You are viewing a free preview of this lesson.
Subscribe to unlock all 10 lessons in this course and every other course on LearningBro.
The set source enquiry is the distinctive feature of Unit Y108, and the execution of Charles I and the Interregnum of 1646–1660 is its prescribed subject. Section A of the examination presents you with a small set of contemporary written sources and asks you to judge, using those sources and your own knowledge, how far they support a particular interpretation of the period. This is not a general essay: it is a specialised skill — the disciplined evaluation of primary evidence — and it is assessed against a single Assessment Objective, AO2. Because it is worth a substantial share of the unit's marks and rewards a technique quite different from the essay-writing tested in Section B, it deserves a lesson to itself. That is the purpose of this lesson: to build both the contextual knowledge of 1646–1660 that the enquiry demands and the evaluative technique that turns that knowledge into a high-scoring source analysis.
The lesson has two interlocking tasks. The first is to consolidate and deepen the history of the years the enquiry covers — the road to regicide, the fierce modern debate over the legality and meaning of the king's trial, and the succession of republican experiments from Commonwealth to Protectorate — because you cannot evaluate a source you do not understand, and the single commonest way to lose marks in Section A is to analyse sources in a contextual vacuum. The second task is to master the enquiry technique itself: how to interrogate a contemporary source by its provenance, tone, purpose, and context, how to read with and against the grain, and how to cross-reference several sources into a single, substantiated judgement about the view under examination. The lesson works through a fully modelled enquiry using four representative types of contemporary source, and closes with banded specimen answers that show exactly what separates a middling source-evaluation from a top-band one.
The organising question of the lesson is a question about method: what does it mean to judge how far a set of contemporary sources supports a given view of the regicide and the republic — and why is the crucial move to weigh each source by its origin and purpose rather than by whether it is "reliable" or "biased"? Keep this in view throughout, because the single most important lesson of AO2 is that a partisan, one-sided source is not thereby a bad source: a Royalist martyrology and an army declaration are both immensely valuable for the right question, and the historian's task is to determine what each can and cannot tell us, not to sort sources into "trustworthy" and "untrustworthy" piles.
By the end of this lesson you will be able to:
This lesson belongs to OCR H505 Unit Y108 (British period study and enquiry): England 1603–1660 — The Early Stuarts and the Origins of the English Civil War. Within our own teaching sequence it is the dedicated enquiry-skills lesson: where the narrative lessons on the regicide and the Interregnum supplied the history, this lesson turns that history into the specific source-evaluation technique the unit's Section A demands. We treat the enquiry as a lesson in its own right — rather than folding source technique into the narrative lessons — because the AO2 skill is distinct, examined separately, and best taught explicitly through a fully worked enquiry. This is our pedagogical arrangement, not a transcription of the specification's ordering. (Refer to the official OCR specification for exact wording.)
Keep asking, throughout, not "is this source reliable?" but "what is this source, who made it, why, and what can it therefore tell us — and not tell us — about the view under examination?" That reframing is the whole discipline of Section A.
Sound source evaluation rests on secure knowledge of the period the sources come from, so this section consolidates the essential context. The narrative can be organised around three phases, each of which generated the kinds of contemporary source the enquiry draws upon.
Charles I surrendered in May 1646 hoping to exploit the divisions among his victorious enemies — the Presbyterians who wanted a negotiated settlement and a national Presbyterian Church, the Independents allied with the army, the New Model Army owed vast arrears and threatened with disbandment, and the Scots who held the king and wanted the Presbyterianism promised in the Solemn League and Covenant. He negotiated with all of them and committed to none, rejecting in turn Parliament's Newcastle Propositions, the army's more generous Heads of the Proposals, and the Levellers' radical Agreement of the People. His decisive miscalculation was the secret Engagement with the Scots (December 1647), which promised to establish Presbyterianism in exchange for a Scottish army and ignited the second Civil War in 1648. In the army's providential reading, a king who had been defeated and spared, and who then deliberately provoked fresh bloodshed, stood condemned by God as a "man of blood" — a judgement pronounced at the Windsor prayer meeting of April 1648. After Cromwell crushed the Scots at Preston, the army lost patience with a Parliament still bent on negotiating, and Pride's Purge (December 1648) — a military coup that excluded around 140 members — created the Rump, the body that would try the king.
The trial of Charles I before a High Court of Justice in January 1649 was wholly unprecedented: the Rump alone established the court, the House of Lords refused to concur and was bypassed, and of around 135 named commissioners only 59 ultimately signed the death warrant. Charles refused to plead, denying that any court could lawfully try a sovereign and demanding to know by what lawful authority he was brought there; by challenging jurisdiction rather than answering the charge, he turned the trial into a debate about the legitimacy of the court and won a lasting rhetorical victory. He was executed outside the Banqueting House on 30 January 1649, and the martyrology Eikon Basilike, published within days, made him a Christian martyr and did more for the Stuart cause than he had achieved in life.
