The Parliamentarians were strong in London and East Anglia.

Reddit did not allow me to copy the table comparing the number of soldiers each side had during major battles of the English Civil War.

Most of the English people and Commissioners of the High Court of Justice were against the trial and execution of Charles I as shown by their reactions and by the number of Commissioners who attended the trial and signed the death warrant of Charles I.

The fact that the army and Parliament restored Charles II shows that people were not willing to sacrifice themselves for the idea of popular sovereignty or a republic. As will be seen, there was not even a legal attempt by the Puritan overlords to make the people sacred. On the scaffold, Charles told the crowd “A subject and a sovereign are clean different things, and therefore until they do that, I mean, that you do put the people in that liberty as I say, certainly they will never enjoy themselves."

The bill of attainder against Strafford passed the Commons on April 20, 1641 with only fifty-nine members voting against the bill of attainder.

On April 29, 1641 the bill was argued before the House of Lords and they passed the bill on May 8, 1641.

Incidentally, Charles later thought that his execution was divine punishment for letting one of his most loyal servants be executed. It also bothered Royalists and made them delay siding with the King in the English Civil War. If Charles was to allow one of his most loyal servants to be executed, then would he allow them to be executed when making peace with Parliament?

The bill of attainder for Archbishop Laud passed the House of Commons on November 16, 1644 and the House of Lords on January 4, 1645. The Long Parliament ignored the royal pardon issued at Oxford on January 5, 1645 showcasing their future willingness to disregard the need for a monarch in the law of treason and in the idea of sovereignty. A pardon is the exception that only the sovereign can make. Laud was executed five days later.

Cromwell was a deeply religious man who believed that he was on a mission from God. This mission from God would result in Cromwell experimenting with different Parliaments. On December 6, 1648 with the help of Colonel Thomas Pride, he removed from office those hostile to the trial of Charles I and made the Rump Parliament. He then replaced them with the Barebone’s Parliament in April 1653 after the Rump Parliament had failed to produce a working constitution and attempting to stay in session despite an agreement to dissolve. Cromwell as Lord Protector had two parliaments in 1654 and 1656. The 1654 Parliament did not pass the eighty-four bills Cromwell wanted ratified and was dissolved. The 1656 Parliament involved not seating 100 representatives because they were not “godly enough.” Cromwell believed in “rigid honesty” and “insisted on worth rather than rank in his subordinate commanders.”This belief in meritocracy would alienate MPs during the Barebone’s Parliament.

The next session of the High Court of Justice started at 10:00 AM on Monday January 22, 1649. Gilbert Mabbott noted that “as [Charles] went down the stairs…the People in the Hall, cried out, some ‘God save the King’ and most for ‘Justice.’” Mabbot’s political views may have caused him to hear fewer cries of “God save the King” and most for “Justice” but the fact must be remembered that this was an official account commissioned by Parliament. If Mabbott had written the opposite, he may have faced the fate of the purged members of Parliament.But if what Mabbott says is true, then this may weaken Charles’ later argument that the purged Parliament did not have the support of public opinion. Then again, Royalists may not have appeared near the trial for the fear of being arrested. And some of the people in the crowd may have stayed silent out of fear that they may be arrested for support of the King. This fear was justified as the Captain of the Guard was told to “fetch and take into his custody those who make any disturbance.”

Philip Henry, a seventeen-year old boy, was present and noted that “The blow I saw given, and can truly say, with a sad heart, at the instant whereof I remember well, there was such a grone by the thousands then present as I never heard before and desire I may never hear again.” A contemporary artist named Weesop painted the execution. In this depiction, the execution has just taken place, and the head of Charles I is being held up for all to see. The crowd is agitated, in the center a woman has fainted, and throughout the picture the spectators appear shocked and stunned.

Sources:

King Charls His Speech Made upon the Scaffold At Whitehall-Gate, Immediately before his Execution, On Tuesday the 30 of Ian. 1648 VVith a Relation of the maner of his going to execution. (London, 1649). http://anglicanhistory.org/charles/charles1.html (accessed February 27, 2018).

Bills of Attainder are an alternative form of ancient punishment. Such a Bill declared an individual attainted, thereby nullifying his civil rights, transferring all his property to the Crown and forfeiting any peerage. Unlike impeachment Bills of Attainder are legislative rather than judicial in nature and Parliament therefore had considerable latitude in imposing an appropriate punishment. The first use of attainder was in 1321 and its last use was in 1798 against Lord Edward FitzGerald for leading the Irish Rebellion of 1798. Bills of attainder were used through the 18th century in England and were applied to British colonies as well. American dissatisfaction with British attainder laws resulted in their being prohibited in the U.S. Constitution ratified in 1789. Jack Simon Caird, Briefing Paper Number CBP7612. June 6, 2016. House of Commons Library. http://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-7612/CBP-7612.pdf (accessed March 1, 2018).

C.V. Wedgwood argued that a general hatred of the target of the bill of attainder was enough for a charge. She also argued that they had been evolved in the Wars of the Roses but discontinued since. The bill of attainder was nothing more than a restatement of the charges put forward in the impeachment. The purpose of the impeachment was to convince a majority in the House of Lords that Strafford was by English law guilty of certain crimes for which the punishment was death. The purpose of a Bill of Attainder was to declare by Act of Parliament was necessary to the safety of the state. The impeachment could succeed only if legal proofs of Strafford’s guilt were forthcoming, but a bill of attainder could be passed as long as the majority felt that the presumption of guilt was strong enough C.V. Wedgwood, The King’s Peace, 1637-1641, vol. 1 of The Great Rebellion (London: Collins Fontana, 1955), 338, 374.

C.V. Wedgwood, The King’s Peace, 1637-1641, vol. 1 of The Great Rebellion (London: Collins Fontana, 1955), 399. The Earl of Northumberland even sided with Parliament due to the King deserting Strafford. Denzil Holles in desperation offered the King the life of Strafford if they both agreed to forego their Church policy and let Archbishop Laud suffer. C.V. Wedgwood, Strafford (London: Jonathan Cape, 1938), 337, 342. Strafford’s death did not appease the King’s critics, but only whetted their appetite for more blood.

D. Alan Orr, Treason and the State: Law, Politics, and Ideology in the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 112.

C.V. Wedgwood, The King’s War, 1641-1647 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1959), 216-17.

Paula Sampson Preston, “The Severed Head of Charles I of England Its Use of Political Stimulus,” Winterthur Portfolio 6 (1970): 1-13. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1180520 (accessed March 7, 2017).