SusannaG - Confessions of a Crazy Cat Lady
Just another GR refugee. Other than that, I had a stroke in 2004, and read almost anything I can get my hands on, though I have a particular weakness for history, mystery, and historical fiction.
Currently reading
Killers of the King
This is the story of what happened to the men who signed the death warrant of Charles I, who were known as the Regicides.
About a quarter of them died between the time of that execution in 1649 and the restoration of Charles II in 1660. Some died of natural causes, like Oliver Cromwell, while others were hunted down by royalists in hiding.
Charles II promised clemency for most - if they turned themselves in. Ten men who did so were then convicted of treason by a rigged court process, hanged, drawn (had their genitals cut off while still alive), and quartered (cut into quarters). George Downing (yes, the "Downing" of "Downing Street") betrayed three that he discovered in the Netherlands, who met the same fate - he wanted to get in the king's good graces. (Pepys talks in his diary about Downing, little of it positive.) Prominent dead regicides, like Oliver Cromwell, were disinterred to be beheaded.
The others, less trusting or just luckier, fled abroad. The safest havens proved to be in Switzerland, and in Puritan New England. I was particularly interested in that section - one of my ancestors hid two of the regicides, veteran generals of the New Model Army, in a cave on his property. (These ancestors left Boston for the New Haven Colony, as they found the Massachusetts Bay Colony was insufficiently godly for them. They were hardcore Puritans.)
This history is pretty much all "this is what happened," and very light indeed on analysis. However, if you just want to know the story of what happened, both to Charles I and to his regicides, it's all here.
My ARC courtesy of Bloomsbury USA/NetGalley - much thanks!
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