Killers of the King

by Charles Spencer

  After a day and a night waiting for the storm to pass, Ludlow was able to slip out of English waters towards the French port of Dieppe. The crew was evidently unaware of the identity of its fine-looking passenger: Ludlow described in his memoirs a conversation he had with the ship’s master, who had worked out of Irish ports during the years of Ludlow’s military command there. The master asked the bearded traveller of news from London: did he happen to know if General Ludlow was one of the judges taken prisoner recently? Ludlow coolly replied that he had not heard of any such thing.14

  At Dieppe, Ludlow went to the home of Madame de Caux, a sympathiser who welcomed him with a choice of staying with her in town, or moving to her house in the country. Worried that one of the many Irishmen he had seen in the port might recognise him, Ludlow opted to move inland. He was keen to get some country air, and even keener to avoid the fate of Isaac Dorislaus.

  After a few days in this new hideout, Madame de Caux forwarded to Ludlow letters received from England. One of these contained a written proclamation from Whitehall, dated 1 September 1660, which recalled the regicides’ obligation to surrender during the two-week window in June earlier that year, ‘and whereas Edmund Ludlow, Esq., being one of the persons therein named, did thereupon render himself’, it announced, ‘nevertheless hath since escaped from out the custody of the serjeant-at-arms attending on the House of Commons, and is fled, or doth obscure himself to evade the justice of a legal trial’.15 The decree warned that nobody must assist Ludlow in any way; rather, they were to apprehend him. The reward for success in this was a temptingly generous £300, the equivalent of almost twenty years’ wages for the average farm labourer.

  Ludlow made plans to head for Geneva, a city with a long history of tolerance and where many British religious exiles had led untroubled lives for well over a century. Ludlow hoped to find himself among like-minded compatriots, for he knew several of the other regicides had talked of fleeing to Switzerland.

  He set off to the southeast, passing through Rouen, before arriving three days later in Paris, where he stayed with a Protestant, Huguenot, family. This was a place of repugnant fascination to Ludlow, both for its rampant Catholicism, and because it was the fulcrum of Louis XIV’s absolute hold over France. The Englishman levelled his contempt at the monarch and his religion with equal ferocity: ‘I saw the King’s stable of horses,’ the old cavalryman wrote, ‘which though not extraordinarily furnished, gave me more pleasure than I should have received by seeing their master, who thinks fit to treat them better than his miserable people. But I loathed to see such numbers of idle drones, who in ridiculous habits, wherein they place a great part of their religion, are to be seen in every part, eating the bread of the credulous multitude, and leaving them to be distinguished from the inhabitants of other countries by thin cheeks, canvas clothing and wooden shoes.’16

  From Paris, Ludlow aimed for Lyons, joining a group of international travellers which included a friendly German aristocrat. On arrival, he was troubled to see how closely newcomers to the city were scrutinised: all were obliged to disclose their details to government officials. Ludlow, somehow, was spared such questioning; his luck was continuing to hold. Relieved, he settled into an inn with his travelling companions. It was not a happy experience. He recorded with disgust how they were forced to share the premises with friars from various orders, one of whom Ludlow took to task for making lewd suggestions to a Parisian youth in their party. Many of his prejudices seem to have been confirmed during his journey through ‘profane France’ towards the promised land of republican, Protestant, Geneva.

  The last stop before reaching Switzerland was Fort l’Ecluse, a border garrison between the Vuache hills and the Jura mountains, which controlled the Rhône valley. Ludlow had been advised that the examination he had avoided in Lyons would be inevitable here, but the warnings came from those unacquainted with the slack discipline at Fort l’Ecluse. Some well-placed bribes, which paid for soldiers’ drinks, saw this last obstacle evaporate. The next day he crossed the River Rhône, and soon afterwards entered Geneva.

