ABSTRACT
What Clarendon called the ‘lamentable tragedy’ of the execution of Charles I, ‘this unparalleled murder and parricide’, had a devastating impact on many royalists.1 e feelings of dismay and horror experienced by the king’s supporters were intensied by the other measures take by a precarious and unpopular regime to weaken its most signicant opponents. A series of court-martials and show trials resulted in a number of royalist commanders captured in the second Civil War being brought either before a ring squad or to the scaold, the most prominent victims being Hamilton and Holland. e combined impact of the harsh composition and sequestration regulations, new Treason Acts, the requirement to take the Engagement oath of loyalty to the Commonwealth as a condition of undertaking any legal proceedings, and various measures to prevent the printing or distribution of ‘seditious’ or ‘scandalous’ texts served for the time being to cripple opposition to the regime.2 According to Clarendon, the ‘spirit of all the loyal party was so broken and subdued, that they could scarce breathe under the insupportable burdens which were laid upon them by imprisonments, compositions and sequestrations’.3
