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Summary
Summary
On August 18, 1648, with no relief from the siege in sight, the royalist garrison holding Colchester Castle surrendered and Oliver Cromwell's army firmly ended the rule of Charles I of England. To send a clear message to the fallen monarch, the rebels executed four of the senior officers captured at the castle. Yet still, the king refused to accept he had lost the war. As France and other allies mobilized in support of Charles, a tribunal was hastily gathered and a death sentence was passed.On January 30, 1649, the King of England was executed. This is the account of the fifty-nine regicides, the men who signed Charles I's death warrant.
Recounting a little-known corner of British history, Charles Spencer explores what happened when the Restoration arrived. From George Downing, the chief plotter, to Richard Ingoldsby, who claimed he was forced to sign his name by his cousin Oliver Cromwell, and from those who returned to the monarchist cause and betrayed their fellow regicides to those that fled the country in an attempt to escape their punishment, Spencer examines the long-lasting, far-reaching consequences not only for those who signed the warrant, but also for those who were present at the trial and for England itself.
A powerful tale of revenge from the dark heart of England's past, and a unique contribution to seventeenth-century history, Killers of the King tells the incredible story of the men who dared to assassinate a monarch.
Author Notes
Charles Spencer was educated at Eton College and obtained his degree in Modern History at Magdalen College, Oxford. He is the author of four books, including the Sunday Times bestseller Blenheim: The Battle for Europe (shortlisted for the British National Book Awards History Book of the Year) and Prince Rupert: The Last Cavalier . He lives in Northampton, England.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
When Charles I fled England, his Scottish captors sold their disbelieving detainee to an angry English Parliament, which swiftly created a legal method to try and execute their sovereign. In this fun and fast, if bloody, account, Spencer (Blenheim: Battle for Europe) divides the story into three sections: the frantic last days of the Catholic monarch, the internal squabbles of Oliver Cromwell's morality-obsessed Commonwealth, and the mad scramble for self-preservation under the Restoration of Charles II. While Spencer refers to those who deposed the king with the loaded-but accurate-term "regicides" throughout, he slowly builds up the personalities of various regicides without letting their identities too heavily bleed into one another. The profiles of these men reveal the courage of some and the desperate attempts of others to escape Charles II's ire-notably with the aid of two regicides' wives, one of whom inadvertently handed over the damning evidence that convicted her husband and some of his co-conspirators. While many readers already know the story's end, Spencer purposefully builds anticipation over which men suffer excruciating death and which ones literally get away with murder. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
In January 1649, King Charles I of England was executed for treason. This was the culmination of seven years of civil war between the forces of the English parliament and forces supporting Charles and his royal prerogatives. Behind the facade of legality, Charles' fate was preordained as the so-called Rump Parliament, under the pressure of Oliver Cromwell and his New Model Army, tried and condemned him. The monarchy was abolished, replaced by a protectorate under Cromwell. Yet just a decade later, Charles' son was invited back, and the Stuart dynasty was restored. So what was to become of those regicides who had signed off on the execution? Despite hopes that the restored Charles II would follow a path of reconciliation, those he deemed responsible for his father's martyrdom were pursued relentlessly. Spencer paints a sympathetic portrait of these men, most of whom believed they acted in the interests of their country. The lucky ones escaped into exile, while others were captured, tortured, and executed. This is a worthwhile examination of an often ignored aspect of English history.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2014 Booklist
Guardian Review
On a freezing day in January 1649, just two minutes' walk from where 10 Downing Street now stands, the King of England, Scotland and Ireland was neatly beheaded by a man in a black mask. Through a lethal mixture of spite, ignorance and stubbornness, Charles I had led his three kingdoms into civil war and a story that ended - for him, at least - on a Westminster scaffold. For the men who had helped to bring him there, the story was only beginning. In Killers of the King, Charles Spencer, the ninth Earl Spencer and historian, asks what happened to these 80 or so regicides - not only the 59 men whose names and seals appeared on the king's death warrant, but those who had worked in other ways to put the king to death, inventing the authority and the procedure necessary to carry out an act that would have been unthinkable just a handful of years before. Spencer follows the careers of the regicides through the tumultuous years of Commonwealth and Protectorate that followed the king's trial and execution, to the Restoration in 1660, when Charles's son became king. Charles II had promised a "free and general pardon" to those who would recognise his right to rule, but this forgiveness was never intended to stretch to those who had been intimately involved in bringing his father to the scaffold. Spencer is a snappy storyteller, chronicling the sordid politicking and horse trading that characterised the months around the Restoration, as people scrambled to prove their loyalty to the dead king's son. Charles Coote, an Irish royalist who had switched sides when things got tough, made a bid for mercy by tricking several regicides into capture, while the gloriously named Colonel Hercules Huncks saved his own skin by offering damning evidence