When the King Lost His Head
Revolution, Rights, and the Ideas That Reached America
by Sherri L. Renner, JD | March 2, 2026
This is Article 4 in The Living Thread series.
In January 1649, King Charles I of England walked out of a second-floor window of the Banqueting House in London and stepped onto a scaffold erected in the street below. A crowd pressed close. The king said a few words, knelt, and placed his head on a block. The executioner’s ax fell.
It was a moment that stunned Europe. Kings had been murdered before, but England had just done something different: it had put a king on trial, convicted him of treason against his own people, and executed him publicly, legally, and deliberately. The crown of England lay in pieces.
What came next were several decades of chaos, violence, and philosophical fire that produced the ideas that Thomas Jefferson drew on when he wrote “all men are created equal,” that James Madison drew on when he drafted the Bill of Rights, and that the American founders used as the intellectual foundation of a republic they were building from scratch. To understand where the United States came from, you need to understand what England lived through in these revolutionary decades. The thread runs straight from a church in Putney to Independence Hall in Philadelphia.
The King Who Believed He Was Above the Law
Charles I came to the English throne in 1625 carrying a conviction, inherited from his father James I, that kings ruled by divine right, and that Parliament existed at their pleasure, not the other way around. For eleven years, from 1629 to 1640, he governed without calling Parliament at all, a period his enemies called the “Eleven Years’ Tyranny.” He taxed his subjects through creative extractions like “ship money,” a naval levy traditionally confined to coastal towns that he extended to the entire country without parliamentary approval. He imposed religious changes on Scotland that triggered outright rebellion.
The Scottish rebellion forced his hand. Desperate for money to fund a war, Charles had to recall Parliament in 1640. Parliament, which had been nursing a decade of grievances, was not inclined to simply hand him a blank check. It demanded reform. Charles refused to compromise. In August 1642, he raised his royal standard at Nottingham and called his subjects to arms against their own Parliament. The English Civil War had begun.
The war lasted, in its various phases, nearly a decade. Parliament’s forces, known as the Roundheads (largely Puritan in religious sympathy), ultimately crushed the Royalist Cavaliers through the creation of the New Model Army, a professional military force built on merit rather than aristocratic privilege. Charles was captured, tried, and executed in 1649. England became, briefly, a republic (the “Commonwealth”), and then a military protectorate under Oliver Cromwell. After Cromwell’s death in 1658 and the failure of his son Richard to hold power, the monarchy was restored under Charles II in 1660. The whole experiment seemed to have failed.
But the ideas unleashed during those chaotic years could not be put back in the bottle.
The Soldiers Who Demanded Democracy
Before the execution, before the republic was created, something happened in a church in the London suburb of Putney that deserves a lot more attention than it typically gets in American classrooms.
In October and November 1647, the soldiers and officers of Parliament’s New Model Army gathered at St. Mary the Virgin Church in Putney to debate the future of England. The “Grandees,” senior generals including Oliver Cromwell and his son-in-law Henry Ireton, sat across from a group of radical soldiers and their civilian allies who called themselves the Levellers. The Levellers had drafted a document called the Agreement of the People, which was a proposed written constitution for England that called for nearly universal male suffrage, biennial elections, freedom of conscience, equality before the law (for some!), and an end to imprisonment for debt.
These were not professional politicians or philosophers. They were soldiers, men who had fought and bled in the Civil War and who had drawn their own conclusions about what they had been fighting for. The Putney Debates, as this exchange came to be called, were transcribed verbatim by a team of stenographers and then lost for more than two centuries before being rediscovered in a library at Worcester College, Oxford in 1890. What they recorded is astonishing.
The central argument was over the right to vote. The Grandees held that only men of property should have the franchise, that voting rights should follow ownership. The Levellers disagreed, and their spokesman Colonel Thomas Rainsborough articulated the counterargument with a directness that still resonates today:
“For really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he; and therefore truly, sir, I think it’s clear that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government.”
Did you catch that? A soldier in 1647 was arguing that government derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed and that every person living under a law has a natural right to have had a voice in making it. This is the philosophical heart of the American Declaration of Independence, articulated 129 years before Jefferson wrote it.
Cromwell shut the debates down on November 8, concerned about military discipline and genuinely alarmed by what he called the “anarchy” of the Levellers’ proposals. The Leveller leaders were eventually imprisoned. Their movement was crushed. But their ideas didn’t die — they circulated, were read, were argued over, and found their way into the work of the man who would become the most important political philosopher of the American founding.
Locke and the Philosophy That Crossed an Ocean
John Locke was born in 1632, the year that Galileo published his Dialogue and about a decade before the Civil War began. He grew up in a Parliamentarian household, was trained as a physician at Oxford, and spent his career in the orbit of powerful Whig politicians who were fighting to limit the power of the monarchy. During a period of political danger, he fled to the Netherlands in exile. He wrote in secret. He published anonymously, knowing that his ideas could get him executed.
What he produced was nothing less than a new theory of what government is for.
Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, published in 1689 just after the Glorious Revolution, argued that political power is not a divine gift to kings. It is a trust granted by the people to protect their natural rights. Locke began from a simple premise: in a “state of nature,” before governments existed, human beings were free and equal, each possessing natural rights to life, liberty, and property. People agreed to form governments through a kind of social contract specifically to protect those rights more reliably than they could protect them alone. A government that failed in this basic task, or that systematically violated the rights it was supposed to protect, forfeited its legitimacy. The people had not just a right but an obligation to alter or abolish it and build something better.
