The manuscript journals of the trial of Charles I: new evidence on their provenance and purpose*

Historians of the trial of Charles I will be familiar with the two copies of the manuscript journals kept in The National Archives of the U.K. and the U.K. Parliamentary Archives. Besides these manuscripts, two further copies of the trial proceedings are held in the Beinecke Library, Yale, and in the British Library. This article compares these versions to propose a tentative document history of the journals, suggesting that these manuscripts were produced for different purposes: what began as the basis for an authoritative public account of the trial later became a text intended for a more select legal audience.

transcriptions therefore attempted to preserve the integrity of the original journals they were based upon. 2 Indeed, as we will see in the case of Nalson's True Copy, they may not even be a transcription of one of these two recognized journals of the trial.
The failure to return to the original manuscripts has been driven in part by an assumption that the differences between these two journals are minimal and of little significance. 3 The National Archives version (hereafter Kew) and the Parliamentary Archives version of the journal, however, are distinct in both content and intent. Additional and underexplored manuscript copies of the journal in the Beinecke Library, Yale, and the British Library can provide important insights into the creation of both the Parliamentary Archives journal and post-Restoration printed accounts of the trial, specifically John Nalson's True Copy. In this article a speculative timeline of the production of these documents will be offered, outlining the relationship between these texts and other materials in both print and manuscript (Figure 1). The evidence from this manuscript material will be combined with both contemporary and later printed accounts to examine the role of the journals in the English Commonwealth's attempts to assert its political authority. It will be argued here that both the Kew and Parliamentary Archives journals were created to promote the legitimacy of the high court of justice and, by extension, the Rump parliament. While the Kew journal was fashioned to contribute to parliament's printed propaganda campaign nationally and internationally, however, the Parliamentary Archives journal was intended for a more select legal audience. As will be shown, these attempts at using the trial of Charles I to promote the authority of England's new governors were not only unsuccessful but ultimately counterproductive: with the Restoration of monarchy, the wealth of material recorded about the king's trial provided ample evidence against Charles's judges.

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All of the manuscript journals were post facto accounts of the trial. For contemporary reports we have to turn to the various newsbook accounts, the majority of which carried the imprimatur of the press licenser Gilbert Mabbott. As Michael Mendle has noted, these were derived from shorthand notes of the trial and gave the public news of the trial with a remarkably short twenty-four-to forty-eight-hour turnaround. 4 The best known of these note-takers is William (later Sir William) Clarke, then secretary to the council of officers. Statements during the trials of the regicides in 1660, however, indicate that, whether authorized or not, there were a number of shorthand writers present. 5 The reports found in newsbooks remain extremely valuable for historians of the trial as, in some respects, they are more revealing than the manuscript journals. A clear example is in their reporting of the drafting of the charge against the king. The various 2 The transcription that Muddiman offers of the Kew journal not only contains inaccuracies, but also excises all of the public proceedings of the court and lacks any direct references to the manuscript itself. See Muddiman,Trial,   manuscript versions of the trial dryly record that the draft charge was presented on 15 January, followed by the delivery of a revised draft on 19 January before the final version was engrossed on 20 January, the day that the public proceedings of the court began. 6 The newsbook evidence, on the other hand, actually provides some indication of why the initial draft of the charge was rejected by the commissioners, thereby reminding us too that the public had access to reports of the court's private as well as public sittings. All of the newsbook accounts reported that the initial charge was felt to be too long, with Perfect Occurrences offering the most detail, stating that the draft charge was 'very large and high, concerning Rochel, Ireland, Scotland, England, betraying, firing, murdering the people'. 7 These accounts suggest, therefore, that the original charge was much broader than the final version, including charges relating to the early years of the king's reign, and that it did not focus so exclusively on the civil war in England.
