by Jordan, Don
John Dixwell: b. 1607, politician; escaped to Germany (Hanau), then America; died in New England, 1689
Valentine Walton: b. 1593/4, army officer; escaped to Germany (Hanau); moved to Flanders or the Netherlands; died 1661(?)
Simon Meyne: bap. 1612, politician; sentenced to death 1660; died in Tower before sentence could be carried out, 1661
Thomas Horton: bap. 1603, army officer, died 1649
John Jones: b. 1597(?) army officer, executed 1660
John Moore: b. 1599, army officer, died 1650
Gilbert Millington: b. 1598, lawyer, politician; death sentence commuted to life imprisonment; died Mount Orgueil Castle, Jersey, 1666
George Fleetwood: bap. 1623, major-general; sentenced to be transported to Tangiers in 1664; unknown whether he was transported; may have emigrated to North America; date of death unknown
John Alured: bap. 1607, army officer, died 1651
Robert Lilburne: bap. 1614, deputy major-general; death sentence commuted to life imprisonment; died in prison on St Nicholas Island in Plymouth Sound, 1665
William Say: b. 1604, politician; escaped to the Continent 1660; lived in Switzerland, Germany and Netherlands, where he probably died around 1666
Anthony Stapley: bap. 1590, politician, died 1655
Sir Gregory Norton: b. 1603, politician, died 1652
*Thomas Challoner (or Chaloner): b. 1595, fled to Netherlands 1660; died in Middelburg a few months later, in August 1660.
Thomas Wogan: b. 1620(?), army officer; imprisoned in York Castle; escaped to Netherlands 1664; died in or after 1667
John Venn: b. 1586, politician, died 1650
Gregory Clement: b. 1594, politician, executed 1660
John Downes: bap. 1609, politician; reprieved from execution and imprisoned for life; died in the Tower in or after 1666
Thomas Waite: army officer; sentenced to life imprisonment; died imprisoned on Jersey in or after 1668
Thomas Scot (or Scott): politician; fled to Flanders 1660; subsequently returned to England under disputed circumstances and executed 1660
John Carew: b. 1622, politician and religious activist, executed 1660
Miles Corbet: b. 1594/5, politician; escaped to Netherlands, seized by George Downing along with Barkstead and Okey; forcibly returned and executed 1662
*Richard Ingoldsby and Thomas Challoner were exceptional in not being present when the king was sentenced, though they later signed the death warrant
Commissioners present when judgment was passed on the king but who did not sign the death warrant; numbering ten in total:
Francis Allen: merchant and politician, died 1658
Thomas Andrews: London merchant and Lord Mayor of London, died 1659
Thomas Hammond: b. before 1605, army officer, died 1651
Edmund Harvey: b. 1603(?), merchant; found guilty of treason 1660 but his life was spared; imprisoned 1661; died in Pendennis Castle, Cornwall, 1673
William Heveningham: b. 1604; sentenced to death 1660, spared and sentenced to life imprisonment; died in Windsor Castle, 1678
Cornelius Holland: b. 1559, courtier and politician; fled to Continent; died Vevey, Switzerland, 1671
John Lisle: b. 1610(?), lawyer and politician; fled to Continent 1660; assassinated Lausanne, 1664
Nicholas Love: b. 1608, lawyer and politician; fled to Continent 1660; died in exile, Vevey, 1682
Isaac Pennington: b. 1584(?), merchant and Lord Mayor of London; sentenced to life imprisonment 1660; died in the Tower 1661
Matthew Tomlinson: b. 1617, army officer; given custody of the king during his trial and up to his execution; avoided trial for treason in 1660; died 1681
Significant associates of the regicides:
Anthony Ascham: bap. 1614, diplomat and pamphleteer; assassinated Madrid, 1650
Daniel Axtell: bap. 1622, an officer of the guard at the trial of Charles I; executed 1660
Andrew Broughton: b. 1602/3, clerk to the High Court of Justice; died 1687/8
John Cook: bap. 1608, lawyer, solicitor-general and chief prosecutor at the trial of Charles I; executed 1660
Edward Dendy: bap. 1613, sergeant-at-arms for the court; arrest ordered 1660; fled and died Switzerland, 1674
John Desborough: b. 1608, leading parliamentarian soldier and politician; died 1680
Dr Isaac Dorislaus: b. 1595, scholar and diplomat, prosecution counsel for the trial of Charles I; assassinated in The Hague, 1649
Francis Hacker: officer commanding halberdiers at the trial of Charles I; signed the king’s execution order; executed 1660
Sir Arthur Haselrig: b. 1601, parliamentarian soldier and important Commonwealth politician; died 1661
George Joyce: b. 1618, army officer; arrest ordered in 1660; fled to Rotterdam with wife and family; last heard of on the Continent 1670
John Lambert: b. 1619 (?), politician and landed parliamentarian soldier; died 1684
Hugh Peters (or Peter): bap. 1598, Puritan preacher and polemicist; executed 1660
John Phelps: b. 1619 (?), clerk to the High Court of Justice; died 1666 (?)
