Killers of the King

by Charles Spencer

  Ewer had been on the council of war that had ordered the summary execution of Lisle and Lucas after the fall of Colchester. Known for his outstanding loyalty to the cause, he had subsequently been sent to oversee the removal of Charles from vulnerable Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight to the solid security of Hurst Castle: there had been doubts about Charles’s custodian, Colonel Hammond, at that time, but there were never doubts about Ewer. He had attended every day of the King’s trial and was an enthusiastic regicide. Now, aware that Ireland might well be his graveyard, he showed similar fervour in battle.

  Around 2,000 of the 2,800 defenders of Drogheda were killed, along with an estimated 750 civilians. Cromwell ordered that any priests or friars found in the town should be treated as combatants, and must be ‘knocked on the head’ – that is, be bludgeoned to death. This was also the fate of Aston, the Royalist commander. He had surrendered Millmount Fort, a small but doughty defence, to Colonel Axtell, on the promise that he and his men would be spared. This was the same Daniel Axtell who had been in charge of troops in Westminster Hall during the King’s trial, ordering his men to fire on the loudly intrusive Lady Fairfax, and forcing them to bay for justice, then for execution, at the height of the proceedings.

  Axtell had the Royalist prisoners disarmed, then led to a mill, where, within the hour, they were murdered in cold blood. Aston was beaten to death with his wooden leg, which his killers then split open: there had been a rumour that this was where he stored gold coins. This gossip proved to be false.

  It was a bloody day all round. When a hundred Royalist soldiers sought sanctuary in the Church of St Peter, Cromwell ordered Hewson to flush them out with fire: thirty were burnt to death, while fifty were killed as they fled the flames.

  Cromwell sent news of his blood-drenched success to John Bradshaw, who was in nominal charge of the Commonwealth’s executive: John Evelyn wrote of him being, in that summer of 1649, ‘then in great power’.30 Cromwell passed to Bradshaw an unashamed account of his ruthlessness. ‘It hath pleased God to bless our endeavours at Treda [Drogheda] . . . I believe we put to the sword the whole number of the defendants. I do not think thirty of the whole number escaped with their lives.’31 The few survivors were transported to Barbados, to work the plantations in a state akin to slavery.

  The Irish campaign continued to be bloody, and one-sided. Three weeks after Drogheda, the New Model Army sacked the town of Wexford while terms for surrender were being negotiated. Again, artillery played an important role, siege guns being brought along the coast for Cromwell by the ships of Richard Deane, who had bombarded Basing House four years earlier, before judging, and signing the death warrant of the King. Deane was now a general-at-sea – an admiral – in the Commonwealth navy.

  Hundreds of women and children were put to death, or drowned in the River Slaney, while attempting to flee the indiscriminate massacre of the Wexford garrison. Again, Cromwell felt little compassion, justifying this suffering as fair vengeance for the shedding of Protestant blood at the start of the decade, and pointing to the loss of just twenty Commonwealth troops as proof of God’s continuing favour.

  The seasons were now changing ominously: Wexford was so badly mangled by the attack that it could not serve as the English winter quarters. Illness was rife in the cold, the mud and the effluence of the makeshift military camps. But with spring came further triumphs, the capture of Kilkenny and Clonmel effectively ending the campaign. Leaving Ireton to hold down Ireland, with Ludlow his second-in-command, Cromwell was now urgently called back to England.

  Ireland had been a running sore for years; but now, for the first time, the various factions in Scotland were ready to unite behind the Prince of Wales. Charles Stuart would need to make compromises of conscience that his father had rejected to the end. However, this he eventually agreed to do, urged on by his mother and the French court to settle with the Scots on any terms, since they presented the only hope of recovering his father’s throne. Charles therefore promised to support the imposition of Presbyterianism in England, once his southern crown had been reclaimed.

