Killers of the King

by Charles Spencer

  In Wales, various Parliamentary troops switched their allegiance to the Crown. Colonel Thomas Horton, a bitter enemy of the Presbyterians in Parliament and a champion of the army’s Puritan faction, was charged with striking them down. He was aided by Colonel John Okey, who commanded the New Model Army’s one dedicated regiment of dragoons – mounted infantry. His men had fought with particular distinction at Naseby. Although his force was half the size of that of the Royalists, Horton’s men were better trained, and had a significantly larger cavalry strength. They won a crushing victory at St Fagans, near Cardiff, in early May. Notable among the Parliamentary heroes that day was Captain Thomas Wogan, a Pembrokeshire man who shared Horton’s firm attachment to the army’s political interests. He was soon promoted to colonel.

  A month later, Colonel Thomas Waite concluded the siege of Woodcroft House in Northamptonshire. The defending commander was Dr Hudson, Charles I’s chaplain, who had guided him on the ill-fated escape from Oxford to the Scots. He was a Royalist who was particularly despised by the New Model Army. Hudson and his men were promised mercy on surrender. However, once the stronghold was secured, the victors poured in, and Hudson was pursued to the rooftop, where he clung from the edge by his fingertips. The Parliamentarians chopped off his hands, sending him plummeting into the moat below. Managing to flail his way to the bank, he was met with a flurry of blows and beaten to death. News of the fall of Woodcroft House, and the hated Hudson’s end, secured Waite the thanks of Parliament.

  The most significant Royalist forces in the south – Lord Goring’s cavalry, Lord Capel’s men from Hertfordshire, and Sir George Lisle’s squadrons from Chelmsford – ended up after various reverses holed up together in Colchester. The Parliamentary commander-in-chief, Sir Thomas Fairfax, blocked sea access to the town, and settled into a determined siege. The Royalists’ only hope of salvation rested with a large army coming south from Scotland, under Charles I’s cousin, the Duke of Hamilton. This invasion was the consequence of the King’s secret dealings with the Scottish commissioners on the Isle of Wight.

  The Colchester garrison was poorly supplied, and was soon reduced to eating its horses, then the townspeople’s dogs and cats, before feeding on soap and candles. After eleven weeks of resistance, the Royalists heard the besiegers’ cannon fire in celebration. Kites drifted over the town’s walls carrying the news that the Scottish army had been defeated in a three-day rolling battle at Preston, Lancashire. There could be no relief for Colchester, now. After the surrender, the Parliamentary council of war was in an unforgiving mood.

  Its officers – who included Ireton, Whalley, Colonel John Barkstead and Colonel Isaac Ewer – sent the Royalist lords to be tried by their peers in London. They also condemned two senior officers, Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George Lisle, to face an immediate firing squad in the courtyard of Colchester Castle. Lisle, a brave and popular infantry general, witnessed a file of dragoons shoot Lucas. He bent to kiss his slain comrade on the head, then rose to face his executioners with bravado, beckoning them to come forward: ‘Friends, I have been nearer you when you have missed me.’24 They made no mistake this time.

  These executions shocked many, and brought home the determination of the New Model Army not to tolerate further Royalist uprisings. It had lost several senior and respected figures in this resumption of hostilities, which was a source of bitter resentment. At Colchester, Colonel Simon Needham of the Tower Guards had been killed early in the siege. His successor as colonel was William Shambrook, who was in turn mortally wounded in early July. The Parliamentary troops believed that both regimental commanders had been shot with ‘poisoned bullets’ – musket balls chewed rough and rolled in grit. Their use was a heinous breach of the prevailing rules of warfare.

