Cromwell

by Antonia Fraser

  So on the morning of Tuesday, 30 January, Charles Stuart walked with calm dignity and religious resignation from St James’s Palace to the designated place of his death at Whitehall. Once arrived, he rested within Whitehall itself, and strengthened himself with a little red wine and a little bread. There was a slight delay, probably because the Commons was even then passing an urgent Act which forbade the proclamation of his successor after his death. They had suddenly taken into account Pride’s words on the problems of cutting off the head of an hereditary King, when they had not yet officially abolished monarchy: they would simply find themselves with another sovereign on their hands. It was two o’clock in the afternoon when Charles stepped forth from the Banqueting House windows in front of the enormous silent crowd. The weather was icy Charles was secretly wearing two shirts so that he should not shiver and be accused of fear. With him came only his chaplain, Bishop Juxon, for his faithful servant Sir Thomas Herbert who had accompanied him on the mournful march from St James’s Palace begged to be excused from the painful task of being a witness. There were the two Colonels Hacker and Tomlinson on the scaffold to supervise the execution, and serried troops below, lest even now the King should appeal to his people – or the people perhaps to their King.

  To the spectators indeed their King seemed greatly aged, his beard grey and his hair silver. Now they could see that, but his words could only he heard by those very close to him, Bishop Juxon, the two Colonels, and the two masked executioners, for the ban on any form of public appeal remained absolute. To this tiny audience, but every word would be lovingly treasured by his chaplain to reach the audience of the world, he regretted nothing: “For the people truly I desire their liberty and freedom as much as anybody whatsoever; but I must tell you that their liberty and freedom consists in ha’ving government, those laws by which their lives and goods maybe most their own. It is not their having a share in the government; that is nothing appertaining to them; a subject and sovereign are clean different things …” So the sovereign went to his death at the hands of his subjects, proud and unrepentant on that interpretation of government whose inflexibility had brought about his downfall: those words alone did much to show why Charles died. Yet another of his sayings showed also why another section of his people would always regard him as King Charles the Martyr: “I go from a corruptible crown to an incorruptible crown,” he told Juxon, “where no disturbance can be, no disturbance in the world.”45 And it was Andrew Marvell, very likely present among the crowd, in an ode intended to celebrate Charles’s mortal adversary Cromwell, who penned the words which later immortalized the King’s courage in his last moments, as he bent his neck in silent submission on to the black-draped block:

  Nor call’d the Gods with vulgar spite

  To vindicate his helpless Right

  But bow’d his comely Head

  Down as upon a Bed.

  A minute later the executioner (believed to be the common hangman named Brandon, but with his assistant he had insisted on the utmost precautions being taken to preserve his identity including a false beard and wig) was holding up the severed head with the traditional cry: “Behold the head of a traitor!” In less than a quarter of an hour, said the French Ambassador, this whole sad ceremony was over. But from the people watching went up not the raucous cries of the crowd at justice done, not the human response to blood lust of so many public executions; something so deeply shocking had been perpetrated that up from the people went a great deep groan, a groan, said an eye-witness, “as I never heard before and desire I may never hear again”;46 it was a lament that would be heard as long and as far as the problems of justice and injustice were cared for. For whatsoever could be said of the execution of King Charles i, that it was inevitable, even that it was necessary, it could never be said that it was right.

