In 1640, Downing entered the first year of undergraduates at Harvard College. Two years later he passed out in the inaugural class, taking second place academically. At the end of 1643 he was taken on to Harvard’s teaching staff, receiving £4 per year ‘to read to the Junior pupils as the President shall see fit’.6 But Downing was restless. His thirst for travel led him to become a ship’s chaplain in the Caribbean. From there he crossed to England, arriving in 1646 in poverty – Ludlow recalled that Downing at this time ‘was not worth a groat’7 – to find a nation torn apart by civil war. John Okey had taken the destitute Downing in as chaplain and preacher to his regiment. Reacquainted with Hugh Peters, the men worked alongside one another, urging Parliament’s troops on towards final victory.
Oliver Cromwell recognised Downing’s qualities: in 1649, the year of Charles I’s execution, he made him his scoutmaster-general in Scotland. There he directed Parliamentary spies, gathering intelligence and transmitting it to London. He also used his powerful position to start the building of that personal wealth which was to become one of his most remarkable achievements. This quest was assisted by his marriage to Lady Frances Howard, an aristocratic beauty.
In January 1657, the first public proposal was made to have Cromwell take the Crown. It was George Downing who seconded the motion with enthusiasm. Later that year, perhaps in gratitude, Cromwell gave him the important diplomatic role of Agent in the Netherlands. In August 1658, Downing was writing to London, with terror, of rumours that Walter Whitford, the Royalist who had murdered Dr Dorislaus, had returned to The Hague to kill him.
Downing’s self-preservation and canniness made him a speedy defector to the Prince of Wales in the run-up to the Restoration. He wanted Charles to know that he ‘wished the promoting of your Majesty’s service, which he confessed he had endeavoured to obstruct . . . alleging to be engaged in a contrary party by his father who was banished to New England, where he . . . had sucked in principles that since his reason had made him see were erroneous’.8 As proof of his newly Royalist loyalties, Downing forwarded a letter he had that day received in code from Thurloe, Cromwell’s intelligence chief, which contained fresh and secret military information. He was happy to turn his back on a failing cause.
Whatever Charles II thought of this old enemy, who had revealed himself to be a shameless and opportunistic turncoat, he was too useful to punish, too cunning to leave unemployed. The new King kept Downing in the Netherlands as his own man, hoping to profit from the diplomat’s underhand effectiveness. Downing had shared some of his successes with his secretary, the diarist Samuel Pepys, who recorded of his master: ‘He had so good spies, that he hath had the keys taken out of [the Dutch leader] De Witt’s pocket when he was a-bed, and his closet opened and the papers brought to him and left in his hands for an [hour], and carried back and laid in the place again and the keys put in his pocket again.’9 Downing was a man who would stop at nothing to achieve his goals.
Fleeing regicides were passing into and through the Netherlands. Thomas Chaloner, Marten’s fellow bon viveur among the ranks of prim Puritans who had signed away Charles I’s life, had fled England on learning that he was to be denied the mercy of the Act of Indemnity. Dutch sympathisers wrote of him at this stage as being ‘an old man, full of grey hairs; a thick, square man’.10 His age and poor health meant he enjoyed only the briefest of freedoms that summer, dying in mid-August 1660. Chaloner’s body was committed to the graveyard of the Old Church at Middelburg, the assumed name of ‘George Sanders’ carved on his gravestone in order to protect his remains from desecration.
Meanwhile, Sir Michael Livesay, who had been an MP and a regimental commander before sitting every day on the High Court and signing Charles’s death warrant, was known to be in the Netherlands in the autumn of 1660: reports that he had then been pulled apart by a murderous mob of vengeful Royalists proved to be incorrect, but there was no doubt that he was somewhere on Dutch territory, in hiding.
