I’m a historian – five things changed after we executed Charles I | UK | News

On January 30, 1649, the English executed Charles I. Thousands gathered to watch. Kings and queens had been killed before – in a battle or bumped off in a tower – but to behead a legitimate monarch in broad daylight, in the middle of Whitehall, was extraordinary. The king was God’s representative on Earth – but they went ahead anyway. After years of civil war and failed negotiations, Charles I had been put on trial and found guilty of being a “tyrant, traitor, murderer and public enemy to the good people of this nation”. He was sentenced to death by the “severing of his head from his body”. Fifty-nine men, including Oliver Cromwell, signed his death warrant.

When the king’s head fell he took “all Britain with him”, for Charles was king of Scotland and Ireland too. The crowd groaned. Some pushed forwards to soak up a drop of royal blood in their handkerchiefs. Even those who had fought against Charles I in the name of Parliament – such as the “brutish general” Sir Thomas Fairfax – were shaken.

Ralph Josselin, an ordinary clergyman from Essex, wept. “Fear and tremble at it, oh England,” he wrote in his diary. Fifteen-year-old Samuel Pepys, who had skipped school to watch the execution, took a different view. “The memory of the wicked shall rot,” he said. He changed his mind later, though, and eventually worked for Charles II. The civil wars that had ravaged England, Scotland and Ireland during the 1640s did not set out to bring down the monarchy. Parliamentarians wanted Charles I to listen to Parliament, not lose his head. But the blow of the axe on that icy January day split apart the long-held idea of the sacred, untouchable monarch.

Things then moved fast. Parliament abolished monarchy, declaring it “unnecessary, burdensome, and dangerous”. The “useless” House of Lords was also dismissed, hereditary peers sent packing. England’s ancient constitution, described by the poet Andrew Marvell as the “great work of time”, came tumbling down.

Now the people, through their representatives in the House of Commons, held supreme power. Monarchy, some said, was “the worst form of government”. The country was renamed a “commonwealth” and “free state”, though the appalled European kingdoms called it “devil-land”. A council of 41 men (Cromwell was one) became the executive. These councillors moved into Whitehall and put other palaces on the market. The king’s clothes, furniture and stunning art collection were also put up for sale.

From the summer of 1649, keen buyers could pop into Somerset House and snap up a Titian, Raphael or Van Dyck for a pittance. Shrewd ambassadors bought paintings, tapestries and sculptures, and took them back to their foreign courts. England’s medieval crown jewels were melted down to boost empty war-time coffers, and the emeralds, rubies and diamonds were added to the greatest and oddest jumble sale of all time, along with other royal bits and bobs – gloves, purses, fans. (At the Restoration many of the artworks andpossessions were recovered, but not all.)

Meanwhile, in the House of Commons, MPs argued about what a British republic should look like. There was no ready-made kingless constitution waiting in the wings. They looked across the water to the Dutch republic, or back to ancient Rome, or to the Bible. These were unpredictable and unstable times, but innovative ones too. Everyone “expected to have his private fancy put in motion,” said the MP Bulstrode Whitelocke. Here lie the roots of modern party politics.

In April 1653, Oliver Cromwell – puffed up after having crushed rebellious Ireland and Scotland, forcing them into a union with the republic – became so enraged by thedawdling MPs that he and his soldiers turfed them out of Parliament. By the end of that year, this gentleman farmer turnedcommander-in-chief was installed as Lord Protector. For the first time in history, Britain had a commoner as its head of state and, also for the first (and last) time, a written constitution.

Cromwell has been accused of hankering after kingship. It is true that he and his family made himself comfortable in Hampton Court and, in 1657, he was even offered the title of king. But Cromwell refused it. He loathed “that hereditary way” and believed that God had blasted the very office of a king. As Protector he had regal trappings, but he was not a king. And the constitution, crucially, limited his powers.

Beyond Whitehall, men and women read about their upside-down world in the hundreds of newsbooks and cheap pamphlets that poured off the presses. “Levellers” hoped for more radical change: regular elections and votes for all men. Votes for women was a revolutionary step too far for the time.

The political thinker James Harrington ran the Rota Club from the Turk’s Head in Westminster, where members discussed democracy and debated the best kinds of republics while they smoked and drankcoffee. “The palates of the English were as fanatical as their brains,” scoffed one observer. The English were also experimenting with new and, to some, alarming religious ideas. Thomas Hobbes thought monarchy was best, but he dared to question God’s existence .

Millenarians” believed that 1656 was the year that Christ would come again. Cromwell and the poet John Milton were among those who argued for no state religion and the freedom for most Protestants (but definitely not Catholics) to worship however they liked. These cries for toleration were unprecedented. The Quakers, who shook and trembled when they felt God within, rattled the authorities with their unorthodox behaviour and displays of nudity – but they converted thousands in the 1650s.

Others took advantage of a post-war society’s need to heal and grow. The brilliant Polish entrepreneur Samuel Hartlib feverishly promoted ideas to the government that were way ahead of their time: paper money, a national bank, a health service, state schools, farming reform, the return of the Jews. (Edward I had expelled Jews from England in 1290.)

John Milton, working at the heart of the republic and drafting the great English epic, Paradise Lost, believed Hartlib to be “the incitement of great good to this island”. Hartlib is not remembered now, but many of the schemes he dreamed of flourished later.

Meanwhile, a group of talented youngscientists met regularly in Oxford. Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke and Christopher Wren were among them. Known as the “Oxonian sparkles” they were committed to rigorous empirical research. They later became the Royal Society, their association with the republican years papered over.

Britain’s daring republican experiment did not last. When Cromwell died at the age of 59, the Protectorate fell apart. His son Richard succeeded as Lord Protector, but he faced an army agitating for a republic without a single person at its head. When this, too, failed, an exhausted Parliament desperate for settlement invited Charles II back from exile.

The British monarchy was restored. But it would never be the same again. It was fragile. The story of continuity and stability the British tell about themselves, today, is a fiction. Not everyone welcomed Charles II back and the relationship between king and Parliament remained fractious. In 1688, another quieter revolution brought in constitutional monarchy. The Anglican church had been restored with Charles II but, eventually, non-conformist Protestants were granted the freedom of worship they had long been calling for (Catholics had to wait longer).

And, at the end of the 18th century, it was to 1650s Britain that the French and American revolutionaries looked back, as they built their new republican states. Britain’s only republic was brief and fraught, but its revolutionary ideas lived on. Some still do.

• Republic: Britain’s Revolutionary Decade, 1649–1660, by Alice Hunt (Faber, £12.99) is published on Thursday June 5