Algernon Sidney: b. 1623, aristocratic republican and political theorist; executed 1683
Sir Harry (Henry) Vane the younger: b. 1613, patrician Puritan and parliamentarian; executed 1662
APPENDIX II: PEOPLE
(An (r) denotes a ‘regicide’ – i.e. a signatory to the king’s death warrant or a judge in the trial who voted for the king’s guilt)
House of Stuart
King Charles I: succeeded to throne 1625; beheaded 1649.
Queen Henrietta Maria: Charles’s widow
King Charles II: Charles’ eldest son, reigned 1660–85
James, Duke of York: second son, reigned as James II 1685–8
Henry, Duke of Gloucester: third son
Henrietta Anne, Duchess of Orléans: daughter of Charles I
Royalists
Sir Heneage Finch: solicitor-general after 1660
Sir John Grenville: royal emissary
Sir Edward Hyde: Charles II’s Chancellor, later Earl of Clarendon
John Mordaunt: leading royalist agent in England 1658–60
Marchmont Needham: master propagandist for the Stuarts (and for the Cromwellians)
Sir Edward Nicholas: secretary of state for Charles I and Charles II
Arundel Penruddock: widow of leader of the Penruddock uprising
William Prynne: archivist/lawyer, former critic of the crown
Silius Titus: courtier
Barbara Villiers: royal mistress
Lucy Walter: royal mistress
Cromwellians
Oliver Cromwell: Lord General 1649, Lord Protector 1653–8 (r)
Richard Cromwell: Lord Protector 1658–9
Sir Charles Coote: Anglo-Irish magnate
Sir George Downing: army intelligence chief
William Goffe: major-general (r)
Richard Ingoldsby: colonel (r)
Henry Ireton: general, Lord Deputy in Ireland and Cromwell’s son-in-law (r)
George Monck: commander-in-chief in Scotland and suspected royalist
Thomas Pride: colonel, notorious for ‘Pride’s Purge’ (r)
John Thurloe: secretary of state and spymaster
Sir Edward Whalley: major-general (r)
Parliamentary soldiers
John Desborough: general
Sir Thomas Fairfax: Lord General in first Civil War
Charles Fleetwood: commander-in-chief 1659
John Lambert: general
Republicans
John Bradshaw: President of High Court of Justice (r)
Thomas Harrison: cavalry general and religious extremist (r)
Sir Arthur Haselrig: MP and dominant voice in Rump Parliament 1659–60
John Lisle: MP, barrister (r)
Edmund Ludlow: commander-in-chief, Ireland (r)
Elizabeth Ludlow: wife of Edmund
John Milton: poet, parliamentary advisor on foreign affairs
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br /> Hugh Peters: Puritan preacher
Thomas Scot: Secretary of Council of State 1659–60 (r)
Algernon Sidney: aristocratic republican and political theorist
Sir Harry Vane: MP, political and religious radical
Officers of the guard during the trial
Daniel Axtell
Francis Hacker
Matthew Tomlinson
Covenanters
Archibald Campbell, Marquis of Argyll
Archibald Johnston, Laird of Wariston
Officials and advisors
Richard Brandon: public executioner
John Cook: lawyer, prosecutor in king’s trial
Edward Dendy: sergeant-at-arms
Isaac Dorislaus: legal academic
Sir Bulstrode Whitelocke: lawyer MP
Spies, plotters and assassins
Joseph Bampfield: mercenary colonel
Aphra Behn: novelist
Abraham Kicke: merchant
Germaine (or John) Riordane: assassin
William Scot: son of executed regicide, double agent
Edward Sexby: disillusioned Cromwellian and royalist plotter
Miles Sindercombe: renegade Roundhead and hired assassin
NOTES
1 The Watchtower
1 Public Record Office (hereafter PRO), SP 29/86.
2 Edmund Ludlow, Memoirs, printed Vevey, Switzerland, 1698.
3 Maurice Ashley, Charles II: The Man and Statesman, 1971
4 Edmund Ludlow, A Voyce from the Watchtower, Part 5, 1660–62, ed. Blair Worden, Royal Historical Society, 1978.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Letters of King Charles II, ed. Arthur Bryant, 1931.
