Killers of the King - The Men Who Dared to Execute
Charles I Hardcover – September 11th 2014 352 pages Bloomsbury Publishing -
ISBN-13: 978-1408851708
"When you strike at a king, you must kill him."
― Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ye shall not defile the land wherein ye 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.
Book of Numbers [35 v. 33]
The bestselling historian Charles Spencer new book tells
the stories of the men that dared to kill a king. It is an understatement to
say this is an interesting subject. A belief widely held amongst historians and
the general reading public.
His trial and subsequent execution was a watershed
moment in British and world history. The only people to kill a king. As Blair
Worden writes "the beheading of Charles I on January 30th, 1649, left an
indelible mark on the history of England and on the way that the English think
about themselves. It was the climactic moment of the Puritan Revolution, and it
also changed the whole character of the conflict. Most of the people who had
taken up arms against Charles I seven years earlier was opposed to his killing,
if not outraged by it. They knew that it would destroy their cause, though they
could not have foreseen how lasting the condemnation of the regicide would be".[1]
Charles Spencer's new book is a splendid,
narrative-driven boo and is part of a large number of narrative-driven books
recently published. It would appear that this particular historical genre is on
the up. As Tom Holland flamboyantly points out "Imagine the Odessa File
re-written by Christopher Hill, and you will have some idea of the pleasure to
be had in reading Killers of the King. The virtues of a thriller and
scholarship are potently combined".[2]
Not all historians are fans of narrative-based historical
writing. When C V Wedgwood produced her splendid book A King Condemned-The
Trial and Execution of Charles Ist, it was criticized by some historians. In the
foreword of the 2011 edition, Clive
Holmes said: "Wedgwood's relationship with academic historians was not an
easy one, and the immediate reception of this work by the professionals in
their flagship journals was cool and even condescending." This silly
snobbery is why there have been no academic reviews of Spencer's book.
In
terms of historiography Spencer's
book is part of a new wave of studies concentrating on different aspects of the
Royalist cause. Royalism during and after the English revolution is a
legitimate subject for study. It is surprising to discover as I am sure Spencer
would have found a dearth of serious academic studies of the trial and
execution of the king and subsequent politics contained within the trial and
execution of the regicides.
It is a richly, rewarding subject to study, so it is
hard to understand why such an important event in the history of both Britain
and the world has been so under-researched. Outside of C V Wedgewood's The
Regicides and the Execution of Charles I there is Jason Peacey's, The Regicides
and the Execution of Charles I December
7th 2001, Why Was Charles I Executed? 2007 by Clive Holmes and last but no
means least in 2010 we have The Tyrannicide Brief: The Story of the Man who
sent Charles I to the Scaffold by Geoffrey Robertson apart from these there is
little on offer.
Like
many other studies of the English revolution, the study of why and how early
the revolutionists were prepared to kill the king. Clive
Holmes defends the view that the regicides knew exactly what they were doing
when they executed the king and had prepared for his killing a good few years
before. Spencer broadly agrees with this viewpoint.
Not all historians agree with Holmes. Sean Kelsey argued
that the New Model Army and the purged Long Parliament had no wish to see the
king dead when they brought him to trial on charges of committing treason
against his people.
Sean Kelsey argued in his essay The Ordinance for
the Trial of Charles I that parliament had a significantly bigger role in
bringing the king to execution than had previously thought. Kelsey believes
that far too little attention has been paid to the role of parliament in bringing
about the trial of the king.
 |
| A contemporaneous print showing the 1649 execution of Charles I outside the Banqueting House, Whitehall, London |
"The ordinance passed by the Commons on
January 1st, 1649 has never aroused much interest amongst historians of the
English Revolution, one of whom has remarked that "formal documentary
evidence for this (first) tribunal is lacking." Neither the House of Lords
Record Office, not the principal collections of parliamentary papers has
yielded the secrets of the Ordinance. A search of the National Archives of
Scotland has not yet located a copy of the Common's measure which the
commissioners of Edinburgh parliament resident at Westminster in January 1649
sent to their superiors shortly after its passage in the English lower house".[3]
The trial and execution of the king were the high
point and culmination of a long and protracted process. The high point of that
process was the English Revolution. The theory of the high road to revolution has
come under heavy attack from revisionist historians. Admittedly the men who
started the revolution against the king did not start to kill him but to make
revolutionary changes in 1642 for "king and parliament" but ended it
cutting the kings head off. It is not Spencer's fault that his book does not
explain this contradiction. The problem is not Spencer's ability as a writer
but his method or theory of historical events.
