Reddit mentions of The Tyrannicide Brief: The Story of the Man Who Sent Charles I to the Scaffold

I highly recommend The Tyrannicide Brief. It's the story of the trial of the men responsible for the execution of Charles I at the end of the English Civil War. When his son, Charles II, retook the throne, he put these men on trial.

It gives a great history of the legal system at the time, and the promising reforms that were put in place under the Commonwealth, only to be ruled back after the return of the monarchy.

My favorite part had to be the story of the judge who stepped down from bench, walked to the witness stand, gave evidence, then got back on to the bench to continue trying the case.

Right, I think you and I's thinking is close on this. But: were these revolutions necessary at all? The english one is more tricky, but in both cases, incremental and marginal reform were happening all along. Schama's Citizens did a lot to show how the ancien regime was not hidebound and dogmatic but was instead dynamic, and innovative. It would not have stood still all through the same time period as our own had it not fallen. There might still be screwy boundaries between departments and some other cruft in the system, but surely some minor cruft isn't a justification for killing millions as the French revolution ultimately led to.

The English revolution is more intractable, and arguably wasn't so much a revolution as an imposition of law where the king was lawless but his law said one thing ('Rex is Lex') whereas Parliament had a different law. There's a really fascinating book I recommend to people on this time period - The Tyrannicide Brief. Arguably, like the American Revolution, this wasn't a revolution in the Marxist sense - the same ruling classes still were on both sides of the conflict with the same social strata and so on. Rather, it was more a civil war where various groups were in conflict on how to rule, and ideology was more dominant than some sort of class conflict.