REGICIDE, the name given to anyone who kills a sovereign (Lat. rex, a king, and caedere, to kill). Regicides is the name given in English history at the Restoration of 166o to those per sons who were responsible for the execution of Charles I. The number of regicides was estimated at 84, this number being com posed of the 67 present at the last sitting of the court of justice, I I others who had attended earlier sittings, four officers of the court and the two executioners.
The trial of the regicides before a court of 34 commissioners took place in Oct. 166o. Twenty-nine were condemned to death, but only ten were actually executed, the remaining 19 with six others being imprisoned for life. The ten who were executed at Charing Cross or Tyburn, London, in Oct. 166o, were Thomas Harrison, John Jones, Adrian Scrope, John Carew, Thomas Scot and Gregory Clement, who had signed the death-warrant ; the preacher Hugh Peters; Francis Hacker and Daniel Axtel, who commanded the soldiers at the trial and the execution of the king; and John Cook the solicitor who directed the prosecution.
In Jan. 1661 the bodies of Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw were exhumed and hanged at Tyburn, but Pride's does not appear to have been treated in this way. Of the nineteen or twenty regicides who had escaped and were living abroad, three, Sir John Bark stead, John Okey and Miles Corbet, were arrested in Holland and executed in London in April 1662; and one, John Lisle, was murdered at Lausanne. The last survivor of the regicides was probably Edmund Ludlow, who died at Vevey in 1692.
Memoirs, edited by C. H. Firth (Oxford, 1894), give interesting details about the regicides in exile. See also D. Masson, Life of Milton, vol. vi. (1880), and M. Noble, Lives of the English Regicides (1798) ; L. E. Welles, History of the Regicides (1927) .