The beheading of Charles I signalled the end of the traditional theory according to which the king had two bodies: his own natural, mortal one and also an immortal one – the Commonwealth itself. Drawing from Scripture (Matthew 18:9), James I, Charles I's father, had argued that in times of rebellion the head of the Commonwealth may be forced to cut off some ‘rotten members’ to preserve the integrity of the rest of the body. He did not foresee that the body would cut off its own head in order to free itself from an unwanted political life. According to Katherine Bootle Atie, Thomas Hobbes (1558–1679) shared the general interest of his contemporaries to resuscitate the metaphor of the immortal body of the state ‘[i]mbuing political discourse with more vitality than any other writer that century’. This essay argues on the contrary that, after the social and political upheavals of the Civil War, Hobbes had no intention of returning to a conception that was divorced from the new political realities and instead preferred to place in the centre of his political theory the idea of the mortality of the political body. Hobbes developed his political theory in analogy with his materialistic view of the human body. Drawing a close parallel between the natural and the artificial bodies enabled him to build a coherent political theory of the state as an autonomous ‘artificial man’.