24. =The King's Trial and Execution. 1649.=--Charles's accusers had on their side the discredit which always comes to those who, using force, try to give it the appearance of legality. Charles had all the credit of standing up for the law, which, in his earlier life, he had employed to establish absolutism. He refused to plead before the Court, on the ground that it had no jurisdiction over a king. His assailants fell back on the merest technicalities. Instead of charging him with the intrigues to bring foreign armies into England, of which he had been really guilty, they accused him of high treason against the nation, because, forsooth, he had appeared in arms against his subjects in the first Civil War. The Court, as might have been expected, passed sentence against him, and, on January 30, he was beheaded on a scaffold in front of his own palace at Whitehall. 25. =Results of Charles's Execution. 1649.=--With the king's execution all that could be permanently effected by his opponents had been accomplished. When the Long Parliament met, in November =1640=, all Englishmen had combined to bring Charles to submit to Parliamentary control. After the summer of =1641= a considerable part of the nation, coming to the conclusion that Charles was ready to use force rather than to submit, took arms against him to compel him to give way. Towards the end of =1647= a minority of Englishmen, including the army, came to the conclusion that it was necessary to deprive Charles of all real power, if the country was not to be exposed to constantly recurring danger whenever he saw fit to re-assert his claims to the authority which he had lost. In =1648= a yet smaller minority came to the conclusion that security could only be obtained if he were deprived of life. In depriving the king of life all had been done which force could do. The army could guard a scaffold, but it could not reconstruct society. The vast majority of that part of the nation which cared about politics at all disliked being ruled by an army even more than it had formerly disliked being ruled by Charles, and refused its support to the new institutions which, under the patronage of the army, were being erected in the name of the people. CHAPTER XXXVI THE COMMONWEALTH AND PROTECTORATE. 1649-1660 LEADING DATES