Killers of the King
The Men Who Dared to Execute Charles I
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3.3 • 3 Ratings
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- £11.99
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- £11.99
Publisher Description
Charles Spencer tells the shocking stories and fascinating fates of the men who signed Charles I's death warrant in this Sunday Times bestseller
'Seamless, pacy and riveting ... exceptional' ALISON WEIR
'The virtues of a thriller and of scholarship are potently combined' TOM HOLLAND
'Outstanding: a thrilling tale of retribution and bloody sacrifice' JESSIE CHILDS
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January, 1649. After seven years of fighting in the bloodiest war in Britain's history, Parliament faced a problem: what to do with a defeated king, a king who refused to surrender?
Parliamentarians resolved to do the unthinkable, to disregard the Divine Right of Kings and hold Charles I to account for the appalling suffering and slaughter endured by his people. On an icy winter's day on a scaffold outside Whitehall, the King of England was executed.
When the dead king's son, Charles II, was restored to the throne, he set about enacting a deadly wave of retribution against all those – the lawyers, the judges, the officers on the scaffold – responsible for his father's death.
Bestselling historian Charles Spencer explores this violent clash of ideals through the individuals whose fates were determined by that one, momentous decision. A powerful tale of revenge from the dark heart of royal history and a fascinating insight into the dangers of political and religious allegiance in Stuart England, these are the shocking stories of the men who dared to kill a king.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
When Charles I fled England, his Scottish captors sold their disbelieving detainee to an angry English Parliament, which swiftly created a legal method to try and execute their sovereign. In this fun and fast, if bloody, account, Spencer (Blenheim: Battle for Europe) divides the story into three sections: the frantic last days of the Catholic monarch, the internal squabbles of Oliver Cromwell's morality-obsessed Commonwealth, and the mad scramble for self-preservation under the Restoration of Charles II. While Spencer refers to those who deposed the king with the loaded but accurate term "regicides" throughout, he slowly builds up the personalities of various regicides without letting their identities too heavily bleed into one another. The profiles of these men reveal the courage of some and the desperate attempts of others to escape Charles II's ire notably with the aid of two regicides' wives, one of whom inadvertently handed over the damning evidence that convicted her husband and some of his co-conspirators. While many readers already know the story's end, Spencer purposefully builds anticipation over which men suffer excruciating death and which ones literally get away with murder.
