Royalists viewed the killing as justified retribution for the death of the King. Sir Edward Nicholas, who had served as one of Charles’s most measured and trusted advisers, had been living in impoverished exile since the fall of Oxford in 1646. He allowed his customary reserve to slip, writing triumphantly of Dorislaus’s end being ‘the deserved execution of that bloody villain’.10
The consternation among the Commonwealth’s heavyweights was great. The King had only been dead for a little more than three months, but already one of the key figures in his trial had been slain in an act of brutal vengeance. In London, as a warning that such acts against the regicides would not be tolerated, Parliament decided to execute a prominent Royalist prisoner in return; but Sir Lewes Dyves, selected as the sacrifice, managed to escape.
The dismay at Dorislaus’s slaying quickly turned to anger and suspicion. It was noted with concern by the Council of State that the killers had got away, the Dutch being seen as either unable or unwilling to help in tracking them down. (In fact, Whitford had slipped over to the Spanish Netherlands, part of present-day Belgium, thanks to the help of the Portuguese ambassador, which would have made his apprehension extremely difficult.) The regicide, Edmund Ludlow, commented: ‘Though this action was so infamous and contrary to the right of nations, yet the Dutch were not very forward to find out the criminals, in order to bring them to justice.’11 The Commonwealth urged the Dutch now to make doubly sure of Strickland’s safety.
Dorislaus’s naked body was laid out on a table in his lodgings. The corpse attracted huge, ghoulish interest, a constant stream of people passing through De Swaen. But nobody provided help in tracking down or even identifying Whitford* and his men, despite a huge reward of 1,000 guilders for information, and a threat of death for any who harboured the fugitives. This would remain a diplomatic grievance between the two nations, as relations deteriorated through the following years, a period of mutual distrust that eventually led to warfare.
The new English republic was determined to honour one who had been murdered for his part in bringing a tyrant to justice. Dorislaus’s body was returned to London, embalmed, then lay in state in Worcester House, one of a series of grand mansions on the Strand overlooking the Thames. The perpetrators of the ‘Horrid Murder’ might not be known by name, but the Council of State concluded the culprits clearly came from ‘that party from whom all the troubles of this nation have formerly sprung’12 – the Royalists. In compensation for their loss, £500 was awarded to each of Dorislaus’s daughters, while an annual pension of £200 was granted to his son.
Dorislaus was given a lavish funeral, before burial in Westminster Abbey. John Evelyn noted: ‘This night was buried with great pomp Dorislaus, slain at The Hague, the villain who managed the trial against his Sacred Majesty.’13 A Royalist balladeer – mindful that Charles had been granted the most modest of funerals, having been quietly transported to Windsor for a simple interment, in the presence of a handful of loyal supporters – gloated at the grief of the distinguished mourners at Dorislaus’s committal:
Now pray observe the Pomp, the Persons, State
That did attend This Alien Reprobate:
Here, went Lieutenant General Crocodile,
And’s Cubs, bred of the Slime of our Rich Nile:
Who weep before they kill, and whose False Tears
Trickle from Blood-shed eyes of Murderers . . .14
Behind the tears – crocodile or otherwise – was genuine fear. The Parliamentary army officers who had sent Sir George Lisle and Sir Charles Lucas to die in front of a firing squad, after the siege of Colchester, had reprieved a third Royalist, Sir Bernard Gascoigne, when they discovered that Gascoigne was a Tuscan. It had been immediately agreed that adding such a man to the list of the condemned could place the Parliamentarians and their families at risk when travelling abroad. He was spared.
This same sense of self-preservation was foremost in the mind of Anthony Ascham. An Eton and Cambridge Scholar, Ascham had been tutor to the King’s second son, James, during the boy’s time in Parliament’s custody. After the young duke’s escape from London to Holland, disguised as a woman, Ascham had published an influential treatise justifying the political supremacy of the army during a time of confusion and revolution.15 He then became a diplomat, serving the Commonwealth in Hamburg, before, as the State Papers for 16 January 1650 record, ‘Anthony Ascham [was] approved to go as resident to the King of Spain and to have notice to go in the fleet going southward.’16 He left on this mission, extremely concerned about the murderous intent of Royalist exiles.
