Killers of the King: The Men Who Dared to Execute Charles I - Charles Spencer

When many of us think of monarchs who were killed by their people, we typically turn our eyes toward the French Revolution, with the deaths of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette via guillotine. Some of us may even think of the Russian Revolution in 1917, when Tzar Nicholas II and the rest of the Romanov imperial family were gunned down by the revolutionary Bolsheviks. Few of us, unless we are well-versed in British history, tend to think of one of the earliest examples of regicide in modern history: the execution of King Charles I in 1649. While previous monarchs had undoubtedly been dispatched and assassinated behind closed doors, in the era of growing instability and political turmoil of the 17th century, we see a truly unprecedented event: the public trial, conviction, and execution of a sovereign. It is often easy for us to forget just how radical this moment was within English history. To some, it signaled the victorious triumphs of the will of the people over an immoral tyrant. To others, the King’s public execution was the highest form of treason and blasphemy, as they lamented the death of God’s divinely-appointed representative. 

While much has been written about the reign and downfall of Charles I, the rise of Oliver Cromwell in his wake, and the ultimate restoration of the monarchy via Charles II, there’s been much less attention directed toward the men who conspired to put the king to death. In his 2014 book, Killers of the King: The Men Who Dared to Execute Charles I, Charles Spencer, the ninth Earl Spencer, historian, and brother of the late Princess Diana, seeks to follow the subsequent trails of these regicides. Painting them in a highly sympathetic light, Spencer tells the stories of what happened to those 80-some regicides as they fled for their lives from the revenge-bent Charles II in the wake of his restoration to the English monarchy. 

Overview:

At the start of the book, we are brought in media res, just after the events of the English Civil War and the immense bloodshed that it wrought upon the fields of England. Spencer paints a picture of Charles I as a king who had a grandiose view of his authoritative powers, and after the fighting against the armies of Parliament, he began to be viewed increasingly as a tyrant. The narrative begins with the captivity and trial of King Charles I, as he repeatedly shows his contempt for Parliament and the courts, asserting that they have no right to try a king. Despite all of his protestations and sincere belief in his own divinely appointed authority, many of Charles’s judges were former soldiers, still bitter over the bloody events of the English Civil War. In a brief account, Spencer speeds through the execution of King Charles I in January of 1649 in the second chapter, which is followed by a brief account of the 10-year Interregnum (the republic Commonwealth government in England during the rule of Cromwell), as well as eventual restoration of the monarchy under Charles I’s son, King Charles II in 1660. 

The remaining bulk of the book then traces the movements and eventual fates (most of them bloody) of the regicides, those men who made the decision to execute their king. Although Charles II had promised a pardon to those who recognized his rule, such measures of grace did not extend to those who had a hand in beheading his dear father. What follows is a bloody and chaotic manhunt for the regicides. Spencer details the internal politics as some figures within the new government scrambled to prove their loyalty to the new king, while others fled to the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the colonies in North America. We read accounts of regicides hunted down and brutally assassinated by bounty hunters as the long arm of the new monarchy stretched across nations. We see Cromwell’s body exhumed and posthumously executed on the twelfth anniversary of the king’s death. Spencer likewise details many of the gory ends that several regicides endured, as they were hung, drawn, and quartered. This is described in vivid detail, which reads much like Foucault’s infamous introduction to Discipline and Punish. As these retributive executions went on, however, Spencer argues that they became less effective tools for the Royalists, and the regicides began to be shaped into the image of martyrs. 

Spencer also details the various regicides who fled the country in order to preserve their lives, such as Goffe and Whalley, who evaded the king’s men with the aid of friends and governors in the New England colonies (where their names can be found throughout the streets of New Haven, CT via Goffe Street and Whalley Avenue). For many of these fled regicides, the long arm of the King’s revenge forced them to live lives of perpetual terror, as they restlessly ran from shelter to shelter to evade their incessant pursuers. In the end, Spencer praises these men for their courage and wit, describing them as “courageous men who dared to kill a king in the hope of bringing peace to their traumatized land” (302). 

