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Recent news reports have warned of likely demonstrations by anarchist and republican groups at events scheduled to celebrate Elizabeth II’s Golden Jubilee. Afraid that cheap flights and the World Cup will mean that the nation may simply fail to turn up, the Queen’s press office have decided to stir up the spectre of sedition in order to rouse disgusted of Tunbridge Wells. Security forces, we are told, are watching internet sites and newsgroups for any reports of attempts to interfere with the public rejoicing. Searching for the word "regicide" on the internet, however, brought up few sites run by ski-mask clad members of the angry brigade. What appeared instead was a far more heterogeneous bunch of pages. Fans of eastern European nightlife (of whom I know there are many amongst the readers of the Turtle) may like to visit Club Regicide in Budapest. Alternatively, those of an Anglo-Catholic bent may like to join the Society of King Charles the Martyr, a bizarre Tory cult run by such luminaries as Lord St-John of Fawsley and John Gummer, dedicated to venerating the memory of Charles I. All said, there were no obvious opportunities available to join up for taking a pot-shot at Brenda.

Perhaps that’s just as well, and not just because killing people is a bad thing, but because, without a revolutionary ideology attached to it, the act of regicide can often work perversely to restore the fortunes of an ailing royal dynasty. The example of the only English monarch to be tried and executed is a case in point. Charles I gave two great gifts to the Stuart dynasty: legitimate male heirs and his remarkable death. Recent work on the trial and execution of Charles I has attempted to separate the modern mental association between the act of regicide and republicanism. Right down to December 1648, it has been argued, and perhaps even once the trial had begun, Charles could have got off and kept his throne if he had been prepared to have his ecclesiastical and political wings clipped. Even after the executioner had separated Charles’ head from his shoulders, a republican government was not a foregone conclusion and it is possible that instead a Cromwellian regency would have been formed with Charles’ youngest son, Henry, as puppet king.

It is also fair to say that the men that put Charles I on trial did not have a concept of "revolutionary justice", unless we can extend that idea to include the notion of the execution of divine wrath upon tyrants. One of the main grounds for punishing the king was the charge of "blood guilt", based upon the words of Genesis 9:6: "He that sheds mans blood, by man shall his blood be shed", and Numbers 35:33: "Blood defileth the land, and the land cannot be cleansed but by the death of him that caused it to be shed". Divine wrath for the sins the nation had incurred, particularly via the Second Civil War in its repudiation of God’s providential design for England, could only be assuaged by the blood of the author of that war. (In an interesting inversion of this sanguinary image, Royalists portrayed the king as the "princely pelican" who regurgitated his nourishing blood into the mouth of a grateful nation). Writers like John Canne and John Cook, the prosecuting counsel in the trial, who tried to justify the proceedings against Charles I also used the medieval precedents for royal deposition, in the cases of Edward II and Richard II, to argue that the king was guilty of infracting his coronation oath, which bound him to uphold the law. The same line was adopted by John Bradshaw, the president of the court in the trial proceedings.

Bradshaw argued that there was "a contract and a bargaine betweene the King and his people and your Oath is taken, and certainly Sir the Bond is Reciprocall, for as you are the liege Lord, so they liege subjects, and we know very well that hath been so much spoken of Ligeantia est duplex, This we know now, the one tye, the one bond, is the bond of Protection that is due from the Sovereigne, the other is the bond of subjection that is due from the subject, Sir if this bond be once broken, farewell Sovereignty". However, the High Court of Justice itself retreated from claiming to be enforcing any new, revolutionary law code, clinging instead to the procedures of English common law. It was this insistence on maintaining old legal forms which prevented Parliament from getting the great rhetorical showdown with the king that it wanted. Charles refused to acknowledge the court’s jurisdiction and in consequence Cook was never given the opportunity to read his lengthy indictment.

