on 23 April 1661, following the
Restoration of the monarchy. The 1639 to 1651
Wars of the Three Kingdoms were fought by
Royalist supporters of Charles I, and an
alliance between his
Parliamentarian and
Covenanter opponents in
England and
Scotland respectively. Although Royal authority in political and religious matters were key issues, the war was fought primarily over political power and religious authority. Charles was defeated in the 1642 to 1646
First English Civil War. In January 1649
a trial court was arranged, composed of 135 commissioners. Some were informed beforehand of their summons, and refused to participate, but most were named without their consent being sought. Forty-seven of those named did not appear either in the preliminary closed sessions or the subsequent public trial. At the end of the four-day trial, 67 commissioners stood to signify that they judged Charles I had "traitorously and maliciously levied war against the present Parliament and the people therein represented". Fifty-seven of the commissioners present signed the
death warrant; two further commissioners added their names subsequently. The following day, 30 January,
Charles I was beheaded outside the
Banqueting House in
Whitehall; Charles II went into exile. The
English monarchy was replaced with, at first, the
Commonwealth of England (1649–1653) and then
the Protectorate (1653–1659) under Cromwell's personal rule. Following the death of Cromwell in 1658 a power struggle ensued. General
George Monck—who had fought for the King until his capture, but had joined Cromwell during the Interregnum—brought an army down from his base in Scotland and restored order; he arranged for elections to be held in early 1660. He began discussions with Charles II who made the
Declaration of Breda—on Monck's advice—which offered reconciliation, forgiveness, and moderation in religious and political matters. Parliament sent an invitation to Charles to return, accepting the
Restoration of the monarchy as the English political form. Charles arrived in
Dover on 25 May 1660 and reached London on 29 May, his 30th birthday.
Treatment of the regicides In 1660, Parliament passed the
Indemnity and Oblivion Act, which granted
amnesty to many of those who had supported the Parliament during the Civil War and the Interregnum, although 104 people were specifically excluded. Of those, 49 named individuals and the two unknown executioners were to face a
capital charge. According to
Howard Nenner, writing for the
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Charles would probably have been content with a smaller number to be punished, but Parliament took a strong line. Of those who were listed to receive punishment, 24 had already died, including Cromwell,
John Bradshaw, the judge who was president of the court, and
Henry Ireton. They were given a
posthumous execution: their remains were exhumed, and they were hanged, beheaded and their remains cast into a pit below the gallows. Their heads were placed on spikes above
Westminster Hall, the building where the
High Court of Justice for the trial of Charles I had sat. In 1660, six of the commissioners and four others were found guilty of
regicide and executed. One was hanged and nine were
hanged, drawn and quartered. On Monday 15 October 1660,
Pepys records in his diary that "this morning Mr Carew was hanged and quartered at
Charing Cross; but his quarters, by a great favour, are not to be hanged up." Five days later he writes, "I saw the limbs of some of our new traitors set upon
Aldersgate, which was a sad sight to see; and a bloody week this and the last have been, there being ten hanged, drawn, and quartered." In 1662, three more regicides were hanged, drawn and quartered. Some others were pardoned, while a further nineteen served life imprisonment. Most had their property confiscated and many were banned from holding office or title again in the future. Twenty-one of those under threat fled Britain, mostly settling in the Netherlands or Switzerland, although some were captured and returned to England, or murdered by Royalist sympathisers. Three of the regicides,
John Dixwell,
Edward Whalley and
William Goffe, fled to
New England, where they avoided capture, despite a search. Nenner records that there is no agreed definition of who is included in the list of regicides. The Indemnity and Oblivion Act did not use the term either as a definition of the act, or as a label for those involved, and historians have identified different groups of people as being appropriate for the name. Shortly after the
Restoration in Scotland, the Scottish Parliament passed an
Act of Indemnity and Oblivion. It was similar to the English
Indemnity and Oblivion Act, but there were many more exceptions under the Scottish act than there were under the English one. Most of the Scottish exceptions were
pecuniary, and only four men were executed, all for treason but none for regicide, of whom the
Marquess of Argyll was the most prominent. He was found to be guilty of collaboration with Cromwell's government, and beheaded on 27 May 1661. File:Aldersgate Hollar.PNG|An old illustration of the Aldersgate, File:Execution of Cromwell, Bradshaw and Ireton, 1661.jpg|alt=A gallows is in the centre of the image, to its left a large bonfire; a crowd watch.|The execution of the bodies of Cromwell, Bradshaw, and Ireton, from a contemporary print File:Oliver Cromwell's head, late 1700s.jpg|alt=Refer to caption |A drawing of
Oliver Cromwell's head on a spike ==Regicides==