“Paper Oathes”: Trust, Treaty, and the Road to Regicide in England, 1642–49

Abstract

This article revisits and attempts to explain the failure of settlement in England between the outbreak of civil war in late 1642 and the execution of Charles I in January 1649. It argues that doubts about the process—and not just the proposed terms—of settlement worked against the possibility of an accommodation in the 1640s. An influential parliamentarian faction regarded negotiated treaties as inherently problematic instruments of peacemaking, which were unable to provide adequate security against the possibility of future abrogation and vengeance on the part of the king. While widespread anxieties about royal dissimulation were partly a product of the “statist” paradigms of political analysis that had become firmly established across Europe by the mid-seventeenth century, specific events in England during the 1640s served to reinforce and accentuate them. Moreover, as the decade progressed there was an increasing tendency to see duplicity, dissimulation, and vengefulness as inseparable features of monarchy, and thus a negotiated peace between prince and people after civil war as an impossibility. Ultimately, these concerns formed an integral, if often overlooked, justification for the regicide.