After three formal sessions no progress had been made. The court took two days to consider the evidence that had been prepared to support the charges. This was hardly necessary since those who had prepared the charges and gathered the evidence were also those who were now hearing it. On 25 January it was resolved that the King was guilty and that his punishment might extend to death, but that this resolution was not binding on the court. After further debate the following day the court assembled again on 27 January and the King was given another chance to plead. He refused, and requested instead a conference with the two Houses. There was some concession here, however, since the terms in which he made this request did not presume the illegitimacy of the court before which he currently stood. This was in turn refused and he was offered two further chances to plead – these were the sixth and seventh opportunities since he was first offered his last chance. It is easy to see why the King might have remained confident that it was a bluff. Continued refusal to plead, and the ambiguity of the concession he had made to the authority of the court, had really backed the commissioners into a corner.60
At this dramatic moment, the will of the commissioners held – Charles was condemned. He seems to have been genuinely shocked by this – the patent hesitation and reluctance of his pretended judges had perhaps made it impossible for him to believe that they would actually go through with it. In any case, he now tried to speak to the charges. Now that he was no longer disputing jurisdiction, he evidently wanted to rebut these claims against him, but since the court had determined its judgement, and since he had not recognized its jurisdiction, there was little reason to let him. Bradshaw rather wearily silenced him.61
Judgement had come on 27 January, another Saturday, and over the rest of the weekend there were further delays in getting the death warrant signed. Here, too, there may have been attempts to pull back from the brink. Comparing the order of the signatures on the warrant with attendance records at the hearings reveals some anomalies – some of those present on 27 January did not sign, and some of those whose names appear high on the list of signatories were not, apparently, present for the condemnation on that day. There has been some technical discussion of this, and the anomalies may reflect the unreliability of the court’s attendance lists, but the simplest explanation may well be the correct one – that the death warrant was not drawn up until after the condemnation, and that signatures were collected on 29 January, the day before the King’s execution. If correct this gives plausibility to the story that the King was approached for a final time, between his condemnation and execution. The story goes that he was approached with a ‘paper book’ prepared by the army grandees, and that if he had been willing to sign it, he could have had his ‘life and some shadow of regality’. This story is usually discounted but it might be true – it was set down after the execution, when it was wistful rather than wishful thinking. It is certainly the case that the King had been approached between 27 and 29 January, since he was aware of the chosen place of execution.62
Whatever the truth of the claims about a last-minute attempt to negotiate, it is clear that some of those present for the condemnation did not sign the death warrant and that others agreed to sign the warrant only after being tracked down. Thirteen of those who signed were apparently present when the King was condemned, but not at the meeting in the Painted Chamber on 29 January when the warrant was presented. They must have been pursued for their signature subsequently. Condemnation was in all early modern proceedings a different thing from the execution of the sentence. It is reasonably likely that condemnation on 27 January, without naming the time and place of execution, had left room for a final attempt to avoid king-killing: to speak to the King with an axe to his neck, in the hope that some crucial concession might be secured in return for a pardon. When this failed too, a number of those who had been persuaded to go along with the condemnation became much less willing to see the sentence actually carried out: only fifty-nine of those present for the condemnation actually signed the death warrant.63
Much of this is guesswork, and it may be that there was more intent behind these proceedings than has been suggested here. But it is difficult to read all this as the proceedings of a military faction bent on a show-trial to be followed in short order by an execution. They seem more likely to have been elements of a negotiation, signs of a willingness to take drastic action in order to demonstrate that there was indeed a real threat to the King, despite the many reservations and hesitations among the parliamentarians, and that there was therefore some reason to try to reach a settlement.