The manuscript accounts of the trial, therefore, do not necessarily offer a richer or more reliable version of events. Instead, this manuscript evidence was influenced by newsbook and pamphlet reports of the king's trial and by the public reception of them in ways that tell us interesting things about the Commonwealth's battle to assert its authority in public. Indeed, the decision to create a record of the court's proceedings was arguably closely connected to the fact that the Rump's reporting of the trial had seriously backfired as a propaganda strategy. On 2 February 1649 the high court of justice ordered a committee of seven commissioners 'to peruse and consider the whole narrative of the p[ro]ceedings of the Court' and to prepare the same for presentation to the house of commons. Clearly, the matter was felt to be urgent, as the committee was to meet with the lord president of the court, John Bradshaw, the following day to discuss the business so that the proceedings could be presented to the Rump on Monday   5 February. 8 The narrative of the trial, however, was clearly not ready by this date, as an order from the Commons on 9 February required that the record of the king's trial be brought before the House forthwith. Significantly, on the same day the Commons also considered an 'Act for restraining and preventing the printing and publishing of the passages and proceedings of the High Court of Justice', as well as passing an act forbidding the reporting of the trial of the earl of Cambridge before the high court of justice. 9 Both pieces of legislation were indicative of the Rump's realization that it had lost the print battle over the legitimacy of the king's trial: as Jason Peacey has noted, the king's adept defence had made its own newsbook reports readily adaptable as source material for Royalist writers in both England and continental Europe. 10 Combined, the legislation and the orders for the presentation of the court proceedings indicated a new propaganda strategy that would see tight controls on reporting allied with the production of carefully state-vetted trial narratives.
The production of the trial narrative, however, was clearly not moving at the pace the Commons wished: a further order to bring in the proceedings of the court a week later on 16 February appears to have had no effect. 11 Another order on 30 March from the council of state for the production of the trial proceedings the following Monday makes clear that the proceedings had still not been produced, and that order also seems not to have been fulfilled. 12 In the interim Peter Cole, Francis Tyton and John Playford had published King Charls His Tryal, a complete narrative of the trial, bringing together newsbook reports of the proceedings. The pamphlet was licensed by Mabbott but it was received by George Thomason on 23 February, so was clearly not the account of the trial that the court and the Commons had ordered to be prepared. By November 1649 the Rump had become so sensitive about the reporting of the king's trial that it ordered the serjeant-at-arms, Edward Dendy, to apprehend Cole, Tyton and Playford for reissuing King Charls His Tryal. As this new edition contained nothing that might be taken as indicating a pro-Royalist slant to the publication, Peacey has argued convincingly that the order given to Dendy demonstrates the general anxiety of the English republic about how reports of the king's trial could ultimately be exploited by its opponents. 13 The Rump, however, had not abandoned the idea of producing an authorized narrative of the trial, at least for an international audience. In December 1649 John Milton licensed Histoire Entiere & Veritable du Procez de Charles Stuart, Roy d'Angleterre, which offered a full account of the trial in French. The text appeared in print early in 1650, Thomason receiving his copy on 20 January. 14 Peacey, while noting that the text was licensed, has questioned whether it was authorized by the Rump, observing that the Histoire did praise the king in places. 15 However, the Histoire's apparently balanced commentary -it promised to 'rapporté le tout sans partialité' 16 -was actually a strategy designed to throw French Royalists off the scent and avoid the fate of previous parliamentarian productions of being repurposed by their political opponents. Additional evidence from state papers strongly indicates that this was an authorized French translation of the trial proceedings. On 26 February 1650 the admiralty committee issued a warrant to permit 'Mousr. Rosin to transport customs free the impression of a book in French, relating some proceedings of Parliament against the late king, for dispersion in foreign parts'. 17 Earlier, on 10 January 1650, a note from the council of state had ordered John Coppin to appoint a convoy to accompany the three ships in the Thames bound for Rouen. 18 A letter from the secretary of the Académie Française, Valentin Conrart, to the Calvinist minister André Rivet, dated 22 July 1650, seemingly confirms that these ships were carrying the authorized French translation of the trial. Conrart stated that 1,900 copies of the text had been sent by ship to France but had been seized at Rouen, a report corroborated by a subsequent order of the council of state to set two French ships at liberty, 'the French having done the like with three English ships they seized at Rouen'. 19 As both Muddiman and Peacey have noted, the Histoire contained information that was not present in any of the newsbook or pamphlet accounts, such as the witness depositions, and which had to be drawn from official sources. 20 The most likely English source for this printed French account was the Kew manuscript, sometimes referred to as 'Bradshawe's journal'. This is a bound volume of manuscripts with the description 'Trial of King Cha[rle]s 1st' written on its front and back covers. As Maurice Bond noted, however, that description is not an accurate reflection of the contents of the whole volume, which from folio 48 onwards contains material from 1654. 21 The text that begins here, written in a different hand from the trial journal, appears to be a revision of the first protectoral constitution, the Instrument of Government. Dated 2 November, it was presumably connected to the discussions in parliament in October and November over the detail of the Instrument. 22 From folio 58r to the end of the volume, the manuscript also lists a series of acts ready to be passed. 23 The presence of this material raises the possibility that the journal of the trial itself, contrary to what appears to be indicated by the note from the clerks of the court, Broughton and Phelps, was not produced in 1649. The similarities between the Histoire and the Kew manuscript, however, suggest that the account of the king's trial was very likely written between the spring and autumn of 1649.
