its implications, and perhaps to offer ideas of their own. One of the Derby House Committee’s orders on 19 December had been that the contents of Dorisla’s report should be conveyed to the two Houses; so it was only natural that Fairfax should have been briefed as well, and, given the gravity of the crisis, that it should be a high-ranking delegation that did so.39 Dorisla’s report of the Hague-Kilkenny treaty thus provided the catalyst for the ﬁnal attempt at a brokered settlement with the king. Denbigh’s own political standing at the time of the Purge has been regularly misconstrued. Far from being one of the ‘feet-dragging’ old guard, the callow courtier-diplomat of the 1630s had been radicalized by the experience of war, and, not least, by his intermittent face-to-face dealings with the king.40 He had been a staunch supporter of the New Model at least since 1646, and so high was his standing with the army leadership at the end of December 1648 that rumours circulated that ‘the Councell of Warr [the Council of Ofﬁcers] intend the Admiralshipp to my Lo[rd] of Denbigh and the cashiering of Warwicke’.41 He was thought sufﬁciently well disposed to the army’s plans to be nominated to the High Court in the ﬁrst ordinance for the king’s trial.42 What, then, was discussed? Beyond an almost certainly fanciful account by Nedham we have almost no knowledge of what was proposed by the two sides at that meeting. Nor do we know whether the four peers arrived at their meeting with Fairfax with a proposal already formulated, or whether the idea for a ﬁnal personal approach to the king emerged as an option only during the course of their discussions.43 What seems likely, however, is that the peers took the opportunity created by the diplomatic crisis to press the army to settle the kingdom without a trial of the king – possibly the same point that Warwick had made in his meeting with Fairfax and Cromwell the previous day. What is certain, however, is that as a result of this meeting it was decided that Denbigh should visit the king at Windsor Castle, where the king was due to arrive from Hurst Castle at the end of the week, on Saturday 23 December. There Denbigh was to put certain terms which, if met, would certainly have saved his life, and possibly enabled to him to remain as

REC2 7/13/01 2:29 PM Page 47

The Frighted Junto 47

at least a nominal king. According to Nedham, the central conditions were that the king should abandon his ‘negative voice’, consent to the alienation of bishops’ lands (thereby consolidating the abolition of episcopacy), and ‘abjure the Scots’, who had just gone to war to restore him to his English throne.44 What Denbigh was in effect asking for was the king’s agreement to maintain the de facto constitution that had prevailed since 1643. Power was to remain in the two Houses, with the additional (but perhaps temporary) complication of the political role of the army. Henceforth, the best Charles could hope for was a nominal monarchy in which he was reduced to the state of ‘a D[uke] of Venice’.45 Given the immediate diplomatic crisis posed by the Hague-Kilkenny treaty, however, there was almost certainly an additional and more topical element to this ultimatum, a demand that had recurred in the army’s lists of grievances against Charles I since the autumn, and which had acquired fresh urgency in the light of Dorisla’s disquieting news.

III It is probably no exaggeration to say that, after the king himself, no ﬁgure loomed larger in Stuart politics during December 1648 and January 1649 than James Butler, 11th Earl and (since 1642) 1st Marquess of Ormond.46 The king’s appointee as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in 1643, Ormond had been a major ﬁgure in the politics of the three Stuart kingdoms throughout the 1640s. Although he had delivered up Dublin to English parliamentarian control in July 1647, and relinquished any military role in Ireland, it was not long before he was again drawn into royalist plotting during his sojourn in England. An interview with the king at Hampton Court in October 1647 led to his involvement in what became the Engagement, Charles’ grand strategy to launch a series of attacks on the English parliament on three fronts: Scotland, Ireland, and within England itself. Ormond was to lead the Irish contingent, an enterprise that acquired even greater urgency after the defeat of the Engagement’s ﬁrst offensive – the Scottish invasion under the Duke of Hamilton – at Preston in August 1648. Ormond returned to Ireland in September 1648, with renewed authority as Lord Lieutenant, and intent on forging a royalist-Confederate alliance that could launch an invasion of England in the coming spring.47 Ormond’s activities in Ireland during November and December 1648 have been almost wholly ignored in modern accounts of the Newport

REC2 7/13/01 2:29 PM Page 48

48

The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

treaty and the king’s trial; in Professor Underdown’s inﬂuential account of the politics of the Purge and its aftermath, he rates not a single mention.48 Yet Ormond is a prominent and familiar presence in contemporary newsbooks and pamphlets during those months and, as the winter progresses, in the army’s literature of complaint.49 During the ﬁnal phase of the Newport treaty, there is a steady series of reports of his progress in forging a tripartite alliance between his own royalist allies, Lord Inchiquin’s army in Munster (which had defected to the royalist cause in February 1648), and the Confederate government at Kilkenny. On 1 November, he had concluded a ‘cessation’ of arms with the Confederates, and from that point set about creating a military alliance with the Confederacy with two principal objectives: defending Ireland against invasion, and ‘suppressing . . . that Independent Party’ in England who laboured ‘the ruine of our Prince’.50 His Declaration of November 1648 was circulating in London by the 27th, the week before Pride’s Purge, and over the following weeks the newsbooks provided regular bulletins of Ormond’s success in raising and arming his forces. In London, Ormond’s activities were almost daily news. Less than a week after the Purge came reports, exaggerated but nonetheless disquieting, that there were 16 000 ‘gallant Lads in Ireland’ under the command of Ormond and Inchiquin, who had been biding their time until they learnt the outcome of the Newport treaty.51 With the failure of the treaty, the time had come to act. ‘My Lord of Ormond hath almost compleated his Irish design [a treaty with Kilkenny]’, it was reported on 15 December; all he needed beyond that was a ﬁnal agreement with Owen Rowe, who had broken with the Confederates to create his own ultra-papalist Catholic force, to acquire total mastery of Ireland.52 Equally disturbing from the English army’s perspective was Ormond’s and the Confederates’ naval strength, reported in mid-December to be around forty ships.53 Even without the Prince of Wales’ Dutch-based ﬂeet, by December 1648 Ormond had – or, more importantly, was believed to have – the makings of an invasion ﬂeet.54 Wales was to be the bridgehead, ‘and so for England’.55 Parliamentarian authority in Ireland had all but collapsed. Even Dublin, almost the only part of Ireland still under English rule, was known to be vulnerable. Inchiquin, who was effectively Ormond’s second-in-command, thought that Colonel Michael Jones, the commander of the Dublin garrison, might also be voluntarily prised away from his English masters. Once Jones understood the ‘designe of the Army and the Independent faction to throw off all obedience and con-

REC2 7/13/01 2:29 PM Page 49

The Frighted Junto 49

formity to Government, whether monarchichall or Parliamentary’, he too might be brought to join the Ormondist alliance.56 On 19 December, those among Fairfax’s ofﬁcers who had picked up that day’s issue of Mercurius Elencticus, before their meeting with Denbigh and the other peers, will have read conﬁdent reports that ‘Col. Jones is to surrender Dublin to the Marquesse of Ormond’, and suggestions that he might well already have done so.57 When The Perfect Weekly Account appeared the following day, the latest bulletins from Ireland were already warning that the Ormondist forces were in a position to overwhelm Dublin, whether Jones capitulated or not. Once there, Chester was vulnerable: another obvious bridgehead for an invasion of England, and for a rendezvous between the Lancashire royalists and Ormond’s invasion force.58 By the time the Moderate Intelligencer appeared on 21 December, the ﬁrst tentative reports were reaching London of an important naval engagement in the Irish Sea in which the Irish ‘pirates’ – a Confederate ﬂeet – had captured 16 English merchantmen; it was time something was done, it urged, to prevent the Irish ‘from doing so much hurt by sea, and Ormond from growing so great by land’.59 In fact, Ormond’s negotiations were proceeding with exasperating slowness, complicated by factional divisions among the Confederates and by the lingering inﬂuence of the papal nuncio, Archbishop Rinuccini, who threatened eternal damnation to any Catholic who collaborated with the Protestant Lord Lieutenant. Many of Inchiquin’s troops were profoundly suspicious of any rapprochement with the Confederates, and there was an ever-present threat of mutiny unless Ormond could show that he had upheld the ‘Protestant interest’ in his dealings with Kilkenny.60 Ormond’s forces, likewise, were nothing near the inﬂated estimates current in the London press.61 The alarmism of the parliamentarian newsbooks (and, conversely, the royalists’ triumphalism) were both responses to shadows rather than realities. But in December and early January the two were almost indistinguishable. In the event of Ormond ﬁnalizing the expected deal with the Confederates, the threat of an invasion of England appeared real enough. This, in turn, had a profound impact on post-second civil war perceptions of the king. For godly English adherents of ‘the cause’, the prospect of yet another pro-royalist invasion powerfully intensiﬁed their sense of grievance against Charles I. If Ormond bulked large in the newsbooks, he ﬁgured even more prominently in the calculations of the king. At the end of the Newport treaty, the two points on which Charles had proved most inﬂexible were the abandonment of episcopacy and his ‘aversnesse’ to disavowing

REC2 7/13/01 2:29 PM Page 50

50

The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

Ormond’s negotiations with the Irish ‘rebels’.62 While the king was prepared to admit an element of compromise on the former question, he was immovable on the second.63 Throughout the closing weeks of the Newport Treaty, and on through December, Charles was adamant that Ormond should continue to raise troops in Ireland, in his name and with his blessing. Of course, with hindsight, it is easy to see the king as the victim of a Micawberish optimism, constantly overestimating his own political credit and gambling his prospects – and in the end, his life – on the hope that ‘something would turn up’. From Charles’ perspective, however, there were sound reasons both for encouraging Ormond to raise an army and for believing that it would eventually arrive. Kings with armies at their command are usually more powerful than kings without; and possibly as early as the autumn of 1647 Charles seems to have viewed Ormond’s promised efforts to raise an army in Ireland (and likewise Hamilton’s in Scotland) as a means of outﬂanking his enemies in England.64 His pursuit of the Ormondist invasion seems to have been less the result of underestimating the army’s resolve to bring him to trial than an insurance policy against that trial ever taking place. Ormond, then, was to be the king’s salvation. Even as Charles’ coach rolled on towards Windsor, where it was expected on Saturday 23 December, the king was making plans for his next military campaign. Despite his captivity, he had remained in contact with the network of royalists in London, and on Wednesday 20 December he wrote to Nicholas Oudart, approving yet another plan for his escape and promising to send further letters to Ormond and to Holland (presumably to the Prince of Wales at The Hague) when he arrived at Windsor on Saturday the 23rd.65 Again the evidence is fragmentary, but it seems that en route for Windsor the king was letting it be known that he had two new proposals to make, both of which were shrewdly calculated to respond to parliament’s fears after the Dutch-Irish treaty. One was to ‘prevent the decay of Trade’; the other was a proposal to ‘recover Ireland’, an issue on which he was in a position to deliver; for Ireland was the one part of his triple-monarchy over which, thanks to Ormond, he was once again king in more than merely name.66 These gestures were vintage Charles I: concessions with menaces. There were ‘two back-dores open for the next Ingagement’ (the agreement of December 1647 that had produced the second civil war), it was reported on 15 December: Ormond in Ireland, and the royalist forces still in the north of England.67 Although it is perhaps fanciful to speak of a second Engagement, in mid-December 1648, as the army leadership considered

REC2 7/13/01 2:29 PM Page 51

The Frighted Junto 51

what Denbigh and his fellow peers had to say at their meeting on 19 December, the threat was real enough. Even as the army’s prisoner, the king could still resort to his favourite negotiating gambit, the threat of military force. Through those ‘back doors’ Charles could show Fairfax and Cromwell a nasty premonitory glimpse of a third civil war. It seems, then, that this aristocratic request to make a ﬁnal overture to the king was not merely a matter of sentimental attachment to monarchy or the ancient constitution. It was a cogent and, as the event proved, politically marketable response to a serious external threat. The potential was obvious. Were Ormond to be ordered to desist from the enlistment of troops in Ireland, the junto would be released from the fear of an Irish invasion at a stroke of the monarch’s pen. ‘Loyal’ Ormond would never act against the direct commands of his sovereign. And with Ormond either neutral or actively assisting a Protestant, English ‘re-conquest’, the planned and long-deferred invasion of Ireland by the New Model, would be a far less costly affair. Likewise, with an order to the prince to desist from hostilities – as would surely follow – London trade, adversely affected by 1648’s naval war, could begin to recover. (This is the likely import of the king’s announcement, on his arrival at Windsor, that he had ‘something to offer concerning the City’.) If the king could be induced to make last-minute concessions, there was no reason to risk provoking an Ormondist invasion, further naval mutiny at home, or war with the Dutch – any of which, singly or in combination, seemed likely if the army went ahead with capital proceedings against Charles I. The junto’s concern to ‘gratiﬁe the Lord Admirall’, the consequences of the Hague-Kilkenny treaty, and the Denbigh mission to Windsor were thus intimately linked.

IV For both sides, then, Ormond was a critically important bargaining counter in any prospective deal. Given the strength of feeling in the army against Charles’ continuing efforts to raise a military force against parliament, it seems inconceivable that Fairfax and Cromwell would have sanctioned a personal overture to the king had not the withdrawal of his commissions to Ormond and the prince been one of its central terms.68 The realization that the king was counting on Ormond to raise a third civil war had penetrated the army in late November, where it had been met ﬁrst with incredulity, then with mounting exasperation. It was

REC2 7/13/01 2:29 PM Page 52

52

The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

probably the major reason why the army treated with such derision parliament’s assertion that the king’s concessions at Newport constituted the basis for a ‘safe and well grounded peace’. As early as 25 November the Ormondist threat is registered in a petition to Fairfax from the ofﬁcers and soldiers of Colonel John Hewson’s regiment, calling for justice against the chief delinquents. It concludes with a denunciation of the king, not for past crimes, but the all-tooforeseeable Irish offensive: the king was ‘the grand Enemy and great abettor of Ormond in Ireland, his son [the Prince of Wales] in Holland, and any other party that hath but a sword to draw for his destructive designs’.69 It was self-evident that Ormond would not have acted without the sanction of the king. Still more offensive, from the army’s perspective, was the king’s steadfast refusal, notwithstanding the defeat of the Scottish and English royalist uprisings, to order Ormond to desist. As one royalist newsbook put it tauntingly in mid-December 1648, ‘you will see some sport the next Spring’.70 The ofﬁcer corps was acutely aware of what the next campaigning season held in store, and where the blame for it should lie. As the New Model’s Council of Ofﬁcers turned to the consideration of the king’s fate, it did so in the almost certain knowledge that, unless Denbigh’s intervention were successful, they would be ﬁghting yet another bloody war come the spring – one which had been in Charles I’s power to prevent. By the time the General Council of Ofﬁcers met on Saturday 23 December, at the latest, it had approved four ‘grand matters’ against the king which might, if necessary, form the basis for a trial. What is striking about these charges is that they refer not only to past but also to current crimes. Charles had not only levied war between 1642 and his defeat in the autumn of 1648; he was doing so again even now. Indeed, while most of the articles are cast in general terms, stating vaguely that the king had sought to establish an ‘absolute tyrannicall power’, the only charge that refers to any speciﬁc act of tyranny (Article 2) instances that ‘the King hath granted Commissions to the Prince [of Wales], as also to ORMOND and his associate Irish Rebells, which are not recalled to this day’.71 The marquess’s name, emphatically capitalized in the printed edition, almost bursts off the page. For Fairfax and Cromwell, on the other hand, should Denbigh’s mission be successful, the beneﬁts more than outweighed any objections that might be raised by Ireton and the more radical ofﬁcers, who were impatient for an immediate trial. There was the chance that

REC2 7/13/01 2:29 PM Page 53

The Frighted Junto 53

the army could achieve through the king what parliament had thus far failed to do through Dorisla’s diplomacy: to neutralize the threat it currently posed by the conjunction of Ormond, the Prince of Wales’ ﬂeet, and the increasingly pro-royalist Dutch. So long as that remained a plausible outcome, there could be no question of beginning judicial proceedings against the king. By 19 December, therefore, it is hardly surprising that Fairfax and Cromwell had moderated their public rhetoric on the question of ‘justice’ against the king. A report published on Tuesday 19 December stated ‘that the Generall and Lieut[enant] Gen[eral] are resolved to act nothing against his Majesties person, but what shalbe agreeable to the known Laws of the Realm and the common Rights of the people’ – an ambiguous phrase, but one that at very least seems to have ruled out deﬁnitively any question of a capital sentence on the king.72 If there was to be no immediate prosecution of Charles I, however, the quest for scapegoats had to begin elsewhere, a conclusion that Cromwell seems to have reached even before the developments of 18 and 19 December. Cromwell wanted ‘to proceed ﬁrst against the [royalist] Lords and other principal persons whom they hold prisoners’, noted the Sieur de Grignon, the French resident in London – a point on which Cromwell differed from Ireton, who wanted to begin the series of prosecutions with the case of the king.73 Of the various ‘principal persons’, it was the Duke of Hamilton, the architect of the 1648 Scottish invasion of England, who was the prime focus of the army’s – and, in particular, Cromwell’s – attentions. Votes passed in the Commons on 13 December revoked the outrageously lenient decision, taken before the Purge, to limit the Duke of Hamilton’s punishment to a ﬁne of £100 000. Some went further and ‘barked a while for his beheading’, unless he disclosed the king’s role in the Engagement of December 1647 and named his co-conspirators from the parliament and City who had ‘invited [the Scots] in’. Nedham, cynically but not implausibly, believed that some form of ‘compact and complyance’ had already been agreed upon between the duke and the army leadership; the threats against Hamilton were mere bluster. What the army wanted was his evidence, not his head.74 While one may doubt whether there was ever a ‘compact’ between Hamilton and his captors, there are numerous pieces of contemporary evidence suggesting that the army leadership was being unusually gracious towards the leader of that July’s abortive Scottish invasion. There are numerous reports that Hamilton was in some form of negotiation with the army leadership, and visits

REC2 7/13/01 2:29 PM Page 54

54

The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

by Cromwell to Hamilton at Windsor were reported to have taken place between Thursday 14 and Monday 18 December, when Cromwell returned to London.75 What did Cromwell hope to achieve? Given the duke’s reputation for loyalty to Charles I, any suggestion that Cromwell expected Hamilton to incriminate the king seems improbable. Rather, what he appears to have sought was the duke’s evidence against those in parliament and the City that had been ‘his Correspondents in England’.76 Shifting the focus to the prosecution of the English ﬁfth-columnists was doubly useful. To show the world that MPs had connived at the Scottish invasion would provide a powerful public justiﬁcation of the army’s action in initiating the Purge. Executing the culprits as ‘grand delinquents’ would go a long way towards gratifying the demands within the army for retribution without necessarily harming the king. The more likely it became that some solution would have to be reached that saved the king from prosecution, the more important it became to ﬁnd scapegoats so that justice could be seen to be done. In this political environment, it was even possible to contemplate – in the event of the king rescinding his commissions to Ormond and the Prince of Wales – a situation in which the king was brought to a trial, but one that was stage-managed to establish not his guilt but his innocence. In the days immediately after Denbigh’s mission had been agreed upon, this seemed the likeliest outcome, assuming there was to be a trial at all. When the Commons set up a committee on Saturday 23 December to consider proceedings against the king, even some of its own members regarded it as posing no serious threat to the king. Wellknown moderates such as Sir Thomas Widdrington and Bulstrode Whitelocke were named among the committee’s members. Another, Nicholas Love, was reported to have assured his friends that the indictment against Charles ‘would be nothing but what he knew the K[ing] could cleerely acquit himself of’.77 Again, it was a shrewd strategy: the Remonstrance’s demand for a trial would nominally have been met, while the acquittal of the king was certain to have been greeted with extravagant popular rejoicing. The Moderate Intelligencer was even more optimistic. Noting that the king had requested that his chaplains be allowed to preach to him at Windsor, its writer noted that once the new ‘Representative’ – the reformed parliament that was to replace the current Lords and Commons – was conﬁrmed, ‘[the king] will have that liberty, and more’.78 Talk was once again of the politics of a restoration. What if the Denbigh mission should fail? Even under these circumstances, there seems to have been little enthusiasm, outside a small

REC2 7/13/01 2:29 PM Page 55

The Frighted Junto 55

group of zealots, for any proposal that extended ‘to the life of his Majesty’. Until 26 December, the severest sanction that commanded widespread support in the Council of Ofﬁcers was that Charles should be deposed and imprisoned. A wide variety of expedients were canvassed, with rarely any suggestion that the king should die. The radical press helpfully quoted the precedents of Edward II and Richard II.79 Others proposed that the king should be restored to titular authority, but should lose his crown if he ever in future attempted to cross the will of parliament. Under the terms of the more moderate of the December Agreements of the People – that promoted by the City government and John Jubbes, the Lieutenant-Colonel in Hewson’s regiment – the deposition of Charles and of his successors was provided for should there ever be an attempt in future to reclaim the monarch’s former ‘negative voice’, the king’s parliamentary power of veto.80 Opinion as to what should follow any act of deposition was still further divided. The stricter republicans, a group represented in the Commons by Thomas Scot (a future regicide), were determined to ‘lay aside the name of K[ing] forever’, and held out for a free commonwealth on the Dutch model.81 Others turned to more historically familiar solutions. In the event of Charles’ deposition, the outcome that seems to have been anticipated by most commentators was the installation of the king’s youngest son, Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, as a puppet king.82 The army leadership’s efforts from as early as November 1648 to ensure that the Prince of Wales and Prince James, Duke of York (the two sons of Charles I who ranked senior to Gloucester) should be perpetually exiled and debarred from the succession if they did not promptly surrender to parliament may well have been a piece of ground-clearing in case such a solution became necessary: Charles’ two elder sons had to be formally disinherited by parliament before Gloucester could be proclaimed king.83 This was probably the option that enjoyed broadest support in the Council of Ofﬁcers in the event of a refusal of Denbigh’s terms; and as late as the second week of January the army leadership was investigating whether the solution commanded the support of the more radical London Independents.84 Diverse though these alternatives may have been, they almost all shared a common assumption: a belief that there was little support, before the last week of December, for a capital sentence against the king. Gauging opinion in the army on 21 December, Nedham concluded that there were probably no more than six members of the Council of Ofﬁcers who were advocates of the king’s execution.85 This may well be an underestimate; but even so, before the failure of Denbigh’s mission

REC2 7/13/01 2:29 PM Page 56

56

The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

aspiring regicides seem to have been a minority in the army council, and scarcer still among the civilian members of the Commons. The outcome of Denbigh’s mission held the key that would determine whether one of these more radical alternatives would be pursued. On the eve of the earl’s departure, the Speaker of the Commons, William Lenthall, told a friend of Nedham’s that ‘if the K[ing] came not off roundly now in point of concession, he would be utterly lost’ – from which Nedham, with his keen nose for intrigue, correctly guessed that the Independent grandees ‘have applyed themselves and are now bartering with his Ma[jestie]’.86 But there was also more than a hint of menace in Lenthall’s remark. Those in the know at Westminster were aware that Denbigh’s mission was an ultimatum that would decide whether the proposal for a trial disappeared without trace in a Commons committee or became a programme for radical action. Denbigh, however, never progressed as far as negotiation. Although it is far from clear what happened after he arrived at Windsor on Monday 25 December, it seems likely that the king either rejected his proposal outright or refused to receive him. In any event, Charles hardly needed to speak with Denbigh to know what his prime condition would be: that he abandon plans for a new war.87 What has gone unnoticed is that the king’s response amounted to an ultimatum of his own. It is directed to ‘divers Ofﬁcers of the Army’, was drawn up shortly before or very soon after his own arrival at Windsor on 23 December, and found its way into print not later than 28 December in a pamphlet that was itself not written earlier than the king’s arrival at Windsor. The proximity of these dates to that of Denbigh’s visit raises an obvious possibility: that Denbigh himself may have acted as the courier for Charles’ message. If so, the document’s deﬁant tone suggests that his efforts at mediation had no effect, even if Denbigh did have access to the king at Windsor. Charles begins his list of assertions with the abstract principle that ‘no Law can judge a King’, before immediately moving on to the reason for his conﬁdence. ‘Though He suffers under restraint’ for the moment, Charles insists, ‘yet his Irish subjects will come in their time and rescue Him’.88 To Denbigh, the king’s refusal probably came as little surprise. From as early as the Army Plots of 1641, Charles, when cornered, had always placed his trust in force. It would have gone against all the king’s instincts – above all his conviction that rebels were to be coerced, not conciliated – if he had thought that by disavowing Ormond he would have made a trial less likely.89 At Windsor it was reported that the king was ‘very pleasant and merry since his comming thither, and [that he]

REC2 7/13/01 2:29 PM Page 57

The Frighted Junto 57

takes much delight in disputing the case of the army’.90 In the week after Denbigh was sent away empty-handed, it was reported that Charles ‘often declares that he is conﬁdent that both Scotland and Ireland will help him’.91 He was in no mood to surrender. Once again, he had an army of his own. News of Denbigh’s rebuff sharply radicalized opinion within the Council of Ofﬁcers. If preparations for a trial had been intended to threaten the king, Charles had called their bluff, and it now became obvious, even to Cromwell – the most inﬂuential advocate hitherto of postponement – that some form of trial could be deferred no longer. The question that remained unresolved, even as the bill for a trial made its controversial progress through the two Houses, was what did ‘bringing the king to account’ actually mean? Did it deﬁnitively mark the point at which the business of treating with the king ended and the business of judging him began, as committed republicans such as Thomas Scot no doubt hoped? Or did the same process of bargaining with menaces – the dialectic of threat and counter-threat that had characterized relations between the king and the regime throughout December – survive into January, to complicate and confuse even the business of proving before a partisan court that Charles I was guilty as a ‘man of blood’?

V The decision to initiate Charles I’s trial is usually seen as the catalyst that transformed a coup into a revolution. From that point, so the argument runs, the momentum of events moves inexorably towards the king’s execution.92 Legislation for a ‘high court of justice’ was introduced into the Commons within days of Denbigh’s return from Windsor; and when the House of Lords rejected the Commons’ bill on 2 January, the lower House retaliated on the 4th by declaring itself ‘the original of all just power’ and ‘the supreme power in this nation’, even when the king and House of Lords refused their consent.93 The High Court began its sessions on the 8th. The king was sentenced on the 27th. By the 30th he was dead. The process of bringing the king to trial, in other words, was principally a matter of executing justice – arguably long deferred – against an errant English king. The dynamic of events was driven, above all, by radicals: ﬁrebrands such as Scot and Colonel Harrison who believed they were doing God’s work by killing the king; ‘the soldiers and junior ofﬁcers’ such as Captain Joyce, who thought the trial ‘the greatest work of righteousness that ever was amongst men’;

REC2 7/13/01 2:29 PM Page 58

58

The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

and, in the end, by Cromwell, ﬁnally convinced that the providential moment for justice had come. In so far as there were divided counsels among ‘the revolutionary leaders’, these were produced by the radical ambitions welling up from the junior ranks colliding with the more conservative social instincts of the army’s grandees.94 Above all, the context of explanation is not only exclusively English, but also almost exclusively metropolitan. Such an interpretation may well make intelligible the political pressures that were to be found at Whitehall. But it makes little sense of those that arose elsewhere in the Stuart kingdoms, and these were not without effect on the trial merely because they did not arise in the immediate environs of Westminster Hall. In many respects, the central problem facing ‘the junto’ remained unchanged: the crisis that had begun with Dorisla’s failure to prevent the treaty being signed between the ‘Irish rebels’ and The Hague, which had been acutely intensiﬁed by the news of Ormond’s success. Indeed, the Council of Ofﬁcers’ decision to go ahead with the king’s trial, on 26 December (the day after Denbigh’s rebuff by the king), coincided with two timely reminders of the Ormondist-Confederate threat. The ﬁrst was a letter to Fairfax, signed jointly by Ormond and his second-in-command, Inchiquin, threatening that if so much as ‘one haire of his Majesties head fall to the ground by their meanes’, they would take ‘speedy revenge’ against himself, the army and parliament – ‘which message did not without cause startle his Excellencie and his Mechanick Councell’.95 Even allowing for the royalist bias of this source, it is not hard to see why developments in Ireland should be a cause for concern. Coinciding with the letter from Ormond and Inchiquin came conﬁrmation of one of parliament’s worst maritime reverses since the start of the war, reports of which had been trickling in since the 21st. It was now deﬁnite: there had been a ‘bloudy Fight at Sea between the English and the Irish’, in which the Irish ‘obtained the Conquest’. Fourteen merchant ships had been captured, along with 40 pieces of ordnance ‘and other rich booty’.96 In this context, it remained plausible to contemplate a renewed offer of the Windsor ultimatum to the king. Denbigh, for his part, seems to have played a decisive role in trying to keep alive the possibility of a settlement based on the king’s disavowal of Ormond. Once again, there was the possibility that the ‘Independent lords’ might yet broker a settlement.97 When seven peers reassembled on 9 January after a weeklong adjournment, Denbigh was again in the Speaker’s chair. The House

REC2 7/13/01 2:29 PM Page 59

The Frighted Junto 59

moved towards a compromise once again implicitly premised on the demand that the king should forswear attempts to raise a new war. Under the terms of the Lords’ new proposal, parliament would pass a resolution that any king who should ‘hereafter levy war against the Parliament and kingdom of England shall be guilty of high treason, and be tried in Parliament’. Charles might yet escape the capital charge of high treason for causing two civil wars; but not if he caused a third.98 Sufﬁcient progress had been made by 10 January to prompt the observation by Algernon Sidney that ‘the [Independent] lords are now in a temper to have given theire assent’ to a new bill for a High Court – a contingency that would have been inconceivable had it been thought likely that execution was the trial’s intended, or even possible, outcome.99 Though it is impossible to be certain, it seems likely that this was also the central proposal discussed at a recent ‘conference’, which took place shortly before 11 January, between leading Independents and the Duke of Richmond, who was attempting to act as intermediary with the king.100 In the event, the resolution went no further, defeated by the procedural difﬁculties inherent in dissolving and re-assembling the current High Court and, no doubt, by the intransigence of the king. It nevertheless highlights what Denbigh and his colleagues – and possibly Cromwell as well – regarded as the critical point at issue: not the king’s guilt for things past, but whether or not he would desist from planning a future war. When the High Court began its public hearings in Westminster Hall on 20 January, the question of Ormond’s threatened campaign continued to dominate proceedings. When the formal charge against the king was read out in court on 20 January, it listed various instances of the king’s campaigns ‘against the present Parliament and the People therein represented’, as examples of his tyranny. They ranged from the start of the war in England in 1642 through to the campaigns of ‘this present year 1648’. Perhaps the most damning clause, however, was the ﬁnal section of the charge – constituting more than a third of the whole document – which recites Charles’ guilt in creating the present coalition that aimed at the destruction of parliament. It culminates with the ﬁnal decisive clause: And for further Prosecution of his said evil Designs, He the Charles Stuart doth still continue his Commissions to the Prince [of Wales] and other Rebels and Revolters, both English Foreigners, and to the Earl of Ormond, and to the Irish Rebels

said said and and

REC2 7/13/01 2:29 PM Page 60

60

The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

Revolters associated with him; from whom further Invasions upon this Land are threatned, upon the procurement, and on the behalf of, the said Charles Stuart.101 In the course of the entire charge, the only ‘delinquent’ mentioned by name in the text, other than the Prince of Wales, is Ormond. The trial of Charles I has usually been seen as a ﬁnal settling of scores, a public afﬁrmation of the justness of putting the ‘grand delinquent’ to death. And there is no doubt that, once the regicide was a fait accompli, this is how parliamentarian polemicists sought to represent it. Setting hindsight aside, however, it is possible to regard the whole protracted business of bringing Charles to account, from the ﬁrst meeting which produced the Denbigh mission through to some relatively advanced stage of the trial, as an extended, and ultimately abortive, attempt at negotiation: a ﬁnal attempt to reach a quid pro quo whereby the king would ﬁnally agree to desist from war-mongering in return for his life. Over the winter of 1648–49, the ‘junto’ – the army grandees and their civilian allies – confronted a dual problem: how to decide the fate of the king, and how to secure a future for themselves and their ﬂedgling regime. Neither could be achieved without removing, or at least neutralizing, the rapidly multiplying network of alliances that were encircling them. In addition, as late as the opening of public sessions of the trial on 20 January, there was still the possibility – albeit growing ever more remote – that Ormond’s negotiations with the Confederates might be called off by the king. So the debate on Charles I’s fate in the weeks between the Purge and the opening of the trial was necessarily a counterpoint to the related debate about how those hostile alliances could be prised apart. It was also a debate inevitably complicated – and, in the event, sharply radicalized – by the equivocal nature of Charles I’s military defeat. Viewed in the context of the three kingdoms, the ‘absolute victory’ over the king, the elusive goal that had been a central reason for ‘new-modelling’ the army back in 1645, still eluded the army grandees even in 1649. Charles had been defeated, deﬁnitively as king of England, almost conclusively as king of Scots; but as king of Ireland, he was still in a position to command his men of war. The considerations that had made Charles I worth dealing with in December had not changed fundamentally in January. It is therefore hardly surprising that, even after the Commons insisted unilaterally on the establishment of the new High Court, the junto moved so haltingly in getting the trial under way. Indeed, although lacunae in the surviving evidence preclude any deﬁnitive conclusions, it is possible to

REC2 7/13/01 2:29 PM Page 61

The Frighted Junto 61

venture these considerations as the explanation of the very halting character of the judicial process against the king; for the trial commissioners’ week-long adjournment after their ﬁrst preliminary meeting; and for the series of opportunities, noted by Dr Kelsey in Chapter 3 of this book, given to the king to save his life once the trial began. It was the king’s adamant refusal to deal – in December, by refusing to admit Denbigh to the presence; in January, by refusing to acknowledge the authority of the court – that foreclosed all options. ‘Nothing will ruine his Majesty more than joining with the Irish against his Protestant Subjects’, the ofﬁcers of the New Model had warned the king at the time of the failure of the Denbigh mission; ‘the kingdom cannot be satisﬁed with Ormonds negotiation with the Rebels in Ireland.’102 What was arguably the decisive event in determining the ruin of His Majesty during the course of the trial occurred not at Westminster, but at Kilkenny. There, on 17 January 1649, the day before the king was moved from Windsor to St James in readiness for the trial, Ormond ﬁnally concluded his military alliance with the Confederates.103 The news reached London not later than 24 January, just as the trial was entering its ﬁnal phase. If Cromwell had earlier been in any doubt about the necessity for a new campaign, this must have been gone by the 24th. What the trial established, then, far more decisively than the monarch’s guilt for crimes past, was Charles I’s continuing determination to ﬁght another war. When the king was formally condemned to death on 27 January, the text of the sentence reiterated the point that had been made so damningly in the original charge: the contemporaneity of his crimes. The king had not only ‘renewed, or caused to be renewed, the said war against the Parliament and good people of this nation in this present year 1648’, but also ‘still continues his Commission’ to the prince and to Ormond ‘from whom further invasions of this Land are threatened’.104 Ireland was self-evidently to be the theatre of the next campaign, with Ormond an experienced and, so the London press insisted, a powerful adversary. The profound enmity this aroused among the soldiery, especially those who could already foresee that the next campaigning season would probably take them to Ireland, seems to have lain outside Charles I’s imaginative grasp. So, too, did the central ﬂaw in his strategy of brinkmanship. Ormond’s Irish coalition was a fragile and variegated alliance held together, above all, by loyalty to Charles I, and by its individual members’ belief that restoring the king to a personal authority in each of his three kingdoms was the surest means of checking an over-

REC2 7/13/01 2:29 PM Page 62

62

The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

mighty and Independent-dominated England.105 If this principle was largely responsible for Charles’ success in creating a party for himself in 1648, it also made his own position far more dangerous than he ever seems to have realized. For if the king remained adamant that he would not disband the anti-parliamentarian alliance in Ireland, then ‘the junto’ in England were left with no alternative but to dismantle it by force. The surest way of disuniting the enemy was by destroying the personal monarch for whom it was ﬁghting. Take away Charles I and, at a stroke, the lynchpin of the anti-Independent coalition was removed.106 Beyond the question of ‘justice against the grand delinquent’, there were therefore sound prudential reasons, once it was clear that Charles’ intransigence was absolute, for wanting the king not merely incarcerated, but dead. And none had more reason to respond to that logic than Oliver Cromwell, who, as early as January, was being spoken of as the likely commander of any Irish campaign. At some point during the trial, Cromwell evidently decided that, faced with the king’s continuing refusal to abandon the new war, the ‘politic moment’ for the king’s death had come. On the scaffold outside the Banqueting House, Charles I became the ﬁrst casualty of the Cromwellian reconquest of Ireland.

Notes 1. I am grateful to Dr David Scott for reading and commenting upon earlier drafts of this essay. 2. Claydon House, Bucks, Verney MS: Sir Roger Burgoyne to Sir Ralph Verney, 20 Nov. 1648. 3. By December 1648, decision-making authority within the army on major issues lay with the members of the so-called General Council of Ofﬁcers, though the senior ofﬁcers of the army’s formal hierarchy, with Fairfax as Lord General and Cromwell as his Lieutenant-General at its apex, continued to exercise a disproportionate inﬂuence. Even so, it is often difﬁcult to determine with any precision from which quarter an initiative derived, particularly since Fairfax’s personal authority within the army had been partially compromised since the creation of the General Council in 1647. The term ‘army leadership’ is used as a convenient, though necessarily imperfect, shorthand. 4. Mercurius Pragmaticus 38 (12–19 Dec. 1648, E476/35), sig. Ddd3, for quotation; cf. Mercurius Elencticus 56 (12–19 Dec. 1648, E476/36), p. 539. 5. Mercurius Elencticus 56 (12–19 Dec. 1648), pp. 538–9. 6. David Underdown, Pride’s Purge: Politics in the Puritan Revolution (Oxford, OUP, 1971), p. 168 (for quotation); see also, Gardiner, Civil War, IV, pp.

REC2 7/13/01 2:29 PM Page 63

The Frighted Junto 63

7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

285–6; cf. Antonia Fraser, Cromwell: Our Chief of Men (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973), pp. 274–5; Graham Edwards, The Last Days of Charles I (Stroud, Sutton, 1999), p. 97; Abbott, Writings, I, p. 718. Denbigh’s visit to the Council of Ofﬁcers is brieﬂy mentioned in Ian Gentles, The New Model Army in England, Scotland, and Ireland, 1645–53 (Oxford, Blackwell, 1992), p. 298. Fraser, Cromwell, p. 274 (quotation); for the most inﬂuential contemporary account, see Mercurius Pragmaticus 39 (19–26 Dec. 1648, E477/30), sig. Eee2[r–v]; see also his newsletter, Bodl. MS Clarendon 34, fol. 12r: [Nedham] to [Nicholas], 21 Dec. 1648. Nedham mentions nothing of their attempt to save the king’s life, and instead describes the occasion as a cynical attempt by a group self-interested lords to bargain away the privileges of the peerage so long as they could hang on to their ill-gotten gains. No abasement was too low for them, Nedham suggests, and Denbigh is reported to have held Fairfax’s stirrup – the act of a menial servant – as he mounted his horse. See also J.T. Peacey, ‘Marchamont Nedham and the Lawrans Letters’, Bodleian Library Record (2000). Professor Underdown’s Pride’s Purge, the most inﬂuential modern account of the events between the Purge and the act of regicide, typiﬁes this Anglocentric trend. Ironically, much of the recent Irish and Scottish historiography, though it pays lip service to ‘British’ concerns, has reinforced the apparent ‘Englishness’ of the crisis by failing to explore the extent to which English politics responded to, and reacted upon, changes in power in the other two Stuart kingdoms. William Erbery, The Lord of Hosts: or God Guarding the Camp of the Saints ([24 Dec.] 1648, E477/22), pp. 7–8; A Declaration of the Ofﬁcers Belonging to the Brigade of Colonel John Lambert ([20 Dec.] 1648, E477/10), pp. 4–5. As the ofﬁcers in Fairfax’s regiment pointed out before the Purge, neither the Lord General nor they themselves had received their commissions from ‘the parl[iament] as now constituted, but from that good party in it, who strugled through many hazards to [new-]model this army for the kingdoms safety’. A New Remonstrance from the Souldiery ([15 Dec.] 1648, E476/27), p. 3. For Pembroke as an object of satire, see The Earl of Pembrokes Farewell to the King ([14 Dec.] 1648, E476/22), esp. pp. 5–7. Bodl. MS Clarendon 34, fol.73v: ‘John Lawrans’ to [Edward Nicholas], 12 Jan. 1649; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, p. 202. LJ, X, p. 630. LJ, X, p. 633; CJ, V, pp. 100–1; BL, Add[itional] MS 37344 (Whitelocke’s Annals), fol. 236v. Pembroke nominated Bulstrode Whitelocke as his deputy in the place: BL, Add. MS 37344, fol. 236v. For Charles I writing to Pembroke in his capacity as Constable, see Sir Thomas Herbert, Memoirs of the Two Last Years of the Reign of King Charles I (London, 1839), p. 148. Rushworth, Historical Collections of Private Passages of State (7 vols, London, 1659–1701), Part IV, II, p. 1366 (for Fairfax and Cromwell); Ireton’s presence is mentioned by Nedham: Bodl. MS Clarendon 34, fol. 12v: [Nedham] to [Nicholas], 21 Dec. 1648.

REC2 7/13/01 2:29 PM Page 64

64

The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

17. For the mutiny see, Robert Ashton, Counter-Revolution: the Second Civil War and its Origins, 1646–48 (New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 84–5, 438–48. 18. For Warwick’s activities in 1648, see A Letter from the Navy with the Earle of Warwick, Lord Admirall (24 Nov. 1648, E437/28), pp. 1–7. The best modern account of the mutiny is R. McCaughey, ‘The English Navy: Politics and Administration, 1640–49’ (DPhil thesis, New University of Ulster, 1983), ch. 5. 19. The suggestion that Warwick’s avoidance of a war with the Dutch was an impressive achievement in the context of 1648 is made in McCaughey, ‘English Navy’, p. 226. 20. For predictions that Warwick would join the Prince of Wales, see the letter of the royalist Major Thomas Harman to an unnamed recipient, 7 Nov. 1648: LJ, X, p. 629. For Warwick’s denial of the rumour, see The Remonstrance and Declaration of his Excellencie Robert Earl of Warwick ([14 Dec.] 1648, E476/21), p. 2. For Nedham’s denunciation of Warwick as ‘perﬁdious’, see [Nedham] to [Nicholas], 21 Dec. 1648: Bodl. MS Clarendon 34, fol. 12v. 21. The Remonstrance and Declaration of his Excellencie Robert Earl of Warwick, pp. 2–3; The Kings Majesties Prophecie concerning the Army ([20 Dec.] 1648, E477/15), p. 6. 22. Mercurius Melancholicus 1 (25 Dec. 1648–1 Jan. 1649, E536/27), p. 6; the printed text erroneously reads ‘though’ for ‘thou’ in the third quoted line. 23. For the date of Warwick’s return, Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer 290 (12–19 Dec. 1648, E476/39), p. 1192; conﬁrmed in Moderate Intelligencer 196 (14–21 Dec. 1648, E477/14), sig. Mmmmmmmmm 2[v]. 24. Kings Majesties Prophecie, p. 6; Bodl. MS Clarendon 34, fol. 12v: [Nedham] to [Nicholas], 21 Dec. 1648. 25. Kings Majesties Prophecie, p. 6. 26. A Declaration of his Highness the Prince of Wales ([24 Dec.] 1648, E477/23), p. 6. 27. For suspicion of Warwick in the army, see Bodl. MS Clarendon 34, fols. 17v–18: [Nedham] to [Nicholas], 28 Dec. 1648; for Warwick’s public stance, see A Declaration of his Highness the Prince of Wales, p. 6, and Articles Exhibited against the King ([29 Dec.] 1648, E536/21), p. 5. 28. This group of leading royalists would obviously have included Warwick’s estranged younger brother, the Earl of Holland, leader of one of the summer’s abortive royalist revolts; it is unclear whether Warwick had decided that punishment of such royalists was a price he was prepared to pay if it meant saving the life of the king, or whether he hoped to negotiate an exemption for his brother. 29. Mercurius Pragmaticus 39 (19–26 Dec. 1648), sig. Eee2. I owe this reference to Dr David Scott. For further evidence of Chaloner’s defence of Warwick, Mercurius Pragmaticus 38 (12–19 Dec. 1648), entry for 15 Dec. 30. Moderate Intelligencer 196 (14–21 Dec. 1648), sig. Mmmmmmmmm [2]. 31. CSPD 1648–49, p. 340. 32. For the background, see Simon Groenveld, ‘The English Civil War as a Cause of the First Anglo-Dutch War, 1640–1652’, HJ, XXX (1987), p. 566. For Willem II, see Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic: its Rise, Greatness, and

REC2 7/13/01 2:29 PM Page 65

The Frighted Junto 65

33.

34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

39. 40.

Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford, OUP, 1995), pp. 595–609; and his ‘The Courts of the House of Orange, c.1580–1795’, in John Adamson, ed., The Princely Courts of Europe: Ritual, Politics and Culture under the Ancien Régime, 1500–1750 (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999), p. 130. Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer 290 (12–19 Dec. 1648), p. 1192; for Ormond’s efforts to create a joint royalist-Confederate ﬂeet, see HMC, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquess of Ormonde, new ser. (6 vols, 1902–9), I, pp. 119–21. For Skippon, see Gentles, New Model Army, p. 311. CSPD 1648–49, p. 340. LJ, X, p. 633. Bodl. MS Clarendon 34, fol. 12: ‘Lawrans’ [Nedham] to Nicholas, 21 Dec. 1648; Mercurius Pragmaticus 39 (19–26 Dec. 1648), sig. Eee. Nedham’s printed account of this meeting states that the fourth member of the delegation was Lord North, but this seems highly improbable for two reasons. North had been a steady opponent of the New Model since early 1647; his inclusion in the delegation would therefore hardly have been diplomatic. Moreover, he was (or claimed to be) ill at the time of the call of the House on 28 December, and otherwise took no part in the proceedings of the House of Lords during December. The mistake may have arisen from a printer’s misunderstanding of Nedham’s MS text. The Bodleian copy of Nedham’s newsletter reads: ‘ye Lords Pemb. Salisb. Denbigh and North. visited the Gen.’. ‘North.’ – terminated with what appears to be a smudged full point – seems to be an abbreviation for ‘Northumberland’. Though Northumberland distanced himself from parliament after the Purge, and abstained from attending the House until January, he is a far more plausible member of this delegation than Lord North. He had a strong record of support for the New Model since its inception, was himself a member of the Derby House Committee, and was still closely involved in the administration of Army Committee (of which he was also a member) through his steward, Robert Scawen, who acted as the committee’s chairman until the beginning of January 1649. For Northumberland’s behaviour during this period, see John Adamson, ‘Of Armies and Architecture: the Employments of Robert Scawen’, in Ian Gentles, John Morrill and Blair Worden, eds, Soldiers, Writers, and Statesmen of the English Revolution (Cambridge, CUP, 1998), pp. 61–7. It is not possible to ascertain the time of the peers’ meeting with Fairfax on 19 December, but as they would have been occupied with the meeting of the House of Lords in the morning, it seems reasonable to assume that the most likely time for the meeting with Fairfax was after the 3 p.m. meeting of the Derby House Committee had concluded; cf. LJ, X, p. 633. For the order, see CSPD 1648–49, p. 340. At their last confrontation, when Charles had refused parliament’s moderate proposals contained in the Four Bills of December 1647, Denbigh had become so incensed that he had addressed the king in ‘harsher terms than one Gentleman ought to use to another’, Sir John Berkeley’s diplomatic understatement for what seems to have been a furious dressing down. Memoirs of Sir John Berkeley (1699), p. 89. For his earlier career, see the perceptive assessment in Ann Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War in Warwickshire, 1620–1660 (Cambridge, CUP, 1987), pp. 221–4.

REC2 7/13/01 2:29 PM Page 66

66

The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

41. Bodl. MS Clarendon 34, fols. 17v–18: [Nedham] to [Nicholas], 28 Dec. 1648. 42. A Declaration of the Lords and Commons . . . Concerning the Tryall of the King ([3 Jan. 1649], E536/36), p. 3. Although Denbigh refused to serve on the court, this should not necessarily be interpreted as implying that he was opposed to any form of trial of the king. He was probably among the peers later mentioned by Algernon Sidney as being prepared to acquiesce in what turned out to be an abortive plan to set new terms for the king’s trial around 9 January. BL, Add. MS 21506 (Autograph letters), fol. 55: Sidney to the Earl of Leicester, 10 Jan. 1649. 43. S.R. Gardiner notes that the motives assigned to the peers by Nedham (using his pseudonym ‘Lawrans’) in his account ‘had their origin in the lively imagination of political opponents’; Gardiner, Civil War, IV, p. 285. 44. Bodl. MS Clarendon 34, fol. 12: [Nedham] to [Nicholas], 21 Dec. 1648; Gardiner, Civil War, IV, pp. 285–6; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, p. 168. 45. Bodl. MS Clarendon 34, fol. 17r–v: [Nedham] to [Nicholas], 25 Dec. 1648; Nedham published a similar report, stating that the army ‘will bring the King in for a share with them, as a Duke of Venice or some such thing’, in Mercurius Pragmaticus 39 (19–26 Dec. 1648), sig. Eee; cf. Mercurius Melancholicus 1 (25 Dec. 1648–1 Jan. 1649), pp. 5–6. 46. Thomas Carte, The Life of James Butler, Duke of Ormond (6 vols, Oxford, OUP, 1851); Patrick Little, ‘The Marquess of Ormond and the English Parliament, 1645–47’, in Toby Barnard and Jane Fenlon, eds, The Dukes of Ormond, 1610–1745 (Woodbridge, Boydell, 2000), pp. 83–99. 47. For Ormond’s involvement in the Engagement, see ‘Some Passages in the Early Life of James, First Duke of Ormond’, in Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquess of Ormonde, new ser., II, p. 353. The editors of the Ormond MSS conjecture that this work may be by William Moreton, bishop of Kildare, who had planned, and collected materials for, a biography of Ormond in 1692. For Ormond’s activities during the 1640s, see Micheál Ó Siochrú, Confederate Ireland 1642–49: a Constitutional and Political Analysis (Dublin, Four Courts Press, 1999), pp. 152–5, 185–6; Little, ‘Marquess of Ormond’, pp. 97–9. 48. Underdown, Pride’s Purge; see also Gentles, New Model Army, pp. 266–314; and C.V. Wedgwood, The Trial of Charles I (London, Collins, 1964). Blair Worden, however, notes ‘in January 1649, an ominous alliance between the king’s Lord Lieutenant, the Earl of Ormonde, and the Confederate Catholics of Ulster’: Blair Worden, The Rump Parliament, 1648–53 (Cambridge, CUP, 1974), p. 163. 49. For an account of Ormond’s tortuous negotiations with the Confederates in Ireland from October 1648 to January 1649, see Ó Siochrú, Confederate Ireland, pp. 188–204. 50. A Declaration of the Lord Lieutenant General of Ireland ([27 Nov.] 1648, E473/25), p. 4; for the use of the term ‘Independent’ in Ireland, see John Adamson, ‘Strafford’s Ghost: the British Context of Viscount Lisle’s Lieutenancy of Ireland’, in Jane Ohlmeyer, ed., Ireland from Independence to Occupation, 1641–1660 (Cambridge, CUP, 1995), pp. 156–7. 51. Mercurius Impartialis 1 (5–12 Dec. 1648), p. 8 (quotation); also reported in Moderate Intelligencer 194 (30 Nov.–7 Dec. 1648, E475/6), sig. Kkkkkkkkk[v]; and 195 (7–14 Dec. 1648, E476/24), sig. Lllllllll[2].

REC2 7/13/01 2:29 PM Page 67

The Frighted Junto 67 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62.

63.

64.

65.

66.

67. 68.

Mercurius Pragmaticus 38 (12–19 Dec. 1648), sig. Ddd2[2v]. Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer 290 (12–19 Dec. 1648), p. 1192. Mercurius Pragmaticus 36–7 (5–12 Dec. 1648, E476/2), ﬁnal page. Moderate Intelligencer 196 (14–21 Dec. 1648), sig. Mmmmmmmmm [2]. Bodl. MS Carte 23 (Ormond papers), fol. 72: Richard Gething to George Lane, Cork, 20 Dec. 1648. Gething appears to have been writing on behalf of Inchiquin to Lane, Ormond’s secretary, who was to put these arguments to Ormond. For Lane, see Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquess of Ormonde, new ser., II, p. 353. Mercurius Elencticus 56 (12–19 Dec. 1648), p. 540 (quotation); cf. Perfect Weekly Account (13–20 Dec. 1648, E477/13), p. 318. Perfect Weekly Account (13–20 Dec. 1648), p. [320]; cf. the similar report in Moderate Intelligencer 196 (14–21 Dec. 1648), sig. Mmmmmmmmm 2[v]. A week later it was reported that ‘The Letters from Chester say that they much fear an invasion by the Irish this Spring’; Perfect Weekly Account (20–27 Dec. 1648, E536/10), p. 330. Moderate Intelligencer 196 (14–21 Dec. 1648), sig. Mmmmmmmmm 2[v]. John A. Murphy, ‘The Politics of the Munster Protestants, 1641–49’, Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society, LXXVI (1971), p. 18. Ó Siochrú, Confederate Ireland, pp. 192–9. His Majesties Declaration to the Army concerning their Seizing . . . of his Royall Person ([22 Nov.] 1648, E473/4), p. 1; Moderate Intelligencer 192 (16–23 Nov. 1648, E473/15), ﬁnal page. The king’s secret correspondence with Ormond during the Newport Treaty, urging him to continue his efforts to help him and assuring him that he would repudiate any agreement concluded at Newport, is noted by Wedgwood, Trial of Charles I, p. 19. For the king’s compromise proposal on the question of religion, see the draft of his answer, dated 27 November 1648: Bodl. MS Clarendon 33, fol. 188r–v. According to one of Ormond’s seventeenth-century biographers, the king had informed Ormond of a plan to ‘to bring him to a public trial for his life’ when the two had met at Hampton Court in October 1647. He looked on Ormond’s mission to Ireland as a means of preventing it. Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquess of Ormonde, new ser., II, p. 353. Francis Peck, ed., Desiderata Curiosa (2 vols, London, 1732–5), II, Book. X, p. 30. Charles seems to have been relatively well supplied with ‘private notice’ of outside events, despite his seclusion at Windsor; see Herbert, Memoirs, pp. 153–4. The proposals are reported in at least two sources: Heads of the Charge against the King, Drawn up by the Generall Councell of the Armie ([24 Dec.] 1648, E477/25), p. 1; and His Majesties Declaration to the City and Kingdom ([Dec.] 1648, E477/28), p. 2. This latter pamphlet prints a declaration by the king that purports to be dated at Windsor on 21 December; but this is obviously incorrect, as the king’s party did not arrive at the castle until the 23rd. Mercurius Pragmaticus 38 (12–19 Dec. 1648), sig. Ddd2 [2v]. In the event of the king refusing this latest offer, the most likely outcome – widely canvassed in the newsbooks – was that the army would revert to the agenda set out in its November Remonstrance: it would proceed to

REC2 7/13/01 2:29 PM Page 68

68

69. 70. 71.

72. 73.

74. 75.

76. 77. 78. 79.

The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I try the king and probably ‘depose him’. Bodl. MS Clarendon 34, fol. 17v: [Nedham] to [Nicholas], 24 Dec. 1648. Two Petitions presented to His Excellency the Lord Fairfax ([Nov.] 1648, E473/23), pp. 6–7, quotation at p. 7. Mercurius Impartialis 1 (5–12 Dec. 1648), p. 8. Heads of the Charge against the King, p. 5. The body referred to as the ‘General Council of the Army’ after the second civil war was one and the same as the General Council of Ofﬁcers, the title by which it was more commonly known; on the nomenclature, see Austin Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen: the General Council of the Army and its Debates, 1647–48 (Oxford, OUP, 1987), p. 324. New Propositions from the King ([19 Dec.] 1648, E477/2), p. 6. The Sieur de Grignon to the Comte de Brienne, 21/31 Dec. 1648, quoted in Gardiner, Civil War, IV, p. 282. Abbott (Writings, I, p. 717), discussing this letter, confuses the recipient with the sender. There are hints that Cromwell had allies for his strategy within the army. As early as November, he seems to have become the focus for those who wanted priority attached to the prosecution of the Scots’ English collaborators, before consideration of justice against the king. The petitions in late November 1648 from Colonel Thomas Pride’s and Colonel John Harrison’s regiments, for example, demanding the punishment of the English ﬁfth-columnists who had ‘invited in the Scots’, were each routed ﬁrst to Cromwell, with the intention that he should forward them to his superior, Lord Fairfax. See Severall Petitions Presented to His Excellency the Lord Fairfax ([30 Nov.] 1648, E474/5), pp. 2–8. Cromwell’s preferences also accorded with the mainstream of opinion in parliament. Since around 13 December, the focus of debate, as revealed both by the newsbooks and the parliamentary record, had shifted away from the king and towards the lesser fry. Reports circulated that the Council of Ofﬁcers had decided on 19 December that the leaders of the royalist rising in Wales, MajorGeneral Rowland Laugharne, Colonel Rice Powel and John Powyer, would be shot by ﬁring squad after trial at martial law. New Propositions from the King, p. 6. Mercurius Pragmaticus 38 (12–19 Dec. 1648), sig. Ddd2[2]. Mercurius Elencticus 56 (12–19 Dec. 1648), p. 540; Mercurius Pragmaticus 38 (12–19 Dec. 1648), sig. Ddd2[2]; Mercurius Melancholicus 1 (25 Dec. 1648–1 Jan. 1649), pp. 5–6; Gilbert Burnet, Memoirs of the Lives and Actions of James and William, Dukes of Hamilton (London, 1677), p. 379; Abbott, Writings, I, p. 710. Burnet, Dukes of Hamilton, p. 379. Hamilton was in a position to provide this evidence. Bodl. MS Clarendon 34, fol. 17r–v: [Nedham] to [Nicholas], 25 Dec. 1648. Moderate Intelligencer 196 (14–21 Dec. 1648), p. 1789. As late as 28 December, when Charles’ refusal of the Denbigh proposal was already known, Nedham was still conﬁdent that the plans of the ‘Independents’ (his phrase for the army leadership and its allies in the Commons) might extend to the king’s perpetual imprisonment, ‘but never to the life of his Ma[jesty]’. For a discussion of deposition, see The Moderate 21 (28 Nov.–5 Dec. 1648, E475/8), p. 179.

REC2 7/13/01 2:29 PM Page 69

The Frighted Junto 69 80. [John Jubbes], Several Proposals for Peace and Freedom by an Agreement of the People, offered unto Commissary General Ireton (Dec. 1648, E477/18), p. 4. Hewson’s was one of the most politicized of all the New Model regiments. For Jubbes, see C.H. Firth and G. Davies, The Regimental History of Cromwell’s Army (2 vols, Oxford, OUP, 1940), II, pp. 406, 408. 81. Bodl. MS Clarendon 34, fol. 72: [Nedham] to [Nicholas], 8 Jan. 1649. 82. [Clement Walker], Animadversions upon the Armies Remonstrance [of 20 November 1648] ([Dec. ?] 1648, CUL, Syn.7.64.110/25), pp. 16–17; for the Gloucester scheme, see also Longleat House, Wilts., Whitelocke Papers, X, fol. 1: Darnell to Whitelocke, 6 Jan. 1649. 83. The Articles and Charge of the Army . . . against the Kings Majesty, the Prince of Wales, and the Duke of York ([22 Nov.] 1648, E473/14), p. 2. 84. Underdown, Pride’s Purge, p. 183. 85. Bodl. MS Clarendon 34, fol. 13r–v: [Nedham] to [Nicholas], 21 Dec. 1648. 86. Ibid., fol. 17r [Nedham] to [Nicholas], 25 Dec. 1648. 87. Gardiner, Civil War, IV, pp. 285–6; cf. Underdown, Pride’s Purge, p. 171. 88. His Majesties Last Proposals to the Ofﬁcers of the Armie ([28 Dec. 1648], E536/13), pp. 1–6; quotations at p. 1. 89. The theme that any concession merely strengthens and emboldens an enemy recurs frequently in Charles’ correspondence. It is articulated clearly in his lengthy letter of advice to the prince of Wales, written from Newport on 29 November 1648: Bodl. MS Clarendon 33, fols 195–207, where the text is in the hand of the king’s amanuensis, Nicholas Oudart. 90. His Majesties Last Proposals, p. 6. 91. His Majesties Declaration concerning the Charge of the Army ([1 Jan.] 1649, E536/25), p. 2. 92. Cf., most notably, Underdown, Pride’s Purge, p. 173. 93. CJ, V, pp. 110, 111. 94. Underdown, Pride’s Purge, pp. 181–3. 95. Mercurius Melancholicus 1 (25 Dec. 1648–1 Jan. 1649), p. 7; for an earlier report see, Moderate Intelligencer 196 (14–21 Dec. 1648), sig. Mmmmmmmmm 2[v]. 96. Articles Exhibited against the King ([29 Dec.] 1648, E536/21), p. 5. 97. Even after the Commons asserted their right to sovereignty on 4 January, there was no reason to suppose the peers – which for the moment meant Denbigh, as Speaker, and his small caucus of pro-army lords – had been permanently written out of the legislative process. Cromwell, not least, remained convinced that aristocratic participation in the legislature was more important than ever. In a speech usually dated to 4 January 1649, Cromwell angrily turned on those who wanted to exclude the lords, asking whether they were ‘madd’ to propose a course that would ‘incense all the Peeres of the whole kingdome ag[ains]t them, at such a time when they had more need to study a neere union with them’. Bodl. MS Clarendon 34, fol. 73v: ‘John Lawrans’ to [Sir Edward Nicholas], 12 Jan. 1649. 98. LJ, X, p. 642; emphasis added. 99. BL, Add. MS 21506 (Autograph letters), fol. 55: Sidney to the Earl of Leicester, 10 Jan. 1649. 100. Bodl. MS Clarendon 34, fol. 72: [Nedham] to [Nicholas], 11 Jan. 1649. 101. Rushworth, Collections, Part IV, II, p. 1397.

REC2 7/13/01 2:29 PM Page 70

70 102. 103. 104. 105.

The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

His Majesties Last Proposals, p. 2. Murphy, ‘Politics of the Munster Protestants’, p. 18. Rushworth, Collections, Part IV, II, pp. 1418–19; emphasis added. M. Perceval-Maxwell, ‘Ireland and Scotland, 1638 to 1648’, in John Morrill, ed., The Scottish National Covenant in its British Context (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1990), pp. 195, 207. 106. These themes are also discussed in Adamson, ‘Strafford’s Ghost’, pp. 154–9.

REC3 7/13/01 2:32 PM Page 71

3 Staging the Trial of Charles I Sean Kelsey

The ﬁgure of Charles I dominates most accounts of the extraordinary events which took place in the great hall of the palace of Westminster in January 1649.1 Our understanding of the trial, as of any court masque, continues to revolve around the central presence of the king, without whom the evolving drama would seem to have had no meaning.2 For his own part, the king played his role to absolute perfection, facing the inevitability of his destruction in the cool assurance of martyrdom and beatiﬁcation.3 Enunciating with unwonted ﬂuency some of the most heroic declarations to have passed into the lexicon of English political history, he faced down his accusers, whose callow pragmatism crumbled before the imperturbable moral certitude of a man with principles for which he was prepared to die. The trial of Charles I rapidly became one of the principal founding myths upon which was erected that great kingship cult sustaining successive constitutional dispensations within the islands of Britain down to the middle of the nineteenth century.4 His persecutors may have ruled against him, but posterity has continued to pass judgement in the king’s favour. By contrast with his calm acceptance of the mantle of moral superiority in defence of his people’s liberties, his antagonists’ handling of the trial was ‘hurried and ill-considered’, its progress ‘little short of disastrous’, an embarrassing advertisement of the desperate illegality of the revolution and the power of the sword on which it rested.5 Much of the mythology surrounding the trial and the ‘inevitability’ of its tragic denouement was implicitly called into question long ago by Samuel Gardiner’s glancing observation that the rather hesitant and unassured conduct of the trial demonstrated the deep differences of motivation and objective which existed amongst the king’s judges. This suggestion has been reinforced by David Underdown who asserted that 71

REC3 7/13/01 2:32 PM Page 72

72

The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

the outcome of the trial was far from preordained.6 Although options for an agreement with Charles had been narrowing for well over a year by the time the trial opened, hopes for a peaceful settlement appear not to have vanished entirely until pronouncement of sentence on 27 January 1649. Some contemporaries believed the trial was just another means of increasing the pressure on the king to make key concessions, whilst also allowing him a greater latitude to acquit himself of the charges in return.7 For his own part, Charles appeared to treat the proceedings as an elaborate negotiation. Ceasing to assert his divine right, he preferred instead to champion his subjects’ liberties, choosing to defend his rapidly weakening position in a language more acceptable to his judges. He even appeared implicitly to recognize the jurisdiction of the court, albeit denying the legitimacy of its authority. Badly overplaying a wretched hand, he sought to enter a demurrer to that authority, and applied to submit his reasons for declining it. Finally, he requested a conference with Lords and Commons. On rejection of his tardy overture, he asked only ‘that this may be entered what I have said’, implicitly accepting the tribunal as a court of record. In later accounts it would be claimed that, on the very brink of receiving sentence, Charles even begged the Lord President ‘that you would hear me concerning those great imputations that you have laid to my charge’.8 Only with hindsight can the king’s mishandling of his last chance be seen as a heroic martyrdom. The real drama of the English revolution was not acted out between a Christ-like king and his pharisaical judges, but amongst the members of the High Court of Justice themselves, those English, Welsh and Anglo-Irish who were required to arraign their monarch on charges of treason, and to respond appropriately in the face of his obstinate refusal to accept his responsibilities to his crown, his posterity and his subjects. This paper therefore deliberately reconstructs the trial of Charles I from a perspective other than the king’s.9 It suggests that the spectacular manner in which the trial was conducted reﬂects some of the political complexities involved in achieving a judicial consensus on the fate of the king. The trial may have appeared hurried and ill-conceived. But this was due neither to chaotic mismanagement nor a failure of will in the face of splendid regal obduracy – it was a manifestation of a kind of competitive choreography. The trial was a drama made up of multiple, intertwining narratives, written by many hands, often working at cross purposes. The question of life or death of an anointed king was not the only source of division amongst the king’s judges. Equally important was their struggle for control of the constitutional settlement

REC3 7/13/01 2:32 PM Page 73

Staging the Trial of Charles I 73

which would have to follow the conclusion of the trial, whatever its outcome. To be sure, for some of its participants the trial was an opportunity to assert the sovereignty of the people and the supremacy of their representatives in the rump House of Commons. Perhaps some of the people’s advocates were also avowed king-killers who had already decided that this king must die, as a stake through the heart of monarchy in England, and as a warning to all tyrants. On the other hand, many of the king’s judges appear to have seen in the trial perhaps the last hope of preserving at least the bare rudiments of a monarchy in some attenuated form, whilst the shadowy presence of leading peers reﬂects what difﬁculty there would be, to the last, in sidelining altogether certain members of the old political elite. The iconography, symbolism and ceremonial of the trial help to lay bare the hesitant and ﬁtful passage towards a resolution of these conﬂicting objectives and the satisfaction, or otherwise, of those contending parties.

I Why was the trial of Charles I conducted in such spectacular fashion, in the great hall at Westminster, the ground-zero of English justice and the ancient constitution? For months before the trial, ofﬁcers and soldiers in the New Model Army and their partisans in the country had been calling for peremptory justice on ‘capital authors’ of the nation’s tragedy, ‘from the highest to the lowest’ and ‘without respect to persons’. Having laid hands on the ‘man of blood’, and destroyed the political opponents at Westminster who had persisted in negotiating with him in godless deﬁance of divine providence, why did the soldiers not strike whilst the iron was hot, and the bitter memories of St Fagans and Maidstone, Preston, Colchester and St Neots remained fresh? The simplest explanation lies in deep divisions within the army, great gaping clefts even deeper than the wounds sustained in the previous 12 months. Left to themselves, the soldiers would never have agreed how, when, or possibly even whether at all to ‘do justice’ upon Charles. A unity of purpose may have entered military counsels after the Windsor prayer meeting in May 1648, but it was dissipated by the autumn. Until November 1648, there had been little or no indication in the conveniently vague demand for ‘justice’ as to what it might actually mean once translated into action. Men of blood had certainly gone unpunished before; certainly contrite kings had earned redemption.10 The debates over Ireton’s Remonstrance of the Army revealed the problems in maintaining a united front. Some ofﬁcers had had grave

REC3 7/13/01 2:32 PM Page 74

74

The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

reservations about the commissary-general’s manifesto, misgivings which survived its adoption at St Albans on 18 November.11 Despite (remarkably successful) efforts to drum up support for this document within the military, one army newsletter in circulation after its adoption reported that ‘some thincke it not seasonable, others not ﬁt at all to tell the Parliament what is ﬁtt to be donne’, however grave the members’ errors.12 The most serious divisions within the army concerned the fate of the king.13 Those opposing the Remonstrance opposed the disruption of the Newport talks. However, supporters of Ireton’s manifesto were by no means all avowed king-killers. Many of the military grandees and their civilian fellow-travellers wanted to keep Charles alive not so much because his execution would be an unconscionable atrocity, but largely because it would be a tactical blunder of the ﬁrst order. Some soldiers considered it ‘irrationall . . . to take away the life of ye K[ing] for by so doing they would exchange a K[ing] in their power, for a K[ing] (meaning the Pr[ince]) out of their power, potent in forraigne allyances, & strong in ye affections of the people &c.’14 It was earnestly believed that ‘they dare not, and cannot (without wilfulle madnesse) touch the Life of his Majesty’. This was not so much wishful thinking as an acknowledgment of the simple political fact that regicide was immensely risky; whilst keeping Charles alive, albeit in chains, was the best way to achieve a settlement which would protect the interests of the king’s captors. ‘Mischeife the K[ing] they dare not, but keep him in prison, as a reserve to apply themselves unto upon all occasions to countenance their designes in case of opposicon’. These ‘designes’ included surrender of the king’s negative voice, conﬁrmation of parliamentary sales of episcopal lands, destruction of the covenant and its partisans, an ‘Independent’ church settlement, the king’s repudiation of his perﬁdious Scottish subjects, their English supporters, and, in all likelihood, as Dr Adamson has argued in the preceding essay, the on-going efforts of the Marquis of Ormond to raise Ireland in the king’s behalf.15 After his seizure at Carisbrooke, reports had certainly circulated of an intention in certain quarters of the army to bring the king to justice without reference to parliament, and many feared for his safety.16 But if they could not hold back a strong providential desire amongst their subordinates to avenge the blood of the innocents, the grandees could at least stay the arm of ﬂesh. For the leaders of the parliamentarian coalition, military and civilian, it was crucial, that ‘justice’ be sought not in some military tribunal, but through more respectable channels.17

REC3 7/13/01 2:32 PM Page 75

Staging the Trial of Charles I 75

Hence the demand of the Remonstrance for a parliamentary proceeding against the king. Hence also the appointment of the committee set up by the council of ofﬁcers on 15 December to consider how best to proceed against the king, thus removing the matter from the army council agenda. The gap was plugged by debate over the army’s new Agreement of the People, with barely a pause to consider the king’s fate for over a fortnight.18 More sympathetic newsbook editors began deliberately to play down reports that, having purged parliament, the military authorities were taking steps of their own to bring the king to justice. The author of intelligence printed in Perfect Occurrences towards the end of December reported from Windsor that ‘The King had some discourse about the Remonstrance of the Army as to the bringing of him to a Tryall, asking how that could be, what way they could do it, or which way they could bring in any Charge against him’, the intelligencer adding that, ‘it was not said that there is any such thing to be done by the Army’. The same author later went on to say that a charge had been drawn up, ‘But the army will not proceed of themselves, without some of the Parliament’.19 On 23 December, the House of Commons set up a committee to draft legislation erecting a High Court of Justice to increase the pressure on the king to capitulate.20 An undated army newsletter written sometime during the following week reported that the king’s judges would meet ‘in the great Halle at Westminster’ – rather a premature report of a decision on the venue for the trial which was not in fact to be made for another fortnight.21 The issue of justice was clearly being ‘spun’ ﬁrmly in the direction of the parliamentary palace. Elsewhere it was suggested that, far from being in danger at Windsor, the king was once more receiving the applications of his captors who came in search of a peaceful settlement. Some sort of trial might be held at Windsor, far enough from public gaze to keep secret whatever deal might yet be concluded. But if talks failed, then the supplicants would be forced to proceed in the open. Hopes of an accommodation worked out behind closed doors with a king in thrall soon ended with the failure of the Denbigh mission. But that did not mean an end to hopes, in some quarters, for a surrender of power by a captive accused of treason in public. Many men believed that an open trial would forcibly demonstrate the righteousness of their cause, whilst making an example to cause all tyrants to tremble. But the prospect of an open trial conducted by parliamentary authority under form of law also performed certain other essential functions in managing the impending transition of power within the constitution. Anticipation of a public trial at

REC3 7/13/01 2:32 PM Page 76

76

The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

Westminster scotched the immediate danger of intemperate action against the king’s person at Windsor. A public trial, which was eventually dragged out over the best part of three weeks, bought time ‘to worke upon [the king] with threats of Death every moment, in hope to bend him to [his captors’] Cue, which seemes to bee the only Designe upon his Majesty, by this accurst mockery of Trial and execution’.22 If in all that time he could still not be persuaded, the whole world might at least know that he had had his chance, and he had rejected it. Then perhaps his crown might be bestowed instead on one whose will might more easily be bent to the designs of the king’s captors – the young prince who remained in the revolutionaries’ power, the Duke of Gloucester.23 By the time the trial began there was, no doubt, a strong mood in favour of the most severe punishment of a king whose guilt was already assumed. But there were clear indications of a moderating spirit at work in other parts of the revolutionary coalition. The Remonstrance, on which the whole proceeding was predicated, had clearly envisaged the trial as an opportunity to harm, through the king’s sides, the political opponents of the army and its partisans, especially the so-called ‘Presbyterians’, allowing Charles to clear his name of tyranny and treason, and ‘the Guilt and Blame [to] be laid where else it is due’. Contemporaries observed that the commissioners for the great seal, Sir Thomas Widdrington and Bulstrode Whitelocke, both of whom had opposed the army’s purge of parliament early in December, were nevertheless named to the Commons committee for bringing in legislation setting up a High Court of Justice. It was reported that Nicholas Love had claimed that the charge which would be brought against Charles ‘would be nothing, but what he knew the king could clearly acquit himself of’.24 Love’s optimism was not enough to persuade the handful of peers still in attendance when an ordinance for trial proceedings was sent up to them on 1 January, and they rejected it out of hand.25 This temporary stumbling block was removed by the declaration of popular sovereignty and Commons supremacy on 4 January, and the way was cleared for a measure, passed on the 6th, which called on the High Court of Justice to commence its work on the 8th. The trial had become tightly enmeshed with the programme of the parliamentary supremacists, and presented an opportunity to any king-killers lurking amongst them. But Widdrington and Whitelocke were able to reconcile themselves to the prospect of the trial sufﬁciently to resume their seats in the House the day proceedings opened, after a lengthy absence in avoidance of any active complicity, whilst Nicholas Love subsequently attended about four in ﬁve of all meetings of the High

REC3 7/13/01 2:32 PM Page 77

Staging the Trial of Charles I 77

Court of Justice, withdrawing only at the very last moment, when his apparent optimism for the king’s chances of survival ﬁnally had to give way to the horrifying prospect of a capital sentence.26 The trial had got off to a far more encouraging start.

