Charles I’s death warrant is depicted in the third plate section.
Victorious in the Second Civil War, the Parliamentarian forces took Charles I captive. Whatever hopes may have been entertained that he could be prevailed upon to accept terms for an enduring peace were undermined by his duplicity and efforts to escape. Furthermore, some of his more war-weary opponents were now suspected of being over-ready to compromise. New divisions had opened up because the war had made the army, not Parliament, the greatest power in the land. Influential army officers were concerned that Westminster’s politicians might negotiate away the rights that the soldiers believed they had won with their swords. Beheading the king seemed the surest way of avoiding defeat being snatched from the jaws of victory.
Creating the enabling legal process proved difficult, as insufficient support existed for it in Parliament. Thus, to get the necessary numbers, soldiers were posted at Westminster to forcibly exclude those MPs assumed to be hostile. Shorn of the vast majority of its members, the resulting ‘Rump Parliament’ duly passed an ordinance bringing the king to trial. The opposition of the House of Lords was overcome by ignoring it altogether. In this way, those who had championed the rights of Parliament got their own way by subverting the laws of Parliament.
Trial proceedings began on 20 January 1649 in Westminster Hall. The charges against the king – now ominously described as ‘Charles Stuart’ – included that he ‘hath traitorously and maliciously levied war against the present Parliament, and the people therein represented’. The case was to be heard by 135 commissioners, sitting as a High Court of Justice, although less than half of them had agreed to serve. The verdict was scarcely in doubt. The trial lasted for seven days during which Charles refused to recognize the court’s legitimacy and, in turn, was not permitted to address it at length.
The First Civil War
1642
22 August Charles I raises his standard at Nottingham, declaring war on Parliament.
23 October The first major battle at Edgehill in Warwickshire ends in a stalemate.
1643
26 July Royalists take England’s second city, Bristol.
20 September Parliamentary forces under the earl of Essex win the first Battle of Newbury.
25 September The Solemn League and Covenant creates an alliance between Parliament and the Scots Covenanters.
1644
2 July At Marston Moor, west of York, the Royalist forces are heavily defeated by a combined Scots and Parliamentarian force and Oliver Cromwell demonstrates his ability as a cavalry commander.
22 October The second Battle of Newbury ends in a draw.
1645
6 January Parliament creates a full-time professional force, the New Model Army, under the command of Sir Thomas Fairfax.
14 June The decisive battle of the war is fought at Naseby in Northamptonshire, where Royalist forces are crushed.
11 September Parliamentarian forces retake Bristol.
13 September The marquess of Montrose’s Royalist army in Scotland is defeated at the Battle of Philiphaugh.
1646
6 May Charles I hands himself over to the Scots at Newark. 24 June Oxford, the Royalist capital, surrenders.
1647
30 January The Scots hand Charles I over to Parliament. He escapes in November to the Isle of Wight.
The Second Civil War
1648
17 August Cromwell defeats a joint Scots–Royalist invading force at Preston.
19 December Charles I is arrested by the army and returned to London.
1649
30 January Following a swift trial, Charles I is executed.
The Third Civil War
11 September During his Irish campaign, Cromwell’s forces massacre the garrison at Drogheda.
1650
3 September Cromwell routs, at Dunbar, the Scottish army loyal to Prince Charles.
1651
3 September Royalist and Scottish forces are defeated by Cromwell at Worcester.
13 October Prince Charles flees to France.
He was sentenced on 27 January. It remains a point of dispute among historians whether the warrant for his execution had been drawn up shortly before or immediately after the sentencing. Certainly, blanks were left for the date and place of execution to be filled in later, and the names of two of the three army officers to whom the warrant was issued had to be changed. It has been speculated that this was because two of the original choices refused to be involved, although authoritative evidence is lacking that the regicides had already begun signing their names even before sentence was passed. Nonetheless, not all the signatures (which were accompanied by individual seals in red wax) were written in a single session. There was a short delay after the first twenty-eight had been added and it was subsequently suggested that some of the second batch of regicides appended their names under duress. It would certainly be convenient for them to later make this claim.
Contemporary engraving of Charles I’s execution outside his Banqueting Hall in Whitehall.
Fifty-nine of the commissioners who had pronounced Charles guilty signed the warrant. The first to sign was John Bradshaw, the presiding judge at the trial. Oliver Cromwell signed third. Other notable Parliamentarian commanders who followed included Henry Ireton (who was Cromwell’s son-in-law), John Hutchinson and Thomas Harrison. Noticeable absentees included the army’s commander-in-chief, Sir Thomas Fairfax, who had fought to uphold the rights of Parliament, not to kill the king.
On 30 January, Charles duly stepped out through a window of the Banqueting House at Whitehall onto a specially erected scaffold. He was allowed a farewell statement to the public spectators, although his voice did not carry far enough beyond the deep ranks of soldiers encircling the stage. He assured them of his innocence without reneging on the belief in divine right that had got him and his realm into much of the trouble in the first place. ‘A subject and a sovereign are clean different things,’ he maintained, before announcing that ‘I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible Crown.’ When the axe severed his head, the crowd responded not with a cheer but a groan. It was an early sign that his enemies had succeeded only in making a martyr out of him.
Within eleven years the republic that replaced Charles’s kingship had foundered. At the monarchy’s restoration in 1660, the Convention Parliament passed an Act of Indemnity and Oblivion, offering a general pardon to those who had taken up arms against the late king. The exceptions were the regicides. Of the fifty-nine who had signed the death warrant, thirty-nine were still alive. Some sensibly fled, either to the continent or to the American colonies. Those the state could get its hands on were all either executed or imprisoned for life, save for Richard Ingoldsby. Alone of the captured regicides, he escaped punishment when his claim to have signed under duress was accepted.
After execution, Charles I’s remains had been interred next to those of Henry VIII in the vault of St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle. With the Restoration, however, the bodies of Cromwell and Ireton were disinterred from Westminster Abbey and, along with the remains of Bradshaw, were publicly hanged and desecrated. Like that of Charles I, Cromwell’s head was severed from its body. It was placed on a pike outside Westminster Hall, where it remained for over twenty years, not finding a final resting place until 1960 when it was laid to rest at his old college, Sidney Sussex, Cambridge. Even then, over 300 years after the Civil War, it was deemed safest if the sole identifiable remains of the great regicide should lie in an unmarked grave.
