If you were to make a list of the top 10 most pivotal events in American History, the execution of King Charles I would have to be on it. It might not be one which immediately sprang to mind, but it hadn’t happened, America would be unrecognizable today. As we will shortly see, everything we associate with America or being an American was affected by this, or had its roots in its aftermath. With that in mind, it’s time to head back across the Atlantic and see how exactly the regicide came to happen.
Introduction
The last thing we discussed regarding England was that the King surrendered to Scottish Covenanters in Newark in May of 1646. Parliament had officially won the First English Civil War. In so doing, though, it split into two rival factions – the Presbyterians, a more moderate group whose base of power was in Parliament, and the Independents, who had accepted all sorts of radical thinkers into their movement.
The Independent movement was strongest in the Army, and Parliament’s Army policies, especially the creation of the New Model Army under Oliver Cromwell and Thomas Fairfax, were one of the most important developments in the War. They had hired an Army with promise of good pay for soldiers, and had also created uniforms, red coated uniforms, in fact. Then, they had kept the Army at full strength for years on end. All of this was completely new to England, and it had definitely helped Parliament win the war, but problems accompanied this.
The first was the aforementioned split between Presbyterians and Independents, and the fact that the Independents were actually able to not only rival Presbyterian dominance, but somewhat assume control of the Puritan movement.
The second, though, was a matter of pay. See, neither side could possibly have afforded to raise an army in the way that Parliament did, but Parliament had done it anyway. Now that the war was over, they were left with several armies full of soldiers they hadn’t paid in months, who they owed an estimated total of $2.5 million pounds. That’s a whole lot more than they could possibly pay back. This is an era before governments were doing a whole lot of taxing and spending, in fact this is the era which would give rise to central governments which do a lot of taxing and spending. Like I said, America would be unrecognizable if it hadn’t happened. In the pre-fiscal state days, $2.5 million pounds was several times what Parliament had been prepared to pay its Armies.
The lack of pay had already led to a series of Army mutinies 1646, and Parliament had only managed to stop these mutinies by promising to pay everything owed. This was an impossible promise, but they hoped that they would be able to disband the armies before the issue arose again in any sort of threatening way.
In the meantime, the burden of supporting the soldiers fell almost exclusively on villagers scattered around the English countryside, and as a result, discontent was growing there, too. The average person may have called for justice and an end to unlawful taxes and other controversial royal policies in 1642, but by 1646 they were living in a devastated country, paying triple the taxes to a government which felt, if anything, even more distant and tyrannical, and as icing on the cake, the country had just entered into 6 years of failed harvests which led the price of bread to double, and the price of meat to rise by 50%. The soldier issue compounded all of this, as disgruntled soldiers were scattered around the countryside, stealing indiscriminately and attacking local officials out of their own frustration.
According to one Newbury petition protesting this, the soldiers had “almost starved the people where they quarter, and are half starved themselves, and for want of pay are becoming very desperate, ranging about the country and breaking and robbing houses and passengers and driving away sheep and other cattle before the owners’ faces.”
The money problem, though, only acted as a catalyst for the deep societal divisions which were emerging. The Army which had originally been formed to win the war for Parliament had taken on a life of its own. The very things which had made it uniquely strong, also made it uniquely threatening. The Army became a place where new ideas were very much taking hold, and for the purposes of our story it’s worth noting that New Englanders were playing a big role in this. New England ministers acted as chaplains, while thousands of New Englanders were in the Army’s ranks, talking about their experiences, spreading ideas, absorbing ideas, and seriously contributing to a more Independent-minded Army. After years of serving together, the personal bonds and ideas within the Army were both stronger than ever, while the failure to pay them had also gradually eroded their allegiance to Parliament. It occurred to soldiers that they didn’t believe the same things as Parliament, didn’t have the same vision for England, and actually, most of them wouldn’t actually see that much practical change in their personal lives if Parliament did what it wanted to. It’s one thing if they were being paid, but they clearly weren’t, so what were they actually fighting for?
Some people in Parliament were starting to realize that this could be a really big problem. “It’s now come to this,” became the mantra of this group. “They must sink us, or we sink them.”
From the king’s perspective, though, this division could be his last best chance to minimize his defeat. His enemies were essentially split into three groups – the Scottish Covenanters, the English Parliament and the English Army – and he would be the key to any post-war peace deal. There was still a level of reverence, or at least respect, for the position of king. Even when King Charles was a prisoner, cheering crowds lined his way, and he touched for the King’s Evil. Even General Fairfax dismounted when he met him, and kissed his hand. Whoever’s movement the king’s treaty favored, would be the one whose ideas influenced England’s future. He, in turn, had his own desires, and he would sign a treaty with whoever accepted those.
