The King's Revenge by Michael Walsh, Don Jordan Read Free Book Online

trial lawful authority involved much legal head-scratching.
     For the people of England, the trial of their king was the latest in adrawn-out series of miseries. The country was broken by war, there was widespread hunger and people lived in fear and uncertainty
     characterised by the witchcraft trials still held up and down the land.
    Not many years had passed since the prosperous early period of Charles’s reign, when the country’s manufacturing had been
     growing and its overseas trade thriving. But at the same time, Charles alienated many sections of his people. From 1629 to
     1640 he ruled without calling a Parliament and imposed forced loans from the gentry and aristocracy to raise finance. New
     customs duties were levied, to the anger of the business classes, who were further infuriated by the selling of trade monopolies
     to the highest bidder and – most explosive of all – the king’s expansion of ship money, a tax traditionally paid only by counties
     on the coast, to cover all counties in England. 1 He then alienated Parliament over the balance of power. If that were not enough, he also alienated large sections of the
     population by dictating how they should worship.
    Once Charles did call a Parliament, in 1640, the struggle became one between a king who longed for a pre-Reformation style
     of rule based on monarch and Church, and a Parliament that wished to keep the northern European Reformation firmly on track,
     with fewer powers for the king and more powers and religious freedom for the people. While the king longed for a medieval
     world of certainty and hierarchy, many of his people were turning in frustration to English political history, the classical
     world and the Bible for examples of how the powerful could be held to account. A heady brew of new and old ideas swirled around
     mid-seventeenth-century England. Those who were about to put the king on trial felt that somewhere in all of this, legitimacy
     could be discovered.
    Judges were chosen by the Rump for the High Court of Justice to try the King. The court’s composition was designed to represent
     a cross-section of the non-royalist establishment – parliamentarians, lawyers, senior army officers and wealthy businessmen.
     As for the actual charge, that would be drawn up once the court was convened.
    On 8 January 1649, at two in the afternoon, the High Court of Justice sat for the first time in a preliminary session, without
     Charles being present. The purpose was to choose court officials and decide how to announce the trial to the people. The meeting
     took place in the Painted Chamber in the Palace of Westminster. The room was a sorry sight. Once it had been the glory of
     the Plantagenet kings, its walls brightly painted with coloured images of saints, kings and queens; now the silvery afternoon
     light played across paintings dulled by four hundred years of soot and neglect.
    The session did not start well. Two-thirds of those appointed by Parliament as judges failed to turn up. In all, 53 out of
     153 took their places. The quorum had been set at twenty, so discussions went ahead.
    Two clerks were appointed. Little is known of one of them, Andrew Broughton. The other, John Phelps, was to play a crucial
     role, arranging a daily shorthand record to supplement the notes taken by the stenographers. It is from these sources that
     we have most of what we now know about the conduct of the trial. Phelps was an ambitious young man from Salisbury, educated
     at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Having been an assistant to the senior clerk of the House of Commons, he was an ideal choice.
     Next, the court selected four lawyers to conduct the prosecution. The most senior by far, the Lord Chief Justice, feigned
     illness and didn’t turn up. Another appointee also failed to show up. The two who agreed to participate were well qualified
     for the historic task. Isaac Dorislaus was an eminent Dutch academic who had been the first professor of