Dan Snow's History Hit - The Trial of Charles I

Episode Date: April 14, 2024

In the mid-17th century, King Charles I of England was put on trial for treason against the sovereign state. Such a process involved a singular determination by Parliament to find a way, through due legal process, to try the one they saw as a man of blood, to ensure that he paid the price for his faults and failings, but not through extrajudicial summary justice.To understand how such a thing came about, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb speaks in this episode of Not Just the Tudors to Professor Edward Vallance, who has deeply researched King Charles I's trial. This episode was produced by Rob Weinberg.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code DANSNOW sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/We'd love to hear from you- what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. It's that wonderful, that joyful time of the week when I share one of our sibling podcasts. This one is about the trial of Charles I. Now, lots of things are said to be the greatest of the fight, the event, the trial of the century. Well, this is one of those rare occasions when it absolutely certainly was. It was held in the mid-17th century. It was one of the most momentous events ever to have taken place in Westminster Hall. Kings of England have been deposed. They've been murdered. But never before or after has one been tried and condemned to death while still king. Please enjoy this episode of our wonderful sister podcast, Not Just the Tudors,

where Professor Susie Lipscomb and Professor Edward Vallance delve into the trial of the century, perhaps the trial of the millennium, and one that shook all the kingdoms of Europe. This is the trial of Charles I. Enjoy. This is the trial of Charles I. Enjoy. involved a singular determination by Parliament to find a way to try the one they saw as a man of blood, through due legal process. To ensure that he paid the price for his faults and failings, but not through extrajudicial summary justice, this would be a trial that

called witnesses. Even a butcher testified against his king. To understand how such a thing came to be, we have to dial back to explain why the civil war had broken out and how the king himself came to be blamed against all historical precedent. And we have to wonder at why it was so very important to have a trial and whether there could have been a different outcome. To discuss this, I'm joined by Professor Edward Vallance of the University of Roehampton. Professor Vallance has written several excellent journal articles pondering Charles I's trial, and his latest book is A Radical History of Britain. Professor Ted Vallance, welcome to Not Just the Tudors.

Thank you, nice to be here. I thought we'd start with some simple, straightforward questions. Professor Ted Vallance, welcome to Not Just the Tudors. Thank you, nice to be here. I thought we'd start with some simple, straightforward questions. So we're going to be talking chiefly about the trial of Charles I, but we need to do some context first. Could you answer that sort of old chestnut and disclose for us the grounds for the Civil War? All right, brilliant, yes. within a couple of minutes. Yeah, the Civil War is really prompted by the unpopularity of Charles I's regime across the British Isles, so not just in England. And that's really important because although there's growing opposition to his policies in England, that doesn't turn into rebellion. At least first of all, it's in

Scotland that we first see the outbreak of rebellion against the religious policies that Charles I is imposing upon his northern kingdom. Primarily, that's the trigger for the rebellion in Scotland. So religion is a huge factor here, and it's Charles's vision of the church across his kingdoms which is heightening tension in Ireland and Scotland and England's vision of the church across his kingdoms which is heightening tension in Ireland and Scotland and England. One of the main reasons for this is that although Charles is a Protestant his kind of vision of what Protestantism is something that looks to quite a lot of English Puritans as something that is moving the church back towards Roman Catholicism. So in particular, the emphasis upon ceremonial, the emphasis upon a kind of separation between the sacred and profane,

the idea that you can have some sorts of entertainments on the Sabbath rather than Sabbath being kept for worship alone. These are all flashpoints for a lot of the sort of hotter sort of Protestants in England. And Charles's attempt to bring his churches into congruence, if not uniformity, is something that also raises a great deal of anxiety in Scotland, which is predominantly Calvinist in outlook, with strong kind of Presbyterian elements there. This is also connected to the way in which the king is governing and the way in which he is supporting his rules. So Charles has been governing without Parliament for 11 years because of disagreements with parliament early on in his reign over foreign policy, over taxation, and he's been basically supporting his regime through

prerogative means, through prerogative taxation. And that has led critics in England to feel that he is ruling beyond the law and also fearing that without Parliament being in session, there isn't really any kind of body or organisation that can hold the king to account or that can bring grievances from the country to the king's attention. So broader anxieties here that go beyond the religious sphere, they're about Charles I's government, how he is governing, his style of government. Some of these criticisms are going to the extent, even at this stage in the 1630s, of making allusions to Charles being a tyrant, comparable to Roman emperors such as Nero, for example. All of these are quite subdued and kept under wraps during the 1630s, but we can find them there in some of the sort of polemical

