His daughter Elizabeth was even more alone. She was twelve years old, and it was half a year since she had seen her father. She had been staying at Syon House, cared for by the Earl of Northumberland, Lucy Hay’s nephew. Charles wrote lovingly to her on 27 October 1648:
Dear daughter,
It is not want of affection that makes me write so seldom to you, but want of matter, such as I could wish; and indeed am I loath to write to those I love when I am out of humour (as I have been these days by past), lest my letters should trouble those I desire to please. But having this opportunity, I would not lose it, though at this time I have nothing to say, but God bless you! So I rest, Your loving father, Charles R. Give your brother my blessing with a kiss, and commend me kindly to my Lady Northumberland, by the same token.
Like a modern father calling his daughter on a mobile phone from far away, Charles knew he urgently wanted to make contact with his little girl, but he didn’t know enough about her world to know what to say.
The Army wanted Charles tried. Lilburne kept up his complaints, warning anyone who would listen that a trial would hand power to the Army grandees and lead to arbitrary government. But most soldiers wanted a trial. For them the former king was now Charles Stuart, the man of blood. They had bled. They wanted something that would make it clear that they had fought for change, for betterment – it would be truly unbearable if nothing were to change. The Army could not trust Parliament; Parliament might make peace with Charles or let him escape.
The Army took action. The king’s Parliamentarian gaoler Hammond was removed from the Isle of Wight and placed in custody, and on 30 November 1648 Colonel Cobbett arrived at Newport with a detachment. Charles’s friends begged him to escape. There were horses ready, and a boat. But at the last minute Charles refused to go. His excuse was that he had given his word to Parliament, but in reality it was to Henrietta he had given it; if he did escape, he would have to face her reproaches. His friends pointed out that it was no longer Parliament with whom he had to deal, but the Army. Charles ignored them, and retreated to bed.
Next morning he was woken at daybreak by soldiers, who hurried him away without his hot breakfast, and prevented his servants from kissing his hand in farewell. The Leveller Major Rolph tried to climb into the carriage with the king, who forcibly removed him, saying that it had not yet come to that; Charles had always been reluctant to share air with commoners.
Across the Solent stood Hurst Castle, surrounded on three sides by sea. It was Charles’s new prison. His rooms were so dark he needed candles all through the day. There was no golf course and his daily exercise was reduced to a walk along the pebbly strand. So Pride purged the Commons while Charles enjoyed watching his ships – his fatal ships – sailing up the Solent. While he was there he managed to smuggle out a letter to Firebrace, sending good wishes to his friends – Jane Whorwood, and Lucy Hay. ‘I do expect the worst’, he wrote. Charles was terrified that he had been brought to Hurst Castle to be murdered, like many another deposed English king. It was a relief when he was moved again, to Windsor, across happily familiar lands, and some people in the town even cried out ‘God bless the king’. And there was plenty of company; Hamilton was a prisoner in the castle too, and so were Elizabeth and Henry, two of the royal children. But as Charles paced up and down the terrace, his change of situation was only too painfully apparent. Now he was not even allowed his own servants, and letters no longer reached him. It was but ‘the husk and shell’ of life, he thought. ‘That I must die as a Man, is certain, that I may die a King, by the hands of My own subjects, a violent, sudden and barbarous death, in the strength of my years, in the midst of my kingdoms, my friends and loving subjects being helpless spectators, my enemies insolent Revilers and Triumphers over me … is so probable in human reason, that God hath taught me not to hope otherwise.’ His hair grew grey, he lost weight, his face looked more haggard. His personal servant, assigned by Parliament, was however all but converted by the Stuart charm that Charles could still wield. When Thomas Herbert’s bedstraw caught alight one night – a common enough occurrence in the seventeenth century – Charles put the fire out himself. When the man overslept, Charles reassured him, and promised him an alarm clock. He could still be a benign father.