Arriving in the southern Spanish town of Puerto Santa Maria in late May, Ascham was ‘in so much alarm for his safety that he would not stir from the port . . . until he had a Maestro di Campo [senior regimental officer] and three or four soldiers to guard and accompany him.’17 Next to his chest he wore an oval-shaped lucky talisman, engraved with the image of regicide: a sword thrusting downwards through a crown. Within a day of his arrival in Madrid, though, the charm had failed, and Ascham had followed Dorislaus as the victim of a gang of sword-wielding Royalists. This time, the perpetrators were arrested. Although contemporary accounts vary, it seems likely that they had stumbled upon Ascham by chance, and had wrongly identified him as John Aske, the barrister assisting Cook and Dorislaus at the King’s trial.
John Milton, the regicides’ propagandist-in-chief, recalled the King’s last word to Juxon on the scaffold: the bishop had been interrogated so as to establish what Charles’s final instruction to him – ‘Remember!’ – had meant. The browbeaten Juxon had eventually revealed: ‘The King ordered me, if I could ever get to his son, to carry him this last command of a dying father, that, should he ever be restored to his kingdom and his power, he would pardon you the authors of his death: this is what the King charged me again and again to remember.’18 Milton publicly berated the Prince of Wales for his failure to honour this, his father’s final wish: ‘But in what manner has he paid obedience to it, when either by his order or by his authority, two of our ambassadors, one in Holland, the other in Spain, have been murdered; the latter without even the slightest suspicion of being accessory to the King’s death?’19 This shrill outrage revealed the level of Parliamentary anxiety at the murder of their vulnerable diplomats.
It was not just the regicides that were under threat; it was also their families, exactly as John Bradshaw’s wife had warned him would be the case when he had accepted the lord presidency – against her strongest advice. Indeed, one of their near relatives was targeted for royal revenge.
In December 1652, Richard Bradshaw, nephew of the lord president, was sent from his regular ambassadorial posting in Hamburg on a special mission to Denmark. The Danish royal family was closely linked to the Stuarts: Princess Anne of Denmark had been wife to James I and mother to Charles I. The current ruler of Denmark, Frederick III, was therefore first cousin to the executed English King. After the beheading, the Danes had joined with the Swedes in working on the Dutch government ‘to join with them in assisting the King of Scots to gain his birthright’.20
Richard Bradshaw was ‘a bold fellow’,21 who had served as a quartermaster general during the civil war. His brief now was to gain an audience with Frederick, with the aim of securing the release of twenty-two English merchant ships that had been impounded in Copenhagen. The vessels carried valuable naval provisions, including large quantities of hemp, used in the manufacture of rope.
The Danish King was in no hurry to meet the favourite nephew of the man who had judged and condemned his cousin. He sent word that he would not receive Richard Bradshaw’s mission until Christmas had been celebrated.
Thomas Whyte, one of the King of Denmark’s naval lieutenants, was in Norway when he learnt that Bradshaw would soon be arriving in Copenhagen. According to an anonymous Commonwealth spy, Whyte declared Richard Bradshaw a rebel, and vowed that he would ‘shoot a brace of bullets into him’.22 The informant reported to Parliament that he had been unsure at that sta
ge whether Whyte was being serious or not, so pretended to agree with this plan in order to find out more. Whyte then started to plan the killing in earnest, saying he would gather a group of men to help him see it through.
On the night of Tuesday 4 January, 1653, Whyte arrived in the Danish port of Elsinore, where foreign shipping had to pay toll money for passing through the straits between Denmark and Sweden. Having established that Bradshaw’s nephew was also in Elsinore, Whyte shared his plan with his companion – who he had no idea was a Commonwealth spy. London soon learnt the structure of the plot: to ‘have the said resident killed in his own lodging, upon a Sunday night, as he sat at supper. At which time the said Whyte said, there were no lights abroad. And that the nature of the people at Copenhagen was such, that, when any quarrel happened at such a time, the people would shut their doors.’23 The Danes’ reluctance to get involved in unexpected drama would, Whyte hoped, assist in the assassins’ escape.
