Colonel Daniel Axtell, baptised 26 May 1622, executed 19 October 1660, was a religious radical from Hertfordshire, who served with the Parliamentarian army during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms.

[1] When his father died in May 1638, Daniel Axtell was apprenticed to the Worshipful Company of Grocers in London, where he became part of a community of Baptists, led by William Kiffin, many of whose members were other apprentices.

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.

[2] After the town's walls and the internal earthworks had been successfully stormed, Arthur Aston, the Royalist governor of Drogheda, and others retreated to a citadel on Windmill Mount, which was heavily fortified and could not easily be taken by assault.

"In the civil wars" writes Grosse "it was strongly garrisoned for the King and commanded by Captain Butler, Colonel Axtell, the famous regicide who was governor of Kilkenny, dispatched a party to reduce it, but they returned without accomplishing their orders; upon which Axtell himself marched out with two cannon and summoned the castle to surrender on pain of military execution.

It is possible that Axtell was a scapegoat; Cromwell had committed similar atrocities a year earlier at Drogheda and at Wexford, in the sense that no quarter had been offered.

After the fall of the Protectorate in May 1659, Axtell returned briefly to Ireland as a colonel under the command of Edmund Ludlow but was sent back to England to support John Lambert against Booth's Uprising in August 1659.