Puritan writings of that period. It's a combination of opposition to his religious policies and opposition to the way in which Charles is governing the anxieties about his government that leads to the Civil War. First of all, with the outbreak of rebellion in Scotland against the imposition of a prayer book that many in Scotland see the imposition of a prayer book that many in Scotland see as an English text and the text which introduces sort of popish elements into the Scottish church and that outbreak of rebellion in Scotland provides an opportunity for Charles's English critics as well because it basically forces Charles to go back to parliament to seek money to support this war that he needs to wage against these Scottish

rebels. And that then gives the opportunity for critics in Parliament to start attacking the personal rule of Charles I and the religious and political policies that he's been pursuing. Now, during 1641 in particular, probably moments in which it might have been possible for the King to, if you like, build bridges with his opponents and to have resolved these issues within Parliament. The problem, again, is that British and Irish dimension, because what is happening in England and Scotland is also triggering anxieties in majority Catholic Ireland as well. And so the triumph, if you like, of more puritanical elements in England and Scotland is raising anxieties amongst Irish Catholics. And there

are longer standing issues as well, which relate to Charles's government in Ireland too. But what we see then is an outbreak of rebellion in Ireland as well. This creates a new security situation. It also really significantly ramps up anxiety about Popery, about the Catholic threat. There's a fear here that actually Charles is not unsympathetic to these rebels. In fact, there's a circulation of a faked commission from Charles authorising the rebellion. And there's anxieties here that Charles may use any army that's raised to suppress this Irish rebellion, actually not against the Irish rebellion, actually not against the Irish rebels, but against Parliament itself. And that he may even welcome these sort

of Irish Catholic rebels into England to commit all sorts of terrible imagined atrocities and so forth. So the Irish rebellion really stymies attempts at compromise and negotiation and plays into the hands of more hardline figures within Parliament who want tougher measures, more limitations on the king's power, who want a more puritanical church settlement. And it also ramps up these security concerns. So we're increasingly looking more towards sort of military confrontation, rather than just polemical debates within Parliament and in the press as well. Ultimately, this breakdown of trust really comes to a crunch point in January of 1642, when Charles attempts to arrest MPs that he sees as

his leading critics within the Commons for treason. He comes to the Commons with an armed force. All the people are anxious that he's turning into a tyrant. This is really fitting into that particular picture. Those MPs have actually already been warned off. They've fled the scene. So Charles is not even successful in decapitating, as it were, the opposition to him. And very shortly after that, as a result, not just of parliamentary anger at this move, but also public anger, which is turning into mass demonstrations against the king, the king decides to move out of London altogether. We then face a sort of gradual move into armed

confrontation, which then breaks out in the autumn of 1642. Well, that was a magnificent summary of the grounds for the Civil War. We do need to consider the progress, I suppose, from August 1642 onwards and when the king is defeated, essentially, the attempts to put terms to him which he regularly rejects. Could you briefly give us an overview of that? Yes. The First Civil War in England lasts between 1642 and 1646 and it's ultimately the parliamentarians who emerge victorious from this first conflict. I think it's important to stress though, just in terms of what happens later, that there are all sorts of twists and turns in terms of this military conflict

and there are points at which it seems in fact that the royalists will emerge victorious. And this does a number of things which were important in terms of our understanding of the events which follow. One is it brings the Scottish Covenanters, so these are the figures who've risen to power because of their opposition to Charles I's religious policies, much more into English politics because the English Parliament needs a military alliance with the Scottish Covenanters in order to resist the Royalist Army. So that alliance is forged in 1643 and it gives the Scots Covenanters a much greater kind of influence and role within

