On January 30, 1649, his subjects brought a king before
judgment and executed him in public. The beheading of Charles I was not simply
the dramatic climax of the English Civil War. It was one of the great
revolutionary acts in world history. For the first time, a reigning monarch was
tried by representatives of the people, convicted as a tyrant and traitor, and
put to death in the name of a higher authority than the crown. The execution
proclaimed that sovereignty no longer resided in the king by divine right, but
could be claimed by society itself.
More than three and a half centuries later, the events of
1649 remain politically explosive. The regicide poses questions that successive
generations of historians have sought either to explain or evade. How did a
movement that began by fighting for Parliament's rights against royal
absolutism end by abolishing the monarchy altogether? Why did ordinary
soldiers, artisans, merchants and farmers conclude that peace was impossible
while the king lived? And why, after overturning the old order, did the
revolution ultimately prove unable to secure its gains?
Charles Spencer's Killers of the King addresses only
part of this historical problem. It is an engaging account of the men who
signed Charles I's death warrant and the vengeance they later faced at the
Restoration. Spencer writes with considerable narrative skill and has done a
genuine service by bringing the regicides' history to a broad audience. Yet his
book exemplifies the limits of contemporary popular history. It tells us much
about individuals' courage and fate, but little about the social forces that
turned political conflict into revolution.
The relative neglect of the regicides by modern historians
is itself significant. C. V. Wedgwood's A King Condemned remains the
indispensable account of the king's trial. Since its publication, only a
handful of major studies have seriously addressed the subject. This neglect
reflects broader developments within academic historiography.
For much of the post-war period, historians such as
Christopher Hill understood the English Civil War as a bourgeois revolution
rooted in profound economic and social transformations. The emerging capitalist
classes sought to break the political constraints imposed by feudal absolutism
and establish forms of government compatible with the developing market
economy. Political and religious struggles reflected deeper conflicts embedded
in society's structure.
Over the last several decades, however, revisionist
historians have sustainedly attacked this interpretation. Revisionist
historians have replaced the concept of revolution with narratives of
contingency, misunderstanding, and elite political manoeuvre. Social class has
largely disappeared from view. The Civil War is presented less as a
revolutionary upheaval than as a tragic misunderstanding among a political
elite that stumbled into conflict.
The implications for understanding the regicide are obvious.
If the Civil War was essentially accidental, then Charles I's execution appears
inexplicable. If no underlying social transformation was underway, then the
destruction of the monarchy becomes little more than a collective act of
political madness.
Spencer's work does not explicitly embrace revisionism, but
it remains influenced by its assumptions. The central question confronting any
account of the regicide is straightforward. Why did men who initially fought
under the slogan of "King and Parliament" come to conclude that the
king himself had to die?
The answer lies not primarily in personal characteristics or
individual motives. Charles I was stubborn, duplicitous and politically inept.
Yet European history contains many incompetent rulers who were not brought
before revolutionary tribunals. The explanation lies not in the king's
personality but in the social crisis that engulfed seventeenth-century England.
As Blair Worden has observed, revolutionary wars transform
those who fight them. The New Model Army, established to defeat the king
militarily, increasingly developed political conclusions that extended beyond
Parliament's original objectives. Prolonged struggle radicalised thousands of
soldiers. They confronted not merely the king's armies but an entire structure
of political authority rooted in hereditary privilege.
The decisive turning point was the Second Civil War in 1648.
Charles I's secret negotiations and encouragement of renewed armed resistance
convinced many who had previously favoured compromise that no stable settlement
was possible while he remained alive. The king had become identified with
perpetual counter-revolution.
Spencer acknowledges this development but never adequately
explains it. His preferred method is biographical rather than social. He
approaches history primarily through personalities and individual experiences.
This produces vivid storytelling but limits historical understanding.
Karl Marx's observation in The German Ideology remains
essential. Human beings make history under specific social conditions, and
consciousness develops through lived experience rather than abstract
reflection. The regicides lacked a modern revolutionary programme. They
understood their actions through religious language, constitutional arguments
and historical analogy. Yet the social content of their actions extended far
beyond their own conscious intentions.
The rank and file of the New Model Army increasingly
represented layers of society whose interests conflicted sharply with the old
order. Smallholders, artisans, merchants and sections of the lower yeomanry had
acquired both military confidence and political expectations. They had fought,
sacrificed and bled for victory. Many were unwilling to accept a settlement
that restored the authority they had spent years defeating.
