The English half of Twenty Years After sends d'Artagnan, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis into a real historical catastrophe that no amount of fictional heroism could have prevented: the trial and execution of King Charles I in January 1649, an event so unprecedented that it shocked much of contemporary Europe regardless of which side of the English conflict any given observer's sympathies lay on.
A King Genuinely on Trial for His Life
What made Charles I's trial so shocking to contemporaries wasn't just the outcome. It was the fact that a sitting, anointed monarch was formally tried at all. European political culture in this period rested heavily on the idea that kings ruled by divine right, answerable to God rather than any earthly court. Parliament's decision to try Charles for treason against his own kingdom represented a truly radical break from that assumption, one that many even among his political enemies found difficult to fully accept in principle, whatever they thought of Charles personally. The trial proceeded regardless, ending in a guilty verdict that led directly to his public execution on January 30, 1649, outside the Banqueting House in London.
Real Royalist Rescue Attempts, Just Like Dumas's
Dumas's depiction of d'Artagnan and his friends attempting to intervene on Charles's behalf reflects a true historical pattern rather than pure invention. Various Royalist sympathizers, both English and continental, did make real efforts to prevent the execution or arrange an escape in the weeks and days before it, none of which succeeded. The novel's fictional characters fail for the same reason the real historical rescue attempts failed: Parliament's military and political control over London and the surrounding region by this point in the conflict was simply too thorough for any small-scale intervention, however well-organized, to meaningfully disrupt.
General Monk, the Man Who Later Undid It All
One of the novel's most significant historical figures, General Monk, was real and pivotal, though his actual historical importance came a full decade after Charles I's execution, not during it. Monk commanded Parliamentary forces during the Commonwealth period, and it was his real, carefully calculated decision in 1660 to support the restoration of Charles I's son as King Charles II that actually ended England's republican experiment and returned the Stuart monarchy to power. Dumas compresses the real timeline somewhat for narrative purposes, but Monk's actual historical significance as the single figure whose choice determined England's political future is not exaggerated. Contemporaries and later historians alike credit him with singlehandedly making the Restoration possible through his calculated support at exactly the right moment.
A Death Sentence Even His Enemies Found Unsettling
Contemporary accounts describe the crowd at Charles's execution as unusually subdued rather than celebratory, a documented, real unease that Dumas's own novel reflects in its portrayal of the event's aftermath. Charles reportedly conducted himself with real composure and dignity in his final hours, a performance that, according to multiple period accounts, complicated public reaction considerably. Executing a king was one thing in the abstract; watching one meet death with apparent calm and true religious conviction was, for many ordinary witnesses, another matter entirely. Some later historians have argued that Charles's dignified conduct at his execution did more for the long-term Royalist cause than almost anything he accomplished as an actual, often politically clumsy monarch during his lifetime.
Why This Mattered So Much to French Observers
For Dumas's French characters and French readers alike, the English regicide carried particular resonance beyond simple cross-Channel political interest. France's own monarchy, watching a fellow European king tried and executed by his own subjects, absorbed a real cautionary lesson about the fragility of royal authority when pushed too far against organized political and religious opposition, a lesson that Marie Antoinette's own fate, over a century later, would tragically echo in ways no one reading about Charles I's execution in 1649 could have anticipated. Dumas, writing in the 1840s with full knowledge of how the French Revolution had eventually played out, gives his English regicide sequence real weight precisely because his contemporary readers understood exactly what kind of history was quietly rhyming underneath it.
Read the full sequence in Twenty Years After, or see this site's own piece on the parallel French civil conflict unfolding in the same novel.