Killers of the King

October 20, 2014
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.

Starred review from November 15, 2014
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.

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November 15, 2014

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

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