  The Second Civil War produced many other fallen heroes of the New Model Army. During the triumph at Preston, Colonel Francis Thornaugh, charging dangerously ahead of his men, was run through by a Royalist lancer. Propped up, his lifeblood ebbing away, he presented a memorable deathbed tribute to the ‘Good Old Cause’ of Parliament. As victory unfolded before him, his final words were: ‘I now rejoice to die, since God hath let me see the overthrow of this perfidious enemy; I could not lose my life in a better cause, and I have the favour from the Lord to see my blood avenged.’25

  Another notable Parliamentarian to fall was Thomas Rainsborough, who had impressed so many with his eloquence at the Putney debates a year earlier. Rainsborough had achieved the rank of vice-admiral in the Parliamentary fleet, but fellow naval officers bridled at his Leveller views; they provoked a mutiny, and Rainsborough was sent back to serve on land. Towards the end of the Second Civil War he was directed to command the siege of Pontefract Castle. Stopping in Doncaster en route, Rainsborough was surprised by a group of Royalist soldiers who, posing as friends, gained access to his bedchamber, intent on kidnapping him. When he resisted, they murdered him instead. Rainsborough’s funeral in London was attended by thousands, wearing sprigs of rosemary in their hats and sea-green ribbons pinned to their clothes – symbols of Leveller support.

  The soldiers had been at the sharp end of these bloodiest of conflicts: by their end the Civil Wars would, through battlefield casualties and war-borne disease, lead to the loss of an estimated 190,000 of the five million inhabitants of England and 60,000 of the one million Scots. (Figures for Ireland are less easy to establish but, during the same period, warfare, plague and exile reduced the 1.4 million population of Ireland by around 600,000.) Many believed Charles had caused the suffering, and they were now convinced that he would only add to it – for nothing would dissuade him from attempting to regain power, whatever the toll on his people.

  Its patience at an end, the army held a three-day prayer meeting at its Windsor Castle headquarters, after which it resolved ‘to call Charles Stuart, that Man of Blood, to an account for that blood he hath shed and the mischief he had done to his utmost, against the Lord’s cause and people’.26 Meanwhile, from August, representatives of the Lords and Commons intensified their negotiations with Charles on the Isle of Wight. The King was released from close guard after giving his word that there would be no further escape attempts, and celebrated his greater liberty by writing immediately to his ‘Sweet Jane’ (Whorwood) in code, inviting her to his quarters. She accepted, and the two became lovers.

  Alongside her new role as royal mistress, Whorwood resumed her travels between the Isle of Wight and London, smuggling correspondence and gauging the mood in the capital towards the King. She found that the gulf between Charles’s enemies in Parliament and the military was ever-widening. On 13 November she sent the King an urgent dispatch, partly in code, telling him things looked so very dangerous for ‘my dear friend’ that, despite having given his word never to do so, he must escape immediately. If he did not, he would find himself at the mercy of the increasingly vengeful element in the army.

  It was as if the New Model Army’s repeated triumphs, built on soldiers’ bravery and washed in their blood, were, to the politicians, an irrelevance. Whatever was achieved for the cause, the King would stand apart, treated with reverence – his powers only partially diminished – free to stir the embers of insurrection. Lieutenant General Edmund Ludlow shared such concerns with his commander, Fairfax. ‘I told him,’ Ludlow recalled, ‘that a design was driving on to betray the cause in which so much of the people’s blood had been shed; that the King being under a restraint, would not account himself obliged by anything he should promise under such circumstances.’ He was also clear that those keenest to negotiate with Charles ‘designed principally to use his authority and favour in order to destroy the army’.27

  Edward Sexby, a soldier from Cromwell’s regiment, had eloquently captured his comrades’ feelings of vulnerability and frustration in victory with eloquent foresight during the Putney debates: ‘The cause of our misery is upon two things. We sought to satisfy all men, and it was well; but in going about to do it we have dissatisfied all men. We have laboured to please a King
and I think, except we go about to cut all our throats, we shall not please him; and we have gone to support an house which will prove rotten studs – I mean the Parliament, which consists of a company of rotten members.’28

  There was now frantic activity as the army’s restlessness grew ever more pronounced. Presbyterian Parliamentarians cast around desperately for a working compromise with the King. Their aim was to settle the nation, cease hostilities, and return a chastened but functioning monarchy that needed no standing army to police its conduct.

  Meanwhile, a senior officer in the New Model Army arranged to consult secretly with the Royalist Sir John Berkeley. They met in a quiet space behind a pub in Windsor, the Garter Inn, where the anonymous soldier warned Berkeley, ‘The way designed to ruin the King is, to send 800 of the most disaffected in the army to secure his person, and then to bring him to a trial; and I dare think no farther. This will be done in ten days; and therefore, if the King can escape, let him do it as he loves his life.’29 All had changed, the officer explained, because of serious cracks appearing in the military: Cromwell, faced with the beginnings of a parade ground mutiny by troops sporting Leveller symbols, had ordered the twelve ringleaders arrested, and had had one of the men face a firing squad.

