REGICIDE: The Trials of Henry Marten

Henry Marten, soldier, member of Parliament, organiser of the trial of Charles I and signatory of the King's Death Warrant, is today a neglected figure of the 17th century. Yet his life was both extraordinary and emblematic. He was at the fulcrum of English history during the turbulent years of the Civil War, the Protectorate and the Restoration. Imprisoned in the Tower of London and tried at the Old Bailey, Marten was found guilty of High Treason, only to be held captive for years on the equivalent of death row. It was while he was in prison that his letters to his mistress Mary Ward were stolen and published in an attempt to destroy his reputation. Witty, clever, loving, sardonic and never despairing, the letters offer a rare and extraordinary insight into the everyday life of a man in the Tower of London awaiting a sentence of death. The attempt to expose him as immoral revealed him instead as a tender and brave man. In this revelatory biography, he emerges as a clever, lively-minded man, free of the fundamentalist zeal so common in many of his republican contemporaries. Marten never abandoned his beliefs in equality, in a representative Parliament under a Constitution (which he had helped to write) without a monarch or a House of Lords, and in that way can be seen as a very modern man. 'A deeply researched and convincing portrait of the later years of one of the most remarkable radical politicians in British history.' - Ronald Hutton. It also reminds us that not all regicides were soldier puritans, and that some men believed in a republic before the Civil War started. Illustrated, 214pp.