  Here, there were few reminders of home. During his journey Ludlow had heard that his fellow regicide, William Cawley, was heading for Geneva, but he discovered that neither he nor any of the other fugitives were there. Geneva itself was a disappointment. ‘Neither in doctrine nor discipline, principle nor practice,’ he wrote, ‘have they made such progress since the time of the first Reformation as might have been hoped for, but have rather gone backward and brought forth sour grapes.’17

  Eleven days after arriving in the Swiss capital, Ludlow was shocked to read of the executions of Harrison, Carew, Cook and Peters. The following week’s gazette gave detailed accounts of the ends of Scott, Scroope, Clements, Jones, Axtell and Hacker. If he had not run away when he did, Ludlow knew he would have been among the same batch of hanged, drawn and quartered Parliamentarians.

  Further news reached Ludlow from England, including concocted accounts of his fate. The Royalist publication Mercurius Politicus declared in early September, ‘We have omitted the proclamation for £300 to any that should apprehend Col. Edmund Ludlow, in regard we hear from very good hands he is already in custody.’18 The following week the paper was less bullish. ‘Ludlow was nearly taken,’ it reported, ‘they took his hat and the coats and cloaks of two or three that were with him.’19 Elsewhere there were rumours that the lieutenant general had been captured while trying to flee the country in disguise.

  Although the bulletins were wildly inaccurate, they reconfirmed the energy that Charles II’s men were putting into apprehending Ludlow. It seemed impossible to his enemies that a man of such high profile could really have got away. The Royalists convinced themselves that such an easily identifiable figure must still be in England, and they redoubled their efforts to hunt him down.

  December brought further false reports, alleging his capture in England: ‘On Saturday night at midnight was Major Gen. Ludlow taken at one Michael Oldsworth his house, secretary to the late Earl of Pembroke; Ludlow married this Oldsworth his sister; he got out of the house, but was taken endeavouring to make his escape.’20

  That same month he learnt that the House of Commons had voted to have the bodies of Cromwell, Ireton and Bradshaw dug up from their burial places and hung from the gallows. This desecration followed the precedent established after the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, when the bodies of Catesby and Percy – two of the conspirators who had died before facing trial and execution – were exhumed and decapitated. Their heads were placed on spikes outside the House of Lords.

  As part of the posthumous retribution against Cromwell, Ireton and Bradshaw, a mason named John Lewis was given fifteen shillings to break open the leading regicides’ lavish tombs so their corpses could be retrieved. He found Cromwell’s remains wrapped in a green wax cloth. The Lord Protector’s torso was clad in a copper gilt breastplate emblazoned with the arms of the Commonwealth, while the reverse recorded the span of his life, and his full title, in Latin. Two days later, on 28 January, Cromwell’s and Ireton’s bodies were taken on carts from Westminster to the Red Lion Inn in Holborn, where they spent the night, side by side. They were joined by Bradshaw’s corpse the following day.

  The thirtieth of January 1661 was the twelfth anniversary of the execution of Charles I. Parliament decreed this day should become, as John Evelyn recalled, ‘the first solemn fast and day of humiliation to deplore the sins which so long had provoked God against this afflicted church and people: ordered by Parliament to be annually celebrated, to expiate the guilt of execrable murder of the late King’.21 A symbolic centrepiece was needed as a focus for the first festival of atonement. That morning the three regicides’ coffins were dragged on sledges to the gallows at Tyburn. There, the caskets were broken open, and the bodies pulled from them. The remains were hanged together, from nine in the morning until six in the evening, dangling on a gibbet in front of a crowd of thousands. Three men of exceptional distinction and power in their lifeti
mes, under the restored monarchy they were just a trio of traitors swivelling in varying states of decay. That evening their remains were beheaded, the bodies slung into the deep common pit. The three heads were stuck on spikes in Westminster, their unseeing eyes directed towards the spot where the King’s scaffold had stood.

  Now the hunt restarted for the remaining men who had shared in the killing of the King, but who had yet to face justice. Charles II instructed his agents to track them down, even if they had managed to flee overseas.

  Chapter 10

  Strangers in a Strange Land

  The first sight of your handwriting filled my eyes with such floods of tears, that for some hours I could not recover my sight to read it; yet at last to reading I went, but then every line, yea every word called back my tears, and so overwhelmed my affections, that I could not get through it till between one and two of the clock that night.