English politics from then on. The other thing about that ebbing and flowing is really twofold and that's the impact that it has on sort of politics and political ideas and also the impact that it has on how parliament organises its army which becomes then very significant as we move on. Actually very early on in the civil war we see a shift in the rhetoric from the initial position that this is a war that is being fought not against the king himself but against his evil counsellors who've been misadvising him and leading him astray and leading him to wage this war with Parliament. Instead, what we see is as early as 1643 is some pamphlets which are starting to say, actually, no, look, it's Charles who's

responsible for this. It is Charles who has initiated the war. It is Charles who is behaving in a way which is compatible with describing him as a tyrant, and which means that he should suffer the fate that tyrants have traditionally faced. So there's a kind of radicalising of ideas that we see here, even quite early on in the Civil War. That's quite a major shift, isn't it? I mean, if you think back a century earlier, everything is always framed in terms of the evil counsellors of the king, because it gives a let out clause to everybody. And it's important to state that because of what you've just said, that a lot of this material is anonymous. People are not really ready to put their names to these sorts of arguments. But

these arguments are being voiced fairly early on in the Civil War. And one of the reasons why they're being aired at that point again comes back to that question of the sort of ebbs and flows of the campaign there are points in 1643 where it actually looks really bad for the parliamentarian cause where it looks as if the royalists are going to seize control of london and they consider all kinds of ways in which they might try and address the situation one of the things that is discussed is the idea of a general rising, so levee en masse, where they will basically recruit a citizen army within London to resist the royalist army that's approaching the capital. And the people who are the architects of

this idea of the general rising are people like William Wallin, and there are also figures who are leading radicals within the city itself. Now, Wallen is somebody who later on we associate with the Leveller movement. And there's a reason for this, which is the ideas that are supporting this campaign for a general rising are also founded on notions of popular sovereignty, the idea that the people are sovereign, and establishing a kind of people's army as a military manifestation of this. And also, again, to come back to that point around breaking this idea that it's not a war against the king, that the king, in fact, is just a public officer, and there's nothing illegal for the people to resist somebody who is supposed to be serving them, ultimately. The other thing that is really

significant about these military ebbs and flows is the way in which they force parliaments to rationalise its military organisation. One of the difficulties they face is the difficulties of getting field armies to fight outside of the areas where they're being raised. So what they then do in 1645 is create one main parliamentarian field army that what we know is the new model army and the creation of the new model army is significant because what we see from the development of that organisation is also an emerging sense that army is a single kind of political entity it's not in their own words a mercenary army, but an army that has been created to defend the liberties and freedoms of the English people.

There's also some really interesting things that then happen in terms of the organisation of the army itself. It establishes something called the General Council of the Army, which is really unusual because it's basically a kind of proto-democratic organisation. because it's basically a kind of proto-democratic organisation. So instead of the traditional kind of military hierarchy where you've got the officers at the top and the rank and file at the bottom, you've now got this really important body in which you have representatives of the rank and file who are basically being put on the same level as their commanders. And a growing sense in which, certainly from the rank and file,

this is absolutely appropriate. They do have to have commanders, but ultimately, because it's a citizen's army, in fact, actually, the rank and file must have a say in terms of the governance of the army itself. And of course, those sorts of democratic elements are something that we see really come to the fore in the post-Civil War period. Now, what happens in the period after Parliament's victory in the Civil War is that Charles really plays a sort of game of shopping around with his opponents, of trying to find the best possible peace terms. So first of all, he surrenders himself to the Scots Covenanters,

because he thinks they're the most likely to give him generous peace terms. That doesn't work for him. So he then is passed over to Parliament, he tries to negotiate with Parliament. That doesn't work for him. So he then is passed over to Parliament. He tries to negotiate with Parliament. That doesn't work. He's taken out of parliamentary custody by the army. He negotiates with the army. That doesn't come to meaningful fruition. He again goes back to negotiating with bits of the Covenant regime that we know as the Engagers because they enter into this engagement with Charles I. So he's basically shopping around for two or so years after the end of the First Civil War, different parties, both trying to get the best possible peace terms out of things,

but also, it seems, really playing for time, in the hope that at some point, all of these different factions are going to fall apart amongst themselves, or there'll be an opportunity, as eventually presents itself to him in late 1647, which is for him to enter into some sort of military agreement to effectively recover his authority without having to negotiate significant concessions in terms of his own power. So eventually we get to the point in which it is decided that Charles must be tried.

