Killers of the King

by Charles Spencer

  At Woburn the King was privately presented with proposals for a settlement that the army had approved, and intended to make public. Sir John Berkeley, one of Henrietta Maria’s confidants, had acted for the King during the brokering of terms. This he did with a realistic understanding of the King’s plight. Berkeley had felt compelled to concede various points: seven senior Royalists would be condemned for their role in the Civil War; none of the King’s supporters would be allowed to stand for Parliament at the next election; the role of bishops – who were loathed by the Puritans as much as they were prized by the King – would be diminished. The army was confident that, if Charles agreed to these points, it could present them to Parliament with every chance that they would be accepted.

  Surely, the King said, the army’s leaders had no intention of reaching agreement with him, if this was what they thought to offer him? Berkeley forcefully disagreed, stating that the opposite was surely the case: if they had sought fewer advantages, then that would have proved that the enemy were not serious, ‘there being no appearance, that men, who had through so many dangers and difficulties acquired such advantages, would content themselves with less than was contained in the said proposals; and that a crown so near lost was never recovered so easily as this would be, if things were adjusted upon these terms.’9 The King was deaf to Berkeley’s good sense, insisting petulantly that he would wait for the army to return to him with improved conditions.

  When instead the army decided to announce its original proposals, Charles was indignant, repeatedly telling the officers present: ‘You cannot be without me; you will fall to ruin, if I do not sustain you.’ Even in defeat, and while being held in custody, the King felt sure he was indispensible. Berkeley, exasperated at his master’s delusion, and embarrassed by his rudeness, reproached him: ‘Sir, you speak as if you had some secret strength and power which I do not know of; and since you have concealed it from me, I wish you had done it from these men also.’10

  Various key figures in the army now gave up all hope of striking a deal with Charles. Instead, they started to look to their own safety, and what they perceived to be the public good. To some, neither of these priorities required the King’s wellbeing, or even his presence.

  Charles was moved to Hampton Court Palace the next month, August 1647. This was a royal residence the King knew well: he had spent his honeymoon there, with his fifteen-year-old French bride, twenty-two years earlier. The wife of a Parliamentary colonel, Lucy Hutchinson,* wrote with disgust that at Hampton Court, Charles ‘lived rather in the condition of a guarded and attended prince than as a conquered and purchased captive’.11 His courtiers reconvened there as his Privy Council, while representatives from Scotland had ready access to the King: they plotted privately with him, judging how best to use him against his Parliamentary captors.

  Charles grew deeply anxious about his personal safety while at Hampton Court, hearing gossip of plans to assassinate him. A letter from Cromwell, conveyed by Colonel Edward Whalley, the King’s custodian since early summer, only stoked these fears. Whalley, a hero of the Civil War and a first cousin of Cromwell, recalled: ‘When I received the letter, I was much astonished, abhorring that such a thing should be done, or so much as thought of, by any that bear the name of Christians. When I had shown the letter to his majesty, I told him, “I was sent to safeguard, and not to murder him. I wished him to be confident no such thing should be done. I would first die at his foot in his defence.” ’12

  Whalley’s prime concern was not an attempt on the King’s life, but the impossibility of keeping Charles at Hampton Court, should he choose to abscond: the King was not officially a prisoner, so had to be granted some privacy, as well as reasonable freedom of movement. But, as Whalley reminded his superiors, Hampton Court Palace ‘is vast; hath fifteen hundred rooms . . . and would require a troop of horse, upon perpetual duty, to guard all the out-goings’.13 All Whalley felt able to do was show vigilance in the daytime, and appoint guards around the King’s bedroom at night. It was, said Whalley, a ‘careful and hazardous duty’,14 and one that he frequently asked to be relieved of because of its huge responsibility, made that much more onerous through the glaring inadequacy of his manpower.