II The king’s judges met early in the morning of 8 January 1649 in the Painted Chamber at the palace of Westminster.27 Formerly the Lords’ robing room, and venue for conferences between the two Houses, the chamber had also recently witnessed enthusiastic toasts to the health of Henry Stuart, who was publicly referred to as ‘Harry the ninth’.28 There, the trial commissioners ordered the proclamation the following day of the commencement of proceedings, a scene which set the pompous tone in which much of the trial would be conducted subsequently.29 As several units of horse and foot drew up in Old Palace Yard, the sergeant-at-arms, Edward Dendy, carrying a great gilt mace, accompanied by drums and trumpets drawn from the regiments of Lord General Fairfax and Lieutenant General Cromwell, rode on horseback into the midst of the great hall, escorting the crier whose job it was to make the proclamation. The party later proceeded to perform the same service in the City of London, where ‘the streets . . . thronged with spectators’.30 His job done, Dendy was appointed by the judges to act as sergeantat-arms to the High Court itself. Son of one of the king’s own sergeants, Dendy was a former lifeguard to the Earl of Essex, one-time commissioned captain in the Earl of Manchester’s army, and then in Nathaniel Rich’s New Model regiment of horse.31 Having apparently left military service in 1647, he had taken up employment as sergeant-atarms to the powerful revenue committee.32 His appointment to this important aristocratic power base would appear to explain why he had been granted privilege of the House of Lords to protect him against actions for debt in the summer of 1648.33 The mace he carried during the trial proceedings was none other than that of the House of Commons. Signiﬁcantly, this icon of parliamentary authority bore the royal coat of arms, whose clear symbolic import was echoed and ampliﬁed by the same regal device which hung on the wall at the back of the High Court of Justice itself, over the heads of the king’s judges.34 Whatever it might mean for Charles I, the trial seemed, at ﬁrst, to pose only a limited threat of any further violence against the regal core of the ancient constitution.

REC3 7/13/01 2:32 PM Page 78

78

The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

Much of the evidence available for other ofﬁcers of the court reinforces the impression that the High Court of Justice was deliberately set up as a kind of annexe to the existing civil authority, rather than as a portal leading to something entirely new. Edward Walford, serjeant’s assistant and messenger to the House of Commons, was appointed usher to the High Court.35 John Powell, another member of the wartime serjeants’ ofﬁce and messenger at Derby House and the revenue committee, was appointed one of the judges’ messengers.36 John Arnold, one of Dendy’s personal team of assistants, had also acted as a messenger for the wartime parliamentary Committee of Both Kingdoms.37 It was suggested that consultations be held with the College of Arms regarding a suitable manner for the attire of these lesser ofﬁcers. The heralds’ stance towards the revolution can only be guessed at. Garter King of Arms was none other than Edward Bysshe, MP for Bletchingley, Surrey, who had withdrawn himself from the Commons at the purge; whilst Clarenceux, Arthur Squibb, was fatherin-law of Serjeant John Glynne, recorder of London, one of the 11 members.38 Whether or not the heralds had a hand in the trial is rather hard to tell from the surviving records. It would appear that Garter and Norroy made trips to Westminster in early January, but it is impossible to ascertain for what purpose.39 Certainly the ushers or door-keepers were provided with gowns and tip-staves, and the messengers with cloaks.40 These early appointments and decisions may have gone some way to reassuring a sceptical public that the trial posed a decidedly limited threat to either the person of the monarch or the institution of the monarchy. Algernon Sidney, for one, had formed the impression by 10 January that several members of the upper House were now reconciled to the direction of proceedings, and even went so far as to predict (inaccurately) the impending return to Westminster of his uncle, the earl of Northumberland.41 Many undoubtedly would have badly needed reassurance, however, given the early prominence of ﬁery spirits such as Augustine Garland and William Say, who chaired the tribunal’s ﬁrst meetings.42 On 10 January, the commissioners for the king’s trial appointed a permanent chairman, John Bradshaw, chief justice of Chester.43 His appointment was enticingly ambiguous. Like the leader of the prosecution, William Steele, Bradshaw was closely associated with one of the great gentry powerhouses in the Commons, Sir William Brereton, who had declined to be drawn into proceedings (as, in the event, would Steele, pleading illness and ceding prosecution to the committed congregationalist solicitor, John Cook).44 On the other hand,

REC3 7/13/01 2:32 PM Page 79

Staging the Trial of Charles I 79

Bradshaw’s appointment to this crucial posting, the hot-seat of the English revolution, entangled the events on the national stage with the revolutionary politics of the City of London, where the common council was contending with the court of aldermen for supremacy over corporation government. Bradshaw had been the commoners’ nominee for judicial appointment in the sheriffs’ court in 1643, contesting the appointment with Richard Proctor, the candidate favoured by the aldermen.45 The revolution in City government which would add such signiﬁcant momentum to the great national overturning to come, occurred, coincidentally or otherwise, at the same time as Bradshaw’s elevation.46 The chairmanship of the High Court of Justice subsequently became the focal point for all efforts to conduct the king’s trial with a suitable degree of solemnity.47 On 12 January it was ordered that the chairman be addressed henceforth as the Lord President of the High Court ‘and that as well without as within the said court’. He was attended by Dendy, bearing the mace, another ofﬁcer bearing a sword of state (to whom we shall return), and a guard of around twenty assorted ofﬁcers and gentlemen, armed with richly gilded partisans.48 It was appointed that the Lord President and his entourage be accommodated during the trial in the house of Sir Abraham Williams, located in the New Palace Yard, not far from Westminster Hall, where he was also allowed the same dietary provision as the king. The presidential household was eventually lodged in apartments located in the dean’s house at Westminster Abbey.49 On the occasion of public hearings in the great hall, the Lord President paraded into each day’s proceedings ‘having his Train held up’, attended by his guards and entourage.50 Such pomp was reassuringly civic in its nature, and yet appeared to make extravagant claims for the legitimacy of that popular sovereignty upon which the Lord President’s dignity was raised. Clarendon later remarked that Bradshaw’s elevation to the rank of ‘the greatest magistrate in England’ was intended not as a temporary measure, solely for purposes of aggrandizing proceedings, but as the prelude to establishing the ofﬁce ‘for continuance’.51 Some of the Lord President’s colleagues clearly disagreed. According to Henry Walker, the authentic voice of the military grandees and their Independent allies in the House, Hebraicized, Bradshaw’s name translated as ‘Purity shall break a Lording vanity’.52 After the appointment of court ofﬁcers, the next key decision was where to hold the trial. The great hall at Westminster was chosen on the recommendation of the ﬁrst of two committees of the High Court

REC3 7/13/01 2:32 PM Page 80

80

The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

with special responsibility for the manner in which the trial was conducted. Appointed on 10 January, it was instructed ‘to consider all circumstances in matters of Order and method for the Carrying on and manageing of the kings tryall’.53 On 12 January, the High Court debated its recommendations concerning the venue. Apart from Westminster great hall, several locations had been suggested, namely St James’s Palace, London Guildhall, and Windsor. St James’s was rejected ‘because it is one of the Kings houses, and thereupon envious people would say (if he should be put to death) that he was murdered, though the proceedings were never so just’; and Guildhall because ‘That may occasion a great disturbance’. Crucially, Windsor was rejected ‘because it will divide the Army’ – thus ending the conﬁdent hopes for a rapid despatch which had continued even into the ﬁrst week of January.54 Westminster was chosen ‘because it is a place of public resort . . . the place of the publick Courts of Justice for the Kingdome’ – the implications were quite emphatic.55 Spun vigorously in the direction of the great hall since the failure of the Denbigh mission in late December, the question of the venue for proceedings had ﬁnally come to rest in the seat of regal justice, keeping alive what slender hopes there yet remained for the maintenance of the constitutional status quo. Having chosen a venue, the High Court passed responsibility for its physical preparation to John Blakiston, John Fry, and Colonels Owen Rowe and Robert Tichborne, appointed as a committee to see to it that the trial ‘be performed in a solemn manner’.56 In this second committee the Commons supremacists had secured an invaluable source of inﬂuence over proceedings. These four men clearly embodied the radical, and City-Independent, inﬂuence over proceedings. Owen Rowe was a ‘new merchant’ colonialist radical with City connections.57 Robert Tichborne, Lieutenant of the Tower of London at this time, had presented to the Commons the petition of the common council of 13 January which sought to establish the council’s supremacy over the Lord Mayor and court of aldermen. In it, the City radicals asked the MPs to settle the sovereignty of the people and the supremacy of the Commons ‘upon foundations of Righteousness and Peace’.58 Tichborne and Blakiston (not alone amongst members of the court) were signiﬁcant investors in episcopal estate.59 Blakiston and Fry were both members of the committee, appointed by the House of Commons on the day it passed the act for the trial, charged with ‘the framing of a Great Seal’, the object – part-symbol, part-judicial instrument, the most potent fetish in all early modern English political culture – which later came to embody the authority of the new parliament of the commonwealth

REC3 7/13/01 2:32 PM Page 81

Staging the Trial of Charles I 81

of England, ‘in the ﬁrst year of freedom, by God’s blessing restored’.60 Blakiston himself personally oversaw the engraving of the new seal.61 Allegations about Fry’s religious beliefs secured his expulsion from the High Court bench and his temporary exclusion from the Commons. The House received a petition on his behalf from citizens of Southwark on the day of the king’s execution which referred to Fry as ‘a Member of this present Parliament’, a most provocative formulation, bespeaking the grandeur of the average Commons supremacist’s pretensions.62 These, then, were men intent on turning the principle of Commons supremacy into a reality, and they successfully exerted such inﬂuence as might dignify the High Court as the living embodiment of that order. It was they who supervised the dismantling of the public courts at the south end of Westminster Hall, as well as the jumble of stationers’ and booksellers’ stalls with which it was crowded. It was they who gave instructions to erect a stage and on it to place benches for the judges, hung with scarlet baise, and for the setting of an upholstered armchair embroidered in crimson and gold for the Lord President, and a turkeycarpeted table for the clerks. Two of them, Tichborne and Blakiston, joined with Thomas Scot and Cornelius Holland to sign the order for providing the Lord President’s bodyguard with such ‘handsome weapons’ as the Tower ordnance ofﬁce had it in their power to provide. Thereupon 50 gilt partisans were collected for delivery to the court by none other than one-time cornet, now Captain, George Joyce, who had proclaimed the revolution as ‘the greatest work of righteousness that ever was amongst men’. Two hundred guards stationed around the hall were also equipped with ‘Rich Javelins with velvet and fringe’.63 There is tantalizing evidence to suggest that extra galleries were erected around the walls of the hall, possibly at the committee’s behest, to accommodate extra spectators, particularly MPs wanting a good vantage point from which to observe the unfolding events.64 Clarendon would later claim that some within the court had argued that a trial was the best foundation and security of the government they intended to establish . . . This argumentation, or the strength and obstinacy of that party, carried it: and hereupon all that formality of proceeding which afterwards was exercised was resolved upon and consented to. In other words, the formality of the trial deliberately foreshadowed the erection of a parliamentary republic.65 But many of the crucial iconic

REC3 7/13/01 2:32 PM Page 82

82

The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

decisions suggest that it was not just the budding republicans in the High Court of Justice who were keen to aggrandize proceedings. Dendy’s appointment had been a case in point, his very presence, bearing a mace marked with the royal coat of arms, helping to amplify the deep resonances of a proceeding tailored to suit, however improbably, the constitutional status quo. The conservative impulse was further reinforced by the court’s decision on 17 January, one week after Dendy’s appointment, to retain a sword-bearer. This gave added edge to fears for the king’s well-being. But even as it raised the stakes, it allowed some potentially very signiﬁcant new political inﬂuences to be felt, albeit rather faintly, within the walls of the great hall. It was suggested in the press that the judges had debated the addition of a sword to the proceedings explicitly because the mace bore upon it the royal coat of arms.66 Perhaps it was felt that the symbolism of the sword, with its more obvious association with ‘justice’, might overawe the moderating inﬂuence of the mace. But the sword itself was a sword of state, provided by Sir Henry Mildmay, at the behest of the High Court, from the Westminster Jewel Tower, and it is perhaps within the bounds of conjecture that it was the sword known as Curtana – the famous, fore-shortened, square-ended sword of mercy.67 The absence of contemporary comment would seem to tell against such a conjecture. By contrast, a rumour reached Cheshire that it ‘was supposed to bee [the sword] sent by the Pope to K. Henry the 8th when he gave hym ye Title of defender of the Faith’.68 In remarks prefatory to the published version of the prosecution speech he had intended delivering in court, the acting attorney, John Cook, denounced the king as ‘a Protestant Prince, styled The Defender of the Faith . . . [who] caused more protestant blood to be shed than ever was spilt, either by Rome, heathen or antichristian’.69 But the introduction of the sword by no means implied the inevitability of the king’s bloody fate. The court appointed Colonel John Humfry or Humfrys to carry the sword. Categorical identiﬁcation is impossible, but the most likely candidate is John Humfry, stellar luminary of the Puritan colonial adventures, who had been treasurer of the original Dorchester Company, patentee, deputy governor and assistant of the Massachusetts Bay Company, propagandist to the New England colonial adventure, and the appointed governor of Providence Island colony.70 However, his son, also Colonel John Humfry, cannot be ruled out.71 The son (offspring of his father’s second marriage) would appear not to have shared the Puritan colonial experience with his father,

REC3 7/13/01 2:32 PM Page 83

Staging the Trial of Charles I 83

who had taken his third wife there – Lady Susan Fiennes, daughter of Thomas, third Earl of Lincoln. Humfry senior was an associate of Hugh Peter and other leading lights in the parliamentarian coalition. He had interests in the Bahamas linking him with other ‘new merchant’ leaders such as Owen Rowe himself, and another member of the court, Gregory Clement.72 These mercantile connections appear to have paid dividends, when in December 1648 a Colonel John Humfries was recommended by the House of Lords for appointment as surveyor or supervisor of the customs in the port of London, ‘in consideration of past and present service to the state’.73 Humfry senior also enjoyed an association, long pre-dating the outbreak of war in England, with the principal members of the so-called ‘Saye-Northumberland’ group of parliamentarian peers. His third wife, Lady Susan, was sister of Theophilus, 4th Earl of Lincoln, who was himself married to Lady Bridget Fiennes, daughter of Viscount Saye and Sele. In 1640, Humfry senior was induced to leave Massachusetts by the offer of the governorship of Providence Island. This provoked some bitter exchanges between John Winthrop, Humfry’s erstwhile close friend and colleague in Massachusetts, and the principal promoter of the ill-fated Caribbean venture, Viscount Saye and Sele – Winthrop fuming with a sense of betrayal at the hands of one ‘well known to the lords of Providence’.74 Later, a Colonel John Humfreis or Humfries was a member of the royal children’s household maintained by the Earl of Northumberland during the war.75 Interestingly, the appointment of the sword-bearer coincided with the ﬁrst appearance at the High Court of Alderman Francis Allen, MP for Cockermouth, a Cumbrian pocket borough in the gift of the Earl of Northumberland, to whom the ‘carpetbagging’ London goldsmith owed his election in 1642.76 Allen would become one of the most prominent amongst the active members of the court who did not sign the king’s death warrant.77 If the decision to incorporate a sword into the proceedings of the High Court was meant as a symbolic threat to the king, perhaps even a wielding of the potential reversionary interest centred on Gloucester, then the appointment of Humfry, servant in the household of the young duke, may have offered reassurance that its power would at least remain in the relatively safe hands of those peers who had been willing to bet everything on a happy conclusion to the talks at Newport in the autumn. (Something similar might be said of the persistent rumour that the king was carried part of the way to his trial in a sedan chair belonging to Philip Herbert, the 4th Earl of Pembroke.)

REC3 7/13/01 2:32 PM Page 84

84

The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

By Saturday 20 January, the stage was set, the dramatis personae all in place, and public proceedings could begin. Notoriously, Charles repeatedly refused to recognize explicitly the authority of his judges. On Tuesday the 23rd, he was brought to the bar for the third time to be asked to plead to charges of tyranny, treason and murder. On arriving that day, wearing as usual the regalia of his royal Order of the Garter, he will have observed, along with the crowds, a further new turn in the symbolic deﬁnition of the High Court. For on that day, the coat of his royal arms which had hung on the wall behind the court had been replaced by a shield bearing the cross of St George, patron saint of England and, indeed, that chivalric order with which the king had long sought so ﬁrmly to identify himself.78 We do not know by whose authority the arms were set up, although the most obvious candidates are the four men of the committee for the solemn conduct of the trial.79 In the engraving which accompanied his 1684 edition of the trial journal, John Nalson referred, anachronistically, to the setting up of the arms of the commonwealth in the great hall, ‘Which surely the Usurpers had caused there to be ﬁxed, (like the Hand writing on the wall,) in direct view of the King to let him know, That His Kingdom was numbered and ﬁnished, and Monarchy itself abolished’.80 Obviously reading back from the declaration of the free state (in May 1649), Nalson saw in this symbolic moment a premonition of the abolition of monarchy, and the unveiling of a new republican order, which in fact came only later to be symbolized by the cross and harp.81 But the action of setting up the arms of St George was certainly pointed. The act establishing the High Court of Justice had stated that Charles Stuart must be tried to prevent further ‘commotions, rebellions and invasions’, an obvious reference to the renewed violence and horror visited by Hamilton’s desperadoes upon the northern English in the summer of 1648. Solving the king was a question of solving, at least temporarily, the much vaunted ‘British problem’.82 Interestingly, this powerful new iconic statement came the day after the commissioners representing the whiggamore regime at Edinburgh had entered another protest against the work of the High Court.83 By erecting the George, someone was proclaiming not only the distinction and supremacy of the national interest over the regal, but also the impending dissolution of the triple crown of Great Britain and Ireland. On 23 January, the High Court, in which the name of the people of England, their liberties and laws had been hurled back and forth repeatedly by accuser and accused, was herewith branded unmistakably as an English tribunal. This was the day that Bradshaw would demand that Charles make his reply ‘in plain English’; and the day that

REC3 7/13/01 2:32 PM Page 85

Staging the Trial of Charles I 85

the crier of the court, ironically named John King, would proclaim at the conclusion of proceedings ‘God bless the Kingdom of England’.84

III By then, for a third time, Charles had refused to plead. If nothing else, his obstinacy forced his judges to reveal the true extent of their divisions. This is not the place to reﬂect upon the further delays experienced before the court ﬁnally handed down its sentence, nor the chain of events which lead from thence to the king’s execution, all of which may yet bear further close scrutiny. Prevarication had been the key-note of proceedings, starting with the court’s long and arduous discussion of the charge against the king; the willingness to allow him not just two but three bites of the cherry; the reluctance to rule him contumacious when he failed each time to plead to the charge; the somewhat supererogatory sessions for hearing witnesses on 24 and 25 January; hesitation in drafting the sentence; further debates over the propriety of deposition and deprivation prior to sentencing; and ﬁnally in the judges’ instructions to Bradshaw concerning any last-minute applications the king might make on the 27th, even on the day when the court was to hand down sentence.85 Struggles internal to the parliamentary coalition which crowded the wheel house of state in January 1649 help to account for the dilatory nature of proceedings at the palace of Westminster in that fateful month. I have suggested that the ceremony, symbolism and iconography of the trial provide a useful index to the complex narrative unfolding there. Unfortunately, that index refers to a text of Borgesian paradox and complexity which remains fragmentary, darkly occluded and in some measure irrecoverable. The achievements of the proceedings are more easily understood. The trial helped draw a line under a period of military intervention in English politics which had appeared to threaten the dissolution of the entire civic, social and political order. In its arrangements, scarlet and gold replaced buff-coats and steel. A rump House of Commons, a mere military junto, was metaphorically transformed, in the minds of its partisans, at least, by the legislation setting up a High Court of Justice, the ﬁrst unicameral act in English history, into a parliament of the sovereign people of England. The trial helped to temper by ﬁre the political order that would emerge, eventually, from the revolution. But the trial had not been intended as a ramp for a republican settlement. By giving all parties something to hold onto, it had become the

REC3 7/13/01 2:32 PM Page 86

86

The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

only way to keep on board as many parliamentarians as possible after the revolutionary hurricane broke at Westminster in December 1648. The king’s own obstinacy would eventually strengthen the hand of the minority among them in favour of scrapping the old constitutional sea charts in favour of new soundings. After his ﬁrst refusal to plead, the court’s clerks were ordered to record that the commissioners perceiv[ed] what the King aimed at – namely to bring in question, if he could, the jurisdiction of the court and . . . through their sides he intended to wound – if he might be permitted – the supreme authority of the Commons of England in their representative, the Commons assembled in Parliament.86 The Commons supremacists were having their day. But it was not all one-way trafﬁc. Many who had a hand in the court’s contrivance – not least its leading military members – had successfully used it to outﬂank the Levellers, block Commons reform, bypass some of the hotter opinions to be found in the council of ofﬁcers, and ultimately to render the army’s Agreement of the People a dead letter even before its publication.87 At its outset, the trial had offered the prospect of a monarchical settlement, and even appeared to offer Charles himself the chance to help broker its terms. By its close, the trial had become a way of diverting the energetic types ﬂourishing their blueprints for political change, thus saving the below-strength and unreformed House of Commons, rather than the king. Charles threw away his last chance, and the crown with it. Had he co-operated, a settlement might have been found that would not have cost him his life, nor his offspring their inheritance. His judges had gone into the trial steeled for the worst, no doubt, but hoping for the best. Very few, if any, badly wanted the king dead at the outset. The numerous opportunities to yield which he was afforded by the High Court bespeak an increasingly desperate need on the part of many commissioners to contrive a way out of the bloody cul-de-sac into which Charles himself was determinedly driving proceedings. Strong currents might still have swept his ship to safety in January 1649. Instead of allowing himself to be borne away on one of the prevailing tides, Charles dropped anchor and watched the storm gather around him. In the end, even the most ‘radical’ of his judges were left shaking their heads in puzzlement over the ‘strange obstinacy and Implacableness’ which were his real undoing, delaying his capitulation beyond what was reasonable for the court to accept.88 It was the fractious crew of the

REC3 7/13/01 2:32 PM Page 87

Staging the Trial of Charles I 87

vessel sent to save him who were left to ride the storms which came in the wake of his passing. Arguably, the trial of Charles I was the ultimate constitutional crisis of the English revolution: certainly it was rather more than merely one man’s heroic tragedy.

Notes 1. C.V. Wedgwood provides the classic account, in The Trial of Charles I (London, Collins, 1967); and ‘The Trial of Charles I’, in R.H. Parry, ed., The English Civil War and After, 1642–1658 (London, Macmillan, 1970). David Underdown, Pride’s Purge. Politics in the Puritan Revolution (Oxford, OUP, 1971), especially chapters 6–7, differs from Wedgwood largely in emphasis, rather than substance. For other more recent additions to the historiography, see W.L. Sachse, ‘England’s “Black Tribunal”: an Analysis of the Regicide Court’, JBS, XII (1973), 69–85; A.W. McIntosh, ‘The Numbers of the English Regicides’, History, LXVII (1982), 195–216; S.M. Koenigsberg, ‘The Vote to Create the High Court of Justice: 26 to 20?’, PH, XII (1993), 281–6. 2. Nancy Klein Maguire, ‘The Theatrical Mask/Masque of Politics: the Case of Charles I’, JBS, XXVIII (1989), 1–22. See also Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1994), chapter 1. 3. Daniel P. Klein, ‘The Trial of Charles I’, Journal of Legal History, XVIII (1997), 1–25. I should like to thank Dr Elliot Vernon for bringing this article to my attention. 4. H.W. Randall, ‘The Rise and Fall of a Martyrology: Sermons on Charles I’, HLQ, X (1946–7), 135–67. 5. Wedgwood, Trial of Charles I, pp. 10, 165. 6. Gardiner, History, V, pp. 280–4; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, pp. 164–5, 168–9, 171, 182–4, 187. 7. Bodl. MS Clarendon 34, fols. 17r–v; Mercurius Pragmaticus (26 Dec. 1648–9 Jan. 1649, E537/20), unpaginated; Wedgwood, Trial of Charles I, p. 32. See below, p. 76. 8. David Lagomarsino and Charles T. Wood, eds, The Trial of Charles I. A Documentary History (London, University Press of New England, 1989), pp. 75, 76, 77, 112, 116. This is a useful, if slender selection of material from a variety of sources, reprinting in parallel excerpts from the formal and informal records of the trial. There are several standard texts for reconstructing the events of those dark January days, all of which differ from each other in subtle and important ways. State Trials, IV, cols 1045–1135, reproduces John Nalson, A True Copie of the Journall of the High Court of Justice for the Tryal of Charles I (1684), as well as important contemporary printed versions of events, including Gilbert Mabbott’s A Perfect Narrative (cols 993–1018). For this and other contemporary printed accounts, see below, pp. 161–80; Wedgwood, Trial of Charles I, pp. 140–3. In turn, Nalson more or less reproduces the enrolled record of the trial, signed by clerk John Phelps and passed to parliament in December 1650, where it was ordered that copies be lodged with all the great courts at Westminster, and transmitted into the

REC3 7/13/01 2:32 PM Page 88

88

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I hands of every county custos: HLRO, MS 3676; CJ, VI, p. 508. The parliamentary roll itself probably derived from ‘Bradshaw’s book’, PRO, SP 16/517, so called by J.G. Muddiman, who reprinted it, with some errors and omissions, as the basis of his Trial of King Charles the First (Edinburgh, W. Hodge & Co., [1928]). R. Lockyer, ed., The Trial of Charles I (Folio Society, 1959) is based on the account given by Rushworth, which derived from A Perfect Narrative. For a discussion of the two principal MS sources, see M.F. Bond, ed., Manuscripts of the House of Lords. Addenda, 1514–1714 (London, HMSO, 1962), pp. xviii–xix. Cf T. Kilburn and A. Milton, ‘The Public Context of the Trial and Execution of Strafford’, in J.F. Merritt, ed., The Political World of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, 1621–1641 (Cambridge, CUP, 1996), pp. 230–51. See above, pp. 14–35. See also Patricia Crawford, ‘Charles Stuart, that Man of Blood’, JBS, XVI (1977), for an analysis of the notion of ‘blood guilt’ as a ‘ﬁgure of speech’ in debates aimed at ﬁnding a solution to the political impasse reached by the search for a personal treaty. I should like to thank Dr Justin Champion for discussions on this score, in particular the case of God’s forgiveness of David for the murder of Uriah, 2 Sam. 12.5 (referred to by Bradshaw in his sentencing speech, Lagomarsino and Wood, eds, Trial of Charles I, p. 128). Few called explicitly for regicide, although many may have been held in check by the fact that it remained treason, of course, to encompass the death of the monarch, at least until such time as it became treason for kings to levy war upon their subjects. Not least the commander-in-chief, who, reportedly, had ‘absolutely refused to concur’: Gardiner, History, IV, pp. 233–7, 245; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, pp. 123, 191. For the text of the Remonstrance, see OPH, XVIII, pp. 161–238. Worcester College, Oxford, Clarke MS XVI, fols 16, 17r–v. For the text of a ‘round robin’ letter from headquarters to unit commanders eliciting expressions of approval for the Remonstrance ‘which wee doubt not of’, see: Clarke MS CXIV, fol. 104. Identical letters were sent to naval commanders on the 28th: Clarke MS XVI, fol. 19v. I am grateful to Professor Ian Gentles for discussion of these and other points concerning attitudes in military circles at this time. Faults in my interpretation remain very much my own. The differences of opinion on this issue were summed up in the regiments of the commander-in-chief himself. Fairfax opposed proceedings, but not on anything like the same grounds as his major, Francis White, who argued that the sword was now the only power in the land, and ought to be used to save the king whilst also bringing about sweeping constitutional reform along Leveller lines. Lieutenant Colonel William Goffe, on the other hand, promoted ahead of White in Fairfax’s foot regiment shortly before the revolution, sat in the High Court of Justice and signed the king’s death warrant: The Copies of severall Letters . . . to Fairfax and Cromwell ([c.22 Jan.] 1649, E548/6); Perfect Summary (22–29 Jan. 1649, E527/13), pp. 7–8; Gardiner, History, IV, pp. 301–2; C.H. Firth and G. Davies, The Regimental History of Cromwell’s Army (2 vols, Oxford, OUP, 1940). Bodl. MS Clarendon 34, fols. 12v–13; Mercurius Pragmaticus (2–9 Jan. 1649, E537/20), unpaginated; Mercurius Melancholicus (5–12 Jan. 1649, E538/6), p. 22. A very similar point was made by an anonymous soldier, ostensibly

REC3 7/13/01 2:32 PM Page 89

Staging the Trial of Charles I 89

15.

16.

17. 18.

19. 20.

21.

22. 23.

24.

around the same time, Bodl. MS Eng. c.6075, fol. 8. I owe this reference to Dr Jason Peacey. Bodl. MS Clarendon 34, fol.12; Mercurius Melancholicus (25 Dec. 1648–1 Jan. 1649, E536/27), p. 7; Mercurius Pragmaticus (2–9 Jan. 1649, E537/20), unpaginated; T. Carte, ed., A Collection of Original Letters and Papers (2 vols, 1739), I, p. 203; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, p. 168. The Resolution of his Excellency the Lord General Fairfax ([14 Dec.] 1648, E476/19), p. 3; Bodl. MS Clarendon 34, fol. 13; Articles Exhibited against the King, and the Charge of the Army against his Majesty ([29 Dec.] 1648, E536/21), p. 2; Mercurius Melancholicus (25 Dec. 1648–1 Jan. 1649), p. 7; The Charge of the Army, and Counsel of War, against the King. With a brief Answer thereunto by some of the Loyall Party ([29 Dec?] 1649, E536/20); A Declaration of the Lords and Commons Assembled in Parliament concerning the Tryall of the King ([3 Jan.] 1649, E536/36), p. 1; The Manner of the Deposition of Charles Stewart, King of England, by the Parliament, and Generall Councell of the Armie ([4 Jan.] 1649, E537/4); The Queens Majesties Letter to the Parliament of England ([5 Jan.] 1649, E537/9), p. 4; His Majesties Declaration and Speech (1649, E537/13), p. 4; Perfect Diurnal (1–8 Jan. 1649, E527/4), pp. 2286–[7]; Carte, ed., Letters and Papers, I, p. 201. Wedgwood, Trial of Charles I, p. 28; see above, pp. 14–35. Underdown suggested the relatively low ranking of the ofﬁcers appointed to the committee, and the exclusion of Cromwell and Ireton from their number, indicated only the coolness of the grandees to the rash proceedings of the junior ofﬁcers: Pride’s Purge, p. 165. In fact, made up of the direct subordinates of Fairfax, Whalley and Ireton, and meeting in the Whitehall lodgings of a Cromwellian creature, one Mr Hunt, this committee might as easily be considered the launch-pad for the grandees’ design of bringing the king before an orderly, parliamentarian tribunal: Worcester College, Clarke MS XVI, fol. 38v. For Hunt, see J. Lilburne, The Legall Fundamentall Liberties (1649). Perfect Occurrences (22–30 Dec. 1648, E526/45), pp. [779]–780. CJ, VI, pp. 102–3. Whitelocke alleged there was opposition on the ﬂoor of the House to doing the soldiers’ dirty-work for them: B. Whitelocke, Memorials of the English Affairs (4 vols, Oxford, OUP, 1853), II, pp. 479–81. If there was opposition, it was not given formal expression by a division: Koenigsberg, ‘High Court of Justice’, pp. 281–6. Worcester College, Clarke MS XVI, fol. 55-v. The newswriter referred to the appointment of a Commons committee to bring in legislation for a trial on ‘Saterday last’, an event which took place on 23 December. Another premature report of the decision on a venue, which was left, ostensibly, to the High Court to make itself, appears in Declaration of the Lords and Commons. Mercurius Pragmaticus (26 Dec. 1648–9 Jan. 1649), unpaginated. This was the more plausible of several unlikely schemes for the king’s deposition: Underdown, Pride’s Purge, pp. 170, 183, citing Bodl. MS Clarendon 34, fol. 72v; BL, Add. MS 37344, fol. 238. See also Mercurius Pragmaticus (26 Dec. 1648–9 Jan. 1649), unpaginated. OPH, XVIII, p. 184; Bodl. MS Clarendon 34, fols. 17r–v. The petition to Fairfax from Ireton’s regiment in mid-October 1648 (which opened the

REC3 7/13/01 2:32 PM Page 90

90

25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32.

33. 34.

35.

36. 37. 38.

The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I ﬂoodgates of regimental petitioning for ‘justice’) had demanded that all who spoke on the king’s behalf be treated as traitors ‘till he shall be acquitted of the guilt of shedding innocent blood’: The True Copy of a Petition promoted in the Army ([19 Oct] 1648, E468/18), cited by Wedgwood, Trial of Charles I, pp. 22–3, 32. The sincerity of their lordships’ opposition is in doubt. See above, pp. 36–70. Underdown, Pride’s Purge, p. 196. Nalson tabulated attendances. His imprecision is matched by Howell, who reprinted daily attendance records kept by the clerks. Lists of those judges present at sentencing, and those signing the death warrant can be found in LJ, IX, pp. 101–2. Abbott prints total attendances, replicating the errors in Howell and adding some inaccuracies of his own: Abbott, Writings and Speeches, I, p. 728n. Wedgwood, Trial of Charles I, pp. 117–18. Underdown, Pride’s Purge, pp. 183–4n. Wedgwood, Trial of Charles I, p. 119. CJ, VI, p. 114; A Proclamation for Tryall of the King (1648, BL, 517.k.15/7); Muddiman, Trial of Charles I, p. 197. Bodl. MS Clarendon 34, fol. 73; captain lieutenant to the Earl of Manchester’s own troop, March 1644: PRO, SP 28/12, fol. 274; Joshua Sprigge, Anglia Rediviva (1647), p. 330; R.K.G. Temple, ‘The Original Ofﬁcer List of the New Model Army’, BIHR, LIX (1986), 50–77, pp. 65, 73; Ian Gentles, ‘The Choosing of Ofﬁcers for the New Model Army’, HR, LXVII (1994), 264–85, p. 273. PRO, E 407/8/168, fol. 29 dors. The revenue committee acted as a commission for the lord treasurership, and Dendy’s appointment may be explained by his father’s earlier service as sergeant-at-arms to the Lord Treasurer: H.D.W. Sitwell, ‘Royal Sergeant-at-Arms and the Royal Maces’, Archaeologia, CII (1969), 203–50. For the revenue committee as an instrument of aristocratic stratagems, in particular those of Salisbury, Pembroke and Howard of Escrick, see J.S.A. Adamson, ‘The Peerage in Politics, 1645–1649’ (PhD thesis, Cambridge, 1986). LJ, X, p. 312. Perfect Occurrences (12–19 Jan. 1649, E527/8), p. 798; A Proclamation for Tryall of the King ([10 Jan] 1649, E537/34), p. 4; The Moderate (9–16 Jan. 1649, E538/15), p. 251; The Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer (9–16 Jan. E538/16), p. 1217; Whitelocke, Memorials, II, p. 493. For the coat of arms on the wall, see below. LJ, VIII, pp. 108, 113; CJ, IV, p. 404; CJ, V, p. 296; HMC, Seventh Report (London, 1879) p. 39; CSPD 1644–5, p. 281; M.F. Keeler, The Long Parliament 1640–1641: a Biographical Study (Philadelphia, American Philosophical Society, 1954); HMC, Seventh Report, p. 35; C.W. Russell and J.P. Prendergast, The Carte Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library. A Report (London, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1871), p. 47. LJ, VII, pp. 117, 575, 607; CJ, IV, pp. 295, 323; PRO, E 407/8/168, fols 9 dors., 30; HMC, Sixth Report (London, 1877), p. 45; CCAM, p. 230. CSPD 1644, p. 216. Sir A. Wagner, Heralds of England. A History of the Ofﬁce and College of Arms (London, 1967), pp. 257–8. On 19 January, the High Court ordered Dendy to secure ‘Mr Squibbs Gallerie [in the great hall at Westminster] by such waies

REC3 7/13/01 2:32 PM Page 91

Staging the Trial of Charles I 91

39.

40.

41. 42. 43. 44.

45.

46.

47. 48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

and meanes as he shall conceave meete’. I am grateful to Dr Andrew Barclay for his observations on this subject. College of Arms, Waiting Books Ofﬁce Accounts, 1633–1700, fols xxix–xxxi. I am grateful to the College archivist, Mr Robert Yorke, for these references. For the wartime dealings of the New Model with the heralds, see Wagner, Heralds of England, pp. 254ff; PRO, E 407/8/168, fol. 21 dors; E. Kitson and E.K. Clarke, ‘Some Civil War Accounts, 1647–1650’, Publications of the Thoresby Society, XI (1904), p. 172. Wedgwood, Trial of Charles I, p. 129; Lagomarsino and Wood, eds, Trial of Charles I, p. 43; State Trials, IV, col. 1065; England’s Black Tribunal (1660), p. 5. It was originally reported that the act for the trial would be proclaimed by a herald: A New Declaration Concerning the King from the Commons of England ([10] Jan. 1648, 103.b.21), p. 6; Perfect Diurnall (8–15 Jan. 1649, E527/6), p. 2272. BL, Add. MS 21506, fols 55–6. Muddiman, Trial of Charles I, p. 198. Wedgwood, Trial of Charles I, p. 122. John S. Morrill, Cheshire 1630–1660. County Government and Society during the ‘English Revolution’ (Oxford, OUP, 1974), p. 176, although for Steele’s connection, see: R.N. Dore, ed., The Letter Books of Sir William Brereton (2 vols., Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire CXXIII and CXXVIII, 1984 and 1990), II, pp. 558, 560. For Cook’s religion, see Murray Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints (Cambridge, CUP, 1979), pp. 56, 110, 187–8. Corporation of London Records Ofﬁce, Common Council Book XL, fols 74, 75; XLI, fols 132–134v; Valerie Pearl, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution, 1625–1643 (Oxford, OUP, 1961), p. 247. For Bradshaw’s earlier involvement in City politics, see Keith Lindley, Popular Politics and Religion in Civil War London (Aldershot, Scolar Press, 1997), pp. 311–19. C.H. Firth, ‘London During the Civil War’, History, XI (1926), 25–36; R. Brenner, ‘The Civil War Politics of London’s Merchant Community’, P&P, LVIII (1973), 53–107; J.E. Farnell, ‘The Usurpation of Honest London Householders: Barebones Parliament’, EHR, LXXXII (1967), 24–46. See below, pp. 202–24. Sidney Lee, ‘John Bradshaw’, DNB. The Lord President’s guards were selected by Ireton, Harrison, Waller and Whalley: State Trials, V, col. 1065. Lagomarsino and Wood, eds, Trial of Charles I, pp. 37, 43, 90; BL, Add. MS 35332, fol. 118v; PRO, WO 55/461, fols. 24–5. Sir Abraham Williams was the agent of the Queen of Bohemia: BL, microﬁlm M325, Alnwick Papers, MS 506, fol.148. His house had been rented by the state for some time: PRO, E 407/8/168, fol. 12. The King’s Tryal (1649, E538/26), p. 1. Clarendon, History, IV, pp. 474–5. Perfect Occurrences (26 Jan.–2 Feb. 1649, E527/14), p. 813. For Walker, see below, pp. 162–9. State Trials, IV, cols. 1057, 1059. Carte, ed., Original Letters, I, pp. 201–2. Perfect Occurrences (12–19 Jan. 1649), p. 798.

REC3 7/13/01 2:32 PM Page 92

92

The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

56. Wedgwood, Trial of Charles I, p. 124; Lagomarsino and Wood, eds, Trial of Charles I, pp. 38–9. 57. DNB. 58. The Humble Petition of the Commons of the City of London in Common Councel Assembled ([16 Jan.] 1648, E538/16); Wedgwood, Trial of Charles I, p. 127. 59. BL, Add MS 9049, fols. 2–3; Ian Gentles, ‘The Sale of Bishops’ Lands in the English Revolution, 1646–60’, EHR, XCV (1980), 573–96. 60. Sean Kelsey, Inventing a Republic. The Political Culture of the English Commonwealth, 1649–1653 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 94–9. 61. PRO, E 407/8/168, fol. 12. For Blakiston, see below, pp. 138–60. 62. CJ, VI, p. 125. For the irregularity of the designation, adopted somewhat in advance of the Rump’s own ruling on the matter, see Gardiner, ‘Note’, EHR, VIII (1893), p. 525. 63. BL, Add MS 35332, fol. 119; Perfect Occurrences (12–19 Jan. 1649), pp. 798, 802; Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer (9–16 Jan. 1649, E538/17), p. 1223; BL, Add. MS 35332, fol. 119; Lagomarsino and Wood, eds, Trial of Charles I, pp. 40, 42–3, 58–60. 64. The declared accounts of the surveyor, Edward Carter for the period 1 Apr. 1648–31 Mar. 1649 include payment for ‘Making a new Gallery out of a Roome belonging to the Exchequer Ofﬁce att the upper end of the Hall for the use of the Commons house of Parliament with windowes to looke into the Hall’: PRO, AO1/2432/82. See also Perfect Occurrences (18–25 Jan. 1648), p. 804; CJ, VI, p. 137. 65. Clarendon, History, IV, pp. 480–1. 66. Perfect Diurnall (15–22 Jan. 1649, E527/9) p. 2302. It was also reported that it had been decided that both the mace and the sword should appear in the court, ‘the Sword alone looking too terrible’: Moderate Intelligencer (11–18 Jan. 1649, E538/21). 67. Lagomarsino and Wood, eds, Trial of Charles I, p. 57. See Martin Holmes and H.D.W. Sitwell, The English Regalia, Their History, Custody and Display (London, 1972), pp. 12–13, and plates 6 and 7. 68. Chester City Archive, Earwaker Collection, CR63/2/696, commonplace book [of John Crewe of Utkinton?], p. 135. See Oliver Millar, ed., ‘The Inventories and Valuations of the King’s Goods, 1649–1651’, Walpole Society, XLIII (1970–2), 1–443, pp. 51, 419. 69. John Cook, King Charls his Case ([? Feb.] 1649, E542/3). 70. Frances Rose-Troup, ‘John Humfry’, Essex Institute Historical Collections, LXV (1929), 293–308. 71. HMC, Sixth Report, p. 27. See CJ, VI, p. 20: ofﬁcers of regiments of Colonel Herbert, Colonel Eyre, Colonel Graye and Colonel Humphrie, 13 September 1648; PRO, PROB 11/230, fols. 312–14, references to letters of administration granted to Colonel John Humfry, son of Colonel John Humfry of Westminster, Middlesex, on 4 June 1653. Mrs Rose-Troup’s assertion that the son was the more likely candidate for the post of sword-bearer seems to have no stronger basis than a touching desire to clear the principal subject of her research from complicity in anything so frightful as regicide. 72. R.P. Stearns, The Strenuous Puritan (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1954), pp. 344, 355; R. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Politi-

REC3 7/13/01 2:32 PM Page 93

Staging the Trial of Charles I 93

73. 74.

75. 76.

77. 78.

79.

80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

86. 87.

88.

cal Conﬂict and London’s Overseas Trade, 1550–1653 (Cambridge, CUP, 1993), pp. 405–6, 526. LJ, X, pp. 273, 635; HMC, Sixth Report, p. 67; CJ, VI, p. 115. A.P. Newton, The Colonising Activities of the English Puritans (New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1914), pp. 46, 66; Rose-Troup, ‘John Humfry’, pp. 302–3. CJ, IV, p. 270; CSPD 1645–7, p. 247. The epithet is Dr Adamson’s: ‘Of Armies and Architecture: the Employments of Robert Scawen’, in Ian Gentles, John Morrill, Blair Worden, eds, Soldiers, Writers and Statesmen of the English Revolution (Cambridge, CUP, 1998), pp. 52–3. For the constituency, see Keeler, Long Parliament, pp. 40–1. A.W. McIntosh, ‘The Numbers of the English Regicides’, History, LXVII (1982), pp. 195–216: p. 198. Wedgwood, Trial of Charles I, p. 161; John Adamson, ‘Chivalry and Political Culture in Caroline England’, in K. Sharpe and P. Lake, eds, Politics and Culture in Early Stuart England (Basingstoke, Macmillan Press – now Palgrave, 1994), pp. 161–97. The action was reported only by Henry Walker (licensed by Theodore Jennings), who referred to ‘the kingdomes Armes; which is a red Crosse in a white ﬁeld’: Collections of Notes Taken at the Kings Tryall, at Westminster Hall, On Tuesday last, Janua. 23. 1648 (1648, E539/4) p. 2. For the signiﬁcance of this reference to the feast of Belshazzar in the iconography of revolution, see below, pp. 94–116. Kelsey, Inventing a Republic, chapter 3. See below, pp. 138–60. A Letter from the Commissioners of Scotland (1649, E539/11). Wedgwood, Trial of Charles I, pp. 162, 164; Lagomarsino and Wood, eds, Trial of Charles I, pp. 85, 87. Gardiner, History, IV, pp. 309–11; Wedgwood, Trial of Charles I, chapters 6 and 7; Lagomarsino and Wood, eds, Trial of Charles I, pp. 35, 39, 40, 43–4, 58, 89–100, 102, 105, 109, 111–13. The remarkable pantomime surrounding the signing of the death warrant is another matter altogether. W.J. Thoms, The Death Warrant of Charles I (London, F. Norgate, 1872; repr. 1880); Gardiner, History, IV, pp. 309–11n; Wedgwood, Trial of Charles I, pp. 173–6; A.W. McIntosh, ‘The Mystery of the Death Warrant of Charles I: Some Further Historic Doubts’, House of Lords Record Ofﬁce Memorandum No.66 (London, House of Lords Record Ofﬁce, 1981). Lagomarsino and Wood, eds, Trial of Charles I, p. 71. Gerald E. Aylmer, The Levellers in the English Revolution (London, Thames & Hudson, 1975), pp. 41–2; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, pp. 198–200. Barbara Taft, ‘The Council of Ofﬁcers’ Agreement of the People, 1648/9’, HJ, XXVIII (1985), pp. 169–185, offers an interpretation far less jaundiced, but none the more persuasive for that. OPH, XIX, p. 71.

REC4 7/13/01 2:35 PM Page 94

4 Belshazzar’s Feast: Regicide, Republicanism and the Metaphor of Balance Sarah Barber

This essay explores one possible link between the regicide of Charles I outside the Banqueting House, Whitehall, on 30 January 1649, and the setting up of the republican government known as the commonwealth, more usually referred to by its contemporary, derogative epithet, the Rump. Almost everything about the link, even to the point of whether there was one, was a controversial and unresolved issue for contemporaries. On 6 December 1648 parliament was purged. Pride’s Purge made possible a Commons vote against the continuation of negotiations with Charles, and left a House which, despite its emasculation, held itself representative of the people as a whole, and claimed this as justiﬁcation for setting up a High Court of Justice to try the king. This group of MPs, left in power by Pride’s Purge, made possible the abolition of the House of Lords, a statement of the sovereignty of the people, and a declaration that kingship was ‘unnecessary, burdensome and dangerous’.1 The former set of actions culminated in regicide, the latter in the republic of the commonwealth of England. The two most revolutionary acts of the Civil War period, the regicide and the abolition of monarchy, therefore, sprang from the same event. Pride’s Purge made them both possible. Both were engendered by an act of force, the coercion of elected members of parliament by the armed men who were theoretically their servants. The measures which were taken over the next six months were of debatable constitutional or legal status. They were made possible by a minority’s refusal to allow a majority to act. Subsequent legislation was enacted by those who remained in the House after 6 December, tainted, because endorsed, by the purgers. The way in which their actions would be received was already coloured by the violence of the purge, but also seemed in any case to continue the theme of military unrepresentativeness. An emotive and 94

REC4 7/13/01 2:35 PM Page 95

Belshazzar’s Feast 95

crucial debate explored how far forcible intervention by a minority had been necessary in order to foster a greater good. The presses reﬂected public concern at the coupling and decoupling of what John Goodwin most notoriously deﬁned as ‘might and right well met’.2 Whether or not the Rumpers approved, and most did not, the government which called itself a republic was deemed to exist because of the military coercion of the parliamentary process, the illegal trial of the sovereign and his execution without due process of common law. We shall therefore re-address how the two strands of regicide and republicanism were woven so closely together in the brief period between December 1648 and March 1649.3 Indeed, there were so few that were enthusiastic for the regicide, republicanism, or both, that only co-operation between minorities could have produced such a revolution. One reason that the impetus to regicide converged with that which promoted republicanism is that although the regicide and the formation of the commonwealth resolved different dilemmas, both could be explained by employing metaphors of ‘balance’. The balance metaphors discussed by apologists for the regicide and the republic were bi-polar, best represented by the metaphor of a pair of scales. The direct and mutually dependent relationship between the two pans of the scales provided the revolutionary aspect of the actions of 1648–49. This metaphor deliberately eschewed the traditional English concept of political balance, rooted in an Aristotelian or Polybian trinity of inter-related institutions that exempliﬁed monarchy, aristocracy and democracy.4 The Rump’s claim to represent the wider notion of the people, freezing out both king and lords, reconﬁgured English political practice into a two-pan set of scales, in which the people’s representatives sat on one side and the people themselves on the other, giving them a direct and immediate role in the constitution. The people’s representatives then invoked the scales to weigh the evidence against their king, which could arguably only be done once the king had been removed from the constitution. This was a balance of judgement. A similar image, now demonstrating a balance in equilibrium, was a means to illustrate how the faults deemed present during (and often before) the reign of Charles Stuart could be rectiﬁed by the government that followed his demise. Charles’ tendency towards unparliamentary autocracy had unbalanced the relationship between the people and those charged with representing the people’s trust. Under a commonwealth, equilibrium would be restored. This was revolutionary, unprecedented and complex. It was often explained to, and given force for, a wider audience by means of scrip-

REC4 7/13/01 2:35 PM Page 96

96

The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

tural parallel. The Stuarts had fallen after two generations, oppressive reigns of father and son. Explanatory texts were found in the biblical stories of Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar. The stories of Nebuchadnezzar and his son, Belshazzar, themselves provided a resolution to two more pervasive threads of scriptural interpretation, drawn from the two Books of Samuel, which traced the origins of Israelite kingship. As such, the untimely deaths of two individual kings marked the end of a longer history of a doomed institution. The genesis of Israelite kingship was foretold in I Samuel 8 – the passage used most frequently, by royalists and non-royalists alike, to discuss the nature of kingship. The Israelites pleaded to the one true God, Yahweh, for a king, so that they could be similar to their (heathen) neighbours. Yahweh warned that they needed only God, and to ask for an earthly king was to reject Him. They persisted, and therefore, through Samuel, God outlined the character and actions of a king on the earth. He would take a tenth of all their possessions, and oppress his people, who would ‘cry out in that day because of your king which ye have chosen you; and the LORD will not hear you in that day’.5 The ﬁrst king of Israel was Saul, who did indeed grow too proud and was jealous of David, who succeeded him. The prophet Jeremiah predicted the eventual fall of Judah, and its capture by Nebuchadnezzar,6 king of Babylon in Nineveh. The Lord’s vengeance would involve making the world mad when it drank from the golden cup.7 Another prophecy of Daniel offered a reminder of the end of proud and oppressive kings who ruled by their will: O thou king, the most high God gave Nebuchadnezzar thy father a kingdom, and majesty, and glory, and honour: And for the majesty that he gave him, all people, nations, and languages, trembled and feared before him: whom he would he slew; and whom he would he kept alive; and whom he would he set up; and whom he would he put down. But when his heart was lifted up, and his mind hardened in pride, he was deposed from his kingly throne, and they took his glory from him.8 The climax came in the Book of Revelation: ‘Babylon is fallen . . . because she made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication’.9 The second strand is rooted in the kingship of David and his son, Solomon. David recaptured the holy city of Jerusalem, and carried back the Ark of the Covenant, which housed the tablets of the Mosaic Law.

REC4 7/13/01 2:35 PM Page 97

Belshazzar’s Feast 97

He built a palace, and would have constructed a temple to house the Ark, but this work was destined for his son, Solomon. The wise Solomon was renowned as a great builder, but the city and the temple were captured by Nebuchadnezzar, as Jeremiah had promised (c.597 BC). Nebuchadnezzar carried away the treasures of the city, including the sacred vessels from the temple. However, like Solomon, Nebuchadnezzar was keen to reconstruct, and built palaces, defences and public works of splendour, on which he liked to leave inscriptions to his own glory. The captive Israelites were forced into exile in Babylon. Among them was Daniel, who predicted the end of Nebuchadnezzar’s kingdom through his interpretations of the king’s dreams. Two in particular concern us.10 Nebuchadnezzar dreamt of the Beast, a composite monster with a golden head, silver breast and arms, belly and thighs of brass, legs of iron and feet of clay, which was broken by a stone.11 In a second dream he envisaged a mighty tree. Daniel told him that this was a metaphor for Nebuchadnezzar’s kingship. It would be hewn down, and Nebuchadnezzar sent to live with the beasts of the ﬁeld, unless he heeded the messages from God. Any root left in the ground would grow into a new kingdom.12 Both biblical strands culminated in the story of Nebuchadnezzar’s son, Belshazzar.13 Belshazzar held a sumptuous pagan banquet, in the presence of his nobles and concubines, at which he feasted from the sacred vessels which Nebuchadnezzar had taken from the Jewish temple. At this feast, a portent of Belshazzar’s imminent end was vouchsafed to him, in the form of a hand which scratched the words ‘Mene, Mene Tekel Upharsin’ into the plaster of the wall. Daniel was called to interpret and declared the words to be a warning to Belshazzar that ‘God hath numbered thy kingdom, and ﬁnished it . . . Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting’.14 As a builder, fount of justice and wise mediator, James I considered himself a second Solomon, or Solomon’s equivalent in the pagan, Roman world, Augustus. Inigo Jones designed the new Banqueting House of James’ Palace of Whitehall to echo the king’s self-image. In the proclamation of 1618, with which James established a commission on new buildings, he was lauded as England’s Augustus, and in 1621, a Latin inscription was attached to the wall of the new Banqueting House, which gloriﬁed James, his building projects, the function of the Banqueting House and the legacy that James’ palace left to future generations.15 Amidst the fulsomeness of an extended parallel with Solomon that shaped the oration of Bishop Williams of Lincoln at James’ funeral, was that ‘Solomon beautiﬁed very much his capital City

REC4 7/13/01 2:35 PM Page 98

98

The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

with Buildings and Water-works. I Kings 9.15. So did King James’.16 James had therefore set himself up as a founder of a kingly dynasty, the power of which was represented in its architecture. Thirty years later, if the worth of that foundation was questioned, the whole ediﬁce of monarchy was sent tumbling. The design and decoration of the Banqueting House celebrated the role of majesty in images of ancient and biblical power. Its ﬂoor plan was like a basilica, adopting the neo-classical style, promoted by Andrea Palladio.17 The basilica of the ancient world, before it was appropriated for Christian use, was the centre of public administration: literally the king’s house, the public seat of justice. It could be argued that James intended to take the metaphor further, with the design for a new court of Star Chamber, which was also planned as a basilica. The Banqueting House was the physical manifestation of the fount of justice; the Star Chamber the parallel, where common law was administered and judgment passed.18 The Banqueting House/basilica was a rectangular hall, with a recessed, semi-circular niche at one end, where the throne was erected and justice dispensed. After the Christian conversion of the Roman world, basilicas were adapted into churches, and the site of the throne became the place for the altar, reﬂecting the position of the Ark within Solomon’s temple. The Banqueting House was also a site of royal entertainment. It overlooked the Tilt Yard, in order to view the spectacles there, and within, foreign ambassadors were received and the court was entertained with lavish feasts and masques. The niche had been removed by 1635, when Charles eventually commissioned Rubens to paint the ceiling of the Banqueting House in a series of scenes that would glorify the reign of his father, that people could ‘[l]ook up to read the king in all his actions’.19 Nevertheless, the project had been conceived before James’ death, and the basilica niche formed a central role in Rubens’ painting of The Beneﬁts of the Reign of James I.20 James sits on a raised dais, placed in a recess, ﬂanked by columns, a canopy over his head, crowned with laurel, embracing Peace and Prosperity whilst saluted by the defeated War and Rebellion. There are a number of echoes of balance within Rubens’ portrayals of James. In each of the main panels, James is the central ﬁgure who acts as a fulcrum between ‘balanced’ virtues: Wise Government and Royal Bounty, in The Beneﬁts. James sits in judgement, deciding in favour of peace rather than war. He is ﬂanked by rejoicing cherubs in The Apotheosis, borne skyward by Religion and Justice. James grips the arm of Justice – who herself holds the balance scales – whilst she leads him up to Heaven. In The Union of England and Scotland, James brings together

REC4 7/13/01 2:35 PM Page 99

Belshazzar’s Feast 99

two nations; Minerva the goddess of wisdom brings the infant, Britain, before his throne. This is a paganized interpretation of traditional representations of the Judgement of Solomon. On either side, Hercules (the strength of heroic virtue) crushes envious Rebellion, and the heroic wisdom of Minerva spears the neck of Ignorance. The English regicide of James’ son, Charles, was enacted outside the northern annexe of the Banqueting House, on a low block set up on a scaffold erected to the south of Whitehall Gate. Charles walked from his lodgings in St James’s Palace to Whitehall, was escorted up a staircase of the Banqueting Hall, and through a door knocked into a wall, onto a platform constructed outside the central windows.21 In doing so, he walked as visiting dignitaries and ambassadors had done before him, beneath Rubens’ paintings of his father’s glory. The situation of the Banqueting House, overlooking the Tilt Yard, could enable a large crowd to stare back, awed by the sure and certain administration of public justice rather than the ediﬁce dedicated to private kingly pleasures.22 None of the regicides attending the ‘committee for considering the time and place of the executing of the judgement against the King’ record their reasons for deciding on the ‘open street before Whitehall’.23 It may have been ironic that Charles passed beneath the paintings of the apotheosis of British kingship, but the protagonists revealed little of why they thought this place ‘ﬁt’. There is no extant material to conﬁrm that the stories of Belshazzar’s idolatrous inversion of the sacred use of Solomon’s temple goaded men to humiliate Charles in this particular place. However, the stories of Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar exercised a powerful force on those who supported the regicide and the subsequent move to a republic. The fateful character of the end of these particular kings performed a valuable explanatory function. Emphasizing that the regicide was about doing justice, but also about it being seen to be done, Edmund Ludlow noted that the people ‘put the soveraigne to death as King . . . at his owne doore (Whitehall), and that at nooneday’.24 A curious piece, The None-such Charles his Character, published by authority in January 1651, noted that Charles’ demise had been frequently predicted, was inevitable, and would be ‘on a Scaffold, before his owne Palace’.25 The fall of Babel and its palaces of idolatry ushered in the new Jerusalem.26 The stories of Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar carried the power of prophecy.27 God warned Israel about the characters of kings. He had, through his prophets, given portents, both to the Israelite kings of Judah and those heathen kings of Babylon who enslaved the Israelites, that

REC4 7/13/01 2:35 PM Page 100

100 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

their pride and power would bring down both themselves and their kingdoms. In the months after Charles’ losses in the second civil war, statements made in the form of prophecies warned of the urgency with which the king should recognize the providential message behind defeat and change his ways. Prophetic warnings could, in turn, create the impression that the prosecution was extending yet further the period during which it had shown all possible patience and forbearance towards Charles, repeatedly giving him every chance and making continual concessions. The forecasting quality of the biblical stories increased the imminence and surety of long-awaited justice. Those resistant to the message could be reminded that a warning which came straight from the Bible would be enacted.28 In October 1648, Colonel Edmund Harvey sponsored Matthew Barker to preach to the Commons, from the text of the Book of Daniel, chapter 2. The four monarchies of the world, represented to Nebuchadnezzar in his apocalyptic image of the Beast, demonstrated that kingship not built on true foundations, but on clay, would be broken at the foot, as ‘Great Babylon the throne of the beast being erected without Christ, yea against him, is falling down every day before him’.29 It was with the wisdom of a prophet that George Wither counselled Charles that there was still time for him to repent and save his name, much like that stamp, may be Which was preserved, when the Royall-tree Once, representing Nebuchadnezzar Was felled down. If he did not recognize God’s message, however, ‘Let him prepare for King Belshazzars fate’.30 Prophecy enabled men to be wise after the event. Even royalists looked back on the reign of Charles I and noted that his coronation sermon had been more ﬁtting for a funeral, and that Charles had worn white – the colour of innocence and martyrdom – rather than regal purple.31 John Nalson, in his 1684 edition of the trial of Charles I, noted that the erection of the arms of the commonwealth on the back wall of Westminster Hall, where the High Court of Justice held its sittings, had been the writing on the wall, for monarchy had been weighed and ﬁnished.32 In August 1649, a prophecy by Lady Eleanor Davies was republished.33 It had originally been delivered to the Elector, Charles Louis, in 1633, and published as All the Kings of the Earth, a commentary on

REC4 7/13/01 2:35 PM Page 101

Belshazzar’s Feast 101

Daniel, chapters 7–12.34 The 1649 edition was glossed with marginal comments. These had either been made by Davies herself, in order to demonstrate the truth of her earlier message in the light of the momentous events of January 1649, or were added by the commonwealth licenser, Theodore Jennings, in order to turn biblical commentary into explanatory political propaganda. Throughout her life Davies had conceived of Charles’ reign as a parallel for the kingship described and terminated in the Book of Daniel.35 Her own name was (almost) an anagram of ‘Reveale O Daniel’, and Belshazzar, if spelt Belchazar, approximated to ‘Be Charles’. Strange and Wonderfull Prophesies by the Lady Eleanor Audeley was published with ‘notes upon the said Prophesies, how farre they are fulﬁlled, and what part remains yet unfulﬁlled, concerning the late King; and Kingly Government . . . And particularly White-Hall’, a government imprimatur, and illustrations. On the frontispiece were woodcut scenes from the Banqueting House; one of the king and queen dancing at a masque and the other of the king, enthroned, presiding over a feast.36 Charles was explicitly called Belshazzar, ‘because the wal of the Banquetting house at White-Hal, where he feasted, should be terrible to him, as the writing on the wall was to Belshazzar, which proved true, for there he was beheaded’. The prediction of Charles’ death proved true, because ‘the heads-man took the hatchet in his hand wher-with he was beheaded, on the wal of the Banquetting-house, after the King had drank a glasse of wine’. Charles did indeed take a glass of claret and some bread at Whitehall before his noonday execution. Royalist propaganda made much of the king’s communion and abstinence before his martyrdom, but for apologists of the regicide, this wine may well have been more akin to the godless toasts at Belshazzar’s feast and a signal that God was about to destroy kingship as it had been vouchsafed to Jeremiah and foretold in the Book of Revelations. ‘[A]t one blow or line of blood’, continued Davies’s version, kingship was ended by the execution of a mere man, for the king died ‘in [the] presence of his then Equalls, for he dyed as Charles Stuart’.37 Robert Bacon also explicitly combined the Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar stories to expound upon Charles’ wilfulness, by which he meant the exercise of prerogative throughout his reign. The kings of England were ‘called God among men’. Their patronage, capriciously lifting and destroying favourites and ministers, was to place lackies within Nebuchadnezzar’s ‘great and tall Cedar, as sometime the King of Assyria did’. Nebuchadnezzar said ‘I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most high.’ Bacon’s references to Belshazzar – and possibly to Charles’ completion of his father’s

REC4 7/13/01 2:35 PM Page 102

102 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

palace at Whitehall – referred to the creation of an idolatrous temple. This was the temple of Nebuchadnezzar, not Solomon. He elided the inscription on the Banqueting House with an inscription with which Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar celebrated their wilful tyranny. Bacon had Belshazzar reﬂect on his own glory, and the works of his own hands, boasted himself before God and men, saying interpretatively . . . Is not this great Babel, which I have built, for the honour of my Majesty? for the spreading of my glory, and for everlasting rest, and tabernacle to me, and mine to all future ages? Compare these words with James I’s inscription on the wall of the Banqueting House: JAMES, the ﬁrst monarch of Great Britain, built up from the ground; intended for festive occasions, for formal spectacles and for the ceremonials of the British court; to the eternal glory of his/its name and of his/its most peaceful empire, he left it for posterity.

