Charles burst in again: ‘Will you hear me a word, sir?’
‘Sir, you are not to be heard after sentence’, Bradshaw replied.
‘I may speak after the sentence. By your favour, I may speak after the sentence ever’, Charles insisted. But the guards began to hustle him out. ‘I am not suffered to speak. Expect what justice other people will have’, he exclaimed. By now the atmosphere was so disorderly, so contemptuous that the king was spat on, and tobacco smoke blown in his face. ‘Poor souls,’ said Charles, as ever closing his eyes to his people’s opinion of him, ‘for a piece of money they would do so for their commanders.’ It was like Charles to blur the lucidity of martyrdom with such reflections. Legally, he had a case; the Rump did lack power to try him. But morally and practically, it had become brutally clear that kings depended on the consent of the governed for their continuance in office.
And now Charles had only to wait. He went back to Whitehall Palace for the night, where he said he wanted to see only his children and his chaplain William Juxon. Some of his supporters appeared, desperate to find a way of saving him. Charles turned them away at the door.
On Monday, he burned all his papers, and then his children came. There had been a letter from the Prince of Wales, borne by a weeping servant. Now Princess Elizabeth and Prince Henry were brought in to say goodbye.
They came in crying, bewildered. Charles tried to help them face the future; he told them they must obey their brother, the prince, who would now be king in his place. Elizabeth went on crying and crying, and her constant sobs began to tear at Charles’s self-mastery. ‘Sweet heart,’ he said desperately, visibly upset, ‘you will forget this.’ ‘No, I shall never forget it while I live’, she swore. Charles on his last day on earth was worried about Elizabeth’s future religious beliefs, suggesting various books ‘which would ground me against Popery’. Charles tried to help her see him as a martyr to true religion, calling it ‘a glorious death’, and urging her to read Hooker, and Lancelot Andrewes, and Laud. He did not forget Henrietta Maria, either, far away in France, and urged Elizabeth to tell the queen that he had never strayed from her.
Later Elizabeth remembered:
He wished me not to grieve and torment myself for him, for that it would be a glorious death that he should die, it being for the laws and liberties of this land, and for maintaining the true Protestant religion … He told me he had forgiven all his enemies, and hoped God would forgive them also, and commanded us and all the rest of my brothers and sisters to forgive them. He bid me tell my mother that his thoughts had never strayed from her, and that his love should be the same to the last. Withal he commanded me and my brother to be obedient to her, and bid me send his blessing to the rest of my brothers and sisters, with a commendation to all his friends.
He tried to give Elizabeth a picture of the better life towards which they were moving: one day, he said, Christ’s kingdom would come, ‘and we shall all be happier than we could have expected to have been, had I lived’.
Charles had a practical message for his eight-year-old son Henry. Seeing conspiracy everywhere – the very mindset that had inspired others to rebel against him – he saw it closing around his son, and he feared some might make him a puppet king. It shows Charles’s difficulty in imagining any regime other than a monarchy. He sat Henry on his knee – good child psychology – and looked into his son’s eyes.
‘Now they will cut off thy father’s head’, he said, matter-of-factly. ‘Mark what I say. You must not be a king, so long as your brothers Charles and James so live, for they will cut off your brothers’ heads (when they catch them), and cut off thy head too at last. And therefore I charge thee do not be made a king by them.’ Charles’s reported speech, with its repeated fierce words of beheading, is an effort to protect his little son by frightening him thoroughly.
Henry played his role with the thespian ability of a true Stuart. He struck exactly the right note. ‘I will be torn in pieces first’, he vowed. Elizabeth reports that Charles ‘rejoiced exceedingly’ at this declaration. Then Henry burst into tears, as did the guards. Charles turned his back hastily and moved towards his bedroom before he too could be seen crying. He gave the children a few remaining pieces of jewellery in an effort to send them away smiling. But when the moment of farewell came, Elizabeth was crying once more. Charles urged her not to weep, ‘for I shall die a martyr’, he said. He kissed the children and blessed them. Elizabeth’s desperate misery, drowning in sobs, made some observers break down too. As his children were being ushered away for the last time, he turned back for one final fierce hug. Then they were gone, and he was alone, facing the end. His accusers spent the day trying to find people willing to sign his death warrant.
