Augustine Garland

Augustine Garland was an English lawyer, and one of the Regicides of King Charles I of England.

Born in 1603, the son of a London attorney, Garland was educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and Lincoln's Inn. He was called to the bar in 1639. He inherited property in Essex and Kent on the death of his father, but came to live in London when the civil wars began. Elected Member of Parliament for Queenborough, Kent, in May 1648, he was involved in drafting the ordinance that constituted the High Court of Justice and was chairman of the committee selected to determine procedure at the King's Trial. He sat as one of the King's judges and signed the death warrant in January 1649. Garland was active in drafting legislation until Oliver Cromwell's expulsion of the Rump Parliament in 1653.

Elected MP for Queenborough in the First Protectorate Parliament, Garland was said to be a republican sympathiser. During the constitutional debates of 1654, however, it was Garland who first proposed to Parliament that Cromwell should be offered The Crown. He retired from public life after Cromwell's dismissal of Parliament in 1655. Garland was arrested and brought to trial as a Regicide in October 1660. He was accused of having spat in the King's face as he was led away after being sentenced, a charge which Garland strenuously denied. Although he was condemned to death, the sentence was commuted. A warrant for his transportation to Tangier was issued in 1664, but it is not known whether this was ever carried out.

References

*This article contains text under a Creative Commons License by David Plant, the British Civil Wars and Commonwealth website http://www.british-civil-wars.co.uk/biog/index_g.htm