Thus, according to Bacon, Charles was shown the writing on the wall, which is now not only Prophetically, but that which has come to pass, easily to be interpreted by every one that passeth by . . . Mene, God hath numbered thy kingdom (taken note of all the particular vanities, follies, cruelties therein) and ﬁnished it . . . Tekel, Thou art weighed in the ballances (of God and man) and art found too light. Peres, divisit, God hath divided it from thee, and thee from it.38 The ways in which the king was weighed in order to cast judgement were various. The king was judged in the balances of two different sets of scales. One judged his crimes with equity.39 If a mere man had been guilty of the crimes of which Charles was accused, he would suffer death, and his posterity disinheritance. This case had been made against Charles as early as 1646. By 1648, the scope of the scales of equity had been extended to weigh Charles against his people. This was to weigh one person against the many (and invariably to devalue Charles, by ﬁnding him light), a situation which was compounded in that it weighed the (one) vanquished against the (many) victors. Milton called on the English people to rid their minds of their distorted history and

REC4 7/13/01 2:35 PM Page 103

Belshazzar’s Feast 103

to approach the question of Charles’ culpability with an unfettered conscience, their ‘judgement uninthrall’d’. If they could do so, he could ‘lay the question before all men in an even ballance’.40 Once they had done that, they could review the history of their own kingship as a secularized version of that of the Israelites in the Bible: For I will tell of things that are neither trivial nor commonplace: of how a most powerful king, who had crushed the laws and beaten down religion, and was ruling in accordance with his own caprice, was at last conquered in war by his own people who had served a long term of slavery; then how he was handed over into custody; and then when he showed absolutely no reason for them to hope for better of him either by words or by deeds, he was ﬁnally condemned to death by the highest council of the kingdom, and struck by the axe before the very door of the palace.41 The High Court of Justice was ‘the law (which) keeps the beam even between sovereignty and subjection’.42 The commissioners of the court ‘weighed the merits of the cause in the Ballances of the Sanctuary, Law and right Reason’.43 God judged all men with equity: there was no allowance made for kings. The trial offered an opportunity for the commissioners to set up a balance between the people’s good and the actions of the king, and to judge him. To Ludlow, Charles had made himself God’s ‘rivall’.44 On the one hand we have the justice of God; on the other we have the ﬁgure of Charles who had set himself up in rivalry or competition. In equity, which would the court choose? It was a physical manifestation of the numerical disparity between the lone ﬁgure of the king and the massed ranks of commissioners and people. Miles Corbet retrospectively considered regicide, weighing the evidence against Charles, who had brought about ‘the horrid rebellion & bloudy murders of the protestants in Ireland, the levying warr against the parlement & the good peopl in England & what bloudshed & miseries did ensue theruppon’. Charles’ loss of authority was balanced against the authority by wch that court for that trial was erected was then the same authority [by] wch the whole nation befor that trial was & for many yeares after was governed by & was submitted unto by the body of the nation, & was owned by the nations also round about wch did appear to me abundantly was owned by the lord the great & righteous Iudg of men & nations and that after many manifestos

REC4 7/13/01 2:35 PM Page 104

104 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

and declarations wherin hath his matie on his part & the parlemt on ther part did appeal unto God the great lord of Hoasts to iudg ther cause & after so many battels the lord was pleased to signal & many wonderful appearances to owne the counsels & armies of the parlemt in deafeating the armies & Counsels & actings that wer against the parlemt.45 Edmund Ludlow counterbalanced Charles’ niggardly concessions of 1641 and those he made in his ﬁnal captivity on the Isle of Wight, both now considered triﬂing attempts to meet the people’s grievances, against the weight of their case demonstrated by ‘the blood of thousands lying at his doore’.46 If the king’s actions were weighed, they were heavy in the balances, because he had acted as a tyrant and bathed the land in blood. The balance-scales of judgement were weighted down by the evidence that could be presented against him.47 The High Court was a new, equitable and just balance which would restore a correct balance to England by disposing of the tyrant Charles. The law was no respecter of persons, and God judged all people equally.48 Charles’ monarchical profession as the fount of law must therefore be inverted by the High Court: ‘for you to set yourself with your single judgment, and those that adhere unto you, to set yourself against the highest Court of Justice, that is not law’.49 For one man to seek to be the entirety of one side of the scales was tyranny because, in terms of number, he would be so heavily outweighed.50 Charles’ actions were weighed, and his role balanced against that of the people. As William Ball put it, in a tract which was reissued several times after his death to reiterate the point at apposite moments, it was inequitable to measure ‘salus populi’ against ‘majestas imperii’.51 If Charles was to be judged with equity, he was a mere man, and guilty of crimes for which any ordinary person would suffer death and disinheritance. If he were judged as a king, no ordinary prisoner, then his tyranny was proven by the arrogance with which he set himself up to oppress the godly people. Marten railed ‘how they talk still of mutuality? of equal giving and receiving? As if the Parliament and their Prisoner were upon a Level’.52 It was Charles’ obduracy which presented his opponents with such a clear choice: one in which they stood at the fulcrum and judged between capitulation and deposition. If they capitulated, the king, having dismissed all entreaties, returned with powers little different from those he had possessed in 1641. Either this, or they refused to allow the king any power. Charles was also ‘light’ if the balances were

REC4 7/13/01 2:35 PM Page 105

Belshazzar’s Feast 105

regulated by representativeness, because he stood for no one but himself or, at the most, the Stuart family. In 1648, the balance between victors and defeated was not proportionable, and a settlement should not be created that treated them so: ‘no Treaty can be indeed altogether equal betwixt the King, and the peoples Parliament, for he deals but for himself, and perhaps for some of his own Family and Posterity; they for two whole Nations.’53 The Leveller petition of 11 September 1648 could not believe that there was still insufﬁcient evidence to make more drastic changes, according as ye have bin accustomed, passing by the ruine of a Nation, and all the bloud that hath bin spilt by the King and his Party, ye betake your selvs to a Treaty with him, thereby putting him that is but one single person . . . in competition with the whole body of the people, whom ye represent; not considering that it is impossible for you to erect any authority equall to your selves.’54 Charles had created a situation in which allegiance was either ‘vain . . . or else obligatory’.55 He had set up the circumstances in which judgement was made of himself, because he would be ‘either an absolute Tyrant over us, or no King’.56 A king with prerogative powers had disproportionate weight in the scales. Stripped of these powers, he weighed light. His image was meaningless and founded on trinkets and spectacle. This was stated explicitly in Davies: How light soever by thee set thou as thy weightless Gold His Image wanting, found much more lighter then can be told.57 The English were ‘idolizing a worme’; treating as great something which was, in fact, a low, insigniﬁcant and despicable thing.58 Seeking to preserve the importance of the king’s person, which had proved constitutionally unnecessary, was to deal with a ‘useless bulke’.59 ‘[M]eer Prerogatives’ were ‘the Toyes and Gewgaws of his Crown’. In these phrases from Eikonoklastes, Milton referred back to On Reformation, in which he had attacked prelates who ‘revell like Belshazzar with their full carouses in Goblets, and vessels of gold snatcht from Gods Temple.’60 The king’s titles were the elements which were useless – ‘arrogancies, or ﬂatteries’ – but if a single person were allowed such titles, the danger would

REC4 7/13/01 2:35 PM Page 106

106 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

be ‘to make the Subject no better than the Kings slave, his chattell, or his possession’.61 George Wither set up the two possibilities. Either Charles had power, in which case he had esteemed his own interest to be greater than that of the lives of the people, or he had none, and would be coerced by the power of the sword merely to ‘hawk, hunt, bowle, and play at Tennis’.62 The same point was made by Charles’ prosecuting counsel, John Cook. Why keep a monarch who had no power? It was ‘dissimulation’ to keep a king, believed by foreign powers to be great, but in reality worthless and powerless.63 The balance which was being calculated, in order to weigh the role of the king, was like a ledger. The people of England should ‘cast up our accounts right’, or in Ludlow’s words, Charles ‘must be reckoned up’.64 Charles was a cipher.65 A balanced constitution could never be achieved whilst Charles constituted a part of it: either way, it would throw it out of balance. Monarchy possessed within itself structural instabilities and anomalies. It would be overstretching a point to say that this formed a conscious theme even in the early 1640s, but the discussion of balance had formed an undercurrent. Thomas May had warned in 1642 that princes were invested with so much majesty that if they were not invested with proportionate powers, the whole would be a mockery.66 Milton described the wisest commonwealth in Of Reformation (1641) as presided over by an incorruptible king. In one pan of the scales was an aristocracy of the wise, who directly represented the people in the other, ‘equally ballanc’d as it were by the hand and scale of Justice’.67 In Milton’s ideal state, however, this form of balance could only be regulated by a person – a king – if that person was incorruptible. Eight years later, experience had taught that this could not work. If there was to be a third element, which stood directly between the two ends, presiding over and regulating the balance, it must be an absolute and abstract concept, for any person who regulated the balance would be corruptible, unfair and possessed of self-interest, which their position would allow them to promote, to the detriment of the balance they were intended to maintain even-handedly. The balance must be an internally self-contained one, regulated by the relationship between the two pans. The inability to conceive of an incorruptible individual in 1649 resulted in the government of Charles and of kings being adjudged to be unnecessary, because it did no real public work, but was merely useless ceremonial; burdensome, because such fripperies involved heavy taxation;68 and dangerous, because the disparity between the two resulted in the people’s worship of a false idol.69

REC4 7/13/01 2:35 PM Page 107

Belshazzar’s Feast 107

The axe with which the English cut down the tree of monarchy neatly provided a forceful reminder of the traditional weapon of English execution. Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of the destruction of a great tree was the metaphor used to illustrate the absence of choice in which there remained no option but to extinguish all of Charles’ power, lest he use what was left to him – such as retaining a veto – to rebuild his tyranny.70 The tree of monarchy could not be cut down whilst any root was left in the ground, for from that root would grow new and stronger tyrannies.71 The legal reformer, John Warr, challenged England’s prerevolutionary laws, because they failed to secure the free choice of the people, justice, or the liberty and safety of the people, and ‘weighed in this threefold balance [were] found too light’.72 Prerogative would always form itself into a separate interest – ‘a Tuber or exuberance growing out from the stock of the Commonwealth’ – and thus God had taken pity on the weak and laid ‘the Axe to the root of the Tree’.73 No matter what degree of power was left to the king, even the slightest hint of potential power was, in the hands of those inured to tyranny, a sufﬁcient opportunity for them to exploit it.74 The None-such Charles his Character presented the whole of Charles’ family as stems from the same root, and listed the various prophecies which had predicted the fall of the Stuart dynasty.75 Verity Victor claimed to have uncovered The Royal Project in October 1648, in which nobility had died because it had ceased to value honour, but aristocrats were merely ‘the Prerogative branches and sprigs. Now to the root, CHARLES REX’. Now that the people had wrested back from kings fundamental powers such as control of the militia, why should they not keep the power forever? ‘In a word’, he continued, to grant the Kings desire in this, would be like the hewing down Nebuchadnezzars mighty Tree, and cutting off the branches and leaves thereof; yet leaving the stump of the roots thereof in the earth with bands of iron and brass. No, let us up with root and all; that there may be no more remembrance of Prerogative, Tyranny, and Norman Bondage amongst us’.76 God strengthened the resolve of the weak by ‘lay[ing] an Axe to the root of the Tree’, replacing monarchy with the ‘foundation of Freedome within us’. To invert the hierarchical tree image, ‘Are we not all derived from one common stock? Is not every man born free?’77 The stories of the father and the son, therefore, pulled together one strand in which an individual king was felled for acting tyrannically,

REC4 7/13/01 2:35 PM Page 108

108 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

and another in which the story represented an allegory of the collapse of the institution that he stood for. Milton inverted the image portrayed in Charles’ encomium, Eikon Basilike – Christ’s temptation on the pinnacle of the temple – to have God taking vengeance on Charles’ blasphemy because ‘it was no Pinnacle of the Temple, it was a Pinnacle of Nebuchadnezzars Palace’. From the pinnacle of this palace, ‘hee and Monarchy fell headlong together’.78 In this story, the end of the one king provides the opportunity to be rid of them all. The tipping over of the balance (disequilibrium) necessitated a trial (judgement) in order to create the conditions to restore balance (equilibrium): But God, you say, gave over many realms to Nebuchadnezzar. I confess that he did so for a certain time, Jeremiah 27.7. Show that he delivered the English over into slavery to Charles Stuart even for the least half an hour . . . I never heard that he delivered them over to it. Or if God gives people into slavery whenever a tyrant is more powerful than his people, why may he not likewise be said to set them free whenever a people are more powerful than their tyrant? . . . Or are to be believe that the uncontrollability of this one man is sent from God for the harm of all, rather than the self-control of the whole state for the good of all?79 In tracing the story even further back, to its roots in the parallel of I Samuel 8, Milton reinforced the idea that in rebelling against the tyrannical kingship of one man, the people had regained the liberty – ‘to our praise and virtue’ – to return to the pre-Samuel point at which all kings were unnecessary and to be condemned: ‘[O]n returning from Babylon they reverted to their old form of government’.80 The bi-polar image of balance came under ﬁre from two directions. There were several within the government and apologists outside it who did not agree with the stability, rightness and constitutional legality of a bi-polar constitution, in which the people and their representatives were in a direct and self-contained balance. Even Milton, who did so much as an employee of the commonwealth to popularize this notion, was scathing about the ability of the people to maintain its part in it. The Cromwellian balanced constitution of the Instrument of Government re-enshrined tri-partite checks and balances and the separation of powers. Nevertheless, some discussions of the bi-polar relationship survived. The paternalistic royalism of Thomas White’s Grounds of Government and Obedience provoked a reissue of William Ball’s distinction

REC4 7/13/01 2:35 PM Page 109

Belshazzar’s Feast 109

between salus populi and magistas imperii. Henry Marten responded with the argument that ‘Supreme LEX esto. By the word Government is ordinarily understood ye ligature or re[s]ult made up of these 2 Correlatives ye persons governing & Governed’.81 Marten believed that in order to have a balance between the two ends of the spectrum represented by liberty and obligation, there should be a similar set of balances, which directly reﬂected the ﬁrst, in which the people (liberty) were balanced by the parliament (obligation). The people were represented by parliament: parliament was accountable to the people. In order to produce a correct balance between liberty and subjection, one needed to include the people within the balance of government and reﬂect their direct sovereignty through the election of their representatives in parliament. To do otherwise was to distort the balance, and thus invoke the balance of judgement. So, when the Rump fell, the protectorate plunged the people back to the choice they had had under Charles, a straight choice between liberty and tyranny.82 Marten’s balance pictured the ‘controversy between Mr. Hobbs and Machiavell conc’ning tiranny and liberty or to weight in an equall balance the inconveniencies which arise from o[pp]ression in the one, and factions in the other’.83 The ‘good old cause’ of the late 1650s sought to re-establish an integral connection between the regicide and the construction of a republic. John Streater revived the Belshazzar image: ‘Alas, alas! what will become of my dear Master, when his Kingdome is weighed in the Ballance and found to [sic] light?’84 The Quaker, George Bishop, incorporated the Nebuchadnezzar/Belshazzar motifs into his 1659 pamphlet, which chided the army for abandoning the ideals of 1648, particularly in denying liberty of conscience. The allusions were considered so clear that the only overt reference was the title, Mene Tekel, together with a suggestive reference that coercion was like Nebuchadnezzar’s tree, in that it sprang ‘in the root, from that of Rome, unto whose height of Coercion and cruelty, it will (in time) ascend, if not beyond, unless it be cut down’.85 The two declarations of which Bishop chose to remind the army were the Remonstrance at St Albans of 16 November 1648 – for ‘the bringing of the King to justice’ – ‘and your draught of the Settlement of the Nation, Whitehal, Jan. 15. 1649’ for ‘changing of the Government, into that of a free State or Common-wealth’.86 He used the metaphor of balance in its two senses. He sought to place the army’s declarations of 1648–49 in a balance with those of 1659 in order to weigh and judge them. He also described the history of the army’s actions for the people, and three times warned them that the forces of

REC4 7/13/01 2:35 PM Page 110

110 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

darkness tried to divide the people in order to place in competition the power of good and evil.87 The second challenge, from the royalists, was more immediate. It did not, however, seek to deny the nature or the power of the balancescale model. It inverted and distorted it, as the republican imagery had inverted that of the royalists. As Charles’ death freed republicans to work through metaphors of balance and biblical example, it also freed the royalists to construct an efﬁgy of Charles which could not be compared (balanced, measured or judged) with his living embodiment. Their construction of Charles as a Christ ﬁgure Gospelized the images, throwing the emphasis away from judgment and onto New Testament values, such as mercy and fortitude. Charles would ‘cast piety in the scale’ and Whitehall, which had ‘lately [been] his palace’, was ‘now his Calvary’.88 If Charles was executed as king, the sovereign, highest power, at the pinnacle (as Ludlow had indicated), then might the scaffold have been Christ’s cross on the hill, on which he sacriﬁced his own life for the future of his people, and not Nebuchadnezzar’s pagan palace? If Charles had already been brought low before his trial and execution – not only to the level of a mere man, but lower, as Davies’s tract suggested – did his subsequent fate expose him to pity and compassion? Neither issue had been resolved by the regicide. The removal of Charles from the world, however, enabled a task of reconstruction to begin. Though he was painted as the harbinger of death whilst he was alive, in death, he became a symbol of new life for royalists and republicans alike.89

Notes 1. From the act abolishing kingship, 17 March 1649, reprinted in Gardiner, Documents, pp. 384–7. 2. John Goodwin, Right and Might Well Met (1648); The Parliament under the Power of the Sword ([11 Dec.] 1648, 669.f.13/52); The Parliament under the Power of the Sword. With a briefe Answer thereunto by some of the Army ([11 Dec.] 1648, E476/1); The Articles and Charge of the Army against Fourscore of the Parliament Men ([8 Dec.] 1648, E475/30); The Second Part of the Narrative concerning the Armies Force and Violence upon the Commons House and Members ([23 Dec.] 1648, E477/19); CJ, VI, p. 97. 3. Committees which dealt with ‘setling the government’ and with ‘proceedings against the king’ sat in parallel sessions, although the committee for settling the government was established ﬁrst, as early as 13 December 1648, if one counts the votes to reverse the legislation which had resumed further addresses to the king: CJ, VI, pp. 95–6. For the decisions of the former, see CJ, VI, pp. 99, 108, 114, 121; and of the latter, CJ, VI, pp. 102, 105, 112. It

REC4 7/13/01 2:35 PM Page 111

Belshazzar’s Feast 111

4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

could be argued that the two dovetailed on 27 January with the vote that no person should be proclaimed king without the ‘free Consent of the People in Parliament’: CJ, VI, p. 124. Elizabeth Sauer hints, though takes no further than a suggestive sentence, a possible means of intellectualizing the bi-polar, rather than the tri-partite view of balance: ‘The difference between dualism and duality is difference itself: in dualism, difference is dichotomy, whereas for duality, difference is supplementary’. See Elizabeth Sauer, ‘The Fall of Nebuchadnezzar’, Renaissance and Reformation, XVII (1993), pp. 43–72; p. 55. I Samuel 8.18. Nabuchodonosor II (reigned c.605–562 BC), a corruption of the Babylonian form of the name Nabu-kudurri-usur, roughly translated as ‘O Nebo, defend my crown’. II Kings 24 and 25; Jeremiah 25.15–17; 36.30–1; 46.13; 49.12; 51.6–9. Daniel 5.18–20. This article follows the general practice in the pamphlets cited here in quoting from the Authorized Version of the Bible. John G. Gomm, ‘A Journey Through Danielic Spaces: the Book of Daniel in the Theology and Piety of the Christian Community’, Interpretation: a Journal of Bible and Theology, XXXIX (1985), pp. 114–56. Jer.51.8; Dan.2.1; 3.1; Rev.14.8. A discussion of the importance which Protestants of the early-modern period placed on the Daniel stories can be found in Thomas H. Luxon, ‘A Second Daniel and the “True Jew” in The Merchant of Venice’, Early Modern Literary Studies, IV (1999) 3.1–37, ·URL: http://purl.oclc.org/emls/04-3/ luxoshak.htmlÒ. Daniel 2.31–3. Daniel 4.10–27. Baltasar in Greek and Latin, or Bel-sarra-usur (‘May Bel protect the king’). Bel was the chief god of Babylon. Belshazzar is now not thought to have been Nebuchadnezzar’s son, but he is described as such in the Bible and was believed to have been so by Bible-readers in the seventeenth century. John Goldingay, ‘The Stories in Daniel: a Narrative Politics’, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, XXXVII (1987), pp. 99–116. Daniel 5.25–7. The importance of the Belshazzar story is reﬂected in four phrases which survive into the present day. If we are transﬁxed with fear, as Belshazzar was by the hand of God, our knees are said to knock. Something of which the days are numbered, is declared doomed by the writing on the wall. The unworthy are counselled that they shall be weighed in the balance, and found wanting. David Howarth, Images of Rule: Art and Politics in the English Renaissance, 1485–1649 (Basingstoke, Macmillan Press – now Palgrave, 1997), pp. 33–4; William Tate, ‘King James I and the Queen of Sheba’, English Literary Renaissance, XXVI (1996), pp. 561–85. Bishop John Williams, Great Britains Saloman. A Sermon preached at the funerall of the king, James (1625, P&R STC, 25723); I Kings 9.15: ‘And this is the reason of the levy which king Solomon raised; for to build the house of the LORD, and his own house . . .’ Howarth, Images of Rule, p. 35; Franco Barbieri, The Basilica of Andrea Palladio (Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1970).

REC4 7/13/01 2:35 PM Page 112

112 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I 18. Howarth, Images of Rule, pp. 40–1; John Webb’s groundplan of the Star Chamber (1617, after Inigo Jones), Courtauld Institute of Art. 19. Ben Jonson, cited in Oliver Millar, Rubens and the Whitehall Ceiling (London, OUP, 1958), p. 18. 20. Ruth Saunders Magurn, ed. and trans., The Letters of Peter Paul Rubens (Evanston, Ill., Northwestern University Press, 1991), pp. 77, 402–3; Oliver Millar, ‘Rubens: the Whitehall Ceiling’, Charleton Lectures on Art, No. 40 (London, 1958); Julius S. Held, ‘Rubens’s Glynde Sketch and the Installation of the Whitehall Ceiling’, Burlington Magazine, CXII (1970), pp. 274–81. 21. The Armies Modest Intelligencer (25 Jan.–1 Feb. 1649, E541/2), pp. 8–9. 22. The low height of the block and the black drapery around the scaffold ensured that all that could be seen was the movement of the axe and not the ﬁnal fall of the king. 23. The Journal of the High Court of Justice, for the Trial of King Charles the First, taken by John Phelps, 29 January 1649, printed in State Trials, IV, cols 1045–1135. 24. Edmund Ludlow, A Voyce from the Watchtower, ed. A.B. Worden (Camden Society, XXI, 1978), p. 206. 25. The None-such Charles his Character ([6 Jan.] 1651, E1345/2), p. 34. A prurient reference to James I’s lasciviousness notes that his hands were always busy, as he called himself a second David, always busy with his pen and his harp. 26. As such, early February 1649 seemed a ﬁtting moment to publish a digest of the mystical writings of Jacob Boehme, ‘concerning the last Times, being divers Propheticall Passages of the Fall of Babel, and the New Building in Zion’: Mercurius Teutonicus, or a Christian Information concerning the last Times ([5 Feb.] 1649, E541/11). 27. J.L. Helberg, ‘The Determination of History According to the Book Daniel Against the Background of Deterministic Apocalyptic’, Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wisderschaft, CVII (1995), pp. 273–87. 28. For an introductory discussion of Civil War prophecy as political statement, mode of empowerment, chastisement by the underdog etc., see the endnotes to Sauer, ‘Fall of Nebuchadnezzar’. 29. Matthew Barker, A Christian standing and Moving upon a true Foundation, taken from R. Jeffs, ed., Fast Sermons to Parliament (34 vols, London, Cornmarket Press, 1970–1), XXXII, pp. 232–302, p. 236, epistle dedicatory. 30. Prosopopaeia Britannica: Britans Genius (1648), in Miscellaneous Works of George Wither (6 vols, Spenser Society, NY, 1967) XVIII, pp. 3–118, pp. 29–30, ll. 886–897. Wither wrote the poem at the end of 1648, after the purge of parliament had secured his freedom, but it was not published until May 1649: David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge, CUP, 1999), pp. 151–5. 31. Carolyn A. Edie, ‘The Public Face of Royal Ritual: Sermons, Medals, and Civil Ceremony in Late Stuart Coronations’, HLQ, LIII (1990), pp. 311–36, p. 314. 32. See above, p. 84. 33. Davies was known as Davies, Douglas and Audeley. She was born the daughter of George Touchet, eleventh Baron Audeley. She married Sir John Davies in 1609. After Davies’ death, she married Sir Archibald Douglas, in the spring of 1627.

REC4 7/13/01 2:35 PM Page 113

Belshazzar’s Feast 113 34. Wing, STC, listing her as Douglas, lists two pamphlets entitled Given to the Elector Prince Charles of the Rhyne, printed in Amsterdam and dated 1633, although in both cases it is assumed that the date was a false one, and that the publications were two editions of 1648 and 1651 respectively: Wing, STC, D1992, D1993. These are also listed in Pollard and Redgrave (under Audeley), along with All the kings of the earth shall prayse thee (Amsterdam) P&R STC, 903.5. Pollard and Redgrave do not challenge the veracity of the dating of this, and the ﬁrst edition of Given to the Elector, as 1633. 35. Esther S. Cope, Handmaid of the Holy Spirit: Dame Eleanor Davies, Never soe mad a Ladie (Ann Arbor, Mich., University of Michigan Press 1992), pp. 12, 60–5, 101, 110. 36. Lady Eleanor Audeley/Davies/Douglas, Strange and Wonderfull Prophesies by the Lady Eleanor Audeley ([27 Aug.] 1649, E571/28). Davies was one of those whose prophecies were cited in The None-such Charles his Character, p. 10: ‘foretelling his death a fortnight before he was killed’. 37. Audeley, Strange and Wonderfull Prophesies, p. 1. 38. R[obert] Bacon, The Labyrinth the Kingdom’s In ([7 Feb.] 1649, E541/26), misnumbered, pp. 5, 6, 12. 39. At some level, it would seem unlikely that there were no link between the popular usage of the term, equity, and the courts of equity. However, no such link can yet be made. The general meaning of equity as fairness, and recourse to justice to correct law, may reﬂect the notion of correcting something which is out of balance. There may also be some link between the equity court’s requirement (during this period) for plaintiffs to show they were in debt to the crown and the prosecution’s obsession with their war-debts and with presenting their inequitable case against the crown in terms of a ledger. For a discussion of the role of the legal principles of equity, see Henry Horwitz, ‘Chancery’s “Younger Sister”: the Court of Exchequer and its Equity Jurisdiction, 1649–1841’, HR, LXXII (1999), pp. 160–82. 40. John Milton, Eikonoklastes in Complete Prose Works, ed. D.M. Wolfe (8 vols, New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1953–82), III, p. 346; Philip Hunton, A Treatise of Monarchie (1642, E103/15), p. 18. 41. John Milton, A Defence of the People of England . . . in reply to A Defence of the King, by Claudius Anonymous, alias Salmasius ([24 Feb.] 1651), in J. Milton, Political Writings, ed. Martin Dzelzainis (Cambridge, CUP, 1991), preface, p. 51. 42. John Cook, King Charls his Case ([9 Feb.] 1649, E542/3), p. 7. Cook uses this as a deﬁnition of mixed government, which is clearly a complete change in meaning from the classic deﬁnition. 43. Ibid., p. 40. 44. Ludlow, Voyce, p. 206. 45. Norfolk Record Ofﬁce, Norwich, NRO MC46/4/1. 488.x.1: the ‘confession’ of Miles Corbet, written just before his execution. 46. Ludlow, Voyce, p. 206. 47. This would, no doubt have been illustrated by the testimony of witnesses, which the court intended to bring against Charles. The court’s inability to parade the witnesses may have further emphasized the use of biblical and historical examples and legal precedents which the court had to cite instead.

REC4 7/13/01 2:35 PM Page 114

114 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I 48. King Charls Tryal: a Perfect Narrative of the Whole High Court of Justice ([27 Jan.] 1649, E545/4–5), p. 42; Psalms 98.9. 49. Bradshaw’s speech, King Charls Tryal, pp. 31–2, 18. 50. John Warr: ‘[g]rant that prerogative laws are good for princes, and advantageous to their interest, yet the shrubs are more in number than the cedars in the forest of the world . . . Communities are rather to be respected than the private interests of great men’, The Corruption and Deﬁciency of the Lawes of England Soberly Discovered: or Liberty working up to its just Height (1649, reprinted in David Wootton, ed., Divine Right and Democracy: an Anthology of Political Writing in Stuart England (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1986), pp. 148–64; p. 158. 51. William Ball (of Barkham), The Power of Kings Discussed; or an Examen of the Fundamental Constitution of the Free-born People of England, in answer to several Tenets of Mr David Jenkins ([30 Jan.] 1649, E340/21). 52. Henry Marten, The Parliaments Proceedings Justiﬁed, in declining a Personall Treaty with the King ([7 Feb.] 1648, E422/16), p. 10. 53. Ibid., p. 10. 54. To the Right Honorable, the Commons of England, in Don M. Wolfe, ed., Leveller Manifestos in the Puritan Revolution (New York, Humanities Press, 1967), p. 285; Noel Brailsford, The Levellers and the English Revolution (London, Cresset Press, 1961), pp. 350–3. 55. The Humble Advice and Earnest Desires of Certain Well-affected Ministers, Lecturers of Banbury in the County of Oxon, and of Brackley in the County of Northampton ([25 Jan.] 1649, E540/12), p. 7. 56. Henry Marten, The Independency of England endeavoured to be Maintained ([11 Jan.] 1648, E422/16), p. 14. Thomas Chaloner, An Answer to the Scotch Papers ([10 Nov.] 1646, E361/7), p. 7: ‘For either wee must take him as a King or a Subject, since betwixt them two there is no medium’; Harro Höpﬂ and Martyn P. Thompson, ‘The History of Contract as a Motif in Political Thought’, American Historical Review, LXXXIV (1979), pp. 919–44, esp. pp. 921–6. 57. Audeley, Strange and Wonderfull Prophesies, p. 6. 58. Ludlow, Voyce, p. 204. 59. John Milton, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, in Milton, Political Writings, p. 7. 60. Milton, Eikonoklastes, p. 481; his, Of Reformation, in Complete Prose Works, I, p. 590. Almost exactly the same phrase was employed in Defence of the People of England Touching Church-Discipline in England (1641), which decried the ‘Idolatrous erection of Temples’ the money for which could have been better spent on churches and schools. 61. Milton, Tenure, in Milton, Political Writings, p. 11; the king’s title was from ‘Flattery, Oppression, Superstition, Ignorance, and the like’, Bacon, The Labyrinth, p. 5. 62. G[eorge] W[ither], Respublica Anglicana or the Historie of the Parliament in their late Proceedings ([28 Oct.] 1650, E780/25), p. 42. 63. John Cook, Monarchy no Creature of Gods Making ([26 Feb.] 1652, E1238/1), pp. 129–30. Sauer contends that the argument was continued by Milton in Paradise Regained: Sauer, ‘Fall of Nebuchadnezzar’. 64. Ludlow, Voyce p. 206; [Henry Robinson], A Short Discourse between Monarchical and Aristocratical Government, Or a sober perswasive of all true hearted

REC4 7/13/01 2:35 PM Page 115

Belshazzar’s Feast 115

65. 66.

67. 68.

69. 70.

71.

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

78.

79. 80. 81.

82. 83.

Englishmen, to a willing conjunction with the Parliament of England in setting up the Government of a Common-wealth ([24 Oct.] 1649, E575/31), p. 14. Robinson took as his text I Sam.8. 6–7. The attribution of the pamphlet to Robinson has not been challenged. For Robinson’s career see W.K. Jordan, Men of Substance (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1942), pp. 38–66. Cook, King Charls, p. 18; Cook, Monarchy no Creature, pp. 129–30. Thomas May, A Breviary of the History of the Parliament of England, in Francis Maseres, ed., Select Tracts Relating to the Civil Wars in England (2 vols, London, 1815), I, pp. 49–102. John Milton, Of Reformation, in Complete Prose Works, I, p. 599. Milton on the absurdity of comparing Charles I with Solomon: ‘Solomon “oppressed the people with the heaviest taxes”: but he spent it on the temple of God and public buildings, Charles on extravagance’: A Defence, in Milton, Political Writings, p. 104. [Robinson], A Short Discourse, p. 14. A Shrill Cry was issued in February 1648 against all the parties who constituted the ‘Babilonish Hierarchy’ who tried to prevent the godly from rebuilding the Tabernacle of David: A Shrill Cry in the Eares of Cavaliers, Apostates, and Presbyters ([5 Feb.] 1648, E541/10), p. 12. Verity Victor, The Royal Project: or, a clear Discovery of His Majesties design in this present Treaty ([20 Oct.] 1648, E468/22), p. 16; the reference is to Daniel 4.4–27. Warr, The Corruption and Deﬁciency of the Lawes, in Wootton, ed., Divine Right and Democracy, p. 148. John Warr, The Priviledges of the People ([5 Feb.] 1649, E541/12), pp. 1, 4–6. To His Excellency the Lord Fairfax ([24 Nov.] 1648, 669.f.13/47). The None-such Charles his Character ([6 Jan.] 1651, E1345/2), pp. 2, 4–5, 10, 21, 166. Verity Victor, The Royal Project, pp. 4, 16. Warr, Priviledges of the People, pp. 6, 11. There was also a Danielic reference to the ﬁery furnace of righteousness, which would prove too hot for the wicked. Milton, Eikonoklastes, in Complete Prose Works, III, p. 405; Eikon Basilike, The Portraiture of His Sacred Majesty in his Solitudes and Sufferings, ed. Philip A. Knachel (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1966). Milton, Defence of the People of England, in Milton, Political Writings, p. 117; Sauer, ‘Fall of Nebuchadnezzar’, p. 54. Milton, Defence, in Milton, Political Writings, p. 90. Henry Marten, ‘Obeservations of Henry Martens upon Mr Whites grounds of Obedience & Government’, BL, Add. MS 71532 fols 9–10v; William Ball, State-maxims or certain dangerous positions destructive to the very nature very natural Right and Liberty of mankind ([5 Aug.] 1656, E886/6), p. 27; Beverley C. Southgate, ‘Covetous of Truth’: the Life and Work of Thomas White, 1593–1676 (Dordrecht, Khuver Academic Publishers, 1993), pp. 54–5. Edmund Ludlow, Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, ed. C.H. Firth (2 vols, Oxford, OUP, 1894), I, p. 387. Brotherton Collection, University of Leeds, Marten Loder Manuscripts, Political and Miscellaneous ii, fol. 39.

REC4 7/13/01 2:35 PM Page 116

116 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I 84. J[ohn] S[treater], The Picture of a New COURTIER ([18 Apr.] 1656, E875/6), p. 13. 85. George Bishop, Mene Tekel. or, the Council of Ofﬁcers of the Army against the Declarations, Ec. of the Army ([29 Sep.] 1659, E999/13), p. 21. There is a continuous allusion to Babylon in the references to building and language, and a reference to the Tower of Babel. 86. Ibid. p. 5. 87. Ibid. pp. 32 (the parliament operated balance in a difference way, not a divisive one), 35, 36 (the King’s power, through Inchiquin, against the righteous force of the New Model Army in Ireland). 88. See below, pp. 225–46. 89. The regicide of Charles I is remarkably little studied. These issues have been addressed with regard to the regicides of Louis XVI and Peter III, however. See, for example, Susan Dunn, ‘Michelet and Lamartine: Regicide, Passion, and Compassion’, History and Theory, XXVIII (1989), pp. 275–95, and The Deaths of Louis XVI: Regicide and the French Political Imagination (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1994); A. Lloyd Moote, ‘Popular Violence and Elite Regicide in the French Revolution: Who Caused What?’, Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History, XVIII (1991), pp. 176–81.

REC5 7/13/01 2:37 PM Page 117

5 The Juristic Foundation of Regicide D. Alan Orr

The following chapter will examine the legal basis of the case against Charles I, King of England. Its central contention is that this case drew on a familiar Roman law conception of treason, under which the regicides construed treason as the usurpation of sovereign power while relocating that power in the people rather than the king. Traditionally the king acting in his regal and legal capacity (in parliament and out) was the lawful holder of sovereignty in England and any attempt to deprive him of that sovereignty was considered a compassing of his death. The regicides amended this juristic framework by uncoupling the king’s public authority as king from his person and the heirs of his body. Concomitantly they reduced him to the status of an inferior magistrate in a popular state who had unlawfully and treasonably overstepped the jurisdiction of his ofﬁce in derogation of the people’s sovereignty. The chapter is structured in four parts. The ﬁrst considers the statutory basis of treason and the corporate nature of kingship and public authority in early modern England. The second discusses the practical deﬁnition of sovereignty as a cluster of positive powers or ‘marks’ and ‘rights’ of sovereignty. The third addresses the relationship of sovereignty to treason under Roman law. The fourth and ﬁnal section relates the Roman law conception of treason and the corporate nature of public authority to the charge and proceedings against the king. I will argue that the regicides struck a chord of continuity with England’s monarchical past in deﬁning treason as the unlawful appropriation of sovereign or state power while relocating the locus of that power with the people and their representatives. 117

REC5 7/13/01 2:37 PM Page 118

118 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

I The law of treason in England as it existed in January 1649 appeared inimical to regicide. Since 1352 the English law of treason has been based on Edward III’s statute of treasons (25 Edward III). This was the principal statutory foundation of English treason law throughout the seventeenth century and much controversy which arose during the early modern period is attributable to disputes over its scope and meaning. Held as treasonable under this statute were: 1) compassing or imagining the death of the king, queen or eldest male heir to the throne; 2) violating the king’s ‘companion’, his eldest unmarried daughter or the eldest male heir’s wife; 3) levying war on ‘the king in his realm’; 4) adhering to the king’s enemies in his own realm ‘or elsewhere’; 5) counterfeiting the great or privy seal, the king’s coin or bringing counterfeit coin into the realm; 6) killing the chancellor, treasurer or any of the king’s justices in the execution of their ofﬁces.1 The traitor’s lands held in fee simple and ‘holden of others as of himself’ were escheat to the crown.2 The statute was careful to distinguish high treason (crimes against the king, his family and servants) from petty treason (crimes of servant against master, wife against husband, father against son or cleric against superior). This statutory conception was neither wholly impersonal nor wholly personal. The king’s supra-personal or ‘public’ authority remained tied to his natural person and the heirs of his body natural. The law was aimed not only at safeguarding the king’s position as king but also at safeguarding the lawful inheritance of his heirs. Early modern jurists, most notably Plowden and Coke, articulated this in what Ernst Kantorowicz has termed the theory of the king’s two bodies. This represented an important halfway point in the emergence of the impersonal state. It was crucial because it provided a vocabulary for discussing the relationship of the king’s ofﬁcial powers as reigning sovereign to his person.3 While treason remained a crime against the king and his heirs under 25 Edward III, the theory of the king’s two bodies rendered it not simply a crime against the king’s person but a crime against his (or her) kingship in the abstract as a juristic ﬁction. Essentially, the king’s two bodies redeﬁned treason as a crime against the king by virtue of his sovereignty over the whole state.

REC5 7/13/01 2:37 PM Page 119

The Juristic Foundation of Regicide 119

This theory held that the king had in him two capacities. The ﬁrst of these, wrote Coke in Calvin’s Case (1608), was ‘a natural body, being descended of the blood royal of the realm’. This natural body was ‘the creation of Almighty God, and . . . [was] subject to death, inﬁrmity and such like’. The second of these was the body politic, ‘or capacity, so called, because it is framed by the policy of man . . . and in this capacity the King is esteemed to be immortal, invisible, not subject to any death, inﬁrmity, infancy, nonage, etc.’4 While the person of the king was mortal and would inevitably perish, the dignity of his ofﬁce was immortal: upon the death of one monarch the English crown would descend automatically to the heirs of his body without need of formal coronation.5 The role of law was essential in constituting the king’s political body. According to Coke, it was ‘by the policy of the law’ that the king was rendered a political body.6 The law constituted the ‘soul’ or alternately the ‘sinews’ of the body politic.7 This law, argued Coke, was the law of England of which the law of nature was a part.8 Speaking of the attainder of the Earl of Strafford in 1641, John Pym referred to the law as that which unites king and people in a single political body and warned of the dire consequences to the whole political body should the law be subverted or destroyed.9 This theory was heavily indebted to Roman law not only in its borrowing of the doctrine of capacities but in its appropriation of the terms ‘dignity’ and ‘majesty’.10 While the body natural was mortal the kingly dignity was immortal and lent a degree of continuity to the English constitution that the common lawyers of the early modern period valued.11 While the king’s person could only be in a single place at any given time, the king’s majesty and thus his power, authority and his law extended to all corners of his realms.12 The ﬁnal and crucial aspect of the king’s two bodies was inseparability: while the king’s political body was distinct from his (or her) body natural it was also inseparable. Crimes against the body politic were necessarily also crimes against the body natural. Consequently, attempting to destroy the king’s political body was necessarily also an attempt to destroy the king’s person. Furthermore, the powers that the king enjoyed by virtue of his role as the lawful sovereign were inseparable from his person. The indivisibility of the king’s two bodies was a common assumption among jurists such as Bacon and Coke,13 but perhaps the clearest expression of this idea came from the royalist judge David Jenkins who stated categorically that:

REC5 7/13/01 2:37 PM Page 120

120 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

the body politick and the naturall body of the King make one body, and not divers, and are inseperable and indivisable. The body naturall and politique make one body, and are not to be severed: Ligeance is due by nature, Gods Law, and Man’s Law cannot be forfeited nor renounced by any meanes, it is inseparable from the person.14 Jenkins was responding to parliamentary theorists who had as early as 1642 asserted the rather strained claim that the king, while personally absent from parliament, remained legally present at Westminster.15 In contrast, William Prynne appropriated the idea of inseparability to the parliamentarian cause arguing that it was the ‘Cavaliers about him’ who had procured the king’s absence from Westminster thus ‘unkinging’ him.16 Undoubtedly Jenkins also aimed to rebut parliamentary writers such as Henry Parker who had argued that to levy war against the king’s personal commands was not treasonable.17 Calvin’s Case had repudiated both the idea of a fully abstract state and the impersonal conception of allegiance it entailed. The key issue was whether or not Robert Calvin, a Scot born at Edinburgh after the accession of James VI of Scotland to the English throne in 1603, was entitled to inherit land in England and enjoy the beneﬁt of English law. In Coke’s report of the decision the judges insisted that subjects owed their allegiance not only to the king’s crown, that is his corporate body or ‘state’, but also to his (or her) natural person as well. Conversely, the losing side, seeking to disinherit Calvin from his English possessions, argued an impersonal conception of political authority: that because Calvin was a Scot his allegiance was to the crown of that country and not to the natural person of the king who was king of both England and Scotland. Therefore, on this argument, Calvin was an alien in England and was subsequently denied the beneﬁt of English law.18 Conrad Russell has characterized the losing position in Calvin’s Case as impersonal allegiance.19 Lord Ellesmere in his speech touching the post-nati attributed this argument to the traitorous Despensers of the fourteenth century and vigorously denounced it as making James ‘a king divided in himselfe’ and as creating ‘a dangereous distinction betweene the King and the Crowne, and betweene the King and the kingdome.’20 Jenkins’ position was customary of early Stuart jurists such as Bacon and Coke: allegiance was owed to the king’s body natural as well as the body politic and the two should not be severed. In practice this meant that treason of levying war could happen in the remotest corner of the realm and still be construed as a crime against the king’s person. This could

REC5 7/13/01 2:37 PM Page 121

The Juristic Foundation of Regicide 121

be the case even if he were 500 miles away and asleep in bed or if the treason had been committed in the king’s realm of Ireland against his political body there. Moreover, any attempt to destroy the king’s kingdom, ‘state’, or political body was a constructive compassing of his death. Marie Axton has noted that by the late Tudor period English jurists ‘were formulating an idea of the state as a perpetual corporation, yet they were unable or unwilling to separate state and monarch.’21 However, the potential for such a separation did exist: the anonymous Huguenot author of the Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos (1579)22 observed that, ‘although kings die, the people meanwhile, just like any other corporation, never dies’ and suggested that errant monarchs were themselves subject to the law of treason should they misrule.23 Similarly the regicides wedded a popular corporate conception of statehood to the Roman law of treason.

II Historians of political thought and constitutional history have paid much attention to the emergence of the notion of the abstract state in the early modern period. Quentin Skinner has argued that the watershed in the evolution of the idea of the state occurred near the end of the sixteenth century when theorists began to conceive of political power in abstract, impersonal terms. Hitherto the idea of the state had been understood in terms of a ruler holding or maintaining his or her state. With the emergence of a more ‘modern’ idea of the state, however, political power was conceived of as standing free from the person or persons of any individuals and attributed to an abstract entity known as the ‘state’.24 Skinner has identiﬁed the key conceptual transition ‘from the idea of the ruler “maintaining his state” – where it simply meant upholding his own position – to the idea that there is a separate legal and constitutional order, that of the State, which the ruler has a duty to maintain.’25 In the pre-modern formulation of the state the legal and constitutional order depended on the king by virtue of the suprapersonal powers of his ofﬁce: the law was the king’s law and the state was the king’s state to acquire, to hold and to maintain. As a result of this transition subjects no longer owed their allegiance to particular rulers but to the abstract entity of the state as the host of sovereign power.26 Originally, Skinner suggested that the writings of the French jurist Jean Bodin and in particular the appearance of an English edition of

REC5 7/13/01 2:37 PM Page 122

122 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

The Six Books of a Commonweal (1606) marked a watershed in this transition.27 Skinner has argued that this translation was one of the ﬁrst instances in England where the term ‘state’ was employed ‘with some consistency in a recognizably modern sense.’28 More recently, however, he has suggested that Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651) marked an important transition, not simply from a supra-personal view of public power – such as the king’s two bodies – to impersonal, non-monarchical notions of corporation but, more importantly, towards a ‘purely artiﬁcial’ or abstract conception of the ‘state’ as ‘the name of an artiﬁcial person ‘carried’ or represented by those who wield sovereign power’.29 There was, however, a more commonplace meaning of the term ‘sovereignty’, as simply the practical demarcation of the rights or marks of sovereignty – a cluster of positive powers wielded by the sovereign. In this respect Bodin remains the central ﬁgure.30 Bodin provided one of the most rigorous attempts to deﬁne what in practice constituted the positive powers of the state available prior to the English Civil War.31 The most important of these was ‘power to give lawes to all . . . subiects in generall, and to euerie one of them in particular . . . without consent of any other greater, equall, or lesser than himselfe.’32 This basic mark of sovereignty was inalienable. While particular individuals may receive commissions to draft laws, these laws could not be brought into force without the consent of the sovereign, be they prince, people or aristocracy.33 The other marks of sovereignty included also: 1) 2) 3) 4) 5) 6) 7) 8)

power of war and peace and the making of alliances; the receiving of appeals from inferior magistrates; the power to appoint and dismiss ‘great ofﬁcers’; the levying of taxes and subsidies and the power to exempt subjects from them; powers of pardoning and dispensing ‘against the rigour of the law’; ‘power of life and death’; coinage; and ‘to cause all subiects and liegemen to sweare for the keeping of their ﬁdelitie without exception, unto him to whome such oath is due.’34

Bodin asserted that these ‘true markes of soueraigntie, [were] comprized vnder the power of being able to giue a law to al in generall, and to euery one in particular, and not to receiue any law or commaund from any other, but from almightie God onely.’35 Power to give law was, therefore, not simply power to legislate and make commands that would be obeyed as positive law but pertained more generally to the administra-

REC5 7/13/01 2:37 PM Page 123

The Juristic Foundation of Regicide 123

tion of justice – power to judge causes and appoint magistrates to judge in the sovereign’s place. Bodin was not the only thinker to deﬁne practical sovereignty in these terms. Indeed, Brian Levack has noted that English civil lawyers, and to a lesser extent common lawyers, arrived at differing conceptions of the marks of sovereignty independently of Bodin, deriving them from such sources as the Corpus Juris Civilis. Because English jurists found themselves trapped in the same classical and Roman-law sources as Bodin, family resemblances between his schema and theirs should not be surprising. Bodin’s demarcation of the true marks of sovereignty may have been the most rigorous and inﬂuential in the early Stuart period but it was not the only such catalogue of powers available. The marks and rights of sovereignty were not exclusive to Bodin’s writings and were subject to a number of varying formulations in terms of both what constituted the marks and who lawfully held them among both civilians and common lawyers alike.36 The men who conducted the war of words in the seventeenth century did not have access to the positivist writings of John Austin.37 They did, however, have the opportunity to read Bodin and other similar authors and did have a loose understanding of sovereignty as a cluster of positive, or ‘state’ powers.38 Furthermore, because there existed varying and imperfectly shared conceptions of the marks of sovereignty, sovereignty was an inherently contestable concept.39 Thus, its very deﬁnition stood at the heart of much political discourse. The struggle for sovereignty in early modern England was as much a struggle for precise practical deﬁnition of the positive powers of the state as it was for the control of those powers. For example, because of the particular course of the Reformation in England, many considered royal supremacy over the Church of England a mark of sovereignty. Levack has identiﬁed this position among a number of English civilians concerned with rebutting Catholic polemicists.40 The civil lawyer John Haywarde, writing in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot, went so far as to argue that this power constituted a mark of sovereignty in all states.41 Haywarde also defended the royal supremacy in a language clearly evocative of Bodin arguing that, ‘it is necessarilie expedient, that they who beare the soueraigntie of [the] State, should alwaies manage the affaires of religion; either by themselves, or by some at their appointment within the same State; and neuer receiue direction and rule from a foraine power.’42 By the outbreak of the civil war, both civil and common-law jurists possessed a conception of sovereignty as a cluster of positive rights or

REC5 7/13/01 2:37 PM Page 124

124 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

powers. Disagreement, however, persisted over the exact nature of these powers, their number, their extent and the institutional mechanics by which the king exercised them whether in council, in parliament or through his appointed justices. Controversial measures such as the Forced Loan and Ship Money heightened these disagreements and the marks and rights of sovereignty increasingly became the loci of a series of conﬂicts culminating in the militia ordinance and the commencement of hostilities in the summer of 1642.

III The relationship between the English law of treason as an evolving body of law and Roman-law sources is problematic. Assertions about direct inﬂuence are difﬁcult to maintain although the presence of numerous civil and Roman-law texts in the library of Sir Edward Coke suggests that even the champion of common-law insularity was not immune to the inﬂuence of the Roman law.43 However, the approach here will not explore the thorny question of ‘inﬂuence’ but rather examine and discern the family resemblances between the English law of treason on the eve of the Civil War and the Roman law of treason or maiestas.44 According to J.G. Bellamy, the treason of levying war against the king originated in the later thirteenth century, when during the conquest of Wales, Edward I was ‘inﬂuenced by the Roman theory that the right of levying war belonged only to princes without a secular superior’.45 While such conclusions are difﬁcult to draw, this probably reﬂected the degree of penetration of Roman law into northern Europe at this time. Its inclusion in the statute of 1352 is signiﬁcant as were the sections declaring it treason to kill a magistrate in the execution of his ofﬁce or to counterfeit coin, all of which correspond with the Roman law of maiestas or treason.46 The Roman law of maiestas evolved ﬁrst in a republican and then a monarchical or imperial context. Initially, maiestas pertained to the honour, dignity and, most importantly, the powers of the plebes and their representatives the Tribunes. Later, under the early emperors, maiestas came to be identiﬁed with the ruling imperial family. This transition was achieved either through a ‘maiestas shift’ or through a synthesis of the personal maiestas of the ruling family with the remnant of republican maiestas. While scholarly opinion on this issue varies, the more crucial aspect here is the relationship of the rights and marks of sovereignty to maiestas.

REC5 7/13/01 2:37 PM Page 125

The Juristic Foundation of Regicide 125

In Roman law, the relationship of the marks of sovereignty to the law of treason was one of infringement. According to J.A.C. Thomas, ‘the sovereignty of the state was infringed when anyone exercised powers other than those conferred on him, be it by unwritten law, statute, senatusconsult or any other entitlement.’47 For example, according to Justinian, anyone who ‘being a private citizen, knowingly and with malicious intent acts as though holding ofﬁce or magistracy’ was guilty of maiestas or treason.48 This along with the crime of killing a magistrate had clear origins in Roman law.49 The latter was also potentially an usurpation of that mark of sovereignty by which the sovereign appoints and dismisses magistrates.50 Justinian’s Digest made it clear that anyone waging war or raising forces to wage war without the command of the emperor was subject to the penalties of treason as was any provincial commander who refused to hand over his command when he had been superseded.51 Furthermore, while it remained ambiguous whether 25 Edward III exerted a monopoly claim over power to make war, it was generally accepted in early Stuart England that power of war and peace lay primarily with the king.52 This was in spite of the fact that, as the parliaments of the 1620s and the Anglo-Scottish conﬂagration of the late 1630s demonstrated, the crown’s ability to pay for any sustained conﬂict depended largely on the beneﬁcence of parliaments. Seen in this light, the treasons of Strafford and Laud assume new signiﬁcance. The former, as a provincial governor, assumed the mantle of sovereignty in the king’s realm of Ireland, in derogation of regal and sovereign authority, and plotted, so to speak, to turn his legions of papists on Rome. The latter erected and maintained an ecclesiastical state within a state – an independent, sovereign sphere of clerical action over and above that emanating from the crown in derogation of the royal supremacy. That both Strafford and Laud acted with the king’s complicity and by his leave was conveniently overlooked. The king, after all, could do no wrong – or at least not in early 1641 when articles of impeachment against both these servants of the crown were presented to the Long Parliament. Early modern legal writers seem to have been fully aware of the points of convergence between the English law of treason and Roman-civil law sources. For example, the presence of counterfeiting in the Roman law of treason was noted by the late Tudor legal writer William Fulbecke as being ‘for the most part consonant to the Common Law of this Realme.’53 Indeed, Bodin himself remarked on the similarity of the English law of treason to the Roman law of treason, observing: ‘As by the laws of England, to aid the enemie in any sort whatsoeuer, is

REC5 7/13/01 2:37 PM Page 126

126 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

accounted high treason. Which points of treason I see not to be distinguished by these interpretos of the Roman law.’54 While assertions about direct inﬂuence can only be made with a closer examination of the medieval context that gave birth to 25 Edward III, there can be no doubt that the English conception of high treason bore strong familial resemblances to that of the Roman law or that the appropriation of Roman law concepts of treason into the English law was well advanced at the outbreak of the English Civil War.

IV This section will consider the charge and evidence against the king as well as the speech of John Bradshaw, president of the High Court of Justice, with regard to the themes introduced in our opening remarks. These include the corporate nature of kingship, the relationship of monarchy and state, and the Roman-law conception of treason as the unlawful appropriation of sovereign power. It will argue that, in spite of the unprecedented circumstances of the replacement of a reigning monarch by a republican regime, the regicides did not operate in a juristic vacuum but drew on many familiar concepts. I will begin by considering the act for the erecting the High Court of Justice passed by the Rump on 6 January, 1649. The act claimed: That Charles Stuart, the now King of England, not content with those many Encroachments which his Predecessors had made upon the People in their Rights and Freedoms, hath had a wicked Design totally to Subvert the Ancient and Fundamental Laws and Liberties of this Nation, and in their place to introduce an Arbitrary and Tyrannical Government, and that besides all other evil ways and means to bring this Design to pass, he hath prosecuted it with Fire and Sword, Levied and maintained a cruel War in the Land, against the Parliament and Kingdom, whereby the Country hath been miserably wasted, the Publick Treasure Exhausted, Trade decayed, thousands of People murdered, and inﬁnite other mischiefs committed.55 The theme of the subversion of the fundamental law of the land was a familiar one. Both the Earl of Strafford and Archbishop Laud had faced similar allegations. However, while in Strafford and Laud’s trials the law was presumed to be the king’s law and the king the fountain of the law

REC5 7/13/01 2:37 PM Page 127

The Juristic Foundation of Regicide 127

and of justice, here the ancient and fundamental law of the land was separate from the king’s person. The king was merely the ‘Chief Ofﬁcer or Magistrate’ charged with maintenance of law and justice and not its original.56 Indeed, for Henry Parker, writing as early as 1642, the law could ‘be nothing else amongst Christians but the Pactions and agreements of such and such politique corporations.’57 Furthermore, Charles’ treason of levying war was conceptualized as a crime against the ‘Parliament and Kingdom’. Treason remained a crime against the sovereign power and in order to try the king for treason the locus of sovereignty had to be relocated with the people as a perpetual, popular corporation. The legal constitutional order had to be uncoupled from the person of the king. Essential to the regicide and the subsequent establishment of a republic was the severing of the law and the state established by it from the monarch in all his capacities, politic and natural. This was a radical departure. As C.V. Wedgwood noted over thirty years ago: ‘It was an axiom in English law that all justice proceeded from the sovereign.’58 More recently Alan Cromartie has remarked that ‘[t]he king as a legal expression was a part of great swathes of the law.’59 Writs were issued in the king’s name under his seal and it was the king who appointed and dismissed magistrates to sit in his courts and administer his law. In order to govern, both the Rump, and the Lord Protector afterwards, were forced to behave like a king.60 However, just as the king needed to behave corporately in order to govern the expanse of his realms, so too did the commonwealth need to act as a corporate state, albeit a corporation independent from the king and his heirs. The charge against the king, read to the court by John Cook on 20 January 1649, essentially re-conceived England as a popular state in which Charles had been entrusted with the powers of chief magistrate provided that he continue to act for the good of the people. This was evident from the preamble. It charged: That the said Charles Stuart, being admitted King of England, and therein trusted with a limited power to govern by and according to the laws of the land, and not otherwise; and by his trust, oath, and ofﬁce, being obliged to use the power committed to him for the good and beneﬁt of the people, and for the preservation of their rights and liberties; yet, nevertheless, out of a wicked design to erect and uphold in himself an unlimited and tyrannical power to rule according to his will, and to overthrow the rights and liberties of the people, yea,

REC5 7/13/01 2:37 PM Page 128

128 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

to take away and make void the foundations thereof, and of all redress and remedy of misgovernment, which by the fundamental constitutions of this kingdom were reserved on the people’s behalf in the right and power of frequent and successive Parliaments, or national meetings in Council; he the said Charles Stuart, for accomplishment of such his designs, and for the protecting of himself and his adherents in his and their wicked practices, to the same ends has traitorously and maliciously levied war against the present Parliament and the people therein represented.61 The king was simply a magistrate who had committed treason against the parliament and people by raising an unlawful and unnatural war in the land to the destruction of the commonwealth. The charge went on to enumerate Charles’ treasonable actions. These included, most notably, his setting up of his standard of war at Nottingham in August 1642 and the engagements that followed.62 The charge went on to blame Charles for the renewal of the war in 1648 and allege that Charles had levied ‘cruel and unnatural wars’ by which, much innocent blood of the free people of this nation hath been spilt, many families have been undone, the public treasure wasted and exhausted, trade obstructed and miserably decayed, vast expense and damage to the nation incurred, and many parts of this land spoiled, some of them even to desolation. Charles was also accused of continuing to issue commissions to his son Charles, Prince of Wales, ‘and other rebels and revolters’, most notably the Earl of Ormond, and ‘Irish Rebels’ to press forward the armed struggle against people and parliament.63 In conclusion the charge asserted that the king had carried forward his ‘wicked designs, wars, and evil practices’ in order to advance and uphold ‘a personal interest of will, power, and pretended prerogative to himself and his family against the public interest, common right, liberty, justice and peace of the people of this nation, by and from whom he was entrusted aforesaid.’64 There can be no doubt that Charles’ principal sin was the levying of war. The other allegations of murder, rape and the destruction of property were ancillary to this. Charles was tried largely for bringing war and its attendant destruction on the land. The majority of the depositions given before the court on 24 and 25 January bore this out. For example, one John Bennett, a soldier in the royalist army at the outbreak of the war testiﬁed to the king raising his standard of war above Nottingham

REC5 7/13/01 2:37 PM Page 129

The Juristic Foundation of Regicide 129

Castle in August 1642 and the king’s presenting of his regiment and others with their colours.65 Another deponent, Samuel Morgan, testiﬁed that in the autumn of 1642 ‘upon a Sunday morning in kenton ﬁeld [he] sawe the kinge upon Edge Hill in the heade of the Army some two hours before the ﬁght.’ The same deponent claimed to have seen the king, in 1644, dismount his horse in the vicinity of Cropredy Bridge, ‘and drawe upp the body of his Army in p[e]rsone himselfe.’66 The bulk of the charges and depositions emphasized the king, sometimes in armour, standing or riding at the head of his army and taking command of his forces against those of the parliament. The evidence was not unlike that brought against rebellious barons in the later middle ages emphasizing the king’s martial and warlike deportment. Levying war was a mark of sovereignty, and in the kind of popular state the regicides envisioned, power of war and peace lay not with the king but with the people and their representatives assembled in parliament. However, Charles’ actions did not simply constitute usurpation but were unnatural. After all, what sovereign people could rationally give their chief magistrate a commission to levy war on them? Such actions were deemed not only irrational but contrary to the public interest. It is interesting to note that the charge deﬁned this interest as one of economics as much as simply of the peace, physical security and well being of the king’s subjects. War is notoriously bad for business especially when waged on one’s doorstep. The civil wars were both expensive and destructive and the regicides did not hesitate to lay the blame for the resulting decay of trade and exhaustion of public ﬁnance on the defeated king. If the charge and the evidence did not clearly reveal the Roman-law basis of the charge against the king, Bradshaw’s speech to the High Court of Justice assuredly did.67 This speech was a reinterpretation of the origins of the English polity as a popular state and a redeﬁnition of kingship as a popularly elected magistracy operating within the conﬁnes of a particular commission. This was consistent with at least some of the values of classical republicanism concerning the desirability of elected magistracy over hereditary.68 In this narrow sense it was one of the ﬁrst guarded and limited attempts, in the words of J.G.A. Pocock, ‘to restate the terms in which Englishmen lived as civic beings’ in terms of republicanism.69 However, the speech was in keeping with Jonathan Scott’s characterization of most early English republican thought as limited and defensive, seeking only to justify a particular set of actions.70 Its primary task was not the systematic restatement of the conditions in which Englishmen lived as civic beings. This would come later in

REC5 7/13/01 2:37 PM Page 130

130 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

response to the actual experience of republican government and its failure. Bradshaw moved quickly to the key issue of who was the sovereign law-giver in the state. He pointed out that the king’s claim to have ‘endeavoured and studdied the Peace of the Kingdom’ was belied by his actions and that if ‘Actions must expound Intentions’ his actions had been contrary.71 Bradshaw told the king he had held himself ‘and let fall such language’ as though the law had been his superior and had maintained the pretence that he had ruled according to the law.72 The key issue Bradshaw identiﬁed was the question of who held the law-giving power. He told the king bluntly that in this trial, the difference has bin who shall bee Exposite[r]s of this Lawe, Whether you and yo[ur] p[ar]tie out of the Courts of Iustice shall take upon them to expound the Law, or the Courts of Iustice, that are the Expounders, Nay the Soveraign and the highest Court of Iustice the Parliament of England, that is not only the highest Expounder but the sole maker of the Lawe.73 The king and his party had set themselves ‘against the Resolucon of the Highest Co[ur]t of Iustice’, the commons of England assembled in parliament. Consequently he and his party had set themselves above that which was itself ‘superior to the lawe’ as ‘the parent and the author of the Law . . . the People of England.’74 This was essentially a Roman-law conception of treason applied to a popular state. Only the people were sovereign and for any magistrate or pretended magistrate to attempt the giving or making of law without their consent, or beyond the boundaries of their particular commission, was high treason. The absolutist John Cusack may have been a minority voice in the 1630s but he was simply restating the Roman law of treason when he asserted that, ‘the king makes the laws of England and to admit any other lawmaker in England is high treason.’75 While placing the locus of legal sovereignty in the people, Bradshaw was in fundamental agreement with this statement. Treason remained essentially the unlawful seizure or appropriation of sovereign power and that power received practical deﬁnition in the marks and rights of sovereignty. Bradshaw then embarked on a lengthy re-description of both the English monarchy and kingship in general as a form of elected magistracy. He did so by appealing to a popular conception of the origins of government. He argued that the people of England, ‘at the ﬁrst, as other

REC5 7/13/01 2:37 PM Page 131

The Juristic Foundation of Regicide 131

Countries have done, did chuse to themselves this forme of Government.’76 For the proper administration of justice and the preservation of the peace the people gave their governors laws ‘according to w[hi]ch they should govern.’77 However should the laws ‘prove inconvenient or p[re]iudiciall to the publique, they had a power in them, A Power reserved and innate to alter them as they should see cause.’78 Bradshaw afﬁrmed with the royalists that the king had no peer in his realm.79 However, he also invoked a maxim popularized by conciliarist thinkers such as Gerson, telling the king that although he was peerless in the sense of being ‘Maior Singulis’ he was still ‘Minor Vniversis’ having his superior in God and in law.80 He thus reduced the king in status from sovereign to chief magistrate in a popular state. Bradshaw asserted that the king ‘must vnderstand that hee is but an Ofﬁcer in trust, and hee ought to discharge that trust for the People, and if hee doe not they are to take order for the Animadversion and Punishment of such an offending Governor.’81 This law was not a new law, argued Bradshaw, but was ‘Lawe of ould.’82 Bradshaw then launched into a veritable paean on the virtues of parliaments, praising them in their capacity for redressing the people’s grievances. He accused Charles of attempting to do away with them forever and argued that they were kept ‘anciently’ twice a year and that later under Edward III it was decreed by statute that parliaments were to be held annually.83 He referred to the ‘sadd consequence’ of the personal rule of 1629–40, a period in which the realm was governed by an ‘high and Arbitrary hande.’84 He told the king that the Long Parliament had been called ‘when god by his p[ro]vidence . . . brought it about that you could no longer decline the Calling of a Parliam[en]t’.85 In attempting to dispense with parliaments Charles’ intent to subvert the fundamental law of the land was manifest, ‘for the greate Bulwarke of the Liberties of the People is the Parliam[en]t of England, and by subverting and Rooting vpp that . . . at one . . . blow confounded the Liberties and the Propriety of England.’86 Bradshaw also made use of examples drawn from classical antiquity suggesting an active appropriation of Roman law. He likened the parliament to the Ephori of Lacedemonia and, more tellingly, to the Tribunes of ancient Rome. The latter was highly signiﬁcant and suggested a well-developed appropriation of the Roman law of treason or maiestas. Once again, while direct inﬂuence may be hard to nail down, the familial resemblances remain striking. The Lord President of the High Court also accused Charles of emulating the Roman tyrant Caligula who had reputedly expressed the wish

REC5 7/13/01 2:37 PM Page 132

132 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

that the people of Rome possessed a single neck so, ‘That at one blowe hee might haue cutt it off.’87 The president argued that in England ‘the Body of the People . . . hath bin no where els rep[re]sented but in the Parliam[en]t’ and that, if the king had been able to confound it, he would have ‘at one blowe cutt off the Necke of England.’88 The notion of a body politic remained but it was reconstrued in terms of a popular state in which magistrates exercised their ofﬁces like the tribunes of ancient Rome for the preservation of the common good. Bradshaw then presented a plethora of examples, drawn from both English and European history and from classical antiquity, intended to illustrate the elective and magisterial character of kingly government in all states. Aside from the example of Nero, Bradshaw also drew on the history of the Scottish monarchy, arguing that in ancient times Scottish kings were elected and that the Scots had on many occasions deposed and punished ‘theire offending and transgressing kings.’89 More provocatively he cited the example of Charles’ grandmother set aside in favour of his infant father, James VI, in 1568, asserting that ‘the State did it’.90 In the case of England his cause was undoubtedly helped by the fact that the hereditary principle of succession was often more preached than practised. Bradshaw cited the depositions of Edward II and Richard II as obvious examples, arguing that of the 24 kings of England who had reigned since the Norman conquest ‘more then one halfe of them came in by the State and not meerly vpon the poynt of Descent’.91 Bradshaw’s use of the term ‘state’ in this context was highly signiﬁcant. The king was not God’s anointed holding his crown by hereditary right but a magistrate who had gained his ofﬁce by the consent of ‘the state’ and was entrusted for the protection of the people and the promotion and preservation of the common good. He used explicitly contractarian language arguing that, ‘there is a Contract and Bargaine made betwixt the Kinge and his People’ sealed by the coronation oath. In a possible allusion to James VI and I’s The Trew Law of Free Monarchies,92 he spoke of the duplex nature of allegiance. The bonds of allegiance were reciprocal, with the king acting as the people’s protector in return for their allegiance. If this bond was broken then ‘farewell Soveraignty.’ Charles, rather than acting as ‘the Protector of England’, had become ‘the destroyer of England’, and it was left for ‘all England and all the world’ to judge.93 Bradshaw’s rhetoric revealed an understanding of the state that was impersonal in the sense that the king was inferior to the state. The monarch was granted his authority as chief public ofﬁcer by the contracted consent of the governed to maintain their state. The

REC5 7/13/01 2:37 PM Page 133

The Juristic Foundation of Regicide 133

state was not his and nor was the law but the duties of his ofﬁce demanded that he maintain both. The law remained the soul or the sinews of the body politic but it was no longer the monarch’s law.

V Recent debate on the origins of English republicanism has suggested that republican modes of civic consciousness coexisted with the values of territorial and jurisdictional monarchy in English political thought and culture in the years leading up to the civil war.94 The English republic did not spring holus bolus from the upheavals of the 1640s but had deeper roots. Similarly, the regicides depended on a pre-existing public law vocabulary that they hoped would enable them to re-describe the nature of kingship as a popular magistracy. Patrick Collinson has remarked that the Elizabethan succession crisis led many in England to envision monarchy, ‘not as an indelible and sacred anointing but a public localised ofﬁce, like any other form of magistracy’ and referred to the later Elizabethan regime as a ‘monarchical republic’.95 The regicides similarly viewed the monarch not as a sovereign but as an elected chief magistrate – a magistrate, furthermore, who had overstepped the boundaries of his authority in derogation of the people’s sovereignty to the ruin of the commonwealth. In constructing a theory of treason, the regicides resorted to familiar notions of corporation, practical sovereignty and a Roman-law conception of treason that had in earlier times reinforced the English monarchy rather than undermined it. The result is that the regicides acted in ironic continuity with a monarchical past that they were in the process of rejecting.

Notes 1. It is important to note that this statute remains largely in force to this day: The Statutes at Large (18 vols, 1783–1800), I, pp. 261–2; hereafter cited as SL. 2. Ibid., I, p. 262. 3. Ernst L. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: a Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1957); F.W. Maitland, ‘The Crown as Corporation’, LQR, XVII (1901), pp. 131–46; and Sarah Barber, ‘Charles I: Regicide and Republicanism’, History Today, XLVI (1996), p. 30. 4. John Henry Thomas and John Farquhar Fraser, eds, The Reports of Sir Edward Coke, Knt. In Thirteen Parts (6 vols, London, 1826); 7 Reports, Calvin’s Case, fol. 10a. I will refer to Coke’s original foliation and volume numbers rather than those of his nineteenth-century editors. 5. Calvin’s Case, fol. 10b; Sir Edward Coke, The Third Part of The Institutes of the Lawes of England concerning High Treason, and Other Pleas of the Crown, and

REC5 7/13/01 2:37 PM Page 134

134 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

6. 7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

25.

Criminall Causes (1644), p. 7; Louis Knaﬂa, ed., Law and Politics in Jacobean England: the Tracts of Lord Chancellor Ellesmere (Cambridge, CUP, 1977), p. 234. Kantorowicz has traced this aspect of the theory from the accession of Edward I to the throne in the thirteenth century; absent from the realm when his father died, Edward’s coronation did not actually take place until two years after he became king: King’s Two Bodies, pp. 328–9. Calvin’s Case, fols 10a, 12a. Sir John Davies, Le Primer Report des Cases & Matters in Ley resolues & adiudges en les Courts del Roy en Ireland. Collect et digest per Sr. John Dauys Chiualer Atturney Generall del Roy in cest Realme (Dublin, 1615), fol. 8b; this idea was not new in the seventeenth century but had a long heritage in English law: see Sir John Fortescue, On the Laws and Governance of England, ed. Shelley Lockwood (Cambridge, CUP, 1997), p. 21. Calvin’s Case, fol. 12b. The Speech or Declaration of John Pym, Esquire: After the Recapitulation or summing up of the Charge of High Treason against, Thomas Earle of Strafford, 12 April. 1641 (1641, BL, E208/8), pp. 3, 16. Kantorowicz has traced the Roman-law origins of the theory of the king’s two bodies in considerable detail in the second half of his study. Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies, pp. 383–401. Ibid., pp. 382–5 and esp. 383. Ibid., p. 382; Coke argued that allegiance was due not only to the king’s ofﬁce but to his person as well: Calvin’s Case, fols 11a–b. David Jenkins, Lex Terrae, in The Works of That Grave and Learned Lawyer Iudge Ienkins, Prisoner in Newgate upon Divers Statutes Concerning the Liberty and Freedome of the Subiect (1648), pp. 21–2. C.C. Weston and Janelle Greenberg, Subjects and Sovereigns (Cambridge, CUP, 1981), pp. 56–7. William Prynne, Sovereign Power of Parliaments and Kingdomes: Divided into Fovr Parts Together with an Appendix (1643), pt. I, sig. L3r, p. 105 (pagination is irregular). Henry Parker, Observations upon Some of his Majesties Late Answers and Expresses, in William Haller, ed., Tracts on Liberty in the Puritan Revolution (3 vols, New York, Columbia University Press, 1933), II, p. 211. Calvin’s Case, fols. 2b–3a. Conrad Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford, OUP, 1990), pp. 157–8. Knaﬂa, ed., Law and Politics, pp. 244–5. Marie Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London, Royal Historical Society, 1977), p. 12. Scholarly opinion is divided on whether the tract was the work of Philippe Mornay or Hubert Languet: see George Garnett, ed., Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos (Cambridge, CUP, 1994), intro. part 2, passim. Ibid., pp. xxxvi, 90, 156. Quentin Skinner, ‘The State’, in Terence Ball, James Farr and Russell L. Hanson, eds, Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (Cambridge, CUP, 1989), pp. 90–131. Quentin Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought (2 vols, Cambridge, CUP, 1977), I, pp. ix–x.

REC5 7/13/01 2:37 PM Page 135

The Juristic Foundation of Regicide 135 26. Skinner, ‘The State’, p. 123. 27. This edition, based on both prior Latin and French editions, was translated by a possibly recusant schoolmaster named Richard Knolles: Jean Bodin, On Sovereignty, trans. and ed. Julian H. Franklin (Cambridge, CUP 1992), pp. xxxv–xxxviii; all quotations given here, however, will be from Kenneth D. McRae’s 1962 facsimile edition of Knolles 1606 English translation: Jean Bodin, The Six Books of a Commonweale, trans. Richard Knolles and ed. Kenneth D. McRae (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1962). 28. Skinner, Foundations, II, p. 355. 29. Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge, CUP, 1998), pp. 4–5. 30. These are explained in great detail in Bodin, book I, chapter 10. 31. Julian Franklin in discussing Bodin’s early theory of sovereignty has traced Bodin’s ﬁrst formulation of the rights of sovereignty in his Methodus of 1566 to a key passage from the Histories of Polybius: Julian H. Franklin, Jean Bodin and the Rise of Absolutist Theory (Cambridge, CUP, 1973), pp. 32–3. 32. Bodin, Book I, pp. 159, 162 [161] (irregular pagination). 33. Ibid., p. 162 [161]. 34. Ibid., pp. 162 [161]–163 [162]. 35. Ibid., pp. 162 [161]–163 [162]. 36. Brian P. Levack offers the example of Richard Zouch and other notable examples include the Tudor civil lawyer and statesman Sir Thomas Smith, the common lawyer Sir John Davies and the royalist Judge David Jenkins: Brian P. Levack, The Civil Lawyers in England, 1603–1641: a Political Study (Oxford, OUP, 1973), pp. 99–100; Sir Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum, ed. Mary Dewar (Cambridge, CUP, 1982), p. 88; Sir John Davies, A Discovery of the True Causes Why Ireland was Never Entirely Subdued [and] Brought under Obedience of the Crown of England until the Beginning of His Majesty’s Happy Reign, ed. James P. Myers Jr. (Washington DC, Catholic University of America Press, 1988), pp. 74–6; Jenkins, Lex Terrae in Works, p. 8. 37. This fact was conveniently overlooked by J.H. Hexter in his attack on the revisionism of the late 1970s: J.H. Hexter, ‘The Early Stuarts and Parliament: Old Hat and the Nouvelle Vague’, PH, I (1982), p. 207. 38. Bodin’s afﬁnity to legal positivism has been questioned by David Parker: David Parker, ‘Law, Society and the State in the Thought of Jean Bodin’, HPT, II (1981), p. 254. 39. For a discussion of essentially contestable political concepts see William E. Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse, 2nd edn (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 10–44. 40. Levack, Civil Lawyers, p. 101. 41. [John Haywarde?], A Reporte of a Discourse Concerning Svpreme power in Affaires of Religion (1606), sig. B1r, p. 3; I would like to thank Alan Cromartie for drawing my attention to this text. 42. Ibid., sig. C1r, p. 11. 43. For Coke and insularity see J.G.A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: a Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century, 2nd edn (Cambridge, CUP, 1987), chapters 2–3. The book list of Coke’s library reveals that he possessed a library which included no less than 56 volumes on the civil and canon laws including not only continental editions of Justinian but also John Cowell’s controversial Interpreter of 1607:

REC5 7/13/01 2:37 PM Page 136

136 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

44.

45. 46.

47.

48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62.

63. 64.

W.O. Hassall, ed., A Catalogue of the Library of Sir Edward Coke, with a Preface by S.E. Thorne (New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1950), pp. 38–41. Crimen Maiestatis translates literally as ‘crimes of majesty’ or, alternately, ‘crimes of sovereignty’, maiestas being the cognate for sovereignty in the Latin edition of Bodin. See McRae, ed., Six Bookes, intro. J.G. Bellamy, The Law of Treason in England in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, CUP, 1970), p. 14. Theodor Mommsen, Paul Kreuger, and Alan Watson, eds, The Digest of Justinian, trans. Alan Watson (4 vols, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), IV, pp. 802–4; see also Floyd Seyward Lear, Treason in Roman and Germanic Law (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1965), pp. 28–9. J.A.C. Thomas, trans. and ed., The Institutes of Justinian: Text, Translation and Commentary (Cape Town, Juta and Co., 1975), p. 335; a further useful discussion of the Roman-law conception of treason may be found in S.H. Cuttler, The Law of Treason and Treason Trials in Later Medieval France (Cambridge, CUP, 1981), chapter 1. Digest, 48, 4, 3. Ibid., 48, 4, 1; this included also the crime of conspiring to kill a magistrate. Bodin, Book I, 166–8. Richard A. Bauman, Crimen Maiestatis in the Roman Republic and Augustan Principate ( Johannesburg, Witwatersrand University Press, 1967); Digest, 48, 4, 3. For example see Coke, The Third Part of the Institutes, p. 9. William Fulbecke, A Parallele or Conference of The Civil Law, the Canon Law and the Common Law of this Realme of England. Wherin the agreement and disagreement of these three Lawes, and the causes and reasons of the said disagreement, are opened and discussed (1618; ﬁrst published 1602), fol. 88a. Bodin, Book I, p. 26. Firth and Rait, Acts and Ordinances, I, pp. 1253–4. Ibid., I, p. 1254. Parker, Observations, p. 167. C.V. Wedgwood, The Trial of Charles I (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1983), p. 96. Alan Cromartie, Sir Matthew Hale, 1609–1676: Law Religion and Natural Philosophy (Cambridge, CUP, 1995), p. 61. Ibid., p. 58. Gardiner, Documents, pp. 371–2; for other copies see John Nalson, A True Copy of the Journal of The High Court of Justice for the Tryal of King Charles I as it was Read in the House of Commons, and Attested under the hand of Phelps, Clerk to that Infamous Court (1684), sig. I1r–I2v, pp. 29–32; PRO, SP 16/517, fols 14–16; Beinecke Library, Osborn MS fb 146, 20 January, 1649 (I cite by date due to lack of foliation marks); the latter two copies are subscribed John Cook. Most notably at Edgehill and Brentford (1642), at Caversham Bridge, the city of Gloucester and Newbury (1643), at Cropredy Bridge, Bodmin and Newbury (1644), and at the sack of Leicester and the battle of Naseby (1645): Gardiner, Documents, p. 372. Ibid., p. 373. Ibid., pp. 373–4.