to the point in which it is decided that Charles must be tried. We get to January 1649 and the High Court of Justice. And given what you've said about the army and what we've talked about in terms of him trying to negotiate with people, can you tell me about the nature of the authority of the court that tried the king? On what grounds did they have the authority to do so? That was very problematic for them. And actually, there are discussions before the court is set up in December of 1648, when Cromwell in particular is considering this, have meetings with leading lawyers where they're trying to get a kind of legal view about whether they can bring the king to trial. And uniformly, the kind of legal opinion is no they can't there isn't a court that could try the king for treason because the conception of treason is that it's actions or conceiving of actions that threaten the king's life in person so on how could the king be guilty

of treason now what those who are sort of with the trial do is that they're not trying to set up what we might describe as a kangaroo court. They're trying as hard as they can to establish something that has some sort of basis in legal precedent and contemporary legal frameworks. This is a kind of hybrid court. So it brings together elements of the English common law, it brings together elements of civil law procedure, it brings together elements of the way in which military courts and martial law procedure works to try and establish some sort of arena and procedure by which they can try Charles. What they're building upon as well is something that has been happening over the 1640s

in dealing with some of those evil counsellors who identified Charles I. So figures like Thomas Wentworth, the Earl of Stratford, and William Lord, Archbishop of Canterbury. Now in those trials, Parliament had tried to reconfigure what treason meant. Instead of being this idea of an attack upon the king's person, it was instead being reconceived as an attack upon the kingdom. They end up with in the trial is a reshaping of treason so that what Charles is being accused of is waging war against his kingdom, against his people, the sovereign people of England. So it's involved this kind of reconfiguring of treason within the trial and it's also involving a reconfiguring of procedure here as well. So we don't have a judge and a jury, instead we've got commissioners who

occupy status of both jurors and also judges at the same time. There's a total of 135 of them who are named in the initial legislation, although about a third of these don't turn up. And there's also some sort of real ebbs and flows in terms of the attendance of those who do appear as well. In addition to these commissioners, we've got prosecutors who are appointed to lead the case against the king. And again, these prosecutors reflect that sort of hybrid nature of the court. So we've got people here like Isaac Doris Louse, who are experts in both international law and also in martial law as well. And we've also got figures like John Cook, who is an expert in the common law and a big

advocate of England's common law too. The importance of bringing these different traditions into play as well is for us to understand what the court is trying to hold Charles accountable for. And in the charges that are brought against the king, they are essentially focusing upon what we might now describe as being war crimes and the idea of command responsibility. So the charges almost exclusively relate to what happened during the First Civil War. They argue that Charles initiated the war, they argue that Charles was present on the battlefield at various sort of major conflicts during the 1640s, basically urging on his troops, major conflicts during the 1640s, basically urging on his troops, that he encouraged atrocities and abuses of not just combatants, but non-combatants as well. So that presence of experts in military

law is really important there, as well as that international dimension, because in international law at the time, there is a growing understanding that in fact this idea of command responsibility can even extend to a king who is held to have led his army in a war against his people might be held to account for the bloodshed that has resulted in that particular conflict. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Yonaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history.

We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. you've alluded to it but perhaps we can address explicitly the fact that there is this big historical debate about the objective when it came to trying charles i was his death a predetermined outcome of the court proceedings? Or by contrast, was it the least likely outcome? Where do you fall on this? Yes. So there is this major debate. It's been

a big debate around the trial for the last decade or so. The historian Sean Kelsey has basically argued that the trial was not intended to end in the King's death. He describes it as a form of extended negotiation. So this is really another attempt to, through this kind of legal proceedings, negotiate with Charles and get him to accept terms. On the other side, you've got historians such as the late Clive Holmes who are arguing that no, actually the intent of the trial was always to end in a capital sentence. And partly this is for not just legal reasons or political reasons, but for religious reasons as well. The idea that Charles I was a man against whom, in Cromwell's words, the Lord had witnessed. He was a man of blood, somebody who had to be punished in order