  The King’s routine was at least helpful to the colonel, because of its predictability. ‘Mondays and Thursdays were the King’s set days for his writing letters to be sent into foreign parts,’ Whalley recalled. ‘His usual time of coming out of his bedchamber, on those days, was betwixt five and six of the clock. Presently after he went to prayers. And, about half an hour after that, to supper: at which times I set guards about his bedchamber.’15

  On a November evening, Whalley went to the anteroom that abutted the King’s bedchamber and asked Charles’s attendants if he could see their master. They said this was not possible: he was busy writing letters, and had left strict instructions not to be disturbed.

  Whalley waited for an hour, with mounting anxiety. The courtiers persisted in their tale: the King was dealing with extraordinary business. When pushed further, they claimed he was writing a long letter to his eldest daughter Mary, the Princess of Orange. By seven o’clock, Whalley was deeply concerned. He suggested to a senior courtier that the King might be unwell and that he should look in on him. The courtier refused to disobey the King’s instructions.

  ‘I was then extreme restless in my thoughts,’ recorded Whalley, ‘looked oft in at the keyhole, to see whether I could perceive his majesty: but could not.’16 Still stonewalled by the royal attendants, Whalley went to fetch Smitheby, the keeper of the privy lodgings, and with him approached the King’s quarters from the other side, going up a stairway leading from the rear garden, before hurrying through the suite of rooms that culminated in the space adjacent to the King’s bedroom. There, in the middle of the floor, lay Charles’s crumpled cloak.

  Circling back to the anteroom, Whalley insisted in the name of Parliament that the courtiers open the King’s locked bedroom door. Realising that the colonel was no longer to be denied, one of them eventually agreed, went into the room, then reappeared. Confirming Whalley’s fears, he simply reported that the King had gone.

  It was found that Charles had left behind three letters, one of them containing a courteous acknowledgement of Whalley’s good treatment of him.

  The colonel sent soldiers on horseback to sweep the grounds, and on foot to scour the surrounding buildings. He also immediately reported the King’s disappearance to his cousin, Cromwell, and to Sir Thomas Fairfax, the Parliamentary army’s commander-in-chief. Then he dispatched men to John Ashburnham’s house, a mile away, and learnt that he too was gone. The King and Ashburnham had embarked on another of their bids for freedom.

  In the days leading up to his escape Charles had sent his trusted agent, Jane Whorwood – the striking, redheaded stepdaughter of one of his leading Scottish courtiers – to ask the astrologer William Lilly in which direction he should flee. Lilly was a known Parliamentarian: towards the end of the First Civil War he had urged the King to bow to the authority of Parliament, since to do otherwise would endanger his life. He had also berated Charles for having waged ‘an uncivil and unnatural war against his own subjects’.17 However, Lilly’s reputation was such that Charles felt compelled to seek his advice: in his almanac for 1645, Anglicus, Peace or no Peace, Lilly had deduced from Mars’s predicted alignment that June would be the most promising time to attack the King’s forces – ‘If now we fight, a Victory stealeth upon us.’ The triumph of Naseby had duly occurred in the middle of that month. Both sides now looked keenly at Lilly’s projections: his almanac for 1647 had sold 17,000 copies by the time Charles consulted him.

  Lilly advised Jane Whorwood that the King’s best hope lay in fleeing to Essex. But the King did not wait for Jane’s return, and, headed south, instead of east intending to sail for France if he remained in danger. Through the bungling of a well-meaning courtier, Charles found himself compromised and in the hands of Colonel Robert Hammond – a cousin of Crom
well and the governor of the Isle of Wight. On arrival the King declared he had come to seek sanctuary on the island out of fear for his life, and claimed to be ‘desiring to be somewhat secure till some happy accommodation may be made between me and my Parliament’.18 He was housed in Carisbrooke Castle. While there, Charles was still treated as a respectfully detained king, staying in the comfort of the Constable’s Lodgings. Some of the Parliamentary officers stationed there were openly hostile to the king, but the local population was largely Royalist. For several months Charles believed he would be able to leave at any time, the illusion of liberty completed by Hammond allowing him freedom to ride around the island.