8 Memoires de Mlle. De Montpensier, ed. A. Cheruel, 1889.
9 Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, Life of the Duke of Newcastle, ed. C.H. Firth, 1886.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12 ‘The Parliaments’ Commission to the Earl of Essex to be Captain-General of their Army’, Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–60, 1911.
13 Isaiah 21, 6–9.
14 Ludlow, A Voyce.
2. ‘That Man of Blood’
1 ‘Heads of the Proposals’, 1647. See S. R. Gardiner, Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, http://www.constitution.org/eng/conpur071.htm.
2 Sir William Clarke Papers, PRO.
3 Sarah Poynting, ‘Decyphering the King: Charles I’s letters to Jane Whorwood’, The Seventeenth Century (2006), vol. 21, no. 1.
4 Ludlow, Memoirs.
5 Bulstrode Whitelocke, Memorials of the English Affairs, 1625–1660, London, republished 1860, vol. 2.
6 A true copy of a petition promoted in the army, 1648
7 The Diary of Sir Bulstrode Whitelocke, 1605–1675, ed. Ruth Spalding, OUP, 1990.
8 Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Legibus, Book III.
9 ‘A Remonstrance of His Excellency Thomas Lord Fairfax and the Council of Officers’, 1648, PRO, SP 116/531.
10 The Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, ed. T. B. Macauley, Methuen, 1904.
11 Ibid.
12 According to S. R. Gardiner in History of the Great Civil War, London, 1888–94, the order came from Fairfax, but we can see that Ireton and others were to a large extent directing his actions.
13 Sir Thomas Herbert, Threnodia Carolina or Memoirs of the Last Two Years of the Reign of Charles I, 1678, pub. 1701.
14 Ibid.
15 Mark Noble, Lives of the English Regicides, 1798.
16 Earl of Clarendon, History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, 1717.
17 Herbert, Memoirs.
18 Perfect Occurrences, 23–30 December 1648.
19 James I, Basilikon Doron, Edinburgh, 1599; London, 1603.
20 Spalding (ed.), Diary.
21 Thomason Collection of Civil War Tracts, British Library (hereafter BL), E537.
3 A Wicked Design
1 Christopher Hill, The English Revolution 1640, Lawrence and Wishart, 1940.
2 Ronald Mellor, ‘Tacitus, Academic Politics and Regicide in the Reign of Charles I: the tragedy of Dr Isaac Dorislaus’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, vol. 11, no. 2, 2004.
3 For this insight, the authors are indebted to the human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, QC.
4 ‘A Remonstrance of Lord Fairfax and the Council of Officers’. See Libertyfund.org for complete text.
5 C. H. Firth, Dictionary of National Biography (hereafter DNB), 1889.
6 J. Nalson, A True Copy of the Journal of the High Court of Justice for the Tryal of King Charles I, 4 January 1683, reprinted 1731. Almost all the descriptions of the trial are taken from this source, except where the version of Nalson published in William Cobbett’s State Trials, 1809, 1810, is used, or that given in the more partisan royalist version of events by Gilbert Mabbott, ‘A Perfect Narrative of the Whole Proceedings of the High Court of Justice, in the Trial of the King’, printed 23 January 1648, in Lord Somers’s Tracts, vol. 5, ed. W. Scott, 1811.
7 Mercurius Pragmaticus, January 1648, BL.
8 Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, vol. XI.
9 Ibid.
10 Nalson, A True Copy.
11 C. V. Wedgwood, The Trial of Charles I, Collins, 1964.
12 Anon., The King’s Tryal, in Thomason Tracts, BL.
13 James I, Basilikon Doron.
14 J. Cook, The Poor Man’s Case, 1648.
15 The Moderate Intelligencer, 16–23 January 1649, BL
16 S. R. Gardiner, Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1625–60, Clarendon Press, 1906.
17 Mabbott, ‘Perfect Narrative’.
18 Ibid.
19 J. Cook, ‘King Charles, His Case’, 1649, in The Trial of King Charles the First, ed. J. G. Muddiman, 1928.
20 Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum, the Manner of Government or Policie of the Realme of England, written 1562–3, published 1583.