That evening, Charles took communion, prayed, read. His guards were persuaded to leave him alone. He told his servant to put out his best clothes, saying he must be up early, having important work to do. He was determined to put on two shirts; it was still bitter January weather, the Thames frozen in London, and he worried that his shivers from cold might be attributed to fear. He finally fell asleep at around two in the morning.
The next day was 30 January 1649. Charles woke before dawn, because his servant Herbert was in the noisy throes of a nightmare about William Laud, an appropriate dream. On this icy day, Charles was calm. ‘This is my second marriage day’, he said. ‘I will be as trim today as may be, for before night I hope to be espoused to my blessed Jesus.’ Then Juxon arrived, and together they read Matthew’s account of the Passion of Jesus Christ. It happened to be the lesson for that day. Charles knew it was an omen, and it made him happier.
There was a knock at the door. ‘Come, let us go’, said Charles, taking Juxon’s hand. It was ten o’clock. They were marched across St James’s Park, to the drumming of dozens of soldiers. Charles’s dog Rogue tried to follow his master, but was turned back. They entered Whitehall Palace by the Tiltyard steps and made their way to Charles’s old bedroom. The walls were bare. The king prayed, and – on Juxon’s urging – ate a loaf of bread and drank a small glass of claret. Bread and wine: the Last Supper.
So they waited. A little after two, Charles was summoned, and Juxon went with him to the end. They were led into the Banqueting Hall, its Rubens splendours shrouded in darkness. They had proclaimed the divine protection afforded sovereignty. Now the sovereign himself was led through one of the first-floor windows out onto the scaffold, which had been built in the street. It was draped in black. On it stood the executioner and his assistant, and the very small block Parliament had ordered, perhaps an unkind response to Charles’s height. It was so low that he had to lie on the floor, and had large straps to bind him if he fought.
There was a great silence. Most – though not all – shops were closed. The crowd – in the street, on the roofs – waited in bitter cold for Charles to speak. But the guards had kept the people so far back that none could hear his words.
Charles felt his death was justice, not for the war, but for his acquiescence in the fate of Strafford, and he returned to the argument he had used at his trial. ‘A subject and a sovereign’, he insisted, at this last, ‘are clear different things.’ He remembered to declare his faith only when Juxon prompted it, not because it was not central to his thoughts, but because it was so central that he had forgotten to confide in those around him.
And now there was a prick of fear. Someone tried the edge of the axe, and Charles’s anxiety surfaced: ‘Hurt not the axe that will hurt me’, he urged, and then asked Colonel Francis Hacker, in command of the King’s Guard, ‘Take care they do not put me in pain.’ He remembered accounts of bungled beheadings. He tucked his hair carefully under his white satin nightcap, to make sure his neck was clear.
‘I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown, where no disturbances can be, no disturbances, in the world’, he said. He gave Juxon his Garter insignia, and said ‘remember’ to him. No one has ever been sure of what it meant. The last words of the ghost in Hamlet to his son
are ‘Adieu. Remember me.’ The son is supposed to remember, and avenge.
Charles now prayed a little. He had been on the scaffold for fifteen minutes or so. Then he lay down on the block. He thrust out his arms. The axe swung down, and severed his head in one clean blow. There was a sigh from the crowd – no cheering, no laughter, just a long-breathed sigh, a collective groan.
At once, two troops of horse dispersed the crowds, though not before some had managed to dip handkerchiefs in the king’s blood; they would sell them later as remedies for scrofula, for now there was in the Three Kingdoms no king left to touch for it.
XXXIII Into Another Mould? The Aftermath
The men who had fought in the Civil War gave it various names; ‘the war of King Charles the First’, ‘the troubles’, ‘the late unnatural and uncivil wars’, ‘the civil wars’, ‘the late deplored war’, ‘the late unhappy wars’. Historians have been equally uncertain: ‘the great rebellion’, said Clarendon stoutly, but few have followed him; ‘the English Revolution’, said the late Christopher Hill, and many agreed, but the term was Hill’s invention, not that of contemporaries. Whether or not there had been a revolution, the regicides were men who had done the unthinkable and survived. But after Charles’s death, no one quite knew what came next.