Downing lay ready to pounce on any of Chaloner and Livesay’s comrades, should they stray within his reach. He was nervous of revealing his plans to the Dutch because he felt sure they would block the abduction of foreign refugees on their soil. ‘I am very much afraid lest that if I should go to De Witt, or any other, for an order to seize them,’ he wrote home in early July 1661, ‘it should somehow or other be discovered; for I know the humour of these people; and therefore if I might have my own way, I would in such a case employ three or four resolved English officers, and seize them, and then immediately give notice to the burgomasters of the place, and States General. Or, if the King would adventure, without more ado, if possible, to get them aboard some ship. Let me know the King’s pleasure herein.’11
A week later his network of spies had sent reports of the scurrying regicide activity along and around the corridors he controlled. It became clear they were heading for Germany: ‘Dendy is yet at Rotterdam and I am put in hopes of finding Corbet. I hear that Okey and some others of them are at Strasbourg, and have purchased their freedom there publicly; and that Hewson is sick, but intends thither also with one or two more by the first occasion.’12
Edward Dendy had followed his father as serjeant-at-arms to the Commons. On 8 January 1649 he had proclaimed the establishment of Charles I’s trial. Miles Corbet was a constitutional lawyer who had served as Lord Chief Baron of Ireland. He had meanwhile been one of Norfolk’s MPs for thirty-seven years. It was in that capacity that Corbet had written to Parliament, in 1646, relating sightings of Charles I in disguise with his chaplain, after the King had slipped away from beleaguered Oxford. A busy bureaucrat, Corbet had been an effective chairman of the Committee of Examinations, helping to suppress Royalist propaganda news-sheets. That, and his chairing of the committee that drew up the capital prosecution against Archbishop Laud, had marked out Corbet as one of a handful of fellow Parliamentarians (the others were Cromwell, Ireton, Scott, Marten and Peters) subjected to those publications’ coarsest broadsides. Corbet’s sallow complexion prompted his attackers to virulent anti-Semitism, calling him a ‘bull-headed, splay-footed member of the circumcision’, and a ‘bacon-faced Jew’.13 The fact that Corbet was the most devout of Christians was irrelevant: in the minds of bigots, his physical appearance fitted that of the stereotype of the Jew.
Although appointed to the High Court of Justice, Corbet had refused to sit in judgment of the King during its preliminary phases, arguing against the trial’s validity in law. But a verse from the Book of Revelation kept coming to him, pricking his conscience: ‘The fearful and unbelieving shall have their part in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone.’14 Corbet felt compelled to answer his summons to sit as a commissioner, and on the day of sentencing he went to assure himself as to the legality of the proceedings. Satisfied that all was in order, he added his signature to the death warrant.
Colonel John Hewson, a former shoemaker, was a fellow signatory. He had served in Ireland with uncompromising vigour, losing an eye during the siege of Kilkenny in 1650, before being made governor of Dublin later that year. In 1659 he had become deeply unpopular for attacking demonstrators in London when they called for a free Parliament: some had died during his troops’ heavy-handed suppression of the protest, and Hewson was blamed.
That August, after some delay, Downing secured a blank arrest warrant from the representatives of the Dutch States-General. By the time he was ready to use it, his quarry had scattered. Dendy had slipped away, alerted, as Downing had predicted, by powerful Dutch friends that his capture was imminent. Dendy would join the growing band of regicides settling in Switzerland. Corbet temporarily disappeared. Hewson melted away for ever, the place and time of his eventual death unrecorded.
Clarendon wrote consolingly to Downing: ‘I do not know that you could do more than you did in the case of Dendy; yet it is plain that upon the granting of any such warrant notice will be given them [the regicides]; but I like your design well,’ the chancellor urged, ‘of causing any of them to be arre
sted, and afterwards they will not so easily get from you.’15
Confident that its time would come, Downing filed away the blank arrest warrant for future use.
John Okey, ‘little thinking,’ as a friend wrote, ‘that his New England tottered chaplain whom he clothed, and fed at his table, and who dipped with him in his own dish should prove like the Devil among the twelve to his Lord and Master’,16 assumed that he and Barkstead would be left alone during their travels through the Netherlands. He quickly checked through an intermediary that this would be the case, and received assurances of their wellbeing from Downing, who claimed that he had no orders to look out for them.