to assuage the wrath of God. And there's this sort of almost apocalyptic and millerian imperative behind the proceedings inevitably meaning that they were going to lead to Charles I's death. My view about this is that the debate between Holmes and Kelsey leads us to a point where we start losing sight of the fact that this is a trial and what those who've been involved in the discussions around what to do with Charles I had resolved upon, and what was really interesting about what they'd resolved upon, was that they decided to go for a public trial of the king. And that's what's really unprecedented here, because regicide itself is not unprecedented in the early modern period or the late medieval

period. There are several examples of English monarchs who are bumped off by their own subjects, whether it's on the battlefield or whether it's after they've been deposed in the case of Richard II, for example. But what's really unique here is this trial and this public nature of it. And the reason I think that they decide upon this course of action is because the number one demand that is coming out across the autumn of 1648 and we have to remember here there's actually quite a lot of public activity going on and petitioning activity going on in the autumn of 1648 the number one demand is for justice they're calling for not just the, but for other leading royalists to be brought to account for what they seem to have done in the civil wars. Those kinds of texts are demanding justice. They're not necessarily demanding that the king be killed, although we might read that

as being a kind of inevitable conclusion to draw out from those kinds of texts. So for me, the most important thing is the fact that they've chosen this path of establishing a trial in order to show that they're proceeding against the king in a way of justice. They're not just going to bump him off. They're not just going to do this thing, as Thomas Harrison, one of the regicides, later says, is a thing done in a corner. I do not think that there's an option here for Charles I, even if he were to have accepted the authority of the court and entered into a plea, to have got off. I don't think the intent of the proceedings is to give him an opportunity to actually acquit himself of these charges and therefore be found not guilty. It is, I think, instead, as John Cook really frames it in the pamphlet that he published after the

trial a way of establishing by legal means the crimes that he says the king is publicly notorious of so it's a way of saying we have investigated these matters and we have now proved it legally so can I clarify are you saying there was no way that he could have been declared not guilty because of the weight of evidence against him not because you're saying that this was an unfair trial? Both, really. We should generally say that what we might term state trials in the early modern period, they're not fair. They're not intended to set up an even playing field between the defendant and the prosecution. They're intended to demonstrate that the state has dealt with its enemies. And in this case, the capital enemy is Charles I. He is the figure

who is alleged to have waged war against his sovereign people, to have led to all this bloodshed, this destruction, all the rest of it, and he's now going to be brought to book. And that's the purpose of these sorts of state trials, is to show that justice has been performed and the state has emerged with its authority intact. But it's also about that weight of evidence that you're talking about. The king's judges go to significant efforts to secure evidence against the king. So ultimately 33 witnesses give evidence against Charles I. They don't do it in open court, they do it in private session in front of the commissioners. But we can see that they went to considerable efforts to secure this evidence. For example, we know that they actually issued public proclamations to try and

get people to come to Parliament to deliver evidence against the King. Although Vatican newsletters actually demonstrate there was a pretty poor response to those proclamations. It says that only one miserable independent soldier, Cobbler, turned up in response to this proclamation. But there were lots of other witnesses where they were doing things like getting people from actually quite far away bits of the country to come specifically to London to deliver evidence against the king. There are many other witnesses as well who are actually also serving junior officers and soldiers within the New Model Army who also appear as witnesses in the trial too. And partly we could see this as a product of bias.

These are people here who are parliamentarian soldiers. Some of them are actually what are described as agitators. So they are representatives of the rank and file in the army. And some of them are also people who are signed up radicals, as it were, who have shown their sympathies for the democratic level of movement. But they're also people who can give good evidence that the king was actually present on the battlefield because they were actually there too. I've got a number of questions I want to ask you

about the witnesses. I suppose the first thing is, what do we know about them? Why them? Are they being induced to testify? Are they patsies? What is it about these particular people, apart from that presence on the battlefield, that they can testify to that moment? Are they voluntary? There are many questions about who they are. Yeah, I think it's a bit of a mixture in terms of whether they have volunteered to give evidence or whether they're being coerced or ordered into giving evidence. Some of them later say that they were forced by their commanders to give evidence at the trial. So one of the witnesses, Samuel Burden, who's actually a soldier in Daniel Axtell's troop, when the regicides themselves are put on trial in