His first attempt was with the Scots, and that is in fact why he went to Newark. Those negotiations had gone nowhere, though, so the Scots had sold him to Parliament for 400,000 pounds. That means that by 1647, he was Parliament’s prisoner, and negotiations with them were going no better than they had with the Scots.
But wait! There’s more. That Irish rebellion which had helped spark the English Civil War in the first place was still going on, and it’s an interesting story in its own right, actually involving Baltimore’s close friend the Duke of Ormond, but what’s really key to our story is that in 1647 things in Ireland took a turn for the worse from Parliament’s perspective, thanks to the defection of one of the Protestant leaders there to Ormond’s Royalist cause. This meant that Parliament really needed to send some people over to fight in Ireland, but to do this, they would have to recruit from an army that they hadn’t paid in almost a year, against their own promises from a year before, to fight in a place that no one wanted to go. And, because the Army was ever more visibly splitting from Parliament, they also wanted to replace its very popular leaders, Oliver Cromwell and Thomas Fairfax, with people loyal to them. How well do you think this went? Actually, it went worse. There were two nearly simultaneous rebellions within the Army, the more immediately severe one predictably directed at Parliament, listing grievances and electing people to demand that Parliament right these wrongs.
The other, however, though smaller, was perhaps even more alarming. A group called the Levellers, whose movement was influenced by Providence Island colonist Henry Halhead, submitted a petition demanding that the Long Parliament be dissolved, Parliamentary seats be completely redistributed, and then a new Parliament elected by universal male sufferage. They demanded an end to the enclosures, which were the foundation of the wealth of a huge portion of MPs. They also wanted general religious toleration, and what effectively amounted to a bill of rights. This all sounds great in the modern day, but not only were the ideas new then, the timing was such that if they were actually implemented, it would plunge the country back into chaos. A rebellion in response to the Ireland thing was at least predictable. This wasn’t, and it wasn’t just a couple people saying this. Evidently, it was a widespread thing.
Parliament ordered Fairfax to suppress all of this, but mutinies continued through the summer. They only ended up with 1000 volunteers to fight in Ireland, and they couldn’t quite figure out what to do, but, and June 3, things were about to get unimaginably worse. Five days after meeting with Cromwell, a coronet, which from my understanding is essentially like a modern sergeant, named George Joyce went to Holmby House, where the king was being held prisoner. Accompanied by 500 soldiers, he told the King to come with him. When Charles asked to see his commission, Joyce gestured to his men and said “This is my commission! It is behind me,” to which the King responded “It is as fair a commission, and as well written a commission as I have seen in my life.”
With this, the King became a prisoner of the Army, instead of Parliament. He met with Cromwell for the first time after that, and Cromwell denied any part in the plot. “I’ll not believe you until you hang him!” Charles said, but instead, Joyce was given a promotion, a pension, and remained one of Cromwell’s closest confidantes for the rest of the war.
The King might have been angry at the indignity of the event, but Parliament was the one now facing an existential threat. They had now lost every bit as much control as the king had lost to them with the execution of Strafford. Custody of the King had been their one unmistakeable advantage over the Army.
The day after seizing the king, the Army drafted the Solemn Engagement, and the day after that, they signed it. In this, the Army formed its own leadership council, and they promised not to disband until Parliament had both paid them and granted them indemnity for anything they’d done during the war. Since there was no way that Parliament could pay them as much as they were owed, this meant that the Army wasn’t going anywhere, and it’s not like Parliament could oppose them by force.
After signing the Solemn Engagement, the Army started marching on London, and if anyone in Parliament wasn’t panicking before, they were now. There were some officers in London at the time, but they were there trying to get paid for their previous service, so when MPs desperately tried to recruit them, their answer was predictable. “You didn’t pay us last time, so why would we work for you again?” Parliament had the London Trainbands, that local militia, and that was it. They ordered the Trainband to man the city’s defenses, but there was no way they could hold out against the New Model Army.
