Daniel Axtell

Colonel Daniel Axtell, 1622 to 19 October 1660, was a grocer and religious radical from Hertfordshire who served with the Parliamentarian army during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. He was in charge of security during the Trial of Charles I at Westminster Hall in January 1649, and as a result was excluded from the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion after the 1660 Stuart Restoration. He was hanged, drawn and quartered for treason on 19 October 1660. Biography Axtell was a Baptist from Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire, who was apprenticed as a grocer. He joined the New Model Army, serving in John Pickering's regiment of Foote, and rose to the rank of colonel. Axtell played a big part in the English Civil War after being recruited by Parliament in 1643. He fought as an infantryman and was present at the sieges of Lindon (May 1644) and York (June 1644), along with the battle of Marston Moor and many other sieges and battles. Axtell was a keen puritan and in 1646 he and some other puritan soldiers started preaching in churches in Oxford. At that time it was illegal to preach unless one was a qualified clergyman, so he had to force the clergymen to give way. He participated as a lieutenant colonel in Pride's Purge of the Long Parliament (December 1648), arguably the only military coup d'état in English history, and commanded the Parliamentary Guard at the trial of King Charles I at Westminster Hall in 1649.