Events in London were to show that Charles’s advisers were right about who held power. On the morning of 3 December 1648, the House of Commons had agreed to accept the king’s answers, given at Newport. But the Army leaders noted who had voted in its favour; as the House rose, a group of officers and their allies decided that the Commons must be purged of anyone even faintly supportive of a negotiated settlement with Charles. Suspicion fell on any member who had implicitly or explicitly denied that supporters of the Scots were traitors, anyone who had wanted to settle with the king, any who had voted to repeal the Vote of No Addresses in which Parliament had agreed to halt approaches to the king, and on those who had shown that they were too eager to treat with Charles Stuart, that man of blood.
A war that had begun when Charles had tried to remove unruly MPs ended with the Army deciding to do the same. Colonel Thomas Pride, with a group of musketeers, forcibly removed one hundred and forty-five Presbyterian MPs, leaving a group of fifty who supported the Army. This was an extraordinary event, an armed coup. It was the end of ‘Parliament’ as a cause, the end of law and order, but also the beginning of true populism. After all its moderates had been forcibly expelled, the House of Commons was transformed into a kind of kangaroo court. Its purpose was to emerge almost at once: try the king for high treason. Its opponents were to christen it the Rump Parliament, which made for a lot of bitter jokes. Among those excluded were the Harleys, new widower Robert and Brilliana’s beloved Ned; Robert had been among those who had pushed hardest for a treaty with the king. Some of those excluded were imprisoned for the night in a tavern called Hell, and they spent the night singing psalms and talking. Ned Harley tried to write to Fairfax about the king’s trial; everyone knew Fairfax was not in favour of killing the king, but he did not take any open action against the regicides. Ned urged him to do just that:
Neither God nor man can be satisfied with any passive dislikes of what is done amiss by your army. Their evils for want of your prohibition will become your guilt, which I beseech your excellency seriously to consider. I hope God has given your excellency this command for such a time as this. But if you altogether hold your peace – and a General’s words cannot be other than commands – at this time, then shall there enlargement and deliverance arise from another place … they [the Army] are hastily digging a miserable sepulchre for all the beauty and strength of our native kingdom, if God be not pleased wonderfully to deliver.
Still Fairfax did not act, or did not act directly, although Ned Harley was not the only one to beg him to involve himself. John Milton, too, addressed him, in a sonnet subtitled ‘at the siege of Colchester’:
Thy firm unshaken virtue ever brings
Victory home, though new rebellions raise
Their hydra heads …
O yet a nobler task awaits thy hand;
For what can war, but endless war still breed,
Till truth and right from violence be freed,
And public faith cleared from the shameful brand
Of public fraud. In vain doth valour bleed
While avarice and rapine share the land.
But Milton’s new friend Andrew Marvell, who was at this time tutor to Fairfax’s daughter Mary, praised him for his decision to retire. And Fairfax may also have repudiated Royalist overtures to lead troops to rescue the king. He spent the rest of the war out of politics, raising horses and collecting books at his house Nunappleton. His war was all but over.
XXXII Oh, He is Gone, and Now hath Left Us Here: The Trial and Execution of Charles I
On Saturday 20 January 1649, Charles travelled from St James’s Palace in an enclosed sedan chair to Whitehall Steps; the river mists made it cold that day. There he boarded a barge, also heavily curt
ained. He was accompanied on the river by boats of musketeers. There was a chilly half-mile journey to the steps of Sir Robert Cotton’s house on the Thames. Cotton, the great librarian, had no reason to love Charles, who had seized some of his antiquarian treasures twenty or so years earlier. And the guards were hostile, keeping their hats on even in his presence.
Charles’s trial was about to begin. A king of England was being openly and publicly tried for high treason. It was to be held in Westminster Hall. At one end sat John Bradshaw, the Lord President, on a velvet chair, with a desk in front of him and judges behind him. On a nearby table rested his sword and mace of office. The dock walls were so high that the audience could see only the top of Charles’s head. Tickets had been sold weeks in advance. Everyone saw Charles walk in, and refuse, in his turn, to take off his hat for his judges. But revenge was what the whole day was about. The indictment was read aloud to the court by the prosecutor, ardent republican and godly zealot John Cook, who accused Charles of having ‘traitorously and maliciously waged war against his people’.