At this point, the Army had absolutely no reason to compromise with Parliament. If they actually marched into Westminster, there would be absolutely nothing that Parliament could do to stop them. In light of this, as the Army camped at St. Albans, they issued their strongest declaration yet, saying they were “not a mere mercenary army, hired to serve any arbitrary power of a state, but called forth to the defense of our own and the people’s just rights and liberties.” In other words, they were declaring themselves the God-ordained defenders of English liberty, not just a military, but the people who would do whatever they had to to protect England from whoever threatened it, whether that was the King, or Parliament.
Then, the Army demanded that the 11 MPs who had tried to defend London from them be impeached. When Parliament responded by offering one month’s pay and refusing to impeach, the Army simply kept marching forward until they reached Uxbridge. Parliament got the hint, and decided to make some concessions. They ordered all soldiers to leave Westminster, so there would be no more recruiting of soldiers to fight the Army, and they appointed commissioners to negotiate with Fairfax. In those negotiations, Parliament agreed, among other things, to give control of the London Trainbands to the Army. In response to Parliament’s concessions, Fairfax withdrew the Army to Reading, which was a more comfortable distance away, but he also opened formal negotiations between the Army and the King.
Interestingly enough, and somewhat relevantly to our story, the Army also started negotiations with England’s Catholics at this point, to consider the idea of adding Catholics to the groups which would be granted religious toleration. This was a Jesuit project, but one which all of England’s prominent Catholics united behind. What little we know about this, we only know from the Jesuit archives and perspective, and I wasn’t able to access much information at all about this event, but what we know is that while the Catholics tried their best to make it work, negotiations broke down a few months later. Still, an interesting tidbit, and this is around the time that Baltimore was restructuring Maryland’s government.
Back to our main story, Fairfax’s withdrawal meant that pressure from the Army had temporarily lessened, but now Parliament faced pressure from the other direction. London Presbyterians were afraid for their lives and property if the Army got the kind of power Parliament was ready to cede to them, so a group led by apprentices and demobilized soldiers, formed a mob and besieged Parliament to demand that they not make any concessions to the Army. They stormed the Commons and the Lords, and blocked off the streets which MPs might use to escape. They demanded that Parliament negotiate a peace with the King, restoring him to the throne in exchange for just three years of Presbyterianism, and they demanded especially vehemently that Parliament not give the Army control of the city’s militia. “Keep them in. Keep them in these three days, and if they will not grant your desires, cut their throats! Traitors! Put them out. Hang their guts about their necks and many other like wounds.” These were the words of one of the mob’s leaders, and Parliament now agreed to their demands, even though this reversed the agreement they’d made with the Army just a couple weeks before. With their own military having turned against them, Parliament was at the mercy of any group with any level of physical strength, and would agree to anything just to maintain a semblance of safety. With the mob now backing off, 57 Independent MPs, including Henry Vane, fled to Reading and the safety of the Army.
At the same time as all this was going on in London with the New Model Army, other army mutinies also continued around the countryside. There was systematic plundering, refusal to obey orders from Presbyterian officers, seizure of officers and officials and threats of mass desertion. In one mutiny in Chester, for example, soldiers arrested 15 people, including city leaders, deputy lieutenants and their colonel, andlocked them together in one small plague-ridden room without food, drink, or any place to use the bathroom, and they said they would keep them in there until they got all the money they were owed. Officers could only watch helplessly and beg the troops to at least move their prisoners to somewhere more humane. The troops did ultimately agree to move the prisoners to a 2 room house, but the frustration and terror were both real, and these in turn led to unrest among civilians in the countryside. In Kent, the civilian unrest alone was strong enough that people expected it to lead to a new war.
By August, the Army was tired of Parliament, and tired of the King, and tired of Parliament’s attempts to negotiate with the King. The King was clearly trying to get the best settlement he could by making Parliament and the Army bid against each other, and at a time when he should theoretically have been meeting their demands, he wasn’t compromising with either. It was time to end the stalemate, so they resumed their advance on London. On August 3, 15,000 New Model Army troops gathered on Hounslow Heath, which is even closer to Westminster than Uxbridge is, and started marching East.
Watching the Army advance, the 11 members asked permission to flee. Granted it, they left London and started making their way abroad. Three days later, the New Model Army marched through Hyde Park and escorted the Independent MPs back to Westminster. Then they arrested 6 Presbyterian MPs who had remained in the city. Lord Willoughby, our future Barbadian governor, was one of them, and when released 4 months later, he went to the Netherlands to join the King’s cause. Now, the New Model Army controlled not only England’s King, but its capital city, too.