  Charles’s former suitors soon gravitated towards the Isle of Wight, their honeyed words confirming his belief that he remained central in the framing of his subjects’ future. Commissioners arrived from Parliament, eager to see if there was a way of negotiating a peaceful settlement of the nation, and at the same time achieving their aim of sidelining the army. Meanwhile Scottish emissaries appeared, intent on brokering what advantages they could for their people. They felt aggrieved that Parliament had failed to honour its side of their alliance, particularly in religious matters, and secretly plotted with the King: they talked of a march south by the Scottish army to overthrow the mutual enemy. This was clearly an exciting prospect for Charles, but he kept other options in play.

  Charles consistently overestimated the strength of his hand and the patience of his enemies, as he played Parliament, the army and the Scots off against one another. He felt sure that none of these competing forces could achieve what they wanted without his support. At the same time, he felt no qualms of conscience about his many deceits: all was being extracted from him through duress, while he was in effect a prisoner. The King believed this negated his concessions: he fully intended to go back on any promises made, once his freedom was restored. He wrote as much, repeatedly, in letters that he intended for sympathisers on the mainland. Many were intercepted. As the conditions of his confinement became stricter, it began to dawn on Charles that Governor Hammond was not his protector, but his gaoler, and that he was under house arrest.

  His most trusted intermediary, now shuttling between the Isle of Wight and London with secret messages, was Jane Whorwood, the intermediary who had consulted Lilly for the King. This ‘tall, well-fashioned and well-languaged gentlewoman, with round visage . . . exceedingly loyal, understanding and of good judgement’, was, in the estimation of a Parliamentary spy, ‘the most loyal to King Charles in his miseries of any woman in England’.19 This was a reputation earned over several years. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Jane Whorwood’s husband, Brome, had gone abroad rather than dare to fight for either cause. The abandoned wife remained in Holton House, Oxfordshire, with her two children. When the Royalists settled in Oxford, four miles from Holton, she utilised her family’s trading connections and a network of sympathetic contacts to arrange a smuggling ring. In this way, during 1643 and 1644, she succeeded in getting 1,700lbs of gold from Royalist supporters into the King’s hands, some of which was used to pay for the escape of Henrietta Maria and the Prince of Wales to France. Whorwood’s principal role, though, was trafficking clandestine correspondence.

  After the conclusion of the First Civil War, Whorwood remained an agent of the compromised Crown. She defrauded the Parliamentary revenue committee for Charles’s benefit.

  During Charles’s detention on the Isle of Wight, Jane Whorwood tried twice to help him escape. During the first attempt, in March 1648, the King had become stuck between the bars of the window of his bedchamber. Charles had checked that his head would fit between the window bars, ‘and he was sure, where that would pass, the body would follow’; but when he attempted to clamber out, ‘His Majesty . . . too late, found himself mistaken, he sticking fast between his breast and shoulders, and not able to get forwards or backwards . . .’ The second attempt, two months later, took place after Lilly had put Whorwood in contact with a locksmith who provided the King with the tools to escape: nitric acid and a file. The plan foundered after two guards, who had been bribed, betrayed him. Whorwood was left waiting in vain for weeks aboard a ship on which she planned to sail with the King to the Netherlands. The Royalist Marquess of Hertford concluded of the King’s failure to escape, while acknowledging Jane’s impeccable loyalty, ‘Had the rest done their parts as carefully as Whorwood, the King would now have been at large.’20

  Charles was now kept under closer guard in Carisbrooke, unable to receive visitors, his principal servants sent away. Increasingly frustrated by the King’s obstinacy, and appalled by his lack of integrity, the feelings of those dealing with Charles hardened against him. There had been a vivid moment that onlookers saw as revealing Charles’s true thinking, beneath the affably accommodating veneer. One day he was observed throwing a bone for his two spaniels, and taking inordinate pleasure in the ensuing tussle, as the dogs fought for the prize. Parliament’s commissioners and the representatives from the Scots wondered if they, too, in seeking the King’s cooperation, were ragging over a tossed bone in front of an amused monarch. They came to believe that his true intention was to keep them beholden to him, yet unfulfilled in their aims, until he was in a position powerful enough to turn and strike them down.

