On the morning of Saturday 27 January, as Charles was brought back into Westminister Hall, Hugh Peter raised the guards to a chorus, ‘Execution! Justice! Execution!’ Charles tried to speak. He was cut off. Bradshawe, dressed in red robes, reminded the court that Charles was brought before them on a charge ‘of treason and other high crimes’ and that this was carried out ‘in the name of the people of England’. At that a woman’s voice rang out from the gallery, ‘Not half, not a quarter of the people of England. Oliver Cromwell is a traitor!’ ‘What whore is that?’ muttered a musketeer officer. His men levelled their weapons at a masked woman being restrained by another woman, also masked, sitting beside her. The voice was again that of Anne Fairfax, and the woman beside her was a sister of another judge who had chosen to absent himself.17 The guards in the gallery dragged the women out.
Bradshawe offered Charles a last opportunity to acknowledge the jurisdiction of the court and speak in his own defence. Charles, instead, asked ‘that I may be heard in the Painted Chamber before the Lords and Commons’. The time had come, at last, to negotiate–or so Charles believed. But in asking to see the Lords as well as the Commons he was again denying the supremacy of the Commons.18 The sentence was now to be handed down. The prisoner was not allowed his title as king, but addressed as one ‘Charles Stuart’, ‘tyrant, traitor, murderer and public enemy’, and, as such, he was to be ‘put to death by severing his head from his body’.19 The court stood.
Charles began to panic. He suddenly realised there was to be no negotiation. They really were going to cut off his head. He now had to make his defence for posterity. ‘Will you hear me a word, sir?’ he asked. ‘No, sir,’ replied Bradshawe, ‘you are not to be heard after the sentence.’ ‘No, sir?’ Charles asked. ‘No, sir,’ Bradshawe repeated, ‘guard, withdraw your prisoner.’ Charles was indignant: ‘Sir, I may speak after the sentence ever?’ The guard began to move. ‘By your favour [hold] the sentence, sir,’ Charles insisted, ‘I say, sir, I do.’
He turned to those standing by. ‘I am not suffered to speak,’ he said. ‘Expect what justice other people will have’.
In the passageways behind the hall the soldiers lining the route blew pipe smoke in his face, and jeered and mocked. Years before, when Charles was still a prince, his father had described such a scene in his last political work. Dedicated to Charles and titled ‘A Pattern for a King’s Inaugeration’, James had reviewed for his son the significance and meaning of the coronation ceremony. He had recalled Christ’s suffering during the last hours before His crucifixion, how in ‘the public place for the administration of justice’, the Common Hall, ‘soldiers had mocked our Saviour, with putting the ornaments of a king upon him’ and crowned him with thorns. James had warned Charles to prepare himself ‘for the worst’ so he might become worthy of the kingdom of heaven.
At the printers, the cover for the Eikon Basilike now bore an image of Charles carrying a crown of thorns. In the portrait he looks up at the heavenly crown to which he aspires, while at his feet lies the earthly crown he will leave behind.* The image was designed to send a powerful message: a debased Parliament was executing the envoy on earth of Christ the King.
* Was it true that England had been an hereditary kingdom for 1,000 years? Henry VII, the first Tudor king, had not ruled by hereditary right–he had none. Henry VII had claimed his right by divine providence. His ‘right’ (never described) was affirmed by parliamentary statute in 1485. Elizabeth I, a bastard in law, owed her right to the throne to statute. King James had succeeded the last Tudor by hereditary right, but the proclamation in 1603 had been signed and approved by representative peers, gentry and councillors. Without that backing it would not have happened–and it was considered necessary to confirm James’s right in statute the following year. England was not quite an elective monarchy–but it was not merely hereditary.
* The crown in the upper right corner is ‘beatam & aeternam’ (blessed & eternal), which is to be contrasted with the temporal crown at the king’s foot, ‘splendidam & gravem’ (splendid & heavy). He holds the martyr’s crown of thorns, ‘asperam & levem’ (bitter & light).
24
EXECUTION
CHARLES WAS BROUGHT FROM WESTMINSTER TO WHITEHALL IN A closed sedan chair. He was sealed from his people, ‘as they carry such as have the plague’.1 Witnesses would remember the silence of the foot soldiers lining King Street and the onlookers gathered at windows and shop stalls, many in tears.