REC5 7/13/01 2:37 PM Page 137

The Juristic Foundation of Regicide 137 65. PRO, SP 16/517, fols 27–8. 66. Ibid., fol. 29. 67. The speech appears in the account of the ofﬁcial censor Gilbert Mabbott in his published account of the trial but not in Nalson. I cite it here from manuscript PRO, SP 16/517, fols. 38–42. For the published text at the time of the trial see Gilbert Mabbot, King Charls his Tryal or A perfect Narrative of the whole proceedings of the High Court of Iustice (1649, E545/4), sigs. D4r–F2v. 68. Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge, CUP, 1995), p. 2. 69. J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 348. 70. Jonathan Scott, ‘The English Republican Imagination’, in J.S. Morrill, ed., Revolution and Restoration: England in the 1650s (London, Collins & Brown, 1992), pp. 36–7. 71. PRO, SP 16/517, fol. 38. 72. Ibid., fol. 38. 73. Ibid., fol. 38. 74. Ibid., fol. 38. 75. Quoted in Linda Levy Peck, ‘Kingship, Counsel and Law in Early Stuart England’, in J.G.A. Pocock, Gordon Schochet, and Lois Schwoerer, eds, The Varieties of British Political Thought (Cambridge, CUP, 1993), p. 113. 76. PRO, SP 16/517, fol. 38. 77. Ibid., fol. 38. 78. Ibid., fol. 38. 79. ‘Rex non habet parem in Regno suo’: ibid., fol. 38. 80. Ibid., fols 38–9. 81. Ibid., fol. 39. 82. Ibid., fol. 39. 83. Ibid., fol. 39. 84. Ibid., fol. 39. 85. Ibid., fol. 39. 86. I have removed from the quotation only the second person pronouns and possessives as these remarks were addressed directly to the king: ibid., fol. 39. 87. Ibid., fol. 40. 88. Ibid., fol. 40. 89. Ibid., fol. 40. 90. Ibid., fol. 40. 91. Ibid., fol. 40. 92. The Trew Law of Free Monarchies: or the reciprock and mvtvall dvtie betwixt a free king, and his naturall subiects, in King James VI and I, Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge, CUP, 1994), pp. 62–84. 93. PRO, SP 16/517, fol. 41. 94. The most prominent recent discussion is that of Peltonen. See Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, chapters 10 and 11, passim.; Peltonen, Classical Humanism, passim. 95. Patrick Collinson, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, LXIX (1987), p. 406.

REC6 7/13/01 2:40 PM Page 138

6 Motives for King-Killing David Scott

For accessories to arguably the most dramatic act in English political history, the men who condemned King Charles to death have not received the attention they deserve. Whether we accept the recent argument that there were in fact 69, not 59 regicides,1 those who stood up in open court and avowed the death sentence, or who signed the death warrant, crossed the Rubicon;2 and a detailed investigation into their careers and motivation would surely add much to our understanding of the causes and nature of the English revolution. Yet while our appreciation of the political background to the regicide has improved considerably in recent years, the majority of those who actually signed the death warrant have been largely overlooked. Perhaps one reason for the neglect of the regicides is that, historiographically speaking, they have fallen between two stools. Whig and Marxist traditions have tended to regard Charles’ execution either as a necessary step in England’s progress towards constitutional government, or as a potent symbol of ‘bourgeois revolution’.3 From such teleological perspectives the careers and motives of those who ultimately emerged as arbiters of the king’s fate are in a sense irrelevant. The implication in most revisionist interpretations, on the other hand, is that the Civil War was largely the product of functional radicalism with few, if any, long-term causes. From this standpoint, the regicides appear as merely the most notorious products of an aberrant political environment. The recent renewal of interest in Puritanism as a motor of Civil War radicalism may help to propel the regicides and their motives back towards the mainstream of events and ideas in seventeenth-century England. Professor Morrill has argued that the main impetus for revolution was supplied by ‘religious fanaticism’, but fanaticism with a 138

REC6 7/13/01 2:40 PM Page 139

Motives for King-Killing 139

respectable Puritan pedigree.4 Nevertheless, more work is needed on the religious context of regicide before we can assess whether Cromwell’s reliance on providence to determine the king’s fate was typical of those who thought and acted regicidally, or whether millenarianism and the doctrine of blood guilt proved more compelling arguments for kingkilling.5 It is likewise unclear precisely how the ferment of new political ideas that emerged during the 1640s related to the events of January 1649. Until quite recently, the notion that some form of secular radicalism, whether it be classical republicanism or civic humanism, might signiﬁcantly have contributed to the king’s downfall rather than been generated by it has not really been considered.6 Most surprising of all, perhaps, in view of the current vogue for ‘three kingdoms history’, is the lack of work on the archipelagic dimension to the causes of severing the regnal union.7 One of the aims of this essay is to examine how the thinking of the regicides was inﬂuenced by the problems arising from multiple monarchies, particularly the often fraught relationship between England and Scotland during the 1640s. An investigation into the motives of each individual regicide would require an entire book to do justice to the evidence and indeed to the men themselves. This essay will focus therefore on the regicides from north-eastern and north-western England – that is, the area comprising the counties of Westmorland, Cumberland, Northumberland, County Durham and Yorkshire. Professor Underdown was the ﬁrst historian to notice the comparatively high number of signatories to the death warrant from this region – eight men in all – and to treat these eight as a distinct sub-category with its own regionally derived motives for regicide.8 That this grouping is not an entirely arbitrary one is suggested by the emergence of the ﬁve counties as a discrete political unit during the 1640s, shaped and inﬂuenced by forces peculiar to the region. The extensive military and political network built up by the commanders of parliament’s ﬁrst northern army – Ferdinando Lord Fairfax and his son Sir Thomas – played a major part in eroding the pre-war political boundaries of the ﬁve counties. Fairfax inﬂuence stretched northwards from the West Riding to the border; it was little in evidence south of the Humber, and made few inroads into Lancashire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire.9 In 1645 the authority of the Fairfaxes was supplanted, technically at least, by that of the Northern Association, but this body was dominated by the Fairfax interest and again tended to articulate the concerns of Yorkshire and the counties to the north. Heading the list of the Northern Association’s grievances was the intolerable burden imposed by the covenanting forces that had entered the region from

REC6 7/13/01 2:40 PM Page 140

140 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

1644.10 It was the baleful presence of Leven’s army, which was only rarely felt south of Westmorland and Yorkshire, that above all helped to bind the ﬁve counties together. Occupation by a foreign nation not only brought hardship to the north, it provoked a powerful xenophobic and patriotic reaction which, as this essay will show, helped transform the post-war quest for settlement into revolution. It is possible to assign relatively clear-cut motives to some members of our group of eight, particularly in the case of the Yorkshire recruiter, ‘King-cudgeling Tom Chaloner’.11 Indeed, the problem with Chaloner is not puzzling out why he signed the death warrant, but which of his several motives ultimately proved the most compelling. To John Aubrey, Chaloner’s grievance against the king was purely personal. The crown had appropriated the Chaloner family’s share in an alum works on their estate at Guisborough, which, in Aubrey’s view, ‘was the reason that made Mr Chaloner to interest himself for the Parliament cause, and, in revenge, to be one of the king’s judges’.12 Many of Chaloner’s contemporaries apparently agreed with this assessment.13 But it would be simplistic to assume that the sole, or even the main, reason that Chaloner opposed the crown in the 1640s was because he had been deprived of his inheritance. His acutely critical mind and free-thinking attitudes, nurtured by extensive travel on the Continent in his youth, were arguably far more powerful stimuli to opposition. Two episodes early in Chaloner’s parliamentary career reveal the unusually radical and unconventional bent of his thinking. The ﬁrst was in the autumn of 1646, when he made a highly controversial speech asserting parliament’s right to custody of the king without reference to the wishes of the Scots or indeed of Charles himself. In the so-called Speech Without Doors, he made it clear that he considered Charles to be entirely subject to the laws of England, and that the ‘rights of Parliament, and the liberties of the kingdom’, took precedence over the king’s person and ofﬁce.14 Parliament, he argued, constituted the supreme authority in the kingdom, ‘accountable to none but God Almighty’, and as such could dispose of the king’s person and powers as it saw ﬁt.15 Although Chaloner did not discuss the king’s role within the legislative trinity, he clearly believed that this should be exercised solely by the two Houses. The Speech Without Doors reveals that even as early as 1646 Chaloner was feeling his way towards a republican position. The second episode occurred a year later, when Chaloner was assigned the task of inserting a clause on the king’s negative voice into the preamble of parliament’s peace propositions.16 A holograph draft of his report has survived, and amid the interpolations and deletions (appar-

REC6 7/13/01 2:40 PM Page 141

Motives for King-Killing 141

ently in the hand of Henry Elsynge, the clerk of the Commons), there is the statement that the king is ‘bound in justice, and by the duty of his ofﬁce’ to assent to all laws tendered to him for his assent by ‘the people represented in Parliament’ – or, in other words, the House of Commons. This was apparently too much for Elsynge, who changed it to the more conventional ‘as by the Lords and Commons in Parliament’.17 But Chaloner’s use of this phrase is signiﬁcant, and suggests that he favoured, at the very least, a shift in the distribution of power within the legislative trinity towards the Commons, possibly even including the removal of the king’s and the Lords’ veto. The king’s escape from Hampton Court in November 1647, contrary to the terms of his parole, was the last straw for Chaloner. From that point onwards he appears to have been resolutely opposed to having any further dealings with Charles, and was consistently identiﬁed as one of the most ‘bloody minded against the king’.18 After Pride’s Purge he was able to come out of the republican closet, and with Henry Marten and Thomas Scot provided much of the leadership and impetus in bringing the king to the block and in establishing the commonwealth.19 His animus against Charles and kingly government is perhaps best summed up in the Commons’ declaration which he reported on 6 January 1649 (and which he probably helped to draft) for repealing the votes on re-opening negotiations with the king. Although not a particularly radical document, the declaration strongly echoes Chaloner’s Speech Without Doors: Unless we should value this one Man, the King, above so many Millions of people, whom we represent, and prefer his Honor, Safety and Freedom before the Honor, Safety and Freedom of the whole Nation . . . Unless we should stake All which we have to the Kings Nothing, and Treat with him, who hath not anything to give us . . . Unless we should value the blood of so many Innocents, and the Army of so many Martyrs, who have dyed in this Cause, less then the blood of a few guilty persons, by what Name or Title soever stiled, We could do no less then repeal those Votes before speciﬁed . . . Yet we are resolved . . . to settle the Peace of the Kingdom by the authority of Parliament, in a more happy way than can be expected from the best of Kings.20 Where Chaloner was unusual was ﬁrstly in his willingness to translate this sentiment into a coherent programme of constitutional reform; and secondly in the comparative speed with which he moved from

REC6 7/13/01 2:40 PM Page 142

142 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

hostility towards Charles to opposition to kingly government in general. Chaloner was a republican well before he was a regicide, and his decision to have done with the king stemmed in large part from his commitment to the establishment of a commonwealth, not vice versa as was apparently the case with most of his fellow ‘king-cudgellers’. While we are spoilt for choice in Chaloner’s case, the motives of the other northern regicides are more inscrutable, although we can often hazard a pretty good guess. Colonel Robert Lilburne, for example, second-in-command of the Northern Brigade under John Lambert, was, in both religion and politics, one of the most radical ofﬁcers in the English army by 1648.21 Noble discerned in him ‘a prodigious hatred to the court, and even the person of his majesty’, which he attributed to a personal grievance – the punishment meted out to his brother, John Lilburne (the future Leveller leader), by the court of Star Chamber in the 1630s.22 But again this seems a less-than-convincing line of argument. The only evidence before 1647 which would lend it weight, and then not very much, is Robert’s decision to take up arms against the king. Any grudge that he had against Charles or his ministers for their treatment of John certainly never developed into wholesale support for his brother’s Leveller principles. Indeed, in so far as they threatened army unity Robert Lilburne was an opponent of the Levellers. In fact, his road to regicide was probably the more public and conventional route taken by most of those ofﬁcers who emerged as champions of the political interests of the army in the spring of 1647. The Presbyterians’ attempt to divide and disband the New Model evoked in Lilburne a genuine concern for the liberties and birthrights of his fellow soldiers. Add to this his drift towards the Baptists from 1647, and his conduct in January 1649 becomes more explicable in terms of principle rather than private grievance. Perhaps the nearest thing we have to a personal testament from Lilburne in support of regicide is a petition to Fairfax in December 1648 from the regiment of Northumberland horse, which Lilburne had commanded during the second civil war.23 The regiment denounced the ‘yoke of Norman captivity’, called upon the army to make good its declarations of 1647, and reiterated demands made by Cromwell’s regiments in the north that the Commons be established as the supreme power in the nation, and that the king be ‘brought to a fair tryal to make answer for all the innocent bloud that hath been spilt in the land’.24 Sir William Constable was a northern regicide very much in Lilburne’s mould.25 He had effectively separated from the Church of England even before the collapse of episcopal government in 1640, and by the end of

REC6 7/13/01 2:40 PM Page 143

Motives for King-Killing 143

the decade was either a religious Independent or Baptist.26 During the ﬁrst civil war he served as a colonel under his brother-in-law, Lord Fairfax, and it was probably on Sir Thomas Fairfax’s recommendation that he obtained command of Lambert’s old regiment of foot in December 1647.27 Constable, like his men, was keen to see justice done against the king, and during November and December 1648 played a leading role in the council of ofﬁcers as it moved towards confrontation with parliament.28 He supported the army’s Remonstrance of 16 November, and was a member of various council committees for deciding army policy, including the joint committee of ofﬁcers, Levellers and radical MPs responsible for drawing up the Agreement of the People.29 Precisely what moved him to sign the death warrant we shall probably never know. Noble’s verdict – that he was ‘a disappointed, enraged, ruined patriot, ready to execute whatever could gratify his anger, pride, or avarice’ – can be dismissed immediately.30 Unusually for a Puritan, Constable was something of a spendthrift, and it was his proﬂigacy rather than any action of the crown that had nearly ruined him before the war.31 Likewise, any anger that he felt by late 1648 was almost certainly that of the Saints and army militants at Charles’ duplicity, wickedness and blood guilt. Although dubbed an ‘Annabaptisticall’ sectary by Marchamont Nedham,32 John Blakiston was probably nearer the Puritan mainstream than either Lilburne or Constable. He was, even so, a man of deeply godly convictions who spent much of his time both at Westminster and in his native town of Newcastle working to establish a gospelpreaching ministry.33 Politically, he was invariably to be found on the more militant wing of the parliamentarian interest, and by 1648 newsbook editors such as Nedham were lumping him together with Thomas Scot and other pro-army radicals in the House.34 Nedham referred to him as one of the ‘more Levelling sort’ in the Commons, and noted his support for the Levellers’ ‘large petition’ of 11 September 1648.35 But while there are strong indications that he was a committed ‘Commons supremacist’,36 his zealous Puritanism, and his reputed links with Scot and Sir Henry Vane junior, make it hard to imagine that he was entirely at ease with the worldly republicanism of Chaloner and Marten.37 His most compelling motive for regicide may well have been religious in nature. Another northern regicide whose signature on the death warrant seems to have been primarily a testament to godly conviction was Sir John Bourchier,38 and it is therefore ironic that he has been consistently portrayed as one of the most unsavoury and self-seeking of the king’s

REC6 7/13/01 2:40 PM Page 144

144 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

judges.39 C.V. Wedgwood described him as an ‘unprincipled, choleric malcontent’40 – a familiar portrait of Bourchier that probably had its origins in the words of another choleric malcontent, Sir Thomas Wentworth, ﬁrst Earl of Strafford. When, during the early 1630s, Bourchier forcibly resisted being dispossessed of part of his estate by the crown, Wentworth attributed his reaction to incipient madness.41 Yet he was convinced that Bourchier had acted ‘rather out of animosity towards me . . . than with the least insolent thought towards his Majesty’, and even Bourchier’s supposed grudge against Wentworth was apparently short-lived.42 He refused to testify at Strafford’s trial, and although his case was used by the prosecution to illustrate the Lord Lieutenant’s arbitrary proceedings, this charge, as Strafford observed, was ‘not insisted upon’ by Bourchier himself.43 Wentworth was so convinced of Bourchier’s insanity that he seems to have overlooked an even more disturbing trait – his devout attachment to godly religion. Indeed, one suspects that Wentworth simply confused the two conditions. Even a cursory glance at Bourchier’s career will reveal that his driving interest was not revenging himself upon Wentworth, far less upon the king, but, as he informed Lord Fairfax in 1647, to settle a ‘learned and conscionable ministry’ upon an ‘ignorant and sottish people . . . that the gospel may ﬂourish’.44 Bourchier was moving in prominent godly circles and presenting Puritan ministers to livings well before his run-in with Strafford, and continued to do so years after the execution of the king.45 The other charge sometimes levelled against him – that he was ‘a person of no great note, nor estate, till by his activeness in our late distempers . . . he angled fair, and catcht a great estate which was that he fought for’ – is equally groundless.46 With lands valued at over £2000 a year before the war, Bourchier was one of Yorkshire’s wealthiest gentlemen and sat on the commission of peace for all three ridings.47 And though he was involved in the sale of forfeited estates under the Rump, there is no evidence that he acquired any of this property for himself. Far from being an unprincipled malcontent, Bourchier seems to have combined the godly enthusiasm of the Saints with the social conservatism of a substantial gentry landowner.48 Trying to determine the motivation of the three remaining northern regicides – John Alured, Sir Thomas Mauleverer, and Peregrine Pelham – threatens to raise more questions than it answers. Alured’s family had been Puritans for several generations and had a history of conﬂict with the crown over its ecclesiastical and other ‘unparliamentary’ policies.49 Alured himself had been one of the ﬁrst gentlemen to raise troops for

REC6 7/13/01 2:40 PM Page 145

Motives for King-Killing 145

Parliament in 1642,50 but his subsequent career, regicide apart, is largely indistinguishable from that of any other prominent Yorkshire parliamentarian. Never very active in the Long Parliament, he had apparently abandoned his seat entirely by 1646, making the task of explaining his regicidal behaviour even more difﬁcult. One possible clue is his likely patronage of Philip Nye’s gathered congregation at Hull;51 and certainly in the absence of any evidence that he favoured a radical overhaul of the established social and political order, one is left to conclude that his likely motivation for regicide was either millenarian zeal or militant Puritan notions concerning the workings of providence. Sir Thomas Mauleverer, on the other hand, is another of C.V. Wedgwood’s ‘unprincipled, choleric malcontents’, and in this case she probably had a point.52 A close friend of the Fairfaxes, Mauleverer possibly had a pious side to his character but if so he kept it well hidden.53 All the evidence suggests that he was a nasty piece of work, which for a Yorkshire gentleman of the period is saying something. His lack of restraint as a colonel in Lord Fairfax’s northern army resulted in him being summoned to Westminster in 1643 to answer charges of extortion against himself and his ofﬁcers.54 And he was no less unscrupulous in his ﬁnancial dealings. Although heir to an estate worth £1500 a year before the war, he was not above fabricating charges of delinquency against his creditors to avoid paying his debts.55 He even tried to short-change, and possibly disinherit, his own son, who, perhaps not surprisingly, sided with the king in the 1640s.56 Nevertheless, prior to the war Mauleverer had deﬁed the crown in ways that indicate some sensitivity on his part to constitutional issues – he had refused to compound for distraint of knighthood, for example, and had signed local petitions critical of royal policies57; hence his motivation to take up arms against the king, and ﬁnally to help kill him, cannot be written off as entirely the workings of an over-active spleen. It may also be signiﬁcant that he married his daughter to perhaps the only Leveller in the Commons, Major Thomas Scot.58 Peregrine Pelham represents an even greater disappointment to those seeking hard and fast motives for regicide.59 So obscure were his reasons for signing the death warrant that Noble was forced to conclude that he was ‘only a tool in the hands of artful and ambitious men’.60 Pelham’s correspondence with Hull corporation during the mid-1640s shows him to have been a ﬁrm but moderate political Independent – a less prominent version of his friend and fellow MP, Samuel Browne. But although an Independent in politics Pelham had little sympathy for the sects, and in a letter to Hull’s Presbyterian magistrates expressed the hope that the

REC6 7/13/01 2:40 PM Page 146

146 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

‘multiplicitie of opinions which swarme generally (of which your towne is much infected as I heare) will ere long be reduced to government’.61 He seems to have favoured a parochial Puritan ministry and ‘orthodox’ divines such as Hull’s minister, William Styles (removed from his living in 1650 for refusing the Engagement) and Thomas Coleman, who was opposed both to the gathering of churches and the ‘rigid’ Presbyterianism of the Scots.62 What transformed Pelham from middle-of-theroad political Independent to regicide is hard to fathom. Given his conviction that it was he, not Sir John Hotham, who had been principally responsible for barring Charles from Hull in April 1642, it is possible that he feared royal retribution and that regicide was his only ﬁrm guarantee of safety.63 A more plausible explanation, however, is that by 1649 he had come to regard the king as fundamentally untrustworthy. The revelations in the king’s correspondence taken at Naseby made a deep impression on him.64 Thereafter he was convinced that Charles was ﬁghting to establish Catholicism, and that there was ‘noe hopes of peace but by the sword’.65 His antipathy towards Charles may also have been fostered by his ﬁrst hand experience of the horrors of the second civil war as one of Fairfax’s civilian advisers during the summer of 1648.66 Taken as a group, these eight men seem almost as diverse in their backgrounds and beliefs as the regicides collectively. On the one hand, we have men of relatively modest wealth – Alured’s estate was worth no more than £500 a year, for example – and on the other, county grandees such as Bourchier.67 While Chaloner was studying at Exeter College, Oxford, and the Inner Temple, before embarking upon the ‘grand tour’, Pelham and Blakiston were serving out apprenticeships. And whereas Blakiston and Chaloner were conﬁrmed civilians who never commanded so much as a militia unit, Lilburne and Constable became career soldiers. In terms of their religious preferences the northern regicides covered almost the entire length of the godly denominational spectrum, from the erastian Presbyterian Peregrine Pelham to the Baptist Lilburne. And there is some doubt whether Chaloner was even a Christian, never mind a Puritan. The allegation in 1648 that he was an atheist, and would make ‘a good divine amongst the Indians’,68 was the ﬁrst of many. The northern regicides also arrived at the central act of revolution via different political routes, and although their paths were ultimately to converge in the realization that settlement was impossible while Charles remained king, some apparently accepted this fact sooner than others, and they almost certainly had differing notions

REC6 7/13/01 2:40 PM Page 147

Motives for King-Killing 147

about who or what should replace him. Chaloner, Constable, Lilburne, and probably Blakiston, seem to have looked favourably on the sects, sympathized with some aspects of the Levellers’ reform programme, and had few qualms about jettisoning the hereditary components of the ancient constitution. Pelham, however, was opposed to a ‘multiplicitie of opinions’ in religion, and probably ambivalent at best towards republicanism. Nor is there anything in the careers of Alured, Bourchier and Mauleverer, apart from the regicide, that would suggest a burning desire on their part for political or social revolution. Although we cannot be certain what ultimately inspired any member of the group to sign the death warrant, most of their career proﬁles suggest that a powerful source of motivation was consternation at Charles’ wickedness in defying providence and in deﬁling the land with innocent blood.69 Even those who shied away from condoning the king’s execution were encouraged to take a very tough line against him by the notion of blood guilt and the terrible consequences if expiation was not made. In October 1648, Alderman Thomas Hoyle of York and other militant Independents (only one of whom, John Venn, became a regicide) argued that the bloud of the People being shed, it would be required somewhere; and if the House did not doe justice now it is in their power, upon their Capitall enemies from the highest to the lowest, that had a hand in the former or latter Wars, there is no question but all the bloud will be required at their [i.e. parliament’s] hands.70 Given such sentiments it is perhaps less instructive to ask why Venn and his like signed the death warrant than why Hoyle did not. Another possible source of regicidal thought was republicanism – deﬁned for the purpose of this essay as antipathy towards kingly government and a concomitant desire to establish a ‘free state’, in which some form of representative body exercised supreme authority. Although there was no necessary connection between republicanism (however deﬁned) and regicide,71 practical commonwealth men such as Chaloner and Marten may well have reasoned that Charles’ execution constituted a vital step in establishing the principle of the sovereignty of the people’s representatives and thus in the creation of a republic. Regicide and republic represented the surest way of guaranteeing some measure of power and inﬂuence for themselves in the new dispensation that must follow the trial. Whichever group steered the ship of state in the event that Charles was retained as a puppet monarch,

REC6 7/13/01 2:40 PM Page 148

148 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

or Henry Duke of Gloucester installed under a Lord Protector (perhaps the two likeliest outcomes if the king had struck a last minute deal with Denbigh, Cromwell and company), it was very unlikely to include Marten or Chaloner. Their position clearly differed from that of ‘godly’ regicides such as Cromwell, for whom it was largely a case of the king’s deposition or execution necessitating constitutional change rather than vice versa.72 Among those who were inﬂuenced primarily by the Law of the Old Testament and the revelations of providence, there may have been a tendency to regard the king’s execution as the ‘closing act’ of civil war – to borrow Sarah Barber’s phrase.73 But to Chaloner it probably represented the dawn of a new and exciting political era. However, it would be foolish to presuppose too sharp a distinction between what might be called civil and religious motives for regicide. Antimonarchical ideas could in some cases provide a complementary rather than an alternative source of motivation to that derived from biblical exegesis. The demands for justice against the king from the northern garrisons, for example, were fuelled both by a desire for constitutional reform (in accordance with the Levellers’ ‘large petition’) and a belief in the ‘special over-ruling hand of providence’.74 Alongside Puritan apocalyptic and republicanism, however, it is possible to locate a third major source of regicidal thought, which can be traced to the king’s novel decision late in 1647 to apply a British solution to his problems in England. Indeed, the high proportion of northern regicides may partly be explicable in terms of Charles’ success in hitching his cause to that of Scottish confederalism – that is, the Scots’ self-preserving reﬂex to intervene in England’s affairs, by force if necessary, in order to impose Presbyterian church discipline and (as the Engagement put it) to restore the ‘just rights of the Crown . . . that His Majesty, according to the intention of his father, shall endeavour a complete union of the kingdoms’.75 Admittedly, the relatively large number of northerners among the trial commissioners (from whom the regicides were drawn) probably owed something to a desire on the part of whoever drew up the commission to bolster the wavering Lord General (Fairfax) with as many members of his circle as possible.76 But structural factors of this sort are not convincing when it comes to explaining why a similarly high proportion took the momentous step of signing the death warrant. It seems that some kind of regionally derived grievance against the king was in operation, and here we need look no further than the ruinous impact on the northern counties of the king’s dealings with the Scots since the late 1630s. The Bishops’ Wars had ended in humiliating defeat and with Scottish and English armies quartered

REC6 7/13/01 2:40 PM Page 149

Motives for King-Killing 149

upon the inhabitants of Northumberland, County Durham and Yorkshire for over a year. Even greater hardship was caused by the Scottish occupation of the ﬁve northern counties between 1644 and 1647. Although the Scots had been called in by a parliamentary faction that included many future regicides, their stay in the north was greatly prolonged by the royalists’ and Presbyterians’ secret negotiations with the Scots. Northern parliamentarians were pleading as early as September 1645 that the Scottish forces be removed from the region, but it was not until January 1647 that Leven’s army ﬁnally quit English soil. For three long years the northern counties had to endure the ‘inﬁnite oppressions and extortions’ of the Scots’ pay-starved soldiery, and were just beginning to recover when the Scots invaded again in 1648, this time at the king’s behest.77 The resumption of negotiations with the twice-defeated Charles was particularly resented among the northern ‘well-affected’. The Northumberland garrisons were among the ﬁrst units to send letters to Fairfax denouncing the Treaty of Newport and pleading for justice against ‘our Capital & Bloudy Enemy . . . that God speaks no Peace to’.78 They followed up these letters a few weeks later with petitions warning against bringing ‘other Instruments and Incendiaries to condign punishment, while the grand Delinquent is untouched . . . as being not an acceptable Sacriﬁce to the Justice of God, to offer him ought else, while the Agag is spared’.79 Between October 1648 and mid-January 1649 a vocal element among the regiments in the north, including Lambert and many of the Northern Brigade ofﬁcers, threw their weight behind the campaign of the army militants to scupper the peace negotiations and bring the king to trial.80 Nor was this hard-line attitude conﬁned to the northern soldiery. In October 1648 the mayor and corporation of Newcastle-uponTyne – not a town noted for its zeal in parliament’s cause – petitioned the Commons, urging that before any personal treaty be concluded ‘full and exemplary Justice be done upon the great Incendiaries of the Kingdome the fomenters of, and actors in the ﬁrst and second war, and the late bringing in of the Scots’.81 This petition was presented to the Commons on 10 October 1648. On the same day, Alderman Hoyle of York presented a petition to the House from the ‘gentlemen, ministers, freeholders and other inhabitants’ of Yorkshire, and the towns of York and Hull, demanding ‘[i]mpartial and speedy execution of justice upon offenders, especially such as are guilty of polluting a land with blood’.82 The Yorkshire and Newcastle petitions for justice against delinquents were among the ﬁrst of their kind, certainly from civilians, and were soon followed by similar petitions from the gentlemen of four northern

REC6 7/13/01 2:40 PM Page 150

150 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

counties, and from County Durham on its own.83 It is questionable, of course, whether these petitions were representative of anything like majority opinion in the north. According to Marchamont Nedham ‘not one of twenty in the City of Yorke . . . nor one of forty in the County’ had signed the Yorkshire petition,84 and it was certainly not endorsed by the York or Hull corporations. Pressure from Cromwell’s army in the north-east and the garrisons in the region may well account in part for this spate of northern petitions.85 But we should not be too cynical about reports that Cromwell’s forces were ‘entertained with great guns and ringing of bells and feasting’ at Newcastle.86 The fact that over eighty of the town’s leading citizens signed the petition to parliament largely bears out the claim of one northern correspondent that they had acted ‘most freely and unanimously’.87 Moreover, after the regicide a letter from the town expressed the view that Charles had ‘died like a desperate ignorant Roman . . . nothing we can see in him tending to a true Christian, or the power of godliness’.88 Weighing the evidence, Roger Howell concluded that Newcastle’s leaders had come to hold ‘a very low view’ of the king by the winter of 1648–49 – which, if true, is a remarkable state of affairs for what had been one of the most ‘loyal’ towns in the kingdom. No less remarkable was the willingness of Yorkshire’s Presbyterian gentry to defy the king’s will in the summer of 1648, and then to acquiesce in his execution six months later. Several of the county’s most prominent Presbyterians commanded the militia regiments which besieged Pontefract, recaptured Scarborough, and generally made sure of the region for parliament.89 While they undoubtedly feared the intrusion of the ‘clubs and clouted shoes’ of the New Model soldiery upon the gentlemanly preserve of national politics, they evidently hated the Scots and the prospect of another Scottish occupation of Yorkshire even more.90 Nor would the crowning of Charles II as king of Britain have done much to diminish their fear of Scottish invasion. Whatever their views of the regicide, therefore, their antipathy towards the Scots was apparently enough to prevent many of them turning their back upon the commonwealth entirely. Indeed, large numbers of the Yorkshire gentry, including several Presbyterians, turned out at the Yorkshire spring assizes in March 1649 to hear Francis Thorpe defend the revolution.91 They then signed a petition to the Rump from the ‘well-affected party of this County’ calling for the slighting of Pontefract Castle.92 A month later, as JPs across the country deserted their posts in droves, the ﬁrst meeting of the West Riding quarter-sessions after the regicide saw the fullest attendance of any session during the later 1640s, with most of the leading Presbyterians putting in an appearance.93

REC6 7/13/01 2:40 PM Page 151

Motives for King-Killing 151

If even the northern Presbyterians were moved by heightened fear of the Scots then there is no reason to suppose that the region’s regicides were any different. Several of them had suffered materially at the hands of the Scottish army and all had emerged as opponents of continuing Scots’ inﬂuence in English affairs. Alured, Bourchier and Mauleverer were prominent ﬁgures on the Yorkshire and Northern Association committees, and between them signed virtually every one of the committees’ numerous letters to parliament complaining about the abuses of the Scottish army and pleading that it be removed from the region.94 Chaloner became the most notorious of the Scots’ northern enemies following his Speech Without Doors in October 1646 (indeed, reading this speech it is easy to conclude that his republican convictions were strengthened and perhaps even shaped by his reaction to Scottish intervention).95 Holles thought Blakiston an incendiary between the two kingdoms, recounting how the Westminster Independents had ‘thrust on some of their little Northern Beagles (as Mr Blaxton and others)’ when trying to provoke a confrontation between the Covenanters and the New Model.96 Similarly, Constable and Pelham had a hand in drafting and disseminating what to the Scots’ eyes was blatant propaganda against their army and nation.97 During the second civil war Pelham, Bourchier, Mauleverer and Blakiston helped to organize the north’s defences; Lilburne harried the Northumbrian royalists; Chaloner battled with the ‘Scottiﬁed’ interest at Westminster; Constable held Gloucester for parliament; and Alured almost certainly assisted his younger brother, the future commonwealth man Matthew Alured, in raising the East Riding trained bands against the cavaliers.98 Although the regicides were united in their loathing of the Scots’ confederalist programme, hostility to Scottish intervention had inevitably acquired a keener edge among their enemies in the north. The northern counties stood on the front line of conﬂict between the two kingdoms,99 and some parts had been so devastated by Scottish occupation that their inhabitants had been driven to insurrection. Much of the blame for the region’s sufferings was attributed, somewhat unjustly, to the Scots themselves, but by the end of 1648 many northerners had good reason to see the king as the main author of their woes. After all, it had been his ill-conceived bellum episcopale which had prompted the ﬁrst Scottish occupation of 1640–41; the machinations of his leading advisers in seeking to negotiate a Scottish military alliance which had helped prolong the stay of Leven’s army after 1645; and his own negotiation of the Engagement that had led directly to Hamilton’s invasion of the region in 1648. In putting himself at the head of the Scottish

REC6 7/13/01 2:40 PM Page 152

152 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

interest late in 1647, and inviting the Engagers to bring blood and hardship across the border for the third time in a decade, Charles was toying dangerously with the loyalty of his northern English subjects, and the high proportion of regicides from that region may have been one result. Surrounded by the devastation which the king’s designs had inﬂicted on their region, the northern parliamentarians probably found it particularly easy by late 1648 to look upon Charles as a ‘man of blood’, worthy of condign punishment. But they were given even greater cause to consider regicide by the king’s refusal to abandon the Scottish interest after God’s judgement upon his cause at Preston.100 From the autumn of 1647 and Charles’ rejection of the Heads of Proposals, the army and Independent grandees had adopted ‘new counsels . . . where, by afﬂiction, menaces, terrors of deposing, calling to account for blood etc., they hoped to . . . work him out of all thoughts of ever admitting the Scottish Presbyterian interest to any share in the settlement of the kingdom’.101 The failure of this strategy was conﬁrmed by Charles’ unwillingness in the last few months of his life to disavow Ormond, who was seen by English radicals as simply an Irish version of Hamilton.102 ‘The late transactions of Ormond in Ireland, not disavowed by the King’ struck the northern regiments as compelling evidence that far from repenting his ways Charles was laying ‘a new design to bring about his former wicked intentions’.103 Despite the Scots’ defeat at Preston and Cromwell’s pact with Argyle and the Whiggamore Covenanters, the northern parliamentarians remained fearful that their ‘frontier’ region faced imminent invasion by land and sea.104 The ﬁnal ultimatum that the army and Independent grandees made to the king, brokered by the Earl of Denbigh in December 1648, included the demand that he abjure the Scots.105 But Charles’ belated commitment to seeking a British solution to his problems was not to be shaken, and his stubbornness on this issue may well have sealed his fate. In signing the Engagement, the king did more than re-invent himself as the would-be champion of Scotland’s and Ireland’s autonomy in the face of an aggressive Independent ‘junto’ at Westminster, as John Adamson has recently argued;106 he also set the royal seal of approval on Scottish confederalism. Charles staked his future and, as it turned out, his life on the notion of a reinvigorated regnal union. Where the Irish were concerned this would probably have entailed some degree of internal political autonomy, with Charles and his prerogative powers providing the only link between England and Ireland.107 But the Scots, even the Hamiltonians, wanted something more akin to James I’s union of crowns. In other words, a larger Scottish presence at the English court;

REC6 7/13/01 2:40 PM Page 153

Motives for King-Killing 153

a greater say in the upbringing of Prince Charles; and a stronger voice in royal counsels at Whitehall.108 The king’s willingness to make these concessions, even in defeat, and his refusal to abjure his ‘foreign’ allies raised the spectre of a fourth Scottish invasion in the confederalist cause. It was perhaps the hope, misplaced as it turned out, that his death would dissolve the union and ﬁnally exorcize the threat of Scottish confederalism that may have helped to drive on the regicides.109 That some such calculation was running through the minds of the king’s enemies seems particularly likely in the case of our eight northerners, given that they had the most to lose should the Scots again decide to ﬁght Charles’ battles for him. The king’s refusal to renounce his perceived design to ‘vassalize’ the English to the Celtic nations may not have provided the most emotive reason for king-killing, but it apparently served to remove any lingering doubts in the mind of Cromwell, and probably other future regicides, that God had marked him for destruction.110 Regional grievances and anxieties born of the British problem were fused in the north during the 1640s, so that by 1648 northern parliamentarians had come to link the future well-being of their native counties with the cause of resisting those intent upon ‘the subduing and enslaving of our kingdom’ by ‘a forreign Nation’.111 Three Scottish invasions in the space of eight years created a powerful head of resentment and anger among northern parliamentarians. By signing the Engagement the king diverted some of the force of this anger from the Scots and their ‘Scottiﬁed’ English allies onto himself; and his leading northern opponents may have come to the conclusion that only his death could free them from the state of misery and fear to which the regnal union had reduced them. This is not to say that regional concerns or the stresses and strains of British politics provided the most compelling motives for regicide. Pride of place in that respect should probably go to Puritan wrath at the king’s pride and intransigence in the face of his blood guilt and the evidences of divine providence. Even support for radical constitutional reform was often underpinned by godly fanaticism, as the cases of Blakiston, Constable and Lilburne illustrate. But the careers of all the northern regicides suggest that we have hitherto underestimated the importance of Scottish intervention as a stimulus to English political radicalism. The king certainly did himself no favours in meddling with the regnal union, and since he had stirred up the whole hornets’ nest in the ﬁrst place it represented perhaps a kind of justice that he should end up one of its victims. There is irony too in the fact that while the Scots sought to strengthen the union as protection against the military and political pretensions of their domineering

REC6 7/13/01 2:40 PM Page 154

154 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

neighbour, a section of the English tried to sever it in January 1649 for exactly the same reason.

Notes 1. A.W. McIntosh, ‘The Numbers of the English Regicides’, History, LXVII (1982), pp. 195–216; I. Gentles, The New Model Army in England, Ireland and Scotland, 1645–1653 (Oxford, Blackwell, 1992), p. 527. Six of the ten trial commissioners who avowed the death sentence but failed to sign the death warrant were accused in 1660 of having condemned the king to death ‘under their Hands and Seales’: The Grand Memorandum: or, a True and Perfect Catalogue of the Secluded Members of the House of Commons ([26 Mar.] 1660, 669 f.24/37). 2. What ultimately separated those trial commissioners who signed the death warrant from those who did not may in some cases have come down to personal character traits – how courageous, cautious, or rash an individual was – rather than to signiﬁcant ideological differences. I am grateful to Professor Ann Hughes for discussion on this point. 3. Gardiner, Civil War, IV, pp. 329, 330; B. Manning, 1649: the Crisis of the English Revolution (London, Bookmarks, 1992), pp. 13–24. 4. J.S. Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution (London, Longman, 1993), p. 23. 5. Providentialist and millenarian ideas could heighten an individual’s sensitivity to the sin of blood guilt, but not, it seems, in the case of Cromwell, for whom this doctrine served as justiﬁcation rather than a motive for regicide: see above, pp. 14–35; P. Crawford, ‘ “Charles Stuart, That Man of Blood” ’, JBS, XVI (1977), pp. 41–61: pp. 51, 54, 55. 6. S. Barber, ‘Scotland and Ireland Under the Commonwealth: a Question of Loyalty’, in S.G. Ellis and S. Barber, eds, Conquest and Union: Fashioning a British State 1485–1725 (London, Longman, 1995), pp. 199–205; S. Barber, Regicide and Republicanism: Politics and Ethics in the English Revolution, 1646–1659 (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1998), chapters 1–5; D. Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics 1627–1660 (Cambridge, CUP, 1999), pp. 5–6, 93–101. 7. The consequences of the regicide across the three kingdoms have been studied in greater depth. See, for example, D. Stevenson, ‘Cromwell, Scotland and Ireland’, in J. Morrill, ed., Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (London, Longman, 1990), pp. 155–61; Barber, ‘Scotland and Ireland Under the Commonwealth’, pp. 205–21; D. Hirst, ‘The English Republic and the Meaning of Britain’, in B. Bradshaw and J.S. Morrill, eds, The British Problem, c.1534–1707: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago (Basingstoke, Macmillan Press – now Palgrave, 1996), pp. 192–219. 8. D. Underdown, Pride’s Purge: Politics in the Puritan Revolution (Oxford, OUP, 1971), pp. 228–9, 273. 9. Sir Thomas Widdrington, Lord Fairfax’s son-in-law, was a vital ﬁgure in this respect: D. Scott, draft biographies of Ferdinando 2nd Lord Fairfax, Sir Thomas Widdrington, History of Parliament Trust; D. Scott, ‘The “Northern Gentlemen”, the Parliamentary Independents, and Anglo-Scottish

REC6 7/13/01 2:40 PM Page 155

Motives for King-Killing 155

10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29.

Relations in the Long Parliament’, HJ, XLII (1999), pp. 357–8; W. Dumble, ‘The Durham Lilburnes and the English Revolution’, in D. Marcombe, ed., The Last Principality: Politics, Religion and Society in the Bishopric of Durham, 1494–1660 (Nottingham, University of Nottingham Press, 1987), p. 231. For the composition of the ofﬁcer corp of Lord Fairfax’s northern army, see J.A. Jones, ‘The War in the North: the Northern Parliamentarian Army in the English Civil War, 1642–1645’ (PhD thesis, York, Toronto, 1991). Scott, ‘Northern Gentlemen’, pp. 359, 361, 362, 371–2. Mercurius Pragmaticus (3–10 Oct. 1648, E466/11), sig. Pp7. Nedham also dubbed him Chaloner ‘the King clapper’: Mercurius Pragmaticus (19–26 Dec. 1648, E477/30), sig. Eee3. For Chaloner’s background and career, see Scott, draft biography of Thomas Chaloner, History of Parliament Trust. J. Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. A. Clark (2 vols, Oxford, OUP, 1898), I, p. 159. [Thomas Chaloner] The Justiﬁcation of a Safe and Wel-Grounded Answer to the Scotch Papers ([23 Nov.] 1646, E363/11), p. 12; C.V. Wedgwood, The Trial of Charles I (London, Collins, 1964), p. 100. [Chaloner] Answer to the Scotch Papers, pp. 6, 7, 9. Lex Talionis, or a Declamation against Mr. Challener ([5 July] 1647, E396/20), p. 4. CJ, V, pp. 351, 352. Bodl. MS Tanner 58B, fol. 569. I would like to thank Dr John Adamson for drawing my attention to this evidence. Lex Talionis, p. 2; Bodl. MS Clarendon 30, fols. 188–9; Mercurius Elencticus (29 Dec. 1647–5 Jan. 1648, E421/34), p. 42; Mercurius Melancholius (24–31 July 1648, E455/12), p. 295; Mercurius Pragmaticus (15–22 Aug. 1648, E460/21), sigs. Aav, Aa2; OPH, XVII, p. 404. B. Worden, The Rump Parliament 1648–1653 (Cambridge, CUP, 1974), pp. 36–7. A Declaration of the Commons . . . Expressing their Reasons for Adnulling . . . these ensuing Votes ([15 Jan.] 1648, E538/23), p. 16. The following paragraph relies heavily on R. Howell, Puritans and Radicals in North England (New York, University Press of America, 1984), pp. 178–97. P. Noble, The Lives of the Regicides (2 vols, 1798), I, p. 378. C.H. Firth and G. Davies, The Regimental History of Cromwell’s Army (Oxford, OUP, 1940), p. 266. His Majesties Declaration upon his Departure from the Isle of Wyght ([4 Dec.] 1648, E475/4), pp. 2–6; To His Excellency Thomas Lord Fairfax . . . The Humble Representation of the Desires of the Ofﬁcers and Souldiers in the Regiment of Horse, for the County of Northumberland ([4 Dec.] 1648, E475/13), pp. 1–6. See Scott, draft biography of Sir William Constable, History of Parliament Trust. Bodl. MS Tanner 65, fol. 24; M. Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints: the Separate Churches of London, 1616–49 (Cambridge, CUP, 1977), pp. 44–5; J. Nickolls, ed., Original Letters and Papers of State (1743), p. 125. Firth and Davies, Regimental History, p. 254. Mercurius Militaris (10–17 Oct. 1648, E467/34), p. 3. C.H. Firth, ed., The Clarke Papers (Camden Society n.s. LIV, 1894), (Clarke Papers II), II, pp. 54, 56, 61, 262, 272; B. Taft, ‘Voting lists of the Council

REC6 7/13/01 2:40 PM Page 156

156 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45.

46. 47.

48.

of Ofﬁcers, December 1648’, BIHR, LII (1979), pp. 138–54: pp. 142, 144, 148. Noble, Lives of the Regicides, I, p. 147. J.T. Cliffe, The Yorkshire Gentry from the Reformation to the Civil War (London, Athlone Press, 1969), pp. 123, 351, 353. Mercurius Pragmaticus (21–28 Nov. 1648, E473/35), sig. Bbb3v. Howell, Puritans and Radicals, pp. 49–64. Mercurius Pragmaticus (25 July–1 Aug. 1648, E456/7), sig. S3v; (22–29 Aug. 1648, E461/17), sig. Cc4; (12–19 Sept. 1648, E464/12), sig. Ii2v; (21–28 Nov. 1648), sig. Bbb3v; (5–12 Dec. 1648, E476/2), sig. Ccc3; (12–19 Dec. 1648, E476/35), sigs. Ddd4, Ddd4v; (19–26 Dec. 1648), sig. Eee3; A Letter from an Ejected Member . . . to Sir Jo: Evelyn ([14 Sept.] 1648, E463/18), p. 24; [Clement Walker], The History of Independency ([14 Sept.] 1648, E463/19), pp. 120, 122; Mercurius Elencticus (5–12 Dec. 1648, E476/4), p. 532; (12–19 Dec. 1648, E476/36), p. 539. Mercurius Pragmaticus (22–29 Aug. 1648), sig. Cc4; (12–19 Sept. 1648), sig. Ii2v. See above, pp. 80–1. Mercurius Pragmaticus (For King Charls II) (5–12 June 1649, E559/14), p. 69; John Lilburne, The Legall Fundamentall Liberties of the People of England Revived, Asserted, and Vindicated ([18 June] 1649, E560/14), p. 15. See Scott, draft biography of Sir John Bourchier, History of Parliament Trust. R.R. Reid, The King’s Council in the North (London, Longman, 1921), p. 422; W.L.F. Nuttall, ‘The Yorkshire Commissioners Appointed for the Trial of King Charles the First’, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, XLIII (1971), pp. 147–57: p. 150. Wedgwood, Trial of Charles I, p. 100. W. Knowler, ed., The Earl of Strafforde Letters (2 vols, 1739), I, pp. 88, 249. Knowler, ed., Strafforde Letters, I, p. 249. Rushworth, Collections, VIII, pp. 137–8, 146; CJ, VI, p. 612. R. Bell, ed., Memorials of the Civil War: Correspondence of the Fairfax Family (2 vols, London, 1849) (Fairfax Correspondence III and IV), III, pp. 337–8. A. Serle, ed., Barrington Family Letters 1628–1632 (Camden Soc. 4th ser. XXVIII, 1983), pp. 35, 63, 145, 181, 182, 251; Cliffe, Yorkshire Gentry, p. 310; J.T. Cliffe, The Puritan Gentry: the Great Puritan Families of Early Stuart England (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 11; BL, Add[itional] MS 36792, fols 35, 37v, 42v, 57v, 59, 60v, 65v; Lambeth Palace Library, ARC, L.40.2/E16, passim; PRO, SP 22/2B, passim. The Mystery of the Good Old Cause ([July] 1660, E1923/2), p. 21. PRO, WARD 9/677, fol. 5v; The Victoria History of the County of York, North Riding (2 vols, London, Constable, 1914–23), II, p. 162; PRO, C 231/4, fol. 190. A clue to Bourchier’s religious sympathies may lie in his appointment late in November 1648 to request the Independent divine, Thomas Brooks, to preach to the Commons. After the sermon, in which Brooks called for justice against the enemies of the Saints, Bourchier was appointed to return him the thanks of the House: CJ, VI, p. 91, 107; T. Brooks, Gods Delight in the Progresse of the Upright ([26 Dec.] 1648, E536/6). See also, T. Brooks, The Glorious Day of the Saints Appearance ([Nov.] 1648, E474/7).

REC6 7/13/01 2:40 PM Page 157

Motives for King-Killing 157 49. Scott, draft biography of John Alured, History of Parliament Trust; I. Morgan, Prince Charles’ Puritan Chaplain (London, George Allen & Unwin, 1957), pp. 56–60; PRO, SP 16/68, fol. 82; Richard Cust, The Forced Loan and English Politics 1626–1628 (Oxford, OUP, 1987), p. 227. 50. PRO, SP 28/143, p. 8. 51. A.E. Trout, ‘Nonconformity in Hull’, Transactions of the Congregational History Society, IX (1924–26), pp. 31–2. 52. Wedgwood, Trial of Charles I, p. 100. 53. See Scott, draft biography of Sir Thomas Mauleverer, History of Parliament Trust. 54. CJ, III, p. 125. 55. CCAM, pp. 851, 1190; PRO, SP 24/62. 56. PRO, SP 23/215, p. 264; SP 23/236, fols. 31, 32. 57. Acts of the Privy Council of England 1630 June–1631 June (London, HMSO, 1964), p. 93; CSPD 1640, pp. 523–4. 58. Scott, draft biography of Thomas Scot, History of Parliament Trust. Major Thomas Scot died in January 1648 and should not be confused with his namesake, the future regicide and Rumper. 59. See Scott, draft biography of Peregrine Pelham, History of Parliament Trust. 60. Noble, Lives of the Regicides, II, p. 119. 61. T. Tindall Wildridge, ed., The Hull Letters (Hull, Wildridge and Co., 1886), p. 123. 62. Wildridge, ed., Hull Letters, pp. 103, 122, 135; Kingston-upon-Hull Archives, L476; L481. 63. CUL, Mm.1.46, p. 83. 64. Wildridge, ed., Hull Letters, p. 89. 65. Wildridge, ed., Hull Letters, p. 89; Kingston-upon-Hull Archives, L383. It was apparently the Naseby letters which convinced Thomas Scot and John Cook that Charles was the principal author of the nation’s ills: [T. Scot], A Paire of Cristall Spectacles with which any Man may See Plainly at a Miles Distance into the Councells of the Army ([18 Dec.] 1648, E476/30), pp. 1–6; J. Cook, King Charls his Case ([Feb.] 1649, E542/3), p. 35. 66. CJ, V, p. 615; CSPD 1648–9, pp. 88, 102, 104, 105, 110, 111, 112–13, 115, 118, 119. 67. PRO, C 142/452/42; WARD 9/678, fol. 178v; CSPD 1637–8, p. 558. 68. The Kentish Fayre, or the Parliament Sold to their Best Worth ([8 June] 1648, E446/21), pp. 6–7. 69. For the role of the doctrine of blood guilt as both a motive and justiﬁcation for regicide, see Crawford, ‘ “Charles Stuart, That Man of Blood” ’. 70. Mercurio Volpone (5–12 Oct. 1648, E467/22), p. 15; Mercurius Pragmaticus (10–17 Oct. 1648, E467/38), sig. Rr2v. 71. Barber, Regicide and Republicanism, pp. 2–3. 72. See above, pp. 14–35. 73. Barber, Regicide and Republicanism, p. 2. 74. A Copie of Two Letters, Sent from Divers Ofﬁcers of the Army in the North, to his Excellency Thomas Lord Fairfax ([Oct.] 1648, 669 f.13/27); Two Petitions Presented to His Excellency the Lord Fairfax ([Nov.] 1648, E473/23), pp. 3–5. 75. Gardiner, Constitutional Documents, pp. 347–53. 76. An even more mundane reason for the high proportion of northern regicides was simply the high proportion of constituencies in Yorkshire

REC6 7/13/01 2:40 PM Page 158

158 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

77. 78.

79. 80.

81. 82.

83.

84. 85.

compared to other counties. To be a trial commissioner, it greatly helped if one was ﬁrst an MP – and in Yorkshire there was greater opportunity to enter parliament than in almost any other county. Scott, ‘Northern Gentlemen’, p. 359. A Copie of Two Letters. These letters were reprinted or summarized in Letters from Lieutenant General Crumwels Quarters ([9 Oct.] 1648, E466/7), pp. 2–6; The Declaration of the Armie ([9 Oct.] 1648, E466/10), pp. 2–3; The Moderate (3–10 Oct. 1648, E467/1), pp. 105–7. Marchamont Nedham alleged that these letters were framed by Ireton, countenanced by Cromwell, ‘and that the prosecution of it among the Souldiery is left to Sir Arthur Hesilrigg, Henry Marten, Paul Hobson, and Major Cobbet’: Mercurius Pragmaticus (3–10 Oct. 1648), sig. Pp6. Two Petitions Presented to His Excellency the Lord Fairfax, pp. 3–5. The Independents Declaration and Remonstrance to the Parliament of England ([18 Oct.] 1648, E468/13), pp. 2–3; A Declaration of the Army, concerning the Kings Majesty ([14 Nov.] 1648, E472/6), pp. 1–2; The Declaration of Lieutenant-Generall Cromwell ([17 Nov.] 1648, E472/20), pp. 1–2; The Moderate Intelligencer (16–23 Nov. 1648, E473/15), p. 1750; (23–30 Nov. 1648, E474/3), p. 1762; (7–14 Dec. 1648, E476/24), p. 1787; (14–21 Dec. 1648, E477/14), p. 1793; The Moderate (14–21 Nov. 1648, E473/1), p. 162; (28 Nov.–5 Dec. 1648, E475/8), p. 188; (12–19 Dec. 1648, E477/4), p. 212; (16–23 Jan. 1649, E539/7), p. 272; Two Petitions Presented to His Excellency, pp. 3–5; His Majesties Declaration upon his Departure from the Isle of Wyght, pp. 2–6; The Humble Representation of the Desires of the Ofﬁcers and Souldiers in the Regiment of Horse, for the County of Northumberland, pp. 1–6; A Declaration of the Ofﬁcers belonging to the Brigade of Col. Iohn Lambert ([20 Dec.] 1648, E477/10), pp. 3–8; BL, Add. MS 21246, fol. 216; Add. MS 21417, fol. 40; Firth, ed., Clarke Papers, II, p. 70; Fairfax Correspondence, IV, p. 11; D. Farr, ‘The Military and Political Career of John Lambert 1619–57’ (PhD thesis, Cambridge, 1996), pp. 257–9. The Moderate (10–17 Oct. 1648, E468/2), pp. 115–16. According to Gilbert Mabbot, the editor of The Moderate, who had excellent connections among the northern parliamentarians, the petitioners demanded ‘exemplary justice’ upon all offenders ‘without partiality, there being no exception therein to excuse any particular person (though the highest and greatest incendiary and Delinquent) from Justice’: The Moderate (10–17 Oct. 1648), pp. 116–17; Firth, ed., Clarke Papers, II, p. 46. T. May, A Breviary of the History of the Parliament of England, in F. Maseres, ed., Select Tracts Relating to the Civil Wars in England (2 vols, London, 1815), I, p. 127; The Moderate Intelligencer (26 Oct.–2 Nov. 1648, E470/1), p. 1725; (2–9 Nov. 1648, E470/24), pp. 1736–7; CSPD 1660–1, p. 113. Mercurius Pragmaticus (10–17 Oct. 1648), sig. Rr2; The Moderate Intelligencer (14–21 Sept. 1648, E464/25), p. 1552. Some of the Yorkshire petitioners described themselves as those who had ‘drawn a sword the second time’ in parliament’s defence. It was also endorsed by the garrison at Hull: The Moderate (10–17 Oct. 1648), p. 119; Mercurius Pragmaticus (31 Oct.–14 Nov. 1648, E470/33), sig. Zz3v; A Perfect Diurnall (25 Dec. 1648–1 Jan. 1649, E527/1), p. 2275.

REC6 7/13/01 2:40 PM Page 159

Motives for King-Killing 159 86. B. Whitelocke, Memorials of the English Affairs (4 vols, Oxford, OUP, 1853), II, p. 429; The Moderate Intelligencer (19–26 Oct. 1648, E469/1), p. 1714; (26 Oct.–2 Nov. 1648), p. 1724; The Moderate (7–14 Nov. 1648, E472/4), sig. S3. 87. The Moderate (10–17 Oct. 1648), p. 120. 88. The Moderate (30 Jan.–6 Feb. 1649, E541/15), pp. 295–6. 89. National Archives of Scotland, Hamilton Correspondence, GD 406/1/2318; The Moderate (31 Oct.–7 Nov. 1648, E470/12), sig. R2v; Scott, draft biographies of Sir Henry Cholmley, Hugh Bethell, History of Parliament Trust. 90. Bodl. MS Tanner 58, fol. 547. 91. Sergeant Thorpe Judge of Assize for the Northern Circuit, his Charge ([4 June] 1649, E558/6). 92. The Petition and Presentment of the Grand-Juries of the County of York ([29 Mar.] 1649, E548/26). 93. Underdown, Pride’s Purge, p. 299; West Yorkshire Archive Service, Wakeﬁeld, QS 10/2, p. 247. 94. Bodl. MS Nalson IV, fols 60, 108, 187, 212–13, 244, 282, 309; MS Nalson V, fols 16, 21; MS Nalson VI, fol. 14; Bodl. MS Tanner 59, fols 75, 195, 218, 266, 294, 357, 366, 389, 473, 550; MS Tanner 60, fol. 556; LJ, VII, pp. 640, 642. 95. Barber, Regicide and Republicanism, pp. 15–21. 96. Memoirs of Denzil, Lord Holles, in Maseres, ed., Select Tracts, I, pp. 227–8. 97. CJ, IV, p. 481; Wildridge, ed., Hull Letters, p. 139; Kingston-upon-Hull Archives, L449; L473. 98. BL, Add. MS 36996, fols. 47, 66, 76; CJ, V, pp. 473, 544, 549, 554, 557, 615, 638, 640, 673, 678; Bodl. MS Nalson VII, fols 22, 126, 203; HMC, The Manuscripts of His Grace the Duke of Portland I (London, 1891), p. 478; CSPD 1648–9, pp. 88, 102, 104, 105, 110, 111, 112–13, 115, 118, 119; Firth and Davies, Regimental History, p. 266; Scott, draft biographies of John Alured, Matthew Alured, Bourchier, Chaloner, Constable, Mauleverer, and Pelham, History of Parliament Trust. 99. The region’s geopolitical status was broadly analogous to that of Ulster; both lay on a major fault-line in archipelagic politics. 100. Clarendon, History, IV, pp. 430–1, 451. 101. Bodl. MS Clarendon 34, fol. 17v; [Walker], History of Independency, p. 77; Mercurius Militaris (31 Oct.–8 Nov. 1648, E470/14), p. 28. I am grateful to Dr Jason Peacey for the ﬁrst of these references. 102. J. Morrill, ‘Three Kingdoms and One Commonwealth? The Enigma of Mid-Seventeenth-Century Britain and Ireland’, in A. Grant and K.J. Stringer, eds, Uniting the Kingdom? (London, Routledge, 1995), p. 185. See also John Adamson’s contribution to this present volume (Chapter 2). 103. Two Petitions Presented to His Excellency, p. 4. 104. The Moderate Intelligencer (2–9 Nov. 1648), p. 1736. 105. Underdown, Pride’s Purge, pp. 168, 170–1. 106. J. Adamson, ‘Strafford’s Ghost: the British Context of Viscount Lisle’s Lieutenancy of Ireland’, in J.H. Ohlmeyer, ed., Ireland from Independence to Occupation 1641–1660 (Cambridge, CUP, 1995), p. 158. 107. M. Perceval-Maxwell, ‘Ireland and Scotland 1638 to 1648’, in J.S. Morrill, ed., The Scottish National Covenant in its British Context 1638–51 (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1990), p. 207.

REC6 7/13/01 2:40 PM Page 160

160 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I 108. D. Stevenson, ‘The Early Covenanters and the Federal Union of Britain’, in R.A. Mason, ed., Scotland and England 1286–1815 (Edinburgh, John Donald, 1987), pp. 175–6; P. Gaunt, The British Wars 1637–1651 (London, Routledge, 1997), p. 70. 109. After the regicide the Rump expressed surprise that the consequences of its ‘late transactions’ should entail the Scots espousing a quarrel foreign to their concern, or seeking further ‘interposition’ in the government of England: A Declaration of the Parliament of England ([22 Feb.] 1649, E544/17), pp. 19, 28. See also, J. Morrill, ‘The English, the Scots and the British’, in P.S. Hodge, ed., Scotland and the Union (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1994), p. 82. 110. See above, pp. 14–35. 111. The Moderate Intelligencer (2–9 Nov. 1648), p. 1737.

REC7 7/13/01 2:43 PM Page 161

7 Reporting a Revolution: a Failed Propaganda Campaign Jason Peacey

During the English Civil War, both royalists and parliamentarians made great strides in the development of sophisticated propaganda machinery. Parliamentarian politicians in particular sought to exert inﬂuence over the media, and to effect ‘control’ over the press. Such control manifested itself in ways which were both negative, in terms of a system of censorship, and positive, in terms of inﬂuencing the content of books, pamphlets and newspapers in a substantive way. I have traced elsewhere the development of propaganda techniques during the 1640s,1 one key to understanding the sophistication of which lies in the integration of pre-publication licensers with authors, printers, publishers, and distributors, all of whose efforts could be coordinated by politicians. Another key is the way in which the appearance of propaganda came to be timed in order to offer maximum support to individual actions, events and initiatives. Beyond identifying works of propaganda, and the nature of the propaganda machine operated by parliament during the 1640s, there are more difﬁcult questions. What were the precise intentions of those responsible, and what was the impact of their work? Was propaganda instigated to inform or misinform? Was it intended as an exercise in kite-ﬂying, in order to soften audiences for impending policy developments? Was it designed to target speciﬁc groups within society? Most difﬁcult of all is the question of the reception of propaganda, and the effect which it had on contemporary readers. Although the notion of impact is touched upon by contemporaries, such comments are scattered through private correspondence and published works, and tend to be rather bland and unhelpful. They generally involve meaningless claims about the pernicious impact of enemy propaganda, and the beneﬁcial effect of that produced by one’s own side. Interesting as such comments are, neither could be regarded 161

REC7 7/13/01 2:43 PM Page 162

162 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

as particularly trustworthy, and indeed they both ought to be regarded as propagandistic themselves. This paper, a study of the reporting of the trial of Charles I, attempts to examine some of these difﬁcult questions. It seeks to determine why the trial was reported, and what such a decision says about the motivation of those responsible for its staging. By examining the work of Henry Walker and Gilbert Mabbott, the two men who masterminded the trial reports, it reveals not just the sophistication achieved by parliament and its propaganda in the years after 1642, but the way in which the propaganda system itself reﬂected political factionalism at Westminster, and even the variety of attitudes towards the trial. Most importantly, the episode provides important insights into the ways in which propaganda might be received, and how, ultimately, the success or failure of a propaganda campaign can be assessed.

I What does the decision to report the trial indicate about the thinking of the parliamentarian and army leaders? In theory, the High Court of Justice had the power to prevent reporting of events in Westminster Hall, if they chose to hold the sessions in camera, as in a court martial. The army and the Rump decided, however, that the trial would be held in public, and as a result were unable to prevent news of events from becoming widely known. While the inevitability of trial details entering the public domain may have contributed to the decision to authorize the publication of ‘ofﬁcial’ reports, it is likely that trial reportage was actually integral to the decision to hold a formal trial. Justice needed not just to be done, but to be seen to be done, and since few would have been able to gain access to Westminster Hall, the press was obviously essential to the presentation of the case against the king. Beyond this, the decision to report the trial provides an indication of the attitude to the trial itself, and the propaganda beneﬁt which they anticipated. In essence it suggests that Charles was expected to make a plea, since his failure to do so would prevent the solicitorgeneral, John Cook, from expounding his case, thus lessening the propaganda potential. Conversely, the decision to allow publication of reports suggests that Charles was not expected to score propaganda points from the trial. It was unlikely that the reporters would have been permitted to take the risky step of providing readers with a selective report, suggesting that army and the Rump were not expecting to lose the debate.2

REC7 7/13/01 2:43 PM Page 163

Reporting a Revolution 163

II Beyond seeking explanations for the decision to report the trial, it is necessary to examine the way in which the task was carried out, and by whom. The High Court of Justice granted two prominent journalists special access to the trial, and gave them leave to publish their reports. The ﬁrst, Henry Walker, had become a controversial pamphleteer in the early 1640s, and was notorious for throwing a work called To Your Tents O Israel into the king’s coach in January 1642.3 By January 1647 he was editor of one of the most important and controversial weekly newspapers, Perfect Occurrences, and had ingratiated himself with the army grandees and their friends in parliament. In April 1647, he requested that his paper might be perused by members prior to publication, and in the following September asked to be made a licenser himself. He was subsequently granted the privilege of publishing ofﬁcial army literature.4 In 1648 he was involved in the publication of the ﬁrst English edition of the Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos, as well as an edition of Robert Parsons’s notorious Conference Concerning the Succession. Walker was widely recognized as ‘the state’s hackney intelligence monger’, and may even have shared lodgings with Cromwell.5 The second man involved in reporting the trial was Gilbert Mabbott, a journalist and licenser who had begun his career as an assistant to John Rushworth in 1642, under whom he was licensing newsbooks by April 1645.6 Although removed as a licenser by the Presbyterians in the summer of 1647, Mabbott was restored to his post with the blessing of Sir Thomas Fairfax, for whom he was an agent, in the following autumn.7 Throughout 1648 he maintained his links with both Fairfax and the army, not least through his brother-in-law, William Clarke.8 Little evidence survives in the accounts of the commissioners for the trial regarding the logistics of reporting, and no mention is made of permission for Walker and Mabbott to have privileged access to the proceedings. Nevertheless, the nature of their reports indicates that both were admitted to Westminster Hall, and either granted seats close to the clerks, or given access to ofﬁcial notes of each day’s proceedings. As a result, they were able to produce accounts which conveyed the unique atmosphere in the court, and to inform their readers of the proceedings with remarkable, and perhaps unprecedented detail. The accuracy of such reports – indicating that they may have had assistants to help take notes – is evident from the fact that their authenticity was never challenged.

REC7 7/13/01 2:43 PM Page 164

164 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

Both Walker and Mabbott realized that, with events unfolding rapidly during the trial, the standard newspaper format was wholly inadequate. At the time, there were no daily papers, although different weekly papers appeared on most days. This meant that individual papers, constrained to appear once a week, would not be able to keep up with the news, and would not be able to report satisfactorily events which occurred in the days immediately before they went to press. The answer, as put into practice by both men, was to have a roster of different newspapers, appearing on different days of the week, carrying news of the trial alongside reports of other notable events. In addition, each man produced works devoted to reporting the trial, which could be published as often as necessary. In Henry Walker’s case, the work devoted to the trial appeared as four instalments of Collections of Notes Taken at the King’s Tryall, published by Robert Ibbitson, his regular printer. Each edition covered one day of the trial, in what was probably the most regular news reporting the English public had ever had.9 In addition, Walker was the author of Perfect Occurrences, two editions of which covered the trial, and which was also published by Ibbitson. Ibbitson and Walker also collaborated on a new journal called A Perfect Summary (which later became A Perfect Collection). Mabbott’s work devoted to the trial appeared as A Perfect Narrative of the Whole Proceedings of the High Court of Justice, which covered the ﬁrst two days of the trial, and as two editions of A Continuation of the Narrative, each of which covered a single day’s events. This work was written by ‘C.W.’, almost certainly William Clarke, licensed by Mabbott, and printed for John Playford. It claimed to be ‘published by authority to prevent false and impertinent relations’.10 Mabbott also appears to have been responsible for the appearance of The Charge of the Commons of England Against Charls Stuart, as read to him in the High Court on 20 January,11 and continued to supervise the appearance of a newspaper, The Moderate. He also licensed the appearance of A Perfect Diurnal, published by Francis Coles and Laurence Blaiklock, as well as The Perfect Weekly Account, and The Kingdomes Faithfull Scout, although the latter, which only began to appear on 2 February, offered no account of the trial.12 In comparing the ofﬁcial accounts of the trial the ﬁrst thing to notice is that Walker got off to the better start. His ﬁrst instalment, covering the opening day of the trial, was licensed on 20 January, and may have appeared as early as the following day.13 Mabbott’s series of works ﬁrst appeared in the form of the Perfect Diurnall on 22 January, but its author clearly had time to offer only the briefest of accounts of the ﬁrst day’s

REC7 7/13/01 2:43 PM Page 165

Reporting a Revolution 165

proceedings.14 Another journal licensed by Mabbott, The Perfect Weekly Account, which appeared on 24 January, offered little evidence that its author had been in the court on either the 20, 22 or 23 January, the events of which were covered only brieﬂy.15 Mabbott’s coverage improved dramatically, however, with the appearance of the ﬁrst instalment of his Perfect Narrative, on 23 January.16 Furthermore, in the aftermath of the trial and execution, it was Mabbott’s account which proved the most enduring. On 23 February, his three-part edition was republished in one volume, as King Charls His Tryal.17 Advertised as including Bradshaw’s long peroration prior to sentencing, its author also noted that it had been ‘corrected and enlarged by a more perfect copy’.18 This edition also appeared, albeit in an edited form, in a French translation, and Francis Coles, who had printed one of the newspapers licensed by Mabbott, published another French account.19

III Beyond identifying the personnel responsible for reporting the trial and examining their methodology, it is possible to use such reports for the purpose of saying something about the nature of factional politics at Westminster in January 1649. In my study of parliamentarian polemic in the civil wars, I have sought to show how propaganda, like politics itself, became factionalized during the 1640s, and how the propaganda machine gradually came under the sway of both the Independents and the army.20 As events unfolded in 1648, however, and as disagreements emerged between old Independent grandees, ofﬁcers of the army council and army radicals, such splits came to be mirrored in the press, and a struggle developed to control the press by each faction. This certainly appears to have been true during the trial of Charles I. In essence, there is more to the story of the decision to allow Walker and Mabbott to report the trial than simply the recognition of their talents as journalists. The episode is interesting because of the acrimonious argument in which the two men had become involved during 1648 and, while their dispute clearly reﬂected economic competition, it is possible that there were underlying political differences, and that each man represented the interests of a different faction. The ﬁrst major controversy between the journalists in 1648 had centred on Mabbott and John Dillingham, author of the Moderate Intelligencer, who has long been recognized as the spokesman for the so-called ‘royal Independents’.21 Mabbott, who provoked the dispute by refusing to license Dillingham’s work, and by launching a rival

REC7 7/13/01 2:43 PM Page 166

166 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

newspaper called The Moderate, probably regarded Dillingham’s views as being too favourable towards the king, and his paper was popular enough to be a threat.22 This row was followed by the more important dispute between Mabbott and Walker. In March 1648, Walker sought to secure ofﬁcial approval for his newspaper, and was subsequently granted permission to publish Perfect Occurrences.23 He then claimed to have faced threats from Mabbott, leading him to complain about the power which the latter held, particularly by virtue of being both a licenser and a journalist.24 Walker sought Mabbott’s replacement as licenser – at least of his own work – either by himself or some other parliamentary appointee.25 In September 1648 Dillingham was involved in the investigation which was duly launched into Mabbott’s paper, ‘wherein the king and Parliament is much dishonoured’.26 While simple economic competition cannot be ruled out as a stimulus for such controversies, it seems clear that Walker and Mabbott disagreed politically. Mabbott had fashioned The Moderate into an extremely radical paper, whose views have been likened to those of the Levellers, while Walker more accurately reﬂected the views of the parliamentary Independents, and the grandees of the army council.27 It is possible, therefore, that the dispute between Walker and Mabbott in 1648 was part of a struggle for inﬂuence between the radical army faction and the parliamentary Independents and army ofﬁcers. The latter were almost certainly apprehensive about the former, and about the power of their most able spokesman. As a result, the decision was taken, in early January 1649, to appoint new licensers, in an attempt to offset Mabbott’s power. The ﬁrst, Theodore Jennings, had a long record of service in parliamentary administration, as a factotum of the Committee of Both Kingdoms, while the second, Henry Whalley, was advocate-general of the army, and intimately connected with the army grandees.28 These two men may be taken to have represented the interests of the Independent grandees and the army council, and were probably both a good deal less radical than Mabbott. Furthermore, it was they who would subsequently be responsible for licensing the various works of Henry Walker, and a petition of 16 January 1649 conﬁrms the basis of the latter’s support. Walker informed the House of Lords that the Stationers’ Company was refusing to recognize a letter of approbation which he had received from members of the army council. The ofﬁcers who had signed the letter were Peter Stubber, adjutant-general, William Rowe, scoutmaster-general, and Henry Whalley, as well as Colonels Edward Whalley, Thomas Sanders, John Barkstead, John Hewson, John Okey and Thomas Pride, and two army chaplains, Hugh

REC7 7/13/01 2:43 PM Page 167

Reporting a Revolution 167

Peters and Isaac Knight.29 Five of these would subsequently become regicides, but it is interesting that the majority had been part of the army council which had sided with Henry Ireton during the Whitehall Debates, and had rejected radical ideas during discussions on the Agreement of the People.30 Such is the background to the decision to allow Walker and Mabbott privileged access to the High Court of Justice in January 1649. It seems likely that different factions within the army and the Rump sought to secure the privilege for their favoured authors. Given the radicalism of Mabbott’s newspaper, there appear to have been parliamentarians and Independents who feared that Mabbott’s reports of the trial would be too controversial, and who therefore sought to ensure that the more moderate Walker was also permitted to attend.

