regicide n. 1. a person who kills or takes part in killing a king. 2. the act of killing a king [L rex regis king +CIDE]
In August 1660, following the Restoration of King Charles II, the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion was passed as a gesture of reconciliation to reunite the kingdom. A free pardon was granted to everyone who had supported the Commonwealth and Protectorate, but exceptions were made for those who had directly participated in the trial and execution of King Charles I in 1649. A special court was appointed in October 1660 and the Regicides that were in custody were brought to trial. Ten were condemned to death and publicly hanged, drawn and quartered at Charing Cross or Tyburn, London, in October 1660: Thomas Harrison, John Jones, Adrian Scrope, John Carew, Thomas Scot, and Gregory Clement, who had signed the King's death warrant; the preacher Hugh Peter; Francis Hacker and Daniel Axtell, who commanded the guards at the King's trial and execution; and John Cook, the lawyer who had directed the prosecution. A further nineteen were imprisoned for life.
By order of the Convention Parliament, all the Regicides who had died before the Restoration were posthumously attainted for high treason and their property was confiscated. In January 1661, the corpses of Oliver Cromwell, Henry Ireton and John Bradshaw were exhumed and hanged in their shrouds at Tyburn before their skulls were impaled at Westminster Hall.
Twenty Regicides fled to Europe or to America. George Downing (1623-84), formerly Cromwell's director of military intelligence, tracked down and arrested three of them: John Barkstead, John Okey and Miles Corbet, who were extradited from the Netherlands and executed in April 1662. John Lisle was murdered by a royalist at Lausanne in Switzerland in 1664. The last survivor of the regicides was probably Edmund Ludlow, who died at Vevey, Switzerland, in 1692. The identity of the executioner who beheaded the King was never discovered.