against his former fellows. Those regicides who had survived the interregnum were firmly in the new regime's sights. A judge's instructions to the jury in a trial of 1660 left little room for clemency. He reminded them that "you are now to enquire of Blood, of Royal Blood, of Sacred Blood . . . This Blood cries for Vengeance, and it will not be appeased without a Bloody Sacrifice". Spencer's attention to the gruesome sights and smells of hanging, drawing and quartering is cinematic: throughout, he shows an eye for the details, gory or intimate. Rather than face trial or execution for treason, some of the regicides managed to escape, either by dying conveniently before the long arm of royal authority could get to them, or by fleeing far away. One lived out his days as a gardener in the Netherlands. But even those who went into exile were not necessarily safe: some were forced to move restlessly from place to place, pursued by informers and assassins for whom a regicide's scalp was a sought-after prize. The sleepy Swiss hamlet of Vevey harboured several of these refugees, protecting them from multiple attempts on their lives. One of their number chose unwisely to venture further afield, only to die riddled with bullets in a Lausanne churchyard, while others kept running as far as New England, only to find that the new king's revenge followed them there. Spencer has a gift for set-pieces such as the killing of Isaac Dorislaus, a Dutch lawyer who had taken part in the king's trial and helped to send a number of royalists to their deaths. Sent as a diplomat to the Hague by the new regime, he took rooms at an inn with only a few bodyguards attending him. At the same time, a rumour was circulating that he had been one of the two masked men seen on the scaffold with Charles: one had swung the axe and the other had shown the king's head to the crowd. Hearing that Dorislaus was nearby, a royalist colonel assembled a gang, stormed the inn and butchered the lawyer as he cowered underneath the chimney. High-octane sequences like these are where this book is at his best. Elsewhere, the difficulty of following a group of 80 very different individuals to their various fates is evident. The stories - even if they are of bloody ends and narrow escapes - can become repetitive. More worrying is that Spencer's narrative often seems built on shaky foundations: this history of Roundheads and revenge is too cavalier with its sources. Too often, he illustrates his narrative of Charles's trial with sources dating from much later - John Evelyn's diary, for instance, which was written in a greatly changed political climate. Another of Spencer's key sources for his reconstruction of Charles's trial is a book published in the year of the Restoration, which attacks the regicides as "the murtherers of his late sacred majesty of most glorious memory". It claims to be "an exact and most impartial accompt" of the trial; it is neither. Unreliability doesn't automatically rule out the use of a source, but Spencer's fault lies in sidestepping crucial issues of trustworthiness and bias. His headlong narrative leaves little room to stop and consider how we build our stories, and why that matters both ethically and politically. In the poisonous atmosphere of the early Restoration, whether the regicides lived or died was decided in large part by the stories people chose to tell about them, and those they worked to conceal: retelling them demands a keen critical eye. The killing of Charles I is still a divisive issue: you can join the Society of King Charles the Martyr, to pray for the man its members believe to be a saint and "for the defence of the Church of England against the attacks of her enemies". Alternatively, you could stop by the oddly triumphalist exhibit at Cromwell's house in Ely - a museum which allows you to vote on whether Cromwell was a hero or a villain by sticking magnets to a wall. For all Spencer's attempts at objectivity - he is relatively clear-eyed about parliamentarian atrocities, and avoids painting Charles as a monster - this is still a story about heroes and villains. Following John Milton, who wrote that the killing of Charles had been "an action so distinguished, so worthy of heroic ages", Spencer sees the regicides as "courageous men who dared to kill a king in the hope of bringing peace to their traumatised land". Even if Charles's execution was a good day's work, it need not mean that the men behind it were any less bigoted or controversial than the king they chopped down. - John Gallagher Spencer follows the careers of the regicides through the tumultuous years of Commonwealth and Protectorate that followed the king's trial and execution, to the Restoration in 1660, when Charles's son became king. Charles II had promised a "free and general pardon" to those who would recognise his right to rule, but this forgiveness was never intended to stretch to those who had been intimately involved in bringing his father to the scaffold. Spencer is a snappy storyteller, chronicling the sordid politicking and horse trading that characterised the months around the Restoration, as people scrambled to prove their loyalty to the dead king's son. Charles Coote, an Irish royalist who had switched sides when things got tough, made a bid for mercy by tricking several regicides into capture, while the gloriously named Colonel Hercules Huncks saved his own skin by offering damning evidence against his former fellows. More worrying is that Spencer's narrative often seems built on shaky foundations: this history of Roundheads and revenge is too cavalier with its sources. Too often, he illustrates his narrative of Charles's trial with sources dating from much later - John Evelyn's diary, for instance, which was written in a greatly changed political climate. Another of Spencer's key sources for his reconstruction of Charles's trial is a book published in the year of the Restoration, which attacks the regicides as "the murtherers of his late sacred majesty of most glorious memory". It claims to be "an exact and most impartial accompt" of the trial; it is neither. - John Gallagher.