The travellers were also confident in the Dutch as guarantors of safe passage. Theirs was a country that had come into being after ridding itself of the oppressive rule of the Spanish – its prize for enduring, then winning, the bruising Eighty Years’ War. They prided themselves on their tolerance, and they enriched themselves through trade. The Dutch were famed for putting commerce before all else – and that included not bothering themselves overmuch with the religious, political or criminal concerns of their neighbours. Okey and Barkstead were unaware, however, that at the time of their expedition, the Dutch were interested in forming a trade alliance with Charles II’s England. To secure this, they might be prepared to sacrifice something of their famed reputation for tolerance.
Ignorant of the danger they were in, Okey and Barkstead started out for Delft, the southern Dutch city that was still being rebuilt after an enormous, accidental gunpowder explosion in 1654: more than a hundred citizens had been killed, and thousands injured. The two men set off expecting a speedy reunion with their wives.
On reaching Delft the pair settled into their lodgings. There they were visited by Miles Corbet, happy to see friendly faces after spending much of his time in exile in prayer, meditation and reading the scriptures. During those times of quiet he had examined his conscience about his role in Charles I’s execution – an event he referred to as ‘that necessary and public Act of Justice’. A chronicler later recorded of Corbet that ‘he did never repent at all that he had a hand in it, nor, after all the searchings of heart about it, did see cause to do so, when at any time he had the most serious and calm reflections upon it’.17
Corbet would also recall the lack of food that he endured during his time in hiding in the Netherlands, ‘and yet,’ he claimed, ‘I found God all sufficient to me, even in my short commons.’18 More challenging was the fear of being discovered, which meant that he ‘did the best to secure myself, and was careful not wilfully to run into any danger’.19 As part of his strategy of self-preservation he had not dared to send a letter to his wife for eight months. He went to see Bradshaw and Okey to learn how he could safely communicate with her in future, without compromising his liberty.
Corbet was so happy to be reunited with these English friends that he delayed his planned journey home that evening, and stayed with them late into the night. The three men were at last saying their farewells when Downing and his henchmen pounced: cornered, the fugitives were quickly rounded up, placed in chains and assaulted by their captors, before being escorted to prison. There they were again treated roughly, their wrists and ankles manacled, before they were committed to a dungeon, where the only place to sleep was on the wet floor.
Early the next afternoon a delegation of Dutch politicians came to visit them. Their leader conducted the examination, asking them to explain why they had been taken, and what their roles had been in England before their self-imposed exile. Barkstead answered most of these questions. He spoke clearly, convincingly and well, appealing to his audience’s liberal, republican, sympathies. The three regicides were relieved to hear the Dutchmen confirm that they would be granted a public hearing in Delft, before there was even a possibility of their being handed over to their Royalist compatriots for extradition.
Downing, though, had other ideas – he would later be called by the French first minister ‘the greatest quarreller of all the diplomats in Europe’20 – and now he displayed his combative streak. Having finally caged three of his prey, he was not prepared to contemplate their release. He bullied the Dutch officials, insisting on his jurisdiction over men who had killed his royal master’s father, and insinuating dark consequences if he did not get his way. He pointed to his blank arrest warrant, and insisted it had been granted him precisely for this sort of eventuality. The Dutch capitulated, a disbelieving friend of the regicides writing, ‘By order from the States-General at two o’clock in the morning [the three men were] taken out of prison, and thrust into a vessel lying at Delft, and from thence conveyed into one of the King of England’s frigates provided for the purpose, and so in a few days were brought for England, where they arrived at the Tower of London upon the Lord’s Day in the evening.’21 There, they were led to separate cells.