  Colonel John Barkstead, writing to a friend in London, while in hiding in the Netherlands

  On 11 October 1660, during the trial of the twenty-nine regicides, Sir Heneage Finch had addressed the court with words of warning for those men who had so far evaded the reach of Charles II: ‘Some eighteen or nineteen have fled from Justice, and wander to and fro; about the world with the Mark of Cain upon them, a perpetual trembling, lest every eye that sees them, and every hand that meets them, should fall on them.’1

  Just before his execution, Colonel John Jones had written to a friend: ‘O dear hearts, in what a sad condition are all our dear friends beyond sea, where they may be hunted from place to place, and never be in safety, nor hear the voice of the turtle dove. How much have we got the start of them, for we are at a point, and are now going to heaven.’2 Jones preferred the certainty of imminent death, followed by eternal paradise, to a life on the run.

  From his Swiss sanctuary, Ludlow kept track of the whereabouts and fates of his fellow commissioners from the High Court of Justice of January 1649. He learnt that four of the court’s other military men – Colonels Valentine Walton, John Dixwell, John Barkstead and John Okey – had managed to get to apparent safety in Germany.

  Walton had served as a captain in his brother-in-law Oliver Cromwell’s regiment: in 1617, aged twenty-four, he had married the sixteen-year-old Margaret Cromwell. The Waltons lost their eldest surviving son at the battle of Marston Moor in 1644, when a Royalist cannonball shattered his leg and desperate surgery could not save him. Around this same time Margaret died, after which Walton married again. In 1646 he co-authored the letter to Parliament from Norfolk, recording sightings of the fugitive Charles I and his chaplain, Michael Hudson, as they attempted to reach the Scots.

  A committed republican, Walton had been keen for Charles I to stand trial in 1649. He attended many of the sittings, and signed the death warrant without hesitation. After the royal beheading, Walton became a prominent figure, sitting on all five councils of state during the Commonwealth. He was one of the numerous committed Parliamentarians who fell out with Cromwell when he ruled as Lord Protector. Further disillusioned by what he had seen of the army’s role, in the late 1650s, Walton sided with the House of Commons against the military. He secretly communicated with Monck, but as soon as Monck was made commander-in-chief he took away the Puritan Walton’s command of a cavalry regiment, and gave it, tellingly, to a Catholic Royalist officer instead.

  When Walton realised that Monck was working to restore the monarchy, he was quick to flee. According to Ludlow, though, he only ‘narrowly escaped’3 overseas. Walton travelled to Hanau, a walled metropolis on a river near Frankfurt am Main that contained two separate entities. One of these, ‘new Hanau’, established a couple of generations earlier, included a large population of Calvinist émigrés from France and the Spanish Netherlands (modern-day Belgium). Many of these were successful merchants. They demanded and gained religious tolerance and other privileges from the reigning count, Frederick Casimir, on whose land their new settlement stood. The count was a Lutheran, impoverished by the ravages of the Thirty Years War (during which Hanau’s impressive defensive walls withstood its one attempted siege with ease), as well as by his own personal extravagance. Frederick Casimir had travelled to Britain as part of his Grand Tour during the English Civil War, and so understood something of the conflict whose aftershocks had brought this trickle of refugees to his city.

  Walton became a burgess of Hanau, which entitled him to the city’s protection; but he remained deeply concerned for his safety. He was troubled by reports that the Royalists were sending forces after the escaped regicides, to assassinate them or take them back to England: he knew that accused men, such as himself, who had fled, were seen to have acknowledged their guilt. They were no longer eligible for trial. If caught, they would simply be formally identified, and then brutally dispatched.

  Walton decided that the safest course was no longer to remain as a respected but recognisable guest of this independent German city, but rather to disappear quietly into obscurity. This he succeeded in doing: he became a humble gardener in the Lowlands and is believed to have died soon afterwards, possibly in 1661.