Kirkus Review
C.V. Wedgwood's masterwork told this story in three volumes, but Britain's Charles I (1600-1649) loses his head on Page 55 of this fascinating, one-volume account in which British historian Spencer (Prince Rupert: The Last Cavalier, 2008, etc.) describes what happened afterward.Stubborn and authoritarian, Charles provoked a rebellion that ended in his defeat, capture, trial and execution. Nearly 60 of the 83 "commissioners" who conducted Charles' trial signed his death warrant. Careful to observe bureaucratic niceties, they carefully preserved the warrant and all records, a move that proved to be a bonanza for historians as well as Royalists on their return 10 years later. Before assuming his father's throne in 1660 (following Oliver Cromwell's death two years earlier), Charles II issued his famous Declaration of Breda, proclaiming general forgiveness for those who declared their loyalty "excepting only such persons as shall hereafter be excepted by Parliament"a big loophole. Readers will initially be sympathetic to Royalists who suffered under the republic, which treated Charles I badly, executing him after a distinctly Stalin-esque show trial. However, they will reverse their sympathies as Charles II and a new Parliament, dominated by Royalists, wreaked vengeance. Spencer recounts the mostly dismal fates of the surviving regicides. Thirteen were tried (in equally Stalin-esque settings) and executed, mostly by drawing and quartering, a gruesome, protracted procedure. Nineteen received life imprisonment under awful conditions, and few of those survived. Fifteen fled to Europe and three to America where several were murdered by Royalists, three kidnapped and returned for execution, and the rest passed anxious lives, the last dying in 1689. A gripping account of the aftermath of Britain's revolution, during which both sides fought for justice and Christianity and behaved despicably. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Spencer (Blenheim) has taken a novel approach to the history of the English Civil War (1642-51) and the Restoration that began in 1660. Rather than focusing on battles or court intrigues, Spencer gives the accounts of the regicides: the men who signed the warrant to have Charles I (1600-49) executed. This is an ambitious project as 59 men in total signed the document. The author provides a brief background of the English Civil War as well as Charles's trial and doesn't skip the dramatic execution scene, which was later to incriminate so many men. Spencer is unable to follow all of the regicides' stories, sometimes because they were so successful in concealing themselves from the legal revenge of the Restoration court that they have disappeared from the historical record entirely. VERDICT This account is readable and entertaining but might have benefited from a slight reduction in scope. Tracking several individuals who scatter in various directions is a test not only of the author's narrative skill but of a reader's ability to recall names. However, Spencer's excellent popular history will appeal to fans of Alison Weir and those interested in British history. Hanna Clutterbuck, Harvard Univ. Lib., Cambridge, MA (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
Author's Note | p. xi |
Prologue | p. 1 |
1 Man of Blood | p. 3 |
2 A King on Trial | p. 29 |
3 The Republic | p. 57 |
4 A New Monarchy | p. 81 |
5 The Word of a King | p. 101 |
6 A Bloody Sacrifice | p. 129 |
7 Men of God | p. 149 |
8 A Time to Die | p. 173 |
9 Surrender or Else... | p. 189 |
10 Strangers in a Strange Land | p. 205 |
11 A Swiss Sanctuary | p. 227 |
12 Vengeance at Last | p. 241 |
13 An Ocean Away | p. 259 |
14 Into the Wilderness | p. 277 |
15 To the Last Man | p. 297 |
Notes | p. 303 |
Bibliography | p. 317 |
Acknowledgements | p. 321 |
Index | p. 323 |