Commendations:

First of all, this book is written in a highly readable narrative style. At it’s best moments, it can be a gripping read. Spencer has a gift for bringing certain scenes to life in vivid detail, taking a complicated and complex period of religious and political strife and turning it into a highly engaging and readable account. Without getting too lost in the weeds, Spencer does a commendable job in describing the basic political and religious climate of the era, including the apocalyptic worldviews of the Fifth Monarchists, who were an extreme Puritan sect that believed Christ would return in the year 1666. 

Spencer is particularly adept at describing settings and narrative events in a cinematic way. Whether relaying the covert assisination of Isaac Dorislaus, describing the gruesome death of Thomas Harrison at the first public execution, or taking us through the harrowing, narrow escapes of Goffe and Whalley, Spencer has a keen eye for detail and storytelling. Short, particularized scenes such as these are where this book truly shines. Spencer also includes a collection of full-colored images and portraits in the center of the volume, which helps to put faces to the many names of the regicides that arise throughout the work. 

Furthermore, his attention towards the horrific sights, smells, and sounds of hanging, drawing, and quartering is quite intimate and explicit. While some of his descriptions may overwhelm those with particularly weak stomachs, his representations are indeed accurate and paint the regicides in a rather heroic light. While these scenes are often repeated several times through the subsequent arrests, trials, and executions of more and more regicides, reach one still remains unique in their capacity to fascinate and perturb. 

As such, this book serves as an intertwined biography of the many men who had a hand in killing King Charles I, and it is strangely fascinating to read about their various paths that led them either to freedom or death. Along the way, we are able to learn a few details about their multifaceted (and sometimes divergent) motivations, and what prompted them to make their decision to execute their sovereign. In this end, Spencer’s work gives a fairly good historical narrative of the events that led to the death of the king and what eventually happened to his killers. Yet, in some of the finer historical details of this account, Spencer’s work falls a bit short. 

Critique: 

While this is an easily accessible book, Spencer’s narrative style leads it to gloss over the finer details of the historical account. I was rather surprised that the trial and execution of the King sped along at such a breakneck pace, with Cromwell’s subsequent Commonwealth government only taking up one brief chapter. Thus, only three chapters in, we are left with twelve chapters about the fates of the regicides. To be fair, this is completely acceptable in a work whose focus is on the regicides. Yet, we are left with a rather large cast of characters (around 80 regicides), and while the book does not attempt to trace every single one, the accounts that we do read start to blend together and become rather repetitive. This is not entirely Spencer’s fault, however, since this balance between brevity and detail is a difficulty that any historian would have to face. 

However, one of the more glaring issues from a historian’s perspective is the issue of sources, and just which sources are used to build a particular historical narrative. While I must plead that I was rather ignorant of the historical execution of Charles I before reading this work, I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that the narrative, which pits the heroic, brave regicides against a villainous, bloodthirsty monarchy, might be a bit too simplistic. Accordingly, I have since done a bit of research into these events, comparing Spencer’s notes and bibliography to contemporary scholarship. 

Spencer relies rather heavily on the memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, a fellow regicide who (spoiler!) survived in exile until 1692. His memoirs, titled, A voyce from the watch tower, were written while he was in exile, and were heavily rewritten and edited at the end of the 17th century by its publisher. In 1970, copies of the original manuscripts were discovered in Warwick Castle, leading many scholars of the era to reassess the reliability of the memoirs. While Spencer, in an author’s note at the beginning of the book, acknowledges these facts, he also reassures the reader, via another historical expert on Ludlow,  that the manuscripts can be “profitably consulted.” Yet, Spencer never sources the original manuscripts discovered in 1970, instead referring to editions printed in 1751, 1771, and 1882. Yet, the question of reliability does not contain itself to Ludlow alone. 

