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Puritans and Regicide: Presbyterian-Independent Differences over the Trial and Execution of Charles (I) Stuart. By Noel Henning Mayfield. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1988. xii + 269 pp. $28.50.

In this provocative study, a revision of the author's doctoral dissertation (University of Mississippi, 1984), Noel Mayfield challenges prevailing views of the political and ecclesiastical struggles in England in the late 1640s, particularly the vexed question of Charles I's execution and the fierce debate it provoked. Mayfield sees the regicide as a radical act rather than a merely expedient decision forced on Oliver Cromwell; indeed, Mayfield's Cromwell is not the reluctant revolutionary or "moderate constitutionalist" depicted by most historians but a truly radical leader motivated by "spiritual-millennial independency." The decision to bring the king to justice was not made, according to Mayfield, solely because of circumstances stemming from the second civil war but in keeping with "radical antimonarchical tendencies" present by at least 1641; as early as the fall of 1647, Cromwell, he argues, accepted the possibility of Charles's execution in principle.