  The opinion of the King from the army, in particular, was one of escalating contempt. In late October 1647, while Charles was ensconced seven miles away in Hampton Court Palace, a church next to the army headquarters in Putney became the venue for the start of a series of debates of a deeply radical hue. The General Council of the Army that convened there included not only senior officers, but also representatives of the New Model Army’s regiments: highly politicised and articulate men from all ranks, who felt entitled through victory to have a say in the way their country should progress from this crossroads in its history.

  Some were Levellers, an egalitarian movement that flowered briefly in the late 1640s. Strikingly modern in their aims, the Levellers wanted religious tolerance, manhood suffrage (the vote for all men), regular and accountable parliaments, and popular sovereignty, whereby those in power placed the public good ahead of their self-interest. Charles’s example of kingship, insisting on privileges, assumptions and abuses rooted in the Middle Ages, was a lightning rod for their hatred.

  The most senior officer openly advocating the Leveller position at Putney was Colonel Thomas Rainsborough, who had been a military commander on land and sea during the recent Civil War. Rainsborough’s background was steeped in religious devotion and social liberalism. He was the son of an admiral who, as ambassador, had fought to end white slavery in Morocco. Rainsborough and his brother had both visited the colony of Providence Island, off the Central American Mosquito Coast, where English Puritans had tried to establish an independent utopian society, devoid of profanity, prostitutes, drunkenness and gambling – with a rather ill-matched sideline in piracy, directed against the nearby Spanish colonies.

  When Rainsborough addressed the military assembly at Putney, he did so with broad vision and startling radicalism, championing the common man – the backbone of the army, as he pointed out – while highlighting the selfish tendencies of their social superiors, including those in Parliament. ‘I would fain know what the soldier hath fought for all this while?’ he asked; ‘He hath fought to enslave himself, to give power to men of riches, men of estates, to make him a perpetual slave.’21 The ordinary soldier had delivered victory. Now he deserved and demanded a stake in the fresh world he had created.

  Among those listening to Rainsborough and the other impassioned debaters were two of the tightly meshed officer elite: Commissary General Henry Ireton, son-in-law to Oliver Cromwell; and Lieutenant Colonel William Goffe, son-in-law to Charles’s former custodian, Colonel Whalley. An intensely religious man, Goffe took time to remind all present of God’s omnipotence, and warned them of his appetite for severe retribution when his will was flouted. ‘And I pray, let us consider this,’ Goffe offered: ‘God doe
s seem evidently to be throwing down the glory of all flesh. The greatest powers in the kingdom have been shaken. God hath thrown down the glory of the King and that party . . . I do not say that God will throw us down – I hope better things – but he will have the glory.’22

  Goffe warned that God met obstinacy with a rod of iron, and that those who went away from his path would either be broken in pieces, or robbed of their glory. It was time, Goffe maintained, to listen to God, through a devout and humble prayer meeting. Otherwise, all may well be lost.

  Ireton followed by paying tribute to Goffe’s wisdom, eloquence, and godliness. The commissary general then confided that his own increasingly close relationship with God had given him confidence to ignore ‘considerations of danger and difficulty . . . and perhaps to do some things that otherwise I should not have thought fit to have done’.23 This was a statement pregnant with possibilities.

  It became clear as the debates went into their second day that Goffe was in that growing group of soldiers convinced that the army and Parliament should cease trying to accommodate the King, and should instead call him to account for the bloodshed he had caused in the land. Goffe believed that these were very urgent considerations, for, through his fervent study of the Bible, and in particular the Book of Revelation, he was convinced he was living in the final days of human history: soon God would return, to judge all. There was no time to lose.

  The army’s wish for the King to be punished gained further traction in the spring and summer of 1648, when a series of Royalist risings flared up in a brief, twitching spasm that would be known as the Second Civil War.