A Riposte to Clive Holmes, ‘The Trial and Execution of Charles I’

Abstract In a number of articles and essays, I have questioned whether regicide was the intended outcome of the trial of Charles I. Although initially well received, my scholarship has since come in for criticism from Clive Holmes. This article is one part of my response. It shows that Holmes has misunderstood my arguments about what the trial of Charles I was intended to achieve and has focused on a handful of sources which are peripheral to my case. Meanwhile, the thesis Holmes offers in place of mine appears evidentially, rhetorically and even logically flawed. It is largely reliant on unexamined articles of faith, dependent in part on literary legerdemain, and oddly reluctant to address what actually happened during the king's trial. Not only has Holmes failed to reinstate the orthodoxy that regicide was the trial's inevitable conclusion: he has underlined that orthodoxy's redundancy.