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This chapter discusses Milton and his idea of regicide. It discusses his The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and the concepts of regicide, tyrranicide, and enemy found in his work. Milton's Tenure asserts that a tyrannical ruler should no longer be regarded as one of the powers ordained by God and may be therefore be resisted like a private person who employs unjust force. The chapter also discusses his political theory and his emerging notion of resistance, including the significance of his method of not naming Charles Stuart as a public enemy or hostis in his Tenure.

This chapter begins with the fortunes of the Stanley circle in the aftermath of regicide by exploring their involvement in a volume of elegies for Henry, Lord Hastings, which is also an indirect lament for the death of the king. Hall and Marvell both contribute elegies, even though Hall was by now a paid propagandist for the Commonwealth government. The rest of the chapter addresses the ‘Horatian Ode’ and relates it to the new patronage environment of post-regicide England. Former royalists were persuaded by John Hall to continue their literary activities under the new government, and the ‘Ode’ is seen as a meditation by Marvell on the choices open to the poet in this brave new world. The echoes of the poem embedded in early Restoration writing by Dryden and Cowley show that the poem circulated and was read as a bid for Cromwellian patronage.

This chapter contextualizes the composition of Leviathan by placing that text within the religious debates roiling the English Revolution in the aftermath of the regicide. It demonstrates how Hobbes's interest in Erastianism peaked during these years, as did his appreciation for Independency as a church form. These developments are set against a historical backdrop in which Oliver Cromwell and the Independents rose to power within post-regicidal England. Hobbes's intellectual development estranged him from the royalist cause, and ensured his fall from grace at the exiled court of the Stuarts. Hobbes offended both of the main royalist factions: the old royalists grouped around Edward Hyde, and the Louvre group royalists around Henrietta Maria.

At no point in the history of Britain and Ireland has the whole archipelago experienced such sustained and brutal internal war as in the 1640s and early 1650s. Alongside and largely underpinning the persistent Scottish demand for a confederal settlement, and a factor in the English preference for either an integrative union or no union at all was, of course, religion. There were two largely separate rebellions in Ireland in late 1641: by the Old English of the Pale and Munster and by the dispossessed and the exiled Gaelic Irish communities of Ulster. There has been a tension between calling the events of 1638–54 the War of the Three Kingdoms and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. The Covenant itself and the king's response both in making the Cessation in Ireland and in authorising Montrose's Scottish-Irish war in Scotland or the early months of 1645 are considered. It then describes the way the English and the Scots reacted to the crisis of the winter of 1648–9 and the wholly English act of regicide. The wars of the 1640s fragmented the political communities in England and in Scotland.

The prose that John Milton published before the regicide constituted two phases. There were the anti-episcopal or anti-prelatical tracts of 1641–2; and there were the pamphlets of 1643–5 which argued against divorce laws, against the licensing of the press, and for the reform of education. His political polemic likewise had two phases, but both of them came after the regicide. There were, as he observed in the Latin of his Defensio Secunda in 1654, ‘three species of liberty … namely ecclesiastical, domestic or private, and civil’. Milton's priorities were reflected in the pattern of his own writing. In the year in which the first civil war ended, 1646, when his ‘right hand’ returned from a period of poetic silence, it was for religious, not for political, liberty that his verse called. A longer period of poetic silence ended in 1652 with poems on the subject of liberty of conscience.

John Milton and Marchamont Nedham were fellow writers for the government that came to power in 1649. The treatises that Milton published for the government were written in its first two years, when its rule was precarious. In their vindications of the regicide and of the rule of the republic, Milton's and Nedham's writings developed common arguments and a common vocabulary. The resemblances, at least in their persistence, set their prose apart from the run of polemic in the Puritan cause. Behind its shared features lie premisses and rhetorical methods that derive largely from the classical world, to whose history, and to whose civic values, both writers so often appeal. From that source they acquired a confident intellectual cosmopolitanism that is rarely matched in other defences of the new order of 1649–53, most of which were narrowly biblical or providentialist or legal or prudential in scope.

John Milton and Marchamont Nedham agreed that Pride's Purge and the regicide, the emergency measures, had delivered England from a return to tyranny. So long as the royalist military threat survived, Nedham's propaganda was mainly negative. It had more to say about the evils of royalism and Presbyterianism than about the virtues of kingless rule. Yet the concluding chapter of The Case of the Commonwealth in May 1650, a work published when the morale of the government was at its lowest point and when the regime was desperate for survival, departed from that policy and supplied his adventurous ‘discourse of the excellency of a free state above a kingly government’. By the time of the Battle of Worcester he had, on the same subject, a book or series of essays up his sleeve.