IV If Mabbott and Walker had different political outlooks, and represented divergent political interests, it is important to assess the extent to which such prejudices were evident in their reports of the trial. It is certainly possible that their different approaches to reporting reﬂected political disagreements over the proceedings in Westminster Hall. They chose different approaches, for example, to the famous incident when Lady Fairfax interrupted the proceedings. In reporting proceedings on 29 January, Mabbott noted that when Bradshaw claimed that the charge was laid ‘in the name of the people of England’, ‘a malignant lady interrupted the court (saying not half of the people), but she was soon silenced’.31 Walker – perhaps out of deference to one of the army grandees – made no mention of the interruption.32 More importantly, it is possible that the two men’s very different approaches to reporting had a political signiﬁcance. Walker’s version offered a detailed account of the scene in Westminster Hall, and conveyed a vivid sense of the atmosphere. He provided, for example, details of personnel and court assistants, and of episodes such as Charles’ attempts to attract John Cook’s attention by tapping him on the shoulder with his cane. However, he offered little direct quotation of speeches and exchanges.33 Walker’s coverage of the second day again offered a vibrant sense of the atmosphere in the court, and of the noise and chaos caused by the people ‘thronging’ into Westminster Hall. Once again he offered readers an account of the exchanges between Bradshaw and Charles in summary form, a pattern of coverage which remained constant for the remainder of the trial, and which was mirrored in the other

REC7 7/13/01 2:43 PM Page 168

168 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

works which formed part of his roster.34 Although offering little colour, little setting, and little of the atmosphere in the court, the strong point of Mabbott’s work was the verbatim account of the speeches and exchanges which it purported to offer.35 This approach was also evident in Mabbott’s newspaper, where it was explained as being necessary ‘because I see some imperfect printed copies of the proceedings of the court martial this day come forth to deceive the people’.36 When his paper was forced to condense certain speeches because of the pressure of space, full versions were included in the following week’s edition, as well as in his serialized account of the trial.37 His third instalment of the latter was also able to offer by far the most detailed account of Bradshaw’s lengthy oration on 27 January, which Walker had only mentioned in brief, albeit with the comment that it was ‘most excellent’.38 Furthermore, Mabbott’s approach was mirrored in Francis Coles’ French account, which, although taking the form of a summary, nevertheless offered some quoted exchanges from the trial.39 It is possible that Walker’s decision to convey a sense of the confusion and noise in Westminster Hall reﬂected the unease with which he and others observed the proceedings, since through his account the trial appeared far less stage-managed, and those present far less uniformly hostile to the king. The approach adopted in Mabbott’s work, on the other hand, may have been a novel, deliberate, and provocative act of lèse majesté, for in quoting the exchanges between the king and Bradshaw in such detail, he made perfectly clear to his readers the extent to which Charles was treated with no more regard than any other man indicted for treason. When he adopted obstructive tactics, challenged the authority of the court, and sought to make lengthy speeches, he was dealt with ﬁrmly by Bradshaw, and spoken to as a man, and not as a divinely ordained monarch. Furthermore, the tone of Mabbott’s account was undoubtedly more hostile to the king. When he commented upon the incident when Charles tapped the shoulder of Cook to interrupt him, for example, Mabbott noted that the tip of the king’s cane fell off, and added that this was ‘conceived will be very ominous’.40 There are also instances where adjectival emphasis can be regarded as conveying political sensibilities. In their accounts of events on 23 January, for example, Mabbott described Charles’ ‘austere countenance’, while Walker noted his ‘sad countenance’. Walker also noted the fact that the king’s arms had already been replaced by the ‘the kingdoms arms, which is a red cross in a white ﬁeld’, a symbol that the verdict on the king’s guilt had already been reached.41 The two men also differed in their accounts of one of

REC7 7/13/01 2:43 PM Page 169

Reporting a Revolution 169

the speeches which Charles made on 23 January regarding the treaty on the Isle of Wight. Mabbott’s account quoted the king as mentioning that he was ‘in a treaty’ and recorded him as having said that, ‘when I had almost made an end of the treaty, then I was hurried away and brought thither’.42 Walker, however, gave a much more detailed account of the way in which the king had ‘made a narrative of the treaty which he saith was so near concluded’.43 In his Perfect Occurrences, furthermore, Walker noted that the king had said that he had been treated ‘honestly and uprightly’ during the negotiations.44 If Mabbott offered the most enthusiastic account of the trial, then he was probably reﬂecting the views of those radicals most eager to see Charles brought to justice and sentenced to death. Walker, however, conveyed to his readers the sense that a political settlement had been more plausible than Mabbott appears to have been prepared to admit, perhaps reﬂecting the view of those who supported the trial, and even became regicides, but who did so perhaps with a degree of reluctance, and in the face of the king’s ongoing obstinacy. In this sense, his coverage was closer to that of men like Dillingham than to that of Mabbott.45

V To all intents and purposes, the propaganda campaign surrounding the trial appears to have been a great success. The two different reports of the trial provided the public with the nearest thing to daily news they had ever had. The accounts were produced rapidly and effectively, and the existence of a number of newspapers under the control of Mabbott, Walker, Jennings and Whalley permitted widespread coverage of events in the High Court of Justice. Furthermore, it is important not to overplay the political differences between Walker and Mabbott. While they may have reﬂected the opinions of different factions at Westminster, their accounts certainly complemented each other, and both were ultimately pro-regicide and pro-republic. However, the success of this propaganda campaign depended not only upon the skill with which works were produced, but the impact which they made upon the public. The infrequency with which this topic is dealt reﬂects the difﬁculty of making a judgement regarding ‘impact’. However, in the second half of this paper, I intend to argue that, for the propaganda campaign surrounding the trial of Charles I, impact can be assessed, and the degree of success measured. There were clearly some basic drawbacks with the press campaign, in terms of problems inherent in the reporting of the trial. The ﬁrst centred

REC7 7/13/01 2:43 PM Page 170

170 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

on the king’s failure to enter a plea. His refusal to do so meant that John Cook was unable to deliver his set-piece speech as solicitor-general, although this setback was circumvented without much difﬁculty, since the ‘speech’ was quickly printed regardless.46 A more serious problem concerned the interruptions and objections raised by those present. The interjection by Lady Fairfax, already mentioned, posed difﬁculties for the journalists, who came to different conclusions about whether to include it in their accounts. More serious, however, was the objection raised by John Downes, one of the commissioners for the trial. Neither Walker nor Mabbott reported his outburst, and yet the public nature of the trial meant that it was impossible to cover up its occurrence. One royalist commentator certainly exploited the doubts expressed by Downes, saying that he was ‘prickt in conscience’, but added that he was ‘paid off with ﬂouts and jeers, intermingled with no small threats’.47 Most importantly, there were problems stemming from the king’s demeanour at the trial, and his responses to Bradshaw. In order to establish how much of a problem this posed, it is necessary to ﬁnd some way of assessing the reaction to the trial, and to the king’s behaviour in particular. One way of doing this is to examine the correspondence of contemporary witnesses. During the trial, one contemporary wrote that the king’s deportment was ‘magnanimous and kingly, questioning their authority, and smiling when it was said they represented the whole people of England’. He also said that Charles was ‘kingly smooth and pious’, and added that ‘His Majesty holds up with an unbroken courage’.48 A letter of 25 January noted that the king was ‘full of courage, and nothing moved, nor greatly gave regard to what they said. The Hall seemed . . . to be divided: many people and soldiers weeping, others crying justice’.49 Later, on 18 March 1649, Dr Denton wrote that ‘the king’s book, with his deportment, [and] endurance, at his trial and on the scaffold, hath amazed the whole kingdom, to see so much courage, Christianity, and meekness in one man’.50 In addition, it is possible to look for printed notices of the king’s trial. In 1651, for example, Clement Walker produced a hostile account of the proceedings, as The High Court of Justice, or Cromwells New Slaughter-House in England.51 In 1658, Peter Heylyn noted the king’s behaviour at his trial, and Clarendon, in his History, wrote of ‘his majestic behaviour under so much insolence, and resolute insisting upon his own dignity, and defending it by manifest authorities in the law, as well as by the cleverest deductions from reason’.52 Sir Philip Warwick later wrote that ‘the king’s deportment was very majestic and steady, and though his tongue usually hesitated, yet he was very free at this time, for he was never discomposed in mind’.53

REC7 7/13/01 2:43 PM Page 171

Reporting a Revolution 171

Such printed attacks upon the trial, and such eulogies to Charles’ demeanour only appeared in later years, however. More important is evidence from 1649, and here too there are signs that royalists found solace in the king’s performance. As early as 2 February 1649, one royalist pamphlet appeared entitled A Hand-Kirchife for Loyall Mourners, Or a Cordiall for Drooping Spirits. Its author commented that recent events had been ‘so like him in the temper of his sufferings, with so much meekness and fortitude, undauntedness of spirit, and submission to the will of God’.54 By the early summer of 1649, many royalist works made reference to the trial in this way,55 while in the following months others appeared which noted the king’s challenge to the authority of the High Court of Justice.56 Another work from 1649, called The Bloody Court, or the Fatall Tribunall, and printed in blood red ink, spoke of ‘so much meekness in his replies to their reproaches, that it even thawed the rigid bowels of those rigid clowns, viz. judges, to a kind of inward reluctancy; ask some of their consciences whether this is not true, they do confess it’. This author continued by saying that, the king, with an amiable grave countenance beholding his enemies, and joining with it such meek language, so full of deep and solid reason, made his enemies admire and applaud him and his friends to weep bitterly for him. The king would not (because in conscience he could not) acknowledge their authority. It was, he said, ‘admirable to see this heroic prince bear up undauntedly under all these discouragements with which he was oppressed’.57 Another royalist author, John Quarles, wrote in his Regale Lectum Miseriae that: None could observe during the time he stood Before his Pilates, that his royal blood Mov’d into fury, but his heart was prone To hear their speeches, and retort his own, But when they found his language did increase With sense, he was desired to hold his peace. Quarles also ‘quoted’ the king, as with the following, poeticized section: . . . May I desire to know from whence this great authority doth ﬂow That you pretend to act by? If it be Derivative; I shall desire to see,

REC7 7/13/01 2:43 PM Page 172

172 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

And know from whom; till then I shall deny To give my tongue a license to reply . . . and, As for my charges, I own it as a thing of small concernment, as I am a king You cannot try me; what your new made laws may do, I know not, have a care and pause before you act in blood, strive and convince Your stubborn hearts, and know I am your prince Y’are but abbortive judges, have a care Ye may be tangled in your own made snare.58 These authors may not have been in court themselves, and probably had to draw upon other sources of information. Needless to say, some of their works were based upon the ofﬁcial accounts of the trial.59 Sometime in 1649, George Bate, a royal physician, published a work called Elenchus Motuum, and amidst a wide-ranging critique of parliamentarianism, turned his attention to the trial. He said that the king appeared, ‘without the least sign in his countenance of any discomposure of mind’, and that he had ‘a majesty in his looks and words that cannot be expressed’. Bate went on to quote some of the exchanges between Charles and Bradshaw, and to discuss the king’s demeanour as he was led from the court after sentence was passed. Bate claimed that ‘though he was strained with time and disturbed with the noise of barbarous soldiers, yet with a religious and sedate mind . . . he ﬁnds the favour of God amidst the hatred of man, and vanquishes and drives away the terrors of death even before they approach’.60 This reliance upon ofﬁcial sources by royalist opponents of the trial and the republican regime became yet more evident in the words of others. The letter of 25 January, quoted above, is interesting for the way in which it noted that ‘all the kings admired responsals at the new court’s bar are in print’, an indication that its author was ﬁnding solace in works intended to support the trial and attack the king.61 Royalists such as the merchant John Paige were probably not alone in turning to, and recommending to others, both the Eikon and the printed editions of the trial, in order to ﬁnd comfort in the months after the execution.62 Furthermore, one pamphlet which appeared in late May 1649 noted that ‘I have . . . chieﬂy chosen for my guide that stitched paper, which they say was published by special authority . . . this I have the rather chosen, because

REC7 7/13/01 2:43 PM Page 173

Reporting a Revolution 173

their damnation may the more fully ﬂow from their own mouths and presses’. This author noted the king’s demand to know the authority by which the court sat, and quoted Charles as saying, ‘True it is there are several authorities; for thieves and robbers make themselves an authority by their swords and pistols, is that therefore just?’, and ‘To a Parliament I will give account, to their demands I will answer, but who are you? Who gave you this authority? Where are my Lords?’.63 The most dramatic indication of the way in which royalists turned the ofﬁcial accounts of the trial to their own ends in 1649, however, was the appearance of Perfect Narratio Totius Processus Supremi Tribunalis Justitiae. This Latin account of the trial was appended to one of the illicit miniature versions of the Eikon Basilike to appear in the second half of 1649, and also appeared in a compendium of Civil War pamphlets in the same year. Not only were the proceedings of the trial regarded by some as offering beneﬁcial propaganda for the royalist cause, but also this particular account of the trial was little more than a word-for-word translation of Mabbott’s narrative, albeit covering only the events on 20 and 22 January.64 In addition, senior royalists evidently sought to circulate accounts of the trial on the Continent. In early 1650, therefore, Lord Hatton wrote to the royalist ambassador in Paris, Sir Richard Browne, with orders that he should ‘divulge and publish’ a new translation of the trial proceedings by one Testard, ‘wherein you shall give your assistance to further and promote it in our name and interests, and upon all occasions show such respect and kindness to the said Monsieur Testarde, and any other whom we shall employ for the publishing thereof’.65 Furthermore, in 1660, Mabbott’s original publisher, John Playford, displayed how easy it was for former parliamentarians both to trim their sails to catch the prevailing political wind, and to turn the account of the king’s trial into a straightforward piece of royalist propaganda. Playford republished the Mabbott edition in May 1660 under the new title Englands Black Tribunall, which went through many editions during the next seventy years, providing one of the best indications of the way in which both contemporaries and later generations reacted to the published account of Charles’ trial.66 Subsequently, edited highlights would appear in at least some of the editions of the king’s works as well.67 The decision to report the revolution had been a mistake.

VI It is clear from such comments, printed or otherwise, that royalists took signiﬁcant comfort from the king’s performance at the High Court of

REC7 7/13/01 2:43 PM Page 174

174 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

Justice, and that they sought to turn his trial to their advantage, by including comments about, and quotes from, its proceedings in their own propaganda. In addition to judging the impact of the propaganda campaign with the beneﬁt of their comments, however, it is necessary to observe the way in which the government viewed royalist tracts in the aftermath of the execution of Charles I. The Rump and Council of State certainly recognized the threat posed by royalist pamphlets, especially works such as the Eikon Basilike. Royalist newspapers such as Mercurius Elencticus, Mercurius Pragmaticus and The Man in the Moon attracted the attention of the council and its agents, as did the Defensio Regia by Salmasius.68 Furthermore, errant licensers – who had been giving approval to works attacking the new regime – were called to account and removed from ofﬁce.69 Royalist commentators also noted the zeal with which the Eikon was targeted by the new regime. The royalist newspaper Mercurius Pragmaticus said that one Mr Munford was assaulted and plundered by a ‘crew of sectarian ragamufﬁn souldiers’ for binding copies of the Eikon. The author said that: yet further to express their cankered malice to their murdered sovereign and together with his life to end his fame and extinguish his supernatural virtues, they like envious wretches leave no means unassayed to stiﬂe and delete those sweet meditations and melliﬂuous lines, which his late majesty’s more than humane pen had so divinely composed. He concluded that ‘this book, I say, is become a stumbling block to rebellion, and lyeth so heavy upon their blood surfeited appetites, that they cannot by any means digest it: therefore, they make daily search and enquiry at all booksellers and printing houses’.70 Furthermore, when the Commons issued an order, on 16 March 1649, that James Cranford should be removed from ofﬁce as licenser, they also ordered that the serjeant-at-arms was to ‘make stay of, and seize at the press, all those books now printing or printed under the name of the book of the king’.71 On the following day it was reported that the press had been seized, and that the printer was at the door of the House. The matter was then referred to a committee for investigation.72 The royalist stationer, Richard Royston, certainly claimed to have been questioned over his work on the Eikon, and the council also ordered, on 31 May 1649, that the perpetrators of the ‘Henderson papers’, which had been printed in one of the editions of the Eikon, were to be apprehended.73 Others associated with the Eikon also experienced arrest and

REC7 7/13/01 2:43 PM Page 175

Reporting a Revolution 175

imprisonment during 1649. William Dugard, the master of Merchant Taylors’ School, who also operated a private printing press, found himself in trouble for producing Bate’s Elenchus Motuum, Salmasius’s Defensio Regia, as well as the Apothegmata, and at least some editions of the Eikon.74 The Council of State ordered the Merchant Taylors to remove Dugard in February 1650, his press was seized, and he was despatched to Newgate.75 In addition, the arrest was ordered of John Williams, the publisher of the Eikon who had been responsible for the edition containing the account of the trial, on 25 December 1649.76 More important than the reaction to royalist pamphlets, however, is evidence concerning the attitude of the council to those works whose appearance it had blessed in January 1649. In particular, it is essential to examine their reaction to the second republication, in midNovember 1649, of Mabbott’s account of the trial. This work differed slightly from the earlier edition by including the full charge against Charles, as well as an account of events on the scaffold. The other changes were of a minor nature, although they included the return of the reference to Lady Fairfax’s interruption, which had been removed in the February reprint.77 On 19 November 1649, however, the Council of State ordered the serjeant-at-arms, Edward Dendy, to apprehend Peter Cole, Francis Tyton and John Playford, the stationers responsible for producing the edition, and to seize all copies of the work. Two days later, on 21 November, the council appointed a committee comprising its press supremos, John Bradshaw and Thomas Scot, together with Anthony Stapley, to investigate the printers.78 This response to the new edition of Mabbott’s work may be regarded as surprising, given that the regime apparently remained willing to endorse publication of accounts of the trial in translation.79 One work in particular, the Histoire Entière, which was published in London in January 1650, appears to have received ofﬁcial backing. Essentially a translation of Mabbott’s edition, it offered more descriptive detail concerning the scene in Westminster Hall, and a lengthy account of the charge read on 20 January and the sentence passed on 27 January, as well as details of the witness statements, all of which were lacking from Mabbott’s account.80 Such information presumably came from ofﬁcial sources, and suggests that the work received ofﬁcial backing. This supposition is given credence by the fact that John Milton apparently licensed the work on 16 December 1649.81 If this is the case, then the work was being given ofﬁcial approval and seen through the press at precisely the time when attempts were being made to suppress the reprint of Mabbott’s edition.

REC7 7/13/01 2:43 PM Page 176

176 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

However, the appearance of this work does little to contradict the idea that the government was worried about the reception of their ofﬁcial account of the trial. It was, for example, quite common to sanction books for a foreign market that were not available in England, not least with Milton’s polemical tracts. More importantly, there are reasons to suspect that the work did not receive ofﬁcial support. Milton’s involvement, for example, is not certain, since by 1649 the stationers’ register provides an unreliable indication of ofﬁcial approval, and even of the identity of the person who entered an individual work.82 Furthermore, there are hints that the book was actually produced by someone opposed to the trial, since it included comments about the king’s ‘superb’ and ‘assured’ countenance during the proceedings, which suggest that it was inspired not by Milton, but by royalists.83 There is, furthermore, no reason to believe that the attempt to suppress the new edition of the trial proceedings represented an attempt to protect a publishing privilege from an interloping stationer. The printers whose arrests were ordered in December 1649 were the same men who had published the work in the previous January. Neither is there any reason to believe that the decision was part of the feud between Walker and Mabbott. In spite of the fact that Walker continued to ﬁnd ofﬁcial favour in 1649, while Mabbott’s radicalism brought about his downfall as a journalist and licenser, there is no evidence that Walker played any part in the decision to ban the new edition, or that he would have had any reason to do so. Mabbott, whose fall from grace was far from total, probably had nothing to do with the republication, which was likely to have been little more than a publishing initiative by Playford and his associates. The most plausible explanation for the decision to suppress the new edition of the account of the trial, therefore, is that it was a response to the way in which royalists were turning the king’s performance to political advantage. This explanation also has the advantage of making sense of the decisions, made at the same time in December 1649, to suppress printed accounts of other controversial trials, of both John Lilburne and the Earl of Strafford.84 These decisions display an awareness that the accounts of ‘state trials’ provided fertile ground in which to nurture martyrs, and, in the case of the king’s trial, an admission that the Rump’s propaganda campaign had backﬁred.

VII The press campaign which coincided with the trial of Charles I provides an indication of the way in which politicians thought about the

REC7 7/13/01 2:43 PM Page 177

Reporting a Revolution 177

proceedings against the king, and about the part that polemical literature could play in support of political and judicial business. Furthermore, it displayed much that was sophisticated about the propaganda techniques developed during the 1640s. It made evident the ability of both sides to co-ordinate the efforts of journalists, stationers and licensers, and the possibility of producing good quality tracts, pamphlets and newspapers with sufﬁcient speed to keep up with the developments in Westminster Hall. Beyond this, however, the episode displayed some of the problems inherent in the propaganda machinery of the day, in that the press inevitably mirrored the tensions and divisions within the parliamentarian community. The fractures in political life at Westminster were revealed to the wider world, or at least to the more subtle contemporary reader, by the way in which competing factions found their voice in print. Perhaps most importantly, the story of the manner in which the trial was reported provides an opportunity to analyse the way in which political and polemical literature impacted upon contemporaries. The Council of State learnt the hard way that a propaganda campaign could backﬁre, and that its consequences could be unforeseen, unexpected and, ultimately, undesirable.

Notes 1. J. Peacey, ‘Henry Parker and Parliamentary Propaganda in the English Civil Wars’ (PhD thesis, Cambridge, 1994). 2. J. Raymond, Making the News (Moreton-in-Marsh, Windrush Press, 1993), p. 207. 3. E. Sirluck, ‘To Your Tents O Israel: A Lost Pamphlet’, HLQ, XIX (1956), pp. 301–5; J.B. Williams, ‘Henry Walker, Journalist of the Commonwealth’, The Nineteenth Century and After, LXIII (1908), pp. 454–63. 4. LJ, IX, p. 142; HLRO, MP 27/9/47; LJ, IX, p. 450. 5. The Man in the Moon (27 June–4 July 1649, E562/27), p. 90; Mercurius Elencticus (22–29 March 1648, E434/1), p. 138; J.G. Muddiman, The Trial of King Charles the First (London, W. Hodge & Co., 1928), p. 21. 6. CSPD 1641–3, p. 417; CSPD 1644–5, p. 414; LJ, VIII, pp. 439, 441. 7. HLRO, MP 30/9/47; LJ, IX, p. 456; CP, I, pp. 1–5, 218. 8. CSPD 1648–9, p. 225; CJ, V, p. 695; CJ, VI, p. 19; LJ, X, pp. 499, 501; E. Kitson and E.K. Clarke, ‘Some Civil War Accounts, 1647–50’, Publications of the Thoresby Society, XI (1904), pp. 141, 146, 166, 169, 192, 193; CP, II, pp. 11, 226; National Library of Scotland, Adv. MS 35.5.11, fols 17, 22, 50; Chequers MS 782, fols 43, 45, 58v, 60, 62. 9. Collections of Notes Taken at the Kings Tryall [1] (1648, E538/27); Collections of Notes Taken at the Kings Tryall [2] (1648, E538/30); Collection of Notes Taken at the Kings Tryall [3] (1648, E539/4); Collections of Notes Taken at the Kings Tryall [4] (1648, E540/9). 10. A Perfect Narrative of the Whole Proceedings (1648, E538/28, E541/19); A Continuation of the Narrative 2 (1648, E539/15, E541/20); A Continuation of the

REC7 7/13/01 2:43 PM Page 178

178 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

Narrative 3 (1648, E540/14, E541/21). For the idea of Clarke’s authorship I am grateful to Frances Henderson, who drew my attention to Clarke’s claim, in 1660, to have been at the trial, as well as to evidence that he took notes at other trials in the High Court of Justice, and on the king’s speech on the scaffold: State Trials, V, cols 1017–73; Worcester College, Oxford, MS 70; King Charls his Speech (1649, Worcester College, AA.2.4/11), p. 9. The Charge of the Commons of England (1648, E541/18). The Kingdomes Faithfull Scout (26 Jan.–2 Feb. 1649, E541/5). Collections of Notes [1], pp. 1–5. A Perfect Diurnall (15–22 Jan. 1649, E527/9), p. 2304. The Perfect Weekly Account (17–24 Jan. 1648, E540/2), pp. 361–4. Perfect Narrative, pp. 1–16. King Charls His Tryal, 1st edn (1649, E545/4). Ibid., pp. 31–44. Narration des Procedures de la Haute Court de Justice en l’Examen du Roy Charles ([Paris], 1649); Relation generale et veritable de tout ce qui c’est fait au procez du roy de la Grand Bretagne (Paris, 1649). Peacey, ‘Henry Parker’. A.N.B. Cotton, ‘John Dillingham, Journalist of the Middle Group’, EHR, XCIII (1978), 817–34; PRO, SP 28/56, fols 430r–v. The Royall Diurnall (25–31 July 1648, E455/15), sig. A2v; Mercurius Bellicus (30 May–6 June 1648, E446/2), p. 7; Mercurius Elencticus (20–27 Sept, 1648, E464/46), sig. Vv; HMC, Seventh Report (London, 1879), pp. 33, 53; LJ, X, pp. 345, 508. HMC, Seventh Report, p. 16; LJ, X, p. 354. HMC, Seventh Report, p. 45; LJ, X, p. 442. HLRO, MP 8/9/48; HMC, Seventh Report, p. 51; LJ, X, p. 494. LJ, X, p. 508. J. Diethe, ‘The Moderate: Politics and Allegiances of a Revolutionary Newspaper’, HPT, IV (1983), pp. 247–79; R. Howell and D.E. Brewster, ‘Reconsidering the Levellers: the Evidence of The Moderate’, Past and Present, XLVI (1970), pp. 68–86. Peacey, ‘Henry Parker’, pp. 247–8. HLRO, MP 16/1/49; HMC, Seventh Report, p. 70; LJ, X, p. 645. B. Taft, ‘Voting Lists of the Council of Ofﬁcers, December 1648’, BIHR, LII (1979), pp. 138–54. A Continuation, 3, p. 4. Collections of Notes [4], p. 2. Collections of Notes [1], pp. 1–5. Collections of Notes [2], sigs. A–A4v; Collections of Notes [3], sigs. A–A4v; Collections of Notes [4], pp. 1–8; A Perfect Summary (22–29 Jan. 1648, E527/13), pp. 2–5, 8; Perfect Occurrences (18–25 Jan. 1648, E527/11), pp. 803–10; Perfect Occurrences (26 Jan.–2 Feb. 1648, E527/14), pp. 814–6. Perfect Narrative, pp. 1–16. The Moderate (16–23 Jan. 1649, E539/7), sigs. (ee)–(ee2v). A Continuation, 2, pp. 1–8; The Perfect Weekly Account (24–31 Jan. 1648, E540/23), pp. 366–70; A Perfect Diurnall (22–29 Jan. 1649, E527/12), pp. 2307–12; The Moderate (23–30 Jan. 1649, E540/20), pp. 274–80, sig. (ff ); The Moderate (30 Jan.–6 Feb. 1649, E541/15), pp. 287–9.

REC7 7/13/01 2:43 PM Page 179

Reporting a Revolution 179 38. A Continuation, 3, pp. 10–13; Collections of Notes [4], pp. 6–8; Perfect Occurrences (26 Jan.–2 Feb. 1648, E527/14), pp. 814–16. 39. Relation générale et veritable. 40. The Moderate (16–23 Jan. 1649, E539/7), sigs. (ee)–(ee2v). 41. A Continuation, 2, p. 1; Collections of Notes [3], sig. Av. 42. A Continuation, 2, p. 5. 43. Collections of Notes [3], sig. A3. 44. Perfect Occurrences (18–25 Jan. 1648, E527/11), p. 806. 45. Moderate Intelligencer (18–25 Jan. 1649, E539/13), sigs. 9rv, 9r2, (9rv), (9r2); Moderate Intelligencer (25 Jan.–1 Feb. 1649, E541/4), sig. S8f2; The Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer (23–30 Jan. 1648, E540/22), pp. 1233–40; The Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer (30 Jan.–6 Feb. 1648, E541/17), sigs. 7r–7r2. 46. J. Cook, King Charls his Case (1649, E542/3). 47. G. Bate, Elenchus Motuum (1685), p. 148; State Trials, V, cols. 1005, 1210–13; J. Downes, A True and Humble Representation (1660); HMC, Seventh Report, pp. 157–8. 48. T. Carte, ed., A Collection of Letters and Papers (2 vols, 1739), I, pp. 209–10. 49. Carte, ed., Letters and Papers, I, pp. 210, 212. 50. F.P. Verney and M.M. Verney, Memoirs of the Verney Family (2 vols, London, Longmans & Co., 1907), I, p. 446. 51. The High Court of Justice, or Cromwells New Slaughter-House in England (1651, E1951/9), pp. 19–59. 52. P. Heylyn, A Short View of the Life and Reign of King Charles (1658), p. 150; Clarendon, History, IV, p. 488. 53. Sir P. Warwick, Memoirs of the Reign of King Charles the First (Edinburgh, 1813), p. 379. 54. A Hand-Kirchife for Loyall Mourners (1649, E541/6), p. 6. 55. The Royall Legacies or Charles the First (1649, E557/1), p. 1; The Life and Death of King Charls the Martyr (1649, E571/2), p. 2. 56. Loyalties Tears (1649, E561/15), p. 5; The Scotch Souldiers Lamentation (1649, E560/15), p. 17. 57. The Bloody Court; or the Fatall Tribunall (1649), pp. 6–10. 58. J. Quarles, Regale Lectum Miseriae: Or a Kingly Bed of Misery (1649, E1345/1). 59. Engelandts Memoriael (Amsterdam, 1649), pp. 123–69; Le Procez, L’Adiournement personel, L’interrogatoire, et l’arrest de mort du roy d’Angleterre (Paris, 1649). 60. G. Bate, Elenchus Motuum (1685), pp. 144–8, 150–1. 61. Carte, ed., Letters and Papers, I, p. 210. 62. G.F. Steckley, ed., The Letters of John Paige, London Merchant, 1648–1658 (London Record Society, 1984), pp. 3–4. 63. The Royall Legacies, pp. 7–8. 64. Eikon Basilike . . . Perfecta Narratio Totius Processus Supremi Tribunalis Justitiae ([Hague] London, by William Bentley for John Williams and William Shears, 1649); F.F. Madan, A New Bibliography of the Eikon Basilike of King Charles the First (Oxford Bibliographical Society, new series III, 1949), pp. 99–100; Sylloge Varorium Tractatum (Hague, 1649). 65. BL, Egerton 2547, fol. 13. This move was prompted in part by another translation, by one Marsys, which was deemed to have portrayed Charles as a Catholic: ibid., fols 5–10v.

REC7 7/13/01 2:43 PM Page 180

180 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I 66. Englands Black Tribunall Set Forth in the Triall of King Charles I (1660, E1805/1). See also The Oglio of Traytors (1660). 67. Basilika. The Workes of King Charles the Martyr (2 vols, 1662), I, pp. 425–46; Basilika. The Works of King Charles the Martyr, 2nd edn. (2 vols in one, 1687), I, pp. 189–205; The Works of King Charles I (1735), pp. 398–420. 68. CSPD 1649–50, pp. 106, 204, 411, 474, 529–30, 534, 537, 541, 550; CSPD 1650, p. 143. 69. Most importantly, Caryl had entered into the stationers’ register on 16 March the Eikon, while Downham subsequently entered the Apothegmata, or extracts from the Eikon, on 5 June: A Transcript of the Registers of the Worshipful Company of Stationers (3 vols, London, privately printed, 1913–14), I, pp. 314, 319. 70. Mercurius Pragmaticus (27 Feb.–5 Mar. 1649, E546/4) sig. Hhh2. 71. CJ, VI, p. 166 (my emphasis). 72. Ibid. 73. CSPD 1649–50, p. 167; Madan, New Bibliography, pp. 116, 153, 164–7; Eikon Basilike. The Pourtraicture of His Sacred Majesty . . . with the papers which passed at Newcastle betwixt His Majesty and Mr, Alexander Henderson (1649). 74. Merchant Taylors’ Company, Court Minute Book 9, fol. 196v; H.R. Plomer, A Dictionary of the Booksellers and Printers . . . 1641 to 1667 (London, Bibliographical Society, 1907), pp. 67–8; F. Madan, ‘Milton, Salmasius and Dugard’, The Library, fourth series, IV (1924), pp. 119–45; Madan, New Bibliography, pp. 168–70. 75. CSPD 1649–50, pp. 500, 568; Merchant Taylors’ Company, Minute Book 9, fols 338r–v, 346. 76. CSPD 1649–50, p. 453; Madan, New Bibliography, pp. 171–3. 77. King Charls His Tryal, 2nd edn (1649, E1303/1), pp. 13–19, 43, 74–83. The decision to remove the reference in February may have followed pressure from Mabbott’s employers: King Charls His Tryal, 1st edn, p. 23. 78. CSPD 1649–50, pp. 401, 555. 79. Relation generale et veritable; Narration des Procedures. 80. Histoire entière et veritable (1650, E1353/1), pp. 17–21, 42–59, 86–91. Thomason received his copy on 20 January 1650. 81. Stationers’ Register, I, p. 333; J.M. French, Life Records of John Milton (5 vols, New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1949–58), II, pp. 276, 302. 82. Peacey, ‘Henry Parker’, p. 254. 83. Histoire entière, p. 21. 84. CSPD 1649–50, pp. 558, 561.

REC8 7/13/01 2:45 PM Page 181

8 The Levellers and the End of Charles I Andrew Sharp

I It is not surprising to learn from John Lilburne that about the time of the famous Putney debates, he, together with Richard Overton, William Walwyn, John Wildman, Maximilian Petty, and their New Model Army confederates, were branded ‘Levellers’.1 The London civilians and the army agents may not have been in a coherent or lasting political grouping and there were differences within each arm of the alliance;2 but in the events leading up to and during the debates (of 28 October–9 November 1647) they presented to their opponents the spectacle of anarchical conspiracy: a conspiracy against the constitution, against the order of society, and – as the crucial component in both – against both Charles I and kingship. There at Putney, LieutenantGeneral Oliver Cromwell and Commissary-General Henry Ireton found themselves, on behalf of the ofﬁcer corps, opposing in a General Council of the army what its authors called An Agreement of the People for a Firm and Present Peace upon Grounds of Common Right and Freedom. Written by a combination of civil and military ‘Levellers’, and defended in debate by army agents elected from the regiments together with Wildman and Petty among their civilian friends, the Agreement proposed (‘as their native right’ and the ‘price’ of the people’s ‘blood’) a written constitution authorized by an ‘agreement of the people’ at large. There would be a ‘Representative of the People’ elected on a reformed franchise so that the ‘deputies’ were ‘more indifferently proportioned according to the number of inhabitants’. Even more threatening to the current constitution of authority would be the abolition of the legislative powers of king and the House of Lords, much of the king’s executive power, and all of the ancient royal prerogative power in foreign 181

REC8 7/13/01 2:45 PM Page 182

182 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

affairs. The power of the ‘representative’, stated the Agreement, would extend: without the consent or concurrence of any person or persons, to the enacting, altering, and repealing of laws, to the erecting and abolishing of ofﬁces and courts; to the appointing, removing, and calling to account magistrates and ofﬁcers of all degrees; to the making of war and peace; to the treating with foreign states. This was not all. Among the powers ‘reserved’ from the sphere of government and left altogether in the hands of the ‘represented’, was the individual’s choice of religious expression. ‘Matters of religion and the ways of God’s worship are not at all entrusted by us to any human power, because therein we cannot remit or exceed a tittle of what our consciences dictate to be the mind of God, without wilful sin’. Under the scheme proposed, there was no prospect of a centrally controlled national church: no room for Charles to head an Anglican church anything like as powerful as the pre-war church, or for the victorious Long Parliament to discipline the populace by way of the Presbyterian church they were in the process of constructing at Westminster, or for clergy of any denomination to practise a theocracy other than over the particular congregations which might allow them to. Thus the Leveller settlement of the kingdom after civil war would overturn a constitution and a form of government legitimated by immemorial custom: one which featured a hereditary king and House of Lords – as well as a House of Commons – and a church deeply implicated in the state. Henceforth moreover, ‘in all laws made, and to be made, every person’ should be ‘bound alike; and . . . no tenure, estate, charter, degree, birth or place’ should ‘confer any exemption from the ordinary course of legal proceedings’. King, lords, the gentlemen of the commons, clergy, and all their friends and relations in city and country, were to be denied the legal privilege and protection due to their rank, degree or ofﬁcial position.3 These were the areas in which the powers and immunities of government and heraldically deﬁned4 rank were to be abridged or abolished. In the light of such proposals, Lilburne’s story that it was Cromwell and Ireton who ‘baptised’5 the supporters of the Agreement ‘Levellers’ makes good sense. The New Model ofﬁcers might be willing to reform the franchise for the House of Commons, to force the king to call parliaments biennially and have them sit for at least four months (but no more than eight) once called, to abolish episco-

REC8 7/13/01 2:45 PM Page 183

The Levellers and the End of Charles I 183

pacy and make optional the English liturgy, to give parliament control over the militia for ten years, and in other more minor ways to regulate the power of the king. But they stood squarely for the ancient constitution of king, Lords and Commons, and they would restore the king, queen and their issue ‘to a condition of safety, honour and freedom in this nation, without diminution to their personal rights, or further limitation to the regal power’. Their propositions – contained in the Heads of Proposals they were proffering to Charles even as the General Council met at Putney – would become a binding settlement only with his consent. The very idea that the consent of the people or even of any organized group like the General Council could constitute a structure of government was dismissed by Cromwell as leading to ‘anarchy’.6 Another story, however, had it that it was Charles himself who had baptised the ‘Levellers’.7 Again this would not be surprising, given the merely residual powers and privileges that the Agreement seemed to leave for him. Perhaps the people, in coming to an agreement, might even abolish kingship. The process suggested by the Agreement did not rule abolition out – and this at a time when the end of the king was contemplated by none of the other main political actors: not by the ofﬁcers, nor yet by parliament, nor the City of London, nor the Presbyterian divines at Westminster, nor the Scots. So in The Levellers Levell’d of December 1647, the royalist Marchamont Nedham was able to condemn the Levellers, assured of their singularity, in a doggerel beginning: No King, the Levellers do crie, Let Charles impeached be; And for his conscience let him die When (hey Boyes) up we go we. We’ll have no Ruler, Lord, or Peere, O’er us for to command: We’ll levell all alike, we sweare, And kill those that withstand Bring forth the King, chop off his Head We ne’re our wish shall gaine Till we upon his trunk do tread. His Blood must wash our staine.8 Such was the well-deserved Leveller reputation as to Charles and kingship.

REC8 7/13/01 2:45 PM Page 184

184 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

When, however, the trial and execution actually occurred during the winter of 1648–49 the Levellers would have nothing to do with it, even though a further, bitter, civil war had been fought, in Leveller as well as in army opinion because of the king’s unyielding grip on the reins of tyranny. It is curious that their organization, so voluble in print and busy in organizing petitions and demonstrations throughout 1647 and during much of 1648, was utterly silent from 28 December 1648 until Lilburne burst forth on 28 February 1649 with Englands New Chains Discovered – the ﬁrst in a series of pamphlet attacks on the new commonwealth and its masters. As A.L. Morton said of what he took to be a fatal tactical blunder of the leadership: ‘At this most critical moment in their history they simply ceased to function’.9 After England’s New Chains, Lilburne was joined by Overton, Walwyn and Thomas Prince (all imprisoned with him for The Second Part of Englands New Chains of about 24 March) in a pamphlet war against the new military dictatorship. It was only then, and after the event, that they publicly opposed the settlement they had been powerless to shape in face-to-face negotiations with the New Model ofﬁcers in November and December 1648. But by then Wildman had apostatized,10 and the rank and ﬁle of the movement in London and in the army would not, or could not, effectively support them. Hopeless demonstration and mutiny were all that were left. It is the embarrassing combination of the Levellers’ well-developed intellectual and spiritual anti-monarchism with their tactical and political abhorrence of the army leaders’ disposal of the king that gives their reactions to the end of Charles and kingship their particular colour and weight. It probably accounts, too, for the late timing of Lilburne’s entirely negative published reaction to the trial and political settlement, and the evident inconsistency to be found among the Levellers on the issue of the end of the king. For his part, Lilburne was able to ﬁnd in his intellectual heritage a series of positions which indicated why he was on principle capable of thinking of a restored monarchy. He had made those positions clear to the army ‘grandees’ during the negotiations and was to repeat them and embellish them in 1649. But while it is easy to see why he was against the commonwealth, it is hard to imagine that his heart and mind were really at ease with the idea of restoring kingship. Certainly other Leveller sources suggest a happier reaction to Charles’ end. Indeed the Levellers as a group – in so far as they were still a group in 1649 – should have had no problem denying accusations of royalism, indeed, should not even have been accused of it. But that it was their enemies who had brought about Charles’ end

REC8 7/13/01 2:45 PM Page 185

The Levellers and the End of Charles I 185

made it impossible for them to rejoice unalloyedly and to reject royalism utterly convincingly.

II There is no question but that the Levellers had little time for Charles I, for kings and for kingship. If scripture, reason and a juridico-moral history of an ancient constitution inherited from one’s forefathers showed most Englishmen that kingship – including Charles’ kingship – were central to the order of things, they showed the Levellers, on the contrary, that ‘the freeborn people’ were central. Scripture taught them the basic political and social equality of mankind and their equal access to religious truth. Reason entailed natural equality and freedom. History demonstrated the genesis and continuance of kingship in England in conquest and arbitrary tyranny over ‘freeborn Englishmen’. As Overton put it in 1646: The history of our forefathers since they were conquered by the Normans does manifest that this nation has been held in bondage all along ever since by the policies and force of the ofﬁcers of trust in the commonwealth, amongst whom we always esteemed kings the chiefest. And what in much of the former time was done by war and by impoverishing of the people to make them slaves and to hold them in bondage, our latter princes have endeavoured to effect by giving ease and wealth unto the people; but withal corrupting their understanding by infusing false principles concerning kings and governments and parliaments and freedoms.11 Thus for the Levellers – Overton and Walwyn in particular – there could be no question of the generally binding nature of the customs and laws they had inherited from their forefathers and which were ‘conﬁrmed’ in Magna Carta and in succeeding declarations. Only certain old customs were good, including the taking and keeping of coronation oaths, and adherence to certain legal procedures and subject’s rights; but no thanks to kings.12 The Levellers attacked kingly authority and kingship from the beginning of the movement in 1646, and were to continue to do so, especially when they attacked him as the ‘prerogative fountain’ of the House of Lords. But it was on 6 January 1647 that there appeared the longest concentrated attack on kings, kingship and Charles I that the Levellers were to produce. Ironically it was by Lilburne, the Leveller

REC8 7/13/01 2:45 PM Page 186

186 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

who was in 1648–49 to defend kingship as better than military dictatorship. In Regall Tyrannie Discovered, Lilburne repeated by-thencommon Leveller arguments about the popular basis of justiﬁed government, the purposes of government lying in the common weal, and the rights of the people to resist and destroy evil governments. Of the doctrines of the Agreement of the People of nine months later, only the natural right of the people to constitute governments anew was lacking.13 The title page summed up his claims: all lawfull (approbational) instituted power by God amongst men, is by common agreement and mutual consent. Which power (in the hands of whomsoever) ought alwayes to be exercised for the good, beneﬁt and welfare of the Trusters, and never ought otherwise to be administred: Which, whensoever it is, it is justly resistable and revokeable; It being against the light of Nature and Reason, and the end wherefore God endowed Man with understanding, for any generation of men to give so much power into the hands of any man or men whatsoever, as to enable them to destroy them. It will be noted that Lilburne did not deny that there might be various forms of ‘instituted power’, including monarchy. In common with most anti-royalist thinkers his view was that God allowed men to choose for themselves what forms of government they would, and he could not and did not deny the possibility that kingly power could have been chosen by the English and could have been consented to by them.14 But the history of English law and politics told against kings, kingship and against Charles I himself. The actual origin of kingship did not lie in consent but in conquest, or if it did lie in consent (as he sometimes said it did, as evidenced in king’s coronation oaths to govern according to such laws ‘as the people shall choose’) that consent was soon obliterated in conquest. The subsequent history of kingship was a history of kings pursuing their own grossly immoral ends; and Charles was the worst king of all. Regall Tyrannie would show, again according to the title page: The Tyrannie of the Kings of England, from the dayes of William the Invader and Robber, and Tyrant, alias the Conqueror, to this present King Charles, Who is plainly proved to be worse, and more tyrannicall then any of his Predecessors, and deserves a more severe punishment from the hands of this present Parliament, then either of the dethroned Kings, Edw. 2. or Rich. 2. had from former Parliaments;

REC8 7/13/01 2:45 PM Page 187

The Levellers and the End of Charles I 187

which they are bound by duty and oath, without equivocation or colusion to inﬂict upon him, He being the greatest Delinquent in the three Kingdoms, and the head of all the rest.15 All these points (religious, natural, legal and historical) were then proved at some length. More interestingly in the light of Charles’ subsequent fate, the modes of religion, nature, law and history were used to show that he should be resisted and punished for his sins. In a single passage,16 Lilburne rehearsed what he elsewhere showed in asides and digressions – an almost normal parliamentarian case for opposing Charles. Only two aspects of Lilburne’s case were not normal: a digression where he broke off to attack the Lords, like the king, as ‘usurpers and incroachers’ with no right to authority at all; and a clear conclusion that the king himself (as opposed to his evil counsellors) must be punished. He must certainly be stripped of his power and probably killed. So far as the reader can discern his drift, kingship itself should probably be abolished, or if not abolished rendered utterly powerless. Charles, Lilburne argued, following the lines of parliament’s case, had a contract with his people in the coronation oath to govern by law; and the House of Commons, ‘the representative body of the realm’ (‘the only, proper, competent, legall, supreame judge’) was in a position to judge breaches of that contract. Moreover, the facts on which they would judge were plain enough. The ﬁrst 17 years of his reign were ‘a constant continued Act of violating the Lawes of the Kingdome and the Liberties of the people’. It might have been thought that when he called the Long Parliament he ‘intended to turne over a new leafe’; but no: he ‘had a ﬁnger in the Irish rebellion’; he was slow to proclaim the Scots traitors; he refused to pass the Militia Bill; he withdrew from parliament with a ‘design to levy war’ against his trust and oath; he sent forth of his own volition a host of proclamations and declarations against parliament. It may be that he was ‘seduced by evil counsell’ into making war against his parliament and people; but his acts were owned by him, and the responsibility was his. As parliament itself had told him when he was at Oxford during the last year of the war in 1646: ‘he was guilty of all the innocent blood shed in England, Scotland and Ireland, since the wars’. Charles was, in brief, guilty of tyranny – of governing outside the law. Legal precedent showed what should be done: Edward II (‘who was not one quarter so bad as C.R.’) had been ‘called to account by the parliament’ and deposed. And if the precedent were thought to be merely de

REC8 7/13/01 2:45 PM Page 188

188 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

facto and not de jure, scripture and reason would supply the defect. The books of Judges and Kings instructed the Christian that: ‘GOD is a just GOD, and will revenge innocent blood even upon Kings’. And if it were thought that ‘Kings are above people and not punishable by any’, one should consider that God was the ‘fountain, or efﬁcient cause of all punishment’, and that ‘He . . . hath expressly commanded, Man, his rationall creature, shall not tyrannize one over another, or destroy . . . power) each other’. God, continued Lilburne, does not normally punish for himself and leaves the matter to human instruments, especially supreme magistrates: but ‘in extraordinary cases . . . when the magistrate is extraordinarily corrupted in the execution of his duty, God hath raised up particular or extraordinary persons to be his executioners’. For executioners there must clearly be. It is, on this and other evidence, clear that the Levellers had developed a strongly anti-monarchical political theory by the time of Putney. It is equally clear that they were undismayed by the thought of punishing Charles and of replacing contemporary kingship and his ‘creatures’ sitting in the House of Lords with a government dominated by a ‘representative of the people’. Soon after Putney, on 23 November 1647, they petitioned the Commons as the ‘supreme authority’ to declare that authority and restore the people’s freedoms in instituting the Agreement.17 The presenters, including Thomas Prince, were immediately imprisoned.18 For, besides the fact that the Commons had already declared the Agreement subversive of the ‘fundamental constitution of the kingdom’,19 there is reason to think – and their opponents made public the reasons20 – that under the guise of petitioning their real intention was to expand their organization through the nearby counties and in the New Model so as to ‘give law’ to parliament. Though Lilburne and Wildman denied it, such intentions, reported to have been implicit in an organizing meeting, certainly seem to be expressed in their petition of 20 January 1648. There, though they did not precisely ask for the abolition of king and lords,21 and though they insisted that the House of Commons declare itself the supreme power, the whole is suffused with such a desire for vengeance that the Commons might well have thought that the reformation and bloodletting demanded would not stop short of themselves. The petition, its presenters said: SHEWETH: That the devouring ﬁre of the Lords wrath, hath burnt in the bowels of this miserable Nation, until its almost consumed. That upon a due search into the causes of God heavy judgements, we ﬁnd that injustice and oppression, have been the common National sins, for which the

REC8 7/13/01 2:45 PM Page 189

The Levellers and the End of Charles I 189

Lord hath threatned woes, confusions and desolations, unto any people or Nation; Woe (saith God) to the oppressing City. Zeph. 3. 1.22 It was Charles who had ‘opened the ﬂoodgates’ of ‘injustice and oppression’ and brought war upon his people before he himself was brought low. ‘God’, continued the petition, expects Justice from those before whose eyes he hath destroyed an unjust generation. Zeph. 3. 6. 7. and without doing justly, and releeving the oppressed, God abhors fastings and prayers, and accounts himself mocked. Eas. 58. 4, 5, 6, 7. Mic. 6. 6, 6, 8. But the victorious parliament was failing to bring him to account and to free the people. They had continued to negotiate with Charles (the Commons allowing the Lords to act with them), and had thus in effect conceded that it was partly a matter of the ‘Will of the King and the Lords, which were never chosen or betrusted by the People, to redress their grievances’. ‘And so the invaluable price of all the precious English blood; spilt in the defence of our freedoms against the King, shal be imbezelled or lost; and certainly, God the avenger of blood, wil require it of the obstructors of justice and freedom. Iudges 9. 24’.23 That it was not just Charles but kingship that was at issue was made manifest soon after, in Putney Projects of December 1647. Here Wildman – in between attacking Cromwell and Ireton for continuing to deal with the king, and dismissing the House of Lords as his mere ‘creatures’ – devoted several passionate pages24 to attacking the king’s ‘ﬁve inslaving principles’. These were: 1) ‘that all power and authority in this Nation is fundamentally in the WILL of him, and his heirs, and successors’; 2) ‘that his absolute WILL is supream, or a law paramount to all determinations of Parliament’; 3) ‘that its his essential propertie to sit in the throne as our God on earth, without any BAND upon him to conforme his actions to our lawes, as their proper rule’; 4) ‘that the estates, liberties, and lives of the whole Nation, are his RIGHT and PROPERTY, and at his absolute WILL and pleasure for the disposing whereof he neither OUGHT nor can be REQUIRED to render the least ACCOUNT’; 5) ‘that its essentiall to his absolute dominion and greateness to maintaine the government of his Church by Bishops’.

REC8 7/13/01 2:45 PM Page 190

190 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

After the second war in which they supported parliament but expressed great distaste for all men and authorities (Walwyn claiming that ‘all the quarrel we have at this day in the Kingdome, is no other then a quarrel of Interests, and Partyes, a pulling down of one Tyrant to set up another’),25 the Levellers settled in the petition of 11 September 1648 for what was in broad outline their ﬁnal policy. They did not, indeed, insist on an ‘agreement of the people’ as the constitutive act of constitutional reformation as they were later to do. But they combined their insistence on the ‘supreme authority’ of the Commons with equal insistence that the House should carry out reforms which would set out a new constitution along the lines of the Agreement. They therefore petitioned for the supremacy of a reformed ‘Representative of the People’, limited in its powers to control religion and other matters, and itself controlled by law. Of the position of the king they made the following complaints (among the many they in addition made of parliament): 1. That you would have made good the supremacy of the people in this honourable House from all pretences of negative voices either in king or Lords’; . . . . 6. ‘That you would have made both kings, queens, princes, dukes, earls, lords and all persons alike liable to the law of the land, made or to be made; that so all persons, even the highest, might fear and stand in awe, and neither violate the public peace nor private right of person and estate . . . without being liable to account to other men. . . . 19. That you would have declared what the duty or business of the kingly ofﬁce is, and what not, and ascertained the revenue past increase or diminution, that so there might never be quarrels about the same. . . . 25. That you would have done justice on the capital authors and promoters of the former or late wars, many of them being under your power, considering that mercy to the wicked is cruelty to the innocent and that all your lenity doth but make them all the more insolent and presumptuous. . . . 27. That you would have laid to heart all the abundance of innocent blood that has been spilt and the inﬁnite spoil and havoc that has been made of peaceable, harmless people by the express commission of the king, and seriously consider whether the justice of God be likely to be satisﬁed or his yet-continuing wrath be appeased by an Act of Oblivion’.26 Whoever read this cannot have had much doubt that the Levellers wished the king brought to justice, and kingship at the very least

REC8 7/13/01 2:45 PM Page 191

The Levellers and the End of Charles I 191

severely cropped in its powers and privileges. Even to think that the Levellers proposed the outright abolition of king and Lords would not be too wild an inference. How then did it come about that Levellers were silent on such matters during the crucial revolutionary period, very soon after, when the second civil war ﬁnally ended? What can explain the grudging paucity of their response to a revolution not so far, after all, from many of their ideals?

III It was with the clearly anti-monarchical Levellers that the army leadership, especially Cromwell and Ireton, thought itself wise to negotiate during the winter of 1648–49. Bitter and frustrated after the second civil war, the ofﬁcers pushed towards the ﬁnal solution of the issue of Charles I. Old and new royalists were defeated, Presbyterian parliamentarians could be no longer allowed to negotiate with him who in April 1648 they had called ‘that man of blood’.27 The trick would be to ﬁnd a settlement which would satisfy the army’s supporters in parliament, the Independent churchmen in London, and the ‘Levellers’ in the City and the New Model. The negotiations began with a message sent by Lilburne to Cromwell at the siege of Pomfret Castle, probably just before 18 September when parliament’s treaty with the king at Newport began – against all the advice of the Leveller petition of 11 September. Lilburne, whose account one perforce must mostly follow here,28 was convinced the king should not be negotiated with, and told Cromwell that the war could not have been justiﬁed except as defending a ‘just government’, ‘under which the glory of God may shine forth by an equall distribution unto all men’ and in ‘the defence of the peoples right’ and ‘freedom’ under such a form of government. Cromwell, a far less enthusiastic proponent of forms of government and less optimistic about what good government could bring, was nevertheless prepared to parley. He directed his answer to some parliamentary ‘gentleman independents’.29 These in turn (exactly when is not clear) invited Wildman, Lilburne and others to the Nag’s Head Tavern by Blackwell Hall where the Independents were accustomed to meet. It was at this ﬁrst Nag’s Head meeting, according to Lilburne: where we had a large debate of things, and where the just ends of the War were as exactly laid open by Mr Wildman, as ever I heard in my life. But towards the conclusion, they plainly told us, The chief

REC8 7/13/01 2:45 PM Page 192

192 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

things ﬁrst to be done by the Army, was ﬁrst To cut off the Kings Head, &c. and force and thoroughly purge, if not dissolve the Parliament. Lilburne demurred, saying among other things that the Levellers did not trust the army enough to allow it to destroy king and parliament without there being an ‘Agreement of the People’ solidly in place. At which the ‘gentleman independents . . . were some of them most desperately cholerick’. Cooler heads prevailed and the debaters agreed to meet again at the Nag’s Head on 15 November. The rest of the story is well enough known: how the two Nag’s Head groups agreed on a series of propositions revolving around the production of an Agreement of the People; how they took their proposals to the ofﬁcers at the army headquarters at St Albans; how Ireton (playing for time at Windsor so that the army could enter London and purge parliament) was brought to agree to a drafting body of four army ofﬁcers, four Independents, four ‘honest’ parliament men (and even four Presbyterians should they, incredibly, accept an invitation); how the body to draft the Agreement, meeting regularly in London after Pride’s Purge, had the ground cut from under its feet after 11 December when Ireton took the completed document to the General Council of the Ofﬁcers at Whitehall, not merely for the Council’s information but for change; and how Lilburne, Wildman, Petty and Walwyn argued through late November and December both in the drafting body and in the army Council against Ireton’s proposals.30 By mid-December, Lilburne reported later, while Wildman, Walwyn and Overton stayed on to battle in the Council as it worked towards what Lilburne was to call the Ofﬁcers’ Agreement, ‘I took my leave of them as a pack of dissembling juggling knaves’. And on 15 December he published (with slight changes) what the Levellers and Independents had agreed upon in what is now known as the ‘second agreement’: Foundations of Freedom: or an agreement of the people.31 But the ofﬁcers, offering concessions to the Independents as to their religious liberty – and probably career inducements to Wildman – did not need to listen any more. Wildman and Walwyn are last recorded at the Council on 18 December, and both fell silent thereafter as the revolution progressed through the trial, execution and institution of the commonwealth ‘without king and lords’.32 On 28 December Lilburne and 13 others including Overton, published A Plea for Common Right and Freedom. There they called for an Agreement of the People along the lines of Foundations of Freedom, which in substance would echo the petition of 11 September 1648, and they berated the ofﬁcers for insisting all along on control of religion and an

REC8 7/13/01 2:45 PM Page 193

The Levellers and the End of Charles I 193

uncontrolled right to punish in parliament: ‘for what freedom is there for Conscientious people where the Magistrate shall be intrusted with a Restrictive power in matters of Religion? Or to judge and punish in cases where no Law hath been before provided?’ The next day Lilburne ‘and some of his disciples (with him)’, delivered the Plea to the Council of Ofﬁcers which was still debating their Agreement. The Levellers fell into debate and ‘declared their dissent in some particulars’. But they made no impression. The trial, execution and constitutional revolution had been decided upon. Lilburne, with interests to contest in Durham – it remains a moot point as to whether parliament voted him rent on delinquents’ lands on 22 December33 to silence him – refused (according to his own story)34 an invitation to join his brother Robert on the High Court to try Charles, and rode north in early January on his own affairs. He did not return to London until after the king was dead. For their part the ofﬁcers ﬁnally produced their own Agreement which they introduced to parliament on 20 January.35 It differed in various ways from Foundations of Freedom,36 but the changes were in any case irrelevant: it was never heard in parliament. The trial and execution of the king and the process of founding a commonwealth went on regardless, driven by the petitioners themselves. Lilburne’s later analysis was that the ofﬁcers had entered negotiations, meerly to quiet and please us (like children with rattles) till they had done their main work; (viz. Either in annihilating or purging the House to make it ﬁt for their purpose, and in destroying the King; unto which [they] never had our consents in the least) that so they might have no opposition from us . . . for if they ever intended an Agreement, why would they let their own lie dormant in the pretended Parliament ever since they presented it?37 It is hard to disagree with him.38 In The Second Part of Englands New Chains, the work mainly of Lilburne, but owned by Overton and Prince, who together with Walwyn were arrested and committed to the Tower for it, Lilburne summed up the Leveller view of the revolution: The Removing the King, the taking away the House of Lords, the overawing the House, and reducing it to that Passe, that it is become but the Channell, through which is conveyed all the Decrees and Determinations of a private Councell of some few Ofﬁcers, the erecting of their Court of Justice, their Council of State, the Voting of the

REC8 7/13/01 2:45 PM Page 194

194 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

People the Supreame power and [the commons] the Supreme Authority: all these Particulars, (though many of them to good ends, have been desired by Wel affected [sic] People) are yet become, (as they have managed them) of sole conducement to their ends, and Intents, either by removing such as stood in the way between them and the Power, wealth, or command of the Common-Wealth; or by actually possessing and investing them in the same.39 The treatment of Charles and kingship was, in the Leveller view, simply a means to tyranny. What could have been in other circumstances a major victory for the people was part of a long train of abuses carried out by the grandees.

IV It remains to record the mixture of pragmatism and principle with which the Levellers greeted the king’s trial and execution and the abolition of kingship. In fact they seem to have had no single view, and most of their expressions of opinion were set in contexts where they were obsessed with other matters. Walwyn and Wildman, for their parts, were silent. Only their newspaper,40 The Moderate, perhaps sometimes by way of the pen of Overton, spoke in tones of almost unalloyed approval of the events of January and February 1649. It asserted that ‘Government by blood, is not by the Law of Nature, or Divine, but only by Human and Positive Law of every Commonwealth, and may, upon just cause, be altered’; it afﬁrmed the right of the people to bring Charles Stuart to trial. He was a king not by consent but by conquest: one who had broken all ‘bounds and limits’, not least the laws he had sworn to maintain in his coronation oath.41 It approved the abolition of the House of Lords and the Lords’ legal privileges.42 It noted that parliament, ‘the better to take away the sting of tyranny . . . by successive Kings’, had voted the abolition of kingship.43 Overton too, on his own account, expressed fairly straightforwardly his support of the revolution. In a petition of 7 March 1649 to ‘the supreme Authority of England, the Representors of the people in Parliament assembled’, he spoke gratefully of the old prohibition on petitioning being lifted: your late Proceedings in taking off the King, (the supreamest piece of Justice that ever was in England,) your rejection of the House of Lords, your vindication of the supreme Authority of the Nation, declaring and avowing it to be originally (as of right it is) in

REC8 7/13/01 2:45 PM Page 195

The Levellers and the End of Charles I 195

the People, and legally in their representative, clearing the same from all pretences of a Negative voice, doth animate your Petitioner with lively hopes that now at last, after all the blood, the sighs and tears of the people . . . we shall yet ﬁnd a Sanctuary of Refuge in this House.44 Yet his approval might not have been as straightforward as it seems. He was, it has to be said, probably intent on ﬂattering those he petitioned. And certainly Lilburne’s opinion, and accusations laid at Levellers of being royalists, points in another direction. Lilburne’s position was enunciated at the ﬁrst meeting of the Nag’s Head group in September 1648, and it was one followed thereafter by him, and implicit in most subsequent Leveller activity. This was the meeting, it will be recalled, when Lilburne had said to the ‘gentlemen independents’ that he would not trust the army, having cut off the king’s head, to reach a settlement – at which his hearers had grown ‘choleric’. What Lilburne had actually said was this: Its true, I look upon the King as an evill man in his actions, and divers of his party as bad: but the Army had couzened us the last yeer, and fallen from all their Promises and Declarations, and therefore could not rationally any more be trusted by us without good cautions and security: In which regard, although we should judge the King as arrant a Tyrant as they supposed him, or could imagine him to be; and the parliament as bad as they could make them; yet there being no other balancing power in the Kingdome against the Army, but the King and Parliament, it was in our interest to keep one Tyrant to balance another, till we certainly knew what Tyrant that pretended fairest would give us our freedoms; that so we might have something to rest upon, and not suffer the Army (so much as in us lay to devolve all the Government of the Kingdom into their wills and swords . . . and leave no persons nor power to be a counter-ballance against them: And if we should do this, our slavery for the future (I told them) might probably be greater then ever it was in the Kings time, and so our last great errour would be greater then our ﬁrst; and therefore I pressed very hard for an agreement amongst the People ﬁrst, utterly disclaiming the thoughts of the other, [t]ill this was done. And this (I told them) was not onely my opinion, but I beleeve it to be the unanimous opinion of all my friends with whom I constantly conversed.45

REC8 7/13/01 2:45 PM Page 196

196 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

In future Lilburne’s case as to the king was to be an elaboration of this position, both before and after the revolutionary events of January and February 1649. It was one published after the facts though often retrospecting on what he had argued in the meetings with the grandees at St Albans, Windsor and Whitehall. It spoke, ﬁrstly, of bringing Charles to justice. The king was certainly guilty, and should have been brought to justice and executed. Justice, however, required that he be tried according to the laws of the land and not by an army ‘junto’ or a ‘mock parliament’ in conditions where ‘all authority is broken’. Of course it was by no means clear that Lilburne had the law on his side in this matter – at his trial Charles asked precisely by what existing legal right he was tried – and so secondly his case was one that sought to show, however tendentiously, that there was some kind of right on his side. At Windsor he told the grandees that, as they themselves admitted, there was no authority in England – conquest was not a title – so that the people were now free to enter a: mutuall engagement to appoint rules whereby to chuse (seeing they cannot be in one place themselves) and impower new Trustees, Commissioners or Representors, to make equall and just Lawes to bind all, and to provide for their future well-being, there being no other [w]ay justly, either in Law or Reason; to settle this Nation in peace and quietness, but by one of these two means: First, either by admitting the King in again upon terms: or else, secondly, to lay the foundations of a just Government, by an Agreement made amongst the generality of the people capable of it.46 At that time he seems to have envisaged the people choosing ‘a new and equal free Representative’, and legality then consisting in either the representative trying the king, ‘or else . . . their Judges sitting in the Court called the Kings Bench’. Impeachment then, by a newly constituted and just authority would be ‘legal’; and so would trial by the ordinary courts. Yet, thirdly, there was something to be said for the king and for kingship in the condition of ‘mere nature’ where there was no authority, or (to say the same thing) where the military junta ruled by arbitrary and illegal will. A parliament purged by the army had neither the authorization of the other two estates nor of the people: and therefore the whole power of all is returned to [the people] singly and alone, (but if any part [of power] is yet inherent in any

REC8 7/13/01 2:45 PM Page 197

The Levellers and the End of Charles I 197

[previously constituted authority], then it is in PRINCE CHARLES as Hair apparent to his Fathers crown and Throne) over whom (I mean the people) no persons nor power on earth can now set no change of Government whatsoever, but what is done by their own mutuall consent by AGREEMENT AMONGST THEMSELVES.47 The crucial point was that the people had a constitutive power which they should exercise, but that if they could not, the prince (Lilburne is writing in June 1649) retained a legal title to the throne. Finally, Lilburne’s case played off the prince’s residual right against the tyrannical usurpation of the grandees, most provocatively in the face of Hugh Peters, Cromwell’s chaplain, whom he told in May 1649: I had rather chuse to live seven years under old King Charls his government, (nothwithstanding their beheading him as a Tyrant for it) when it was at the worst before this Parliament, then live one year under their present Government that now rule[s]: nay, let me tell you, If they go on with that tyranny they are in, they will make Prince Charls have friends enow, not only to cry him up, but also ready to ﬁght for him, to bring him to his Fathers Throne . . . I must aver to you, I had rather by many degrees chuse to live under a regulated and wel-bounded King without tyrannie, then under any Government with Tyranny.48 In August 1649, in An Impeachment of High Treason against Oliver Cromwell, he summed up his many publications of the year portraying the tyranny of the new junto which he had found to be as bad as that of the king.49 Then, having advised the people not to side with either the ‘present power’ or with the Prince of Wales, he added that: if we must have a King, I for my part had rather have the Prince, then any man in the world because of his large pretence of Right, which if he come not in by Conquest, by the hands of foraigners (the bare attempting of which may apparently hazard him the loss of all at once, by gluing together the now divided people to Joyn as one man against him) but by the hands of Englishmen, by contract, upon the principles aforesaid (which is easie to be done) the people will easily see that presently thereupon, they will injoy this transcendent beneﬁt (he being at peace with all forraign Nations, and having no regall pretended competition) viz. The immediate disbanding of all Armies, and Garrisons . . . and so those grand three plagues of the people

REC8 7/13/01 2:45 PM Page 198

198 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

will cease, viz. Free-quarter, Taxations, and Excise, by means of which, the people may once again really say, they injoy something they can in good earnest call their own.50 It is not hard to see that in such remarks lay the accusations of their enemies – later to be proved true in Wildman’s dealings with royalists, and possibly to be true in Lilburne’s erratic later behaviour – that the Levellers had turned royalist. The truth seems to be that throughout 1649 they were willing to contemplate a restoration in much the frame of mind expressed by Lilburne; but on terms that no royalist could possibly have stomached: a king only if the people erected one; a king probably elected rather than inheriting his power; a king with no prerogative; a king subject to law and a king with no negative voice; a king no longer head of a national church; a king unarmed. All their proposals suggest this.51 And their best reply, penned on behalf of the four prisoners in the Tower by Walwyn in his Manifestation rings true, and may stand as the epitaph of this essay: For those weak suppositions of some of us being agents for the king or queen, we think it needful to say no more but this: that though we have not been any way violent against the persons of them or their party (as having aimed at the conversion of all, and the destruction of none), yet do we verily believe that those principles and maxims of government which are most fundamentally opposite to the prerogative and the king’s interest take their ﬁrst rise and original from us – many whereof though at ﬁrst startled at and disowned by those that professed the greatest opposition to him, have yet since been taken up by them and put in practice. And this we think is sufﬁcient, though much more might be said to clear us from any agency for that party.52 Leveller royalism, such as it was, was the accidental production of the odium in which they held the new regime.

Notes 1. J. Lilburne, The legall fundamentall liberties of the people of England, 1st edn ([8 June] 1649), p. 36; Apologetical relation (1652), p. 69. Legall fundamentall liberties is printed in extract in William Haller and Godfrey Davies, eds, Leveller Tracts, 1647–1653 (Gloucester, Mass., P. Smith, 1964), see p. 424. 2. See Roger Howell Jr and David E. Brewter, ‘Reconsidering the Levellers: the Evidence of the Moderate’, P&P, XLVI (1960), reprinted in Charles Webster,

REC8 7/13/01 2:45 PM Page 199

The Levellers and the End of Charles I 199

3.

4.

5. 6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

ed., The Intellectual Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (London, 1974), pp. 80–2, esp. on the Levellers as a ‘heterogenial body’. Differences among Levellers and between Levellers and army agents are most recently analysed in John Morrill and Philip Baker, ‘The Case of the Armie Truly Restated’, in M. Mendle, ed., The Putney Debates (Cambridge CUP, forthcoming). An Agreement of the People ([28 Oct.] 1647), in Andrew Sharp, ed., The English Levellers (Cambridge, CUP, 1998), pp. 92–101; Don M. Wolfe, ed., Leveller Manifestoes of the Puritan Revolution (New York, T. Nelson & Sons, 1944), pp. 225–34; and in A.L. Morton, ed., Freedom in Arms. A Selection of Leveller Writings (New York, International Publishers, 1975), pp. 137–49. On ‘heraldic deﬁnition’ see Andrew Sharp, ‘Edward Waterhouse’s View of Social Change in Seventeenth Century England’, P&P, LXII (1974), pp. 27–46. The phrase Lilburne uses in Legall fundamentall liberties, p. 36. A.S.P. Woodhouse, ed., Puritanism and Liberty: Being the Army Debates (1647–49) From the Clarke Manuscripts (London, J.M. Dent, 1951), pp. 1–124 (esp. pp. 4–5, 7–10, 18, 48–52, 96–9, 103–7, 110–12, 114–20, 122–4), 422–6 (Heads of the proposals) and 449–52. M.A. Gibb, John Lilburne the Leveller (London, Lindsay Drummond, 1946), p. 163n1; Austin Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen. The General Council of the Army and its Debates 1647–48 (Oxford, OUP, 1987), p. 275. The Levellers Levell’d. Or, the independents conspiracie to root out monarchie. An interlude: written by Mercurius Pragmaticus (1647, E419/4). Morton, ed., Freedom in Arms, p. 59. In dating the silence, Morton overlooks A plea for common right and freedom ([28 Dec.] 1648). Lilburne, Legall Fundamentall Liberties, p. 65; J. Lilburne, An Impeachment of High Treason against Oliver Cromwell and his Son in law Henry Ireton ([10 Aug.] 1649), p. 34. Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens, in Sharp, ed., English Levellers, p. 34. Also reprinted in Wolfe, ed., Leveller Manifestoes. See R.B. Seaberg, ‘The Norman Conquest and the Common Law: the Levellers and the Argument from Continuity’, HJ, XXIV (1981), pp. 791–806; Andrew Sharp, ‘John Lilburne’s Discourse of Law’, Political Science, XL (1988), pp. 18–33. The power that Julian Franklin calls the ‘constitutive power’ and attributes the invention of to George Lawson and John Locke, though ‘anticipated’ by the Levellers: J.H. Franklin, John Locke and the Theory of Sovereignty (Cambridge, CUP, 1978), pp. 1, 105, 125. Lilburne quoted Henry Parker’s Observations upon Some of His Majesties Late Answers and Expresses (1642) to this effect in Regall Tyrannie Discovered (1647), pp. 40–1. Lilburne, Regall Tyrannie, tp. Ibid., pp. 42–3, 50–63. To the Supream Authority of England . . . The Humble petition of many free-born people, printed in Wolfe, ed., Leveller Manifestoes, pp. 237–41. Wolfe, ed., Leveller Manifestoes, p. 236; Morton, ed., Freedom in Arms, p. 50. CJ, V, p. 353. [Walter Frost], A Declaration of Some Proceedings of Lt Col. John Lilburne, and his Associates ([Feb.] 1648), printed in Haller and Davies, eds, Leveller Tracts,

REC8 7/13/01 2:45 PM Page 200

200 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

21.

22.

23. 24.

25.

26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

32.