  Such frictions threatened to evolve into a split in the army’s loyalties, with many regiments then likely to declare for Parliament. If this happened, those associated with the recent high-handedness of the New Model Army – Cromwell, Ireton and their closest associates – would be vulnerable to severe retribution, which might cost them their lives. Out of self-preservation, these leaders now sided with those who were most vocal in calling for justice against the King, even if that made Charles’s destruction all but inevitable.

  On 1 December, Parliament’s commissioners reported back from the Isle of Wight that the King had conceded on some of their most recent demands, in particular an admission that he had been ‘guilty of the blood spilt in the late war, with the proviso, that if the agreement were not ratified by the House, then this concession should be of no force against him’.30 The sticking points, as ever, remained the questions relating to bishops, and to the pardoning of key Royalists. On the same date Fairfax, nervous that Charles might be rescued from Carisbrooke, had the King moved across the Solent to Hurst Castle – a functional fortress, built on a shingle spit, that was devoid of frills. It was Charles’s first taste of stark prison conditions. Meanwhile the Parliamentary commander-in-chief sent a force of 7,000 soldiers to occupy London.

  Against this tense background, late into the night of 5 December, the House of Commons furiously debated the value of Charles’s recent concessions to their demands. They concluded, by 129 to 83 votes, that there was enough in them to form the basis for settling with the King. Several of the MPs defeated in this motion – supporters of the army – demanded that their utter rejection of the majority decision be recorded in the House’s book.

  That same night, realising that time was running out, a subcommittee of six officers and MPs met to work out how best to bypass the will of the Presbyterian MPs. The next day Colonel Thomas Pride, a wealthy London brewer who had long been a vociferous champion of the army’s cause, implemented this meeting’s conclusions. It was effectively a military coup, known to posterity as ‘Pride’s Purge’. Sir Hardress Waller and his regiment stood in menacing support of Pride’s men as young, ruddy-faced Lord Grey of Groby – republican son of the Earl of Stamford – pointed out which members could be relied upon, and so be admitted to the Commons, and which could not be trusted to implement the New Model Army’s will. There were just seventy-five who passed muster; the rest were barred: some were arrested, while around 150 were denied access to the chamber. When one member, William Prynne, tried to push past the soldiers, he was manhandled and led away. As he went, he demanded that Pride and Waller explain who was authorising their aggression. In reply the two colonels pointed silently to their men, whose weapons were at the ready.

  On 16 December, Fairfax sent soldiers to bring the King from Hurst Castle to London. They collected their prisoner three days later, and immediately headed back north.

  Charles was now in the hands of Colonel Thomas Harrison, a most dangerous enemy. Harrison, a long-haired dandy, removed his hat on greeting the King, in feigned respect for a man he viewed with contempt. At the Putney debates, Harrison had been prominent among those calling for Charles to be punished for spilling his subjects’ blood.

  The son of a Staffordshire butcher, Harrison was a notorious and eye-catching scourge of the Royalists who had risen to prominence through merit, and through his closeness to Cromwell. Harrison’s religious zeal also counted in his favour: at the battle of Langport, the final great victory of the First Civil War, he was heard to cheer at the sight of the fleeing enemy, and ‘with a loud voice break forth into the praises of God with fluent expressions, as if he had been in a rapture’.31

  The King had a particular terror of Harrison: he had heard that the colonel had been entrusted with his murder. Charles knew of Harrison’s reputation for ruthlessness and brutality. One of the most obstinate pockets of Royalist resistance in the south had been Basing House, home of the Roman Catholic Marquess of Winchester. As an English stronghold, it was second only to Windsor Castle in size, and successfully withstood two sieges in 1643 and 1644. Conditions were so dire for Basing’s defenders at one stage that the marquess’s brother secretly plotted with some dispirited comrades to let the Parliamentarians take the place. When the scheme was discovered, this aristocrat’s life was spared, but his punishment was severe: he was forced to hang his fellow conspirators.