The First Treatise dismantled the divine right of kings argument point by point. The Second Treatise built up Locke’s positive vision of legitimate government. Together they gave the American founders a philosophical vocabulary and a moral framework for revolution. Jefferson’s phrase “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” is a deliberate echo of Locke’s “life, liberty, and property.” In 1825, Jefferson described the Declaration of Independence as drawing from the works of “Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, &c.” placing Locke at the center of the intellectual tradition from which the Declaration grew. One historian summarized it precisely: the Declaration “succeeded admirably in condensing Locke’s fundamental argument into a few hundred words.”
The Glorious Revolution: When England Chose Its King
By 1685, the English had restored the monarchy and lived under two Stuart kings: Charles II and his brother James II. James II was Catholic, openly so, in a country that had just spent decades torn apart partly by conflicts between Catholicism and Protestantism. He appointed Catholics to military commands. He issued declarations of religious tolerance that his Protestant subjects read as cover for a Catholic takeover. When his queen gave birth to a son in 1688, raising the prospect of a Catholic dynasty, several leading Englishmen wrote a letter inviting William of Orange, a Protestant Dutch prince married to James’s own Protestant daughter Mary, to come to England with an army.
William landed in November 1688. James’s army melted away. The king fled to France. Parliament declared the throne vacant and offered it jointly to William and Mary, but with a condition. Before they could be crowned, they had to accept a Declaration of Right, which was subsequently codified into law as the English Bill of Rights of 1689.
The English Bill of Rights did what no document had yet done quite so explicitly and completely: it permanently established Parliament as the supreme governing power of England, and it listed, in specific terms, what the monarch could and could not do. No standing army in peacetime without Parliament’s consent. No taxation without parliamentary approval. Free elections. Freedom of speech in Parliament. Trial by jury. Habeas corpus. No cruel and unusual punishments. The king could not suspend laws, could not maintain a secret court, could not jail subjects without charging them.
The Glorious Revolution permanently established Parliament as the ruling power of England. This represents a shift from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy. When William and Mary were crowned, they swore to govern according to the laws of Parliament, not the laws of the monarchy. England’s king or queen would never hold absolute power again.
The constitutional revolution that had started with the execution of Charles I in 1649 had arrived not through republic or military rule, but through a carefully managed transfer of power that preserved the monarchy while permanently subordinating it to elected government. The English called it the “Glorious Revolution.” The American founders, who grew up reading Locke’s justification of it and experiencing its legacy through the English Bill of Rights, would call it something closer to their inheritance.
Law as Tool — Once More
These revolutionary decades are another chapter in the dual nature of legal progress, and we will not look away from the shadows.
The Levellers, who argued most powerfully for universal suffrage and equality before the law, excluded women from their proposed franchise entirely. Even their most progressive positions excluded wage-earners out of a fear that the poor would simply vote however their employers dictated. Although the Agreement of the People was a genuine leap forward for 1647, it still left most of England’s population on the outside looking in.
The Glorious Revolution secured the rights of English Protestants while simultaneously encoding discrimination against Catholics that would persist for more than a century. The English Bill of Rights explicitly barred Catholics from the throne. The religious toleration that some had fought for during the Civil War was only partially achieved, and only for some.
Locke himself owned shares in slave-trading companies and helped draft the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, which included provisions protecting the institution of slavery. The man whose philosophy would be used to justify the American Revolution was complicit in one of history’s great violations of the natural rights he claimed were universal.
None of this cancels the importance of what was achieved in this century. But it explains why the thread keeps getting pulled and why the work of each generation is not to celebrate the document and rest, but to demand that its principles actually extend to everyone they claim to cover.
Three Things This Era Gives Us
The revolutionary decades from 1640 to 1689 add three important threads to what we’ve been tracing.
Ideas are the engine of change, but only when people are willing to fight for them. The Levellers articulated democratic principles a century before the American Revolution. Locke provided the philosophical architecture. But neither ideas nor philosophy alone produced constitutional government. It took decades of war, execution, exile, and organized political pressure before England arrived at the constitutional monarchy the Glorious Revolution established. Ideas matter enormously but they require human courage to become reality.
Revolutions don’t travel in straight lines. England tried a republic and got a military dictatorship. It restored the monarchy. It fought over it again. It achieved constitutional monarchy through what was essentially a coup dressed in constitutional clothing. The American founders studied this messy, zigzagging history and designed the separation of powers and the Bill of Rights specifically to prevent the cycles of tyranny and chaos they had watched England experience.
The right to alter or abolish an unjust government is the most dangerous and most necessary idea in the democratic tradition. The Levellers lived it. Locke wrote it. Jefferson echoed it. The idea that government derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed, and forfeits that legitimacy when it systematically violates the rights it exists to protect, is the philosophical cornerstone of American democracy. It was considered radical and dangerous in Locke’s time. It remains contested today.
Looking Ahead
In the next article, we cross the Atlantic. The ideas that circulated through the English Civil War, the Putney debates, the Glorious Revolution, and Locke’s study arrived in the American colonies and collided with a new set of circumstances, new grievances, and extraordinary men and women who would try to put them into permanent institutional form. We’ll meet the founders, examine what they built, and take an honest look at what they left unfinished.
The thread doesn’t break. It just changes hands.
Sources and Further Reading
- English Civil Wars — Encyclopædia Britannica
- English Civil War Overview — UK Parliament
- Glorious Revolution — Encyclopædia Britannica
- Glorious Revolution Summary — History.com
- English Bill of Rights — History.com
- Putney Debates — Wikipedia
- Levellers — Wikipedia
- Levellers — Encyclopædia Britannica
- John Locke — First Amendment Encyclopedia, Middle Tennessee State University
- Two Treatises of Government — Wikipedia
- How John Locke Influenced the Declaration of Independence — John Locke Foundation
- Natural Rights and the Declaration of Independence — Bill of Rights Institute
- Natural Rights — Teach Democracy
The Living Thread is a 12-part series tracing the history of freedom, law, and resistance from ancient Babylon to the American founding and beyond.