The Kew manuscript is distinct from the other three manuscript trial journals in terms of both its content and its presentation. The most glaring difference is in the presentation of the exchanges in Westminster Hall between the king and officers of the court. Whereas the Parliamentary Archives, Beinecke and British Library manuscripts all paraphrase and abbreviate these exchanges, the Kew manuscript records them as direct speech with the name of the speaker in the left-hand margin of the text. In this regard, it is much closer to newsbook reports of the trial, a similarity that is perhaps not coincidental. There are other, apparently minor, variations between the texts that may again point to the Kew manuscript being the earliest version of the journal, and which also cast a significantly different light on statements made at the trial. In Bradshaw's closing speech to Charles I, he refers to the story of the death of Uriah the Hittite (2 Samuel 11), orchestrated by King David, who was having an affair with Uriah's wife Bathsheba. In the Kew manuscript Bradshaw is recorded as telling Charles, 'Truly Sir, the story tells us That hee was a Repentant King, & it Signified enough that hee had died for it [meaning the death of Uriah] but that God was pleased to accept of him, and to give him his Pardon'. 24 In this version of Bradshaw's speech there remains some ambiguity. Admittedly, the use of this biblical example of God forgiving a blood-guilty king comes after Bradshaw's earlier comparison of Charles with classical tyrants such as Caligula. Nonetheless, in the Kew manuscript it remains possible to read this as an injunction to Charles to repent of his 'bloodguiltinesse' and thereby spare his life. 25 This reading could be supported by accounts of a last-minute reprieve being offered to the king. 26 This ambiguity, however, is closed off in the Beinecke, British Library and Parliamentary Archives versions of the journals. Here, in a much-abbreviated version of Bradshaw's speech, the lord president's direction to Charles to repent is to enable him 'to prepare for his eternall Condition'. 27 Other details suggest that the Kew manuscript represents the first iteration of the journal, which was then tidied up in the later versions. For example, in the Kew list of commissioners present on 25 January, one commissioner is recorded only by surname, 'Wilde', and is rather crammed in to the bottom of the list as if as an afterthought. (Indeed, Muddiman misses this commissioner's name in his transcription of the journal.) In the other three versions of the journal, the name of this commissioner, Edmund Wilde, is given in full. 28 Yet, although other small variations in spelling are present, there is a remarkable consistency in the way in which the four journals report the private sittings of the court, indicating again either that the Kew manuscript provided the foundation for the other versions of the journal that followed or that there was a common set of trial notes from which all of these manuscripts were derived. 24 T.N.A., SP 16/517, fo. 42v. 25 It should be noted, however, that Bradshaw in this version of the journal closes with a quotation from 2 Samuel xii:14, in which God tells David that though his life will be spared, because he has given occasion to the enemies of God to blaspheme, 'the child also that is born unto thee shall surely die' (K.J.V. The licensing of the Rump's authorized French account of the trial in December 1649 excludes three manuscripts from being the source for the Histoire (the Beinecke, Harleian and Parliamentary Archives journals). This leaves the Kew manuscript as potentially providing the basis for the French account. Indeed, though it omits some key details, such as the names of commissioners present at each session of the court, the wording of the Histoire closely follows that of the Kew manuscript, reporting the king's exchanges with Bradshaw as direct speech. It follows the Kew manuscript in offering the unexpurgated version of Bradshaw's closing 'harangue' (as the Histoire puts it), including its distinctive recording of the story of the death of Uriah the Hittite. 29 The Histoire also follows the Kew manuscript in its reports of the court's private sessions. In revealing the court's inner workings, however, the Histoire spins this information to help confirm the king's guilt to its readers. In contrast to the purely procedural report of the taking of witness depositions in the Kew manuscript, for example, the Histoire takes the opportunity to stress that such sworn testimony was 'tres veritables'. 30 The text is not, therefore, a verbatim translation of the Kew manuscript, and in other places it demonstrates the incorporation of some material from English newsbooks. 31 The duodecimo edition of the Histoire makes clear that its apparent even-handedness is deceptive: it informs its readers that Charles was accused not only of the crimes outlined in the charge made in court, but of many other crimes and offences that, it says, are enumerated in parliament's declaration justifying the vote of no addresses (which includes the extraordinary allegation that Charles covered up the poisoning of James I by the duke of Buckingham) and in the Commons' declaration of 18 January 1649, which explains the abandonment of the Treaty of Newport. 32 Both declarations are provided in translation at the end of the work.