  John Dixwell had wrong-footed his enemies in England, pretending that he was on the point of surrendering, while in fact sorting out his finances before fleeing. He was, for now, content to reside in Hanau. Another ‘friend’ in the city was Colonel John Barkstead, the unpopular but effective Lieutenant of the Tower, who was also steward to Oliver Cromwell’s household. The manner in which he profiteered from prisoners in the Tower during his seven years in charge there had scandalised even his own side, and he had been fortunate to escape punishment during Richard Cromwell’s brief Protectorate. After being named as the seventh regicide to be executed, he escaped, but he found exile an unbearable separation from those he loved, replying to a letter from London:

  My dear friend,

  I am very sensible of my great neglect of that duty which is incumbent upon me . . . that I had not long before this given you an account how it has been with me, and what the Lord hath done for me his poor unworthy servant since I last saw you; that I have been a stranger in a strange land I need not tell you, I am persuaded you will judge favourably of me till you understand how it hath pleased the Lord to deal with me. The truth is, my condition in some respect may resemble the dove that Noah sent out of the Ark that could find no place to set the sole of her foot on, thus hath it been for some months with me, so that I could not with any consistency (because of those that bear an evil will to Zion) write to you; but my dear friend though I have been absent from you in the body, yet I can say truly I have not been so in my spirit; the Lord knows how my soul hath both night and day longed after you and all the rest of my Christian friends in Christ Jesus . . .4

  Barkstead eventually settled in Hanau: the free city was an important centre for jewellery manufacture and the working of gold – an attraction for Barkstead, who before the Civil Wars had been, along with his father and brother, a prosperous London goldsmith. Barkstead also had some German roots, his grandfather having emigrated from there to Staffordshire. He felt he could make a home in Hanau, but looked forward to his wife coming to join him there.

  John Okey also encouraged his wife to quit England for a new life with him in Hanau. During the Civil War he had risen from being a quartermaster to command of the New Model Army’s sole regiment of dragoons. He and his men had performed with gallantry throughout the Civil Wars, their flanking fire troubling the sweeping charge of Prince Rupert’s Royalist cavalry at Naseby. In the Second Civil War they were among the victorious Parliamentarians at St Fagans, and at the taking of Pembroke Castle. A ready judge at Charles I’s trial, he also signed the death warrant, before helping to oversee the military arrangements surrounding the execution.

  Okey was opposed to Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate. In the autumn of 1654 he was one of those to draw up The Humble Petition of Several Colonels of the Army, which was designed to rein in Cromwell’s ambitions and return a parliament free from his meddlin
g. This resulted in Okey’s trial for sedition, and he was sentenced to death. Cromwell commuted this to the loss of his commission, and enforced retirement. During this he lived off the income from the property he had acquired during his years in power. Okey reappeared in public life in 1657, joining those opposed to the calls for Cromwell’s coronation.

  There was a brief resurrection of his military career after the fall of Richard Cromwell. At the end of 1659 he was among the soldiers who tried forcibly to stop the secluded members from gaining access to Parliament. Monck lost no time in taking his new regiment from him. Okey’s last stand as a soldier was an ignominious one, fleeing from Major General Lambert’s side when surprised by Ingoldsby near Daventry.

  Mrs Barkstead and Mrs Okey had agreed to travel through the Netherlands to Hanau. They knew that theirs was a one-way journey into a lifetime of exile: they would not be able to return to England, once they had settled with their condemned husbands overseas. The two colonels wanted to meet their wives in the Netherlands, in order to reunite with them as quickly as they could, and so as to help them on their way to Germany. They received ‘encouragement to undertake the voyage from a friend whom they had employed to solicit some of the States-General’, a friend wrote, ‘that they might abide for a short time within their jurisdiction unmolested’.5

  Okey and Barkstead knew Charles II’s envoy to the Netherlands: he was a former colleague of theirs. A devout Parliamentarian who had aided the soldiers of the New Model Army, George Downing was a figure whose background extended to both sides of the Atlantic. His maternal uncle was John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Downings were encouraged by their relatives to move to Massachusetts, and settled in Salem, where their preacher was Hugh Peters.