Regicide

Before the Tudor period, English kings had been murdered while imprisoned (for example Edward II and Edward V) or killed in battle by their subjects (for example Richard III), but none of these deaths are usually referred to as regicide.

The word regicide seems to have come into popular use among continental Catholics when Pope Sixtus V renewed the papal bull of excommunication against the "crowned regicide" Queen Elizabeth I,[4] for—among other things—executing Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1587, although she had abdicated the Scottish crown some 20 years earlier.[5] Elizabeth had originally been excommunicated by Pope Pius V, in Regnans in Excelsis, for converting England to Protestantism after the reign of Mary I of England.

After the First English Civil War, King Charles I was a prisoner of the Parliamentarians. They tried to negotiate a compromise with him, but he stuck steadfastly to his view that he was King by divine right and attempted in secret to raise an army to fight against them. It became obvious to the leaders of the Parliamentarians that they could not negotiate a settlement with him and they could not trust him to refrain from raising an army against them; they reluctantly came to the conclusion that he would have to be put to death. On 13 December 1648, the House of Commons broke off negotiations with the King. Two days later, the Council of Officers of the New Model Army voted that the King be moved from the Isle of Wight, where he was prisoner, to Windsor "in order to the bringing of him speedily to justice".[6] Then in the middle of December, the King was moved from Windsor to St James's Palace, Westminster. The House of Commons of the Rump Parliament passed a Bill setting up a High Court of Justice in order to try Charles I for high treason 'in the name of the people of England.' From a Royalist and post-restoration perspective, this Bill was not lawful, as the House of Lords refused to pass it and it predictably failed to receive the Royal Assent. However, the Parliamentary leaders and the Army pressed on with the trial anyway.

At his trial in the High Court of Justice on Saturday 20 January 1649 in Westminster Hall, Charles asked "I would know by what power I am called hither. I would know by what authority, I mean lawful".[7] In view of the historic issues involved, both sides based themselves on surprisingly technical legal grounds. Charles did not dispute that Parliament as a whole did have some judicial powers, but he maintained that the House of Commons on its own could not try anybody, and so he refused to plead. At that time under English law, if a prisoner refused to plead, he would be treated identically to one who had pleaded guilty. This has since changed; a refusal to plead is now interpreted as a not-guilty plea.[8]

Charles was found guilty on Saturday 27 January 1649, and his death warrant was signed by fifty-nine commissioners. To show their agreement with the sentence of death, all of the Commissioners who were present rose to their feet.

A contemporary print depicting Charles I's beheading

On the day of his execution, 30 January 1649, Charles dressed in two shirts so that he would not shiver from the cold, lest it be said that he was shivering from fear. His execution was delayed by several hours so that the House of Commons could pass an emergency bill to make it an offence to proclaim a new King, and to declare the representatives of the people, the House of Commons, as the source of all just power. Charles was then escorted through a window of the Banqueting House in the Palace of Whitehall to an outdoor scaffold where he would be beheaded.[9] He forgave those who had passed sentence on him and gave instructions to his enemies that they should learn to "know their duty to God, the King – that is, my successors – and the people".[10] He then gave a brief speech outlining his unchanged views of the relationship between the monarchy and the monarch's subjects, ending with the words "I am the martyr of the people".[11] His head was severed from his body with one blow.

One week later, the Rump, sitting in the House of Commons, passed a bill abolishing the monarchy. Ardent Royalists refused to accept it on the basis that there could never be a vacancy of the Crown. Others refused because, as the bill had not passed the House of Lords and did not have Royal Assent, it could not become an Act of Parliament.

The Declaration of Breda eleven years later paved the way for the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. At the time of the restoration, thirty-one of the fifty-nine Commissioners who had signed the death warrant were living. Parliament, with the assent of the new king, Charles II, enacted the Indemnity and Oblivion Act, giving a general pardon to those who had committed crimes during the civil war and interregnum, but the regicides were among those excluded from it. A number fled. Some, such as Daniel Blagrave, fled to continental Europe, while others like John Dixwell, Edward Whalley, and William Goffe fled to New Haven, Connecticut. Those regicides who could be found and arrested were put on trial. Six were found guilty and suffered the fate of being hanged, drawn and quartered: Thomas Harrison, John Jones, Adrian Scrope, John Carew, Thomas Scot, and Gregory Clement. The captain of the guard at the trial, Daniel Axtell, who encouraged his men to barrack the King when he tried to speak in his own defence, an influential preacher, Hugh Peters, and the leading prosecutor at the trial, John Cook, were executed in a similar manner. Colonel Francis Hacker, who signed the order to the executioner of the king and commanded the guard around the scaffold and at the trial, was hanged. Concern amongst the royal ministers over the negative impact on popular sentiment of these public tortures and executions led to jail sentences being substituted for the remaining regicides.[12]

Some regicides, such as Richard Ingoldsby and Philip Nye, were conditionally pardoned, while a further nineteen served life imprisonment. The bodies of the regicides Cromwell, Bradshaw, and Ireton, which had been buried in Westminster Abbey, were disinterred and hanged, drawn and quartered in posthumous executions. In 1662, three more regicides, John Okey, John Barkstead and Miles Corbet, were also hanged, drawn and quartered. The officers of the court that tried Charles I, those who prosecuted him, and those who signed his death warrant, have been known ever since the restoration as regicides.

The Parliamentary Archives in the Palace of Westminster, London, holds the original death warrant for Charles I.