Politics on Trial: Charles I vs Parliament

Past Present Future

D&HR Media Ltd

Society & Culture, History, News, Politics, Philosophy

4.8 • 747 Ratings

🗓️ 12 June 2025

⏱️ ? minutes

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Summary

Today’s political trial is perhaps the most consequential in English history: the trial and execution of King Charles I for treason in January 1649. How could a king commit treason when treason was a crime against the king? How could a court try a king when a king has no peers? How could anyone claim to speak for the people after a civil war when so many people had been on opposite sides? The answers to these questions would cost more than one person his life – but they would also change forever the prospect of holding tyrants to account. Out now on PPF+: Part 2 of David’s conversation with Robert Saunders about the 1975 European referendum and the question of why it all ended up so differently in the Brexit referendum of 2016. Sign up now to get this and all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus David’s new 20-part series Postwar – about the 1945 general election and the making of modern Britain – is available now on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002d8v1 Next time: The History of Bad Ideas: Austerity w/Mark Blyth Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	The road stretches before you, but there's trouble ahead, stationary cars.
0:04.0	You're faced with the McDonald's side mission.
0:06.7	Do you, A, join the ever-growing queue, or B, take the next exit and treat yourself to a glorious Mackey's?
0:15.0	Detouring to McDonald's.
0:16.7	Start your side mission today.
0:34.4	Hello, my name's David Rundsenman and this is past, present future, the History of Ideas podcast.
0:35.7	Today, it's the last episode in this first batch in our series
0:40.3	Politics on Trial. There are going to be plenty more. Today, I'm talking about another trial
0:45.6	that has many, many epic qualities, a very dramatic trial. The trial of Charles I, at the end of
0:53.3	the English Civil War that resulted in his execution. It's one of those trials like a number of the ones I've talked about already that feels like it was a foregone conclusion. Here was a king who'd lost a civil war. He was going to get his head chopped off. It wasn't a foregone conclusion. It was anything but.
1:16.6	For this series about trials that took place a long time ago, the way I try and approach it
1:22.4	is, first of all, to read the transcripts of the trials, which do exist, with the exception of the
1:29.0	trial of Socrates. They're not like contemporary court transcripts. These are various kinds of
1:35.3	official records. It's not completely clear how much has been adjusted or altered or tampered with.
1:41.2	But the odd thing about it, whether it's Joan of Arc or Thomas Moore, Galileo,
1:46.0	is how alive they feel when you read them. They're like dialogues, a lot of them. This is one of the
1:50.7	reasons why they end up producing these remarkable plays. And even if this isn't the authentic
1:56.7	record, there's a feeling that you are listening to people arguing with each other. Even in the
2:02.7	case of Socrates, where there's no transcript, that version of his speech by Plato, maybe I'm
2:08.8	just using hindsight to make this interpretation, but when I read it, and I'm ashamed to say I'd
2:15.2	never read Plato's apology before, recording the episode about
2:19.4	the trial of Socrates, when I read it for the first time, it felt really alive. You believed
	...

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