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Despite these similarities, we cannot definitively identify the Kew manuscript as the source of the Histoire. For one thing, the distinctive rendering of the story of Uriah the Hittite that features in both the Kew manuscript and the Histoire was also used earlier in Gilbert Mabbott's King Charles His Tryal, published, as we have seen, in February 1649. 33 This suggests either that Mabbott and the compiler of the Kew manuscript were working from common materials or that the Kew manuscript and possibly the Histoire incorporated material from this printed account of the king's trial. Another manuscript version of the trial also raises further issues with seeing the Kew manuscript as the basis for the Histoire. The Beinecke manuscript has attracted relatively little attention from scholars of the trial, although Alan Orr has referred to it in his Treason and the State. 34  unbound paper manuscript, although an indication of the date is given in the statement on its opening page that the text was 'Read xi imo Decembr 1650'. The text then begins, as in the Kew manuscript, with the title 'A journall of the proceedinges …', followed by the act establishing the high court of justice. 35 In terms of its presentation, the Beinecke manuscript is formatted more like the Parliamentary Archives journal, with the names of commissioners typically appearing in rows rather than columns (as in the Kew manuscript). Like the Kew manuscript, however, the Beinecke manuscript is not completely devoted to recording the proceedings of the king's trial. From fo. 51 until the end of the manuscript, a series of orders relating to security are recorded, beginning with an order to apprehend any who maintain that Charles Stuart (meaning Charles II) is king. Considering the similarities of content and formatting with the Parliamentary Archives journal and the note concerning the reading of the manuscript, it seems probable that the Beinecke manuscript was part of the documentation produced in preparation for the presentation of the proceedings of the high court of justice to the Commons on 12 December 1650.
In contrast to the other three versions of the journal, the Beinecke manuscript contains a number of blank pages and apparent false starts, as well as directions for the insertion of trial materials, such as the names of the witnesses: 'Here write the rest of the names [?] of the witnesses w[hi]ch yow shall find in a loose sheete of paper afor the w[ri]tt [?] for exacucon of the Kinge'. 36 As the note indicates, the names of the witnesses can be found on the reverse of the text of the king's death warrant. Directions of this kind and breaks in the journal (for example, in the recording of witness depositions) suggest that the manuscript was rather hurriedly copied from a range of other documentation. 37 If this was the case, it raises the question of why the Kew manuscript was not employed as the source instead. As we will see, the answer here may lie in the different purposes behind the creation of these manuscript journals.