This is the point at which Presbyterians started defecting en masse to the Royalist side. There really were only two choices – the Royalists or the Army. It’s not unlike the decision that Bermudian Presbyterians had once had to make. The problem is, though, that the Presbyterians who remained in the Army were mostly officers, and when these people started leaving the armed forces, they were being replaced, and they were being replaced by people from within the Army, itself. So this only increased the Army’s level of radicalism and perceived separation from Parliament.
The Levellers were still a major force within the Army, though, and as the Army became more powerful, they also got more vocal, publishing their Case of the Army Truly Stated. Leaders like Cromwell and Fairfax, though traditionally loved, started to find themselves criticized for not being radical enough. They had control that they couldn’t have dreamed of even two years before, but now they were at risk of losing it to people like the Levellers, who they didn’t support. The Levellers could actually undermine Army unity. If the Army was destabilized at this point in time, not only would the Independent cause be lost, but their chance of being paid would also evaporate.
To prevent this from happening, the Army gathered at Putney at the end of October for two weeks of debates. When the debates were over, though, soldiers were still expected to obey the final decisions of their superiors. This was an Army, not a Parliament, and it would not adopt a Leveller position. Soldiers who mutinied against the policy, or the required declaration of loyalty, were put to death. The Putney Debates are important for a couple of reasons. First, they allowed Cromwell and Fairfax to maintain Army unity and prevent further fragmentation of the Parliamentary side. Second, though, is that they were the first time that the idea of executing the King had really been put out there. The idea was shocking, in every possible way. If the King was God-ordained in any way, then what would killing him be? Even worse, what if he was the legitimate leader of the English Church? This would be a political act, a religious act, and an unprecedented act in European history. So far, though, Cromwell and Fairfax didn’t want to go that route.
Christmas of 1647 brought yet-more unrest, because this was the first year Parliament tried to actually enforce its ban on celebrating Christmas, along with Easter and Whitsun. They’d banned all holy days except Sunday in 1645, but hadn’t actually declared celebrations to be punishable offenses. So this year on Christmas, ministers were arrested for preaching sermons, and in response to the new rules, a large crowd gathered in Canterbury to demand that the usual traditions be observed. This gathering ended with a riot in which the mayor, several magistrates and clergymen were forced out of town.
As these events unfolded, the king decided his best bet was to negotiate with the Scots, and possibly with the Irish Catholics. He escaped and made his way to the Isle of Wight, via Southampton, planning to go to Scotland, and though he was soon imprisoned again, he continued his negotiations in secret. When, on Christmas Eve, Parliament presented its final peace offer to the King, he rejected it, and two days later signed an agreement with the Scots, called the Engagement, which would put him back on the throne in exchange for three years of compulsory Presbyterianism.
The Second English Civil War was officially beginning. When his jailer, Robert Hammond, learned of this agreement, he burst into the King’s room and rifled through all his possessions, even searching the king’s pockets. In response, Charles struck him, and he evidently hit the King right back. The now-Independent-dominated Parliament passed the Vote of No Addresses, saying they wouldn’t continue negotiating with the king, but also neglecting to impeach him. Royalist regiments started to re-form and go north to join the Scots, while Royalists started returning from France and the Netherlands.
Kent rose in revolt in the name of “God, King Charles, and Kent.” At the end of March, on the anniversary of his accession, there were celebratory bonfires throughout London. Coach travelers were stopped and pushed to drink the king’s health. Butchers declared that if they could catch Hammond, they’d butcher him as small as ever they chopped their meat. There were riots in Ipswich and Canterbury, and smaller ones throughout England and Wales. The country’s populace cheered the King this time. When London’s Lord Mayor sent its trainbands to disperse a growing crowd of apprentices, the group turned on them, captured their weapons and gleefully marched off chanting “King Charles!” All this unrest I’ve talked about, well this was the outlet, this was the chance to fight and oppose everything that had been going on.
Royalist pamphlets flooded the country, while Parliamentarian ones couldn’t keep up. Kent, Essex and Surrey sent petitioners to Parliament asking them to just put the King back on the throne. These had been Parliamentarian regions in the first war, especially Essex, and now they were raising troops to support the King. Even a formerly Parliamentary Naval fleet now joined in Kent’s revolt. South Wales declared for the king as a Royalist commander took control of Tenbury Castle. To the North, Royalists took the sympathetic cities of Berwick, Carlisle and Pontifract, and Scarborough declared for the king, too.