21 Mabbott, ‘Perfect Narrative’.
22 Cobbett, State Trials, vol. V.
23 Geoffrey Robertson, The Tyrannicide Brief, Chatto & Windus, 2005.
24 State Trials, ed., Cobbett. Augustine Garland states he signed on the last day of the trial. His signature is the twenty-ninth on the warrant.
25 Ibid.
26 A. W. McIntosh, DNB, ‘The Numbers of the English Regicides’, History, vol. 67, Issue 220, January 1982.
4 Execution
1 Herbert, Threnodia Carolina.
2 Ibid.
3 Letter from Charles Stuart to General Fairfax from The Hague, 23 January 1649, from Letters of Charles II, ed. Bryant.
4 Clarke Papers, PRO.
5 Ibid.
6 The Confession of Richard Brandon, Hang-man, London, 1649.
7 Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, XII.
8 ‘Sir Thomas Herbert’s Narrative Concluded’, in Charles I in Captivity from Contemporary Sources, ed. Gertrude Scott Stevenson, 1927.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 ‘Sir Henry Halford’s Report to the Prince Regent, in 1813, on the Discovery and Examination of the body of King Charles I’, contained in Charles I in Captivity, ed. Stevenson.
12 Letter from Sir Thomas Herbert to Sir William Dugdale, 3 November 1681, quoted in Memoirs of the Martyr King, ed. Alan Fea, London, 1905.
5 Propaganda and Assassination
1 F. F. Madan, A New Bibliography of the Eikon Basilike, 1950.
2 L. Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writings: Royalist Literature 1640–1660, Cambridge University Press, 1989.
3 Philip A. Knachel, ed., introduction to Eikon Basilike, Cornell University Press, 1966
4 Society of King Charles the Martyr, http://www.skcm.org/SCharles/Eikon_Basilike/eikon_basilike.html
5 A. Lacey, The Cult of King Charles the Martyr, Boydell Press, 2003.
6 Ibid.
7 John Milton, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, London, 1649.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
Here Milton is quoting Claude de Seyssel, La Grande Monarchie de France, 1519.
10 Thomas Hobbes, De Cive. Although this was released in limited form in 1642, it was not generally published until 1647.
11 Ibid.
12 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651.
13 Bob Clarke, From Grub Street to Fleet Street, Ashgate, 2004.
14 C. V. Wedgwood, The King’s War, Collins, 1958.
15 Francis Cheynell, Aulicus, his dream, of the king’s sudden coming, 1644.
16 Clarke, Grub Street to Fleet Street.
17 A Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe, 1742.
18 John Taylor, Mercurius Melancholicus, Craftie Cromwell and His Murderous Crew, a Tragi-Comedie, 1647.
19 Quoted in J. T. Peacey, ‘Order and Disorder in Europe: Parliamentary Agents and Royalist Thugs 1649–1650’, The Historical Journal, vol. 40, no. 4, 1997.
20 Ibid.
21 Related in The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I, ed. J. T. Peacey, Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.
22 Perfect Diurnall, no. 315, 6–13 August 1649.
23 Robert Chambers, History of the Rebellions in Scotland under the Marquis of Montrose, 1828.
24 George Wishart, The Memoirs of James, Marquis of Montrose, London, 1819.
25 Peacey, ‘Order and Disorder’.
26 F. Peck, Desiderata Curiosa, 2 vols, London 1779; P. A. Maccioni and M. Mostert, ‘Isaac Dorislaus’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, no. 8 (1981–4).
27 S. R. Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, vol. 1, 1897.
28 Peacey, ‘Order and Disorder’.
29 Ibid.
30 DNB.
31 A. Ascham, A Discourse, 1648 (revised 1649); The Bounds and Bonds of Publique Obedience, 1649.
32 Whitelocke, Memorials of the English Affairs.
33 Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth, vol. 1.
34 According to Whitelocke, writing not long after the events, he was employed by Hyde; according to Peacey’s researches, by Cottington.
35 Peacey, ‘Order and Disorder’.
36 John Evelyn, Diaries, vol. 2, Oxford, 1955.
37 For this disgraceful episode, see D. Jordan and M. Walsh, White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America, Mainstream, 2007.
38 The whole tale, so well known, is told in Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth, vol. 2, and in A. Fea, The Flight of the King, 1897.
6 ‘The Honour of Dying for the People’