On 15 May 1660 the Convention Parliament ordered that justice be meted out on the regicides Oliver Cromwell, Henry Ireton, John Bradshaw and Thomas Pride. For a Parliament that had welcomed monarchy back to England there was nothing surprising about initiating revenge against those who had committed the act that had led to eleven years of republican rule. What was different of course was that all four men were already dead. For the justice required by this Parliament to be enacted their bodies would have to be dug up, taken to Tyburn, the traditional place for the execution of traitors, hung, decapitated and disembowelled before being publicly displayed.

The horror of such a process is only heightened by the length of time these men had been dead. Cromwell died on 3 September 1658; Pride on 23 October 1658; Bradshaw on 31 October 1659. Of the four Ireton, despite being the youngest, had been the first to die, in Ireland aged 40 on 26 November 1651. A royalist satire played upon the fact that Ireton had been dead for a considerable length of time. Of the fifty-nine regicides twenty-four died before the Restoration but of that number only these four were singled out for such treatment, a mark of how they were regarded ‘as most guilty of the King's death’. In a declaration of 26 August 1651 Charles Stuart had offered indemnity to all but the regicides, specifically naming Cromwell, Ireton and Bradshaw.