He could have consulted even an out and out
revisionist historian such as Blair Worden who perceptibly writes, "Yet
wars, once embarked upon, have to be won. The fighting and winning of them can
radically extend their aims. The New Model Army, raised in 1645 to end the
carnage, acquired revolutionary goals in both politics and religion. Only
slowly did its generals come to contemplate trying the king. The decisive event
was the Second Civil War, fought in 1648. It centred on an invasion by a
Scottish army, with whose leaders Charles had been conspiring even as he
negotiated, ostensibly in good faith, for his restoration of the English
parliament. In 1647 Oliver Cromwell and his ally and son-in-law Henry Ireton
had conducted their negotiations with him. Now they concluded that Charles's
inherent duplicity would wreck any settlement. There could be no lasting peace,
they decided, while he remained alive".[4]
His concentration on the narrative to the detriment
of theory does not get us very far. While it is important to understand what
went through the minds of the leading actors of the revolution such as
Cromwell, Ireton, and Harrison to do so would only give us a one-sided
understanding of why a king's head was cut off and a republic established.
Spencer is free to adopt whatever theoretical approach he wants to portray
historical events but the rise of narrative history has been at the direct
expense of a materialist understanding of the revolution.
As Karl Marx correctly points out "the
production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly
interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the
language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men,
appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same
applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws,
morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of people. Men are the producers of
their conceptions, ideas, etc. – real, active men, as they are conditioned by a
definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse
corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be
anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their
actual life process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear
upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from
their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does
from their physical life-process.”[5]
A snapshot of the regicides shows that they came
from diverse social backgrounds but were united by their opposition to the
king. They were not conscious revolutionists they were however to varying
degrees conscious of their role as "ideologists of the revolution (who)
ransacked the Bible, and half-understood historical precedent for some kind of
theory to explain what they were doing".
The most politically aware of the revolutionists
were astute enough to know that when they executed their king after a
complicated trial with long deliberation, it was the result not of an accident
or misunderstanding. Many soldiers from the New Model Army who were mainly
drawn from smallholders and lower yeomanry were acutely aware of what and more
importantly, why they moved against the king. When the Cornet George Joyce
captured the king, he was challenged by Charles who asked him where he received
his commission Joyce is reported to have waved his sword towards his troops and
replied: " here is my commission."
It cannot be denied that the killing of the king had
as Ann Talbot recounts “ a profound
revolutionary significance entailing a complete break with the feudal past.
Although the Monarchy was later restored and the triumphant bourgeoisie was
soon eager to pretend that the whole thing had been a ghastly mistake, no
monarch sat quickly on the throne after that event until quite late in Victoria's
reign".[6]
The Killers of the King is Spencer's third book
covering the English Civil War. The author was recently asked why this
subject and answered "the three most important history books that I have
written have concentrated on the period 1642-1704 – quite a short period, in
fact. I am not the first to be intrigued by the English Civil War – but my
particular interest is in the characters involved: there seem to have been so
many huge personalities active during that time of massive, national, upheaval.
For me, history has always been more about people watching than dry statistics
and dates. The mid-to-late seventeenth century provides very rich pickings
indeed”.
The book and the author have received a substantial
amount of interest from the media partly because of the subjects dramatic content.
The book is very well written and very well researched and is beautifully
illustrated. It is not for the fainthearted as Spencer at times
goes into graphic detail of the punishment handed out to the king killers. Many
after all were hung drawn and quartered and their genitals cut off and innards
burned before their eyes while still alive.
Spencer's book at times reads like a novel. He
shows that leading figures of the revolution turned on their former colleagues
and hunted them down. One was Sir George Downing of Downing Street fame,
and described by Samuel Pepys as "that perfidious rogue," he plotted
and went to the Continent, kidnap and if necessary murder then and there his
former friends or bundle them back to England to stand trial and certain
execution.
It would appear from the book that the reign of
Charles was dominated by this manhunt. While sanctioning what amounted to
judicial murder, the regime was hardly a picture of stability. The longer the
show trial went on, the more nervous Charles and his ministers became and
recognized the growing danger of rebellion. Charles II made one mistake in
giving a public funeral to one of the regicides over twenty thousand people
attended testifying the still considerable support held for Republican ideas.