The meaning of the trial is one of the liveliest debates in the field, and knowing it sharpens source evaluation. Sean Kelsey has argued that the decision for execution was taken remarkably late and remained genuinely uncertain even as the trial proceeded — that the regime may have hoped Charles would acknowledge the court and accept terms, so that his own intransigence, not a fixed republican design, sealed his fate. Others emphasise providentialism: for men like Cromwell, the army's victories were God's verdict, and to spare the "man of blood" would be to defy Him. Blair Worden, in his work on the Rump and the republic, has stressed the political character and the chronic weakness of the regime that emerged — a government perpetually in search of a legitimacy it could never command, given the coup and regicide from which it sprang. These interpretations matter for AO2 because they alert you to what different sources are doing: a royalist source constructs a martyr and a lawless court; an army or republican source constructs a righteous act of justice and a sovereign people; and the historian reads each as evidence of the position it was made to advance.
The abolition of monarchy and the House of Lords (March 1649) and the declaration of England as a Commonwealth (May 1649) inaugurated eleven years of republican government that never resolved the tension between authority and consent. The Rump governed until Cromwell dissolved it by force in 1653; the nominated Barebone's Parliament collapsed within months; the Instrument of Government made Cromwell Lord Protector under England's only written constitution; the rule of the Major-Generals (1655–57) fused military government with a "reformation of manners" so unpopular that it fixed the regime's authoritarian image for good; and the offer of the crown in the Humble Petition and Advice (1657), which Cromwell agonised over and refused, captured the paradox of a regime edging back towards monarchy yet barred by the army from completing the journey. After Cromwell's death in 1658 the regime unravelled under his son Richard, and General Monck's march south in 1660 led to the Convention that recalled Charles II. Each of these episodes generated its own contemporary literature — official declarations, hostile pamphlets, printed newsbooks, Cromwell's own speeches — and it is that literature the Section A enquiry asks you to weigh.
With the context in place, we can turn to the technique. Section A presents a set of four contemporary written sources and a stated view — an interpretation of some aspect of the regicide or the republic — and asks how far the sources, used together with your own knowledge, support that view. The single most important thing to understand is what AO2 actually rewards, because a great deal of avoidable mark-loss comes from misunderstanding the task.
AO2 rewards the evaluation of sources in their historical context. It does not reward retelling what the sources say, and it does not reward the crude sorting of sources into "reliable" and "unreliable." The examiner is not asking whether a source tells the truth; the examiner is asking what the source, understood as a historical artefact produced by particular people for particular purposes, can tell us about the view under examination. This means the governing framework is not reliability but provenance, tone, purpose, and context — the four questions you put to every source.
| Question | What it asks | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Provenance | Who produced this source, when, where, and in what circumstances? | The origin of a source shapes what it can and cannot know, and whose interests it serves. An army declaration and a royalist meditation come from opposite poles of the conflict |
| Tone | In what register is it written — triumphant, defensive, accusatory, devotional, reportorial? | Tone is evidence of intention: a calm, dignified register may itself be a strategy (as with Charles at his trial), while a vehement one signals a mobilising purpose |
| Purpose | What was the source designed to do — persuade, justify, mobilise, commemorate, report? | Purpose is the key that unlocks a source: a document written to rally support will select and shape its material to that end, which is exactly what makes it valuable as evidence of a case being made |
| Context | What situation was the source responding to, and what do we independently know about it? | Only knowledge of the context lets you detect a source's silences, exaggerations, and distortions — and judge the gap between what it claims and what was so |
Two further disciplines separate strong Section A work from weak. The first is reading against the grain: a source is valuable not only for what it intends to tell you but for what it inadvertently reveals — a defensive tone betrays a threat, an omission betrays an inconvenient fact, a strident justification betrays a contested act. The second is cross-referencing: the enquiry is about the set of sources, not each in isolation, so the highest marks go to answers that group the sources, weigh them against one another, and use their agreements and disagreements to build a judgement. A source that stands alone in supporting the view, against three that undercut it, tells a different story from four that converge — and noticing that pattern is the essence of the enquiry. Throughout, the reframing to hold onto is this: never ask "is this source biased?" (all these sources are partisan, and partisanship is not a defect but a fact to be interpreted); ask instead "what is this source for, and what does that make it good evidence of?"
To see the technique in action, consider a representative enquiry built around the view: "The execution of Charles I was an act of justice carried out on behalf of the English people." This is precisely the kind of contested interpretation Section A sets, because the contemporary sources pull violently in opposite directions. Below are four representative types of contemporary source such an enquiry might draw upon. To respect citation integrity, these are described as source types — "a source of this type would…" — rather than presented as verbatim extracts from named documents; the technique of evaluation is identical whatever the specific texts on the paper.
Subscribe to continue reading
Get full access to this lesson and all 10 lessons in this course.