Here it will be argued that, unlike the Kew manuscript, the Beinecke, British Library and Parliamentary Archives journals were not intended to form the basis of a printed account of the trial. The Rump had seen the value of publishing an account including material from the private sessions of the court (notably the witness testimony, which had been reported only in brief summaries in English newsbooks) for an international audience. Yet it did not adopt the strategy in England. As far as we can tell, the names of the witnesses, let alone their depositions, did not appear in print before 1660. Two broadsides including the names of the witnesses that were previously dated by the English Short Title Catalogue as printed in 1649 can be confidently placed as having been produced in 1660.  only in the late 1650s. 40 Finally, a likely post-regicide publication date is indicated by a Dutch copy of the broadside, published by Hugo Allard in Amsterdam in 1660. 41 It is possible, however, that information regarding the witnesses' names circulated in manuscript immediately after the king's execution. Two manuscripts written in the same hand and held in the Derbyshire Record Office and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, U.C.L.A., include details of the witnesses' names and may demonstrate that information about the court's inner workings was circulating in scribal form (Figures  3 and 4). 42 The manuscripts do not appear to have derived their information from any post-1660 printed accounts or broadsides. The Derbyshire Record Office copy is part of the papers of Sir John Gell, and Gell's papers contain a significant amount of other material related to the king's execution. For example, the papers also contain copies of the 'Lawrans' newsletters concerning the king's trial, which are now part of the Clarendon manuscripts in the Bodleian Library. 43 Further evidence that unpublished details of the trial were circulating in manuscript can be found in the papers of the Royalist antiquary Elias Ashmole. In August 1651 Ashmole recorded that he had begun to write the 'manuscript of the great trial'. This account is very similar to that preserved in state papers, including details of the witness depositions and Bradshaw's closing argument in full. Material evidence indicates that the volume was collected from single sheets of notes: the manuscript consists of sixteen sheets of folio paper, folded into quarto. 44 This may indicate that the manuscript was prepared in a manner that would allow it to be circulated surreptitiously and easily concealed if necessary. Analysis of a portion of the manuscript by Frances Henderson indicates that Ashmole was copying from another written account rather than recording speech: he used none of the methods normally employed by shorthand writers to speed up the transcription process, such as omitting punctuation. Ashmole would later produce a longhand version of the trial account, a task that the marginal notes indicate he did not complete until at least the 1680s. 45  Attacking the credibility of witnesses was, of course, a common legal strategy. In attacking the witnesses brought by the Commonwealth, however, Gell, Love and Gibbons were also attacking the legitimacy of the regime's courts and, by extension, the republic itself. Given the capital that Gell, Love and Gibbons made out of their trials, and out of witness testimony in particular, it is not hard to imagine what Royalist writers could have done with the witness depositions against the king, many of which, as has been shown elsewhere, were provided by soldiers serving in the regiments of trial commissioners, such as John Hewson and John Barkstead. 55 By late 1650, therefore, the publishing of trial proceedings had become a weapon of the republic's opponents rather than, as it had been hoped in January 1649, a means of publicly legitimating parliament's authority.
* Nonetheless, in November 1650 the Commons ordered that a report of the proceedings of the trial of the king should be made to the House. 56 This report was then considered by the House a week later on 5 December. 57 The delay between this and the initial orders of 1649 relating to the journal has also occasioned little comment, but considering the immediate context in which the parliamentary Archives journal was presented may illuminate the different motivations behind the creation of this version of the trial proceedings.
The Parliamentary Archives text is the only version of the trial journal for which the provenance is relatively clear: this is the 'engrossed' version of the journal presented to the Commons on 12 December 1650 and entered into the records of the court of chancery in March 1651. It is formatted as a 'parliament roll', recorded on vellum membranes stitched together, rather than in a bound or unbound paper volume, as in the case of the other manuscripts. It concludes, as do the Beinecke and British Library manuscripts, with the attestation of the clerk of the court, John Phelps. After the Restoration, the journal was taken out of the chancery records to facilitate the prosecution of the surviving regicides, and it is now lodged in the Parliamentary Archives. Although this is a far cleaner copy than either the Beinecke or the British Library versions of the journal, like the death warrant of Charles I itself, it continues to betray evidence of erasures and later amendments.