the restoration period, says that he was basically ordered by Axtell to give evidence. And the reason why Axtell was picked upon Burden in particular is because Burden was a former royalist as well. It's pretty common during the Civil War for people to switch sides, whether voluntarily or because they're basically forced to do so. Burden was able to testify about the king's presence on the battlefield because he had been in the king's army, so he was close enough to the person of the king on the battlefield to see him there and to give that testimony. But there are others, as I've said, who we might imagine were probably very happy to give evidence and may well have

been politically motivated to give evidence. So the very last witness who gives evidence is a Richard Price. And he's just described in the trial journals as being a scrivener. But in fact, that description doesn't tell us really very much about who Price was. Price was really a key figure in the sort of radical movements in 1640s London. So he's connected to some of those individuals who were involved in plans for general rising back in 1643. He's an associate of level of figures like William Wallen. He's involved in acting as an agent provocateur for the parliamentarians in the mid-1640s, and that's actually what he delivers his evidence about, a plot that Charles I is allegedly involved in trying to orchestrate. And he's also one of the

figures who's involved in late 1648 in discussions about settling the kingdom upon the basis of the leveller's agreement of the people, instead of the ancient constitution of king, lords and commons. So we've got figures like Price who've got this sort of long history of involvement in radical activity which is now, if you like, almost in a way coming to fruition in their presence here at the trial delivering evidence against the king. The last thing I'd want to say about the witnesses as well, I think it's really important to think about how revolutionary in a way the calling of these witnesses is. Now in one sense it's part of affirming a murder charge. We've got witnesses who can confirm that Charles is present when people are being killed on the battlefield and so on and they're holding him

accountable for that and having multiple accounts underwrites that charge. But the other element of it as well is of having the charges against the king being substantiated by the evidence of individuals of pretty lowly social status. So we've got people like a 22 year old butcher as he's described in the trial proceedings Diogenes Edwards giving evidence against the king. Now, as I said, this evidence wasn't delivered in open court because Charles didn't enter into a plea. But it was imagined that if he had have entered a plea, they would have been delivering evidence in open court before the king, with the king present there. And that's a really remarkable and dramatic challenge to the

traditional social and political hierarchy. That's so interesting, because I wanted to ask you why the witnesses had been heard privately. And it boils down, does it, to this legal point that the king doesn't tend to a plea, because otherwise it doesn't seem to quite fit that you're getting witness testimonies to encourage wider public acceptance of the king's guilt, but then the testimonies are given privately. That's absolutely right. So the fundamental issue that the court commissions are faced with is that the king will not recognise the authority of the court. He will not enter a plea of guilty or not guilty. And they try multiple times during the trial to get him to enter a plea so that they can move forward with publicly presenting the case and

publicly presenting the evidence. What is interesting however, and you've just picked up on this really, is that not only is the witness evidence heard in private, it is also not reported in full. The trial proceedings in general are being widely reported in the press. What is happening is you've got shorthand note takers within the trial itself, they're taking these notes, the notes are then being passed on to the publishers of contemporary newspapers, newsbooks as they were called at the time, and then within 24 to 48 hours those proceedings are in print available for people to buy. So really for the time a really rapid kind of turnaround in terms of the dissemination of that news. But in the case of the witness's testimony

there are only little fragmentary reports of this that come out in the news books. They don't report the evidence in any kind of real detail and in fact it doesn't appear in print at all until the post-restoration period, in English, I should say. But it does appear in French in 1650, because in 1650, Parliament basically decides to publish a French-language version of the trial for international consumption to justify its proceedings to an international audience, and it reproduces the witness's evidence in full there in French. It is very interesting that they don't publish those testimonies from the witnesses during the trial itself or shortly after the trial in English and I think one of the

reasons for that is it sheds too much of a light on the inner workings of the trial. The connections for example that could have been drawn between some of these witnesses and some of the military commissioners in particular. So we've got people here who are providing testimony and their commanding officers are commissioners on the court. And that obviously leads to all sorts of questions about the independence of their testimony and the reliability of their testimony. and the reliability of friends murder rebellions and crusades find out who we really were by subscribing to gone medieval from history hit wherever you get your podcasts and you've mentioned already that some of what the witnesses are saying is, you know, we can place Charles at this particular location at a certain time. And I'm acknowledging the sort of problems we have with