Whyte decided that the murder would not, after all, involve the blast of the ‘brace of bullets’ originally envisaged. Instead he and his companions would rely on silent weapons: axes. What could be more suitable for the near relative of the man who had ordered the late King’s beheading? The would-be killers travelled by wagon from Elsinore to Copenhagen, arriving there late on 6 January, intending to strike quickly. Meanwhile the Commonwealth spy slipped off to warn Richard Bradshaw of the plan against his life. When he learnt about it, Bradshaw encouraged the informant to urge Whyte on: he would be ready, when he came for him.
Whyte, meanwhile, appears to have been so excited by his mission that he became torn about which method of assassination would work best. The plan involving the axe was now left to one side, as he vacillated between shooting Bradshaw with a musket through the windows of his lodgings, and slaying him face to face with a pistol. One day he was going to kill his man in Denmark; the next he was planning to wait till he had returned to Hamburg. Whyte shared every, shifting, detail with the man he thought was his friend, but who was in fact reporting all to London – even down to how Whyte planned to cut off the dead man’s fingers and steal his valuable rings. Meanwhile, throughout January, nothing happened.
Early in February, Whyte presented his latest plans to one of Frederick III’s heralds, who reported ‘that the King of Denmark would be glad this business were done, to wit, the killing of Lord Resident Bradshaw; but was unwilling to have it done in his land’.24 So it was that Richard Bradshaw escaped assassination – partly because of Whyte’s procrastination, and partly because of this royal request not to have the murder committed on his soil. However, when reports of Whyte’s plots reached the remaining regicides in England, they were reconfirmed in their fear that, one day, they might suffer death at the hand of Charles I’s avengers.
Those who had been most openly engaged in the trial and execution of Charles were soon adapting to life under a republic, where the army remained a formidable force. Having been infrequently paid for a long time, the soldiers now demanded that Parliament make good its debts. This it attempted through the sale of land and chattels belonging to the late King and his Royalist supporters.
Although one of the intentions of killing the King had been to stop further risings in favour of the Crown, the execution made the Prince of Wales the new focus of opposition. The Marquess of Ormonde, the leading Irish Royalist, proclaimed Charles Stuart ‘the King of Ireland, Scotland and England’. Meanwhile, the Scots – for so long divided by Charles I’s uncompromising religious convictions – began to unify after the King’s death and explore ways of uniting behind his heir. The Commonwealth, England’s new republic, geared itself up for further action in the Third Civil War.
Cromwell took command of the Commonwealth forces headed for Ireland, a country known to be a grim place to wage war, with its uncompromising enemy, thick mud and disease-ridden bogs. Some English soldiers had mutinied at being sent there in 1647, and they would do so again now. Meanwhile the Parliamentarians who had been fighting against Royalists and Catholics in Ireland since the beginning of the decade were low in morale, supplies and funds: Sir Charles Coote, leading Parliamentary troops in the north of Ireland, reported that the men of his six regiments ‘have had but eight months’ pay in eight years, and a peck [2 gallons] of oatmeal a week’.25
The New Model Army had twenty-eight regiments. It was decided that eight of these – four regiments of foot and four of cavalry – would suffice for the invasion. The choice as to who would be sent on this bleak campaign was decided, after prayer, by lot: ‘Ten blanks and four papers with “Ireland” writ in them were put into a hat, and, being all shuffled together, were drawn out by a child, who gave to an officer of each regiment in the lot the lot of that regiment; and being [done] in this impartial and inoffensive way, no regiment could take exception at it.’26
Six of the eight regiments were commanded by regicides: Henry Ireton, Richard Deane, John Hewson, Thomas Horton, Isaac Ewer and Adrian Scroope (Scroope who had captured the Earl of Holland during the Second Civil War, then helped organise security in Westminster Hall during the King’s trial). They departed in the knowledge that this would be a dangerous assignment: learning he would be crossing the Irish Sea to fight, Isaac Ewer wrote his will, ‘not knowing,’ as he said, ‘whether God may ever bring me back’.27 He would be one of several men closely involved in Charles’s execution destined to die in Ireland. Indeed, Colonel Horton, hero of St Fagans, died of dysentery very soon after landing there. Colonel John Moore, a former governor of Liverpool who had helped to sign the King’s life away, would follow soon after, from fever.