  Basing became a self-regarding bastion of Catholicism, and consequently a place of particular revulsion to Puritans. In 1645 the marquess insisted that all Protestants leave his property, and met the third siege of Basing, from late August, with just 300 Catholic troops. His estate’s gamekeepers acted as snipers, while women and children assisted in the forlorn defence. The New Model Army experimented with poisoned gas, lighting wet hay bales doused in arsenic and brimstone, which the wind carried towards Basing’s defenders. Meanwhile the sprawling mansion was pummelled with artillery fire. Cromwell’s heavy guns rolled into position in October, under the command of Richard Deane. Deane’s cannon-royal fired a 60lb shot that no wall could withstand, supported by 30lb cannonballs from two other mighty pieces. Discouraged by his priests from surrendering, Winchester invited disaster. A frontal assault by the 7,000-strong Parliamentary force followed, and slaughter ensued, in which women and children fell and priests were hanged. Harrison took part in it all with enthusiasm. He dispatched two of the senior Catholic officers: the Royalists claimed that one of these, Major Robinson (from a family of prominent actors), was shot by Harrison in cold blood after surrendering.

  Charles was right to be worried about Harrison. He was in cahoots with the Levellers, listening to their hopes of fundamental reform while remaining focused on his core belief: that the ‘carnal’ government of man in all its forms should be jettisoned in favour of the rule of God. Harrison did not want to scare his prisoner, so treated him with clipped politeness. But he wanted the King to be punished before he could be reconciled to the Presbyterian majority in Parliament. Such a rapprochement would inevitably involve the disbanding of the army, and that would quickly be followed by revenge against its leaders. Harrison was aware that his notoriety must place him high on the list of those to receive Royalist retribution. Twelve years later Harrison recalled: ‘There was a little discourse between the King and myself. The King had told me, that he had heard, that I should come privately to the Isle of Wight, to offer some injury to him. But I told him I abhorred the thoughts of it.’32 Harrison advised his prisoner that, ‘Parliament had too much honour and justice to cherish so foul an intention; and assured him that whatever the Parliament resolved to do would be very public, and in a way of justice, to which the world should be witness, and would never endure a thought of secret violence.’33


  In his determination to deliver Charles safely and speedily for trial, Harrison had those officers with the fastest horses ride alongside the King, with a hundred others in close attendance with pistols drawn. The colonel was suspicious when Charles insisted that they break their journey eleven miles south of Windsor, with dinner at Bagshot Park, a favourite royal hunting lodge where, Clarendon recorded, the King ‘had used to take much pleasure’.34 There they would be guests of a couple of Royalist stalwarts, Lord and Lady Newburgh: in 1643, Lady Newburgh had narrowly escaped execution for her active role in a plot to turn London over to the Crown; and both the Newburghs had helped convey letters between Charles and his wife during his time at Hampton Court Palace.

  Lord Newburgh had got word to Charles during his detention in Carisbrooke Castle. The plan was that he should, when approaching Bagshot, pretend his horse was falling lame. Newburgh would provide the replacement from his stables: one of his own racehorses, allegedly the fastest in England. The King should then wait until he was being taken through Windsor Forest, whose wilder tracks he knew well, and then gallop away to freedom.

  At Bagshot, though, Charles’s hosts greeted him with devastating news: the champion mount had been kicked hard by a stable mate the previous day, and was itself lame; the escape plan was stillborn. Harrison tightened his grip on Charles at Bagshot Park, insisting he was guarded by at least six soldiers at a time, stationing sentries at every doorway and banning anyone from talking to the king in low or whispered voices. It ended up being a visit that was both brief and fraught, the Newburghs saying farewell to the King in tears, convinced they would never see him again.

  On 23 December, Harrison delivered Charles to Windsor Castle. That same day a committee was appointed to consider ‘how to proceed in a way of Justice against the King, and other Capital Offenders [the captured Royalist generals from the Second Civil War]’.35 Five days later the reading took place of ‘An Ordinance for Trial of the King’. Charles could now make sense of Harrison’s words to him: he was going to be tried in public.