But the pressure was certainly applied. It was later said that when the King heard that he was going to be moved from Hurst Castle to Windsor accompanied by Colonel Thomas Harrison, he feared that he would be killed at some lonely spot – it had not escaped his ears that Harrison had favoured assassination at an earlier point in negotiations. Harrison, the godly soldier who had experienced rapture at Langport, reassured the King that in fact all he had said was that justice should have no respect of persons, great or small. Harrison was a willing regicide, but not a murderer.64
At Windsor, Charles had touched for the King’s Evil, until his captors had stopped him doing so. From there he was taken to St James on the eve of formal proceedings and his conditions seem to have been much worse. Writing much later, Clarendon dwelt on the petty humiliations. No-one other than his guards had access to him, but he was never free from his guards, ‘some of whom sat up always in his bedchamber, and drank and took tobacco… nor was he suffered to go into any other room, either to say his prayers or to receive the ordinary benefits of nature, but was obliged to do both in their presence and before them’. Such ‘rudeness’ and ‘barbarity’ represented a kind of ‘monstrous duty’ and soldiers were apparently only asked to do it once. Charles’s refusal to plead in the formal proceedings, and his refusal to show the proper deference in his gestures and demeanour, was echoed by his prosecutors. In particular Bradshaw was castigated by posterity for his arrogance and insolence – he ‘insolently reprehended the King for not having stirred his hat’ and his manner was marked by ‘great sauciness and impudence of talk’. But this was political theatre of course. The court could not show deference to this man, Charles Stuart, who stood before it, denying its jurisdiction over him: Bradshaw’s point, even on a hostile reading, was that the King had not shown ‘more respect to that high tribunal’.65
Publicity was part of the trial, and it was political theatre for all parties, but it was not all choreographed. Here again there was a relatively even battle. For example, when proceedings opened and the roll of the names of the commissioners was called silence greeted Fairfax’s name. When it was called a second time his wife called out from the gallery that ‘he has more wit than to be here’. Her voice rang out again when the impeachment was read in the name of ‘the good people of England’: ‘It is a lie, not half, nor a quarter of the people of England. Oliver Cromwell is a traitor’. Exasperated, Daniel Axtell, who was commanding the guard in the court, ordered shot to be fired into the box, but wiser counsels prevailed.66 Although this rather intemperate order was not obeyed, Axtell remained sufficiently prominent in proceedings that he could incite the soldiers to chant ‘justice, justice’ as Charles was led away at the end of proceedings.67 Clarendon claimed that Axtell’s brutality was matched by others present: although in the course of the trial ‘there was in many persons present… a real duty and compassion for the King, so there was in others so barbarous and brutal a behaviour towards him, that they called him Tyrant and Murderer, and one spit in his face; which his majesty, without expressing any trouble, wiped off with a handkerchief’. Another reasonably well-attested story is that Charles tried to interrupt Cook as he read the charge by touching him on the sleeve with his cane. As he reached over the silver tip of the cane came off and there was a momentary pause as Charles waited for someone to retrieve it, before doing so himself.68
These stories of cruelties and indignitie
s suffered silently and patiently in the name of larger ideas formed the bedrock of Charles’s martyrdom: by the time Clarendon wrote he felt that ‘the saint-like behaviour of that blessed martyr, and his Christian courage and patience at his death, are … so well known’ that there was no need to enlarge upon them.69 This martyrdom he willingly embraced on the scaffold, and in the subsequent propaganda battle both sides had reason to play down the ambiguities and tensions of the trial. Charles, in Clarendon’s and subsequent accounts, was the patiently suffering martyr in the trial who died a good death on the scaffold. His judges were later portrayed by their partisans as implacably pursuing justice on that man – both sides found a simpler version of the trial as a foregone conclusion, or an unavoidable act of justice, useful to their self-image.
All this is not to deny that Charles did indeed conduct himself bravely both during the trial – where he apparently shed a life-long stutter in delivering a commanding performance – and on the scaffold. In preparation for his execution, Charles burned his papers and was visited by his two youngest children, Henry and Mary, on 29 January. Sentence was carried out on 30 January in Whitehall, probably because it was more easily policed than Tyburn or the Tower. Again there is significance to this choice of site, and irony too. Charles was led to the scaffold through the Banqueting House, Inigo Jones’s masterpiece which he had once dreamed of turning into part of the frontage of a massive new palace on the Thames. The ceiling under which he passed was decorated with Rubens’s Apotheosis of James I – a giant portrait of his father and a powerful representation of Stuart aspirations for the English monarchy. There were fears that he would make a scene on the scaffold and his execution was delayed to allow the Houses to pass an ordinance forbidding the naming of a successor. In anticipation that he might not co-operate the scaffold had been prepared to allow for the King to be roped down, but they need not have worried. Charles gave, literally, the performance of his life. Dressed in an extra shirt in order to avoid shivering and thereby giving the appearance of fear, he finally delivered his answer to the charges laid against him in the high court. Predictably, given the weakness of the charges, his response was ringing and effective. Two days earlier it would have saved his neck, but not perhaps the monarchy in a form he could accept. Unusually, his executioners were disguised and, equally unusually, he did not forgive them for what they were about to do.70
The response of the crowd was horrified, and two troops of horse were set to patrol the streets in anticipation of trouble. The fatal blow was said to have been greeted with a groan: ‘such a groan as I never heard before, and desire I may never hear again’, remembered one witness who was seventeen on the day that the axe fell.71 But quite what the groan meant is not clear – regret at the cruel necessity which Cromwell was later said to bemoan? Shock at the rupture of the divine order or more prosaic fears for the future? A late outpouring of love and loyalty to the monarch? The most famous image of the execution, complete with swooning woman in the foreground, was produced in Holland two years after the fact and has to be distrusted – such images were clearly of political importance at that point, and may have been intended as political interventions. Nonetheless, shock at the execution clearly did resonate, and is easy to reconcile with the reservations of those who actually orchestrated these events.