  * * *

  And where were they then, the authors of this doom, the Army leaders, the regicides, the signatories of that melancholy warrant? Heath suggested that Cromwell was actually attending a prayer-meeting of the Council of Officers at the fatal moment at which many “tedious expedients” were still being discussed in order to save the King. Oliver, agreeing that much calumny would fall upon them all if he was killed, suggested that they should “seek God to know his mind in it”. In the midst of the meeting, and a particularly lengthy prayer from Cromwell himself, a messenger arrived to announce the death of the King. At which Cromwell, holding up his hands, declared that it had obviously not been “the pleasure of God that he should live” and they had done ill to tempt him against his will to this moment of weakness. This last-minute wavering on Cromwell’s part has little corroboration: a more convincing testimony of Cromwell’s unalloyed resolution was given at the trial of Colonel Hacker, the supervisor of the execution, by a Colonel Huncks. An hour before the King died, Huncks was in Ireton’s chamber, when the warrant for the execution was produced, and Hacker read it. Cromwell then ordered Huncks to draw up the further order for the executioner, Huncks refused and there were “some cross passages”. But – “Cromwell would have no delay”. Sitting down at a little table by the door, he wrote the order out himself, and handing the pen to Hacker, ordered him to sign. According to Huncks, Cromwell termed him a “froward, peevish fellow” for his squeamishness. Another picture of Cromwell the inexorable organizer was given by a witness at the trial of Hugh Peter; the fellow happened to arrive with a warrant concerning the Army as the execution was pending; Cromwell suggested pleasantly that he might like to go down to Whitehall and see the beheading of the King.47

  The story of the prayer-meeting itself is more probable, if only because it is corroborated by the tale of Sir Thomas Herbert, the dead King’s servant, who met Fairfax by accident after the execution, coming back from a prayer-meeting in Harrison’s rooms. Fairfax did not even seem to know that the King was dead, but shortly afterwards Cromwell appeared and told them “they should have orders for the King’s burial speedily”. Richard Baxter also heard that Cromwell kept Fairfax praying. It would certainly be characteristic not only of Cromwell but of all those round him who believed themselves to be the instruments of,God’s will, to pray during the actual death of the King.

  The arrangements for the King’s interment were put in hand with great efficiency. First the body in its coffin lay under a velvet pall in that room in Whitehall where Charles had spent his last days. It was then embalmed according to the custom of the time, and removed to St James’s Palace. Since permission was now refused his servants to bury Charles in the Henry vn Chapel within Westminster Abbey, his body was taken down to Windsor. Here, on 9 February, under a further pall of falling snow, “the colour of innocency”, the King’s body was buried, attended by a small retinue of his loyal friends and servants led by Juxon, who was not however allowed to use the service from the Book of Common Prayer which Charles would have wanted.48 Burials make strange bedfellows : Charles was placed in a vault with King Henry vm and Queen Jane Seymour, the ruthless monarch and the immaculate consort.

  Tradition loves to have it that Oliver Cromwell, on the night that the King’s body lay in its coffin in Whitehall, came also to pay his last respects. About two o’clock in the morning, as the Earl of Southampton maintained watch in the Banqueting House with a friend, sitting by the corpse “very melancholy”, they heard the tread of someone coming slowly up the stairs. Presently the door opened and a man entered, much muffled in his cloak, his face completely hidden. Approaching the body, he gazed at it attentively for some time, and then shook his head. The listeners heard these words sighed out: “Cruel necessity!” Then the unknown departed in the same secret manner. Although nothing could be discerned of his features, Lord Southampton used to say afterwards that “by his voice and gait he took him to be Oliver Cromwell”.* ( * The story was first published in Spence’s Anecdotes in the eighteenth century; it was supposed to have been told by Lord Southampton to an intermediary whence it reached Alexander Pope.) In a way, the story, however improbable, does receive
a kind of backing from Heath who tells another anecdote of Cromwell openly inspecting Charles in his coffin and observing that “if he had not been King he might have lived longer”, for although the details are different, the impression left of Cromwell is somewhat the same. Certainly by the eighteenth century there was a substantial tradition of some visitation by Cromwell to Charles’s coffin: the Reverend Mark Noble regarded it as “certain, that he went to feast his eyes upon the murdered King”, and gave yet another version of Cromwell in front of the guard putting his finger to the neck to see if it was quite severed. This soldier, Bowtell, whose sword Cromwell was supposed to have used to lift the lid of the coffin, asked the General boldly: “What government they should have now?” To which Cromwell replied briefly: “The same that now was.”49 Those words too have quite a Cromwellian ring; perhaps the exchange was authentic if the details were not.

