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By Root 1333 0

’s, or the Victorians”. History is more often a diversion or entertainment than a guide to action, or to justice – a stock of stories to divert rather than experiences in which we can find ourselves reflected, informed, or even corrected. Remote events such as the English civil war are very unlikely to be recruited as a detailed guide to action in current political affairs. That may be a mistake; but it may be one reason why the current generation is more comfortable with a plurality of meanings, or parallel realities and alternative values.

Thomas May certainly saw some advantage in this multiple perspective: ‘If those that write on the other side will use the same candour, there is no fear but that posterity may receive a full information concerning the unhappy distractions of these Kingdoms’.7 Milton, surprised, offended but not cowed by the hostile response to his arguments about divorce, went further: he embraced this clash of opinion as the best route to the truth. Our generation is more sceptical about the possibility of such final truths, and more likely to find more than one meaning in the events of the 1640s. Emphasizing this indeterminacy has contemporary warrant too, since those who lived through the wars certainly did. It was a conflict fought with pens as well as swords, and which ‘divided the understandings of men, as well as their affections’. In fact, in a sense, it was what the war was about.

Killing the King did not settle the arguments. For most people, even many of those most responsible for carrying it out, the execution of Charles had not been the main business of civil war politics, the abolition of monarchy even less so. Those who carried through this revolution subsequently declared England to be a ‘Commonwealth and Free State’, to be governed by the supreme authority, ‘the representatives of the people in Parliament, and by such as they shall appoint and constitute as officers and ministers under them for the good of the people’. These ideals were neatly expressed in the new Great Seal: ‘1649 in the First Year of Freedome by Gods Blessing Restored’. The central image was not a head of state, but the representative of the people, the expression of their sovereignty. In practical terms, however, this vision proved more difficult to realize than simply by maintaining government ‘without any King or House of Lords’. Throughout the 1640s the strength of the parliamentary alliance had been as a negative force – anti-Laudian, anti-episcopalian and, eventually, explicitly anti-Caroline. As a movement for a positive and defined end it had been liable to fissure, and this continued to be the case.

In the regicide we might see the consummation of a number of revolutionary impulses: the army purged the Commons of its corrupting elements, hoping thereby to create a body more nearly representative of the people; the purged Commons shed an inhibition and passed an Act without the consent of the Lords or the King; the King was held to be a man, answerable like all others to the representative of the people, his interest subordinate to the salus populi, and capable of treason against the state erected to defend it; the children executed their father. But this was, even in the last days, a reluctant consummation. In these final weeks the party who most wanted Charles dead may have been Charles himself: in his martyrdom lay the best hope for monarchy as he understood it, more attractive by far than the various emasculations being proposed to him. It was probably personally appealing too. Unable to ‘deal’ with rebels, it was better to call their bluff, to let them paint themselves into a corner and be forced to commit this final, monstrous, barbarity.

If we can be reasonably sure what the regicide meant to Charles, then, its wider meaning was more complex. Although this was clearly not a popular act, there were at least two Londoners who were actively thrilled by these events: Phineas Payne, the boastful man about town, intent on impressing countrymen; and Samuel Pepys, the equally boastful schoolboy.8 Moreover,