The famous encounter between Colonel George Joyce and
Charles I captures this shift with remarkable clarity. When the king demanded
to see Joyce's commission authorising his actions, Joyce pointed to the
soldiers behind him. Their collective force was his commission. Authority no
longer flowed downward from the monarchy. It was being recreated from below
through revolutionary struggle.
This was the profound significance of 1649. As Christopher
Hill and other Marxist historians argued, Charles's execution represented far
more than the punishment of a failed monarch. It signalled a decisive rupture
with feudal conceptions of power. Whatever compromises followed, no English
ruler could ever again govern exactly as Charles had attempted. The revolution
permanently altered the relationship between ruler and ruled.
The greatest strength of Spencer's book lies not in its
discussion of the regicide itself but in its account of what followed.
The Restoration unleashed one of the most determined
political manhunts in British history. The surviving regicides became
fugitives. Some escaped abroad. Others were captured and subjected to
spectacularly brutal public executions intended to terrify republican sentiment
into submission.
Spencer vividly recreates this campaign of revenge. What
emerges most clearly is the social background of the men being hunted. Many
were not members of ancient aristocratic families. They were sons of tradespeople,
craftsmen, and minor property holders who had risen through talent, conviction,
and military service. Their careers reflected the social mobility revolution
itself unleashed.
The pursuit of the regicides also exposed the extraordinary
opportunism of many Restoration figures. Sir George Downing, once a servant of
the Commonwealth and later a diplomat for Charles II, personally organised the
capture of former comrades. Spencer's account shows how quickly principles
dissolved as the political climate changed.
Yet here the book's limitations become most evident. Spencer
largely presents the Restoration as an understandable act of royal revenge.
Charles II wanted to punish those responsible for his father's death. Former
parliamentarians sought to divert attention from their own past actions. Such
explanations are not false. They are simply inadequate.
The Restoration was not merely a personal triumph for a
returning monarch. It was a political settlement accepted by broad sections of
the ruling class. By 1660 the propertied elite had secured many of the changes
they desired from the revolutionary period. The old absolutist project had been
defeated. The power of Parliament had expanded. Property relations had been
consolidated in ways favourable to emerging capitalist interests.
At the same time, these same social layers feared the
democratic impulses that the revolution had unleashed. Levellers, radical
republicans, and militant sections of the army raised demands that threatened
not merely the monarchy but property itself. The ruling classes increasingly
feared popular radicalism more than they feared kings.
The punishment of the regicides therefore served a broader
political purpose. It symbolically buried the revolutionary aspirations that
had extended beyond the interests of the propertied elite. The revolution
retained its constitutional achievements. Its most radical possibilities were
repudiated.
This contradiction explains the fate of the English
Revolution more effectively than appeals to individual betrayal. George Monck's
opportunism mattered. But political turncoats succeed only when broader social
conditions permit it. The republic's collapse after Cromwell's death reflected
deep weaknesses within the revolutionary regime, including its inability to
build a durable alliance with the popular classes whose mobilisation made the
revolution possible.
Historians such as James Holstun have examined these
contradictions far more seriously than Spencer. Questions of class, property
and political power remain largely absent from Killers of the King.
Consequently, the book describes the end of the revolutionary process without
fully explaining either its origins or its defeat.
Spencer's own conclusions are ironic. The ninth Earl Spencer
began the project expecting to sympathise with Charles I. Instead, he ended
with considerable admiration for the men who condemned him. He accepts that the
king's execution was necessary and endorses the view that the trial helped
secure constitutional gains that shaped Britain's future development.
This is ultimately a modernised Whig interpretation of the
Revolution. Spencer recognises the progress embodied in 1649, but he
understands that progress primarily in constitutional terms. Parliamentary
government, the rule of law and limits on executive power emerge as the
revolution's chief achievements.
What disappears from view is the deeper social
transformation that made such constitutional changes possible. The English
Revolution was not merely a dispute about legal arrangements. It reflected the
emergence of new social forces and property relations that increasingly clashed
with the old feudal order.
For that reason, Killers of the King remains an
important but limited work. It is not a serious analysis of the English
Revolution. It lacks a coherent social interpretation and never fully
transcends the horizons of political biography. Nevertheless, it is
exceptionally readable, meticulously researched and often compelling. Above
all, it rescues from historical obscurity a group of men who carried out one of
the most audacious acts in political history.
The regicides understood the historical forces they
represented only imperfectly. Yet through their actions they demonstrated a
truth that has echoed through every subsequent revolution: kings rule only for
as long as society permits them to rule. Once that belief is destroyed, no
throne is secure. The men who signed Charles I's death warrant discovered this
truth in its most dramatic form. The ruling classes that returned to power in
1660 never forgot it. Neither should historians today.