Defensio Secunda is a response to another Latin work, Regii Sanguinis Clamor, ‘The Cry of the Royal Blood’, which was published anonymously in or around late August 1652. Clamor took up the cause of Claudius Salmasius against the English regicides and against John Milton. It savagely attacked the first ‘defence’ (Defensio) and the character of its author. Milton supposed that it had been written, in France or Holland, by the clergyman Alexander More, a friend of Salmasius. Though More contributed prefatory material to Clamor and helped it through the press, it was almost certainly composed, in England, by the Anglican clergyman Peter du Moulin. Milton, who had manufactured evidence to support his mistake in 1652, thereafter refused to acknowledge his error, though by the time Defensio Secunda appeared he must have been fully aware of it.

This chapter discusses the secret history's shifting place in contemporary political imagination from 1655–63. As the revolution stabilized under Oliver Cromwell, it no longer seemed quite so important to legitimate the regicide and the Republic. Indeed, as the Protectorate incorporated men of a more conservative bent, repeating stories about the murderous former king may have seemed increasingly counter-productive. In the crisis following Cromwell's death, contentious tracts again poured from the presses, and they again alluded to the secret history, albeit to a lesser degree. By that point, Royalist writers had finally seized back some of the initiative in the battle over James I's death. Within months of Charles II's restoration, some of the men who had engineered the regicide and made James' murder a political shibboleth would be punished for their actions, and the secret history returned to the underground.

Rather than being a marginal activity with little impact on the war's outcome, a bewildering number of contemporaries can be identified for whom side‐changing became a critical issue. The concept of a ‘turncoat’ was culturally constructed and highly contested, as a double standard emerged over the circumstances in which changing sides was acceptable. Side‐changing shaped the war's outcome, accelerating royalist decline and radicalizing elements of the parliamentarian coalition in 1648. Notions of treachery became central to defining ‘the cause’ on both sides, while discrediting comrades as turncoats deepened the infighting on both sides. Whilst side‐changing could have a benign effect in making civil‐war divisions less absolute, the opposite sometimes occurred when particular defectors provoked extreme reactions. The concept of breach of trust, first applied to side‐changers, was turned on the king himself to justify the regicide and the regimes that followed it.

This chapter asks what happened to the political and spiritual languages of women in the sects at the regicide, through an exploration of the published texts of Elizabeth Poole. The chapter continues the discussion of the political implications of printed texts emerging from the sectarian struggles of the 1640s, tracing the political languages and positions of sectaries responding to the regicide. In examining Elizabeth Poole's place in the controversies, this chapter addresses the complexity of women's relationship to the figural languages and print debate which emerged in response to that event. In this story of Poole, prominence is given to the radical publishers Giles and Elizabeth Calvert, the Baptist minister John Pendarves and his wife Thomasine, her minister William Kiffin and his old associate, John Lilburne. The chapter asks the twin questions of who bound Poole to politics, and what were the implications of her spoken, written, and published interventions.

The libretto for Saul was provided by Charles Jennens, who would later supply Handel with the libretto for Messiah. Saul in the biblical text is often read sympathetically by modern scholars as being victimized by the prophet Samuel and by God. But for Jennens this was unthinkable, and he portrays the clash between Saul and his young rival David as a clash between embodiments of vice and virtue. In addition, Jennens's treatment of David in the libretto has overtones of Messianism, making David a kind of Christ‐figure, and Saul by implication his satanic adversary. However, Saul's death is narrated in a way that emphasizes the wickedness of regicide even if the king killed is evil. This is a position that probably comes from Jennens's convictions as a non‐juror. The libretto thus appears as a meditation on monarchy that contains a rich mix of morality, theology and politics.

This chapter looks at William Shakespeare's Macbeth as a source for graphic satire. Given both its resonant depiction of regicide, atrocity, and criminality, and its sensational conjoining of the political and the fantastical, it is to be expected that Macbeth was a recurrent source for the period's graphic satirists. Between 1754 and 1835, at least sixty-two political prints cite the play in some manner: thirty-seven do so in extended or elaborate ways, and many others engage with it by means of brief but often complex intertextual gestures of the kind exemplified in Isaac Cruikshank's The Near in Blood, The Nearer Bloody (1793). The chapter then considers the largest and most prominent cluster of Macbeth prints, that is, parodies of the weird sisters. The weird sisters have long been the subject of scholarly fascination, but when looked at through the political and parodic lens of graphic satire, their history and status seems suddenly less familiar.