The differences between the Kew manuscript and the Parliamentary Archives journal suggest that each was produced with a different audience and purpose in mind. In contrast to the detailed, vivid accounts of the exchanges in Westminster Hall, the Parliamentary Archives journal offers a drier report of the proceedings, effectively muting Charles's voice. The more procedural account of the trial offered in the Parliamentary Archives journal was probably shaped by the need for a template for the operation of these new legal institutions. On 7 December 1650 Bulstrode Whitelocke and John Lisle were ordered by the council of state to confer with other members of the high court of justice on the management and procedure of a new high court proposed to be held in Norfolk to deal with the prosecution of individuals involved in an insurrection in the county. 58 Further orders were issued on 9, 10 and 11 December establishing the remit of the new court and appointing officers. These same orders justified the creation of the Norfolk court on the basis of the weight of business being dealt with by the existing high court of justice and the strong possibility of more Royalist conspiracies further expanding its work. 59 On the same day that the narrative of the king's trial was presented to the Commons, the House was also considering the legislation to establish the new high court of justice in Norwich. 60 The timing of the presentation of the proceedings of the king's trial to the Commons in December 1650 suggests, therefore, that this was prompted by the need to establish the management and procedure of these courts as their use expanded to deal with the Commonwealth's opponents. Nonetheless, the attention the Parliamentary Archives version of the journal continues to pay to the king's deportment at the trial -his refusal to take off his hat, his use of his cane to attract the attention of John Cook, the withering gaze that he cast upon the president and commissioners -appears out of place if the document was intended largely to provide a manual for the operation of future iterations of the high court of justice. 61 These remarks may provide evidence that the Parliamentary Archives text was still developed with a public audience in mind, to counter Royalist reports of the trial that had made much of king's courageous, eloquent and dignified behaviour in court. 62 The Parliamentary Archives journal, however, was also produced with a more specialized, legal readership in view. After approving the proceedings, the Commons had ordered that the trial journal should be entered into the records of chancery but also that it should be 'sent by Mittimus from thence into the Courts of the Upper Bench, Common Pleas, and publick Exchequer, and also to the Custos Rotulorum in the Respective Counties of this Commonwealth, to be recorded in each of them'. 63 One possibility is that the non-procedural details within the journal were retained to demonstrate that Charles had been found guilty, not only because he failed to enter a plea but also, in the words of Bradshaw, on the basis of the king's 'contumacie & of that confession wch in Lawe doth arise upon that contumacy'. 64 While historians of the trial have noted the move to treat Charles's case as pro confesso (as if he had confessed) because of his refusal to plead, only A. W. McIntosh seems to have recognized the significance of the king's extreme contempt (contumacy) for the court as contributing to his condemnation. 65 Charles's physically and verbally expressed disdain for the court effectively compounded the contempt already registered by refusing to enter a plea. While notice of the king's contempt was present in all iterations of the trial journal, it appears even more clearly in the Parliamentary Archives version. For example, in recording the court's warning to the king on 22 January that his refusal to acknowledge its jurisdiction would be taken as 'Contumacie', the Parliamentary Archives version goes further and includes the warning that Charles's 'Contumacy and contempt would be recorded'. 66 The expansion of this warning is more remarkable given that otherwise the Parliamentary Archives journal here compresses to a mere few lines an interchange that covers four pages in the Kew manuscript. Similarly, in its treatment of the public proceedings on 23 January, the Parliamentary Archives journal omits Cook's argument that the facts of the case were as clear as the noonday sun but includes the statement that 'if advantage were taken of his [the king's] past contempts, nothing would remayne but to pronounce Judgmt'. 67 By the winter of 1650 there was a clear need to assert the authority of the republic's courts. The first business the high court of justice had undertaken after executing the king was to deal with those who were accused of speaking disparaging or even threatening words against the court and its officers. 68 As we have seen, as it was considering the account of the king's trial, the Commons was also establishing the legal machinery to deal with Royalist risings in East Anglia. Many of the Commonwealth's critics and opponents, from Lilburne to Love, had adopted the king's strategy of contesting the legitimacy of the Commonwealth's courts. Moreover, though the Commonwealth had created a test of loyalty (the Engagement) that did not require an acknowledgement of the legitimacy of the regicide, pledging loyalty to the republic was a requirement for defendants or plaintiffs in courts of law. 69 The repeated references to the king's contumacy in the Parliamentary Archives journal, then, may have been intended as a reminder to England's magistrates of the severe penalties that would be faced by any who contested their authority in a court of law.

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Exploring the provenance of these various versions of the trial journal can provide some insights into their probable purpose, as well as helping to explain why the Rump did not receive a full account of the proceedings until December 1650. Examining the detail of these manuscripts may also help us identify the sources for printed accounts of the trial, notably John Nalson's True Copy. Historians have previously assumed that Nalson's book was based upon the Parliamentary Archives version of the journal. 70 This assumption is drawn from the work's title page, which states that it was taken from the version of the journal 'Attested under the hand of Phelps'. The Beinecke and British Library versions of the journal, however, also finish, like the Parliamentary Archives journal, with Phelps's attestation. 71 The British Library manuscript appears to have been overlooked by historians. A short, red, leather-bound volume on paper, the manuscript, in contrast to the Beinecke and Kew manuscripts, focuses exclusively on the trial. The manuscript may have come from the papers of Henry Scobell, clerk to parliament. In a diary entry of 18 August 1725, Humfrey Wanley, Harley's librarian, recorded a visit from a 'Mr Goodwyn', the executor of 'Mr Scobell', who had brought three modern manuscripts to Wanley, along with a matrix seal of the Commonwealth. 72 Although Scobell's will does not refer to any children, other items from the interregnum, notably a medal of Scobell himself, appear to have been passed down through his family. 73 Besides some variations in spelling, the treatment of the trial is nearly identical to that in the Beinecke and Parliamentary Archives versions, with the interchanges in the public sessions of the court abbreviated and paraphrased. Like the Beinecke journal, it is dated as having been read on 11 December 1650. Although there is some evidence of amendments and additions, it is a much cleaner text than the Beinecke manuscript. In presentational terms, it is closer to the Kew manuscript, giving the names of commissioners in columns, with the social status of the individuals (esquires, knights and so on) indicated in brackets. Cosmetically, then, it appears to be a 'half-way house' between the Kew and parliamentary Archives versions. These variations in formatting may provide some important clues to which manuscripts served as the basis for later printed works.
