‘Charles Stuart, that man of blood’

The concept of blood guilt, the necessity of avenging the shedding of innocent blood, and the sense that the shedding of blood polluted not only the land but the whole people were crucial ideas that shaped thinking in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Army called upon the biblical precedent of blood vengeance to justify the regicide of Charles I in 1649; to accuse him of shedding the blood of innocent subjects was to find a legitimate motive and an Old Testament mandate to kill him. Even after executing those who had signed the king’s death warrant, royalists continued to pray that the nation would not suffer punishment for shedding the king’s innocent blood.