How to Kill a King

The Trial of Charles I took place 375 years ago, and the anniversary of his death is today. By Leanda de Lisle.

Charles I at his trial. He was 48.

The Painted Chamber in the Palace of Westminster was a wonder of the thirteenth century. But the faded images were now obscured by tapestries; the medieval world barely intruded into the new on 8 January 1649, when men in military buff coats or plain Puritan suits, sat at trestle tables and debated the fate of their king.

Two days earlier a High Court had been established that would for the first time try a king of England. This was justified on the practical grounds of preventing Charles from raising further ‘commotions, rebellions and invasions’, and on a matter of principle: that the king should have no impunity from the law.

The 135 judges who had been appointed by the House of Commons were mostly army officers and radical MPs. Eighty-three attended this meeting, including the leading General Thomas Fairfax and his subordinate Oliver Cromwell.

Charles was to be charged with having ‘a wicked design totally to subvert the fundamental laws and liberties of this nation, and, in their place, to introduce an arbitrary and tyrannical government’: crimes, it was declared, that deserved ‘exemplary and condign punishment’ – in others words, death.

There was no certainty of outcome. Executing the king risked provoking foreign reprisals, or a popular rising.  On the other hand if Charles accepted the legality of the tribunal, he would be accepting that he had no veto over the Commons decisions. He could be returned to the throne subject to parliament,  ‘ a sword always over his head..[and] ..grown grey in the documents of misfortune’.

Yet, as Cromwell reportedly warned, if the king refused to plead, then, in order to confirm the supreme power of the Commons, they would have to ‘cut off his head with the crown on it’.

How had it come to this?

The answer can be traced back to the 1550s when Britain had two Catholic queens.  To justify their efforts to overthrow them, Protestants had argued that monarchs drew their right to rule from the people who therefore had the right to resist – even to kill – those they judged tyrants, or of the ‘wrong religion’.

Charles was Protestant, but for some be was the wrong kind of Protestant: his love of beauty in worship idolatrous; his attachment to church government by bishops, Popish. During the early years of his reign his leading ministers had stood as surrogates for attacks on the king’s policies. One was murdered, another executed for treason by Act of Parliament. Eventually the mutual mistrust between Charles and his MPs had paved the way to civil war.

But there was still no talk of killing the king. In 1642 parliament claimed it was acting, not against the rightful authority of the crown, but as England’s Highest Court was seizing a form of power of attorney The aim was to ‘rescue’ Charles from evil counselors, who supposedly held him in their power, and the commission for parliament’s leading general called for the ‘perseveration of the king’s person’.