33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

pp. 90–134. Compare Leveller activity and accounts of the proceedings in J. Lilburne, The Peoples Prerogative ([14 Feb.] 1647/8), esp. Lilburne’s letter of 8 Jan. 1647/8, following tp; Lilburne, Impeachment of High Treason, 2nd paging, pp. 10–16, 21–8, 32–4; J. Wildman, Truths Triumph ([18 Jan.] 1648). Wildman, imprisoned with Lilburne for prosecuting the petition, spoke in Truths Triumph, where he defended his position, that the king and Lords should have no legislative power: pp. [5]–7, and was pleased (p. 7) with the vote of ‘no further addresses’. To the Supreame Authority of England, the Commons Assembled in Parliament, the Earnest Petition of Many Free-Born People of this Nation, printed in Wolfe, ed. Leveller Manifestos, p. 263. Ibid., p. 264. The pages following inveigh again against king and Lords. Putney Projects ([30 Dec.] 1647), esp. pp. 15–19. The summary in Woodhouse, ed., Puritanism and Liberty, pp. 426–9, is enough to show Wildman’s distaste for any dealings with the king. W. Walwyn, The Bloody Project ([Aug.] 1648), in Jack R. McMichael and Barbara Taft, eds, The Writings of William Walwyn (Athens, Ga, University of Georgia Press, 1989), p. 301. Also printed in Haller and Davies, eds, Leveller Tracts, pp. 135–47, and Morton, ed., Freedom in Arms, pp. 163–79. Sharp, ed., English Levellers, pp. 131–9. Also in Wolfe, ed., Leveller Manifestoes. Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, pp. 332–6. The account which follows is mainly from Lilburne’s Legall Fundamentall Liberties, pp. 29–42, the crucial excerpts of which are published in Haller, ed., Leveller Tracts, pp. 415–28, 432–3, in Woodhouse, ed., Puritanism and Liberty, pp. 342–55, and in Wolfe, ed., Leveller Manifestoes, appendix I, pp. 411–24. Including Colonel Robert Tichborne, Colonel John White, Dr Parker, Mr Taylor and John Price. Barbara Taft, ‘The Council of Ofﬁcers’ Agreement of the People, 1648/9’, HJ, XXVIII (1985). Foundations of Freedom: Or an agreement of the people: proposed as a rule for future government . . . drawn up by several wel-affected persons, and tendered to the consideration of the Generall Council of the Army, printed in Wolfe, ed., Leveller Manifestoes, pp. 293–303. Wildman may have been suborned by army ofﬁce; Walwyn may have actually supported the Ofﬁcers’ Agreement. See McMichael and Taft, eds, Writings of William Walywn, pp. 37–8. CJ, VI, p. 102. Lilburne, Legal Fundamentall Liberties, p. 42. A Petition from His Excellency Thomas Lord Fairfax and the General Council of Ofﬁcers of the Army, to the Honourable Commons of England . . . concerning the draught of an Agreement of the people ([20 Jan.] 1649). See Lilburne’s attack on it in England’s New Chains, in Sharp, ed., English Levellers, pp. 141–4. Also in Haller and Davies, eds, Leveller Tracts. Lilburne, Legall Fundamentall Liberties, p. 37. Pauline Gregg, Freeborn John. A Biography of John Lilburne (London, George G. Harrap & Co., 1961), judges (p. 258) that ‘Ireton had played for time and won’.

REC8 7/13/01 2:45 PM Page 201

The Levellers and the End of Charles I 201 39. Wolfe, ed., Leveller Manifestoes, p. 183. 40. See for authorship and content, Howell and Brewster, ‘Reconsidering the Levellers’. 41. The Moderate, 26 (2–9 Jan. 1649), p. 237. The issue refers back to issue 42 (19–26 Dec. 1648), pp. 213–15; and also issue 25 (26 Dec. 1648–2 Jan. 1649), which denied Prince Charles’ right to succeed (pp. 225–6), and (under date 24 December) approved the idea of trying Charles. He ‘is to be brought to speedy justice (for which we have much cause to blesse God)’. 42. The Moderate, 35 (6–13 Mar. 1649), p. 349. 43. The Moderate, 31 (6–13 Feb. 1649), p. 298. 44. To the supreme authority (7 Mar. 1649), printed in The Moderate, 35 (6–13 Mar. 1649), second page. 45. Lilburne, Legall fundamental liberties, pp. 29–30. 46. Ibid., pp. 56–7. 47. Ibid., p. 57. 48. A Discourse betwixt Lieutenant Cononel John lilburne . . . and Mr Hugh Peter ([29 May] 1649), p. 8. 49. Compare The Second Part of Englands New Chains (1649), in Haller and Davies, eds, Leveller Tracts, pp. 174–5, 183. 50. Lilburne, Impeachment of High Treason, p. 8. 51. Often by neglect of mentioning kings. But see the slightly more direct evidence in Englands New Chains, in Sharp, ed., English Levellers, p. 143; An Agreement of the Free People, in ibid., pp. 172–3. 52. A Manifestation from Lieutenant Col. John Lilburne, Mr. William Walwyn, Mr. Thomas Prince, and Mr. Richard Overton (1649), in Sharp, ed. English Levellers, p. 162; printed also in Wolfe, ed., Leveller Manifestoes, pp. 387–96, and in McMichael and Taft, eds, Writings of William Walwyn, pp. 334–43.

REC9 7/13/01 2:47 PM Page 202

9 The Quarrel of the Covenant: the London Presbyterians and the Regicide Elliot Vernon

And I will bring a sword upon you, that shall avenge the quarrel of my covenant (Leviticus 26:25)

I At the height of the regicide debate, Christopher Love, the Presbyterian minister of St Lawrence, Old Jewry, declared that he was ‘a friend to a regulated Monarchy, a free Parliament, an obedient Army, and a Godly ministry; but an enemy to Tyranny, Malignity, Anarchy and Heresie’.1 In announcing this programme, one shared by the lay and clerical Presbyterians of London, Love was issuing a challenge to the regicides’ claim to represent the parliamentarian cause. The London ministers had learnt of the army’s plans in December 1648 during the course of the Whitehall debates.2 The reason for the Presbyterians’ involvement in these deliberations was that the Levellersponsored ‘Agreement of the People’ controversially demanded liberty of conscience in matters of religion.3 Hoping to reach a consensus among the godly, the Council of Ofﬁcers decided, on 14 December, to invite representatives of the City’s Presbyterian system to discuss the matter at Whitehall.4 On the day of the meeting, however, Edmund Calamy and Simeon Ashe, two respected and senior Presbyterian ministers, refused to consult with the army and instead offered the revolutionaries a conference on the illegitimacy of their revolution.5 Since the publication of the army Remonstrance of 16 November, the London Presbyterians had become increasingly concerned about the course of events. They especially feared the implications of the army’s claim that it would remodel 202

REC9 7/13/01 2:47 PM Page 203

The Quarrel of the Covenant 203

the political system according to the Agreement of the People.6 To the London ministers, Pride’s Purge, the Whitehall debates and, ominously, the trial of the king, were seen as betrayals of the parliamentary cause. Worse still, the ministers feared divine judgment issuing from the breach of parliament’s oaths. Given the deepening political crisis, the Presbyterians felt consciencebound to warn the army of the error of their ways. This took the form of three published letters: the Serious and Faithful Representation, the Apologeticall Declaration (an unsubscribed letter issuing from lay Presbyterians) and, lastly, the Vindication of the Ministers of the Gospel.7 These letters provoked Milton to write his Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. The Presbyterians, Milton argued, cynically displayed ‘a dissembl’d and seditious pity’ for the king.8 The reason was that their ‘hope to bee made Classic and Provincial Lords’ had been dashed by the army’s purge and so their chance to dominate the religious sphere was lost. Not content to accept the judgement of providence graciously, the ministers ‘in their presumptuous Sion’ now sought to ‘gull the simple Laity, and stirr up tumult . . . for the maintenance of thir pride and avarice.’9 Milton’s verdict on the London Presbyterians has often been repeated by historians, yet little attention has been given to understanding the intellectual history of their position, or even the nature of their input into the regicide debate. This chapter seeks to reconstruct the Presbyterian voice during the regicide crisis and, in doing so, to contribute to our knowledge of the political and religious dynamic that fuelled the debate over the regicide.

II The revolutionary turn of events in late 1648 triggered a deep crisis of conscience amongst the Presbyterians who met at Sion College, on the northern end of the City’s walls. Although they acknowledged that Charles had sinned deeply, the London Presbyterians saw that the king was essential to any lasting political and religious settlement. The Presbyterians’ united and public stance against the army emerged from a period of collective soul-searching, prayer and fasting directed towards an appeal to the divine for the correct and providential course of action. On the 11 December 1648, Edmund Calamy and Jeremiah Whitaker had met with Fairfax to discuss the events of the previous fortnight. At this meeting, the Presbyterians told the Lord General of their grave dislike of the army’s actions.10 On the same day, a session of the fourth

REC9 7/13/01 2:47 PM Page 204

204 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

London Provincial Assembly (the highest tribunal of the City’s Presbyterian government) met at Sion College. With Calamy as moderator and Whitaker as a delegate, we can only assume that the meeting with Fairfax was discussed.11 The Assembly ordered that ‘none but Ministers and Elders within the Province . . . be admitted heereto and that the businesse be kept secret.’ Between 28 December and 20 February 1649, the Presbyterians began a period of private prayer and fasting designed to ‘ﬁnd out some way to disappoint . . . [the regicides’] bloody intentions.’12 In order to censure the army publicly for its illegitimate actions, the London ministers needed to establish their own authority to speak in the public sphere. This fact had been made particular clear to the ‘Sion College Conclave’ during the second civil war, when their sectary enemies had accused them of acting outside their legitimate domain. John Price, the principal ﬁrebrand of John Goodwin’s congregation, provides the clearest example of this attack on the London ministers. Price accused Sion College of breaching their sphere of activity by trying to steer parliamentary proceedings for factional advantage. He charged them with commanding ‘their sturdy boyes’ to ransack parliament in July 1647. Furthermore, it was from an ‘upper roome in Sion Colledge’ that both the ‘City, and Countrey-ministers’ had, according to Price, received their orders ‘to speake and write . . . with one mouth and penne’ in the petitioning campaigns of late 1647 and 1648.13 In so doing the Presbyterian ministers had derogated their pastoral duties to their ﬂocks and had misused the pulpit to kindle sedition against parliament and army.14 For Price, the ultimate root of this behaviour was factional self-ambition; he argued that under an army-backed regime the Presbyterians’ ‘crown of classical jurisdiction is fallen to the ground’. The hope that they would be again ‘lifted into the chaire of impulsory authority and government’ had led them into the perilous clutches of the Scots and the royalists.15 The point of Price’s accusation was that the London Presbyterians, because they had only engaged in politics so as to serve nefarious private interests, had lost any legitimate public voice in matters concerning the settling of the nation. In January 1649, Sion College found the need pre-emptively to answer these criticisms by demonstrating the source of its authority to engage with the army. As we shall see, the dichotomies of legitimate action and unlawful behaviour, public authority and personal obedience were the underlying themes that deﬁned the Presbyterians’ engagement with the revolution.

REC9 7/13/01 2:47 PM Page 205

The Quarrel of the Covenant 205

In their Representation to Fairfax, the ministers declared that it was both their duty as ‘Ambassadors of Christ’ and within ‘the Bounds of Ministeriall Liberty’ to censure the army for its sins. This authority derived from the position of the clergy as stewards of Christ’s kingdom. Like the Old Testament prophets, they were under divine obligation to ‘shew the people their trangression, and the house of Jacob their sins’ (Isaiah 58:1).16 The clergy also had a pastoral duty to their ﬂocks to ‘assert the integrity of [their] hearts’ in order to keep their ‘ministeriall function immaculate.’17 Likewise, it was the fear of the lay Presbyterian apologists that ‘sinful silence’ would make them guilty by association. To expiate this fear they felt bound in conscience to publish their dismay with the ‘illegal actings of these times’.18 The metaphor of contagious sin used to describe the army’s actions seems to have been experienced almost literally by Presbyterians. As ministers of Christ, the Apostle commanded them not to be ‘partakers of other men’s sins’ (I Tim. 5:22) and to ‘abstain from all appearance of evil’ (I Thess. 5:22).19 It was their duty ‘as Ministers . . . in a time [when] the sins of Rulers and Magistrates . . . have so far provoked God as to kindle the ﬁre of his wrath against his people’ to induce the nation to repent.20 In such times they were to follow St Paul’s advice to ‘have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather to reprove them’ (Eph. 5:11).21

III One of the reasons for the charge of hypocrisy in Milton’s Tenure was that the London ministers, in tracts such as their Scripture and Reason Pleaded for Defensive Armes (1643), had taught doctrines that justiﬁed both Pride’s Purge and the regicide. The effect of the ministers’ argument, Milton believed, was that the king had been ‘reduc’d . . . to such a ﬁnal pass, as was the very death and burial of all in him that was regal.’22 However, now the ministers ‘juggl’d and palter’d with the world’ by crying out against the Army and praying for a king they had done so much to damn.23 What were the reasons behind this apparent Presbyterian about-turn? Part of the answer lies in the political realities of late 1648. Glenn Burgess has noted that the political debate of the 1640s was not about ‘the nature or extent of authority but about its right employment.’24 The radical constitutional project of late 1648 and early 1649: of a new-modelled government, whose power was pronounced through a Leveller Agreement and whose authority rested on army bayonets, was

REC9 7/13/01 2:47 PM Page 206

206 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

a political reality that no Presbyterian relished. This was especially true for the laity closest to the Presbyterian ministers. In their Apologeticall Declaration, the lay Presbyterians complained that the civil war had been fought for religious reformation and to protect citizens from ‘illegal Impositions and Taxes.’ However, with the army’s purge they now found that their ‘Franchises and Priviledges, as Freemen of [the] City [of London]’ were ‘voted and rent from us’.25 These sentiments give a clue as to whom the authors of the anonymous Declaration were. Their talk of disenfranchisement indicates that they were victims of the Common Council purge of December 1648. In particular, the complaints of the breach of covenant, the rejection of church discipline and the sectarian threat to Calvinist orthodoxy leads us to the group that styled themselves the ‘covenant-engaged citizens’.26 Throughout the late 1640s this group of citizens had supported a treaty with Charles I on the conditions enshrined within the Solemn League and Covenant, and it included many of the most committed ruling elders of the Presbyterian Province of London.27 As middle-ranking citizens, the ‘apologists’ were seeking peace in order to establish what they saw as the point of the civil wars. The Apologeticall Declaration followed the demands of City Presbyterian petitions of the summer of 1648. These petitions expressed the aims of the ‘covenant-engaged citizens’ in demanding a peace settlement according to the spirit of the Solemn League and Covenant. Their objectives were the perfection of the Presbyterian discipline; the suppression of heresy and error; the protection of the ancient constitution and the ability to re-establish their trades free from exorbitant taxation.28 These demands, the ‘apologists’ argued, had been the basis for the civil wars in the ﬁrst place. At the root of the Presbyterians’ argument was the notion that the army had betrayed the intentions of the war against Charles. Both Hugh Trevor-Roper and John Wilson have argued that the Presbyterian ministers were among the principal agents who presented John Pym’s constitutional modiﬁcations to the parliament.29 Since Pym’s death, however, the London Presbyterian ministers had been politically nearer to Edinburgh than Westminster and, in general, the Sion College Conclave’s engagement with political forces had mirrored the changing alliances of the Scots. As the casuists of Pym’s political gambits, the London Presbyterian ministers had been responsible for the legitimization of the parliamentarian entry into the civil war in 1642.30 In 1649, the Sion College Conclave returned to this casuistry in order to demonstrate the error of the army’s actions.

REC9 7/13/01 2:47 PM Page 207

The Quarrel of the Covenant 207

As Calvinist divines, the London Presbyterians had drawn on the tradition of resistance theory in their justiﬁcation of the war. This taught that while obedience to magistrates was the divine obligation of every private Christian soul, the lesser magistrates of a nation, as public persons, could command private individuals to resist a king who commanded evil.31 John Sanderson’s analysis of the ministers’ political arguments demonstrates that the private law strand of this theory was developed in the casuistry of resistance.32 This strand was based on individuals’ natural rights of self-defence, and consequently the ministers had cast the civil war in terms of defensive arms against an ill-advised king. The effect of this was that, as Glenn Burgess has astutely commented: ‘much so-called resistance theory . . . was actually the rhetorical denial that resistance to lawful authority had occurred.’33 In order to demonstrate that in 1649 the army was transgressing its mandate, the Sion College Conclave returned to this defensive strand of justiﬁcation. Both Price and Milton accused the London ministers of developing the doctrine of regicide. Yet the ministers undercut this accusation by returning to the casuistry of 1643. Their strategy was to establish that the laudable aims of the parliament’s war had been usurped and perverted by the army and its radical supporters. The war, the ministers argued, had been fought on the authority of ‘both Houses of Parliament’ who, with the king, was ‘intrusted with the Supreame Authoritie of the Kingdome.’34 Using the basic tenet of resistance theory, that only magistrates were able to legitimize resistance to a king, the Presbyterians demonstrated the illegitimacy of the army’s intervention. The laws of ‘God, Nature, and Nations, together with the Dictates of Reason’, the ministers argued, put affairs of state only in the magistrates’ hands. They thus denied that a ‘multitude of Private Persons’, such as the army, could legitimately meddle in such affairs.35 Furthermore, the Presbyterians reminded the army that the grounds of the war were expressly defensive in scope and preservative in aim. Parliament had taken up arms ‘for the defence of their Persons and Priviledges, and the Preservation of Religion, Lawes, and Liberties’.36 The war had not been fought to bring the king to justice ‘but to put him into a better capacity to do justice’ by removing ‘the wicked from before him, that his throne might be established in righteousnesse’.37 Yet, it appeared that the army not only intended to kill the king but also to overthrow the very constitution that magistracy had commanded it to preserve.38

REC9 7/13/01 2:47 PM Page 208

208 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

To the Sion College Conclave, this proved that the events of winter 1648–49 were the actions not of loyal parliamentarians but of a faction of self-interested usurpers. The ministers believed that the cause for which they had engaged their congregations to ﬁght was a principled, legitimate engagement. For them, the war had been a stand ‘against all Malignant Counsels and Designes for the introduction of an Arbitrary and Tyrannical power in the king’. The objectives of the war were enshrined in the parliament’s propositions of June 1642: they were ‘The Protestant Religion, The Kings Authority, his person in his royall dignity, the free coyrse of justice, the Laws of the Land, the Peace of the Kingdome, and the Priviledges of Parliament, against any force which shall oppose them’.39 This line of argument led to the conclusion that the army had betrayed the ﬁrst and legitimate principles of parliament’s war. Polemically it served a double purpose: on one hand, it countered the accusation of sectaries such as Price and Milton that the Presbyterians were intellectually responsible for the events that led to regicide. On the other hand, it allowed the Presbyterian casuists to ask the army a probing question: had they not fallen from the purity of their ﬁrst engagement and succumbed to the corrupting inﬂuence of their own might?

IV The issue of ‘ﬁrst engagement’ was critically important in the Presbyterian attack on the army. It is here that we can see the bedrock of the Conclave’s problem with the revolutionary course of events. The London ministers never tired of reciting the clauses of parliament’s early declarations for a defensive war. It was these declarations of ‘ﬁrst engagement’ that became the principal touchstone of the ministers’ accusation of army deviance and illegitimacy. As noted above, the Presbyterian ministers had justiﬁed the civil war by drawing on the political theology of resistance theory. It is important to note that this political theology was the product of a larger meditation on the nature of Christian obedience and obligation under the Covenant of Grace.40 The polemical ﬁgure of the betrayal of ‘ﬁrst engagements’, found throughout the Conclave’s discourse, was rooted in this theology. The various parts of the ministers’ argument drew their strength from being reiterations of earlier parliamentarian orthodoxy. Obligation to the nation’s supreme authority, the ministers argued, was the duty of

REC9 7/13/01 2:47 PM Page 209

The Quarrel of the Covenant 209

every subject.41 However, as the supreme authority of England rested in the mixed constitution of king, Lords and Commons, the Houses of Parliament were legitimately able to resist a king whose judgement had been perverted by malignant and Popish counsel.42 When this became necessary, as in 1642, parliament had engaged their subjects to ﬁght a defensive and preservative war.43 By commanding subjects in this engagement, parliament had continually declared the legitimate and limited objectives of its aggression against the king.44 Furthermore, loyal subjects had been obliged to these objectives by a series of oaths and covenants.45 The Presbyterian ministers argued that the army had deviated from these binding objectives and now laboured under the shadow of both political illegitimacy and divine wrath.46 One strand of the Sion College Conclave’s argument was particularly important: that of the special obligations of individuals and the three kingdoms to the Solemn League and Covenant. Introduced in December 1643, the covenant had engaged the three kingdoms for ‘the advancement of the kingdom of our Lord and Saviour . . . the honour and happiness of the King’s Majesty and his posterity, and the true public liberty, safety and peace of the kingdomes.’ The ideal of a bounded and reformed monarchy, held in check by a mixed constitution and unable to interfere with an autonomous Presbyterian church was what the Presbyterians had fought for. This ideal was what they defended during the regicide debate.47 The clauses that followed from this rubric seem to have been considered by the London Presbyterians as the clearest statement of parliament’s ‘ﬁrst engagements’, yet historians have rarely taken the Solemn League and Covenant seriously. While it may be true that many English politicians, notably the younger Sir Henry Vane, seem to have entered into the covenant disingenuously, the London ministers, concerned as they were for a new wave of church reformation, made the covenant the principal statement of their engagement to the parliamentarian cause. Why did the Sion College Conclave adhere to the covenant so intransigently? In order to understand the Presbyterian conviction that the covenant was a binding oath, we need to explore the complex political theology of obligation that they had woven around the document since the last days of the ﬁrst civil war. The Presbyterian ministers believed that covenants were the foundations of political authority. Using Old Testament examples, the theory of the covenantal origin of government had been invoked by ﬁgures such as Samuel Rutherford to describe the limits of magisterial power.48

REC9 7/13/01 2:47 PM Page 210

210 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

The theory that covenants served to yoke human agency under divine sovereignty had often been used to describe the origins and purpose of government.49 At the same time, however, this theory could just as easily be projected as the means to attain a holy commonwealth and a nation of godly citizens.50 For the Sion College Conclave the purpose and true end of the parliamentarian engagement had been to bind the three kingdoms together as a covenanted people.51 In January 1646, Simeon Ashe presented this view when he compared the covenanters of the three kingdoms to the tribes of Israel. Referring to the Israelites’ practice of pitching their tents around the tabernacle of the Lord (Num. 2), Ashe explained that this was a sign of a people under covenant. For such nations, Ashe preached, ‘Gods speciall presence’ was ‘in the midst of them’ and acted ‘for their preservation and welfare of every kinde.’52 In the mind of the Presbyterian ministers, the Solemn League and Covenant was the blueprint of the new Jerusalem.53 The comparison of the three kingdoms under the Solemn League and Covenant with Old Testament Israel was a powerful trope in the Presbyterians’ discourse. The greatness of Israel had been due to the graciousness of God in choosing them to be his covenanted people. Likewise, under the Solemn League and Covenant, God had enabled the three kingdoms to do great things.54 Just as obedience to the covenant had been the symbol of Israel’s ﬁdelity to God, so the Solemn League and Covenant bound both individuals and the three nations to perform it.55 Edmund Calamy preached on this point: a covenant, he related, ‘is a promise joyn’d with an oath, it is a mutuall stipulation between God and us’. Simeon Ashe added that covenants were ‘sacred obligations upon our consciences’.56 As such, the Sion College Conclave later argued, ‘it is not in the power of any person or persons on earth to dispence with it, or absolve from it.’57 By promising in the presence of God to uphold the covenant, those who took it had bound themselves into a special relationship with God. Like Old Testament Israel, the three kingdoms were obliged to pursue the covenant’s stipulations.58 As well as this comparison to the Israelites, part of the force of the Presbyterians’ argument on the covenant came from the connection they made between it and the cosmic Covenant of Grace.59 By a master stroke of casuistic elision, the Presbyterians linked the Solemn League and Covenant to reformed conceptions of Christian duty under the cosmic covenant. The effect of this was to bind the national covenant, a potentially partisan and contingent oath, with the existential

REC9 7/13/01 2:47 PM Page 211

The Quarrel of the Covenant 211

demands of the covenant that was understood to be the source of Christian life. The link made by the ministers between the national covenant and the duty of believers was that in both cases people were bound to fulﬁl God’s conditions on pain of judgement.60 Furthermore, Calvinist practical divinity taught that the ability to fulﬁl Christian duty was an index of God’s grace. A survey of Presbyterian doctrines on covenant-keeping demonstrates that the clergy were quick to identify the individual’s ability to keep the covenant with the fruits of assurance.61 By eliding the programme of covenanted reformation with their practical teaching on soteriological issues, the ministers attempted to show that obedience to the covenant was more than a mere political duty. The casuistic effort to tie together covenant-keeping and the existential quest of the godly for assurance argued that the Solemn League and Covenant was more than a simple civil oath; on the contrary, it had become the deﬁnition of the relationship between God, the godly citizen and the godly nation. Annexed to the existential dimension of the covenant was the threat of divine judgement for its violation. Edmund Calamy referred to the inclusion of covenant-breakers in St Paul’s list of reprobates worthy of death (Rom: 1:18–32).62 Added to the threat of personal damnation was the judgement meted out to covenanted nations by the mere presence of anti-covenanters: this idea was the inverse of the notion of the saving remnant. Calamy exclaimed that to refuse the yoke of the Lord was ‘a soul-destroying and land-destroying sin’ for which ‘God may justly give a Bill of divorce to a Nation’.63 It would be interesting to know how the lay supporters of the Presbyterians received these arguments for the binding nature of the Solemn League and Covenant. Judging from the numerous pamphlets presenting a counter-casuistry, of which John Canne’s The Snare is Broken is the most representative, it would appear that the entanglement of regicide with the covenant presented a difﬁcult case of conscience to many people.64 Furthermore, the lay Presbyterians who placed themselves under the sign of the ‘covenant-engaged citizens’ indicate that a declaration of covenant engagement held some polemical force among lay circles in the City.65 Certainly, Nehemiah Wallington, the Presbyterian ruling elder of St Leonard’s Eastcheap, lamented the breach of the covenant. In November 1647, Wallington noted that the parliamentarians had ‘grievously . . . sinned in losing their ﬁrst love’ and as a consequence of ‘having forsaken God in breaking the covenant . . . sinns . . . break forth without any restraint [and] God begins to leave [us]’.66 This

REC9 7/13/01 2:47 PM Page 212

212 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

lament was to become a continual feature of Wallington’s letters and diaries and we ﬁnd him making the same complaints throughout the whole period of the English revolution.67 For both lay and clerical Presbyterians, the issue of the parliamentarians’ ‘ﬁrst engagements’ was a crucial factor in their understanding of why the civil wars had been fought. The covenant deﬁned what parliament’s purpose was; it also showed the limits to which private individuals and public authority could go in order to achieve those aims. The binding nature of the Solemn League and Covenant on the consciences of the godly had been a constant feature of Presbyterian discourse throughout the 1640s. The political theology that had been woven around the covenant is fundamentally important to our understanding of the Sion College Conclave’s reaction to the course of events leading to the regicide.

V Given that the covenant had become a Presbyterian shibboleth in the late 1640s, it is not surprising that Sion College was quick to attack the army’s revolutionary actions. It had been an explicit aim of the November Remonstrance to counter the third clause of the covenant. This had promised to ‘preserve and defend the King’s Majesty’s person and authority, in the preservation and defence of the true religion and liberties of the kingdoms’. This clause contained an even more explicit declaration, to the effect that ‘the world may bear witness with our consciences of our loyalty, and that we have no thoughts or intentions to diminish His Majesty’s just power and greatness’.68 The author of the army Remonstrance, probably Henry Ireton, noted that to make a covenant ‘perpetually obliging’ to the king had turned out to be inconsistent with its other clauses. As such the Solemn League had become a snare to the conscience.69 In order to overcome this trap the Remonstrance employed an argument based on the hierarchy of values contained within the covenant. Ireton argued that the Solemn League engaged the covenanter primarily to the twin principles of civil liberty and religious reformation and only secondarily to the preservation of the king.70 He suggested that if these two stipulations came into conﬂict, the primary clauses should take precedent. To back this point up the Remonstrance attacked the king’s position within the covenant from two angles. The ﬁrst of these was to remark that as the king had never actually taken the covenant, the covenanters had made a clause for the ‘beneﬁt of . . . [a] person not present nor

REC9 7/13/01 2:47 PM Page 213

The Quarrel of the Covenant 213

party to the agreement’. This, no doubt, demonstrated the good will of its takers, but unfortunately, the king refused ‘to join in it’ and had, in fact, ‘multipl[ied] contests with all the covenanters.’ In this case, the laws of reason and of contract both decreed that the clause relating to the king was no longer binding. The Remonstrance argued that Charles ‘[excluded] himself from any claim to any beneﬁt there-from at [the covenanters’] hands as to what concerns himself’.71 At the same time, the Remonstrance acknowledged that the threat of divine judgement hung over covenant-breakers and so sought to mollify consciences that might scruple at the Solemn League’s third clause. The army conceded that while disingenuous covenanting incurred divine wrath, divine satisfaction was fulﬁlled if a person covenanted with both honest intentions and the endeavour to fulﬁl the covenant’s stipulations. This was the case between parliamentarians and the king. While Charles had been included as a party within the covenant, he had actively declined to be obliged to it. In this situation, parliamentarians had fulﬁlled their side of the bargain in good faith. They could not reasonably be expected to be obliged to one who not only refused the reciprocal nature of the covenant but also engaged in arms against the covenanters.72 In declaring this, the Remonstrance presented convincing arguments to demonstrate that the snare of the third clause of the covenant was broken. The army, like other parliamentarians, had been faithful in both intention and endeavour. It was the malice of the king that had caused the third clause to become a problem and it was his malice alone that had broken the obligations of parliamentarians to uphold it. The Sion College Conclave, however, would have none of this and attempted to show that the army’s casuistry was utterly invalid. By breaking their ﬁrst engagements, the army were not only acting illegitimately but threatened to invoke divine wrath on the nation for their deﬁance of the covenant. Like the Old Testament rebels, Corah, Dathan and Abiram, the army was bloated with pride against lawful authority. In the casuistic boxing-match over the fate of the king, the Presbyterian ministers appealed to parliamentarian sensibilities and heartfelt obligations which had driven their cause for over seven years. The army was wrong, the Presbyterian ministers argued, to think that it could wriggle out of the third clause of the covenant. Even without the covenant, the Word of God and the laws of the land enforced basic submission to magistrates. Even more seriously, parliamentarian forces were under sacred oath; the army had taken the covenant and so was obliged to protect the king! Thomas Watson, the minister of St Stephen

REC9 7/13/01 2:47 PM Page 214

214 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

Walbrook, bravely announced to the post-purge Commons on 27 December that ‘We act against God, when we act against his Covenant’. He added that ‘Breach of Covenant is no better then perjury, and if we breake the Oath, look that God should make good the curse’. Alluding to the army’s Remonstrance he declared ‘let no man say it was a snare; this is after vowes to make enquiry’.73 Even if a sacred oath became unsavoury the ministers argued it was the duty of the godly to adhere to it. The Presbyterians admitted that the king had committed ‘many and very great . . . wofull miscarriages’ so that he was ‘cast down from his Excellency into a horrid pit of misery’.74 Yet this did not absolve men from obedience to the Solemn League and Covenant: it was a ‘righteous Oath’ made with God, not the king, and to break it would ‘provoke the wrath of the Lord’.75 Had not God visited vengeance against Jerusalem for breaking their covenant with Nebuchadnezzar, the tyrant of Babylon (Ezek 17:11–24)? What should England expect if the army ‘dare[d] to draw upon themselves and the Kingdome the bloud of their Soveraign’.76

VI The ultimate aim of London Presbyterian discourse during the regicide debate was to present the army with a case of conscience aimed at unsettling its revolutionary conﬁdence. The ministers hoped that once the error of the army’s ways was made clear, the soldiers would make amends by returning the constitution to its traditional foundations. The ﬁrst step in the ministers’ strategy of presenting a case to the army’s conscience was to remind the army of the reasons for its existence. In doing so, they hoped to instruct the soldiers as to the limits of their legitimate sphere. The origin of the army, the ministers remembered, had been the result of the bungled attempt to arrest the ‘ﬁve members’. This violation of parliamentary privilege had led to an armed guard and later to an army.77 By going back to the outbreak of civil war, the ministers sought to show the army that they were merely the public servants of parliament. Secondly, the invocation of the strife that ensued from the illegal attempt on but ﬁve members of parliament contrasted well with the army’s unprecedented seclusion of over a hundred MPs.78 The servile nature of the army also demonstrated that they had fallen far out of their regular sphere. The effect of this was that the whole political system was in danger of collapse. Thomas Watson sought to show the danger of the revolution by arguing that it was totally at odds

REC9 7/13/01 2:47 PM Page 215

The Quarrel of the Covenant 215

with divine order. God, Watson preached, ‘is the God of Order, he hath set everything in its proper sphere . . . Thus in the Body Politique, God hath set Kings, Nobles, Judges, still in a descent; and this makes up the Harmony.’79 As readers of E.M. Tillyard might remember, the homology between the cosmic spheres and the political state was a dominant theme in early modern political discourse.80 The Presbyterians used this political cliché to drive home the perversion of the revolutionaries’ actions. The ministers argued that by ‘walking in by-paths of [their] own’ the army had caused tremendous damage to the political harmony of the nation.81 The army had been entrusted with protecting parliament and preserving the nation’s ‘Religion, Lawes and Liberties’ as expressed in the covenant. In breaking this public trust, the army now acted for the ‘manifest Subversion’ of the nation’s freedoms.82 Robert Ashton has noted that this period saw recognition, amongst some parliamentarians, that ‘the rights of the individual was intimately bound up with the restoration of the King to his own rights.’83 The London Presbyterians follow this pattern, but it must be added that the purge of parliament and the breach of the covenant were as much of concern as the execution of the king. Given that ‘the Head and most eminent members of the Commonwealth’ had been ‘tyrannically and barbarously . . . trampled under feet . . . by an imperious Military-power’, the lay apologists argued, how could ordinary citizens ‘but most justly fear . . . [that] intolerable pressures [were] to be unmercifully exercised on [them]’.84 The fear of a military tyranny, supported by sectarian upstarts and the loss of constitutional checks in the form of a bounded monarchy were the ultimate fears raised by the revolution. This fear was of longstanding origin. In July 1647, Christopher Love had written: O Ye Inhabitants of ENGLAND . . . Wil ye suffer the Army under pretence of justice to bring you under oppression, and under the notion of Liberty to bring you into bondage, and under the name of the Saints of Light to act the part of Angels of darkness?85 In 1649, Love believed that his prophecy had come true. He asked the army: have you not brought the kingdom to a ﬁne passe, that in stead of having it governed by Lawes which should administer an equall right to all, the Land should be overruled by the sword, which will give right to none, neither King, Parliament, nor People?86

REC9 7/13/01 2:47 PM Page 216

216 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

In presenting these fears to the army, the ministers assumed a selfproclaimed prophetic voice. They invited the soldiers: ‘commune with your own hearts’ and consider ‘the evil of your present ways, and turn from them’.87 The Sion College Conclave used their discourse on political legitimacy and obligation to demonstrate the evil fallacy in the soldiers’ reasons for revolution. In justiﬁcation of their actions, the army had pleaded the warrants of both providence and necessity. The ministers, recognizing that the army’s case rested upon these two fault-lines, attempted to demonstrate the soldiers’ errors.88 The army’s justiﬁcation from providence, as Professor Worden has noted, sometimes tended towards the highly subjective.89 The London Presbyterians were quick to seize upon this and reminded the army that providentialist arguments provided no ﬁrm ground to warrant either political disobedience or covenant-perjury. The ministers reminded the army that ‘the Providence of God . . . is no safe rule to walke by’ for God does not always approve ‘the practice of whatsoever his Providence doth permit’.90 Nor was the fact that the army was undefeated in battle a sign that it could claim the favour of God. The ministers reminded the army council that they had formerly walked in the ways of God by acting under a solemn covenant. However, now the army had moved out of its legitimate sphere it could no longer expect the blessings of the Lord.91 The army was also mistaken, the ministers argued, in using parallels with the Old Testament to legitimate their appeal to providence. While the army and its supporters might claim that their actions were justiﬁed by God’s command to avenge blood-guilt, the Presbyterians argued that far less oblique examples discounted these arguments regarding Charles I.92 The ministers’ main counter-texts were those concerning the relationship between David and Saul. Despite being in great personal danger, David had refused two opportunities to kill Saul (I Sam. 24–6). On the second of these occasions, David shared his reasons with Abishai: ‘Destroy him not: for who can stretch forth his hand against the Lord’s anointed, and be guiltless’ (I Sam. 26:9).93 Charles, like Saul, was a divinely anointed king, protected by the covenant and the sanctions of God. Despite Charles’ undoubted guilt, the ministers insisted, the true crime of blood-guilt would be upon those who ignored the advice of David! In fact, the Presbyterians argued the discernment of providence was always to be yoked to the teaching of the Bible.94 They pointed out that both Old and New Testaments (Isa 28:20 and II Pet 1:19–20) expressly taught that providence followed the light of scripture.95 Consequently,

REC9 7/13/01 2:47 PM Page 217

The Quarrel of the Covenant 217

Christians were able to try all impulses that could be attributed to the Holy Spirit with God’s revealed Word.96 If impulses were contrary to biblical precedents it was easily possible that the believer was not hearing the inspiration of the Holy Spirit but instead ‘the voice of Satan’ or the utterance ‘of their owne corrupt hearts.’97 Furthermore, Satan had often been permitted to use the wicked to do God’s mysterious bidding. The ministers, consummate casuists as they were, warned the army ‘you know, that it is one of the greatest Judgements, when God suffers men to prosper in sinfull courses’. Christopher Love cited the examples of the Old Testament usurpers, Zimri, Omri and Menahem (I Kings 16, II Kings 15), all of whom were aided by Providence but ‘did not dye an naturall death, but came to an untimely end.’98 Following the message of these types, the ministers warned the army that the Word clearly demonstrated ‘Successe in an Evil way . . . is no justiﬁcation thereof, nor incouragement to proceed therein’.99 Believing that they had demonstrated that the army’s providentialist arguments were suspect, the ministers directed their attack to the topic of necessity. John Sanderson has noted that for many parliamentarians necessity ‘justiﬁed everything [and so] it really justiﬁed nothing’, therefore ‘its use was an indication that the acts in question were indefensible.’100 Arguments from necessity, the ministers asserted, ‘must be Absolute, Present, and Clear’, yet the fact was that the majority of the political nation desired a peace treaty, was opposed to the regicide and feared a military regime. This led the ministers to conclude that the army’s plea of necessity was ‘Doubtful, Uncertain, and Conjectural’.101 We have noted that the crux of the Presbyterian censure of the army’s actions centred on the breach of binding political obligations. The ministers reminded the army that, despite its attempts to wriggle out of these obligations, the covenant to preserve the king’s person and to protect parliament was the real necessity.102 To warn the army that it was stirring up divine wrath, the ministers cited God’s judgement upon Israel for Saul’s slaughter of the Gibeonites. This example ﬁtted the situation well, for Israel had been bound by covenant to the Gibeonites over two hundred years before, and although the Gibeonites continually threatened Israel, God had still punished her for its breach. This proved, the ministers argued, that ‘no Necessity can justiﬁe Perjury, or dispense with lawful Oaths’.103 This fact illustrated the extent of the army’s backsliding: it had become a party whose means and ends aimed at its own advancement and the nation’s captivity. ‘The truth is’, Christopher Love wrote, ‘the

REC9 7/13/01 2:47 PM Page 218

218 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

Kings person, and the armies designes stood both in competition; and therefore they must destroy the one to carry in the other’. Love asked: ‘what can be more unreasonable then to make necessity a plea to justiﬁe not only irregular action but corrupt ends also?’104 The ministers begged the army to ‘recede from these evil ways, and contain your selves within your own bonds’.105 It was not the job of soldiers to bring the king to justice but ‘to pray that God would give him effectual repentance’. If this meant that they would undergo hardship then Christopher Love advised that it was better for the godly to ‘suffer the greatest evil then to commit the least sin’.106

VII At the end of their Representation, the Presbyterian ministers declared that in condemning the army’s sins they had ‘discharged their duty’ and hoped to have ‘delivered our own souls’.107 For all their casuistry, the ministers knew that they were impotent to stop the regicide and the revolution. In many respects this impotence was a sign of their acceptance that 1649 marked the beginning of a new political reality, one they saw as being based entirely on the power of the sword. In the face of the new politics of the 1650s, the Sion College Conclave could do nothing but preach on the twin themes of covenant obedience and the illegitimacy of the government. The act of regicide arrived, and in monarchy’s place a civilian republic was set up. The ministers’ attack on the army during the regicide debate was repeated in essence against the republic during the Engagement controversy. Although the hope that God would establish a covenanted godly kingdom was still enticing to a few lay Presbyterians, the Sion College Conclave had lost both its political constituency and the theoretical argument. The impotence of the Presbyterians has been noted by John Wallace, who argues that their ‘fundamental limitation . . . was that they were not prepared to argue for immediate resistance or further rebellion.’108 Given the theoretical sterility of the Conclave in the face of the republic, it is little wonder that the de facto basis for the theories of thinkers like the MP Francis Rous was begrudgingly accepted by many disgruntled parliamentarians.109 Of course, the duty of covenant obedience did leave open another course of action: that of joining the Scots in armed resistance to the republic. In 1651 Christopher Love and a small hard core of covenantengagers would take up this fateful course with disastrous consequences. Love and his fellow conspirators were never royalists per se. Yet, as

REC9 7/13/01 2:47 PM Page 219

The Quarrel of the Covenant 219

covenanters, they were enticed by the foolhardy dream that Charles II and the Scots, engaged together under covenant with God, would be able to settle a holy Presbyterian commonwealth in the three kingdoms. The cost of their fanciful adventure with royalism was severe: the summer of 1651 saw the republic’s victory at Worcester, the execution of Love, the ﬂight of numerous key Presbyterians and the utter discrediting of the Sion College Conclave. Love’s plot was the last tragic thrust of the London Presbyterians’ attempt to re-establish what they saw as the covenanted ‘ﬁrst engagements’ of the civil war. Although few Presbyterians accepted the legitimacy of the republic, they seem to have appreciated that political quietism and a renewed attention to their pastoral duties was a better course of action to take.110 The Conclave had preached for the cause of 1642, not the revolution of 1649: for a mixed constitution and a godly commonwealth, not an army-led republic and the gathering of a few saints. As ministers of the Gospel, men who modelled themselves on the cultural template of the Old Testament prophets, the Sion College Conclave’s role had always been to preach against the nation’s sins. Seeing the regicide as the ultimate betrayal of the covenant between God and the three kingdoms, the London ministers were bound in conscience to refuse the army a happy compliance with their coup d’etat. Yet as ministers of the Gospel, this was the extent of their legitimate engagement with the political sphere. In the face of the new political reality of 1649, an age not of peace but of the sword, the London ministers, like Jeremiah after the fall of Israel, were forced to retreat into lamentations on the sins of a nation in quarrel with the covenant.

Notes 1. [Christopher Love], A Modest and Clear Vindication ([13 Mar.] 1649, E549/10) frontispiece. 2. A.S.P. Woodhouse, ed., Puritanism and Liberty (London, J.M. Dent & Sons, 1974) p. 125; Carolyn Polizzotto, ‘Liberty of Conscience and the Whitehall Debates of 1648–9’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, XXVI (1975), esp. pp. 74–6. 3. Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty, pp. 361–2. 4. The Sion College ministers to be consulted were Edmund Calamy, Simeon Ashe, Lazarus Seaman and Cornelius Burgess: ibid., p. 125. Another meeting seems to have been arranged at Tichbourne’s house for the 18 December: ibid., p. 467. 5. [Love], Modest and Clear Vindication, p. 10. 6. Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty, pp. 456–65.

REC9 7/13/01 2:47 PM Page 220

220 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I 7. A Serious and Faithfull Representation of the Judgements of the Ministers of the Gospel Within the Province of London ([18 Jan.] 1649, E538/25), hereafter SFR; An Apologeticall Declaration of the Conscientious Presbyterians of the Province of London ([14 Jan.] 1649, E539/9), hereafter AD; A Vindication of the Ministers of the Gospel ([27 Jan.] 1649, E540/11), hereafter VMG. 8. John Milton, Political Writings, ed. Martin Dzelzainis, trans. Claire Gruzelier (Cambridge, CUP, 1991) p. 6. 9. Ibid., p. 36. 10. Obadiah Sedgewick and Stephen Marshall were also present at this meeting: David Underdown, Pride’s Purge (Oxford, OUP, 1971), pp. 176–7; SFR, sig. A2v. 11. Doctor Williams’ Library, MS 201.12.13 (Records of the London Provincial Assembly, 1647–1660), hereafter RLPA, p. 42. 12. Ibid., pp. 48–52; Doctor Williams’ Library, PP.12.50*.4 (21) (Mary Love, ‘The Life of Mr Christopher Love’), fols 85, 87. 13. John Price, The Pulpit Incendiary (1648, E438/10) p. 9; and Clerico-Classicum, or the Clergi-Allarum to a Third War ([19 Feb.] 1649, E544/1), p. 48. 14. Price, Pulpit Incendiary, sig. *. 15. Price, Clerico-Classicum, pp. 4, 56. 16. SFR, sig. A2v. The association between the house of Jacob and the Church is made in Luke 1:33: ‘And he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end.’ 17. VMG, p. 3. 18. AD, p. 3. 19. SFR, p. 3. 20. VMG, p. 2. 21. SFR, p. 3. 22. Milton, Political Writings, pp. 30–1, 43–4. 23. Ibid., p. 4. 24. Glenn Burgess, ‘The Impact on Political Thought: Rhetorics for Trouble Times’, in John Morrill, ed., The Impact of the English Civil War (London, Collins & Brown, 1991), p. 73. 25. AD, p. 5. 26. For attempts to describe the programme of this group see: E.C. Vernon, ‘The Sion College Conclave and London Presbyterianism during the English Revolution’ (PhD thesis, Cambridge, 1999). See also Valerie Pearl, ‘London’s Counter-Revolution’, in G.E. Aylmer, ed., The Interregnum: the Quest for Settlement, 1646–1660 (Basingstoke, Macmillan Press – now Palgrave, 1972), pp. 49–50; Ian Gentles, ‘The Struggle for London in the Second Civil War’, HJ, XXVI (1983), esp. pp. 281n22, 291. 27. Most prominent amongst these lay elders were six militia ofﬁcers who had been involved in the political cabals of the City covenanters since the mid1640s. These included, for example, Capt. John Jones who had joined James Cranford in attempting to discredit viscount Saye and Sele during the ‘Saville Affair’ and who was one of the Presbyterian Common Councillors expelled in 1647. See Valerie Pearl, ‘London Puritans and Scotch Fifth Columnists: a Mid-Seventeenth Century Phenomenon’, in A. Hollander and W. Kellaway, eds, Studies in London History (London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1969), pp. 317–31. The other Presbyterian militia ofﬁcers were Col. Daniel

REC9 7/13/01 2:47 PM Page 221

The Quarrel of the Covenant 221

28.

29.

30. 31.

32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

Sowton of St Mary Saviour, Southwark, Lt. Col. Jeremiah Baines of St Olaves, Southwark (Baines had been arrested for his part in the ‘Apprentices Parliament’ of July 1647), Col. Joseph Vaughn of St Christopher-le-Stocks, Capt. William Hubbard of St Mary Woolnoth and Col. Edward Hooker of St Mary Hill. (See RLPA, p. 44, 46.) For the ofﬁcers’ placements in the London Militia, see Lawson Chase Nagel, ‘The Militia of London, 1641–1649’ (PhD thesis, London, 1982), pp. 317–23. Other lay members of the Provincial Assembly’s grand committee included known Presbyterian agitators such as William Prynne’s brother-in-law George Clarke and Prynne’s fellow martyr Dr John Bastwick. The other lay members of the fourth Provincial Assembly’s Grand Committee were the later lord mayor Thomas Vyner of St Magnus the Martyr, Dr Edward Odling, Andrew Dandy, George Willingham of St Swithin, London Stone, Joshua Kirby of St Olave, Southwark, Anthony Bickerstaffe, Maurice Gething of Allhallow Breadstreet and Deputy of Cordwainer Ward between 1647 and 1655, Edward Lucas of St Stephen Coleman Street, Lawrence Warkman of St Magnus the Martyr, and John Mascal of St Olave, Old Jewry: RLPA, pp. 44, 46. See for example: The Humble Petition of Divers Well Affected Magistrates, Ministers, Citizens and Other Inhabitants in the City of London ([12 July] 1648, E452/7); The Humble Petition . . . of the City of London ([9 Aug.] 1648, E458/7); Three Petitions ([31 Aug.] 1648, E461/23). Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘The Fast Sermons of the Long Parliament’, in Religion, the Reformation and Social Change, 2nd edn (Basingstoke, Macmillan Press – now Palgrave, 1972) p. 297; John F. Wilson, Pulpit in Parliament (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1969), chapter 1. On the casuistry of the war see: John M. Wallace, Destiny his Choice: the Loyalism of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge, CUP, 1968), pp. 9–11. For resistance theory see: Q.R.D. Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (2 vols, Cambridge, CUP, 1978), II, chapter 7; Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: their Origin and Development (Cambridge, CUP, 1979) pp. 143–56. John Sanderson, ‘But the People’s Creatures’: the Philosophical Basis of the English Civil War (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1989), chapter 1; Wallace, Destiny his Choice, pp. 9–43. Examples of the use of the private law theory include Stephen Marshall, A Plea to Defensive Armes (1643) and the London ministers’ Scripture and Reason Pleaded for Defensive Armes (1643). Burgess, ‘Impact on Political Thought’, p. 69. SFR, p. 6. Ibid., p. 6. Ibid., p. 7. VMG, p. 3. SFR, p. 7. Ibid., p. 7; VMG, p. 4. Francis Oakley notes that the Reformed theologians ‘saw the heart of the Christian life . . . as a humble and painstaking obedience to the divine will as it is revealed in the scriptures’: ‘Christian Obedience and Authority, 1520–1550’, in J.H. Burns and M. Goldie, eds, The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700 (Cambridge, CUP, 1991), pp. 182–7.

REC9 7/13/01 2:47 PM Page 222

222 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52.

53.

54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65.

66.

SFR, p. 4. Ibid., p. 6; VMG, p. 3. SFR, p. 6; VMG, p. 4. SFR, pp. 7–8; VMG, p. 3. SFR, pp. 8–9; VMG, p. 5. SFR, p. 3. Gardiner, Documents, pp. 267–71. John Coffey, Politics, Religion and the British Revolutions: the Mind of Samuel Rutherford (Cambridge, CUP, 1997), pp. 163–4. Ibid., pp. 162–3. Wilson, Pulpit in Parliament, pp. 199, 206–7. Conrad Russell, ‘Arguments for Religious Unity in England, 1530–1650’, in Unrevolutionary England, 1603–1642 (London, Hambledon, 1990), pp. 179–204. Simeon Ashe, Religious Covenanting Directed and Covenant-Keeping Perswaded ([14 Jan.] 1646, E327/5), p. 2. See also: Edmund Calamy, The Great Danger of Covenant-Refusing ([14 Jan.] 1646, E327/6), pp. 7–8. For the context of these sermons see Corporation of London Record Ofﬁce, Journal of Common Council 40, fols 154v, 166v, 174. For the employment of the trope of rebuilding Jerusalem see Edmund Calamy’s allusion to Nehemiah in Great Danger of Covenant-Refusing, sigs. A2–3. This was the theme of Edmund Calamy’s fast sermon God’s Free Mercy to England (1642, E133/18). Wilson, Pulpit in Parliament, p. 171. Calamy, Great Danger of Covenant-Refusing, p. 14; Ashe, Religious Covenanting Directed, p. 10. [The Ministers of the Gospel in London], A Testimony to the Truth of Jesus Christ (1647), p. 28. For the pedigree of these arguments see Skinner, Foundations, II, p. 237. Wilson, Pulpit in Parliament, pp. 184–6. For a contemporary survey of the federal theology of the 1640s see Edmund Calamy, two Solemne Covenants Made Between God and Man: Viz The Covenant of Workes, and the Covenant of Grace ([17 Feb.] 1647, E373/6). Calamy, The Great Danger of Covenant-Refusing, pp. 2, 5; Ashe, Religious Covenanting Directed, pp. 14–15. Calamy, The Great Danger of Covenant-Refusing, pp. 10–12, 18–22; Ashe, Religious Covenanting Directed, pp. 4, 9, 13–14. Calamy, The Great Danger of Covenant-Refusing, p. 20. Ibid., pp. 8, 18. John Canne, The Snare is Broken ([17 May] 1649, E552/22). Other pamphlets of this ilk include a tract published by the army printer Robert Ibbotson: Some Considerations about the Nature of an Oath, More Particularly Relating to our Nationall Covenant ([4 Oct.] 1649, E575/11). The Presbyterian apologists exclaimed that they were ‘made very sensible of the dangerous effects of the violation of all our Covenant-concernments’ were ‘in our consciences perswaded and assured of our indispensible obligation’ to follow the letter of the Covenant: AD, p. 2. Tatton Park MS 104 (Nehemiah Wallington, ‘Great Marcy’s Continued, or yet God is good to Israel’), pp. 544–5.

REC9 7/13/01 2:47 PM Page 223

The Quarrel of the Covenant 223 67. For laments at the breach of Covenant see: BL Additional MS 1457 (Nehemiah Wallington, ‘God’s Judgement on Sabath Breakers’), fols 93r-v (at the taking of the Engagement in January 1650), fols 99–100v (on the reasons for God’s judgement in the City in 1655); BL, Sloane 922 (Nehemiah Wallington, ‘Letters on Religious Topics’), fol. 165v (NW to Master [Matthew] Grifen, 25 Feb. 1649), fol. 169v (NW to Master [Matthew] Barker, 22 Apr. 1650). 68. Gardiner, Documents, p. 269. 69. Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty, pp. 459–60. 70. Ibid., p. 460. 71. Ibid., p. 461. 72. Ibid., p. 461. 73. Thomas Watson, God’s Anatomy upon a Man’s Heart, or a Sermon Preached by Order of the Honourable House of Commons at Margarets Westminster, Decemb. 27 Being a Day of Publique Humiliation (1648, E536/7), pp. 12–14. 74. VMG, pp. 6–7. 75. SFR, p. 9; VMG, p. 5. 76. VMG, p. 7. 77. SFR, pp. 5–6. 78. Ibid., p. 5. 79. Watson, God’s Anatomy upon a Man’s Heart, pp. 16–17. 80. E.M. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1963). 81. SFR, p. 9. 82. Ibid., p. 4. 83. Robert Ashton, ‘From Cavalier to Roundhead Tyranny, 1642–1649’, in John Morrill, ed., Reactions to the English Civil War 1642–1649 (Basingstoke, Macmillan Press – now Palgrave, 1982), p. 206. 84. AD, p. 8. 85. [Christopher Love], Works of Darkness Brought to Light (1647, E399/36), p. 7. On a similar theme John Geree argued that just as Satan presented himself as an Angel of Light so usurpers often pretended ‘publike weal or liberty’: Might Overcoming Right, or A Cleer Answer to M. John Goodwin’s Right and Might Well Met ([18 Jan.] 1649, E538/24), p. 1. 86. [Love], Modest and Clear Vindication, pp. 30–1. 87. SFR, p. 9. 88. For the army’s plea from providence see Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty, p. 467; and on necessity see ibid., pp. 456, 458–9. 89. Blair Worden, ‘Providence and Politics in Cromwellian England’, P&P, CIX (1985), p. 84. 90. SFR, p. 13. 91. Ibid., p. 12. 92. On blood-guilt see Patricia Crawford, ‘Charles Stuart: That Man of Blood’, JBS, XVI (1977), pp. 41–61. 93. Ibid., p. 13. 94. Worden, ‘Providence and Politics’, p. 91. 95. SFR, p. 14. 96. Ibid., p. 14. 97. Ibid., p. 14. 98. [Love], Modest and Clear Vindication, p. 61.

REC9 7/13/01 2:47 PM Page 224

224 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109.

SFR, p. 12. Sanderson, ‘But the People’s Creatures’, p. 174. SFR, p. 15. Ibid., p. 15. Ibid., p. 15. [Love], Modest and Clear Vindication, pp. 21, 37; SFR, p. 14. Ibid., p. 14. [Love], Modest and Clear Vindication, p. 21. SFR, p. 15. Wallace, Destiny his Choice, p. 61. On de factoism see: Wallace, Destiny his Choice; Quentin Skinner, ‘Conquest and Consent: Thomas Hobbes and the Engagement Controversy’, in Aylmer, ed., Interregnum, pp. 79–98. 110. Worden, ‘Providence and Politics’, p. 83.

REC10 7/13/01 2:50 PM Page 225

10 Elegies and Commemorative Verse in Honour of Charles the Martyr, 1649–60 Andrew Lacey

After the Eikon Basilike, the most popular royalist literary responses to the regicide of January 1649 were the elegies and commemorative poems, large numbers of which were published between 1649 and 1652.1 Much excellent work has been undertaken recently on the ‘king’s book’, but apart from the work of Lois Potter, little attention has been paid to elegies as an historical source. Most writing on royalist literary culture is undertaken from the perspective of literary criticism and in relation to parliamentarian and republic literature.2 I approach this material as an historian of the cult of ‘Charles the martyr’, to discover what this material tells us about perceptions of Charles, the origins of the civil wars and the reasons for their defeat current amongst royalists in the months after the regicide. This eulogistic material also throws light upon the creation of the cult and the extent to which that was not only under way before the regicide, but also reﬂected in other forms of polemic such as the commemorative sermon. Like so many aspects of the cult, the typologies found in the postregicide elegies are to be found in royalist literature before the death of the king. John Cleveland had set the tone as early as 1644 in his commemorative poem on Laud, and Abraham Cowley’s unﬁnished epic poem of 1642–43, designed to celebrate an expected royalist victory which never occurred, breaks off with a lengthy eulogy on the death of Falkland at the battle of Newbury in September 1643.3 The edition of the Eikon Basilike published in mid-March 1649 contained a dedicatory poem and an epitaph, and in the same month Henry King, Bishop of Chichester, published A Deepe Groan Fetch’d at the Funerall of that Incomparable and Glorious Monarch, Charles the First,4 soon joined by An Elegy upon the Most Incomparable K. Charls the I. Also in March appeared a collection of elegies and epigrams in English, French and Latin entitled 225

REC10 7/13/01 2:50 PM Page 226

226 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

Vaticinium Votivum. This has been attributed to George Wither, but the ascription is unlikely since he was a Puritan and parliamentarian who wrote in favour of the republic. It is far more likely that Vaticinium Votivum is an anonymous collection of elegies collected from several authors, as was a further collection of eight pieces published anonymously in June 1649 under the title Monumentum Regale. This included a reprinting of King’s A Deepe Groan, and others have been attributed, probably falsely, to John Cleveland, although he did publish Majestas Intemerata. Or, the immortality of the King. In late March, early April appeared Regale Lectum Miseriae by John Quarles (the son of the better known Francis Quarles), who had fought for the king in the civil war. In Flanders at the end of 1648 he wrote Fons Lachrymarum; Or a fountain of tears, dedicated to the Prince of Wales, which was probably being published immediately before the regicide, preceding Regale Lectum Miseriae.5 John Draper argues that the royalist elegy declined after 1650–51, partly owing to the response of the republican authorities to this concerted literary attack on their rule. However, whilst it is true that the majority of these works belong to the ﬁrst two to three years of the 1650s, they did continue to appear, and were reprinted throughout the decade and after the Restoration.6 In 1661 Owen Felltham published An Epitaph to the Eternal Memory of Charles the First, in which he refers to Charles as ‘Christ the second’. This was printed in an edition of Felltham’s Resolves, although it was probably in circulation some years earlier.7 The previous year Thomas Forde had published Virtus Rediviva, a prose celebration of Charles, with which were printed three elegies on the royal martyr, including two written to commemorate the fasts of 1657 and 1658, and a poem celebrating Charles II’s entry into London in 1660. Explaining the eight years’ delay before writing an elegy on Charles’ death, he claims that ‘he who well would write thine elegy / Must take an ages time to study thee’,8 and Laura Lunger Knoppers, in discussing Jacobite uses of the martyr, demonstrates the extent to which typologies created in the 1640s and 1650s were reused in the early eighteenth century.9 There was even a play published in 1649, The Famous Tragedie of King Charles I Basely Butchered, which covered the period between the siege of Colchester and the king’s death. In it Fairfax is portrayed as the honourable and moderate man outwitted by the Machiavellian Cromwell who is seen seducing Lambert’s wife whilst Charles goes to his death. As Susan Wiseman has observed, the play was part of the continuing attempt by both royalists and republicans to come to terms with and articulate the momentous events of January 1649.10 Another favoured device of the royalist

REC10 7/13/01 2:50 PM Page 227

Elegies and Commemorative Verse 227

literary assault on the republic was the satirical litany. Both Robert Herrick and John Cleveland produced them during the 1640s, and a number of anonymous examples survive from the republic.11 These had the advantage of being offensive to the enemy both in content and in form, for the litany was part of the ordered liturgy of the church retained in The Book of Common Prayer, but excluded from the Directory and anathema to more advanced Puritans. Such commemorative literature reveals that under the impact of defeat and regicide a number of consistent ideas emerged to explain the position of Charles, the reasons for the civil wars and the nature of the opposition. Many of these views were current before the king’s death, but now became consolidated. As such they constitute a cult ideology which will appear in its most obvious public form in the fast-day sermons after 1660. The elegies take up and use themes found in the Eikon Basilike, in Salmasius, Cowley, and the commemorative sermons concerning the nature of monarchy, the war and the defeat of the king. As such the elegies, sermons and the king’s book speak to each other in the ﬁrst years of the republic, sharing and acknowledging themes and ideas. As Henry King says of the dead Charles, Thy better parts Lives in despite of death, and will endure Kept safe in thy unpatterned portraiture.12 ‘In serenissimae majestatis regiae’ claims that if we would see Charles after his death Then look Upon his resurrection, his book: In this he lives to us; his parts are here All encompassed in the best character.13 For the author of ‘Caroli’, the king’s book becomes part of a political manifesto justifying the royalist cause, ‘His book, his life, his death, will henceforth be / The Church of England’s best apology’.14 What the Eikon Basilike did, according to the eulogists, was to underline the fact that Charles, unlike his enemies, would never be forgotten: ‘thou . . . triumphest more by thine all-conquering quill’.15 His life and death would conﬁrm his place in the pantheon of heroes and martyrs, yet the existence of ‘that incomparable book’ made that remembrance doubly sure. As John Quarles puts it,

REC10 7/13/01 2:50 PM Page 228

228 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

His glory shall survive with fame, when they Shall lie forgotten in a heap of clay That were the authors of his death.16 This assurance was something the defeated royalists could cling to; however much the rebels tried to wipe out his name they could not invade the memory of his loyal followers. In ‘The requiem or libertie of an imprisoned royalist’, the captive glories in the fact that whilst his body is conﬁned, his memory is free: What, though I cannot see my King Either in his person or his coin, Yet contemplation is a thing Which renders what I have not mine; My King from me what adamant can part, When I can wear engraven on my heart . . . And though rebellion may my body bind, My King can only captivate my mind . . . And though immured, yet I can chirp and sing Disgrace to rebels, glory to my King.17 This attitude echoes Richard Lovelace’s captivity poem of 1642, ‘To Althea, from prison’, and in a phrase which calls to mind a theme from the masque, Henry King in A Deepe Groan compares the very name of Charles to a refreshing and medicinal herb, reﬂection on which revives the senses; Meantime the loyal eye Shall pay her tribute to thy memory. Thy aromatic name shall feast our sore, ’Bove balmy spikenards fragrant redolence.18 Yet here is one of a number of paradoxes found in the elegies. If Charles is to be remembered as a saint, martyr and hero, then the instruments of that martyrdom cannot be ignored. In excoriating the regicides the authors wished to blot them out, yet as the cause and the means of the triumph of Charles they could not be forgotten.19 This ambiguity is found throughout the elegies, perhaps most obviously in the common claim that mere words cannot convey the horror and grief felt by the writer when contemplating Charles’ fate.

REC10 7/13/01 2:50 PM Page 229

Elegies and Commemorative Verse 229

The author of ‘Caroli’ ponders whether he is capable of writing of the regicide: I come, but come with trembling, lest I prove Th’ unequal greet of Semele and Jove. As she was too obscure, and he too bright, My themes too heavy, and my pen too light . . . And can I Who want myself, write him an elegy?20 Thomas Forde begs the muse to help him ‘weep or sigh an elegy’. After all, Charles himself had spoken through his ‘rare portraiture’, and, In such a strain, Our wits are useless, and endeavours vain. Silence and admiration ﬁt me best, Let other try to write, I’ll weep the rest.21 Yet a stunned silence was to be far from the actual reaction of these eulogists. Despite their disclaimers, they were to be very noisy in condemnation and celebration. Yet many must have been aware of the tensions evident in their work. How to describe the indescribable, think the unthinkable? How to craft language into an acceptable memorial, and how to be simultaneously prostrate with grief, ravished by the contemplation of Charles’ heavenly virtues, and full of hatred for his enemies and ready for vengeance in the cause of Charles II? The author of ‘Memoriae sacrum optimi maximi Caroli I’ acknowledged these problems, My dwindling-dwarf-like-fancy swells not big, Nor knows to wear a borrowed periwig Of metaphors, nor from Parnassus rise To ransack far-fetched phrases from the skies; Since all those piddling epithets are too brief, Great Charles, to show thy glory, or my grief.22 Lois Potter has discussed the problem these authors faced, not just in ﬁnding appropriate language, but in avoiding the charge of being weak and effeminate in their grief. She reminds us that women were often used as a literary device to signify hysterical grief or swooning horror:

REC10 7/13/01 2:50 PM Page 230

230 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

reactions the royalists may have felt were not ‘manly’ enough to be ascribed directly.23 Another device was to concentrate on evoking the reader’s sympathy by focusing on the patient suffering of Charles and the courage with which he faced his predicament. As the author of the play The Famous Tragedie puts it, He that can read the play and yet forbear For his late murdered Lord, to shed a tear, Hath a heart framed of adamant and may Pass for an atheist the Reformed way.24 As such the elegies reﬂect a theme running through all cult literature, namely the epideictic technique of evoking the reader’s sympathy and identiﬁcation with the central character, rather than discussing the events and issues which brought that individual into crisis. A dispassionate discussion of the causes of the civil wars or Charles’ downfall was probably impossible for most people caught up in those events. Certainly it was impossible in cult literature, as it required a level of detachment incompatible with the ideological conviction that Charles was a virtuous and saintly prince, whose enemies were all black-hearted villains. Yet some reason had to be given for the downfall of the monarchy, and here the elegies echo explanations found in the few printed commemorative sermons of the 1650s; namely that the wars were caused by the sins of the people and the ambition of the rebels.25 Such an explanation absolves Charles from any responsibility; he is merely the victim, almost passive apart from his resolution not to give in to the rebellion. That Charles’ cause is just was taken for granted, yet it was necessary to counter the Puritan belief that worldly success denotes God’s approval. Three methods were employed to achieve this. In Regale Lectum Miseriae, John Quarles has Charles declare: God knows my cause was just And yet he laid my armies in the dust. Shall I repine because I daily see My foes prevail, and triumph over me? No, no, I will not, they shall live to die, When I shall die to live and glorify The general in heaven, within whose tent I hope to rest, where time will ne’er be spent.26

REC10 7/13/01 2:50 PM Page 231

Elegies and Commemorative Verse 231

In other words, the royalists’ defeat was the necessary preliminary to the gloriﬁcation of Charles, an explanation only possible with the beneﬁt of hindsight, when history is read backwards from some climactic event such as the regicide. As Forde puts it in addressing Charles, ‘spite of the sword and axe, you found a way / To win the ﬁeld, although you lost the day’.27 The second method was to point out the logical fallacy within the Puritan theory of success, namely that it only works when one’s own side is triumphant. As Sir George Lisle says to Fairfax at Colchester, Fortune hath favoured thee I do confess . . . but that proves not the justness of thy cause. For by the same rule Ottoman may boast, the partial deities favour him the most.28 In these elegies and plays the royalists attempt to wring victory out of defeat by placing Charles in the Christian tradition of heroic death. Charles gains his life by losing it; ‘they shall live to die, when I shall die to live’. As such he stands in the gospel and Catholic tradition which sees this life as the preparation for the next, as a vale of tears through which it is necessary to pass before receiving one’s reward. This was a constant theme of the cult. Owen Felltham states that the martyr’s crown is Charles’ only, When by a noble Christian fortitude He has serenely triumphed o’er all rude And barbarous indignities that men (Inspired from Hell) could act by hand or pen.29 Indeed, John Quarles suggests that he was too good a king to remain on earth, and that heaven was jealous for his company.30 The author of The Famous Tragedie turns this idea to cynical account when Cromwell – portrayed as an ambitious, calculating and ruthless rebel – muses that in killing Charles he is doing heaven a favour, for, He is ﬁtter far for to converse with saints and seraphim than with erroneous . . . and ambitious mortals, and twere a sin (a grand one) for to deter the hopes celestial have for to enjoy his presence.31 As such the defeat and Charles’ subsequent reception in heaven are not an obstacle, but rather a conﬁrmation that his cause is just and will win

REC10 7/13/01 2:50 PM Page 232

232 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

through in the end. As Henry King puts it, ‘Thy sweetness conquered the sharp test’.32 However, for those royalists left behind the future was not so rosy, and the eulogists knew that in contrasting the present state of England with a supposed golden age of peace and prosperity before the wars they would strike a responsive chord in their audience. The comparison was even more effective in that it was over a decade since the beginning of the Bishops’ Wars. The memory of Ship Money, the personal rule and Laudian controversies in the church had faded and seemed triﬂing when compared to the upheavals and suffering which had followed. Nostalgia and a yearning for ‘normalcy’ made many happy to forget the problems of the personal rule and to believe that England had been peaceful and happy under a wise prince before the rebellion had turned the world upside down. Yet if England was so happy, and if Charles was such a good, wise and ‘glorious’ prince, why was there a civil war? Why did this golden age end in blood, and why was so great a prince defeated in battle, publicly tried, and executed by his own people? In answering these questions the royalists constructed a historiography which not only absolved Charles from any responsibility, but also helped them come to terms with their defeat. For them, this golden age was disrupted by the ambition of evil men, who, manipulating and misleading the people, sought power for themselves under the pretext of securing liberty and true religion. The whole design against Charles and the state was described as ‘A crime Leviathan / Inﬁdel wickedness, without the Pale’.33 The people were misled because of a surfeit of leisure and security granted them by the benevolent rule of Charles, which made them decadent, arrogant and sinful. This combination of the people’s sins and the ambition of evil men brought civil war to England and resulted in the murder of the king. This historiography also conﬁrmed the royalists’ sense of hope, because if the republic were based on sin, then eventually God would act to destroy it and restore the true rulers. After the Restoration this was to become the ofﬁcial view, repeated in many fast-day sermons. Its weakness was that a signiﬁcant proportion of the population had a different memory of Charles’ rule and the reasons for the civil war. This divergence of historical memory, and the fact that royalist historiography could not discuss the origins of the wars dispassionately, may help explain the eventual failure of the cult. For the eulogists and preachers of the 1650s, however, there was no doubt as to the causes of the rebellion. Henry King was sure that even in 1640 the Puritan faction in the Commons was intent on rebellion.

