In 1649, King Charles I of England was tried for treason and executed after the English Civil War. The act shattered the doctrine that kings were beyond earthly judgement. It transformed monarchy, parliament, and political imagination across Britain and Europe.

The regicide shaped the world of Milton, Marvell, Vaughan, and Dryden. It produced royalist elegy, republican prose, religious meditation, and poems wrestling with obedience, liberty, providence, and the violence of revolution.