Cromwell went to Wales for six weeks, and then he went North, while Fairfax went Southeast to fight in Essex. The distraction of the Army allowed Presbyterians to regain control of Parliament, and the House of Commons now passed a motion calling for a treaty with the King. At the same time, though, they passed a law declaring all people who fought against them in the new war to be traitors.
Militarily speaking, though, that’s about as far as anything got. Everything just sort of fell apart, albeit with notoriously vicious violence. Royalists waited for the Scots as the Scots assembled at the border to fight for the king, but they only ended up with a third of the troops they expected to raise. Then the timing didn’t click either, and nothing really fell together in a coordinated way. Cromwell was able to easily put down what ended up being little more than a series of revolts, and within just a few months, essentially all that was left was a siege in Essex at Colchester, and one in Pontifract in Yorkshire. At Colchester, Fairfax decided to simply starve the city into submission. After going through the city’s cats and dogs, soap and candles, Royalists sent the city’s women and children out of the town, but Fairfax refused to receive them and forced them back inside the walls. By the end of August, after news of their loss at the key Battle of Preston, the Royalists there surrendered. This time, though, surrender would be a little bit different. In the first war, generous quarter had been a good way to encourage people to surrender. Now, though, that wasn’t much of an issue. This was barely even a war, but the Parliamentary side was enraged that it had happened at all. They had won, and it was high time for the Royalists to give up and accept their new, righteous order. Instead, though, it was their own former allies who had switched sides and fought for the king. There was a threat, too, in this new war. The King couldn’t necessarily defeat them militarily, but the continued instability, the continued agitation, the continued ability for people to rally around him while they blamed Parliament for their problems, those were all threats. Those threats emerging against the backdrop of the continued fighting within the Parliamentary side, endangered all that they had fought for.
So this time, not only was the violence within the war itself more unapologetically brutal, terms of surrender were harsh. At Colchester, Fairfax refused quarter to any lords, superior officers or gentlemen. Their troops might live, but they would most likely die.
And not only were the terms of surrender harsh, they also weren’t respected after the fact. Parliament’s declaration of all Royalists in this war to be traitors was used to justify executing soldiers after they surrendered to quarter, something which violated the international rules of war. At the Duke of Hamilton’s trial, an officer said that the intention of granting quarter was “only to preserve him from the violence of the soldiers, and not from the justice of the Parliament.” We know from our last study that the international rules of war never accepted torture or mutilation of bodies, so that isn’t a valid use of quarter. Even Hugh Peter objected at one of these trials, and this is the guy who would soon be so gung ho about killing the King that people suspected he was the actual executioner.
The most famous case of quarter being violated happened in Colchester, where two officers named Charles Lucas and George Lisle were singled out and executed, and I’m going to tell you this story because it’s one of the ones that most epitomizes the war for me. It was Lucas and Lisle’s passion, popularity, and reputation on the battlefield which had inspired such a strong rebellion at Colchester, and now it was those very things which would make them good examples to other would-be rebels. When told the Army’s legal justification for the execution, Lucas responded “Alas! You deceive yourselves; me you cannot, but we are conquered and must be what you please to make us.”
The two friends were shot on the day they were tried. Lucas asked for a little more time to atone for his sins before God, and Lisle asked for permission to write to his parents, but both were denied. “I scorn to ask life at your hands,” said Lucas. “But that I might have time to make some address to God above and settle some things below, that I might not be thrown out of this world with all my sins about me. But since it will not be by your charity, I must submit to the mercy of God, whose holy will be done.”
Lucas was shot first. He voiced his disapproval yet again, and asked that his body be respectfully returned to his hometown, and then finished “I have often faced death in the field, and now you shall see I dare to die.” He knelt briefly in prayer, then stood, opened his shirt and shouted “See, I am ready for you. Now, rebels, do your worst!”
Lisle followed. He walked to Lucas’s still-shaking body, embraced it and kissed it on the forehead, and then stood up and after a brief lament of the wrongfulness of this action, asked his executioners to step closer so they wouldn’t miss him. “I’ll warrant you, sir, we’ll hit you,” said one of the musketeers, and with a smile, Lisle responded, “Friends, I’ve been nearer when you’ve missed me.”
Then, Parliament fined the townspeople of Colchester, civilians who by-and-large weren’t even involved in the resistance, 12000 pounds. Colchester barely survived the combination of siege and fine, and it was over a century before it recovered.