  Whether purely apocryphal the lot of them, or whether as seems more likely together adding up in synoptic fashion to the probability of some form of last inspection, these stories do at least represent the commentary of the times on Cromwell’s attitude to Charles. It has been pointed out that it is on this basis that many demonstrably false anecdotes of history survive down the centuries: even if not true, they are felt to sum up a particular situation in dramatic form – in this case “the impossible dilemma of Oliver Cromwell”.* ( * See Robert Birley, The Undergrowth of History, where other similar stories are considered at length such as King Alfred and the Cakes, Sir Walter Raleigh’s cloak, etc.) It can be argued that their very survival is a proof of their poetic truth, if not of their historic truth. So the famous words “Cruel Necessity” take on a weightier ring than the mere gossip of the past. It was indeed necessity to Cromwell that the King should die. Seeing no way out, he believed therefore that Providence had guided him there, and that it was no longer God’s will that Charles should live. Nor, so far as we know, did he ever regret the decision. Never a particularly backward-looking man, he was supposed to have worried over the thought of the vengeance of King Charles n during the Protectorate, directed perhaps at his family; but of regret for the circumstances which had brought about this desire for vengeance, there was never a trace.

  Indeed, Cromwell went further. The next year, while at Edinburgh, he referred to the death of the King as “the great fruit of the war” because it was “the execution of exemplary justice upon the prime leader of all this quarrel”. Later he described all the regicides as having acted “in a way which Christians in after times will mention with honour and Tyrants look at with fear”.50 Nor was it a view confined to Cromwell alone – the pleas of duress put forward by some at the Restoration trials should not blind one to the very real and continuing sense of purpose manifested by others. The counsel for the prosecution, John Cook, for example, wrote shortly before he in his turn was executed: “We are not traitors, nor murderers, nor fanatics, but true Christians and good Commonwealth men … we sought the public good and would have enfranchised the people, and secured the welfare of the whole groaning creation, if the nation had not more delighted in servitude than in freedom …” It was a point of view Cromwell shared, as he would have sympathized with Mrs Hutchinson’s portrait of her husband, that pattern of a Puritan gentleman, in an agony of reflection but in the end coming down firmly and for ever on the side of necessary execution. Like many others, Colonel Hutchinson had formed the impression from the King’s demeanour that if he were released he would merely seek to incur more bloodshed, for which those who freed him would then be responsible: “God would require at their hands all the blood and desolation which should ensue by their suffering him to escape, when God had brought him into their hands.” Hutchinson then addressed himself to God, to be guided from on high, lest he be acting through human frailty; “finding no check but a confirmation in his conscience that it was his duty to act as he did, he, upon serious debate, both privately and in his addresses to God, and in conferences with conscientious, upright and unbiased persons, proceeded to sign the sentence against the King”. Like Cromwell, Hutchinson never regretted what he had done.51

  Still more explicit was the answer given by the fellow regicide Colonel Harrison at his trial. They had, he said, acted throughout “in the fear of the Lord”. To that followed the indignant question from the court: “Will you make God the author of your treasons and your murders?” The proper answer to that question, at any rate so far as Cromwell was concerned, was – yes, he did make God the author of all that had been done. Cromwell might have been led through the maze of doubts to his last unequivocal position by the actions of Army radicals: nevertheless in the last analysis it was not fear of the Army but conviction of the right which led him to agree to the killing of the King. One only has to recall the bloodthirsty and self-righteous sentiments of those preachers on which he had been nurtured, not only the words of Stephen Marshall, but a tradition of violence preached since the end of the last century, those oftquoted examples of Ahab and Saul, to see that it was all too possible to hold the position of a necessary – and positively justified, holy -judicial execution. On the eve of Charles’s death, Hugh Peter’s sermon at St James’s Palace had taken as its text Isaiah’s denunciation of the King of Babylon – “... thou art cast out of thy grave like an abominable branch … Thou shall not be joined with them in burial, because thou hast destroyed thy land, and slain thy people.” On the day following, the familiar sanguinary texts about the Kings of Israel were paraded by John Cardell and John Owen in sermons to the Commons. Owen, a Welshman who had been chaplain to Fairfax throughout the siege of Colchester, called the regicides the “Lord’s workmen”, and to describe their deeds he took the words of the Psalmist: “It is the Lord’s doing and is marvellous in our eyes.” Stephen Marshall to the Lords was no doubt equally virulent, equally confident. Cromwell was merely the man of action brought up in this tradition, and echoing the words of the preacher, “an eminent witness of the Lord for blood-guiltiness”.52

  Yet the necessity was also cruel. Still the traditional story mirrored another aspect of the truth. If not in the sense that Cromwell ever regretted it, it was a disastrous mistake for the cause in which Cromwell believed. From the moment of his trial, with his unquenchable stand on the illegality of it all, backed up by the marked nobility of his bearing in the eyes of the world, King Charles had begun to tread the long causeway towards martyrdom. The very day he was buried at Windsor appeared that detailed account of “His Majesty in his Solitude and sufferings”, widelybelieved at the time to spring from his own hand – Eikon Basilike. In fact it was the work of a Royalist sympathizer, but that made no difference to the rapt appreciation of the public and before the end of the year Eikon Basilike had been reprinted thirty times. The accusations of arbitrary tyranny, once levelled with some substance at the King, could now be placed firmly at the door of the men who had done him to death. The advantage of honour, the attraction of men who battle for the people’s freedom against governmental forces more powerful than their own, had passed from Cromwell’s cause for ever as a result of an action which ironically enough, he genuinely believed to have been brought about by “Providence and necessity”. There was no greater proof of the deep and dangerous ways into which the doctrine of providences could lead a man, sliding so easily and so conveniently into mere self-justification for any harsh and challenging deed which might seem necessary at the time.

  PART THREE

  The Commonwealth of England

  I do declare and promise that I will be true and faithful to the Commonwealth of England as the same is now established, without a King or House of Lords

  Oath of Engagement of 1649

  12 All things become new

  ... these new Christians have taken care, that old things must pass away, and all things become new, to maintain the new device of the Republic

  MERCURIUS PRAGMATICUS, June 1649

  Now much novelty was introduced into the body politic of England. Its nature ranged from the gr
andiose measures that were intended to sweep away officially the monarchy and its correlative the House of Lords, to much pettier preoccupations with the new flag which should be flown by the Navy. Already before the King’s death, a new Great Seal for the kingdom had been put in hand by the Commons; the services of that paragon of engravers previously in the service of Charles, Thomas Simon, had been engaged to carry it out at a total cost of Ł200, materials and all. Pictorially, the new seal, whose form was established by a committee of the Commons, made the change in the seat of power thoroughly clear. On the one side was shown the House of Commons in crowded session, Speaker in the chair and of course no sign of the House of Lords; circumscribed were the words In the First Year of Freedom by God’s blessing restored 1648* ( * According to the old method of dating which started the year on 25 March, the King had been put to death on 30 January 1648.) The obverse showed the map of England, cut off of course at the Scottish borders, and that of Ireland, combined with their respective arms. On 7 February the new seal was ready to be brought into the House and entrusted to its commissioners. Of the previous incumbents of the office, one, Sir Thomas Widdrington, now begged to be excused, John Lisle a regicide, and Sergeant Keeble a Roundhead lawyer, being brought in to replace him. The other, Bulstrode Whitelocke, allowed himself to accept. He gave his own explanation: although “a strict formal pursuance of the ordinary rules of law, it hath hardly to be discerned in any of the late proceedings on either side .. . unavoidable necessity hath put us upon these courses, which otherwise perhaps we should not have taken.”1 It was the old – or rather the new – argument.