witness depositions as evidence and the fact that they're mediated and curtailed and all that sort of thing. But what else are they accusing him of? Particularly, I suppose, I'm interested in the way that early modern thinking conceived of tyranny as being something about character as well as action. Yes, I think that's a really important observation. Tyranny is not just about a leader, a monarch who breaches the law through their actions, through their rule. It's also about a type of character. Tyrants are unstable. They're almost at the mercy of their emotions and passions, and this leads them to take these kinds of illegal actions. And that's something that some of the witness testimony is also trying to point at. So there's one particular deposition from a witness which is about the sack of Leicester after its storming by royalist forces.

And the witness basically says that parliamentarians are basically telling the king that his forces are abusing parliamentarian prisoners who've been seized, the sack of Leicester. And the witness says, the king says, I don't care. You can abuse them, you can whip them, whatever you want to do. They're my enemies. And it's exactly that sort of lack of control that this testimony is trying to point towards, of saying this is not somebody who exhibits the characteristics of a king, this is somebody who exhibits the characteristics of a tyrant. Similarly, we get

witnesses who give evidence to the king's duplicity as well. So there are accounts of him trying to enter into backroom deals with various parties and showing him as basically unfaithful, somebody who will say that he'll negotiate with anyone, and somebody whose word cannot be taken with any kind of credibility. And does that connect up with the idea of the man of blood that you were talking about earlier? Do they believe that a religious justice is being served as well as a legal one then? I think some of them certainly do, but the language of the man of blood doesn't enter into the trial in very significant ways. It is mentioned in the trial in the President of the Court, John Bradshaw's closing statement after Charles I has been condemned and sentenced. But it's interesting the way in which Bradshaw's closing statement after Charles I has been condemned and sentenced. But it's

interesting the way in which Bradshaw uses it. The idea of blood guilt is as a language and an idea of moral admonition, rather than as a way of saying this justifies the imposition of this capital sentence against the king. He picks up upon the biblical story of David and his responsibility for the death of Uriah the Hittite. So this is the story where David basically has an affair with Uriah's wife Bathsheba and he orchestrates a way in which Uriah will get killed on the battlefield. And then David is basically very remorseful for his actions and so on. And as a result of this remorse, he's effectively forgiven by God. And so what Bradshaw is actually trying to say through this story is now that you've been condemned,

if you show remorse for your actions, this would be a way for you to look after your position in the afterlife, not in this life. to look after your position in the afterlife, not in this life. It's not being used in the trial as a way of saying the king is guilty and therefore he must pay for all this bloodshed with his blood. It's being used to say, actually, Charles, you've now been condemned, but you should reflect on what you've done and you should show contrition for it and therefore God will forgive you. Do you think in the end, Ted, that Charles was a particularly bad king? Was he a tyrant? I think there are ways in which his actions, both during the 1630s and during the 1640s,

would actually have met contemporary definitions of tyranny. Now, does that make him particularly bad, worse than his father, say, or worse than his sons? I'm not sure that he is that much worse than them. In some ways, I think, as others have said, he's less competent, and thereby he ends up in the position that he ends up in. I think the other important thing about Charles's character is the way in which he tends to view any sort of opposition to him as tantamount to rebellion and a direct assault on his authority. And this is one of the things that really gets him into trouble in the 1630s. He can't deal with the opposition in Scotland as something that he can negotiate away or make concessions about and deal with.

can negotiate away or make concessions about and deal with, he sees it straight from the office, this kind of rebellion against him and against his authority and adopts this kind of hardline position, which just ramps up the political temperature. And he adopts that kind of stance over and over again. And it's the same thing with his approach to negotiation, not really being willing to make concessions in earnest and therefore undermining the kind of trust in him. And ultimately, when we get to the trial, he's not temperamentally, in terms of his personality, somebody who can enter into a plea, even if a plea of not guilty, and argue before this court, because he sees that court as entirely illegitimate and the people who are behind it as just these terrible rebels.