Much more personal to our story, though, is the fact that the Earl of Warwick’s brother, the Earl of Holland, who appeared in some of our Providence Island episodes, faced a similar fate. He’d switched sides twice during the war, wavering between the Royalists and most moderate Presbyterians, and wanting above all to work for peace until the rise of the Army, which pushed him firmly into the Royalist camp. While Warwick led the Parliamentary fleet in a blockade of the Royalist fleet in the Netherlands, Holland had returned from exile to lead troops for the King’s cause. He only fought in a couple of minor engagements, though, and was captured after a battle in which both Frances Villiers and Kenelm Digby’s son were killed. He had surrendered on the condition that his life be spared, but though they’d agreed to that, he was immediately imprisoned and soon put on trial for his life, while Warwick also pled his cause.
I’ll finish this story in a couple minutes, but I don’t want to get ahead of the main narrative. I think at this point you have an idea of the bitterness of this phase of the war, and now the King was twice defeated. There were a couple remaining holdouts, most notably Pontefract in Yorkshire, but the Second War was over even before it had really begun. He now faced an Army that refused to negotiate with him, and which was now demanding his trial. Parliament was still willing to negotiate, though, so they concluded a peace deal. He conceded 36 points, and they in turn gave him 4, including his protection of remaining Royalists. When there was some opposition, Parliament voted to continue negotiations, and on December 5, 1648, they passed a resolution to settle. The King was prepared to sign, and England would finally have a peace treaty after 6 years of war, and nearly a decade of strife.
The next day, though, MPs on their way to Parliament found its entrance blocked by soldiers. At the door, a colonel named Thomas Pride held a list of MPs. The MPs whose names weren’t on the list were allowed in, and the ones whose names were written down were either turned away or arrested. Denzil Holles, who had also been one of the 5 MPs King Charles had tried to arrest so early in the conflict, was famously on this list, too. So was every single MP who had voted to continue negotiating with the King. William Prynne was dragged away shouting that this was a high breach of the privileges of Parliament. Another MP asked, “By what power are you doing this?” To which Pride’s reply was “By the power of the sword.”
This was Pride’s Purge. A coup d’etat by the Army, and the beginning of what’s known as the Rump Parliament. Even some of the MPs who were allowed to stay, decided not to, like Henry Vane. Vane was an Independent, through and through and through again, one of the leaders of the cause. He had fled the Presbyterian mob, and he had voted against continuing to negotiate with the King. He had absolutely no qualms about executing King Charles, and he was no enemy to the Army. If they weren’t doing this for Parliamentary Democracy, though, what were they doing it for? This wasn’t his cause, so he went home.
The Army sent one last envoy to propose one last, draconian offer of terms of peace to the king, but he was done, too. He said he had conceded too much, and failed to give satisfaction. He was ready for whatever came next, but it wouldn’t be a treaty. In response, the Rump Commons did what the Levellers had proposed months ago, they passed an ordinance for the King’s trial, for treason. When the Lords rejected it, the Commons passed a resolution to declare themselves the supreme power of the English Government. The Lords couldn’t stop them. Then they established a new high court of justice to try the king. Of its 135 appointed members, only 52 showed up, and Fairfax was not one of them. “He has more wit than to be here,” his wife called from the chamber when his name was called.
Brought to the stand, the king was called a traitor, to which he laughed. By English law, treason was a crime committed against the king, and he was the king, so it was legally preposterous. He refused to plead, even when asked 43 times, because the trial had absolutely no legal foundation. He said the case should be put before a joint session of Parliament, and even some people who objectively favored regicide agreed that this would be more appropriate, but Cromwell told them to sit still and be quiet, and they did. The court pronounced a sentence of death, and the king asked permission to speak, but was refused. Two Dutch ambassadors and Fairfax pleaded for his life, but they were refused as well. Prince Charles sent a message, asking for Parliament to write down whatever conditions it wanted, saying they would meet them if his father’s life was spared. He was also refused.
The king spent his last few days burning his remaining papers, and saying goodbye to his two children who were still in England. It was all very dignified, and yet emotional in a way that moved even the most hostile of people who had been assigned to guard the King. He told his daughter, who herself would die the next year, that he was about to die a glorious death for the liberty of England and the maintenance of the true religion, and then he instructed his son not to let himself be crowned king while his brothers were alive. “I would sooner be torn in pieces first!” The night before his execution, he declined dinner and instead took his last communion, and on his way to his execution, he perhaps ironically passed under some of the few remaining paintings he’d commissioned, ones which venerated the ideal of kingship but were too on a ceiling too high for Parliamentarians to remove or destroy.