REC10 7/13/01 2:50 PM Page 233

Elegies and Commemorative Verse 233

Having denied the king the right to dissolve parliament without their consent, they went on to gain control of the militia; This done, the unkennelled crew of lawless men Led by Watkins, Pennington and Venn, Did with confused noise the court invade; Then all dissenters in both Houses bayed. At which the King amazed is forced to ﬂy, The whilst your mouths laid on maintain the cry. The king, surprised and disconcerted by an unforeseen rebellion, is obliged to run before his enemies, and Henry King maintains the hunting theme, which emphasizes Charles’ vulnerability and innocence before the implacable hatred of his pursuers, The royal game dislodged and under chase, Your hot pursuit dogs him from place to place . . . The mountain partridge or the chased roe Might now for emblems his fortune go.34 The author of An Elegie on the Meekest of Men, the Most Glorious of Princes, the Most Constant of Martyrs, Charles the I sees the link between the mob and those men who controlled it; His ﬁrst afﬂiction from rude tumult came, From them the fuel, but elsewhere the ﬂame, Their trunk and boughs build the instructed pile But worse men light and fan the ﬂames the while.35 The plot is made easier because of the ignorance of the mob, who can be primed against church and king without knowing the reason why, or understanding either the slogans they are being taught or the real motives of their teachers. Yet ultimately it could only be the sinful nature of the people that turned them against their prince, since the eulogists are convinced that the people could have no legitimate grievances. In The Famous Tragedie, Sir Charles Lucas is adamant that ‘Britain’s Charles, his peoples sins did kill’.36 And in A Penitential Ode for the Death of King Charls, the grieving cavalier goes one better, and blames himself. In a manner reminiscent of counter-reformation piety he confesses to the dead Charles, ‘Say not the Commons, nor the army, / City, nor judges; only I did harm thee.’ Warming to his theme, he makes the

REC10 7/13/01 2:50 PM Page 234

234 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

point that if the sins of the nation brought Charles to his death, then each individual is guilty: Though Pontius Bradshaw did in judgement sit, And Cook dress hell-bred sophistry with wit, To drain the blood, Of Charles the good And strike the royal heart, Not by evidence but art. These were but the ﬁre and wood! But who did bring? Or where’s the lamb for a burnt-offering? Let every penitent loyalist now cry, ’Twas sinful England! But most sinful I.37 Most eulogists refrained from such radical introspection and were content to blame the mob and the perﬁdious faction who controlled it to further their ambitions. For, like the preachers, the eulogists were convinced that from the beginning of the troubles the rebels had conceived the rebellion in its entirety. They emphasized that, compared to other outrages perpetrated against kings, this deeply laid design was without parallel. Thus, ‘Raviliack’s was but undergraduate sin / And Goury here a pupil assassin’.38 The parliamentary campaign of 1640–42, the civil wars, the trial and execution of the king and the establishment of the republic, were all carefully planned from the beginning. Thus identiﬁed as hypocritical and unreliable, the rebels’ arguments are dismissed, because however plausible individual assertions may appear, such reasonableness only masks the desire to tear down the fabric of the state and set themselves up in power. Charles himself makes this point in his letter to his son at the end of Eikon Basilike, where he warns the Prince of Wales that the call for reformation in the church is only an excuse to pull down the hierarchy of the state. This view dispenses with the need to engage with, and refute, the rebels’ programme, just as the emphasis on national sins and ambitious factions exonerates Charles from any responsibility for the civil war or the defeat of the royalists. These attitudes and arguments accompanied a deeply felt sense of hierarchy and fear of social upheaval. Henry King identiﬁes the fall of Charles with the fall of property. The fear of religious radicalism has been suggested as an important factor in the creation of a royalist party in 1641–42 and in the change of attitude towards the king after 1646. Certainly any understanding of royalist attitudes must include the pro-

REC10 7/13/01 2:50 PM Page 235

Elegies and Commemorative Verse 235

found anxiety many felt at the way the social hierarchy was breaking down in the face of rebellion and high taxation. Yet in 1649 all the eulogists could do was stand amazed at the spectacle of their king being so profanely treated by his inferiors. Quarles, perhaps referring to the fact that Charles refused to remove his hat before the High Court of Justice, exclaims: Good God, what times are these, when subjects dare Presume to make their sovereign stand bare; And when they sent him from their new made place Of justice, basely spit upon his face.39 In Fons Lachrymarum he refers to ‘A brain-sick multitude, a rabble of all religions’,40 made up of individuals who are only happy if they can ‘rail and reverently bawl / Against grave bishops and their pious king’.41 The whole hierarchy of civilized values has been thrown into the melting pot, for, If a black-smith, or a tinker can Hammer out treason, he’s a zealous man. Or if a learned cobbler will be sure To stitch it close, oh he’s a Christian pure!42 Others refer to peasant leaders of the past, such as Wat Tyler and Jack Cade, not only to damn the present rebels by association, but also to frighten the reader by conjuring up images of wild and all-consuming peasant violence.43 Thus the rebels are ‘dung-hill tyrants’, engaged in ‘rude tumults’, and treason not only goes unpunished but rules the roost. As the author of ‘Caroli’ observed, ‘Does not the judge and law too for a need / The stirrup hold, whilst treason mounts the saddle’.44 This refers not only to the spurious show of legality attending the regicide, but also the familiar theme of the reversal of roles; the master obliged to attend the servant. This fear of social radicalism and the revolution of traditional values is linked to a belief that unleashing the mob will result in the overthrow not only of the social hierarchy but the whole course of nature, based as it is on the balanced operation of the hierarchy of powers. The author of ‘On the execrable murther of Charles the ﬁrst’, carried away by grief, exclaims that, ‘Charles’ tragedy doth portend / Earth’s dissolution and the world’s just end’.45 Others, whilst not looking for the end of the world, clearly see in the regicide the threat of anarchy. The author of

REC10 7/13/01 2:50 PM Page 236

236 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

‘On the martyrdom of his late Majesty’ sees both church and state shaking under the impact of the executioner’s axe, which is laid to society’s roots, thus ‘that building must expect to fall whose prop is turned to dust’.46 In ‘An elegie on the best of men and meekest of martyrs, Charles the I’ the author sees the innocent royal blood dripping into the earth causing such a reaction that, ‘the frame of nature shrinks again / Into a shufﬂing chaos’.47 For the death of the king ‘Voided all forms, left but privations / In church and state; inverting every right’.48 All will be devoured by the monster of rebellion, and as the Fronde came to be represented by a python, so the forces of popular sovereignty unleashed against church and state are called by John Quarles the ‘many-headed monster’ of the people, and by Thomas Forde a hydraheaded monster which boasts of its power and justiﬁes its presence by asserting democratic ideas of popular sovereignty and the subordination of kings to the people.49 Quarles has his democratic monster declare that in a state where our welfare is the supreme law . . . I’d suffer all to preach And sow sedition, everyone shall be At least a saint, and preach upon a tree.50 In this democratic confusion all order, divine and human, is sacriﬁced and, in an image reminiscent of Hobbes’s state of nature, the only law is the greed and lust of each individual pitted against all others.51 Having discussed what the eulogists say about the nature of the tragedy they have experienced, it is now appropriate to look at what they say about Charles himself. If, as the eulogists have already asserted, the civil wars and regicide were the product of national sins and the ruthless ambition of evil men, then Charles emerges as a ﬁgure untainted by any fault or responsibility. Charles’ innocence is absolute, as the author of ‘Caroli’ puts it, ‘Simeon the Stylite in his pillar / Might live more strict, but not more innocent’.52 In none of the elegies is there any hint that Charles’ policies as king were ﬂawed, or his leadership of the royalist war effort in any way mistaken. In fact, some of the writers claim that Charles’ great virtues proved his undoing. The author of Two Elegies reﬂects that Charles’ Saint-like mercies were So great, they did remit that needful fear Subjects should show unto their king.53

REC10 7/13/01 2:50 PM Page 237

Elegies and Commemorative Verse 237

Yet even this implied criticism is immediately countered by claiming that Charles rivalled in valour and wisdom both Caesar and Solomon, and he By the comparison can no loser be If we but cast piety in the scale And patient sufferance, King Charles must prevail.54 We have already encountered the suggestion that Charles was too saintly a character to remain long on earth. He is identiﬁed with the Man of Sorrows, a king unjustly burdened with the sins of his people. He is described as having ‘saint-like mercies’, and some eulogists, hoping to bring the reader closer to the scene of martyrdom, put heart-rending speeches into Charles’ mouth, establishing his loss and sadness. John Quarles has Charles address God in Regale Lectum Miseriae, where he asks, Was ever grief like mine? Was ever heart so sad? Was ever any So destitute of joy, that had so many As I have had? Quarles goes on to say that despite these manifold afﬂictions, Charles remained constant to his virtuous self, through self-discipline and constancy. Echoing the Neostoics, Quarles asserts that, He was a king not only over land But over passion, for he could command His royal self.55 This theme of self-mastery is evident in the Eikon Basilike, and bears witness to ‘a heaven-channeled mind’,56 which allows Charles to be wise, just, chaste, merciful, courageous and devout, but principally gave him that intangible aura of majesty which enabled him to subdue discord by his mere presence. Thomas Forde states that the glory of Charles as he enters heaven puts all former heroes into the shade; Thou art all wonder, and thy brighter story Casts an eclipse upon the blazing glory Of former ages; all their worthies, now (By thee outdone) do blush, and wonder how

REC10 7/13/01 2:50 PM Page 238

238 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

They lost the day beclouded with a night Of silence, rising from thy greater light.57 This theme, so familiar from the masques of the 1630s, is employed when considering the king’s trial to contrast the turbulence of the rebels with the recollected equanimity of Charles. On being brought to the bar, Like a sun he shined Amongst those gloomy clouds which had combined Themselves together, plotting to disgrace His orient lustre and impaled his face . . . But he whose patience could admit no date Conquered their envies and subdued their hate.58 Beyond this stoic self-mastery and majestic equanimity, most of the elegies review the list of Charles’ virtues, almost like a catechism. Charles is the best of men and the best of kings, a loving husband and father, a paragon of all the traditional virtues which, in another echo of the masque, illuminate the land. His piety was beyond reproach, his whole reign had a priestly quality about it, and ‘His crown contained a mitre’.59 In contrast, regicide has destroyed the health of the land, and the author of Chronostichon sees the fall of the axe as rendering Britain blind. Yet again there is a paradox in all this adulation; for if Charles was such a paragon of virtues, why did he inspire such distrust and end his days on a scaffold? The same paradox, noted in looking at Charles’ rule, was, according to the eulogists, an expression of his virtuous self. They, like the preachers, did not often confront these paradoxes head on; indeed they could not without undermining the whole foundation of Charles’ radical innocence. What they could do was to present Charles as a type of innocent suffering in the hope that all those who had shared something of his trials in the civil wars would identify with him. He could also be presented as the good king sacriﬁced for the sins of his people; a people blinded to his greatness and virtue by their sins. Here again we encounter the identiﬁcation of Charles with the godly kings of the Old Testament (David, Solomon and Josiah), and with that most singular and controversial aspect of the cult, the Christ-like parallel. Henry King, having stated that the death of Charles calls to mind the murder of King Josiah, nevertheless feels that some apology has to be given for these biblical parallels, and declares:

REC10 7/13/01 2:50 PM Page 239

Elegies and Commemorative Verse 239

O pardon me that but from Holy Writ Our loss allows no parallel to it. Nor call it bold presumption that I dare Charles with the best of Judah’s kings compare. The virtues of whose life did I prefer The text acquits me for no ﬂatterer. For he like David perfect in his trust, Was never stained like him, with blood or lust.60 Charles is more virtuous than David, more devout and constant than Solomon, more zealous than either Jehosaphat or Hezekiah and more patient than Job. His restoration of St Paul’s is compared to Josiah’s restoration of the Temple and ‘Must (if no other) be his monument’.61 In surpassing the Old Testament kings in piety and wisdom, Charles can have only one biblical parallel, Christ himself. In Felltham’s famous phrase, ‘Here Charles the ﬁrst, and Christ the second lies’.62 The parallel drawn between the Passion of Christ and the death of Charles was made in the very ﬁrst days after the regicide. Within weeks of Charles’ death, Dr Lotius, in a speech before Charles II on behalf of the consistory of The Hague, declared that Charles had walked in the footsteps of Christ and the protomartyr Stephen, particularly in forgiving his enemies and praying for his persecutors on the scaffold. The point was taken up by John Quarles in Regale Lectum Miseriae, and sermons by Henry Leslie and Richard Watson also drew the Christ-Charles parallels without ambiguity.63 Henry King, in A Deepe Groan, refers to the day of execution as ‘Good Friday wretchedly transcrib’d’, and ‘Pilate’s consent is Bradshaw’s sentence here; / The Judgement Hall’s removed to Westminster’.64 Throughout the elegies references to Christ’s Passion recur in connection with Charles. The Scots, for their ‘selling’ of Charles to the English parliament in 1647, are ‘compared with Iscariot’,65 and later in the same elegy King refers to ‘Pilate Bradshaw with his pack of Jews’.66 The author of ‘A pentiential ode for the death of King Charls’ refers to ‘Pontius Bradshaw’ sitting in judgment on Charles,67 and Owen Felltham believes that the regicides went even further than the Sanhedrin, in that they could claim ignorance of Christ’s real identity, whereas the regicides were in no doubt as to whom they were killing, When Herod, Judas, Pilate and the Jews Scots, Cromwell, Bradshaw and the shag-haired mews

REC10 7/13/01 2:50 PM Page 240

240 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

Had quite out-acted, and by their damn’d cry Of injured justice, lessened Cruciﬁe.68 Like Christ, Charles is radically innocent, yet he does not ﬂinch from giving himself up for his people, and the trial and execution are likened to a passion-tragedy His Saviours person none could act, but he Behold what Scribes are here, what Pharisees! . . . Whitehall must be, lately his palace, now his Calvary.69 However, it was the author of ‘Caroli’ who set out the full ChristCharles parallel in full, Now Charles the king, and as good a king too, Being Christ’s adopted self, was both to do And suffer like him. Charles was to walk in the same footsteps as Christ, and wear the same crown of thorns, the very crown he is seen holding in Marshall’s famous frontispiece to the Eikon Basilike. When abused he did not retaliate or abuse his enemies, but accepted his lot so that he might ‘take up / His Saviours cross, and pledge him in his cup’. Having Liv’d o’er our Saviour’s Sermon on the Mount, And did all Christian precepts so reduce That’s life the doctrine was, his death the use; Posterity will say, he should have died No other death than by being cruciﬁed. And there renownest epochs will be Great Charles his death, next Christ’s nativity.70 Here we are confronted with another paradox: Charles’ reputation as a martyr can only be achieved by his death, and only through the failure of his earthly career can his divine qualities be revealed. In this respect Charles conforms to the traditional Christian economy of martyrdom; giving up one’s life to save it, with death as the gateway to greater life. It was a paradox Charles himself appeared to recognize, particularly in referring to parliament’s promise to make him a glorious king, and the eulogists were quick to underline the point that the fury of the rebels

REC10 7/13/01 2:50 PM Page 241

Elegies and Commemorative Verse 241

only succeeded in revealing more clearly Charles’ Christ-like qualities. As the author of ‘Caroli’ puts it, ‘The stones they hurled at him, with intent / To crush his fame, have proved his monument’.71 Whilst the acceptance of suffering may be a commonplace of Christian martryology, there is a sense of predestination in some of the eulogists. Charles’ virtues are so excellent, his enemies so vile, and the sins of the nation so great, that his martyrdom becomes a foregone conclusion. We have already noted the author of Caroli observing that it was unfortunate that Charles was not cruciﬁed, thus making the parallel with Christ even more obvious, and John Quarles has Charles refer to death as ‘my longed for hour . . . I long to throw this burden down, that presses me below’.72 Monumentum regale contains a number of elegies which feature Charles welcoming death, and the authors use it as the medium through which Charles’ virtues can shine. Indeed, weeping at his death is called ‘the treason of our eyes’, for ‘Our sun did only set, that he might rise’. Death, and his agents, are forgiven for killing Charles; their ‘courteous knife’ was the instrument which released Charles from the ‘great injury of life’.73 By subsuming the actual killing into the image of the saint and martyr, and by insisting on reading the circumstances of Charles’ death exclusively from the perspective of the ‘glorious martyr’, the eulogists are able to make even the executioner serve the cult. Charles receives his due not, as Milton would say, as punishment for his crimes and failings as a king, but as a reward for his sanctity and constancy, which leads him inevitably to a martyrs crown. In conclusion, the eulogists present three alternatives for the future. Initially there is apotheosis: the dead Charles is now beyond all earthly sorrow, and, as a glorious saint in heaven, he can rest from his labours. The author of ‘An elegie upon King Charles the First’ records Charles’ apotheosis thus, And thus his soul, of this her triumph proved, Broke, like a ﬂash of lightning, through the cloud Of ﬂesh and blood; and from the highest line Of humane virtue, passed to the divine.74 Thomas Forde, in ‘The second anniversary on Charls the First, 1658’, boasts that, Here is a saint more great, more true than ere Came from the triple crown, or holy chair. We need no further for example look,

REC10 7/13/01 2:50 PM Page 242

242 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

Than unto thee, thou art the only book; Thou art the best of texts.75 The second conclusion was to contrast the glory of Charles in heaven with the sorrows of his subjects left on earth. This was an effective propaganda ploy to use in 1649 when many people were yearning for a return to normality and settled government. The author of ‘Caroli’ compared the present state of England to that of Eygpt assaulted by plagues in the Book of Exodus. But whereas Egypt only had to deal with plagues of locust, and hail storms, England had to contend with ‘frogs and lice, and Independents too’.76 A third way of coping with the regicide was to reﬂect upon the inevitable vengeance which would fall on the rebels; a vengeance to be poured out by God and Charles’ supporters. At its heart was the Old Testament concept of blood-guilt – the conviction that Charles’ innocent blood called out for vengeance. In his second dream on Charles’ death, John Quarles has him declare to the rebels, Be well assured that every drop which parts Out of my veins shall cleave into your hearts Like tangling bird-lime which will hold you fast, And vengeance too shall ﬁnd you out at last. God’s ‘all-surveying eye’ can see what the rebels have done and for that they will be punished; wherever they ﬂee and whatever they do, the guilt of their actions in spilling innocent blood will pursue them.77 Here we see the juxtaposition of resignation and revenge which Milton found so objectionable in the Eikon Basilike; the suggestion that Charles’ saint-like qualities were merely weapons with which to attack his enemies, and that all the comments about meekness, forgiveness and virtues were just a smoke-screen to hide the concrete political motives of hatred for the republic and the desire for revenge. The author of A Cofﬁn for King Charles has the dead king himself assert the juxtaposition of his own glory in heaven and the inevitability of vengeance; Singing with angels, near the throne Of the Almighty Three, I sit, and know perdition (Base Cromwell) waits on thee.78

REC10 7/13/01 2:50 PM Page 243

Elegies and Commemorative Verse 243

Many eulogists look from the dead father to the living son, ‘as may exhale the vapours from our eyes’.79 He is the hope of the future, and one must channel one’s grief into working for his restoration. Henry King calls this hope ‘an antidote for grief’, and all our just arrears Of grief for Charles his death cannot be done In better pay, than to enthrone his son.80 The author of Two Elegies takes this further by arguing that just as the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church, so out of the spilt blood of Charles will spring a restored and strengthened monarchy. One of the most striking features of the political theology underpinning the cult as expressed in these elegies and commemorative verses was that it would allow for no ambiguity. The many paradoxes and evasions exist as a result of a striving to create a closed and allencompassing system. The historiography of the wars, the character and motives of the regicides, and the question of Charles himself, are all drawn with broad brush strokes which allow no dissension or discussion. Given the circumstances of defeat and exile it was perhaps inevitable that the royalists should have painted such an exaggerated picture of Charles; they were trying to sustain a vision of monarchy and Anglicanism against a republic which seemed to carry all before it. Yet in the longer term this rigidity and exaggeration may have worked against the cult. The further one moves from the events of January 1649 the more the image of Charles, and the political theology sustaining it, is challenged and diluted. Once the external imperatives sustaining the vision of these elegies is removed after 1660 the exaggerated claims made on behalf of Charles, and the historiography surrounding the cult, begin to look increasingly untenable. By the time of the Exclusion Crisis voices are heard for the ﬁrst time in public questioning the accepted memory of Charles and demanding the abolition of the fast. However, that development was still to come.

Notes 1. The British Library lists about ﬁfty such elegies in its catalogue in English, French, German, and Latin. 2. L. Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature, 1641–1660 (Cambridge, CUP, 1989), esp. chapter 5; E.S. Wheeler, ‘Eikon Basilike and the Rhetoric of Self-Representation’, in T.N. Corns, ed., The Royal Image: Representations of Charles I (Cambridge, CUP, 1999), pp. 122–40; K. Sharpe, ‘Private

REC10 7/13/01 2:50 PM Page 244

244 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

3.

4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

Conscience and Public Duty in the Writings of Charles I’, Historical Journal, XL (1997), pp. 643–65; J. Loxley, Royalism and Poetry in the English Civil Wars: the Drawn Sword (Basingstoke, Macmillan Press – now Palgrave, 1997), pp. 182–3; S.N. Zwicker, Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649–1689 (London, Cornell University Press, 1993), esp. chapter 2; R. Wilcher, ‘Cruciﬁxion or Apocalypse?: Reﬁguring the Eikon Basilike’, in D.B. Hamilton and R. Strier, eds, Religion, Literature, and Politics in PostReformation England, 1540–1688 (Cambridge, CUP, 1996), pp. 138–60; K. Sharpe, ‘The King’s Writ: Royal Authors and Royal Authority in Early Modern England’, in K. Sharpe and P. Lake, eds, Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (Basingstoke, Macmillan Press – now Palgrave, 1994), pp. 117–38; T.N. Corns, Uncloistered Virtue: English Political Literature, 1640–1660 (Oxford, OUP, 1992), esp. chapter 4; R. Wilcher, ‘What was the King’s Book for?: The Evolution of Eikon Basilike’, Yearbook of English Studies, XXI (1991), pp. 218–28; R. Helgerson, ‘Milton Reads the King’s Book: Print, Performance and the Making of a Bourgeois Idol’, Criticism, XXIX (1987), pp. 1–25; F.F. Madan, A New Bibliography of the Eikon Basilike of King Charles the First with a Note on the Authorship (Oxford, Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1950). This is not intended as a deﬁnitive bibliography of modern scholarship on the Eikon Basilike and elegies, but is, I hope, representative. J. Cleveland, ‘On the Archbishop of Canterbury’, in Poems (1653), p. 60; A. Cowley, The Civil War, ed. Allen Pritchard (Toronto, Toronto University Press, 1973). Although the author of King’s entry in the DNB calls the ascription of this elegy to him ‘doubtful’. Fons Lachrymarum was reprinted in 1655 and 1677, whilst Regale Lectum Miseriae was reprinted three times before the Restoration and again in 1679. Two royalist elegies, replete with the typologies of the 1650s, appeared in 1683, during the Exclusion Crisis, and another in 1709, which re-presented the Christ-Charles parallel. See also L.L. Knoppers, ‘Reviving the Martyr King: Charles I as Jacobite Icon’, in Corns, ed., The Royal Image, pp. 263–87. O. Felltham. The Poems of Owen Felltham 1604?–1668, ed. T.L. Pebworth and C.J. Summers (Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1973). T. Forde, Virtus rediviva (1660), sig. c5r. Knoppers, ‘Reviving the Martyr King’, pp. 263–87. S. Wiseman, Drama and Politics in the English Civil War (Cambridge, CUP, 1998), pp. 62–80. Examples of this form can be found in Henry Morley’s The King and the Commons: Cavalier and Puritan Songs (London, 1868); and in W.W. Wilkins, Political Ballads of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (2 vols, London, 1840). H. King, A Deepe Groan, in Monumentum Regale (1649), p. 18. ‘In serenissimae majestatis regiae’, in Vaticinium Votivum (1649), p. 90. ‘Caroli’, in Monumentum Regale, p. 23. Forde, ‘Second anniversary of Charls the ﬁrst, 1658.’ Virtus rediviva (1660), sig. c6v. J. Quarles, Regale Lectum Miseriae (1649), p. 41. ‘The requiem or libertie of an imprisoned royalist’, in Vaticinium Votivum, pp. 85–6.

REC10 7/13/01 2:50 PM Page 245

Elegies and Commemorative Verse 245 18. King, A Deepe Groan, p. 35. 19. Traditionally the Christian martyr is portrayed with recognized and by the instruments of martyrdom. 20. ‘Caroli’, pp. 20–1. 21. Forde, Virtus Rediviva, sig. c4r & sig. c6v. Forde also uses the contrary device in another elegy in an attempt to underline the subject’s dramatic quality. In The Second Anniversary on Charls the First, 1658 he contends that the grief over Charles’ death is so great that it, ‘would ﬁll a dumb mans mouth with words’: Virtus Rediviva, sig. c6r. 22. ‘Memoriae sacrum optimi maximi Caroli I’, in Vaticinium Votivum, p. 52. 23. Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing, pp. 187–9. 24. The Famous Tragedie (1649), sig. a2v. 25. This theme was to be repeated endlessly in the large number of fast-day sermons printed after 1660. 26. Quarles, Regale Lectum Miseriae, pp. 25–6. 27. Forde, Virtus Rediviva, sig. c6v. 28. The Famous Tragedie, p. 10. 29. Felltham, The Poems, p. 66. 30. Quarles, Regale Lectum Miseriae, p. 41. 31. The Famous Tragedie, p. 33. 32. King, A Deepe Groan, p. 36. In an important insight into the psychology of Jacobite uses of the cult, Laura Lunger Knoppers has suggested that the resignation ascribed to Charles in his ‘solitude and suffering’ inhibited effective action in the Stuart cause. Resignation, patient endurance and a waiting upon the workings of providence, whilst traditional Christian virtues, are not the most effective means of achieving victory in a political or military conﬂict! Knoppers, ‘Reviving the Martyr King’, p. 264. 33. King, A Deepe Groan, p. 33. 34. H. King, An Elegy (1649), pp. 7–8. 35. ‘An elegie on the meekest of men’, in Monumentum Regale, p. 14. 36. The Famous Tragedie, p. 13. 37. ‘A penitential ode for the death of King Charls’, in Vaticinium Votivum, p. 102. 38. King, A Deepe Groan, p. 33. 39. Quarles, Regale Lectum Miseriae, p. 43. 40. J. Quarles, Fons Lachrymarum (1649), p. 5. 41. Ibid., p. 8. 42. Ibid., p. 9. 43. ‘An elegie on, the meekest of men’, p. 8. 44. ‘Caroli’, p. 21. This is a paraphrase of a favourite royalist text, Ecclesiastes 10:7. ‘I have seen servants upon horses, and princes walking as servants upon the earth’. 45. ‘On the execrable murther of Charles the ﬁrst’, in Vaticinium Votivum, p. 99. 46. ‘On the martydom of his late Majesty’, in Vaticinium Votivum, p. 81. 47. ‘An elegie on the best of men and meekest of martyrs, Charles the I’, in Monumentum regale, p. 43. 48. Ibid., p. 40. 49. Quarles, Regale Lectum Miseriae, p. 3; Forde, Virtus Rediviva, sig. c4r. 50. Quarles, Regale Lectum Miseriae, pp. 4, 8.

REC10 7/13/01 2:50 PM Page 246

246 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I 51. Both the monsters in A Famous Tragedy and in Quarles, Regale, are sexually immoral. In A Famous Tragedy, Cromwell is seen seducing Lambert’s wife whilst the king is executed, whereas Quarles has the personiﬁcation of rebellion making love, ‘in the open air’: Quarles, Regale Lectum Miseriae, p. 7. As a symbol of anarchy, sexual licence was often employed, since it represents the breakdown of traditional morality and social restraint. It was also used as part of the campaign to blacken the reputation of the republic’s leaders and to suggest that Puritan morality was hypocritical. 52. ‘Caroli’, p. 25. 53. Two Elegies (1649), p. 4. 54. Ibid. 55. Quarles, Regale Lectum Miseriae, p. 48. 56. Ibid., p. 49. 57. Forde, Virtus Rediviva, sig. c6r. 58. Quarles, Regale Lectum Miseriae, p. 43. 59. ‘Caroli’, p. 23. 60. King, An Elegy, p. 4. 61. Ibid. 62. Felltham, The Poems, p. 66. 63. H. Leslie, The Martyrdom of King Charles; Or his conformity with Christ in his suffering (1649); R. Watson, Regicidium Judaicum: Or, a discourse, about the Jewes crucifying Christ, their king. With an appendix, or supplement, upon the late murder of our blessed soveraigne Charles the First (Hague, 1649), p. 23. 64. King, A Deepe Groan, pp. 2–3. 65. King, An Elegy, p. 14. 66. Ibid., p. 17. 67. ‘A penitential ode for the death of King Charls’, p. 102. 68. Felltham, The Poems, p. 66. 69. ‘On the martyrdom of his late Majestie’, pp. 78–9. 70. ‘Caroli’, p. 26. 71. Ibid., p. 27. 72. Quarles, Regale Lectum Miseriae, p. 22. 73. ‘Caroli’, pp. 27–8. 74. ‘An elegie upon King Charles the First’, in Monumentum Regale, p. 42. 75. Forde, Virtus Rediviva, sig. c6v. 76. ‘Caroli’, p. 28. 77. Quarles, Regale Lectum Miseriae, pp. 13–14. 78. Wilkins, Political Ballads, I, p. 84. 79. Forde, Virtus Rediviva, sig. c4v. 80. H. King, ‘On the barbarous decollation of King Charls the ﬁrst’, in Vaticinium Votivum, p. 104.

REC11 7/13/01 2:52 PM Page 247

11 The European Reaction to the Trial and Execution of Charles I Richard Bonney

Immediately after the Death of the late King [Charles I], Don Alonso de Cardenas, Embassador from Spain, legitimated this bastard Republick; and Oliver had no sooner made himself Sovereign, under the Quality of Protector, than all the Kings of the Earth prostrated themselves before this Idol.1 So wrote Abraham de Wicquefort, a contemporary observer of the events of the regicide. Some three centuries later, C.V. Wedgwood concluded: ‘It would seem that practical statesmen were right to pay lipservice alone to the idea of avenging the outrage [of the regicide], and to govern their conduct towards its perpetrators by purely practical considerations.’2 Since Wedgwood’s verdict, nearly forty years of scholarship has intervened. The time is ripe for a reassessment of the European response to the execution of Charles I and the establishment of the ‘commonwealth’3 and protectorate. Five issues require clariﬁcation. Firstly, the regicide took place within a European context, against a background of inaction on the part of the other European powers. To what extent had other European powers already anticipated, if not the precise course of events in January 1649, at least a change of regime, in their diplomatic alignments? Did they understand the process of change within the new political structure in England and the ‘British’ dimension of events as they evolved between 1649 and 1651? Secondly, what was the immediate response of the other European powers to the postregicide regime? In assessing the issue of recognition of a new regime by other states, governments were, and still are, obsessed with three issues: the likely stability of the regime; the precedents for dealing with the state in question and others in a comparable situation; and the perception of state interest in according recognition or not. To what extent 247

REC11 7/13/01 2:52 PM Page 248

248 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

did other European governments merely adopt a position of wait and see? A third question is the extent to which the English revolution was perceived as an ideological threat to dynastic monarchy, feared more as an exporter of republicanism than for more traditional reasons of state interest. This introduces the attitude adopted by the Spanish monarchy in 1651 and the French monarchy in 1652–55 in seeking to recognize the new regime, thus appearing to renounce support for the inherited dynastic rights of Charles Stuart and accepting sovereignty by ‘right of conquest’ (Nedham), by ‘usurpation’ (Wicquefort) or by ‘acquisition’ (Hobbes). Fourthly, did some states ﬁnd it easier to deal with the new English state in one revolutionary phase rather than another? This question introduces the process of change from commonwealth to protectorate and the complex and shifting relationship with the United Provinces, which lurched between outright war (in 1652–54) and negotiations for a close union at different stages. The issue of what constituted a ‘Protestant’ foreign policy, and the attitude of the different English regimes towards Protestant minorities abroad, are also pertinent in this context. Finally, we need to consider the implications of Charles I’s command to his closest advisers in 1646: ‘Doe not prejudice my son’s right.’4 It seems that until almost the last moment the regime that emerged after Pride’s Purge sought to depose the king, rather than to execute him, and to install instead one of the younger princes on the throne. Part of its motivation was precisely the fact that it took the prospect of foreign intervention very seriously indeed,5 just as later the various English regimes took seriously the prospect of a royalist uprising with foreign support.6 Why, in the years between 1649 and 1660, did the other European powers offer so little material assistance to Charles II’s assertion of his dynastic rights?

I Had Charles I been at war with France and the Dutch Republic in the 1640s,7 then Henrietta Maria’s familial origins might have been as critical a factor in his demise as were Marie Antoinette’s in deciding the fate of Louis XVI in 1792–93. Yet England was not at war outside Britain and Ireland prior to the regicide or even in the years 1649–52; when war was eventually declared, it was not against a monarchy but against the Dutch Republic. Charles I, in the view of Alonso de Cárdenas, the Spanish ambassador from 1640 to 1655, had been ‘overwhelmed in misfortunes

REC11 7/13/01 2:52 PM Page 249

The European Reaction 249

by his own faults and from his own mistaken principles’.8 Cárdenas had concluded early on that Charles I’s regime was a weak one, because of its pusillanimity at the time of the Battle of the Downs in 1639.9 If that naval defeat had been a disaster for the Spaniards, so too had Charles’ rejection of the marriage of Baltazar Carlos to Mary Stuart.10 Yet Charles I had suspected that, because of the crisis in its relations with Portugal and Catalonia after 1640, Spain would be unable to provide its promised military support. Worse still, the English king had sided with the enemy: in May 1641, Mary Stuart had been married to William II of Orange, in the hope of achieving a triple alliance (France, the United Provinces and England), but too late to win friends in parliament. The alliance was to no avail: the Dutch looked at Henrietta Maria, the king’s Catholic wife, and were appalled. Holland saw to it that no help came from the alliance and that any military endeavours by Frederick Henry, the stadholder, were aborted.11 The English marriage alliance with the Dutch was bad enough; worse still from the point of view of the Spaniards was Charles I’s recognition of the ‘tyrant of Portugal’, John IV. This was never forgiven and was recalled as a justiﬁcation for inaction after the regicide.12 From an early stage in the English Civil War, Cárdenas had cultivated friends in the Long Parliament. He had hoped that a measure of naval support might be forthcoming to halt the French advance in the Spanish Netherlands: he was convinced that the Independents were likely to prove favourable to Spain; that they would give some relief to Catholics in England; and, above all (at least by 1646), that they would emerge as the predominant force.13 The French position naturally had counterbalanced that of Spain. Richelieu was known to be opposed to intervention in Scottish affairs, but the Covenanters suggested that French intervention would be in the Bourbon interest, since Scotland’s troubles were said to be part of the machinations of the pro-Spanish faction in England and therefore part of the monstrous aggrandisement of the house of Austria (that is, the Habsburgs). Richelieu’s policy seems to have been to welcome the activities of the Covenanters as an embarrassment to Charles I, whose policies were seen as pro-Spanish, but not to help them actively. Louis XIII denied having any correspondence with them and promised not to favour them.14 After the death of Louis XIII, there may have been some genuine desire on the part of the Regent Anne of Austria to aid her sisterin-law’s cause: on 3 July 1644 a treaty was signed which offered Charles I kind words but no practical assistance. This implied an abandonment of Richelieu’s policy of underhand encouragement to the Scots Covenanters and committed Louis XIV at his majority (7 September

REC11 7/13/01 2:52 PM Page 250

250 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

1651) to renew the treaty of alliance with Charles I as ‘king of Great Britain’; but the English hope of a ‘nearer and ﬁrmer alliance’ was dashed. On the contrary, ‘reason of state’ was cited in 1644 as the justiﬁcation for French diplomatic preparations so that, if a sudden change occurred in England, the French government would be in a position to deal with the new regime which emerged.15 At no time was Cardinal Mazarin prepared to place English concerns before French interests on the Continental mainland.16 For France, the greater danger lay in the attitude of Sweden, which had broken off its military intervention in Germany in 1643–45 to pursue a separate, pre-emptive war with Denmark. By the terms of their renewed treaty in 1641, France and Sweden were obliged not to negotiate a separate peace, yet there was no doubt that Sweden was hostile to Charles I and sympathetic to the cause of parliament.17 After the regicide, Axel Oxenstierna was reported as stating that the English had ‘put away from them a great Tyrant’;18 but then the Swedish Chancellor had notoriously favoured parliament against Charles I.19 Had Sweden openly sided with parliament in the interests of European Protestantism, then this would have broken the anti-Habsburg alliance system on which France depended. From the French point of view, everything possible had to be done to prevent such an eventuality.20 Therefore there could be no rapid French settlement with the Emperor before Swedish interests were taken into consideration; above all, there could be no action taken in support of Charles I prior to the signature of the FrancoImperial Peace on 24 October 1648. By then, the Dutch had already broken their alliance with France the previous January and made a separate peace with Spain. The Spanish unwillingness to make peace with France at Westphalia21 was of critical importance in the context of the European reaction to the events in England in 1649. Mazarin could not understand ‘the motive of their blindness, and why they do not rush to this peace which is the only means by which they can stop their entire ruin’; but then Philip IV and his advisers, like the French plenipotentiaries at Westphalia, predicted correctly that there would be internal troubles within the kingdom of France no later than 1648 or 1649.22 Even had peace been made in 1648, it seems inconceivable that the two governments of France and Spain would have been able to put ‘the general interest of kings and sceptres’ above all other considerations and place collective pressure on the revolutionary regime. Louis XIV intervened with Fairfax and Cromwell on behalf of Charles I,23 but too late to have any effect. The French condemnation of the trial of Charles I, issued on 2/12 January 1649,24 was ‘empty bluster’25 in its appeal to neighbouring

REC11 7/13/01 2:52 PM Page 251

The European Reaction 251

states to make common cause against the English rebels. If the appeal was at all genuine (and was not merely propaganda issued to satisfy Henrietta Maria), it is fairly certain that the French government took care to prevent it being reported within France.26 The declaration of support had no more substance to it than had the earlier treaty with Charles I in 1644. The argument that the ‘unworthy death’ of Charles I might have been averted by joint action seems unrealistic after 13 years of Franco-Spanish war.27 All commiserated on the misfortune and innocence of his son, although those who would unite to avenge the deed would be few in number.28 Once he had been forced into exile, Charles II could have ‘neither security nor facilities for any course he may take’ without a Franco-Spanish peace.29 The best service he could do for himself and his followers was to endeavour ‘personally to compose the differences between the two crowns’. Without this, there was no realistic way of restoring him to his dominions.30 Marchamont Nedham, in both his royalist and republican modes, agreed on the signiﬁcance of the continuing Franco-Spanish conﬂict. In his poem dated 22–29 May 1649 (OS) in Mercurius Pragmaticus,31 and subsequently in his The Case of the Commonwealth of England, Stated (8 May 1650, OS),32 he asserted that the other European powers were so distracted by their own problems that any rapid attempt to overturn the post-regicide regime and intervene in favour of Charles II was ruled out.33 Only one European state took such a negative view of the events in England as to break off diplomatic relations completely. This was Muscovy, which expelled the English resident. Landlocked Muscovy, however, was seeking commercial advantages from the Dutch Republic and such action might seem an appropriate indication of the preferred trading partner.34 For other states, the preservation of commercial relations with an important naval power took primacy over almost every other consideration. On 24 February 1652, on a vote of 116 to 1, with three neutral, the Venetian Senate authorized Morosini, the ambassador in France, to seek an understanding with the commonwealth.35 Clearly by 1652 a very considerable change had occurred in the diplomatic position of the English regicide regime and the reasons for this will now be addressed.

II Three days after the regicide, the Scottish parliament proclaimed Charles II king of Great Britain, France and Ireland. Charles II would not be admitted to the exercise of rule without satisfaction according

REC11 7/13/01 2:52 PM Page 252

252 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

to the covenants; but by proclaiming him king of all his father’s kingdoms, not just of Scotland, the kirk party broke the informal alliance with England and laid itself open to attack.36 It also created a dilemma for other European powers. If they recognized the Rump parliament in England did they thereby deny the legitimacy of Charles II’s claims elsewhere? What would happen if they recognized the Rump parliament and then Charles II’s Scots forces defeated its army? The Rump lacked expertise in dealing with foreign powers; there was a lack of coherence in its viewpoint, and certainly no possibility of an aggressive strategy, before Blake’s naval victory over Prince Rupert in August 1650 and Cromwell’s victory at Dunbar the following month.37 Cromwell’s victory at Dunbar was seen by the Rump and its supporters as a miraculous deliverance (and by Scots Covenanters as a devastating denial of God’s providential purposes).38 The assertion of political control over the whole of Britain occurred later. The declaration ‘concerning the settlement of Scotland’ was not drawn up by the Rump until 28 October 1651 (OS), after the victory at Worcester on 3 September,39 while the incorporation of Scotland into the commonwealth of England was not published until February 1652.40 In the meantime, notwithstanding the defeat at Dunbar and all his earlier equivocations in the negotiations at the Hague, Charles II had been crowned at Scone on 1 January 1651 (OS). The ceremony may have been distasteful to the king.41 The Scots rebellion was irrevocably split by the decision. But from this moment on, and in spite of the ‘crowning mercy’ at Worcester, which made the Rump secure from its enemies,42 Charles Stuart remained a crowned king of Scotland. A king in exile, even with no real prospects of mounting a successful invasion, was still a king with a residual claim which might later be recognized by other European powers.43 Bradshaw commented to Cromwell on ‘our impotent [sic: impatient?] haste to ingratiate with neighbouring states’; the true way forward, in his view, was to be ‘independent enough as to others . . . and teach nations in time to value us aright, and to do as they would be done to.’44 There seems reason to suppose that Cromwell’s victories led the European states to seek to ingratiate themselves with the new regime rather than the other way round. How did states justify a decision on whether or not to recognize the new regime in England, and its eventual assertion of control throughout Britain and Ireland? Hobbes’ view was that a successful revolt absolved a subject of ties to his traditional sovereign and required him to tender allegiance to the new custodian of absolute sovereign power.45 But although Hobbes had been resident

REC11 7/13/01 2:52 PM Page 253

The European Reaction 253

in France while writing Leviathan, he left there in 1651 never to return. He was almost universally decried in France even without public knowledge of his key work (there was no French edition of Leviathan during the Fronde).46 It is safe to assume that Hobbes’ views of sovereignty by acquisition had little or no immediate inﬂuence on European contemporaries. There is a greater case for assuming a tacit acceptance of Marchamont Nedham’s argument that the new English regime’s title to rule rested essentially on the right of conquest.47 In other words, there is reason to conclude that Wicquefort’s views of sovereignty by usurpation tended to reﬂect the contemporary viewpoint.48 Interest of state, or reason of state, a form of reasoning developed chieﬂy in Catholic states enabling them to deal with their Protestant neighbours,49 was a prevailing consideration. A clear practical example of the application of reason of state had occurred in May 1629, when Philip IV of Spain had entered into a treaty with the Huguenot rebel the duc de Rohan.50 Rohan became an expert on state interest and his Treatise of the Interests of the Princes and States of Christendom was translated into English in 1640 and went through a second edition in 1641. There were complaints in England that ‘foreign and modern statists take proﬁt for the sense of interest, where honesty is not their princip[le]’, but the popularization of expressions such as ‘interest of England’ and ‘England’s interest in the Protestant Cause’ probably derives from Rohan’s writings.51 From the point of view of other European powers, one of the surprising and potentially destabilizing aspects of the commonwealth was its apparent commitment to Protestant ideology and opposition to reason of state.52 For reason of state to prevail, however, the perception that the ‘cause of all kings was at stake’ in Charles I’s fate and in the defence of his son’s rights53 and the alleged ideological threat posed by the new English republican regime had to be defeated. Charles I had expressed his conﬁdence that Louis XIII would not assist the Scottish rebels since ‘the Ground of theire Rebellion is nothing but a meere Opposition to Civill and monarchicall Government, wherein the common Interests of Kings are highly concerned’.54 Mazarin was warned that Cromwell and his faction wanted ‘to destroy all monarchies’.55 In spite of Wicquefort’s assertion, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, Cárdenas did not recognize the republic immediately on the execution of Charles I. In 1649–50 Philip IV of Spain was not satisﬁed that the new regime was sufﬁciently stable to merit recognition.56 The letter of condolence to Charles II was carefully ante-dated so that the royal title accorded to him could be explained away on the grounds that

REC11 7/13/01 2:52 PM Page 254

254 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

Philip IV had sent the letter before hearing of the abolition of monarchy in England.57 Five weeks after the regicide, the Spanish council condemned the action of the English, but saw no cause to take action. Exemplary punishment was unrealistic. Charles I had been a heretic prince; the deposition and murder of English kings had occurred sufﬁciently frequently in the past58 that there seemed to be no difference between this and previous occurrences.59 Considerations of foreign policy remained of primary concern. Charles II had recognized the ‘tyrant of Portugal’, immediately after the regicide.60 The war with France continued. The Marquis of Castel Rodrigo expressed the view that ‘great advantages’ would result to Philip IV from the fact of Henrietta Maria’s French origins, and the fall of the Presbyterians, ‘who belonged to the French party’. Any understanding between the new regime of the Independents and the Huguenots should be encouraged, since Christendom had suffered ‘great prejudice’ from the ‘internal stability of France’.61 There was thus at ﬁrst no formal declaration of the Spanish government in favour of either the commonwealth or Charles Stuart. In France, news of the execution of Charles I was received at the Louvre on 19 February 1649.62 There was no ringing defence of dynasticism such as that later made by Louis XIV in favour of the Old Pretender.63 The rights of Charles II were recognized in March and the French ambassador in England was recalled in May. English distrust grew as a result of these events, and the continuing residence of Henrietta Maria in France.64 The reason for Mazarin’s caution is clear. He was a politician in severe domestic political difﬁculties: the French court had moved secretly from Paris to Saint-Germain-en-Laye on the night of 5–6 January and ordered the blockade of the capital in the hope of defeating the Fronde. The complication for the French government during the siege of Paris was that Henrietta Maria and the exiled Stuart court had been left at the Louvre unaware of the sudden evacuation of the French court. The Parlement of Paris set the tone by denouncing the regicides as evil men, who had ‘dipped their murderous hands in the blood of that most just king’. For the Parlement, ‘this cruel deed [was] so unprecedented that it will be abhorred by all people for ever’.65 The Parlement of Paris was able to demonstrate its commitment to monarchical government by offering a pension for Henrietta Maria. In the event, she refused the pension, although one (probably unreliable) source claims that she obtained the money only by threatening to leave Paris during the siege and take up residence at Saint-Germain.66 The French government’s pension to

REC11 7/13/01 2:52 PM Page 255

The European Reaction 255

the Stuart court ultimately gave Mazarin a bargaining counter in his negotiations with the English regime: in the longer term the royalist exiles might be politically neutered.67 The ofﬁcial Bourbon publication, the Gazette de France, published only the most cursory of notices of the king’s execution on 27 February 1649. Its senior editor, Théophraste Renaudot, published a separate account of the king’s death, but this was delayed until 18 March 1649.68 The Déclaration du Parlement d’Angleterre was published on 27 March, or somewhat later, and only in a restricted circulation. With the restoration of civil peace, further publication and distribution in France was prohibited under severe penalties.69 A domestic peace of sorts was patched up at Rueil in March 1649, but severe problems continued to confront the French government, particularly in its relations with the great nobility. There was thus little or no substance to the assertion that eight regiments of cavalry and 12 of infantry would be raised so that France could ‘set an example for other princes to follow’. Mazarin had had grave difﬁculties in trying to raise sufﬁcient resources to mount the siege of Cambrai, as part of the continuing war with Spain: the assertion looks more like a continuation of the ploy for peace overtures with Spain than a genuine attempt to establish a league for the restoration of Charles II.70 Philip IV proﬁted from French internal weakness after 1648 to make signiﬁcant military gains. There were also unsuccessful military alliances with rebellious French grandees during the Fronde. The Spanish Habsburg fear, however, was of a French resurgence; the best way in which this could be prevented was by the construction of an alliance system favourable to the Spaniards.71 The ﬁrst step towards it was the Spanish recognition of the commonwealth. Recognition came after Cromwell’s victory at Dunbar when the Rump regime seemed more settled.72 At this time, the Spaniards recognized only the English commonwealth, since the victory over Scotland was incomplete. Although in his last testament, Philip IV claimed that he had never resorted to Razón de Estado, his long apostilla on the consulta produced by the Junta de Estado on 25 March 1652 was quite explicit on the need to seek a military alliance with the Protestant commonwealth against Catholic France.73 Cárdenas presented the articles for an Anglo-Spanish treaty as early as 12 September 1652.74 If the Spaniards succeeded in getting their feet under the table with the new regime, or worse still entered into a military alliance with England, then the risks for France would be enormous. Mazarin made a clear distinction between declining to recognize the new regime formally and on all accounts avoiding doing anything to offend it.75

REC11 7/13/01 2:52 PM Page 256

256 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

Already in January 1651, shortly before his ﬁrst exile during the Fronde, Mazarin argued that reasons of state obliged the French to support the cause of Charles II in Scotland and Ireland. After the Battle of Dunbar, prudence required recognition of the fact that Charles would not be reestablished as king of England in the foreseeable future. There would be great peril to France if the commonwealth decided to back one of the factions in France, such as the Huguenots. The English regime seemed to be more pro-Spanish than pro-French. There was therefore a pressing need for a treaty, since it was clearly in French interests for England to be at war with Spain rather than France.76 The exile of Mazarin from February to December 1651 inevitably resulted in a loss of momentum in the negotiations, although new instructions were given to the Comte d’Estrades on 23 April 1652, after Mazarin’s return to France. Mazarin’s instructions of the same date make it clear that, in order to protect Gravelines from attack by the Spaniards, the French government was prepared to concede Dunkirk to the English.77 The loss of Dunkirk to the Spaniards, assisted by Blake’s navy, on 16 September 1652,78 convinced the French government that it was time to try once again to mend fences.79 A subsequent letter sent by Louis XIV alleged that the ﬁrst French overtures of friendship had been made after the battle of Rethel (thus after 15 December 1650). According to the letter of the French king, the union which should exist between the two states, which was reinforced by commercial ties, should in no way be impaired by the form of government adopted by England. Since Louis XIV had ‘extinguished the ﬁre which threatened the total ruin’ of his kingdom, that is, had defeated the Fronde, there should be a settlement of the existing trade dispute and the development of good understanding between the two states. The commonwealth replied that while it was ‘gratiﬁed’ by the expressions of friendship from Louis XIV, French piracy in the Mediterranean was to blame for the difﬁculties between the states. Reprisals on French ships and merchandise were ordered until the differences between the two states were settled.80 Henrietta Maria sought to prevent the attempted French recognition of the commonwealth in December 1652; she later stated that ‘reasons of state are terrible’ and avowed that she did not ‘understand them at all, possibly because they are always against me’.81 Anne of Austria advised her that it was ‘necessary to steer according to the weather’, and offered the hope that when the weather changed the policy also would change. Mazarin gave ‘many promises to console’ Charles II, but was ‘the author of this step of acknowledging England in order the better to resist Spain and the Prince [of Condé]’.82

REC11 7/13/01 2:52 PM Page 257

The European Reaction 257

The dissolution of the Rump on 20 April 1653 (OS) led to an inertia in foreign policy as far as the French, Spanish and Portuguese ambassadors were concerned, ‘until the new supreme authority had settled in, or indeed until it had been determined whether there was to be peace or continued war with the Dutch’.83 Cárdenas met the Protector on 4 March 1654, shortly before the Treaty of London was signed ending the ﬁrst Anglo-Dutch war. Cromwell clearly expected a subsidy from Spain in return for any declaration of war against France and any ‘powerful support’ to Condé’s party. The French view, as late as June 1654, was that Cromwell would prefer an alliance with Spain to one with France; but above all he wanted money for the upkeep of his army and navy. Cárdenas was determined at the outset that the cost of the war against France should be ‘borne in common’. If the English received a Spanish subsidy, the risk was that the war would be prolonged in the interest of England while the Spaniards carried the cost.84 On 12 April 1654, however, the Spanish council of state agreed to negotiate with Cromwell, notwithstanding its ﬁnancial problems, on a low initial offer rising to a higher offer of 50,000 crowns a month.85 Once a rupture between England and France had occurred Spanish objectives would have been secured. War with France still seemed a strong possibility as late as 1654, and there was little expectation on the French side of an inevitable ‘defensive’ war to be launched by England against Spain to prevent it from establishing a universal monarchy.86 The task of preventing war, let alone securing the English alliance, was by no means an easy one for Mazarin and his advisers. As late as 26 June 1654, war with England was regarded as likely.87 The siege of Arras by the Spanish army commanded by Condé was a decisive moment: had Arras fallen, the English alliance would have been needed at any price, even an Anglo-French division of the spoils of war.88

III Few states were prepared to emulate the Swiss Protestant Cantons and welcome the extinction of the English monarchy, giving thanks for the Swiss republican constitution. The Swiss Protestants later tried to mediate in the English conﬂict with the Dutch, but were not considered powerful enough by the new regime to be of any use.89 Blake allegedly told Philip IV in Madrid that ‘all kingdoms will annihilate tyranny and become republics.’ The story may have grown in the telling,90 but it introduces the relationship between the various English

REC11 7/13/01 2:52 PM Page 258

258 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

post-regicide regimes and the extent to which they sought to exploit the internal political difﬁculties of other European powers. It may well be that the great European revolutions tend to start off with universal ideological tendencies and then enter a phase of reaction.91 English propaganda after 1649, to the effect that the commonwealth sought ‘the ruin of monarchies and the Catholic faith,’92 and the offer to the United Provinces of a ‘more strict and intimate alliance and union’ might be seen as an example of the ﬁrst tendency.93 The elimination of the Levellers in 1649 and the more conservative regime after 1653 might be depicted as examples of the second,94 and a Bonapartist phase ending the revolution, and re-establishing a more monarchical form of rule, may be a third. However, historical opinion remains divided on the impact of ideology and public opinion in the making of English foreign policy in the 1650s.95 Distinctions need to be made between the viewpoint of the group determining foreign policy and the wider audience to which it appealed. The establishment of ideological control over the wider audience was extremely difﬁcult, as the difﬁculties of Mazarin’s propaganda campaign during the Fronde attests. The Rump was prepared to defy public opinion and it may well be easier to demonstrate the importance of popular royalism than popular republicanism during the early 1650s. This leaves us with the possibility that, while not being able to establish ideological control, the decision makers were nevertheless motivated primarily by ideological considerations or, as a result of political weakness, subject to pressure from a sustained campaign of propaganda from groups outside the government.96 States then, as now, found it difﬁcult to respond to change, let alone to respond fast. The United Provinces were politically divided and decision-making was particularly slow and tortuous; a rapid response to events in England was therefore difﬁcult to achieve. It was the fear of French hegemony which had prompted the Dutch to make their separate peace with Spain in 1648.97 The separate Peace of Münster, which was never forgiven by Mazarin,98 had been driven forward by the province of Holland in the face of opposition from the House of Orange. Conﬂict over the size of the military establishment and the future direction of foreign policy, and on whether to remain neutral or to resume an alliance and therefore once more embark upon a war, meant that there appeared to be a natural political alliance between English royalists and Dutch Orangists. As Charles II’s brother-in-law, the burden of protecting the house of Stuart had seemed to be one which William II,

REC11 7/13/01 2:52 PM Page 259

The European Reaction 259

was ‘not only willing but zealous to take up’.99 His appeal to Mazarin ‘to break with Cromwell . . . [and] to restore the King of England to his kingdom’ was made on 2 September 1650. In so far as it might lead the house of Orange to break with Spain, Mazarin was open to such an approach: but William II died before anything could come of it.100 Yet in any case no army of support could have been provided for Charles II because Holland was determined to reduce the size of the military establishment.101 Were the Dutch reliable allies, given their tortuous decision-making process, and the apparent difference of interests between the stadholderate and the province of Holland? Accusations of Dutch perﬁdiousness and material self-interest were commonplace in England. As Cromwell later reminded them, the Dutch had been prepared to abandon their alliance with France to make peace with Spain in 1648 when it suited their interests.102 From the point of view of Orangist propaganda, the Rump parliament was a body of ‘rebels, traitors and bloodsuckers’; the Independents were held to be of ‘a contrary religion’ (though nearly all were Calvinists they were not Presbyterians).103 Similarly to their Scots Presbyterian counterparts, strict Dutch Calvinist ministers who favoured the Orangist cause tended to deplore the execution of Charles I and the religious ‘licence’ they believed that the English commonwealth was establishing.104 The Orangist party was weak in Holland, but much stronger in the outlying provinces and in the navy.105 In early March 1649 there were already reports of rival propaganda pieces circulating in the Netherlands, with the formation of parties and recourse to violence.106 These divisions played upon the normal provincial differences within the United Provinces. Zeeland, though supportive of the House of Orange, was heavily dependent on its English trade. Holland, the most important province, always favoured doing business with the new English regime.107 The issue was by what mechanisms the attitude of Holland’s political leaders could be made to prevail on the decision-making process of the United Provinces as a whole. In these circumstances, the most obvious response of the new English regime was to ally with the ruling republican regents in Holland.108 At ﬁrst, events played into the hands of the Rump parliament and its supporters. The death of William II was seen in England as an example of divine intervention;109 the hopes of the exiled Stuarts that the Dutch could be swept into their war against the English republic were shattered.110 The divided Orange party was left with two potential leaders, William III’s mother, Mary Stuart, and his

REC11 7/13/01 2:52 PM Page 260

260 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

grandmother, Amalia von Solms, who was determined that the cause of Orange restoration would not be sacriﬁced to the needs of the House of Stuart.111 Peace, not war, seemed the most likely outcome. Yet within 18 months the two republican states were at war. The English declaration of war on the Dutch Republic in 1652 at best made little political sense; at worst it was a gratuitous act of folly. If the primary purpose was the English quest for security, then the obvious way forward was to assist the Dutch opponents of the house of Orange. It was they alone who could determine the outcome in the Netherlands in a way favourable to the English. Historical opinion remains divided on the causation of the ﬁrst Anglo-Dutch war. On the eve of the Second World War, Pieter Geyl wrote: ‘The English outlook was typical of revolutionaries – a mixture of idealism and violence.’112 This interpretation comes close to equating English aggression in 1652 with that of Germany in 1938–39. Political naïveté on the part of the commonwealth seems closer to the historical reality. Though there was an element of bravado about the English position,113 the new state had the foresight to recognize what would become the political and military reality after 1689, namely that England and the United Provinces were the leading ‘Maritime Powers’, whose combined navies could not be surpassed by other states.114 In March 1651, the English regime proposed an alliance between itself and the United Provinces, in effect a merger of the two republics.115 Such a proposal was perceived to be against French interests;116 but the Dutch rejected an offensive and defensive alliance not because of any residual friendship with France but because of their ‘diversity of interests’ with England. They also considered that the new English republic was still not ‘thoroughly established and generally recognised’.117 A breach was more likely than an alliance, owing to the ‘constant reprisals of the English’ and the diplomatic efforts of the French government.118 That an alliance should be proposed between two regimes was hardly surprising: they had much in common, since both were Protestant in ethos and sought to tolerate a pluralistic religious society while at the same time imposing disabilities on Catholics.119 Then, as later, there was talk of a Protestant confessional league, though the obstacles to its creation had always proved insuperable.120 The fact that the two states were rival economic and naval powers was likely to hinder the negotiations, but not necessarily to lead them to collapse. The obstacle, essentially, lay in the fact that the English terms for an alliance were not only unacceptable to the regent regime in Holland and its Orangist opponents;

REC11 7/13/01 2:52 PM Page 261

The European Reaction 261

they would have proved unacceptable to any other conceivable European ruling group of the day unless the state had been overrun by a foreign army. Yet such terms were allegedly proposed by the English in a spirit of friendship,121 although as early as 1590 the Dutch had solemnly recognized that they needed no foreign protector for their defence and that the provinces themselves held full sovereignty.122 How joint decisions would be arrived at in the future remained unclear, and when, later on, proposals were advanced in England for a joint decision-making body they were manifestly unfair to Dutch interests. De Witt hoped that what was meant was ‘a single and uniﬁed sovereign government’, but this gloss was untenable if, as some suspected, the ‘consolidation of the two republics into one body’ had the aim of subordinating the Dutch.123 If the choice was ‘either the incorporation of Dutch interests with those of England, or open hostilities’,124 the Dutch were relatively united in the view that they had not fought the Spaniards for eighty years simply to subordinate themselves to the new English regime. It is clear, therefore, that vital political and economic issues were at stake in the ﬁrst Anglo-Dutch war, which was caused by much more than ideological differences. It is true that, once war broke out, ideological differences came to the fore.125 Their alleged indifference to religion made the United Provinces the new Tower of Babel. They had been corrupted by the house of Orange. Above all, they had rejected the proposal for closer union with England because they had sided with the Stuart cause.126 In reality, the Dutch regent regime had to ﬁght the war against England while simultaneously holding back the Orange party which tried to exploit the war for its own ends.127 The link between the Orange and Stuart causes was clear after the demonstrations on 5 May 1653 in The Hague, and subsequent riots.128 Once De Witt’s regime had survived the internal turmoil, there was likely to be little regent opposition to an Act of Seclusion and in its wake the severing of the link with the Stuart cause. This was a small price to pay to prevent any Dutch economic sacriﬁces as the price of peace. The Treaty of Westminster was signed on 22 April 1654, while the States of Holland passed its Act of Seclusion on 4 May. The Orangist party remained largely moribund until the recall of Charles II to England in 1660;129 but though the Dutch position remained that ‘if the devil rule in England, they must hold fair with him’, this did not halt the protector’s continuing distrust of the Orange interest, nor did it prevent further disputes concerning the balance of power in the Baltic.130 The risk of a war there, resulting from Dutch support for

REC11 7/13/01 2:52 PM Page 262

262 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

Denmark in the face of Swedish aggression remained considerable. De Witt and the political leadership in Holland were willing to recognize the protectorate of Richard Cromwell and to expel the remnants of the Stuart family, so anxious were they to prevent a further outbreak of conﬂict.131 This did not stop the Dutch from using their navy to reestablish a balance of power in the Baltic favourable to their interests in 1658–60, while England was distracted by its participation in the war against Spain.132

IV Since an alliance with the Netherlands had proved impossible, the only other way to champion Protestantism in western Europe was to support persecuted Protestant minorities in Catholic countries. Support for the Huguenot cause in France had seemed the obvious course of action, particularly during the Fronde. But the majority of the French Huguenots had abhorred the execution of Charles I and remained loyal to the French government. The Eikon Basilike had ﬁrst appeared in England on the day of Charles I’s burial, but it was not published in an English language version in France before the beginning of April.133 It was subsequently translated into French by a Huguenot, Jean-Baptiste Porée and published in June 1649. Mathieu Molé, the ﬁrst president of the Parlement of Paris, read it in translation and stated that ‘it was hard to read it without tears’. Whatever the Stuart court’s concern about the accuracy of the various translations of the Eikon Basilike, they enjoyed considerable publishing success in France.134 If the more popular literature concerning Charles I enjoyed wide circulation, so too did the more esoteric polemical debate arising from Milton’s Eikonoklastes. It was to the more learned audience that Claude Saumaise (Salmasius), the émigré Huguenot professor at the University of Leiden, appealed in his refutation of Milton’s Eikonoklastes, which was inspired by the Stuart court. As a Frenchman living and working at Leiden, he sought to knit together the Stuart cause in France and the Netherlands and rally international Calvinism behind the claim of Charles II. His Latin text, Defensio Regia pro Carolo I (1649) appeared in a French edition the following year, entitled the Apologie royale pour Charles Ier, roi d’Angleterre. By 1652 13 editions had appeared, including four Latin and one Dutch joint text (Saumaise’s Defensio Regia and Milton’s Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio).135 For Saumaise, it was the Independents’ voracious appetite for power, not their republican principles, which had motivated the English revolution.136

REC11 7/13/01 2:52 PM Page 263

The European Reaction 263

If Milton’s arguments were superior in style to those of Saumaise, they were condemned for their content in France.137 Though ‘highly commended’ by Queen Christina of Sweden, and eventually going through 17 editions, the Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio was burnt at Toulouse and Paris in 1651.138 The Huguenots were almost all divine-right monarchists. As early as 1644, the Synod of Charenton had speciﬁcally condemned radical ideas emanating from England.139 They rallied behind Claude Saumaise, Moïse Amyraut and Samuel Bochart almost to a man.140 During the Fronde, the Huguenots sought to gain concessions from the crown at a moment of weakness by emphasizing their loyalty, rather than any rebellious tendencies.141 The French Protestants were perceived as being pro-Mazarin and unsympathetic to the regicide regime. Saumaise had won the argument in France, where the principle of absolute monarchy needed no defence once the opposition was defeated in 1652: the most extreme arguments raised were by those who wrote in Condé’s cause.142 The loyalty of the Protestants during the Fronde was recognized in a royal declaration in their favour on 21 May 1652.143 Nevertheless, from September 1649 onwards, foreign observers had noted the suspicion that ‘the insurgents of Bordeaux receive some secret assistance from England’.144 Such assistance to Condé’s faction and the radical party at Bordeaux known as the Ormée could scarcely have failed to have an ideological aspect to it. Edward Sexby was sent, on orders of a secret committee of the Council of State, to Bordeaux in the summer of 1651, and he took with him a copy of the Agreement of the People, which was published in a modiﬁed form in French translation.145 There was reason to suppose that the rebels at Bordeaux could have had an alliance with Cromwell had they accepted his terms.146 After his defeat at Worcester and escape abroad, Charles II declared that if the Bourbon dynasty did not ‘give him powerful assistance to make a diversion in England, the English will certainly come to make war on France’.147 There was a small Huguenot faction within the Ormée in the last stages of the revolt at Bordeaux: this was the group with whom Sexby had dealings in the spring of 1653.148 But everything was conditioned by the expected military support forthcoming from Cromwell: once it failed to materialize in time Bordeaux fell to the government on 3 August 1653. Raison d’état proved the undoing of Ormée republicanism and of the Ormée itself.149 Bordeaux was the great exception in the Fronde, the example of a radical revolution, of what might have been. Elsewhere, the Fronde was a révolution manquée, a series of rebellions which did not quite achieve its possibility of becoming a revolution.

REC11 7/13/01 2:52 PM Page 264

264 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

On the last day of August 1654, Servien, formerly the plenipotentiary at the Westphalian peace negotiations, stated in a memorandum that the negotiations for an English alliance were making progress because of the protector’s own domestic interests. In Servien’s judgement, the English were no longer insisting on an article in favour of the Huguenots. It was essential that the English understand that they could not intervene in French internal affairs. None of this would prevent a conﬁrmation of the edict of Nantes after the conclusion of a treaty with England: this was something traditionally accorded to the Huguenots whenever they requested it. Above all, there was the hint of a new reciprocity in the negotiations: might there not be a reciprocal understanding that France would not support Charles II and his court if the English did not support the exiled rebel Condé and his allies?150 There might have been greater reason for English intervention on the side of the Huguenots had Mazarin’s policy not been the relatively moderate one of leaving the edict of Nantes in place and resisting the blandishments of the French bishops for more aggressive action. In the event, the oppression of the Vaudois by the Duke of Savoy provided an opportunity for the French government formally to disassociate itself from the policy of persecution pursued by an independent ruler. It is not clear that the mechanism was in place at the relevant time for intervention from England to prevent the suffering of the Vaudois in 1655; but there can be no doubt of Cromwell’s failure to achieve any real amelioration of their position.151 Sermons in England recalled the St Bartholomew massacres and it seemed clear to foreign opinion that, although there were other motives to his policy than religion,152 the Protector wanted to act as protector of the faith, albeit without the title.153 However, once there was a military alliance with France, and Dunkirk had been conceded, Cromwell spoke only of the propagation of the Christian faith rather than the ‘great advantage of the Protestant religion’.154 The French government had made it clear that if England wanted to start a war of religion in Flanders, the king of France could not join such an alliance; the issue was war between states and forming an alliance against Spain.155

V Cromwell decided in principle on the ill-judged Hispaniola expedition within a fortnight of the Treaty of London which ended the Dutch war. Spain was less tolerant to Protestants within its own territories and was

REC11 7/13/01 2:52 PM Page 265

The European Reaction 265

considered more vulnerable to attack. It was expected to conﬁne the war to the West Indies and to go on trading with England in European waters. On 20 July 1654 (OS), the Protector asserted that God would favour so worthy a cause and that the cost of the war would be no greater than paying off the ships no longer needed in peacetime.156 Even if Charles Stuart threw in his lot with Spain, this would serve merely to unite the forces of Antichrist in opposition to the Protestant cause.157 The Spaniards were taken by surprise, since Cromwell had carefully concealed his choice of target: Cárdenas could scarcely conceal his anger that Spain had been the ﬁrst to recognize the commonwealth, but the Dutch, Swedes, Danes and Portuguese had gained treaties and even the French seemed on the point of obtaining one; only Spain had not received satisfaction.158 When he heard the news of the humiliation at Hispaniola,159 the Protector retired to his room for a whole day: providence seemed to have deserted him and he needed to discover the ‘accursed thing’ that had provoked the Lord’s wrath.160 Apology to Philip IV and the restitution of Jamaica were impossible: an alliance against Spain in Europe became almost inevitable once the Spanish government had banned trade with England and a privateering war had begun. A declaration of war in Europe was only a matter of time, though Spain delayed making this until March 1656.161 The road to the Anglo-French Treaty of Westminster (3 November 1655),162 was almost inevitable after the defeat of the English expedition to Hispaniola. In the longer term, there were reasonable hopes of successfully attacking the Spanish silver ﬂeet; in the short term, French money was needed to continue the war in the Spanish Indies.163 Wicquefort later commented of Cromwell’s negotiations: he fear’d more the Neighbourhood of France, than he hop’d for Advantage from the languishing and remote Strength of Spain, he sided with the ﬁrst, whose Friend he became; by that means obliging the other to be so to the King of Great Britain, whose three Kingdoms he had usurp’d.164 The maxim ‘mine enemy’s enemy is my friend’ was undoubtedly a driving force in the determining a shift in alliances; but even more important was the French capacity to pay.165 Wicquefort catalogued the slights suffered by Charles Stuart in exile and contrasted his experience with the respect shown to Cromwell.166 Wicquefort was correct in his judgement: in July 1654, after news of an

REC11 7/13/01 2:52 PM Page 266

266 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

assassination attempt on Cromwell’s life which was blamed on the Stuart exiles, Mazarin required Charles II and his entourage to leave France.167 Cromwell insisted on the exile of James Duke of York and others, even though he captained a regiment of Irish troops under the general command of Turenne and Mazarin did not want to lose the commander or his troops.168 The Spaniards continued to support Condé’s interests because he helped them win the battle of Valenciennes in July 1656.169 However, the French bribe to secure a military alliance with Cromwell was only made after they had suffered this new defeat.170 For Mazarin, the way to secure peace was to obtain it on French terms by waging war more effectively, which meant a military alliance with Cromwell. Wicquefort recognized that the shift of alliances had occurred on 2/12 April 1656, when Philip IV offered Charles II not merely sanctuary but a formal treaty.171 The acceptance of this treaty was not forgiven by Mazarin who contended that Charles should have sought exile in a neutral German state as he himself had done when exiled from France in 1651.172 News of this treaty helped the Cardinal to obtain his military alliance with Cromwell. Moreover, Mazarin contended, the Dutch were on the point of offering naval assistance to a new ‘enterprise of England’.173 The treaty of Paris (23 March 1657)174 contained secret articles that were very damaging to the Stuart interest, since it was an offensive and defensive alliance. The Dukes of York and Gloucester and all English lords declared guilty of high treason in England were to leave France without hope of return and those who had employment in the French forces were required to resign it. Henrietta Maria, as a daughter of France, would not be required to leave the kingdom. In return, the republic of England would not receive or shelter the enemies of France.175 The alliance served its purpose for both Cromwell and Mazarin: at the battle of the Dunes on 4/14 June 1658, James Duke of York fought with Condé and Don John of Austria on the Habsburg side, but Philip IV’s forces went down to crushing defeat. The Dutch maintained that Mazarin had failed to perceive France’s true interest, which would not be served by the English establishing themselves in the former Spanish Netherlands.176 There is little doubt that the French ministers realized the dangers of transferring Dunkirk to England, since it could potentially serve as a port for the invasion of France. They argued that, had they not agreed to this, Cromwell would have accepted the Spanish offer of Calais.177 Yet there was also a fairly clear French expectation that before long England would run short of money because of the war with Spain and the interruption of the Anglo-

REC11 7/13/01 2:52 PM Page 267

The European Reaction 267

Spanish trade.178 If the French failed to pay the cost of the upkeep of the English garrison at Dunkirk, and there was already talk of them not honouring the treaty in December 1658, would the English be able to do so?179 Charles II’s sale of Dunkirk in 1662 was not quite inevitable; but the ﬁscal power of France subsequently enabled the prompt payment of the purchase price for Calais.180 The sale demonstrated that Mazarin had been correct in his expectation that England’s ﬁnancial problems would make it difﬁcult to sustain the costs of maintaining a permanent presence on the European mainland. Under the public terms of the Treaty of Paris, Catholic rights of worship would be permitted in any towns recaptured by the English, since Louis XIV’s main concern was stated to be the ‘tranquillity of the Christian world’; but this clause was not enough to stop the Spanishinspired rumour that Flanders was in danger of being infected with ‘the venom of heresy’. Mazarin’s alliance with a heretic of such notoriety was a matter of grave concern for the pro-Spanish Pope Alexander VII, who wished to see a Franco-Spanish peace.181 The riposte of the French government was that Philip IV had been the ﬁrst to recognize the commonwealth and had sought the English alliance; French policy had merely succeeded where the Spaniards had failed.182 But real difﬁculties remained. The French perceived a ploy to secure the dismissal of Mazarin and his replacement by Cardinal de Retz, and accused the Pope of having sided with Spain. The French clergy adhered collectively to its Gallican principles and refused to side with the Pope on the issue of an immediate peace,183 although the Faculty of Theology of the University of Paris created new difﬁculties in November 1657.184 Even in October 1658, after the capture of Dunkirk and its transfer to English control, Mazarin claimed that he ‘deserved praise and not blame for the strenuous efforts made for the conservation of the Catholic faith’.185 From Mazarin’s perspective, the ideological threat was no longer from English republicanism but within Catholicism – his obsession was with the threat posed by the Jansenists. Mazarin’s difﬁculties with Catholic opponents of his foreign policy parallel the experiences of Cromwell in trying to defend his ‘Protestant’ foreign policy of allying with one Catholic king (Louis XIV) against another (Philip IV) on the grounds that all Europeans ‘have agreed that [Philip IV’s] design was the empire of the whole Christian world, if not more, and upon that ground he looks at this nation as his greatest obstacle’. For critics of the protectorate’s foreign policy, the Spaniards were ‘a lost nation’, no longer a credible threat in the way that Cromwell imagined.186 Common interest rather than confessional similarity ought

REC11 7/13/01 2:52 PM Page 268

268 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

to be the basis for foreign alliances, in the view of the Protector’s critics. There was a distinction between defending the Protestant religion and championing the Protestant cause. According to Henry Neville, to defend the Protestant religion meant to prevent persecution of the godly abroad. This was quite a different matter from ‘a Protestant interest or cause’, which involved preventing universal monarchy, or ensuring the balance of power in Europe.187

VI From Charles II’s perspective, the danger of a continuation of the war between France and Spain was that a new alliance system might be forged which would be detrimental to his interests by helping to prop up the regime in England. In establishing this new alliance system, the decisive decision was taken by Cromwell: his choice was for a military alliance with France in 1655–7.188 In his testament, he recommended a pro-French foreign policy to his son;189 and on his death, France and Sweden, as England’s ‘closest allies’, gave immediate recognition to Richard Cromwell because of their ‘community of interests’.190 Thus Charles II, faute de mieux, was forced into the Habsburg camp. After 1659, Spain was still involved in its war with Portugal: this had dashed Charles II’s hopes of assistance resulting from his alliance with Philip IV.191 At the Peace of the Pyrenees, Louis XIV and Mazarin abandoned Charles Stuart and Portugal, while Philip IV and Don Luis de Haro abandoned the English claimant in the hope of defeating the Portuguese war of secession.192 Wicquefort may have been incorrect in his assessment of Mazarin’s ‘aversion’ to the idea of peace.193 But he left no doubt as to Mazarin’s abandonment of Charles II’s cause. On the other hand, Lockhart, the Protector’s plenipotentiary, was received by Mazarin ‘with all the Honours that could have been done to the Minister of the First Monarch of Christendom’.194 The secret conduct of business between Mazarin and Lockhart in 1656–59 was the sort of diplomacy that Mazarin understood and which he had always sought to achieve. There could be no hope for an Anglo-French alliance until Mazarin emerged from the Fronde, newly restored to power in Paris after February 1653; but there could be no hope in any case until the commonwealth and, later, the protectorate was prepared to negotiate with a cardinal,195 and to negotiate in secrecy. A new alliance, once ﬁrmly entered into, was sacrosanct. For Wicquefort, Cardinal Mazarin ‘was no Slave to his Word, and . . . was willing it should be known that he was

REC11 7/13/01 2:52 PM Page 269

The European Reaction 269

not’; yet he concluded: ‘the strict Union he made with the Usurper of the English Crown [in 1657], made an End to undeceive those the Cardinal might have impos’d upon concerning the Sincerity of his Intention in reference to Peace.’196 For the cardinal, it was precisely the secret conduct of diplomacy which was the key to establishing an alliance system, for only the conditions of secrecy enabled the parties to leave aside their ideological baggage. Mazarin allegedly told the papal nuncio in 1657 that France was allied with heretics only because there were no Catholic powers with which to ally; Spain would have entered into this alliance had France not done so ﬁrst. Thus arguments always adjusted themselves to the facts, it was observed, and all measures taken were governed by interests of state.197 When England ﬁnally set its sights on a European monarch (and chose Spain as the enemy) over ﬁve years had elapsed since the regicide. By this time, the English regime had itself undergone a massive transformation with ‘something of monarchy’ reintroduced into the constitution.198 Had ‘Puritan republicanism’ ever constituted a threat to the European monarchies in general, this had clearly receded by the time Mazarin entered into negotiations with Cromwell. For, to take Thurloe’s judgement, the ‘alliances of those times’ were contracted and conserved upon these interests: . . . To deprive his Majesty [= Charles II] of foreign assistance in his restitution [= restoration]: . . . England had the opportunity . . . to be the umpire of peace between [France and Spain]. The other great objective of the Protector was ‘to obviate the designs of the Dutch’.199 By this time, we are very far from the mental world of Charles I, whose cause was that of all European monarchies. Because of his domestic preoccupations Charles I himself had been isolated from the diplomatic realities of the 1640s, with its triumph of reason of state and building of alliance systems to secure the European balance of power. In that respect, our verdict nearly forty years after C.V. Wedgwood’s seminal article on the European reaction to the regicide is to agree that ‘there is little evidence to show that the institution of European monarchy was in any way affected by it’ but not to share her opinion that ‘logically, the death of Charles I ought to have damaged the mystique, or at least the prestige of royalty throughout Europe’.200 For that was the contention of Charles I and the Stuart exiles; and it was an argument which almost from the outset failed to convince the other European rulers.201

REC11 7/13/01 2:52 PM Page 270

270 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

In spite of the later myths that foreigners, notably Mazarin and the Sorbonne, were responsible for the demise of Charles I,202 purely British events had brought about the regicide. Similarly, purely British events led to the restoration of his son in 1660.203 In terms of any positive outcome for Charles II, the European reaction to the regicide was a halfhearted irrelevance. Cromwell aimed to ensure that no Franco-Spanish coalition was ever formed. Possession of Dunkirk denied an invasion point for Charles as well as offering Cromwell’s forces the possibility of invading the European mainland.204 Yet even had a Franco-Spanish peace been concluded before 1659, would Charles II’s position have improved? There was no tradition of Franco-Spanish co-operation and a brief alliance on paper between the two states in 1627–29 had not led to an invasion.205 There had always been a fear that, without an English port under the secure control of a commander who had defected or a rebel faction, such an invasion would in any case fail.206 Far from countenancing an invasion when a favourable opportunity presented itself after 1659,207 Mazarin did not consider it in France’s interests to spend money on an attempted restoration of Charles II. The distracted state of England under Richard Cromwell’s protectorate was more advantageous to France208 than united either under a king or a republic: such unity would certainly arise if there was an invasion from abroad. Moreover, the French ministers recalled Charles I’s alliance with the Huguenots in 1627, as well as Charles II’s conduct in exile,209 in deciding against tangible assistance to the Stuart cause. Reason of state had determined the recognition of the protectorate by the governments of Spain, France and the United Provinces and their attempts to integrate it into the European states system. Such an outcome had not been expected in England in the years after 1649, when those Protestants who were fearful for the security of their faith, their liberties and the survival of the regime suspected that Scotland and Ireland were potential testing grounds for popery and absolutism.210 It was no help at all to Charles II’s cause in seeking restoration to a Protestant nation that he was dependent on Spanish power after 1656. Cromwell’s speech to parliament in September 1656 warned of the union between Charles Stuart, Spain and the Jesuits. The interests of the Protestant nation had become that of maintaining a balance of power. The French alliance system since 1630 had always sought to be a multi-confessional alliance that protected the rights of Protestant states: Cromwell’s speech was not misleading on this point.211 France had not yet become the aggressive power which it became under Louis XIV, seeking to occupy the Spanish Netherlands in

REC11 7/13/01 2:52 PM Page 271

The European Reaction 271

1667 or to overrun the United Provinces in 1672. The Lord Protector cannot reasonably be criticized for his failure to anticipate the lifetime experience of William III, the strengthening of French power in Europe and the aggressive expansion of its frontiers chieﬂy at the expense of Spain. Without a military alliance with England, a French victory over Spain was by no means certain, as the events of 1656 and 1658 demonstrate.212 The Anglo-French alliance that also served to close the door to Charles II’s invasion was a multi-confessional alliance to preserve the European balance of power, not to embark upon a war of religion; it operated on the principle of state interest. In that respect, at least, it was a precursor of the Grand Alliance against France under William III.213

Notes 1. A. de Wicquefort, The Embassador and his Functions, trans. J. Digby, ed. M. Keens-Soper (Leicester, 1997), p. 17. Original French edition: A. de Wicquefort, L’Ambassadeur et ses fonctions (The Hague, 1681). During the Fronde he managed a newsletter for the German princes: H. Carrier, La presse et la Fronde, 1648–1653: Les Mazarinades (2 vols, Geneva, Librairie Droz, 1989–91), II, pp. 45, 189, 325, 343–4. A more graphic depiction of the prostration of France and England before the Protector was given by an English cartoonist: C.P. Korr, Cromwell and the New Model Foreign Policy. England’s Policy Towards France (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1975), pp. 207, 248 n 6. The author thanks Dr John Coffey (Leicester) for his helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper and Dr Andrew Lacey for a number of helpful conversations during its preparation. Professor Hubert Carrier (Tours) provided a number of very helpful clariﬁcations on the printed literature in France. Responsibility for the shortcomings of the chapter remains with the author. 2. C.V. Wedgwood, ‘European Reaction to the Death of Charles I’, in C.H. Carter, ed., From the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation: Essays in Honour of Garrett Mattingly (London, Jonathan Cape, 1966), pp. 401–16: p. 416. She had earlier addressed the problem more brieﬂy in Wedgwood, The Trial of Charles I (London, Collins, 1964), pp. 198–201, 242. 3. The terminology used was in itself partly directed towards the European audience. A.B. Worden, The Rump Parliament, 1648–1653 (Cambridge, CUP, 1974), pp. 172–3. 4. C.S.R. Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford, OUP, 1990), p. 192, quoted in Russell, ‘Why Did People Choose Sides in the English Civil War?’, Historian, LXIII (1999), p. 5. 5. J. Morrill and P. Baker, above, pp. 14–35. 6. D. Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy in England, 1649–1660 (New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1960). 7. K.V. Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 895–7.