entirely illegitimate and the people who are behind it as just these terrible rebels and there's absolutely no reason why he should in any way bow towards their authority by entering into a plea. So I don't think he's necessarily in the ranks of the very worst kings if we were to make a kind of top 10 or anything like that but I think he's somebody whose personality, as well as some of his actions, meant that it was easier to accuse him of tyrannical behaviour than perhaps if he had a different kind of approach towards political challenges. So in a nutshell, perhaps many kings of the period could be accused of tyranny quite fairly, but he was less good at hiding his tyranny. Yeah, also, I think probably to be an effective king at points in time, most of them were doing things that could be represented as tyrannical actions in terms of

overusing perhaps prerogative powers at certain points, dealing with opponents in certain ways. And we might wonder if they didn't deal with him in those ways, whether their authority would have been maintained as effectively. So I think one of the things I keep trying to get away from is any sense of saying he had it coming or yes, guilty or so on. They establish a case against the king that they feel that they can hold or so on, they establish a case against the king that they feel that they can hold him accountable on, which is the reason why they only try him on events primarily that take

place during the First Civil War. They don't try and talk about what goes on in the 1630s or 1620s because they don't think they can provide evidence against him of those kinds of charges. But that doesn't mean that Charles I deserved to die, or there's some sort of moral case that should be made around this. I think it's much more interesting to think about the way in which this was a trial, which was being moved forward, not just by these commissioners within Westminster Hall, but it was also being moved forward by a much broader body of opinion within the army, but also outside of the army in terms of groups of radicals in London and in the provinces as well, who had come to a point where they believed that the way in which the king had

to be dealt with was through this legal proceeding. Finally then, you've said that he had to be dealt with was through this legal proceeding. Finally then, you've said that he had to be dealt with legally and you've said that you don't think there could have been an outcome other than guilty. He's executed on the 30th of January. I mean, I was taught at school that nothing in history is inevitable. Could there have been another outcome? Possibly. So one interesting thing that we might look at is the trials that follow just after it. So in February of 1649, other Royalist commanders are put on trial by the same court in the same venue. So the High Court of Justice, Westminster Hall, trials that then conclude in early March with the conviction of all of the defendants. But the thing that then happens is that the

sentence is referred back to Parliament for a decision and Parliament actually decides to reprieve two of those defendants from the imposition of a capital sentence. Now I think in Charles's case this is much more difficult because of that failure to enter into a plea. And the difference in what happens in February and March of 1649 is that defendants enter pleas against the charges. But I think that there is a possibility of some sort of alternative punishment, perhaps, being entertained. One other piece of evidence that might point in this direction is what Parliament is doing with the King's children. So his younger children, Elizabeth and Henry, are basically in Parliament's custody, but they are not then butchered or being prepared to be strung up. Parliament is actually and does actually look after them whilst they remain in their custody. And so I think there's a sense in which they're not trying through this to do a sort of English Caterin and Bert. They're not trying to wipe out the entire English royal family. And there might have been an option perhaps for Charles to go into exile or to remain in prison. And for, as was being

rumoured potentially at the time, for his younger son Henry to instead become a kind of puppet king. And so I think all of those sort of potential possibilities are there. Ultimately, they continue down the route of deciding to execute Charles. And as you've said, he is executed on the 30th of January outside his banqueting house. But as there were reports at the time, and as later sort of alleged after the restoration, even in that act of signing the death warrant, there's hesitancy. There's reports of commissioners saying that their hands are forced. There's evidence that the warrant itself had names added afterwards rather than all at one time. So there's evidence really late in the stage of things of sort of hesitancy and second thoughts about carrying through this particular sentence.

Well, thank you very much indeed for not only a wonderful overview of the causes of the Civil War and the course of the Civil War, but then this forensic examination of Charles's trial. It's been really fun, if one can say that about the death of the king. Thank you very much, Ted, for your time. Thank you. And thanks to you for listening to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, and also to my researcher Alice Smith and my producer rob weinberg we are always eager to hear from you so do drop us a line at not just the tudors at historyhit.com or on x formerly known as twitter at not just tudors and please remember to follow not just the tudors wherever you get

your podcasts so you get each new episode as soon as it's released.