Many of the primary sources that are utilized throughout the work are taken at face value. For example, in the chapter on Charles I’s trial, several sources are utilized that were written over a century after the events they describe (such as Mark Noble’s 1798 works Memoirs of the Protectoral-House of Cromwell and Lives of the English Regicides, T.B. Howell’s 1816 work, A Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason and Other Crimes and Misdemeanors, and Agnes Strickland’s 1843 work, Lives of the Queens of England, from the Norman Conquest). Even many of the anonymous primary sources written contemporaneously to the execution of the king should be viewed with a skeptical eye, as they purport to describe “a perfect narrative of the whole proceedings of the high court.” While these accounts claim to be impartial and exact, they are far from it, instead being written in defense of the newly restored monarchy. 

To be clear, a historian mustn’t exclude any primary documents that have clear biases. If that were the case, then no historical work could ever be done! Yet, despite all their differences, both historians and scholars of religion like myself are obligated to read texts with a hermeneutic of suspicion. Spencer’s weakness lies in his glossing over of these key issues regarding the trustworthiness of the sources he utilizes. While this book is more of a simple retelling of the narrative, it does still matter what stories we choose to tell and which ones we exclude. For many of the regicides caught in the toxic environment of a newly Restored monarchy, the difference between their survival and their grisly death could be determined by what stories those around them told. As such, it is important to ask: what particular narrative is Spencer trying to persuade us of through his retelling? 

Despite all of the attempts at offering an objective account, Spencer still sets up a clearly defined moral difference between the monarchy and the regicides. Spencer is rather sympathetic towards the regicides, utilizing sources that often present the killers of the king as brave defenders of freedom. As a religious studies scholar, I couldn’t help but compare the descriptions of the regicides’ executions to the hagiographical accounts of martyred Catholic saints. Indeed, Spencer sees these men as martyrs, risking their lives to stand against tyranny, as he writes in the acknowledgments “They deserve, in my view, to be remembered with respect for their sacrifices: this book is my tribute to them” (321). 

Yet, even if the death of Charles I was entirely justified, this does not necessarily mean that the men who disposed of him were saints in their own right. In fact, while Spencer depicts Charles II as a bloodthirsty, vengeful monarch, the book also makes clear that the true enemies of the regicides were their former allies within Parliament. Throughout the book, we see the scapegoat mechanism at work, as former soldiers and military men who fought against Charles in the English Civil War used the men who put him on trial as a type of sacrifice for the new monarch. Several regicides were captured by former friends who wanted to prove their loyalty to the newly reestablished Crown. Through this work, instead of representing the popular will, we see what is essentially a military coup against the Crown. Whether this was justified is up to the discretion of historians, and while Spencer does depict the sincere conviction of the regicides, he does little to justify their actions. Because the first few chapters are so short, unless the reader has a deep background knowledge of the atrocities of the English Civil War, it’s difficult to position the regicides as true moral heroes. Instead of a tale of two moral monsters fighting it out, we are given a rather unconvincing tale of good versus evil, which while it makes for a compelling read, it also fails to paint an entirely accurate picture. 

Conclusion:

In short, while it seems like I’ve been fairly critical of Spencer and his work, I actually enjoyed this book more than I thought I would. Despite its flaws, it really is a great primer on the event of Charles trial, execution, and the resulting fallout, even if you have little to no prior knowledge of the era. If you’re a scholar of this era in English history, there’s not much you’ll find new, but for the casual reader, it does a fantastic job in communicating the basic narrative in a compelling manner. Even so, just be wary of a slightly skewed version of the historical narrative. While it could have been more fully fleshed out (Cromwell is mentioned more in passing and the preceding Civil War is only briefly summarized at the start), the book is relatively short (at 300 pages) and Spencer does a commendable job in focusing on those who had a hand in the death of the king. While the treatment of its sources leaves much to be desired, Killers of the King is a light, gruesome, and relatively quick retelling of this paradigm-shattering event: the death of the “divinely appointed” King of England and head of the Church of England, Charles I.