REC11 7/13/01 2:52 PM Page 272

272 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I 8. F. Guizot, History of Oliver Cromwell and the English Commonwealth, trans. A.R. Scoble (2 vols, London, 1854), I, p. 427. 9. A.J. Loomie, ‘Alonso de Cárdenas and the Long Parliament, 1640–48’, EHR, CVII (1982), p. 291. 10. Sharpe, Personal Rule, pp. 896–7. 11. P. Geyl, Orange and Stuart, 1641–72, trans. A. Pomerans (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969), pp. 9, 12–14, 28. 12. Guizot, Oliver Cromwell, I, p. 386–7. 13. Loomie, ‘Alonso de Cárdenas’, pp. 299–300, 303, 305, 307; Guizot, Oliver Cromwell, I, p. 373. 14. D. Stevenson, The Scottish Revolution, 1637–1644. The Triumph of the Covenanters (Newton Abbot, Devon, David & Charles, 1973), pp. 179–87. 15. Geyl, Orange and Stuart, p. 39 n 119. 16. A. Bigby, ‘An Unknown Treaty Between England and France, 1644’, EHR, XXVIII (1913), pp. 337–41; D. Croxton, Peacemaking in Early Modern Europe. Cardinal Mazarin and the Congress of Westphalia, 1643–1648 (Selinsgrove, Susquehanna University Press, 1999), pp. 213, 351–2 (n. 80). 17. Croxton, Peacemaking, p. 156. 18. S.I. Olofsson, Efter Westfaliska freden. Sveriges yttre politik, 1650–1654 (Stockholm, 1957), pp. 237–8. I owe this reference to Dr Sven Björkman (Uppsala University). However, both Christina of Sweden and Frederick III of Denmark struggled with the problem of legitimacy: ibid., pp. 238–9, 252–3; Charles I was also the cousin of Frederick III. 19. M. Roberts, ‘Queen Christina and the General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century’, in T. Aston, ed., Crisis in Europe, 1560–1660 (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965), p. 208 n 43. 20. Croxton, Peacemaking, p. 276. 21. 1648. La Paix de Westphalie. Vers l’Europe moderne (Paris, Impr. nationale, 1998). 22. Croxton, Peacemaking, p. 188, 201–2. For the Spanish prediction made on 7 June 1647: R.A. Stradling, Philip IV and the Government of Spain, 1621–1665 (Cambridge, CUP, 1988), p. 287. 23. Guizot, Oliver Cromwell, I, pp. 369–70. 24. In England (still using the Julian Calendar) the date was 2 January, while in France (using the New Style Gregorian Calendar) the date was 12 January. 25. P.A. Knachel, England and the Fronde. The Impact of the English Civil War and Revolution on France (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1967), p. 117. 26. T. Carte, A Collection of Original Letters and Papers (2 vols, 1739), I, pp. 195–7. It does not appear in A. Isnard and S. Honoré, eds, Catalogue des Actes Royaux. II. 1610–1665 (Paris, 1938). Professor Hubert Carrier, the great specialist on the printed literature of the Fronde, has informed me that he has not seen a published version of the declaration of 2/12 January 1649. However, it should be noted that the English translation carries the alleged countersignature of secretary of state Brienne. 27. ‘Lettre du Père Michel’, p. 16, in H. Carrier, ed., La Fronde. Contestation démocratique et misère paysanne. 52 Mazarinades (2 vols, Paris, EDMIS, 1982). 28. CSPV 1647–52, pp. 87–8. 29. Ibid., p. 97.

REC11 7/13/01 2:52 PM Page 273

The European Reaction 273 30. Ibid., p. 109; Guizot, Oliver Cromwell, I, p. 390; Knachel, England and the Fronde, p. 219. 31. Mercurius Pragmaticus (for King Charles II), part 2 no. 6. I am indebted to Dr Andrew Lacey for this reference. 32. M. Nedham, The Case of the Commonwealth of England, Stated [May 1650], ed. P.A. Knachel (Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1969), p. 54. 33. Worden, Rump Parliament, p. 253. 34. Wedgwood, Trial of Charles I, pp. 199, 242 n 19; Worden, Rump Parliament, p. 213; CSPV 1653–4, p. 148. 35. CSPV 1647–52, pp. 213–14. 36. D. Stevenson, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Scotland, 1644–1651 (London, Royal Historical Society, 1977), p. 132. 37. Ibid., pp. 51, 185, 237, 253. 38. Worden, Rump Parliament, p. 237; J. Coffey, Politics, Religion and the British Revolutions (Cambridge, CUP, 1997), pp. 249–50. 39. Guizot, Oliver Cromwell, I, pp. 420–1. As late as 9 October 1649, the Spanish council of state had been divided in its views. 40. D.L. Smith, ‘The Struggle for New Constitutional and Institutional Forms’, in J. Morrill, ed., Revolution and Restoration. England in the 1650s (London, Collins & Brown, 1992), p. 29. 41. Stevenson, Revolution and Counter-Revolution, pp. 196–7. 42. Worden, Rump Parliament, p. 262. 43. Guizot, Oliver Cromwell, I, pp. 371, 405–6, 428. 44. Worden, Rump Parliament, pp. 253–4. 45. A.P. Martinich, The Two Gods of Leviathan. Thomas Hobbes on Religion and Politics (Cambridge, CUP, 1992), pp. 177–81. 46. Knachel, England and the Fronde, p. 73. A translation of the Eléments philosophiques du citoyen, traité politique où les fondements de la société sont découverts by Samuel Sorbière was published in 1649. 47. Nedham, Case of the Commonwealth, chapter 2, p. 15. 48. Wicquefort, The Embassador, p. 17. 49. G. Botero, The Reason of State [1589], trans. and ed. P.J. and D.P. Waley (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956); E. Thuau, Raison d’état et pensée politique à l’époque de Richelieu (Paris, 1966); W.F. Church, Richelieu and Reason of State (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1972); R. Bireley, The Counter-Reformation Prince: Anti-Machiavellianism or Catholic Statecraft in Early Modern Europe (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1990). 50. R.J. Bonney, The King’s Debts. Finance and Politics in France, 1589–1661 (Oxford, OUP, 1981), p. 148; Guizot, Oliver Cromwell, I, p. 381. 51. J.A.W. Gunn, Politics and the Public Interest in the Seventeenth Century (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 36–7. 52. S. Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650–68 (Cambridge, CUP, 1996), pp. 79, 89. 53. Guizot, Oliver Cromwell, I, pp. 372, 410. 54. Stevenson, Scottish Revolution, p. 183. 55. Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism, pp. 23, 79; Knachel, England and the Fronde, p. 85; ‘Les véritables maximes du gouvernement de la France’, p. 13, in Carrier, La Fronde, I, (text 8) and note of Carrier, p. iv. 56. Guizot, Oliver Cromwell, I, p. 389; Loomie, ‘Alonso de Cárdenas’, p. 306.

REC11 7/13/01 2:52 PM Page 274

274 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I 57. Guizot, Oliver Cromwell, I, p. 387; Wedgwood, ‘European Reaction’, p. 403. 58. Four times since the Norman Conquest; two other kings had died a violent death. 59. Wedgwood, ‘European Reaction’, p. 412. Surprisingly, there was no reference to the trial of Mary Queen of Scots. 60. Guizot, Oliver Cromwell, I, p. 427. 61. Ibid., I, p. 381. 62. F. Bluche, ed., Dictionnaire du Grand Siècle (Paris, Fayard, 1990), pp. 716, 1390; Carrier, La presse, I, p. 225. 63. H.H. Rowen, The King’s State. Proprietary Dynasticism in Early Modern France (New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1980), pp. 116–17. 64. Knachel, England and the Fronde, pp. 119–21. 65. A.L. Moote, The Revolt of the Judges (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 194–5. 66. Ibid., p. 195 n. 31; Knachel, England and the Fronde, p. 240. The pamphlets claimed that a pension had been handed over openly, in contrast to the government’s preferred method of a secret payment: ibid., pp. 91, 223. For Clarendon’s statement that the French government was unable to pay the pension by December 1651: ibid., pp. 229–30. For secret payments: R.J. Bonney, The Limits of Absolutism in Ancien Régime France (Aldershot, Variorum, 1995), chapter x. 67. Knachel, England and the Fronde, p. 224. 68. Ibid., pp. 81–2. 69. Ibid., p. 57; Gazette of Wicquefort, 28 May 1649 [Wolfenbüttel, Niedersächsisches Staatsarchiv, 1 Alt 6, no. 99, fol. 139r]. The author thanks Professor Hubert Carrier for generously supplying this reference, and for his elucidation of a number of points concerning the Mazarinades and the French response to the trial and execution of Charles I. For the Mazarinades in favour of the Stuart cause printed during the siege of Paris: Knachel, England and the Fronde, pp. 66–71. 70. Korr, Cromwell, pp. 12–13; Bonney, King’s Debts, pp. 217–19; Knachel, England and the Fronde, pp. 122–4. 71. Knachel, England and the Fronde, pp. 117, 133–4, 152, 175–7. 72. Worden, Rump Parliament, p. 253; S. Kelsey, Inventing a Republic. The Political Culture of the English Commonwealth, 1649–53 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 61, 134. 73. Stradling, Philip IV, pp. 297, 305. 74. Guizot, Oliver Cromwell, I, pp. 476–87. 75. Wedgwood, Trial of Charles I, p. 199. 76. Guizot, Oliver Cromwell, I, pp. 443–53. 77. Guizot, Oliver Cromwell, II, pp. 453–8. 78. Knachel, England and the Fronde, p. 175. 79. Guizot, Oliver Cromwell, I, p. 487–91. 80. Worden, Rump Parliament, p. 213; CSPV 1653–4, p. 18. 81. Quoted without a precise date in Q. Bone, Henrietta Maria. Queen of the Cavaliers (London, Peter Owen, 1973), p. 239, but presumably at the time of the exile of Charles II and the royalist exiles. 82. CSPV 1647–52, p. 317. 83. A. Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate (Oxford, OUP, 1982), p. 279.

REC11 7/13/01 2:52 PM Page 275

The European Reaction 275 84. Guizot, Oliver Cromwell, II, pp. 437, 440. 85. Ibid., II, p. 445. 86. Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism, p. 191. Pincus does not consider the possibility of an Anglo-French war, while the seriousness of the naval and trade dispute between the two powers undermines his argument that ideology was the sole determining factor in the making of foreign policy. He discusses the English case against the Spanish claim to universal monarchy more fully in Pincus, ‘England the World in the 1650s’, in Morrill, ed., Revolution and Restoration, pp. 137–44. 87. AAE France 893/2 fol. 93v. 88. AAE France 893/2, fols 236v–237v. Lack of certainty about English intentions had been voiced only a few days earlier: ibid., fol. 290v. 89. Wedgwood, Trial of Charles I, pp. 199, 242 n 20; CSPV 1653–4, p. 30. 90. Worden, Rump Parliament, p. 252 n 5. 91. A. Jones, ‘Towards a New Structural Theory of Revolution: Universalism and Community in the French and Russian Revolutions’, EHR, CVII (1992), 862–900. 92. CSPV 1647–52, p. 202. 93. J.I. Israel, The Dutch Republic. Its Rise, Greatness and Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford, OUP, 1995), p. 713; H.H. Rowen, The Princes of Orange. The Stadholders in the Dutch Republic (Cambridge, CUP, 1988), p. 102; CSPV 1647–52, p. 178. 94. F. Guizot, The History of Civilization in Europe, trans. W. Hazlitt (London, 1997), p. 221; B. Cottret, Cromwell (Paris, 1992), pp. 356, 376; CSPV 1653–4, p. 90. 95. Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism, p. 445. Opinion is divided on whether Pincus is correct to stress the ideological origins of the ﬁrst Dutch war and play down the economic. Israel, Dutch Republic, pp. 713–26, offers a more conventional reading. 96. Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism, p. 445. Cf. ibid. p. 69 n 125. 97. Croxton, Peacemaking, p. 277. 98. CSPV 1653–4, p. 128. 99. Rowen, Princes of Orange, p. 81; CSPV 1647–52, p. 91. 100. Guizot, Oliver Cromwell, I, pp. 238–9. 101. H.H. Rowen, ‘The Revolution That Wasn’t: the Coup d’Etat of 1650 in Holland’, European Studies Review, IV (1974). 102. Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism, pp. 36–7, 149. 103. Ibid., pp. 37, 66, 129. 104. J.I. Israel, ‘England, the Dutch Republic and Europe in the Seventeenth Century’, HJ, XL (1997), pp. 1117–21: p. 1118; Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism, p. 142. 105. Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism, pp. 71, 110–11, 112 n 31. 106. CSPV 1647–52, 89. 107. Geyl, Orange and Stuart, p. 81; Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism, pp. 109, 145–6. 108. Israel, ‘England, the Dutch Republic and Europe’, p. 1118. 109. Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism, pp. 16–17. 110. H.H. Rowen, John de Witt. Grand Pensionary of Holland, 1625–1672 (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 45–6. 111. Rowen, Princes of Orange, pp. 99–100.

REC11 7/13/01 2:52 PM Page 276

276 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I 112. Geyl, Orange and Stuart, p. 82. The original Dutch edition was published in 1939. 113. CSPV 1647–52, p. 192. 114. CSPV 1653–4, pp. 108–9. 115. Ibid., 102; Geyl, Orange and Stuart, p. 82. 116. CSPV 1647–52, p. 178; Guizot, Oliver Cromwell, I, p. 411, II, p. 440. 117. CSPV 1647–52, p. 180. 118. Ibid., p. 207. 119. Worden, Rump Parliament, p. 253. 120. Guizot, Oliver Cromwell, II, p. 427. 121. Israel, ‘England, the Dutch Republic and Europe’, p. 1118. 122. G. Parker, The Dutch Revolt (London, Allen Lane, 1977), p. 243; Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism, pp. 140–1. 123. Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism, p. 138; CSPV 1653–4, pp. 120–1. 124. Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism, pp. 141–2. 125. Pincus, ‘England and the World in the 1650s’, p. 134; S. Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches. An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (London, Fontana, 1988), pp. 259–67; Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism, p. 61. 126. Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism, pp. 87–8, 182–3. For the contrast between Cromwell’s grandeur and De Witt’s more modest bearing: Israel, ‘England, the Dutch Republic and Europe’, p. 1118. 127. Israel, Dutch Republic, p. 720. 128. Rowen, John de Witt, p. 88. 129. Rowen, Princes of Orange, p. 112. 130. Rowen, John de Witt, pp. 260, 264–5, 269. 131. CSPV 1657–9, pp. 251–2. 132. Ibid., p. 243. 133. Knachel, England and the Fronde, p. 66. Wedgwood, Trial of Charles I, p. 206. 134. Knachel, England and the Fronde, pp. 66–7; F. Madan, A New Bibliography of the Eikon Basilike (Oxford Bibliographical Society, new series, III, 1949), pp. 60–8. 135. Carrier, La presse, II, p. 448. Details of the number of editions from Andrew Lacey, ‘The Cult of King Charles the Martyr: the Rise and Fall of a Political Theology, c.1640–1859’ (PhD thesis, Leicester, 1999). 136. Knachel, England and the Fronde, p. 75. 137. J. Solé, Le débat entre Protestants et Catholiques français de 1598 à 1685 (4 vols, Paris, Atelier national reproduction des thèses, 1985), IV, p. 1466. 138. Knachel, England and the Fronde, pp. 58–62; C. Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (London, Faber, 1977), p. 227. 139. Knachel, England and the Fronde, p. 108. 140. Ibid., pp. 74, 107–11; S. Deyon, Du loyalisme au refus: les Protestants français et leur député général entre la Fronde et la Révocation (Lille, Université de Lille, 1991), p. 37. 141. K.W. Wolfe and P.J. Wolfe, eds, Considérations politiques sur la Fronde. La correspondance entre Gabriel Naudé et le Cardinal Mazarin (Paris, Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature, 1991), p. 89. 142. R. Bonney, ‘Cardinal Mazarin and his Critics: the Remonstrances of 1652’, Journal of European Studies, X (1980), pp. 15–31, p. 16; Carrier, La presse, I,

REC11 7/13/01 2:52 PM Page 277

The European Reaction 277

143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148.

149. 150. 151.

152. 153. 154. 155. 156.

157. 158. 159. 160.

161. 162. 163. 164. 165. 166. 167. 168. 169.

170.

pp. 127–33; II, pp. 51–60; Wolfe and Wolfe, eds, Considérations politiques sur la Fronde, p. 58. R.J. Bonney, Political Change in France under Richelieu and Mazarin, 1624– 1661 (Oxford, OUP, 1978), p. 397. CSPV 1647–52, pp. 118, 126, 179, 202, 234, 238, 240. S.A. Westrich, The Ormée of Bordeaux. A Revolution During the Fronde (Baltimore, Md, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), p. 56. Knachel, England and the Fronde, p. 209. CSPV 1647–52, p. 203. Knachel, England and the Fronde, pp. 197–202. Knachel stresses majority Protestant loyalism. Westrich contends that ‘the turn to republicanism was . . . a condition of the social struggle rather than the result of ideological conviction’: Westrich, The Ormée of Bordeaux, p. 57. Westrich, The Ormée of Bordeaux, pp. 94–5. AAE France 893/2, fols 236v–37v. Guizot, Oliver Cromwell, II, pp. 498–504; R. Vigne, ‘ “Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints”: Cromwell’s Intervention on Behalf of the Vaudois’, Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of Great Britain and Ireland, XXIV (1983–8), pp. 10–25. Guizot, Oliver Cromwell, II, p. 513. Ibid., II, p. 510; Korr, Cromwell, p. 152. Guizot, Oliver Cromwell, II, p. 596. Ibid., II, p. 469. R. Hutton, The British Republic, 1649–1660 (Basingstoke, Macmillan Press – now Palgrave, 1990), pp. 109, 137 n 12. The Spanish notion was that a ‘war beyond the line’ was purely ﬁctional: Guizot, Oliver Cromwell, II, p. 516. Korr, Cromwell, pp. 139, 146, 199; Hutton, British Republic, p. 109. Guizot, Oliver Cromwell, II, pp. 479–85; CSPV 1653–4, p. 268; CSPV 1657–9, pp. 17–18, 135. Guizot, Oliver Cromwell, II, p. 515. B. Worden, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the Sin of Achan’, in D. Beales and G. Best, eds, History, Society and the Churches: Essays in Honour of Owen Chadwick (Cambridge, CUP, 1985), pp. 125–45; Coffey, Politics, Religion and the British Revolutions, p. 250. Korr, Cromwell, p. 146. Ibid., p. 167 and more generally, chapter 13 for a discussion of the treaty; Guizot, Oliver Cromwell, II, pp. 554, 571. Guizot, Oliver Cromwell, II, p. 514; Stradling, Philip IV, p. 292; CSPV 1653–4, p. 282. Wicquefort, The Embassador, p. 18. Guizot, Oliver Cromwell, II, pp. 451–2, 469, 531. Wicquefort, The Embassador, p. 17. CSPV 1653–4, pp. 232, 235; Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy, pp. 106, 132; Korr, Cromwell, p. 128. Guizot, Oliver Cromwell, II, p. 486; Korr, Cromwell, pp. 162, 169, 242 n 6. P. Jansen, Le Cardinal de Mazarin et le mouvement janséniste française, 1653–1659 (Paris, Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1967), p. 182; Stradling, Philip IV, p. 289. Bonney, King’s Debts, pp. 242, 246, 253.

REC11 7/13/01 2:52 PM Page 278

278 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I 171. Geyl, Orange and Stuart, pp. 126–7; Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy, pp. 178–9; Guizot, Oliver Cromwell, II, p. 537. 172. CSPV 1659–61, p. 44. 173. Stradling, Philip IV, pp. 290–1, 293 n 176, 297; J.I. Israel, Empires and Entrepots. The Dutch, the Spanish Monarchy and the Jews, 1585–1713 (London, Hambledon, 1990), pp. 437–8; Israel, Dutch Republic, pp. 738, 753. 174. Cottret, Cromwell, p. 443; Jansen, Le Cardinal de Mazarin, pp. 162–3, 172; Guizot, Oliver Cromwell, II, pp. 562–8; Korr, Cromwell, pp. 182–3. 175. CSPV 1657–9, p. 51; Jansen, Le Cardinal de Mazarin, p. 152; G.M. Bell, A Handlist of British Diplomatic Representatives, 1509–1688 (London, Royal Historical Society, 1990), p. 114. 176. CSPV 1657–9, pp. 115, 223. 177. Ibid., pp. 112–14. 178. Ibid., pp. 174, 270–1. 179. Ibid., pp. 270–1. 180. CSPV 1661–4, pp. 130–1, 178–9, 199, 211. 181. Jansen, Le Cardinal de Mazarin, pp. 103, 100–1, 110, 128–9. 182. Ibid., p. 126. 183. Ibid, pp. 133–7. 184. CSPV 1657–9, p. 124. 185. Ibid., p. 247. 186. Pincus, ‘England and the World in the 1650s’, pp. 140–1, 144. 187. Ibid., p. 147. 188. CSPV 1657–9, p. 67. 189. Ibid., p. 247. 190. Ibid., pp. 242–3. 191. Stradling, Philip IV, p. 291; CSPV 1657–9, pp. 24, 32; CSPV 1659–61, p. 28; Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy, p. 219. 192. Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy, p. 293; Croxton, Peacemaking, p. 277; Stradling, Philip IV, pp. 294–9. 193. Croxton, Peacemaking, p. 271; Wicquefort, The Embassador, p. 389. 194. Wicquefort, The Embassador, p. 17; CSPV 1657–9, pp. 30, 150; CSPV 1659–61, pp. 75–6. 195. CSPV 1653–4, pp. 183, 231; CSPV 1657–9, p. 25. 196. Wicquefort, The Embassador, pp. 389–90, 408. 197. CSPV 1657–9, p. 26. 198. Worden, Rump Parliament, p. 276. 199. John Thurloe, ‘Concerning the foreign affairs in the Protector’s time’, reprinted in extract in D.L. Smith, Oliver Cromwell. Politics and Religion in the English Revolution, 1640–1658 (Cambridge, CUP, 1992), p. 90. 200. Wedgwood, ‘European Reaction’, p. 416. 201. Guizot, Oliver Cromwell, I, p. 372. 202. W. Lamont, ‘The Religious Origins of the English Civil War: Two False Witnesses’, forthcoming in D.J.B. Trim and Peter J. Balderstone, eds, Cross, Crown and Community: Religion, Government and Early-Modern English Culture c.1400–c.1800 (Leiden, 2000). 203. Korr, Cromwell, p. 196–7, 209. 204. Ibid., p. 205. 205. Bonney, King’s Debts, pp. 146 n 4, 149; CSPV 1659–61, pp. 12, 18, 23.

REC11 7/13/01 2:52 PM Page 279

The European Reaction 279 206. 207. 208. 209. 210.

CSPV 1657–9, pp. 33–4. CSPV 1653–4, p. 190. CSPV 1659–61, pp. 162–3, 167, 173. CSPV 1659–61, p. 44. T. Claydon and I. McBride, eds, Protestantism and National Identity. Britain and Ireland, c.1650–c.1850 (Cambridge, CUP, 1998), p. 17; T. Harris, ‘The British Dimension: Religion and the Shaping of Political Identities During the Reign of Charles II’, ibid., pp. 134–5. 211. Korr, Cromwell, p. 184. 212. Bonney, King’s Debts, p. 242. 213. Korr, Cromwell, p. 211; S. Pincus, ‘ “To protect English liberties”: the English Nationalist Revolution of 1688–1689’, in Claydon and McBride, eds, Protestantism and National Identity, pp. 100–2.

RECINDEX 7/13/01 2:55 PM Page 280

Index Adamson, John, 152 Agreement of the People Leveller, 18, 19, 22, 167, 176, 181, 182, 183, 188, 190, 192, 196, 202, 203, 205, 263 ofﬁcers’, 55, 75, 86, 143, 192, 193 Alexander VII, Pope, 267 Allen, Francis, 83 Allen, William, 19, 20, 25 Alured, John, 144, 145, 146, 151 Alured, Matthew, 151 Amyraut, Moïse, 263 Andrewes, Thomas, 4 Anne of Austria, queen of France, 249, 256 Argyle, Archibald Campbell, 8th earl of, 152 Aristotle, 95 Army Plot, 1641, 56 Army, New Model, 3, 6, 20, 21, 22, 25, 36, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 57, 58, 60, 73, 74, 75, 77, 109, 142, 143, 150, 151, 163, 165, 167, 181, 184, 188, 192, 195, 196, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218 adjutant general, see Stubber, Peter adjutators, 18, 20 advocate general, see Whalley, Henry agents of the ﬁve regiments, 18, 22, 181 chaplains, 166 council of ofﬁcers, 16, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 29, 30, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 46, 50, 52, 53, 55, 56, 57, 58, 60, 61, 74, 75, 79, 143, 162,

163, 165, 166, 167, 181, 182, 183, 184, 191, 192, 193, 194, 194, 202, 216 divisions within, 74, 80 headquarters, 45, 192 scoutmaster-general, see Rowe, William tyranny of, 6, 95, 186, 193, 195, 197, 215 Lord General, see Fairfax, Sir Thomas Windsor prayer meeting (1648), 25, 73 Army, Northern Brigade, 142, 149 Army, parliamentarian, 129, 139, 145 see also Essex, earl of; Fairfax, Ferdinando Army, Scottish, 139, 149, 151, 152 Arnold, John, 78 Arras, siege of, 257 Ashe, John, 26 Ashe, Simeon, 202, 210 Ashton, Robert, 215 Aubrey, John, 140 Austin, John, 123 Axton, Marie, 121 Bacon, Francis, 119, 120 Bacon, Robert, 101, 102 Bahamas, 83 Ball, William, 104, 108 Baltic, 261, 262 Barber, Sarah, 148 Barker, Matthew, 100 Barkstead, John, 166 Bate, George, 175 Bellamy, J.G., 124 Belshazzar, 96, 97, 99, 100, 101, 102, 105, 109 Bennet, Robert, 6 Bennett, John, 128 Berkeley, Sir John, 23 280

RECINDEX 7/13/01 2:55 PM Page 281

Index

Bible and biblical parallels, 5, 6, 7, 8, 17, 20, 22, 27, 72, 96, 97, 99, 100, 101, 102, 108, 110, 188, 205, 209, 210, 211, 213, 214, 216, 217, 219, 234, 238, 239, 240, 242 see also Belshazzar; Charles I; Nebuchadnezzar; Zeruiah Bishop, George, 19, 109 Bishops’ Wars, 39, 125, 148, 151, 232 Blaiklock, Laurence, 164 Blake, Robert, 252, 256, 257 Blakiston, John, 4, 80, 81, 143, 146, 147, 151, 153 Bletchingly, Surrey, 78 blood guilt, 7, 19, 22, 25, 57, 73, 74, 82, 104, 105, 142, 147, 187, 190, 191, 216, 242 Blue Boar, Holborn, 22 Bochart, Samuel, 263 Bodin, Jean, 121, 122, 123, 125 Bordeaux, 44, 263 Bourbon, House of, 249, 263 Bourchier, Sir John, 143, 144, 146, 151 Boys, John, 23 Bradshaw, John, 72, 78, 79, 81, 84, 85, 126, 129, 130, 131, 132, 165, 167, 168, 170, 172, 175, 234, 239 Bradshaw, Richard, 252 Bradshaw’s journal, 2 Brereton, Sir William, 78 Browne, Samuel, 145 Browne, Sir Richard, 173 Burgess, Glenn, 205, 207 Burgoyne, Sir Roger, 36 Bysshe, Edward, 78 Cade, Jack, 235 Calais, 266, 267 Calamy, Edmund, 202, 203, 204, 210, 211 Calvin, Robert, 120 Calvin’s Case, 119, 120 Cambrai, siege of, 255 Canne, John, 211

281

Cárdenas, Alonso de, 247, 248, 249, 253, 255, 257, 265 Carisbrooke Castle, 74 Carlos, Baltazar, 249 Castel Rodrigo, marquis of, 254 Catalonia, 249 Chaloner, Thomas, 43, 140, 141, 142, 143, 146, 147, 148, 151 Charenton, synod of, 263 Charles I, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 23, 32, 36, 37, 40, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 49, 50, 51, 53, 54, 55, 56, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 71, 73, 76, 77, 86, 94, 95, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 105, 106, 108, 109, 110, 130, 138, 141, 144, 145, 146, 148, 150, 152, 166, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 191, 193, 194, 196, 205, 206, 207, 209, 212, 213, 215, 216, 217, 218, 225, 227, 228, 229, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 237, 242, 247, 253, 262, 270 and Europe, 248, 249, 250, 251, 253, 254, 269, 270 and Irish, 38, 43–62 and Scots, 22, 23, 47, 50, 53, 148, 149, 151, 152, 153 biblical parallels, 22, 72, 110, 226, 234, 238, 239, 240, 241 call for justice upon, 19, 23, 25, 26, 29, 36, 43, 52, 53, 56, 73, 74, 142, 143, 147, 148,149, 169, 188, 189, 190, 62, 196, 207 chaplains, 54 character, 21, 22, 50, 57, 59, 62, 86, 104, 143, 146, 147, 153, 169, 213, 229, 230, 238 coronation, 100, 194 correspondence, 146 crimes, 6, 21, 22, 26, 52, 57, 76, 95, 102, 103, 104, 105, 107, 126, 127, 128, 129, 132, 151, 152, 153, 162, 168, 186, 187, 189, 190, 194, 195, 196, 197, 203,

RECINDEX 7/13/01 2:55 PM Page 282

282 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

Charles I – continued 208, 250 cult as martyr, 7, 71, 72, 101, 225–43 evil counsel, 187, 207, 208, 209 execution, 8, 14, 85, 99, 110, 144, 165, 174, 175, 184, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 215, 226, 227, 234, 240, 243, 254, 259, 262 historical parallels, 131, 132 household, 83 negotiations with, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 28, 30, 36, 37, 43, 45, 46, 47, 49, 50, 51, 57, 58, 60, 72, 75, 94, 105, 140, 141, 148, 149, 169, 189, 191, 206 Personal Rule, 131, 232 prisoner, 22, 23, 24, 50, 140, 141 religion, 146 tactics, 50, 51, 56, 61 see also Heads of Proposals; High Court of Justice; Newport Charles, Prince of Wales (later Charles II), 24, 31, 41, 43, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 59, 60, 74, 128, 150, 153, 197, 219, 226, 229, 234, 239, 243, 248, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256, 258, 259, 261, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271 Chester, 49 Christina, Queen of Sweden, 263 Church of England, 47, 142, 182, 227, 232, 233, 236, 243 Book of Common Prayer, 227 episcopal lands, 47, 74, 80 see also Laud, William Civil War, 184, 206, 207, 225, 226, 227, 230, 232, 234, 236, 238, 249 ﬁrst civil war, 123, 126, 128, 129, 149, 161, 209, 214, 219 second civil war, 9, 21, 43, 50,

100, 128, 142, 146, 149, 151, 184, 190, 191, 204, 226, 231 Clarendon, Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of, 79, 81, 170 Clarke, William, 18, 20, 21, 163, 164 see also Putney Debates Clement, Gregory, 83 Cleveland, John, 225, 226, 227 Cockermouth, 83 Coke, Sir Edward, 118, 119, 120, 124 Colchester, 73, 226, 231 Cole, Peter, 175 Coleman, Thomas, 146 Coles, Francis, 164, 165, 168 College of Arms, 78 Clarenceaux King of Arms, see Squibb, Arthur Garter King of Arms, see Bysshe, Edward Collinson, Patrick, 133 Committee of Both Kingdoms, 78, 166 Commons, House of, 15, 16, 29, 31, 36, 40, 43, 45, 56, 57, 60, 72, 75, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81, 86, 141, 149, 174, 182, 183, 187, 189, 195, 232 clerk, see Elsynge, Henry messenger, see Walford, Edward sermons, 100 Speaker, see Lenthall, William speeches, 16, 23, 24 supremacy, 73, 76, 80, 81, 96, 130, 142, 143, 188, 190, 194 Condé, Louis, Prince of, 256, 257, 263, 264, 266 Constable, Sir William, 142, 143, 146, 147, 151, 153 constitution ancient, 39, 73, 126, 131, 147, 185, 188, 209, 214 balanced, 106, 108, 109, 209, 219 Levellers and, 181, 183, 185, 188

RECINDEX 7/13/01 2:55 PM Page 283

Index

constitution – continued reform of, 9, 18, 30, 72, 86, 141, 148, 153, 181, 182, 205, 206, 207 Cook, John, 78, 82, 106, 127, 162, 167, 168, 170, 234 Corbet, Miles, 103, 104 Cotton, John, 6 County Durham, 139, 149, 150 Coward, Barry, 15, 23 Cowley, Abraham, 225, 227 Cranford, James, 174 Crawford, Patricia, 7 Cromartie, Alan, 127 Cromwell, Dorothy, see Maijor, Dorothy Cromwell, Oliver, 1, 4, 9, 14–32, 39, 40, 42, 43, 45, 46, 51, 52, 53, 54, 57, 58, 59, 61, 62, 77, 142, 148, 150, 152, 163, 181, 182, 183, 189, 191, 197, 226, 231, 242, 250, 252, 253, 259, 263, 267 and Bible, 22, 24, 25, 27, 28 and blood guilt, 25 and House of Lords, 39 and Ireland, 15, 62, 62 and negotiated settlement, 28, 37, 45, 52, 54, 148, 189 and providence, 7, 25, 26, 28, 29, 58, 139, 153 and republicanism, 23 and Scots, 9, 152 and trial, 22, 39, 57 as Gideon, 27 at Putney, 17, 20, 21, 191 correspondence, 25, 27, 28, 31 foreign policy, 257, 263, 267 military campaigns, 25, 27, 252, 255 political thought, 17, 39, 253 protector, 247, 257, 261, 264, 265, 266, 268, 269, 270 Cromwell, Richard, 15, 262, 268, 270 Cropredy Bridge, 129 Cumberland, 139 Cusack, John, 130

283

Danby, Henry Danvers, Earl of, 45 Danvers, Sir John, 45 Davies, Lady Eleanor, 100, 101, 105, 110 Denbigh mission, 31, 37, 45, 46, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 60, 61, 75 see also Charles I, negotiations with Denbigh, Basil Feliding, 2nd earl of, 24, 30, 31, 37, 39, 44, 45, 46, 47, 49, 51, 52, 58, 59, 61, 148, 152 Dendy, Edward, 77, 79, 82, 174, 175 Denmark, 250, 262, 265 Denton, Dr William, 170 Derby House Committee, 44, 45, 46, 78 Derbyshire, 139 Despensers, 120 De Witt, John, 261, 262 Dillingham, John, 165, 166, 169 Doctors’ Commons, 15, 31 Dorchester Company, 82 Dorislaus (Dorisla), Isaac, 15, 31, 44, 45, 46, 47, 53, 58 Downes, John, 170 Downs, Battle of the (1639), 249 Draper, John, 226 Dublin, 47, 48, 49 Dugard, William, 175 Dunbar, 252, 255, 256 Dunes, Battle of the (1658), 266 Dunkirk, 256, 264, 266, 267 Durham, 193 Edgehill, 129 Edinburgh, 25, 84, 206 Edward II, King of England, 55, 132, 186, 187 Edward III, King of England, 118, 131 Eikon Basilike, 108, 170, 172, 173, 174, 175, 234, 225, 227, 237, 240, 242, 262

RECINDEX 7/13/01 2:55 PM Page 284

284 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

Elector Palatine (Charles Louis), 100 Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 133 Ellesmere, Thomas Egerton, 1st Baron, 120 Elsynge, Henry, 141 Engagement, the (1650), 5, 146, 218 Erbury, William, 38 Essex, Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of, 77 Estrades, Comte d’, 256 Exclusion Crisis, 243 Exeter College, Oxford, 146 Fairfax, Ferdinando, 2nd Baron, 139, 143, 144, 145 Fairfax, Lady Anne, 170, 175 Fairfax, Sir Thomas, 22, 25, 26, 27, 29, 30, 37, 39, 40, 42, 43, 45, 46, 49, 51, 52, 53, 58, 77, 139, 142, 143, 145, 146, 148, 149, 163, 203, 204, 205, 226, 231, 250 Falkland, Lucius Cary, Viscount, 225 Felltham, Owen, 226, 231, 239 Fiennes, Lady Bridget, 83 Fiennes, Lady Susan, 83 Firth, Charles Harding, 15 Flanders, 226, 264, 267 Forced Loan, 124 Forde, Thomas, 226, 229, 231, 236, 237, 241–2 France, 24, 30, 31, 173, 248–71 ambassador to England, see Grignon, sieur de see also Fronde; Mazarin Frederick Henry of Orange, stadtholder, 249 French Revolution, 2 Fronde, 236, 253, 254, 255, 256, 258, 262, 263, 268 Fry, John, 80, 81 Fulbecke, William, 125 Gardiner, Samuel Rawson, 3, 16, 22, 38, 71

Garland, Augstine, 78 Gaunt, Peter, 15, 23 Gentles, Ian, 3, 15, 28, 29 Germany, 250 Gerson, Jean, 131 Geyl, Pieter, 260 Gloucester, 151 Glynne, John, 78 Goffe, William, 20, 21 Goodwin, John, 95, 204 Goury, Michel, 234 Gravelines, 256 Great Seal, 80, 81 Grignon, Pomponne de Bellièvre, sieur de, 24, 31, 53, 254 Guisborough, 140 Gunpowder Plot, 123 Habsburg, House of, 249, 250, 255, 266, 268 Hacker, Francis, 4 Hamilton, James, 3rd Marquess and 1st Duke of, 24, 26, 30, 31, 38, 47, 50, 53, 54, 84, 151, 152 Hammond, Robert, 15, 23, 24, 25, 28, 29, 31 Hampton Court, 22, 23, 24, 47, 141 Haro, Don Luis de, 268 Harrison, Thomas, 19, 22, 30, 57 Harvey, Edmund, 100 Hatton, Christopher, 1st Baron, 173 Haywarde, John, 123 Heads of Proposals, 152, 183 Henderson Papers, 174 Henrietta Maria, 22, 24, 101, 198, 248, 249, 251, 254, 256, 266 Henry VIII, King of England, 82 Henry, Duke of Gloucester, 24, 31, 55, 76, 77, 83, 148, 266 Herrick, Robert, 227 Hewson, John, 39, 52, 55, 166 Heylyn, Peter, 170 High Court of Justice, 1, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 25, 31, 36, 39, 41, 46, 48, 51, 53, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61,

RECINDEX 7/13/01 2:55 PM Page 285

Index

High Court of Justice – continued 72, 73, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 81, 82, 84, 85, 94, 103, 104, 126, 129, 162, 163, 164, 165, 167, 169, 171, 173, 177, 184, 192, 193, 194, 203, 234, 235, 238, 239, 240, 250 aim, 54, 57, 59, 62, 71, 72, 73, 76, 86 alternatives to trial, 25, 43 atmosphere, 167, 170, 175 charge against Charles, 26, 31, 59, 60, 76, 84, 85, 117, 126, 127, 128, 129, 164, 167, 175 Charles’ behaviour, 71, 72, 84, 85, 86, 162, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 176, 196, 235 clerks, 86, 163 commissioners, 57, 61, 77, 78, 79, 80, 83, 84, 85, 86, 103, 148, 163, 170 crier, see King, John death sentence, 61, 85, 138, 172, 175 death warrant, 5, 7, 15, 83, 138, 143, 147, 148 form of trial, 29, 31, 74, 75 guard, 79, 81 interruptions, 170, 175 leaders of, 15, 57, 72 legality, 8, 95, 103, 194, 196 legislation for, 46, 57, 75, 84, 126, 127 Lord President, see Bradshaw, John messenger, see Powell, John possible outcomes, 4, 5, 8, 9, 14, 24, 26, 29, 31, 43, 47, 53, 54, 55, 59, 72, 74, 76, 77, 85, 104, 147, 148, 187, 248, 254 press reports, 161–80 proceedings, 162, 163, 168, 169, 172, 173, 175, 176 public nature, 75, 76, 81, 162

285

regalia, iconography and ceremonial, 77, 79, 82, 84, 85, 168 swordbearer, see Humfrey, John, senior usher, see Walford, Edward venue, 75, 79, 80 witnesses, 85, 128, 129, 175 see also Westminster Palace Hispaniola, 264, 265 Hobbes, Thomas, 109, 122, 236, 248, 252, 253 Holland, Cornelius, 81 Holles, Denzil, 151 Hotham, Sir John, 146 Howell, Roger, 150 Hoyle, Thomas, 147, 149 Hull, 145, 146, 149, 150 Humfrey, John junior, 82 Humfrey, John senior 82, 83 Hurst Castle, 40, 46 Ibbitson, Robert, 164 Inchiquin, Murrough O’Brien, Lord, 48, 49, 58 Inner Temple, 146 Ireland, 9, 15, 30, 38–62, 72, 74, 121, 152, 187, 248, 251, 252, 256, 266, 270 and Dutch, 44, 46, 47, 50, 51, 58 Confederates at Kilkenny, 43, 44, 47, 48, 49, 50, 52, 58, 59, 60, 61, 128 English conquest of, 51, 61, 62 rebellion, 58, 103, 187 see also Lisle, Viscount; Ormond, Marquess of Ireton, Henry, 18, 19, 22, 23, 31, 40, 52, 53, 73, 74, 167, 181, 182, 189, 191, 192, 212 Isle of Wight, see Newport Treaty Jacobites, 226 Jamaica, 265 James VI and I, King of Scotland and England, 97, 98, 102, 120, 132, 152

RECINDEX 7/13/01 2:55 PM Page 286

286 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

James, Duke of York (later James II), 24, 31, 55, 266 Jenkins, David, 119, 120 Jenner, Robert, 26 Jennings, Theodore, 101, 166, 169 John IV, King of Portugal, 249 John, Don, of Austria, 266 Jones, Inigo, 97 Jones, Michael, 48, 49 Joyce, George, 57, 81 Jubbes, John, 55 Justinian I, 125

royal supremacy, 123 tree metaphor, 107 see also constitution; political thought King, Henry, Bishop of Chichester, 225, 226, 227, 228, 232, 233, 234, 238, 239, 243 King, John, 85 King’s Bench, 196 Knight, Isaac, 167 knighthood ﬁnes, 145 Knoppers, Laura Lunger, 226

Kantorowicz, Ernst, 118 Kelsey, Sean, 3, 61 Kent, Henry Grey, 10th Earl of, 39 kingship, 96, 99, 106, 130, 131, 133, 181, 185, 186, 189, 194, 196, 215, 218, 227, 243, 253, 254, 258, 263 abolition of, 1, 7, 9, 14, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 29, 31, 78, 84, 86, 94, 108, 183, 184, 187, 188, 191, 192, 193, 194, 230, 254, 257 and church, 198 and magistracy, 117, 127, 128, 129, 131, 132, 133 and militia, 107, 183 and treason, 121 coronation oaths, 132, 185, 186, 187 corporate, 126 duties, 141, 190 elective, 129, 132, 133 hereditary, 132, 182, 248 king’s two bodies, 117, 118, 119 limited, 132, 202, 209, 215 monarchical republic, 8, 133 prerogative and power, 105, 106, 107, 125, 128, 152, 181, 183, 185, 189, 190, 191, 198, 212 negative voice, 19, 20, 55, 47, 74, 140, 141, 190, 195, 198 opposition to, 19, 106, 184

Lambert, John, 142, 143, 149, 226 Lancashire, 49, 139 Laud, William, Archbishop of Canterbury, 125, 126, 225, 232 law, 119, 127, 133 civil, 123, 124 common, 95, 119, 123 English jurists, 119, 120, 121, 123, 125 legal and constitutional thought, 6 Roman law, 8, 117, 119, 121, 123, 124, 125, 129, 131; see also treason Leiden, 262 Lenthall, William, 22, 25, 26, 27 Leslie, Henry, 239 Levack, Brian, 123 Levellers, 6, 18, 19, 29, 86, 105, 143, 145, 147, 148, 166, 181–201, 258 see also Lilburne, John; Overton, Richard; Prince, Thomas; Walwyn, William; Wildman, John Leven, Alexander Leslie, Earl of, 140, 149, 151 Lilburne, John, 18, 19, 142, 176, 181–201 Lilburne, Robert, 142, 143, 146, 147, 151, 153, 193 Lincoln, Thomas Clinton, alias Fiennes, 3rd Earl of, 83

RECINDEX 7/13/01 2:55 PM Page 287

Index

Lincoln, Theophilus Clinton, alias Fiennes, 4th Earl of, 83 Lisle, Sir George, 231 Lisle, Philip Sidney, Viscount, 45 Lockhart, Sir William, 268 London, 18, 36, 42, 43, 48, 49, 50, 54, 55, 80, 181, 191, 192, 202, 203, 226, 233 Guildhall, 80 mob, 233, 234 Nag’s Head tavern, 191, 192, 195 Newgate, 175 politics, 53, 54, 55, 77, 79, 80, 183, 206 Provincial Assembly, 204, 206 Recorder, see Glynne, John St Lawrence, Old Jewry, 202 St Leonard’s Eastcheap, 211 St Paul’s Cathedral, 239 St Stephen Walbrook, 213, 214 Sion College, 203, 204 Tower of, 80, 81, 193 Treaty of (1654), 257, 264 Long Parliament (1640), 18, 26, 29, 36, 37, 53, 54, 74, 77, 105, 120, 125, 145, 150, 161, 163, 182, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 204, 214, 215, 217, 233, 239, 240, 249, 250 diplomats, see Dorislaus, Isaac; Strickland, Walter dissolution, 31 factions, 162 ﬁve members, 214 Militia Ordinance, 124, 187 No Further Addresses, 15, 23, 37 peace propositions, 140, 141 Pride’s Purge, 3, 5, 15, 16, 29, 31, 32, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 45, 46, 48, 53, 54, 60, 76, 94, 141, 192, 193, 196, 202, 203, 205, 206, 214, 215, 248 revenue committee, 77, 78 Self Denying Ordinance, 41

287

serjeant at arms, see Dendy, Edward see also Committee of Both Kingdoms; Commons, House of; Derby House Committee; Lords, House of; Rump Lords, House of, 20, 21, 29, 31, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 42, 57, 59, 72, 73, 76, 77, 83, 95, 141, 166, 181, 183, 185, 187, 188, 189 abolition, 39, 43, 94, 188, 191, 192, 193, 194 negative voice, 141, 190 speaker, see Denbigh, Earl of Lotius, Dr Eleasar, 239 Louis XIII, King of France, 249, 253 Louis XIV, King of France, 249, 250, 254, 256, 267, 268, 270 Louis XVI, King of France, 248 Love, Christopher, 202, 215, 217, 218, 219 Love, Nicholas, 54, 76 Lovelace, Richard, 228 Lucas, Sir Charles, 233 Ludlow, Edmund, 2, 3, 24, 99, 103, 104, 106, 110 Mabbott, Gilbert, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 173, 175, 176 Machiavelli, Nicollo, 109 Madrid, 257 Magna Carta, 185 Maguire, Nancy Klein, 6 Maidstone, 73 maiestas, see treason, Roman law of Maijor, Dorothy, 15 Manchester, Edward Montagu, 2nd Earl of, 77 Marie Antoinette, 248 Marshall, William, 240 Marten, Henry, 4, 104, 109, 141, 143, 147, 148 Mary, Queen of Scots, 132 Massachusetts Bay Company, 82

RECINDEX 7/13/01 2:55 PM Page 288

288 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

Massachusetts, 83 Mauleverer, Sir Thomas, 144, 145, 151 May, Thomas, 106 Mayﬁeld, Noel, 7 Mazarin, Guilio, Cardinal, 250, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 263, 264, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270 McIntosh, A.W., 5 Mediterranean, 256 Merchant Taylors’ School, 175 Mildmay, Sir Henry, 82 Milton, John, 102, 103, 105, 106, 108, 175, 176, 203, 205, 207, 208, 241, 242, 262, 263 Molé, Mathieu, 262 Morgan, Samuel, 129 Morosini, Michiel, 251 Morrill, John, 138 Morton, A.L., 184 Muddiman, J.G., 1, 3 Mulgrave, Edmund Shefﬁeld, 2nd Earl of, 40, 45 Munford, Mr, 174 Munster, 48 Münster, Peace of (1648), 258 Muscovy, 251 Nalson, John, 2, 84, 100 Nantes, Edict of (1598), 264 Naseby, Battle of (1645), 146 Navy Dutch, 44, 259, 260, 262 Irish, 44, 48, 49, 58 Lord Admiral, see Warwick, Earl of; Northumberland, Earl of parliamentarian, 41, 42, 43, 51, 58 royalist, 40, 43, 44, 48, 53 Rump, 260 see also Blake, Robert Nebuchadnezzar, 96, 97, 99, 100, 101, 102, 107, 108, 109, 110, 214 necessity, 23, 216, 217, 218 Nedham, Marchamont, 43, 45, 46, 47, 53, 55, 56, 143, 150, 183, 248, 251, 253

negative voice, see kingship; House of Lords Nenner, Howard, 1, 4 Netherlands, 30, 41, 44, 45, 50, 51, 52, 53, 248, 250, 251, 257, 259, 260, 261, 262, 265, 266, 269 Anglo-Dutch war, 257, 260, 261, 264 Dutch-Irish treaty, 44, 46, 47, 50, 51, 58 Hague, The, 44, 50, 58, 239, 252, 261 Holland (province), 258, 259, 260, 261, 262 States General, 44 United Provinces, 248, 249, 258, 259, 261, 270, 271 Zeeland, 259 see also Orange, House of Neville, Henry, 268 New England, 4, 6 New Model Army, see Army, New Model Newbury, battle of, 225 Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 143, 149, 150 Newport Treaty, 30, 31, 36, 38, 40, 48, 49, 50, 51, 74, 83, 104, 149, 169, 191 newspapers, 21, 20, 38, 42, 44, 45, 48, 49, 52, 54, 75, 143, 161, 163, 164, 166, 168, 169, 174, 177, 194 see also Dillingham, John; Mabbott, Gilbert; Nedham, Marchamont; Renaudot, Théophraste; Walker, Henry Noble, Mark, 142, 143, 145 Norman conquest, 132 Northern Association, 139, 151 Northumberland, 139, 142, 149, 151 Northumberland, Algernon Percy, 10th Earl of, 39, 45, 78, 83 Nottingham, 128 Nottingham, Charles Howard, 3rd Earl of, 40

RECINDEX 7/13/01 2:55 PM Page 289

Index

Nottinghamshire, 139 Nuttall, W.L.F., 4 Nye, Philip, 145 Okey, John, 166 Orange, House of, 258, 259, 261 see also Frederick Henry; William II; William III Orangists, 258, 259, 260 Order of the Garter, 84 Ormée, 263 Ormond, James Butler, 11th Earl and 1st Marquess of, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56, 58, 59, 60, 61, 74, 128, 152 Oudart, Nicholas, 50 Overton, Richard, 18, 181, 184, 185, 192, 193, 194 Oxenstierna, Axel, 250 Oxford, 187 Palladio, Andrea, 98 Paris, 173, 254, 263, 268 Louvre, 254 Parlement, 254, 262 Paris, Treaty of (1657), 266, 267 Parker, Henry, 120, 127 parliament 1640 (Long) Parliament see Long Parliament 1656 parliament, 270 annual, 131 antiquity, 131 and church, 190, 193 electoral reform, 18, 20, 30, 181, 182 new representative, 20, 30, 54, 181, 182 powers and privileges, 47, 55, 59, 109, 117, 183, 202, 208, 214 role, 131, 132 sovereignty of, 130, 140, 147 parliamentarianism, 207, 208, 209 parliamentarians, 86, 161, 172, 206

289

Independents, 7, 18, 37, 39, 45, 51, 55, 56, 58, 59, 62, 80, 145, 147, 151, 152, 165, 166, 191, 192, 195, 208, 242, 249, 254, 259, 262 Presbyterians, 6, 24, 36, 39, 76, 78, 142, 145, 149, 150, 151, 163, 191, 192, 202, 203, 206, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 215, 218, 254 Parsons, Robert, 163 Paul, Robert, 15, 29 Pelham, Peregrine, 144, 145, 146, 147, 151 Pembroke, Philip Herbert, 4th Earl of, 39, 45, 46, 83 Pennington, Isaac, 233 Peter, Hugh, 83, 167, 197 Petty or Pettus, Maximilian, 18, 181, 192 Philip IV, King of Spain, 250, 253, 254, 255, 257, 265, 266, 267, 268 Playford, John, 164, 173, 175, 176 Plowden, Edmund, 118 Pocock, J.G.A., 129 political language and thought, 205, 209, 210, 212, 243 anti-monarchism, 188 balance metaphor, 95, 97, 98, 102–10 civic humanism, 139 conciliarists, 131 conquest, 186, 194, 197, 248, 253 contract, 132, 187 covenants, 8, 74, 209, 210, 218, 219 de facto authority, 218 democracy, 236 Norman yoke, 107, 142, 185 parliamentarianism, 120, 187 people, representatives of, 95, 106, 109, 129, 132, 141, 147, 187, 188, 190, 194, 195, 196

RECINDEX 7/13/01 2:55 PM Page 290

290 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

political language and thought – continued people, sovereignty of, 73, 79, 94, 95, 103, 106, 109, 110, 117, 127, 130, 133, 186, 194, 196, 197, 236 property, 234 republicanism, 5, 6, 8, 9, 23, 55, 57, 82, 84, 85, 95, 110, 126, 127, 129, 130, 133, 139, 140, 142, 169, 184, 218, 219, 226, 248, 257, 258, 262, 263, 267, 269 resistance theory, 207, 208, 209, 218 royalism, 131 sixteenth century, 121 sovereignty, 117, 119, 122, 123, 124, 125, 129, 130 state, 117, 118, 120, 121, 122, 126, 127, 129, 130, 131, 132, 234, 236 see also constitution; Hobbes, Thomas; kingship; law; Levellers Polybius, 95 Pontefract, 150, 191 Porée, Jean-Baptiste, 262 Portugal, 249, 257, 265, 268 Potter, Lois, 6, 225, 229 Powell, John, 78 press and propaganda, 61, 82, 95, 161, 162, 174, 175, 176, 177 army, 18, 19, 163 French, 251, 255, 258 impact of, 161, 169, 174, 176, 177 Leveller, 263 licensers, 161, 163, 166, 174, 177 New Model Army declarations, 48, 142 Orangist, 259 parliamentarian, 104, 161, 162, 177, 205, 208, 225 Presbyterian, 203, 205, 206, 212, 218 royalist, 6, 8, 101, 103, 110, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174,

175, 187, 225–46, 251, 262 Rump, 6, 60, 95, 99, 101, 107, 108, 169, 175, 176, 225, 226, 251, 255, 258 see also Eikon Basilike; Milton, John; Parker, Henry; Saumaise, Claude Preston, Battle of (1648), 15, 26, 27, 47, 73, 152 Price, John, 204, 207, 208 Pride, Thomas, 166 see also Pride’s Purge Prince, Thomas, 184, 188, 193 Proctor, Richard, 79 protectorate, 109, 127, 247, 248, 262 foreign policy, 261, 264–71 Instrument of Government, 108 Providence Island Company, 82 Providence Island, 83 providence, 7, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 28, 29, 32, 57, 58, 73, 74, 100, 104, 131, 139, 147, 152, 153, 203, 216, 217, 252, 259, 265 Prynne, William, 120 Putney debates, 4, 9, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 23, 181, 183, 188 Pym, John, 119, 206 Pyrenees, treaty of (1659), 268 Quarles, Francis, 226 Quarles, John, 171, 172, 226, 227, 230, 231, 235, 236, 237, 239, 241, 242 Rainsborough, Thomas, 18, 19 Ravaillac, Francois, 234 reason of state, 7, 250, 253, 255, 256, 263, 269, 270 Reformation, 123 regicide, 37, 60, 94, 95, 99, 103, 109, 110, 127, 150, 169, 202, 203, 205, 207, 208, 209, 211, 212, 214, 218, 225, 226, 227, 229, 231, 236, 238, 239, 242, 247, 248, 249, 251, 254, 270

RECINDEX 7/13/01 2:55 PM Page 291

Index

regicides, 2, 4, 7, 55, 56, 117, 138, 149, 152, 153, 169, 228, 239, 254 apprenticeship and education, 146 background, 2, 5, 146 career, 138, 140, 143, 145, 146, 147, 153 in exile, 4 wealth and status, 144, 145, 146 regicidal motivation, 4, 5, 9, 14, 15, 73, 138, 144, 145, 146, 243 blood guilt, 139, 143, 153 British problem, 43–62, 139, 148–54 character, 243 distrust of king, 143, 146, 153 fear of retribution, 146 greed, 143, 144 madness, 144 personal grievance, 140, 142 political beliefs, 15, 16, 129, 133, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 145, 147, 148, 151, 153 providence, 145, 148, 153 religious beliefs, 7, 138, 139, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 153 social beliefs, 144, 147 religion atheism, 146 Baptists, 142, 143, 146 Catholics, 249, 253, 258, 260, 262, 267 Huguenots, 253, 254, 256, 262, 263, 264, 270 Independents, 74, 143, 146, 147, 191 Jansenists, 267 Jesuits, 270 Presbyterians, 7, 28, 29, 146, 182, 183, 202–19, 227, 259 Quakers, 109 sectarians, 204, 206, 208, 215 toleration, 18, 109, 182, 192, 198, 202, 259, 260

291

Remonstrance (Army) 22, 26, 28, 29, 30, 31, 36, 43, 73, 74, 75, 76, 109, 143, 202, 212, 213, 214 Renaudot, Théophraste, 255 republic, 3, 6, 81, 85, 94, 109, 184, 192, 226, 227, 232, 234, 242, 243, 247, 248, 254, 256, 260 ambassadors of, 251 legitimacy of, 219 Restoration, 4, 226, 232, 243, 270 Rethel, Battle of (1650), 256 Retz, Jean François, Cardinal de, 267 Rich, Nathaniel, 39, 77 Richard II, King of England, 55, 132, 186 Richelieu, Armand Jean du Plessis, Duke of, 249 Richmond, James Stuart, 1st Duke of, 59 Rinuccini, Giovanni Battista, Archbishop of Fermo, Papal Nuncio, 49 Rohan, Henry, Duke of, 253 Rome, agent of, 24, 49 Rous, Francis, 218 Rowe, Owen, 48, 80, 83 Rowe, William, 166 Rowse, A.L., 2 royalists, 15, 16, 24, 30, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 47, 48, 49, 50, 58, 100, 120, 144, 151, 161, 170, 172, 173, 174, 176, 184, 191, 195, 198, 204, 218, 219, 226, 227, 228, 230, 231, 232, 234, 236, 243, 248, 255, 258, 259 call for justice upon, 25, 26, 43, 52, 53, 54, 73, 147, 149 Royston, Richard, 174 Rubens, Peter Paul, 98, 99 Rueil, Peace of (1649), 255 Rump, 15, 29, 36, 37, 38, 41, 46, 47, 50, 51, 52, 56, 57, 58, 59, 73, 75, 85, 86, 94, 95, 104, 109, 126, 127, 144, 150, 162, 167, 173, 174, 177, 184, 193,

RECINDEX 7/13/01 2:55 PM Page 292

292 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

Rump – continued 196, 197, 198, 214, 226, 251, 252, 253, 255, 258, 259, 263 Council of State, 174, 175, 177, 193, 263 dissolution, 192, 257 factions, 169 foreign policy, 252, 255, 256, 257, 258, 260, 261, 264 legality of, 94, 196, 218 Rupert, Prince, 252 Rushworth, John, 163 Russell, Conrad, 120 Rutherford, Samuel, 209 Sachse, William, 1, 5, 6 Sadler, John, 6 St Albans, 74, 192, 196 St Bartholemew massacre, 264 St Fagan’s, 73 St Germain-en-Laye, 254 St John, Oliver, 24, 25, 27 St Neots, 73 Salisbury, William Cecil, 2nd Earl of, 39, 45, 46 Sanders, Thomas, 166 Sanderson, John, 5, 207, 217 Saumaise (Salmasius), Claude, 174, 175, 227, 262, 263 Savoy, Duke of, 264 Say, William, 78 Saye and Sele, William Fiennes, 1st Viscount, 83 Scarborough, 150 Scone, 252 Scot, Major Thomas, 145 Scot, Thomas, 55, 57, 81, 141, 143, 175 Scotland, 9, 22, 26, 30, 47, 50, 57, 60, 74, 139, 140, 150, 151, 152, 183, 187, 204, 206, 218, 219, 239, 249, 252, 253, 255, 256, 259, 270 army, 139, 149, 151, 152 confederalism, 148, 151, 152, 153 Covenanters, 152, 210, 212, 219, 249, 252 government, 31, 132, 251

invasion, 25, 38, 47, 52, 53, 54, 84, 149, 151, 153 Presbyterian church, 146, 148, 152, 252 regal union, 152, 153, 252 Scott, Jonathan, 129 Seclusion, Act of (Holland), 261 Servien, 264 Sexby, Edward, 18, 19, 20, 263 Ship Money, 124, 232 Sidney, Algernon, 59, 78 Skinner, Quentin, 121, 122 Skippon, Phillip, 45 Solemn League and Covenant, 22, 206, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 217, 218, 252 Solms, Amalia von, 260 Sorbonne, 267, 270 Spain, 247–71 ambassador to England, see Cárdenas, Alonso de Anglo-Spanish war, 262 Spanish Netherlands, 249, 266, 270 Squibb, Arthur, 78 Stapley, Anthony, 175 Stationers Company, 166, 176 Steele, William, 78 Strafford, Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of, 119, 125, 126, 144, 176 Streater, John, 109 Strickland, Walter, 44 Stuart, House of, 96, 105, 107, 258, 259, 260, 261 in exile, 262, 266, 269 scriptural parallels, 96, 97, 99, 101, 102, 108 Stuart, Princess Mary, 249, 259 Stubber, Peter, 166 Styles, William, 146 Sweden, 250, 262, 263, 265, 268 Swiss Cantons, 257 sword of state, 82, 83 Testard, Paul, 173 Thomas, J.A.C., 125 Thorpe, Francis, 6, 150 Thurloe, John, 269

RECINDEX 7/13/01 2:55 PM Page 293

Index

Tichborne, Robert, 81, 80 Tillyard, E.M., 215 Toulouse, 263 treason English law of, 117, 118, 124, 125, 126 regicides’ theory of, 117, 121, 126, 127, 130, 133 Roman law of, 121, 124, 125, 126, 130, 131, 133 treaties, see under individual names Trevor-Roper, Hugh, 206 Trinity Hall, Cambridge, 15, 31 Turenne, 266 Tyler, Wat, 235 tyranny, 6, 52, 59, 184, 186, 188, 194, 202, 207, 257 Tyton, Francis, 175 Underdown, David, 3, 9, 15, 23, 28, 37, 48, 71, 139 Valenciennes, 266 Vane, Sir Henry junior, 143, 209 Vaudois, 264 Venice, 251 Venn, John, 147, 233 Victor, Verity, 107 Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos, 121, 163 Wales, 25, 27, 48, 72 Walford, Edward, 78 Walker, Clement, 170 Walker, Henry, 79, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 176 Wallace, John, 218 Wallington, Nehemiah, 211, 212 Walwyn, William, 181, 184, 185, 190, 192, 193, 194, 198 Walzer, Michael, 1 Warr, John, 107 Warwick House, Holborn, 40, 42, 43 Warwick, Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 46, 51 Warwick, Sir Philip, 170

293

Watkins, Sir David, 233 Watson, Richard, 239 Watson, Thomas, 213, 214 Wedgwood, C.V., 3, 6, 7, 15, 29, 127, 144, 145, 247, 269 West Indies, 265 Westminster, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 61, 76, 78 Abbey, 79 Hall, see under Westminster Palace Jewel Tower, 82 New Palace Yard, 79 Old Palace Yard, 77 Palace, see separate entry St James’ Palace, 61, 80, 99 Tilt Yard, 98, 99 Treaty of (1654), 261, 265 Westminster Assembly of Divines, 183 Westminster Palace, 85 Painted Chamber, 77 Star Chamber, 98, 142 Westminster Hall, 5, 58, 59, 71, 73, 75, 77, 79, 80, 81, 82, 84, 100, 162, 163, 167, 168, 170, 175, 177, 239 Westmorland, 139, 140 Westphalia, Treaty of (1648), 250, 264 Whalley, Edward, 166 Whalley, Henry, 166, 169 Wharton, Philip, 4th Baron, 25 Whitaker, Jeremiah, 203, 204 White, Thomas, 108 Whitehall Debates, 167, 202, 203 Whitehall, 38, 58, 99, 101, 102, 110, 153, 192, 196 Banqueting House, 62, 94, 97, 98, 99, 101, 102 Whitelocke, Bulstrode, 15, 31, 54, 76 Wicquefort, Abraham de, 247, 248, 253, 265, 266, 268 Widdrington, Sir Thomas, 15, 31, 54, 76 Wildman, John, 18, 19, 181, 184, 188, 189, 192, 194, 198 William I, King of England, 186

RECINDEX 7/13/01 2:55 PM Page 294

294 The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I

William II of Orange, stadtholder, 41, 44, 249, 258, 259 William III of Orange, stadtholder, and King of England, 259, 271 Williams, John, 175 Williams, John, Bishop of Lincoln, 97 Williamson, Hugh Ross, 1 Wilson, John, 206 Windsor, 23, 25, 31, 38, 40, 46, 50, 51, 54, 56, 57, 58, 61, 75, 76, 80, 192, 196

Winthrop, John, 83 Wiseman, Susan, 226 Wither, George, 100, 106, 226 Worcester, Battle of (1650), 219, 252, 263 Worden, Blair, 3, 15, 216 York, 147, 149, 150 Yorkshire, 26, 139, 140, 145, 149, 150, 151 Zeruiah, 7, 22, 29, 30, 32