Charles himself lay in state in a lead coffin under a black velvet pall, with his head resewn to his body, a seemly denial of the violence done to his person and the state. He was embalmed, and laid in the chapel at St James’s. It was said that Oliver Cromwell visited the body, to pay his last respects. ‘Cruel necessity’, he is supposed to have told it. Charles was eventually interred at a good safe distance from London, in St George’s Chapel, Windsor. As the body was borne from the castle hall to its vault, thick flakes of snow began to fall, and the heavy black pall turned white. Now he was the White King of prophecy and legend. The day he was buried, Charles was at last heard; his meditations – considerably embellished – were printed as Eikon Basilike, and the loving image was created of gentle Charles king and martyr, destroyed by tyranny. John Milton rushed out a refutation, Eikonoklastes, but no one really attended to it. As the title implied, Milton was eager to align Charles’s death with the iconoclasm that for some had been the whole point of the war. But the moment was over by the time it was printed, and new winds were blowing.
Prince Charles heard the news of his father’s execution on 4 February – no one told him in person; no one wrote; it came as part of the general newspapers. Charles’s chaplain addressed him, stammeringly, as ‘Your Majesty’. Charles asked to be left alone. He was proclaimed king by the Scots at the Mercat Cross, and in Ireland, and in the Scilly Isles. Not in England, however.
Henrietta Maria had heard a different tale: Charles had been rescued by an eager crowd, who had mobbed the scaffold. But invention was soon overtaken by chill truth; she heard the news in silence, and remained sitting silently for some time. Finally, she broke into tears when a friend embraced her. With Charles, she had lost her part in affairs of state; her son did not heed her advice. She was never to play an active part in politics again.
After the war, four of Princess Elizabeth’s rockers, the nursemaids who rocked her cradle, turned up at her brother’s court in exile, and asked for money. The princess herself met a cruel fate, and a lonely one. A sensitive girl, prone to illness, just reaching adolescence, she was terrified when her brother’s landing in Scotland in 1650 led to her own removal to the Isle of Wight. Always dressed in black as a sign of deep mourning for her father, she looked a washed-out little ghost of the old regime. She was unreconciled to her circumstances, and after one piece of teenage defiance, her captors threatened to apprentice her to some nearby glover or button-maker at Newport. Within a week of her arrival, she caught a cold playing bowls with her brother Henry. Her head ached, she refused to eat; perhaps she half-intended to starve herself, one of the only ways left to her of displaying her anger. She developed a high fever, and she died of it, her head resting on a Bible which lay open at the text ‘Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will ease you’. Her mother, helplessly sad at the loss of another family member without so much as a farewell, thought she had died of grief. Ironically, the day before, Parliament had decided to allow her to join her sister Mary in Holland. Queen Victoria, who had been another lonely princess, visited her grave and is said to have cried over it. Prince Henry survived in captivity until soon after the Restoration.
What fell with Charles’s head was the possibility of restoring anything like the pre-war status quo. In the face of Charles’s blood on the straw, not even the most determined ostrich could deny that there had been a change, and therefore that the constitution might need some rethinking.
There was the Rump, less an idea than a body of people sitting, de facto, governing, de facto. Now ideas had to race to catch up with actualité. The learned turned to ancient Rome and to the ideal of the Roman Republic for a model of greatness that excluded a king, and that was founded on the removal of a wicked tyrant. The liberty of the individual was guaranteed by the liberty of the free commonwealth. For the state as well as the individual, the loss of liberty was enslavement. But this blissful state of affairs depended on the individual citizen’s willingness to maintain virtue, and for some people this meant a world of constant warfare in which citizen-soldiers were knitted into units by the experience of shedding their blood for the state. For others, like Marchamont Nedham, it meant that freedom was enshrined in fairly commonsense laws: private property, a system of justice, and free elections – all very much more sturdy. But as it happened, neither point of view would last, nor would either entirely vanish.
