THANK YOU to historian Charles Spencer for a fascinating lecture this week about a little known aspect of Restoration history, the revenge taken by Charles II on the Cromwellian lawyers who killed his father.

Fifty of us gathered to hear the talk in the hall at St Stephen’s Church. Sir Timothy Ackroyd gave a reading from the book and Spencer showed slides of the “killers” and described the gruesome manner of their executions. Some escaped to the US and took assumed names or lived in secret rooms to evade Charles II’s soldiers who combed the globe looking for them.

One audience member spoke up to say that she was a descendant of one of the killers.

Spencer’s book, The Killers of the King: The Men who Dared to Execute Charles I, is at number five in the Sunday Times non-fiction best-sellers chart.

We asked the noble author to send us five facts about Charles I, king during the most revolutionary period in British history.

1. Charles I – saint and martyr – had a mistress. She tried to help him escape prison on the Isle of Wight, and was a Royalist spy and smuggler during the Civil War.

2. He was an exceptional father. Even Cromwell was moved to tears by Charles’s tenderness with his children.

3. Charles’s Civil Wars remain the bloodiest conflict – in terms of loss of life per head of population – that this country has endured.

4. At his execution he repeatedly complained that the block was too low: it was just 6 inches tall.

5. At his trial he defended himself eloquently. His famous stammer was nowhere in evidence, throughout proceedings.