Barkstead was treated vindictively. The Royalists enjoyed the delicious vengeance of placing the hated former Lieutenant of the Tower, who had been such a cruel gaoler to their comrades, in despicable accommodation. He managed to smuggle out a letter to a friend, detailing the conditions in which he was kept:
I being now a close prisoner in the Tower, in one of the (as they conceive) meanest and securest Prison lodgings, in which when it rains I have no place to sit dry but in a high window, being attended with a life guard of two warders and two soldiers day and night, and denied the use of pen, ink, and paper; so that what I write is so by stealth, and that so by bits, that I am forced sometimes before I have writ two lines to tear what I have written, and with much trouble to secure my paper, ink and pen; but yet I have adventured on a line or two to you, to let you know that I received your welcome letter.22
Barkstead’s health soon faltered because of the rain and cold, but he told his friend that his resolve was such, that ‘the dungeon, chains, bolts and manacles have not had the least hardness in them; no, I must say again, through free Grace, the Lord hath not only made them easy, but pleasant, yea kickings and buffetings, when in irons, by some of Downing’s men, yet the Lord strengthened me’.23
On 16 April 1662, the prisoners were transported up the Thames to the bar of the King’s Bench in Westminster for judgment. This area had formed part of the courtroom for Charles I’s trial. The three were asked in turn to confirm their identities, which was the only formality required before sentencing. Yet, when it was put to them that they were the Barkstead, Corbet and Okey who did ‘maliciously, wickedly, and traitorously imagine, contrive or endeavour to murder the late King’, the lawyer Corbet said he could not admit to being one who had acted maliciously to Charles I, therefore he must not be the man mentioned in the charge. He offered that there must be many others who also shared those names, and maybe one of those had possessed the malice referred to?
The court, keen to be done with its work, summoned a jury. The three accused were not allowed to challenge any of its members, since this was not a trial for treason, but rather a process to prove their identities. The jury promptly ascertained that the three well-known men before them were indeed the signatories of Charles I’s death warrant named in the charge. Judgment was given, and the sentence of hanging, drawing and quartering passed. The condemned were returned to the Tower to await imminent death.
That day a friend visited Okey to find him ‘not in the least disquieted’ by his sentence, ‘but thankfully owned the Providence of God in bringing them from the place where they were beyond the sea, to their present condition, wherein he professed himself to be much satisfied, and declared he had rather lay down his life here, than to have been buried in another nation’.24
There were moments of profound sadness. Okey was refused permission to see the daughter from his first marriage on the day of his sentencing. He wrote to her:
My dear daughter,
. . . I am something troubled at the cruelty of wicked men that will not let me see you in such a day as this is; but it’s not to be wondered at, for you know what the Scripture sa
ith, The mercies of the ungodly are cruelty itself. But blessed be our good God, though they can keep our relations from us, they cannot keep us from coming to our heavenly father; within a few days we shall be out of their hands, where they shall afflict us no more . . . I thank you for your love to me as much as if I had seen you: and although we are kept one from another in the body, yet we are not so in the spirit, but do rejoice in one another.
Okey asked her to pray for him to be brave at his end, ‘that I may not dishonour the Lord, nor bring a reproach to the glorious Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, and his cause, which the Lord hath from Heaven so gloriously owned, by scattering of his enemies so often as he hath in the sight of the sun, in bringing many of them to justice, so that the sound of it is gone through the whole world’.25 After apologising for not being able to leave her an inheritance, and having asked her to be kind to his wife (his daughter’s stepmother), and a good example to her children, he signed off: ‘Your loving father, in bonds for the Cause of God and his People, till death.’26
Barkstead admitted to those visiting him in his final days that he had been deeply troubled by ‘the greatness of the sufferings I was yet to go through’, but he too found solace in religion. He settled on biblical passages that made him accept his human weakness, and left his heart ‘filled with ravishing joys and rejoicings’.27 Later in his brief imprisonment he was recorded as saying:
Certainly if I had known the comforts of this sweet communion with God in a prison before, I had run to a prison long ago. If I had suffered when my brethren did suffer, I had had little or no blood in my body to have spilt for Jesus Christ in this good Cause; but God carried me into Germany, and there made us to sow a good seed, which will never die; and now God hath brought me back again, with more strength to suffer for his name and cause; indeed, the Lord hath made me in some measure now fit to go through sufferings for him, and it is indeed He alone who hath done this.28
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