It took only minutes for Charles to arrive at Whitehall, the Tudor palace he had hoped to replace. Even at Carisbrooke Castle he had continued to work on plans for a vast new classical building: England’s Versailles before that palace was even a glint in the eye of Louis XIV. The architect Inigo Jones, having survived the conflagration that had ended the Basing House siege, had travelled, drawings in hand, to the Isle of Wight. This was the world in which Charles was happiest: a world of beauty and order in which he had time to choose his options, calmly and rationally. Yet it was also one of human warmth. In private Charles had always been very different from his chilly and regal public persona. Outside his family he was most relaxed in the company of the creative and knowledgeable commoner. ‘With any artist or good mechanic, traveller or scholar, he would discourse freely,’ others remembered. He was interested to learn from them, but also contributed from his experience, giving ‘light to them in their own art of knowledge’.2
Now even the theatre Charles had built at Whitehall was closed. Parliament had banned all plays in England. The magnificent organ he had bought for the chapel was also sold off, while the bedchamber where he rested had been stripped of his collection of art.3 The full-length portraits he had hung there of his wife, his brother and his sister were all up for sale. For the time being he still had the books in his personal library. These included his volumes on the Order of the Garter, bound in purple velvet or green leather, some with silver mounts and clasps. Many had been gifts from his mother when he was Prince of Wales.4 He had little time to enjoy them now.
Two hours after Charles arrived at Whitehall he was moved again.5 This spared him the sound of the scaffold being built outside the Banqueting House. He was taken instead to St James’s Palace. Here much of his great art collection still remained, although these pictures too were awaiting sale. The family portraits included one of his sister and her children. A ‘whole table of monkeys with my proper self’, she had written jokingly when she had sent it to him as a gift in 1629.6
Charles’s eldest nephew, Charles Louis, was still in London. Charles suspected he would ask for a last interview, as would many of his friends. He didn’t want to see any of them. ‘My time is short and precious,’ he told a servant, ‘I hope they will not take it ill that none have access to me but my children. The best office they can do now is to pray for me.’7 Charles then sent Parliament a request to see the thirteen-year-old Princess Elizabeth and the eight-year-old Henry, Duke of Gloucester.
Charles knew he would never see his other children again.
James, Duke of York, now fifteen, had joined his mother in Paris, having arrived from The Hague a few days earlier. His creditors had seized his baggage and the Dutch government had had to intervene to get it released. James found his mother’s situation not much better. The high taxes Anne of Austria had raised to pay for the wars in Europe had prompted months of violence in Paris. It marked the beginning of civil wars in France known as the ‘Fronde’, after the slings carried by the mobs. Anne had fled Paris with the ten-year-old Louis XIV, but Henrietta Maria remained at the Louvre along with the youngest of the Stuart children, the four-year-old Henrietta. It was bitterly cold, they had no fuel, and the merchants of Paris were refusing Henrietta Maria any further credit.
The Prince of Wales, meanwhile, who remained in The Hague as the guest of his sister Mary and her husband, also had ‘nothing to live on’. He had been obliged to dismiss many of his followers, and was living ‘a private life while awaiting a wind more favourable to [his]
affairs’.8 The prince had written to his father, and the bearer arrived at St James’s Palace that evening. The messenger kissed the king’s hand and, weeping, embraced his knees. Charles consoled him and gave him two letters, one for the prince and another for Henrietta Maria. The prince’s letter asked for his blessing and promised to do all he could to earn it.9 ‘I had rather you be Charles le Bon, than Charles le Grand, Good than Great’, he wanted his son to know, but ‘I hope God has designed you to be both.’ ‘Farewell till we meet, if not on earth, yet in heaven.’10
Charles spent much of the rest of the day praying with the sixty-six-year-old Bishop of London, William Juxon. The old man, who loved his hunting almost as much as he loved his God, had attended on Charles during the trial, and had performed the miracle of attracting little antipathy, even amongst those MPs ‘whose ears’ it was said ‘were ever opened, nay itching after such complaints’.11 Charles broke from his prayers only briefly that night. He had considered what final gifts he had for his children. Surrounded by Parliament’s spies he asked the most ingratiating of them, his bedchamber servant Thomas Herbert, for his assistance. He wanted Herbert to visit one of his couriers, Lady Elizabeth Wheeler. She had kept in her protection a few things that remained precious to him. Charles offered Herbert a testimonial in exchange for his help.* Parliament would learn of every detail of what their spy was now sent to collect.