So classical republican ideas played little part in justifying regicide. Indeed England was only declared a republic two months after the king’s execution. This is not to say that people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries could not think of government without a monarch. Privy counsellors had been forced to consider the prospect many times during the reign of Elizabeth I, faced with a woman who refused to marry or name a successor and who at the same time was ill, ageing and under regular threat from assassination attempts. What they came up with was the idea of a monarchical republic, a type of Wurzel Gummidge monarchy, in which, if one head should get knocked off, a provisional government would be formed to screw on the next one. Always being at odds with the religion of some portion of their population whether Catholics or Protestant non-conformists, English monarchs were subject to repeated efforts by would-be regicides throughout the seventeenth century: the Gunpowder plotters, the Rye House plot, Fenwick’s plot to name just a few of the more serious ones. Scheme for an acephelous republic were resurrected too, with provisions for the continued sitting of Parliament and the creation of a council of the great and good, who would sit as an interview panel vetting prospective noble claimants to the throne. Such schemes had radical undertones. If the ruling monarch was not a good candidate because of their unwillingness to defend religion and/or the laws, surely they could be removed and better qualified individual put in their place? Arguably, earlier schemes for provisional republican governments came to fruition in 1688, as ad hoc assemblies of peers and commoners decided to declare their allegiance for William of Orange.

If the events of January 1649 were something of a personal disaster for Charles I, in public relations terms they constituted just about the best press the monarch had ever received. Government sponsored newssheets, set up to report what was hoped to be a great rhetorical victory for Bradshaw and the other court officials instead recorded the lucid and intelligent responses of a king known previously as a stammer and stutterer, more in love with pictures than words. Most important of all was the success of Charles I’s Eikon Basilike, an addition to the very small genre of autohagiography. Although it may have been taken from Charles’ own papers, the book itself was probably the literary invention of an Anglican clergyman, John Gauden. Gauden successfully replaced the real Charles, an inveterate plotter and double-dealer, inflexible and autocratic, with a saintly king who was perhaps to good for such a sinful world. The providential eschatology of the Parliamentarian saints was turned on its head. It was the king whose innocent blood would expiate the guilt of the rebellious nation’s crimes. Despite John Milton’s revelation that parts of the king’s scaffold speech were actually plagiarised from Sir Phillip Sidney’s Arcadia, the book was a massive best-seller from the moment that it appeared in print and continued to be published in popular and scholarly editions right up to the twentieth century. Wencleslaus Holler’s famous print that adorned the book’s frontispiece with the king kneeling before an altar, eyes cast heavenwards, served up an image as potent and enduring as the text within. When Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660 he ordered that the anniversary of his father’s death, 30 January, should be observed as a day for solemn fasting and public humiliation. Anglican ministers would often preach sermons on this day expounding on the evils of rebellion and the threat still posed by Protestant dissenters.

Compare this with the fate of Louis XVI in 1793. Unlike in England, the French monarchy had come under sustained attack in print from the early 1720s onwards. As Robert Darnton has shown, the damage was done less by the great works of Enlightenment thought, but by a steady stream of salacious tittle-tattle or, to get poncy, mauvais discours about Louis XV -- the Peter Stringfellow of the Bourbon dynasty -- which significantly diminished public respect for the institution. At Louis’s trial, a fairly clear sense of revolutionary justice was in evidence. Louis was tried not as a king, as Charles I was, but as an ordinary citizen, M. Capet (despite Robespierre’s attempts to have him denied even these rights as an "enemy of the people"). There is no equivalent in the English trial proceedings to Saint-Just’s chilling "no-one rules innocently". It was not without reason that Albert Camus saw in the king’s trial the beginnings of modern totalitarianism. Although monarchy would return to France, poor, dull Louis XVI never inspired the saintly veneration of the English king whose parallel life the Bourbon monarch had dwelt upon in his last days.

Without Bolsheviks or Jacobins then, regicide can just as soon prove the backdoor for restoration. William III did a far better job by getting the English ruling classes to push out James II and declare that he had "vacated" the throne. The exiled dynasty would remain a thorn in the side of the Hanoverian state until the final defeat at Culloden in 1745 but in the end who would remember Henry IX, last Stuart pretender to the throne, save as figure of historical curiosity? That sudden death, even if accidental, can confer the moral integrity and intelligence that was sadly lacking whilst the person was alive is clear from the experience of our most recent royal martyr, St. Diana of the Underpass. It cannot be long, surely, before she has her own religious cult with perhaps George Michael and Elton John as her apostles. I wouldn’t want to compare the blessed Obi Wan Kenobi with Charles Stuart, but surely the Jedi’s words encapsulate the historical experience of regicide in England, "If you strike me down I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine".