This article revisits and attempts to explain the failure of settlement in England between the outbreak of civil war in late 1642 and the execution of Charles I in January 1649. It argues that doubts about the process—and not just the proposed terms—of settlement worked against the possibility of an accommodation in the 1640s. An influential parliamentarian faction regarded negotiated treaties as inherently problematic instruments of peacemaking, which were unable to provide adequate security against the possibility of future abrogation and vengeance on the part of the king. While widespread anxieties about royal dissimulation were partly a product of the “statist” paradigms of political analysis that had become firmly established across Europe by the mid-seventeenth century, specific events in England during the 1640s served to reinforce and accentuate them. Moreover, as the decade progressed there was an increasing tendency to see duplicity, dissimulation, and vengefulness as inseparable features of monarchy, and thus a negotiated peace between prince and people after civil war as an impossibility. Ultimately, these concerns formed an integral, if often overlooked, justification for the regicide.

本文回顾并试图解释从 1642 年内战爆发到 1649 年 1 月查理一世被处决之间英格兰定居点的失败。它认为，对定居过程的怀疑——而不仅仅是对拟议的条款——的怀疑与 1640 年代和解的可能性背道而驰。一个有影响力的议会派系认为，通过谈判达成的条约本质上是有问题的和平工具，无法提供足够的安全保障，以防止国王将来可能废除和报复。虽然对王室模拟的广泛焦虑部分是 17 世纪中叶在欧洲根深蒂固的“国家主义”政治分析范式的产物，但 1640 年代英格兰的具体事件强化和突出了这些焦虑。此外，随着十年的发展，人们越来越倾向于将口是心非、虚伪和复仇视为君主制不可分割的特征，因此在内战后王子和人民之间通过谈判实现和平是不可能的。最终，这些担忧构成了弑君行为不可或缺的正当理由，尽管这些理由经常被忽视。