It was dark as Herbert left St James’s Palace and security was tight. Guards were posted at ‘the house, garden, park, gates near Whitehall, King Street, and other where’.12 Herbert, however, was free to go where he wished. He found Lady Wheeler in her house behind the narrow road of King Street, with its notorious taverns. She had kept Charles’s possessions in a little cabinet, which she now handed over.
When Charles opened the cabinet the following morning several jewels tumbled out, including more than one Garter with its George. Several of them appeared to be broken. ‘You see’, Charles said sadly, ‘all the wealth now in my power to give my two children.’13
In the royal chapel that morning Hugh Peter gave a ‘funeral’ sermon on Charles. He chose as his text ‘the terrible denunciation to the King of Babylon’: ‘All the kings of the nations, even all of them, lie in glory, every one in his own house. But thou art cast out of thy grave like an abominable branch, and as the raiment of those that are slain, thrust through with a sword, that go down to the stones of the pit, as a carcass trodden under feet.’14
Frantic efforts were, however, still being made to save Charles’s life. The ambassador from the Venetian Republic reported great hopes of the Scots. They were insisting that the Edinburgh Parliament needed to be consulted on the fate of their king before sentence was carried out. ‘It may be they repent, though tardily, of the abominable example they afforded two years ago by selling their king to the English for a few pounds sterling,’ the Venetian observed.15 The Dutch ambassadors also had an audience with Fairfax and on 29 January he duly urged his Council of War to postpone the execution–but without success.
Charles spent the rest of the day burning his papers and ciphers before preparing himself with prayer for his children’s arrival at his rooms. Eventually Elizabeth was brought in, sobbing inconsolably. She would write down that night all she remembered: how he had blessed her and told her that ‘he was glad as I was come… and although he had not time to say much, yet somewhat he had to say to me’. He asked her to remind James to obey his elder brother as his sovereign, told her they should love each other and forgive their enemies–but never to trust them. He then paused and said to his weeping daughter, ‘Sweetheart, you’ll forget this.’ She promised, ‘I shall never forget this while I live.’ He tried to comfort her, saying ‘not to grieve and torment myself for him, for that should be a glorious death that he should die, it being for the laws and liberties of this land and for the Protestant religion’. He foresaw God settling the throne upon the Prince of Wales. They would all be happy then, he told her. Knowing Elizabeth’s love of study, Charles suggested some reading from the books he still had. They included Laud’s book against the Catholic martyr John Fisher, ‘to ground me against popery’. He asked her also to send his blessing to her other siblings, and to tell her mother that ‘his thoughts had never strayed from her, and that his love should be the same to the last’. Charles then took the eight-year-old Henry onto his knee.
With Charles’s two eldest sons condemned as traitors by Parliament it was still possible Henry would be made a puppet ruler. The boy had been crying like his sister, but Charles spoke to him as plainly and directly as he could. ‘Sweetheart,’ he said, ‘now they will cut off your father’s head.’ At this Henry looked steadfastly at him. ‘They will cut off my head, and perhaps make thee a king; but mark what I say. You must not be a king so long as your brothers Charles and James do live; for they will cut off your brothers’ heads (when they do catch them) and cut off your head too, at the last, and therefore I charge you, do not be made a king by them.’ Henry replied, ‘I will be torn in pieces first.’ The vehemence of the little boy made the king smile. But he then had to say his last goodbyes. Charles gave Elizabeth and Henry all his jewels save his onyx George with its portrait of their mother. Then he kissed his children, with tears ‘of joy and love’.
