Italienische Biographik

Holmes, Deborah

doi:10.1007/978-3-476-05229-2_38

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“…The commanders of at least five regiments which had petitioned for 'justice' along such lines -Cromwell, Ireton, Harrison, Deane and Pride -all formed part of Holmes's 'phalanx' of army officers responsible, in his view, for orchestrating that relentless forced march to regicide which was the 'irresistible' will of 'the army'. 68 As Holmes himself remarked, one of the five -Harrison -was later expressly alleged to have urged the trial commissioners to take steps which would 'blacken' the king's name. It is then perhaps all the more significant that the king's judges rejected a form of charge patterned on the February 1648 declaration, which had of course included a restatement of the heavy insinuation of the king's complicity in the so-called 'murder' of his father, James I, at the hands of his favourite, George Villiers, duke of Buckingham.…”

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Instrumenting the trial of Charles I

Kelsey

2018

Hist Res

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This article argues that the legal instruments for the trial of Charles I support and strengthen the argument that regicide was neither the inevitable, nor even the intended outcome of those famous proceedings. Some of the subtleties and nuances of the legislation erecting the high court of justice, and the charges drawn up against the king, help underline the case for saying that the primary objective of the trial of Charles I was to force him to submit to the authority of a rump house of commons, in acknowledgment of their revolutionary elevation to English constitutional supremacy.The trial and execution of Charles I are currently in the course of a major reappraisal. Regicide having conventionally been portrayed as inevitable by the time judicial proceedings against the king began, it has been argued more recently that the king's execution was not even the intended outcome of his trial, let alone its inescapable objective. On this view, the principal goal, in bringing the king before a self-styled high court of justice, on charges of treason, tyranny and murder, was to frighten him into submission to a new constitutional order. An isolated and embattled parliamentarian rump sought thereby to assume control of the person and authority of the king of England in order to help enable and legitimize a revolution establishing the constitutional supremacy of the house of commons in the overthrow of English prerogative monarchy. This revolution was aimed at removing the biggest obstacle to a peaceful settlement of the kingdom, namely the determined resistance of its lawful, sanctified ruler. Thereafter, the presence among the revolutionaries of a king, figuratively bound in chains and hoist back on his throne in order to lend his imprimatur, as necessary, to anything that they might act, would make it easier for this 'frighted junto' to rule England, reconquer Ireland, and hold Scotland at bay. 1 Legislative and procedural aspects of the king's trial lend support to this new historiography of the English revolution. The ill-fated Ordinance erecting a high court of justice, passed by the Commons but then rejected by the house of lords on 2 January 1649, hints at divisions among those organizing the trial of Charles I, as well as the genuine unpredictability of its outcome. 2 More substantively, debate over the charges to be pressed against the king, the evidence adduced in proof of those charges, and the steps in preparation for sentencing the royal prisoner at the bar, all strongly suggest that for most, if not all of his judges, the priority was not to kill him, but to extract his acknowledgment of their jurisdiction, in exchange for his life and his throne. That priority was amply illustrated, over and over, during the public proceedings, when the 1 See, in particular, J. Peacey, 'Marchamont Nedham and the Lawrans letters ', Bodl. Libr. Rec., xvii (2000), 24-35; J. Adamson, 'The frighted junto: perceptions of Ireland and the last attempts at settlement with Charles I', in

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confidence: 99%