The execution of Charles I
Royalists of course were clear what the groan had meant: ‘None of the Kings, no not one,… ever left the world with more sorrow: women miscarried, men fell into melancholy, some with consternations expired; men women and children then, and yet unborn, suffering in him and for him’. But a provincial Puritan who noted the shock at news of the execution – ‘There was such a consternation among the common people throughout the nation, that one neighbour durst scarcely speak to another when they met in the streets’ – thought it did not denote disapproval – ‘not from any abhorrence at the action, but in surprise at the rarity and infrequency of it’.72 William Simpson, drinking in the Dolphin at Bishopsgate, London, in March 1649, ‘drank a health to Charles II and confusion to the parliament’, but was denounced to a parliamentary committee a month later as ‘a malignant spirit’ who had ‘several times vented his malice against the parliament by evil speaking’. In Stratford-upon-Avon around the same time Thomas Sharpe, a parliamentary soldier with seven years” service behind him, was assaulted by William Greene, an ‘inveterate malignant who has several times raised the rabble people of the said town against the parliament soldiers’. Hearing that Sharpe had arrived in town he came out of his house ‘with a great club in his hand and unexpectedly… without any provocation’ attacked Sharpe. Opinion in the provinces was probably no less complex and divided about the regicide than about any of the other major political turning points of the decade.73
Ralph Josselin, an Essex Puritan who set much store by providence, had in August interpreted another impending harvest failure as a judgement on the divisions among the righteous: ‘the nations sins are many and sad, Lord let public ones be pardoned’, he wrote, noting as causes of the Lord’s anger ‘the war in the nation, the divisions among ourselves; our cryings out after peace on any terms to save our skins, and estates whatsoever become of others’. Here was a Puritan opposed to an easy settlement, and the Engagers” cause, but he was not reassured by the regicide a few months later: ‘I was much troubled with the black providence of putting the King to death, my tears were not restrained at the passages about his death, the lord in mercy lay it not as sin to the charge of the kingdom, but in mercy do us good by the same’. His diary is not clear, but his tears for Charles seem to have been personal sympathy as much as settled hostility to the act: ‘the death of the king talked much of, very many men of the weaker sort of Christians in divers places passionate concerning it, but so ungroundedly, that it would make any to bleed to observe it’. Even for those anxious about the Treaty of Newport and an easy settlement the regicide did not appear an easy answer; but neither did the immediate hostility of the ungodly to the act, either. In the face of these difficulties Josselin was in the hands of God: ‘the lord has some great thing to do, fear and tremble at it oh England’.74
Some at least clearly approved. When soldiers in Yorkshire mistook a relative of Fairfax for his wife, Lady Fairfax, the vociferous dissenter at the trial, they held a pistol at her breast in her coach.75 Samuel Pepys, then fifteen and at school at St Paul’s, remembered celebrating the execution – if invited to preach on that day his text would have been ‘And the memory of the wicked shall rot’.76 This transgressive thrill was also felt by others. The identity of the executioners was not known – later rumours suggested that it might have been Cromwell and Fairfax, William Walker or Hugh Peter – suggesting fear of reprisal. But after the Restoration, when a concerted effort was made to identify them, it emerged that pretending to have been an executioner had been a promising way for one Phineas Payne to impress countrymen in London shops on the day of the execution. A number of others got in trouble for such boasting eleven years later.77
Charles was buried on 8 February at Windsor, not Westminster, and the ceremony was conducted in silence because the military governor had refused permission to use the Book of Common Prayer.78
The purged parliamentary regime and its friends in the army had been unsure about regicide, and most reactions to the execution suggest that they were not political winners as a result of having carried it out. Charles, on the other hand, clearly did secure a political victory, for the day of his death was also the day of his rebirth, or at least reinvention. During the 1630s two dominant images of Charles had been projected – the austere and distant patriarch of the Van Dyck portraits and the dispeller of discord celebrated in court masques. From the mid-1640s these were increasingly abandoned in favour of the suffering king, protecting sacred monarchy from the passions of malicious spirits. An identity was created between the sufferings of the King and of his subjects. This transformation was epitomized in the Eikon Basilike, the supposedl
y autobiographical account of his travails and martyrdom. Charles had probably approved the text at Newport, during his close captivity. In any case the book, advance copies of which were available on the morning of the execution, was an instant publishing success, enjoying thirty-five editions in 1649 alone. Over the following decade it was translated into Latin, French, German, Dutch and Danish. It was also set in verse and to music. It created, in the words of one historian, ‘the King Charles experience’. It was by far the greatest propaganda success following the regicide, calling forth anxious, and ineffective, rival histories. Those facing execution, as we have seen, could accept their death but deny the justice of it by appealing to the ideal of martyrdom. This Charles did with tremendous, and immediate, effect. His opponents were irritated by this success and by the partiality of the account – after his cabinet was opened at Naseby, Charles can hardly have hoped to be so read, or so believed. As history the Eikon is clearly flawed, but the poetic meaning obviously spoke to many readers: this truth about Charles’s martyrdom was powerful, more powerful than the man when alive. Following his death a handkerchief stained with his blood was said to have in it the power to heal scrofula. Those of his supporters who had, in the months around the trial, seemed to favour his execution were vindicated by the power of this image of Anglican royalism. The resonance was with Christ, but in one sense it was a more remarkable event – Charles rose again, effectively, on the very same day.79
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