As I said above Spencer's understanding of why
Charles II would undertake a risky thing to try his father's killers is very
limited and tends to put the trial down to pure revenge as Spencer states "Charles
II naturally loathed those who had seen to his father's beheading. He was
unable to exact vengeance on all those who had fought for parliament, of course
– approximately half the nation; but he was allowed to bring down retribution
on the regicides. Originally he was only looking to make seven of them suffer,
but many – especially in the House of Lords – wanted all those intimately
involved in Charles I's death to die. They had their own reasons for vengeance.
For a lot of Parliamentarians, choosing the king's killers as scapegoats took
the attention away from their own years of rebellion against the Crown."
.
Spencer further elaborates on this matter "Killers
of the King starts with the fall of Charles I, and then his trial and
execution. But the driving narrative is what happened to the many diverse men
who came together to end his life. On the whole, these were not people with a
grand background – they included a butcher's son, a jeweller, a brewer, and a
tanner of hides – men who had risen through merit to regimental command in
Parliament's New Model Army. British history tends inevitably to be seen
through a royal prism, because – apart from the 11 years between Charles I's
death and Charles II's restoration, of course – we have always had a monarchy".
One would normally expect Earl Spencer to side with
one of his own in the matter of the regicide of the king but the opposite would
appear to be the case, As Spencer says "I started the book with a view
that I would end up being hugely sympathetic to Charles I as a victim of a
kangaroo court, but, as I researched the extraordinary drama of the civil war
it had thrown up, these intriguing, individuals whose stories were so
fascinating and diverse. Getting to know some of the key regicides in greater
depth meant I sympathized with them much more," says Spencer, who despite
being an Earl, would have sided with parliament had he been alive at the time.
His book is not a radical history of the English
revolution. The author if anything is sympathetic to the Whig interpretation of
history. Spencer believes that the civil war was a progressive development and
supports Geoffrey Robertson's contention that "the proceeding
against Charles I in 1649 secured the constitutional gains of the Civil War –
the supremacy of Parliament, the independence of judges, an individual freedom
guaranteed by Magna Carta and the common law".
Spencer adds "I do believe the king had to die
for England to have a hope of peace. He was impossible to trust, and the one
thing you had to be like a ruler was decisive otherwise you were too weak to
survive. The whole of society was changing in a fundamental way, and something
drastic has to happen. Sadly for Charles, it was being decapitated. But despite
my feelings against him as a king, I have enormous personal regard for him as a
man. He was a gentle, church-loving, chess playing figure. I feel very sorry
for him, but I also think those who put him to death were very brave men."
Another striking aspect of the book and Spencer
gives ample room space to is how people who were once leading members in the
Cromwellian era shifted their allegiances like some people change a shirt.
Charles Monck, who has always struck me as a person
of extreme opportunism was "a turncoat of heroic proportions". He had
been commander in chief of the English army in Scotland and an ardent follower
of Cromwell. But after being promised the unheard-of sum of £100,000 a year for
the rest of his life changed sides and decided to do the king's dirty work. It
would have added to Spencer's book if he had investigated this phenomenon
further. Another perceived weakness of the book is the fact that he never
actually addresses what happened to the revolution. Why was it so easy for a
regime change so shortly after Cromwell's death?
One severe weakness of the book is that it fails to
convey how the regicides lost power and a monarchy was established albeit with the
help of substantial sections of the bourgeoisie. The book is absent as to the
political and economic makeup of the Charles ll regime. The trial far from just
being about revenge was a counter-revolution by sections of the bourgeoisie who
were still firmly connected to the Monarchy.
As James Holstun's correctly states "What
turned the tide was the failure of bourgeois republican revolutionaries to
unify themselves militarily, and create an interest and stake in the republic
among the copyholders, soldiers, sailors and apprentices; and the superior
power of General Monck and the forces of Restoration in shaping and controlling
the army". To conclude Spencer's book is theoretically light and is not in the same case as Wedgewood. It could have been improved if he had used previous academic research. However, I would recommend the book and would grace any bookshelf.
[1] The Execution of Charles I-
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/execution-charles-i
[2] https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/killers-of-the-king-9781408851715/
[3] The Ordinance for the trial of Charles I-Sean Kelsey-Historical
Research- Volume 76, Issue 193
[4] The Execution of Charles I-
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/execution-charles-i
[5] Part I: Feuerbach.The opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook-German
Ideology-
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm
[6] "These the times ... this the man": an appraisal of historian
Christopher Hill
By Ann Talbot-25 March
2003- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html
