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By Root 1375 0

reminiscent of the Grand Remonstrance. Instead, what was charged was the shedding of his people’s blood since 1642, in England and Ireland but not in Scotland. As drawn up the charges were easy to beat and many amounted to little more than pointing out that he had been present at some of the battles of the first civil war. It was clearly difficult to prove, in court, that his presence on those occasions had been ‘carried on for the advancement and upholding of a personal interest of will, power, and pretended prerogative to himself and his family, against the public interest, common right, liberty, justice, and peace of the people of this nation, by and from whom he was entrusted’. Still less did it clinch the argument that he was ‘the occasioner, author, and continuer of the said unnatural, cruel and bloody wars; and therein guilty of all the treasons, murders, rapines, burnings, spoils, desolations, damages and mischiefs to this nation, acted and committed in the said wars, or occasioned thereby’.54

The trial of Charles I

This latter phrase, which concludes the charge, is a more or less direct quotation from the army Remonstrance which preceded the purge, but its insistence on Charles as the sole author of the troubles made it unlikely to stick. It might in fact have been an invitation to get the King, having pleaded, to allow others to be executed instead of him. The army, in fact, had said as much: if this cannot be proved, ‘let him then be acquitted in judgement and the guilt and blame be laid where else it is due’.55 In any case, few people can have thought that this was the set of charges most likely to secure a conviction, and it may be that they were deliberately enfeebled – the obvious weakness of the charges might have served as a bait to get the King to plead. If this is right it suggests once more that the real point of the trial was to get the King to recognize the court, not to secure his conviction. If the King could be tempted to answer the charges he would, implicitly, have recognized the jurisdiction of the court, and the claims about the constitution that it implied. Once he had pleaded a number of outcomes were possible – restoration as a monarch fettered by the principle of popular sovereignty, or deposition in favour of the Duke of Gloucester among them. Just as importantly, a number of very unappealing outcomes would have been foreclosed.56 These were desperate calculations, made in dire political circumstances, and this is not a point that one would want to start from in constructing a settlement. But this was where things stood, and this was one way out, well short of regicide.

For Charles there was plenty of reason to believe that he could embarrass his prosecutors, by refusing to plead – he had good principled and practical reasons to deny the implied claims about popular sovereignty – and thereby confronting them with the divisive question of what to do next. Sure enough, when the King appeared, on 20 January, he demanded to hear proof of the jurisdiction of the court. On 22 January, Charles, ‘discoursing with those about him’, apparently ‘spoke very much against the court, as no true judicature, and that he did not believe the major part of the commissioners were of that opinion’.57 And there was the rub. This was to be Charles’s main contribution to the drama – his refusal to recognize the legitimacy of the tribunal – and one significant source of encouragement to him in pursuing this line was that he did not believe his accusers were convinced about it either, and he was not completely wrong. He was certainly in a position to know that there were divisions even among those arranging the trial about what it was supposed to achieve, and he played on those divisions very successfully. He did not doff his hat to the officers of the court, and appeared in the garb of a Knight of the Garter, an expression of his respect for the aristocratic traditions of the English monarchy. He denied that this was a parliamentary court since he could not see any Lords, and he seemed willing to stand at the