But Charles was eager to interrupt the reading of the indictment. He still had no idea that things had changed, in ways almost too fundamental for him to grasp. He tapped Cook on the shoulder with his silver-topped cane. ‘Hold a little’, he said. Cook read on. Charles tapped again. Finally, the silver tip fell from his cane with a loud thud, and rolled noisily across the wooden floor. Everyone stood frozen, watching it. Charles waited. No one picked it up.
It was then that Charles realized that he was entirely alone. ‘It made a great impression on me’, he remarked, a few days later. But he could at least take refuge in the person he had been, the one who didn’t understand – it became a mask to hide behind. When Cook called him ‘a tyrant and traitor’, Charles laughed.
Now Bradshaw asked him how he wished to plead.
The king refused to respond. ‘I would know’, he said, ‘by what power I am called hither … There are many unlawful authorities in the world,’ he added, ‘there are robbers and highwaymen.’ He clung to what he knew. ‘Remember I am your king, your lawful king, and what sins you bring upon your hand, and the judgement of God upon this land.’ Bradshaw explained that he was brought to trial ‘in the name of the people of England, of which you are elected king’.
This gave Charles his opening. ‘England’, he pointed out, had never been an elective kingdom, ‘but a hereditary kingdom for these thousand years.’ He added: ‘I do stand more for the liberty of my people than any here that come to be my pretended Judges.’ What he meant was that it was he who was refusing to submit ‘to a tyrannical or any other ways unlawful authority’. Like his grandmother, Mary Queen of Scots, Charles’s responses to his accusers were both intelligent and stupid. He was displaying bright legal manoeuvring, but his recalcitrance was also a tactically dim way of getting everybody’s goat. He underestimated how much he was now blamed for those bloody fields, those empty beds. As he left, people shouted ‘Justice! Justice!’ A few others cried ‘God save the king!’
Charles added a little extra touch of Stuart bravura. Walking past the sword, he said: ‘I have no fear of that.’
The second day was like the first – Charles still refused to plead. If, he said, power without law may make laws, may alter the fundamental laws of the kingdom, ‘I do not know what subject he is in England that can be sure of his life.’
This was Charles’s most telling point, and he knew it. And it was not without substance. But he also disputed the court’s authority. ‘I do not know’, he said, coldly, ‘how a king may become a delinquent.’ He insisted that ‘the Commons of England was never a court of judicature. I would know how that came to be so.’ Bradshaw stonewalled, insisting that Charles make a plea; Charles continued to refuse. Finally he said, ‘I do require that you give me my reasons.’
‘Sir,’ said Bradshaw, still trying, ‘it is not for prisoners to require.’
‘Prisoner, sir! I am not an ordinary prisoner!’ So assured was Charles’s tone that the trial recorders wrote his words in italics.
Charles was returned to Cotton’s house, and on his way someone in the street cried out ‘God bless you, sir’. This consoled him, and he also prayed for a while, then told Herbert that he felt sure the common people only shouted ‘Justice!’ because their officers had told them to; for Charles, common people still had nothing in their heads but what was put there by their betters. And, he said, how insignificant the judges were; he could only recognize eight of them. This was a commonplace Royalist jibe; the Royalist newsbooks still appearing commented on the low birth and mechanic origins of the justices. It was embarrassing for Parliament and for the committee that drew up the list of judges – a body led by Cromwell and Ireton, helped by eager republican Henry Marten – that all of the senior justices originally nominated had refused to serve, including Oliver St John, one of the most consistent critics of the king.