On the scaffold, he gave a speech which included the things he had wanted to say at his trial. The crowd couldn’t hear him, but his words were recorded, as was the fact that he spoke it without any sign of the speech impediment he’d once had. It’s a famously good speech, and one which I’d highly recommend taking the few minutes to read, but I’ll just choose one quote from it. “For the people, and truly I desire their liberty and freedom as much as anybody whomsoever. But I must tell you, that their liberty and freedom consists in having of government, those laws by which their life and their goods may be most their own. It is not for having a share in government that is nothing pertaining to them.”
He knelt, and was beheaded, and the crowd groaned in horror. In the following days, Parliament went about removing and smashing all images and statues of the king, and formalized the abolition of kingship. Even more MPs withdrew from Parliament, until only 90 were left, but these few worked to set up a system of government, a Commonwealth, with Cromwell at its head. Once this was set up, though, some MPs, including Vane, started to trickle back. If this was the permanent government of England, their participation was the only democratic element left, and their choices were to influence it or ignore it. They raised taxes again, confiscated more Royalist estates and asked for loans. In fact, the majority of the new Commonwealth’s activities involved national taxation and public spending, a completely new thing in English history. Meanwhile, Ranters, Fifth Monarchists, Muggletonians, Diggers and Quakers started showing up in Parliament, while Cromwell and Fairfax suppressed another Leveller mutiny. England would never be the same.
On the other side, Scotland immediately proclaimed Prince Charles as Charles II, as did the Royalists at Pontefract, and the Duke of Ormond joined forces with Confederate Catholics in the Irish revolt, prompting Cromwell’s infamous conquest of Ireland. Royalists in England also started spreading a pamphlet of the king’s last writings and an account of his side of the war, called the Eikon Basilike. The purpose, even written in the title, was to show the king to be a saint and martyr at the very time the new government was justifying its “cruel necessity.”
In response to this, and other Royalist pamphlets, Parliament declared it treason to call the new government tyrannical, usurped or unlawful, or to say that the Commons wasn’t the supreme authority of the land, and it issued a resolution declaring any preacher who so much as mentioned Charles I or his son to be a delinquent. They dubbed Royalists “malignants,” drawing on language they’d used against Catholics a generation before.
About 6 weeks after the King’s death, the Royalist garrison at Pontefract castle surrendered, and Parliament was so exhaspirated at the strength of the fortress, and how repeatedly useful it had proven to its enemies, that it ordered the castle demolished. Surviving royalist leaders were tried and executed for “treason for levying war against the late king and the parliament.”
This is also the point at which Warwick’s brother was condemned to death for treason, and I’ll tell you, even as someone who’s not particularly sympathetic to Warwick as a person, I feel horrible for him here. Warwick, such a Parliamentary leader, had pled for his brother’s life for months at this point. The king was dead, and there would be no more effective royalist resistance. Holland, though, refused to denounce his cause, and so Warwick’s loyalty was now declared suspect. His admiralty commission was revoked, when he pled yet again for his brother’s life, it wasn’t enough. Holland was convicted of treason by the government Warwick had done as much as anyone to put in power. He went to the scaffold protesting to the end that he’d surrendered on condition that his life be spared, and was beheaded in front of the Houses of Parliament. At this point, Warwick went home, too, announcing his retirement from public life.
Warwick had pled for his life, but Holland had refused to denounce his cause. Warwick’s loyalty was now declared suspect, and his admiralty commission was revoked. He pled again for his brother’s life, and while that convinced some people to acquit him, it wasn’t enough and his brother was beheaded in front of the houses of Parliament, protesting to the end that he had surrendered on condition that his life be spared. At this point, Warwick went home, too, announcing his retirement from public life. Now, that won’t last, or I’d be giving Warwick a bigger send off than this. Within a couple years he’d be back, thanks to Cromwell’s anti-Spanish policy, a policy that we know better than anyone that Warwick had been waiting for since 1619. For now, though, he’s just dealing with the fact that after helping put a government in power, that very government had stripped him of his titles and killed his brother.
I might have gone overboard in this episode, but this was a pivotal time in American history. The execution of the King sent shockwaves through England’s colonies, and Cromwell’s Commonwealth would permanently change the nature of English Colonization. That’s what we’re going to start discussing next week.