  To ensure Scottish support, the Prince even allowed the ill use and sacrifice of some of his family’s most loyal supporters. Its bravest general in the north, the charismatic and brilliant Duke of Montrose, who had resurrected his campaigns in Scotland to avenge the death of Charles I, was now betrayed after defeat and – testimony to the hurt his previous successes had caused his enemies – was denied the nobleman’s customary death of beheading. Instead, in May 1650, he was led in an open cart through the streets of Edinburgh, his hands tied fast so he could not shield himself from the crowd’s missiles. Montrose conducted himself with a dignity so remarkable at his end, that it was said to have been of more use to the Royalist cause than all his years of military gains. He was hanged, before his body was mutilated – his head stuck on a high spike, his limbs sent off to four important Scottish cities as a warning to others. The same month, twenty-one-year-old Charles Stuart was formally proclaimed King of Scotland.

  Cromwell’s army was half the size of that of his enemy, but his men were united and disciplined, while the Scots’ loyalties were pulled in many directions, many of their men reluctant to serve. Lord Fairfax, an isolated and unhappy figure since Charles’s execution, now stood down from command of the army, claiming he could not in good conscience invade Scotland, whose people had been his allies in the First Civil War.

  Fairfax was replaced by Cromwell, fresh from Ireland. He gathered his forces, then headed towards Berwick-on-Tweed. Thomas Harrison, the Puritan dandy who had escorted Charles from the Isle of Wight towards his trial, and had been promoted major general, was left in charge of military forces throughout the rest of England.

  The able Scottish commander, General David Leslie, had the better of two skirmishes near Edinburgh, but his plans were then hampered by interference from the Kirk party – radical Presbyterians who were nicknamed ‘Whigs’. With Cromwell’s men within striking distance, the Kirk suddenly ordered a three-day pause in hostilities so it could purge the army of the ‘ungodly’. Eighty officers and 3,000 troops were replaced by religiously correct, but militarily inferior, men. On 3 September 1650, confident in supreme command, and focused on the task in hand, Cromwell pulled off perhaps his finest victory, at the battle of Dunbar. The New Model Army annihilated the Scots, despite being outnumbered two to one.

  Cromwell, repeatedly succumbing to serious illness – perhaps malaria contracted in Ireland – spent the next eleven months manoeuvring to capture Leslie’s strongholds. Deciding to strike at Perth at the end of July 1651, Cromwell warned Harrison to stand ready in defence, in case the Scots took this opportunity to march south into England. This they did, King Charles of Scotland at the head of thirty regiments, confident he could reclaim his primary throne, and eager to hold to account those who had put his father to death. He and his men covered 150 miles in their first week.

  The Scottish invasion caused terror in the south. There was particular consternation in the Council of State, many of whose members had royal blood on their hands. ‘Bradshaw himself,’ wrote Lucy Hutchinson, ‘as stout-hearted as he was, privately could not conceal his fear; some raged and uttered sad discontents against Cromwell.’32 Panic even made them question the new lord general’s loyalty.

  Cromwell quickly took Perth, and then wheeled south, sending some of his cavalry under the outstanding young major general, John Lambert, to harry the Scottish force from the rear. Meanwhile Harrison had defused many of those in England who might rise in support of a Stuart restoration. There were raids on suspects’ homes, when their private armouries were confiscated, and the more worrisome among them were taken into custody. Harrison marched slowly back southwards, his retreating footsteps mirroring those of the advancing Royalists, watching them closely while refusing to be brought to battle.

  Colonel Robert Lilburne, a Baptist Leveller who had been the forty-seventh of the fifty-nine to sign Charles’s death warrant, brou
ght about the first major reverse of Charles’s invasion. He defeated the Royalist Earl of Derby at the Battle of Wigan Lane in Lancashire, in late August. The main Stuart army was now out on a limb, its northern wing defeated, the hoped-for support for the Crown not materialising.

  On 3 September 1651, the first anniversary of his triumph at Dunbar, Cromwell struck. At the battle of Worcester he led 31,000 men of the New Model Army against the 16,000 men in Charles Stuart’s predominantly Scottish army. Cromwell lost only 200 men that day, while killing 3,000 and capturing 10,000 of the enemy. The Royalist military cause was shattered, and the Third (and final) Civil War was over. Victory rescued the Commonwealth. It also saved the necks of the regicides – for now.