Henry Vane had been unable to accept Pride’s Purge, which for him violated the Commons, and he too was absent, as was Algernon Sidney, who disliked the legal basis for the Commons trying the king. This did leave the justices looking like second- or third-choice men. Although some of them were indeed former tradesmen drawn from the ranks of the New Model Army – Colonel Pride himself was said to have been a brewer’s drayman – most of the hundred-and-thirty-five men called to try the king for treason were solid mayors and gentlemen.
Charles again refused to plead on the third day. Finally, Bradshaw moved the trial to the Painted Room and the judges heard evidence without the king. The old tales were told: how the king had raised his standard at Nottingham, how he had been at Edgehill, at Newbury, at Cropredy Bridge, Lostwithiel, Naseby. There were thirty-three witnesses, barber-surgeons and soldiers, from north and south. They all told the same story – Charles Stuart was a man of blood, and the judges decided that blood must have blood; their verdict came on 27 January: that ‘Charles Stuart as a tyrant, traitor, murderer and public enemy to the good people of this nation shall be put to death by the severing of his head from his body’.
Decapitation is an ancient practice; Neolithic peoples posted the heads of their enemies around their gates. So did Stuart kings. It is an adaptation of ancient rituals of sacrifice, in which the blood of the accused must spurt – the Greeks even have a word for it, sparge – from the great vessels of the neck. The blood is redemptive, fertilizing; it gives life to the nation on whose soil it is spilt. It is also analogous to hanging, and in Stuart England an upper-class felon was beheaded, a lower-class one hanged; in each case the head was symbolically separated from the lower body. Charles’s blood was to inaugurate a new republic, and his head was to adorn it; it symbolized the new state’s resolution. It also meant Charles’s blood would be spilt to cleanse the land of the blood he had spilt. And it meant, too, that Charles would follow in the footsteps of Strafford and Laud, he would be just another traitor. The sky had not fallen in when they died.
So the justices reassembled in Westminster Hall for sentencing. Bradshaw wore scarlet, the colour of blood, and a black hat.
Charles insisted on being allowed to address the court. He knew the law, and he knew that once the sentence of death was pronounced, he would be legally dead and unable to speak. Bradshaw tried to stop him, telling him he must hear the court first. Charles persisted. Bradshaw continued reading ‘ … Crimes exhibited against him in the name of the people of England … ’
Suddenly Charles was supported from a most unexpected quarter. From the ladies’ gallery, a masked woman cried out, ‘Not half, not a quarter of the people of England. Oliver Cromwell is a traitor.’ The musketeers levelled their arms at her and Colonel Axtell shouted ‘Down with the whores!’ She was hustled out by her friends.
The intervention came from Anne, Lady Fairfax, Thomas Fairfax’s wife. Was she acting without his knowledge? Or was she intervening on behalf of them both, their consciences made increasingly uneasy? No one knew then, nor do they know now. But we do know th
at it was not Anne’s first intervention, not her first piece of barracking. When the names of the judges had been read out, there had been a notable absence from the commissioners empowering the court to act. Fairfax, the man who above all had won the war for Parliament, was not there. A masked woman had cried out, ‘He has more wit than to be here!’ And the fact that Fairfax himself was heard to ask after Charles’s health on the evening of the day he had been executed suggests a determination to be out of the loop. At any rate, Anne’s cry just before the sentencing was itself a kind of verdict – Charles was winning this war. Finally Bradshaw promised that he would be heard before sentence was passed, and again the charges were read.
Now Charles tried a new tactic; he proposed that his case be transferred to a joint session of Parliament. Bradshaw was against it, but others rather favoured the idea; later, Justice John Downes was to make a great deal of his support for the king’s request. Cromwell ordered him to be quiet in an angry whisper, but Downes insisted they deliberate. They did. Half an hour later, they were back, with nothing achieved but a short delay. Bradshaw spoke for forty minutes. And now he told the clerk to read the sentence. The clerk did so: ‘that the said Charles Stuart, as a tyrant, traitor, murderer and a public enemy, shall be put to death by the severing of his head from his body’.
The English Civil War: A People’s History (Text Only) Page 66