5. Charles was charged with High Treason, and tried as a commoner.
Despite widespread opposition from the House of Lords and Chief Justices, the so-called Rump Parliament passed a bill to create a special court to charge Charles with treason. 68 Parliamentarians sat in judgement over Charles on January 20, 1649, in Westminster Hall. The charge specifically read that Charles ‘hath traitorously and maliciously levied war against the present Parliament, and the people therein represented… for the advancement and upholding of a personal interest of will, power, and pretended prerogative to himself and his family, against the public interest, common right, liberty, justice, and peace of the people of this nation’.
At the trial, Charles was tried not as King Charles I but simply as ‘Charles Stuart’, his commoner’s name, a symbolically-charged act. Heroically unwavering in his belief in the Divine Right of Kings, Charles treated the whole affair with utter contempt. He refused to remove his hat – a sign of flagrant disrespect – as in the engraving above, and defended himself thus: ‘I would know by what power I am called hither, by what lawful authority?… the king can do no wrong’. It wasn’t an effective defence. He was found guilty, and 58 commissioners signed his death warrant on January 27.