What was also slow to fade was the cruelty the war had unleashed, its violence, best glimpsed in the admirably upright person of Oliver Cromwell. While the English had been fighting the two Civil Wars, a separate but related conflict had been going on in Ireland. The upshot was that the fledgling English republic was forced to send over an army to pacify those areas of Ireland still unsubdued by forces friendly to it. On 10 September 1649, Cromwell and his army arrived at Drogheda, which controlled the mouth of the Boyne. He who could take Drogheda could take hell, thought its governor, former Royalist commander Sir Arthur Aston. The Cromwellian cannon opened fire, breaching the walls to the south. The next day, there were two terrible assaults, marked by the Pythonesque black comedy of Colonel Warren, who tried to go on fighting when both his legs had been shot off. The breach was in the end closed up with English dead. Finally, the English fell back, but Cromwell had no intention of going home. He led a new assault, in person, and his fresh courage broke through the stack of bodies. The town fell.
Perhaps Cromwell could have taken hell indeed; he certainly proceeded to make Drogheda into a close imitation of it. He ordered that no quarter be given. In its way, this was the last act of the Second Civil War, and partook of its cruelty. The English beat Sir Arthur Aston to death with his own wooden leg. Survivors tried taking refuge in St Peter’s church, and in an uncanny replication of what the Royalists had done at Barthomley, Cromwell set fire to the pews to smoke out those who had hidden in the steeple. The fire spread upwards, and some of the fugitives were burned to death, screaming. Cromwell himself reported that in the midst of the flames one was heard to say ‘God damn me, God confound me, I burn’. As always, he interpreted this providentially: the man was clearly a reprobate, and would be burning soon anyway. The captured garrison was decimated – literally – and the rest sent to Barbados. Cromwell reported coolly, ‘I believe we put to the sword the whole number of the defendants.’ All the officers were bludgeoned to death.
Among those slain was young Sir Edmund Verney, heir to the father who had died at Edgehill, who had been fighting against Cromwell’s forces: ‘As he was walking with Cromwell by way of protection [having been given quarter] one Ropier who is brother to Lord Ropier called him aside in a pretence to speak with him, being formerly of acquaintance, and instead of some friendl
y office which Sir Edmund might expect from him, he barbarously ran him through with a tuck.’
At Wexford, things were even worse. Two boatloads of desperate refugees ‘being over-pressed with numbers sank’, said Cromwell, cool as ever, ‘whereby were drowned near three hundred of them’. The Cromwellian troops killed any priests or friars they found. Two hundred women were butchered at the Market Cross, while they begged for mercy. Cromwell saw himself as acting in the name of God, and God, he thought, was acting through his soldiers. With him on campaign was the tirelessly violent Clotworthy, the man who had destroyed the Rubens Crucifixion in Henrietta Maria’s chapel; now he annihilated human Catholics with the ferocity he had learned there. By May Clotworthy was back in Bristol, and Cromwell was about to turn his lightning bolts on Scotland.
The military campaign went on and on. Oliver Cromwell rose to become England’s greatest military leader to date, and ultimately to be Lord Protector, ousting the republican regime he had done so much to create. He refused the crown three times, and his death in 1658 ended his era and his ideas more finally than Charles’s had ended his ten years earlier. Charles II dug up his body and hung it on a gibbet to show his treason.
Anna Trapnel never forgave Cromwell’s betrayal. For a brief and glorious moment, he had inaugurated what she and others had dreamed of: the rule of the saints, a Parliament chosen entirely by the Independent congregations from among the godly and headed by Praise-God Barebone. It ruled for five months, but then dissolved itself, and Cromwell became Protector, usurping, in Trapnel’s eyes, the power that should belong to those God had chosen. So in 1654 she denounced him as a dark minion of Satan. Falling into an eleven-day prophetic trance at Whitehall, she proclaimed the coming of the kingdom of God, then went on an ill-starred tour of Cornwall to try to preach God’s word. The Cornish, unregenerate as ever, charged her with witchcraft, but she managed to escape conviction. She is last heard of in Bridewell Prison in 1654.
The English Civil War: A People’s History (Text Only) Page 67