It may also be the Harleian manuscript that was presented to parliament on 12 December, as the Commons Journal reports that this was 'contained in a Book [my emphasis], entitled "A journal…etc"'. 74 It was also Scobell who had been instructed to send the roll to chancery and who had endorsed the roll as a true record of the trial in March 1651. 75 As we will see, however, it is not possible to be certain about this, as it is highly likely that other versions of this 'book' were produced that may also have been the volume presented by the M.P. and former trial commissioner William Say on that day. In addition, we should note that the entry in the Commons Journal records that Say also presented the act establishing the court, the charge against the king and the sentence delivered on 27 January, though whether this was for the Commons to compare with the rendering given in the journal or whether these items were at this stage separated from the book of proceedings is not clear.
Nalson's True Copy includes the dating 'Read xi Dec 1650', found in both the Beinecke and British Library versions but absent from the Parliamentary Archives version. 76 Nalson himself gave no indication of how he gained access to the journal, stating only that it came into his hands by 'accident, shall I call it, or particular Providence'. 77 This raises the possibility that either the Beinecke or the British Library text provided the basis for his True Copy. There are clear presentational similarities that suggest that the British Library manuscript provided the source for Nalson's text: not only does the British Library manuscript present the commissioners' names in columns, unlike the Beinecke text, but it also places Bradshaw's name across these columns on a number of pages, a distinctive bit of formatting also found in Nalson's True Copy (Figures 5 and 6). 78 These similarities are not close enough for the identification to be definitive and, of course, there is the question of how, if this manuscript remained in the possession of the Scobell family, it came for a time to be in Nalson's hands. Indeed, the entire discussion of the provenance of these books and journals must remain tentative given the evidence that other manuscript accounts of the king's trial were made. The pamphlet account of the regicides' trials in 1660 indicates that another full version of the trial journal was in existence at this point. An Exact and Most Impartial Accompt of the Indictment, Arraignment, Trial, and Judgment (According to Law) of Nine and Twenty Regicides (1660) began by rehearsing the events of the trial as taken from the commissioners' own 'journal book'. The pamphlet went so far as to provide folio numbers for the events mentioned, but these numbers do not appear to match with any of the four manuscripts discussed in this article. 79 The author clearly had access to the Commons Journals, which were also incorporated into this narrative of the events of 1649, and if they had access to official sources of this kind, it may be the case that the 'journal book' referred to here was the version actually presented to the Commons in December 1650. Equally, given that these were all post facto productions, we must also accept the possibility that these accounts were themselves shaped by earlier printed versions of the trial. Certainly, the Histoire represented a hybrid text drawn from a combination of newsbook, pamphlet and official sources. None of these manuscript accounts can therefore be regarded as offering an original or definitive version of the king's trial. Indeed, there was much that they left out, whether, as we have seen, the basis for narrowing the charge against the king or particular events, such as the presentation of a petition to the court on 22 January 1649 by soldiers calling for justice. 80 The exploration of the provenance of these manuscripts therefore remains speculative. Nonetheless, at the very least it suggests that a new, critical edition of the trial proceedings is needed, incorporating material from all of the versions of the journal. Any such edition would need to acknowledge that the trial journals were similar to other early modern legal reports in privileging the delivery of a moral (and in this case political) message over accurately and comprehensively recording the trial proceedings. 81 As has been noted earlier, however, there was considerable consistency in the way in which the different manuscripts rendered the trial proceedings, especially the court's private sittings. Even