  Chapter 4

  A New Monarchy

  The hand of God was mightily seen in prospering and preserving the Parliament, till Cromwell’s ambition unhappily interrupted them.

  Lucy Hutchinson, wife of the regicide Colonel Hutchinson

  To those who knew him well, Cromwell was different after the battle of Worcester. Hugh Peters – who had ridden before the King’s carriage on its final journey from Windsor to London – was a chaplain to Cromwell, and his intimate confidant. In 1649, Peters had been on the Irish campaign, combining his ministry with command of an infantry regiment.

  He was aware that Cromwell was prone to moments of intense euphoria, but Peters would recall that his leader had been particularly ‘elevated’ (as Peters politely termed it), as soon as the scale of victory at Worcester became clear. It was enough of a concern to him, Peters later confided to Edmund Ludlow, that he ‘told a friend with whom he [Peters] then quartered in his return to London, that he was inclined to believe Cromwell would endeavour to make himself King’.1 It was as if the consecutive 3 September victories, Dunbar and Worcester, had taken Cromwell over the threshold, from a belief that he was leading troops in a godly cause, to a personal conviction that he had been marked out by God for a special duty.

  There were many with a hand in the death of the King who watched with horror and concern, as their suspicions about Cromwell’s limitless ambition seemed set to become reality: horror, because they had not ended one man’s life and absolute rule to see another govern as an autocrat in his place; concern, because they feared this character flaw in one man might leave them all vulnerable to a Royalist resurgence.

  Colonel John Hutchinson, who sat as one of the King’s judges, had been quick to identify Cromwell’s self-serving streak. Even before the Third Civil War he had noticed Cromwell subtly begin to bend the army to his personal cause, replacing officers and soldiers ‘with rascally turn-coat Cavaliers and pitiful sottish beats of his own alliances and others such as would swallow all things, and make no questions for conscience’s sake’.2 After the campaign in Scotland and the triumph at Worcester, Lucy Hutchinson recalled that her husband ‘was confirmed that [Cromwell] and his confederates in the army were carrying on designs of private ambition, and resolved that none should share with them in the commands of the army or forts of the nation but such as would be beasts and ridden upon by the proud chiefs’.3 Men such as Hutchinson, who had fought for civil liberty at huge personal risk and financial cost, felt shoddily treated and excluded.

  Cromwell was supported by an army in which his two key subordinates held sway. One was John Lambert, who had risen to the rank of major general in his twenties. A brave and brilliant cavalry commander, Lambert had contributed significantly to the victories that ended the Second and the Third Civil Wars, Preston and Worcester. The other was Thomas Harrison. Cromwell had spotted Harrison’s potential when the Staffordshire butcher’s son was just a captain, and since then he had been Cromwell’s protégé. Now the lord general had supreme control, Harrison continued his heady ascent: he would be regarded by many as the second most powerful man in the kingdom.

  Harrison was a Fifth Monarchist. He believed that he was living in the prelude to the fifth empire of the world (the previous four had been those of Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome), when the Messiah would reappear to judge all, as envisaged in the apocalyptic Book of Daniel. The Fifth Monarchists even knew the year in which this Judgment Day would fall: 1666, for that year incorporated the dreadful number 666. This figure belonged to the Beast of the Sea, which, the Book of Revelation confirmed, would ‘rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy’.4

  Fifth Monarchy was not a creed for the faint-hearted, and Harrison was a sufficiently rabid believer to become one of its leaders. He believed his role was to help make England godlier, before taking the crusade abroad, helping to prepare the way for the imminent Second Coming.

  Cromwell, with customary pragmatism, harnessed Harrison’s fanaticism for his own purposes. Aiming to bring to heel one of the heartlands of Royalism in the first two Civil Wars, he appointed Harrison president of the Commission for the Propagation of the Gospel in Wales: this involved the turning out of ‘scandalous’ (that is, Royalist) priests from the principality. While fulfilling his religious brief, it was inevitable that Harrison would at the same time root out any remaining support for the Crown.

