Gregory Clement

Gregory Clement

Gregory Clement (1594–1660) was an English Member of Parliament (MP) and one of the regicides of King Charles I.

Clement was the son of John Clement, a merchant and one time Mayor of Plymouth. After working in India for the British East India Company, Clement returned to London and on outbreak of the Civil War supported Parliament.

In 1648, he became an MP for Fowey in Cornwall. In January 1649, as a commissioner of the High Court of Justice at the trial of King Charles, he was 54th of the 59 signatories on the death warrant of the King — although his signature appears to have been written over an erased signature.

He was dismissed from the House of Commons in 1652 over a scandal involving his maidservant. This may have been engineered by Thomas Harrison and other political opponents.

Like all of the other 59 men who signed the death warrant for Charles I, Clement was in grave danger when Charles II of England was restored to the throne. Some of the 59 fled England but Clement was arrested, put on trial, and found guilty of high treason. He was hanged, drawn and quartered at Charing Cross on 17 October 1660.

According to Mark Twain's autobiography, an irate Virginian correspondent called him a descendant of a regicide (apparently referring to Gregory Clement) and berated him for supporting the–as he called it–aristocratic Republican Party.

References

• Gregory Clement British Civil Wars & Commonwealth website
• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. Clements, Gregory
• Mark Twain, Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain's Autobiography, Part One, Kessinger Publishing 2003, ISBN 0-7661-6136-6
• James Caulfield, The High Court of Justice: Comprising Memoirs of the Principal Persons, who sat in Judgment on King Charles the First and Signed his Death Warrant, John Caulfield, London 1820

See also

• Regicide
• List of regicides of Charles I