ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the difficulty of writing about regicide in the 1790s. Focusing on the career of the clergyman and antiquary Mark Noble, it demonstrates how the publication of Noble’s Lives of the Regicides in 1798 affected his publishing career. While his earlier collective biography of the Cromwell family had both established his literary reputation and secured him important patrons, the publication of Lives of the Regicides severely damaged his career as a writer, even though Noble was a loyalist who framed his work as a warning to the regicides of France. Despite having prepared many other historical works for publication, Noble was forced to return to producing apolitical, antiquarian works. Noble’s case illustrates the broader difficulty in the 1790s of invoking the memory of 1649 even to condemn the actions of both French and English revolutionaries. This in turn reflects wider concerns about fuelling the radical imaginery in an Age of Revolutions. Nonetheless, the chapter argues that Noble’s work, regardless of its shortcomings, was influential in opening up the regicide as a subject for first genealogical and then historical research.