  Harrison was a complex character. His sincere and profound religious devotion was of a brand normally associated with those of a dour disposition. However, the major general was, according to a contemporary, ‘of a sanguine complexion, naturally of such a vivacity, hilarity and alacrity as another man hath when he hath drunken a cup too much. But naturally also so far from humble thoughts of himself that it was his ruin.’5

  Such was advertised by Harrison’s peacock apparel. The first foreign ambassador to come to Westminster in recognition of the new republic was that of Spain. This was an important validation for the Commonwealth, albeit from a Catholic power. The day before the audience, Harrison spied several members in a cluster, and took it upon himself to tell them how they must appear the next day: he stressed, one of those present recalled, that they should aim to shine through ‘wisdom, piety, righteousness and justice, and not in gold and silver and worldly bravery, which did not become saints’.6 Tomorrow, he advised, the order of the day would be one of restraint: their dress should therefore be sober, and dignified.

  Surprised by this unsolicited advice, the members nevertheless took care to appear in smart but staid clothes – muted colours, silver buttons and a modest touch of gold in the trim. However, to their astonishment, Harrison entered the chamber in altogether different attire: ‘In a scarlet coat and cloak, both laden with gold and silver lace, and the coat so covered with clinquant [glitter] that scarcely could one discern the ground, and in this glittering habit set himself just under the Speaker’s chair; which the other gentlemen thought that his godly speeches, the day before were but made that he alone might appear in the eyes of strangers.’7

  Such finery came at a cost, and Harrison was one of the busier regicides when it came to building up stockpiles of personal wealth. The Rump soon discovered that finding money to pay its army was an impossible task. Instead, it offered soldiers certificates of credit. These Harrison amassed with such effectiveness, buying them at reduced rates from subordinates desperate for cash, that he was able to buy a slew of confiscated royal and Church properties around London and in his home county of Staffordshire. He became a very wealthy, and much resented, figure.

  There were members of the Rump Parliament who feared Harrison. They heard rumours that he was secretly building up what amounted to a vast army in Wales, and decided to conclude his Propagation of the Gospel there. At the same time, members wanted to curtail the size, power and expense of the army. This was a threat that Cromwell could not tolerate, since it would reduce the basis of his power. Meanwhile Cromwell was frustrated that Parliament was making no discernible progress in the great undertakings of the day, including the drafting of a new constitution.

  In April 1653, Cromwell and Harrison were in the Chamber of the House of Commons, listening to other members in fruitles
s discussion. Cromwell could take no more. He whispered to Harrison, ‘This is the time I must do it’,8 got to his feet, and launched a tirade at the uselessness of the House, before taking personal aim at some of his fellow regicides. He chastised them for their lack of morals. Marten he called a whoremaster, and Chaloner a drunkard.

  Cromwell then told Harrison to call in his men, and two dozen soldiers entered the chamber. While they began clearing the members, Harrison asked William Lenthall – styled by the Commonwealth as ‘Speaker of the Parliament of England’ – to vacate his chair. When Lenthall refused, Harrison grabbed the Speaker by his gown, and hauled him to his feet.

  This violent ending of the Rump Parliament caused lasting consternation and division among those who had striven for the removal, then agreed to the execution, of the King. Three years later Edmund Ludlow asked his fellow regicide, Harrison, if he regretted what he had done: helping to expel an elected assembly at Cromwell’s bidding. Harrison deflected responsibility, saying his heart had been ‘upright and sincere’ when the rumpus took place. Ludlow would have none of Harrison’s evasiveness, replying, ‘That I conceived it not to be sufficient in matters of so great importance to mankind, to have only good intentions and designs, unless there be also probable means of attaining those ends by the methods we enter upon.’9

  Ludlow felt that the Rump had deserved more time to find its bearings in uncharted waters. He was also furious at the open door that Parliament’s dissolution now presented to Cromwell’s ambitions. ‘It could not but be manifest,’ he told Harrison, ‘to every man who observed the state of our affairs, that upon the suppression of the civil authority, the power would immediately devolve upon that person who had the greatest interest in the army.’10