The English invaders headed for a land that had been at war since 1641, when Irish Catholics rose against Protestant settlers from England and Scotland. Parliamentary pamphlets claimed that 200,000 Protestants were massacred then, although the actual figure was perhaps 4,000, with another 8,000 perishing from cold and disease after being driven from their homes in winter. This black propaganda, stoked by the tracts of John Milton and the sermons of their Puritan preachers, combined to form a black hatred of the Irish Catholics, and their Royalist cause, in the hearts of Cromwell’s soldiers. Colonel Hewson, a signatory of Charles’s death warrant, spoke for his fellows when he said that, if the Irish failed to surrender, ‘the Lord by his power shall break them in pieces like a potter’s vessel’.28 The New Model Army, with its uncompromising professionalism, reinforced by religious passion, was just the tool for this job.
In the meantime, the force it faced lacked training and harmony. It was made up of Anglo-Irish Royalists, Catholic Confederates, Munster Protestants and Ulster Scots. The Confederates had come into being in 1642, and comprised two-thirds of the population. Led by native Catholic noblemen, clergy and army officers, they resented being expected to serve under the Marquess of Ormonde, who was a general of modest abilities, a Protestant convert, and their former enemy commander. The Confederates reluctantly provided him with troops because, in return, he, with equal reluctance, promised toleration for Irish Catholics. The other forces under Ormonde joined him with similarly grave misgivings.
Given its natural divisions, credit should go to Ormonde’s diplomacy in holding this dysfunctional military force together. However, militarily, he failed: he oversaw the loss of Ireland to Cromwell in just nine months. His strategy and tactics were flawed from the start. Ormonde had surrendered Dublin to the Parliamentarians during the summer of 1647, preferring then for his English enemies to have the city than for the Irish Catholics to gain it. He now failed in his attempt to recapture the city. Not only that, but the besieged garrison boldly seized the initiative, attacking Ormonde’s lines at Rathmines on 2 August 1649 with great success. The marquess’s troops were scattered, and his artillery captured. Thirteen days later, Cromwell was able to land near Dublin, unopposed.
Ormonde now went on the defensive, ordering his forces to hold fast in a string of key towns, hoping the invaders would succumb to hunger and sickness during protracted sieges. But the
New Model Army set about cracking the strongholds, one by one, with a speed that made Ormonde’s plans irrelevant.
The first to receive Cromwell’s lethal attention, in early September 1649, was Drogheda. Thirty miles north of Dublin, the town guarded the coastward march up into Ulster. Its defending commander, Sir Arthur Aston, had boasted that it would be easier to capture Hell than Drogheda, but the high, thin walls he so admired were suited to an earlier period of warfare. They were no match for Cromwell’s eleven 48lb siege guns. Drogheda held out for just eight days.
Cromwell had offered terms of surrender to the garrison, which had been scorned. Angered by the casualties his forces had subsequently endured, and seeking vengeance for the Catholic massacre of Protestants in 1641, he stormed the town with 12,000 men, ordering that none of the defending troops should be spared. Two of those who had signed the King’s death warrant were among the four regimental commanders to distinguish themselves in this, the bloodiest of assaults: Colonel John Hewson and Colonel Isaac Ewer.
Hewson – a former cobbler who had fought for Parliament since the outbreak of hostilities in 1642, and whose bravery had been rewarded with speedy promotions – was in his element. He had played an important part in the Second Civil War, leading his regiment with determination during the storming of Maidstone in Kent. A fellow regicide, Major General Edmund Ludlow, recalled of that engagement: ‘The dispute growing hot, he [Hewson] was knocked down with a musket; but recovering himself, he pressed the enemy so hard, that they were forced to retreat to their main guard.’29 Hewson was just the sort of gritty officer the New Model Army prospered by. His famed toughness unsettled the enemy and made him feared by civilians: it was Hewson who, in the immediate aftermath of the King’s execution, had ridden through London, forbidding any to mourn Charles, on pain of death.
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