As they were taken to the bedchamber door Elizabeth cried so hard it ‘moved others to pity that were formerly hard-hearted’. Charles, standing by a window, couldn’t bear it and dashed to his children for a last embrace, kissed them and blessed them.16 When they had gone, he collapsed and had to retire to bed.17
Bishop Juxon stayed with Charles until late that night and promised to return early for the day of his execution. Charles managed to rest for around four hours, getting up a couple of hours before dawn. His room was lit as usual by a cake of wax in a silver basin. He opened the curtains and announced to Herbert, who slept on a pallet by his bed, that he had ‘great work to do this day’. It was freezing outside and he asked Herbert for an extra shirt. ‘The season is so cold,’ he said, and it will ‘make me shake which some observers will imagine proceeds from fear. I would have no such impression. I fear not death!’18
Juxon arrived soon after Charles had dressed. Fairfax had gone to Whitehall in an attempt to get the execution postponed. His efforts failed. The king got together his last possessions. He wanted to give the Prince of Wales–soon to be Charles II–his Bible, which had his own annotations in the margins. For his second son, the future James II, he had something practical–a circular silver slide rule. Charles had been good at mathematics as a child. There were more religious books for Elizabeth and a catechism for Henry. There were also two gifts for friends: a romance for the Earl of Lindsey, who had commanded the scarlet-clad Life Guards of Foot at Edgehill, and a gold pocket watch which had belonged to King James and which Charles asked to be given to the Duchess of Richmond, a daughter of his murdered friend and mentor, the Duke of Buckingham. He remembered her playing with it when she was a small child.
Charles then took Communion and prepared to leave. He had been allowed to choose the hour of his death.19 When the call came he smiled at Juxon. ‘Come let us go,’ he said, and took his hand.
With the bishop on his right, Charles walked through the frosted garden and into St James’s Park, where two regiments of foot were drawn up on either side, their colours flying. A guard of halberdiers went before him and others behind. They were bare-headed, a mark of contempt. The drums were beating so loudly no one could hear anyone speak, although Charles tried to say some words to the colonel walking on his left. As they reached Whitehall Charles walked up the stairs and along the Privy Gallery. From the windows he would have been able to see the scaffold that awaited him outside the Banqueting House. It was draped in black. Charles was taken to one of the smaller rooms on the south side of the gallery. From here there was a different view: of the abbey where he had been crowned, and Westminster, the seat of his parliaments and the place of his trial. He had a last meal of bread and wi
ne. It would help prevent him feeling faint.
It was just after two o’clock when Charles was brought back through the Privy Gallery and into the Banqueting House. He walked below the Rubens ceiling celebrating a peace long gone and the Stuart dynasty that was soon also to pass. Parliament had declared it illegal to proclaim a new king on Charles’s death. A line of soldiers stretched the length of the room, holding back a crush of people. As Charles walked between the guard the crowd behind them prayed loudly. Charles smiled at his people, but it was noticed that, at the age of only forty-eight, his beard was ‘long and grey, his hair white and he seemed greatly aged’.20 At the north end of the room the transom and mullions of one of the windows had been removed to create a door. From here he stepped down onto the black floor of the scaffold. At his left knee, a garter band flashed with 412 diamonds. Juxon remained at his side. To one witness, watching from a nearby rooftop, it seemed Charles showed ‘the same concernedness and motion as he usually did’ when he had arrived at the Banqueting House ‘on a masque night’.21
Whatever anxiety Charles felt he was keeping it hidden behind his performance. The scaffold was his stage in this theatre of death: every gesture he made, every detail of what followed, would be remembered and would impact on his heir’s chances of being crowned. Standing in the bright light of that cold day he sought out his audience.
Few of those responsible for his being there would see his end. Fairfax was at a prayer meeting. Hugh Peter was ill in bed. Where Cromwell was is unrecorded. Charles could see rows of infantry and, behind them, cavalry. The crowd had been pushed far back so they would not hear anything Charles said. The confined space had also ensured their numbers had been kept low. Elsewhere the shops were open–Londoners had been encouraged to go about their normal business. On the scaffold itself there were more soldiers, but it was the executioner and his assistant who stood out. They were dressed in wigs and sailors’ costumes, their faces masked with fishnet. The executioner had even added a false beard. He was taking no chances in ever being recognised.
The White King Page 29