ABSTRACT
During the course of the eighteen months which followed the royalist defeat in the civil war, the leaders of first the Long Parliament and then the New Model Army made a series of attempts to negotiate a political settlement with Charles I, which would allow him to continue ruling but with more restricted powers than he had enjoyed before 1642. In the event, none of these efforts to reach a compromise proved successful. In 1648 Charles tried to recover his throne by military means with the help of a Scottish army, but these forces and the other English royalists who once more took up arms in the summer of 1648 were again defeated by the New Model Army. This decision by Charles to renew the fighting finally convinced the leaders of the army that he would never accept their terms for a settlement. Abandoning all efforts to reach an accommodation with him, they instead decided to proceed against him at law as a traitor who had waged war against his own people. Following a show trial before a revolutionary tribunal in early 1649, Charles was publicly executed at Whitehall on 30 January. After outlining these events in more detail, this chapter will consider whether Charles’s ultimate fate was to a great extent unavoidable, or whether, as has frequently been argued, he himself did much to bring it about and thus deserves to be regarded as ‘his own executioner’.
