Rebels and traitors

by Lindsey Davis

  For Colonel Okey and the other organisers, Monday brought a race to finalise the death warrant. A draft with a blank space for details already existed, signed by some of the commissioners, but a full version with all its amendments filled in now had to be created or, in the language of legislation, engrossed. Two of the three officers originally named to supervise the execution refused to do it. The time and place needed to be fixed. As the clerks reworded these details, the parchment had to be carefully 'scraped' in places for amendments. This would inevitably look like tampering afterwards. Fears were that the commissioners who had already signed might back out if a clean new draft was drawn up.

  Wild stories circulated of chaotic attempts to persuade more commissioners to sign. In the scramble to add signatures, Cromwell was said to have been almost hysterical, flicking ink at one, Henry Marten, like a manic schoolboy, and allegedly grasping another man's hand and forcing him to write. In fact more signatories came forward than had been allowed for, so later names had to be cramped inelegantly close together. Eventually the warrant was complete, the parchment engrossed, fifty-nine names courageously signed and sealed. The judges had given sentence. The army was to take over. The order for the execution was issued to Colonel Francis Hacker, Colonel Hunks and Colonel Phayre:

  Whereas Charles Stuart, King of England, is and standeth convicted, attainted, and condemned of High Treason and other high crimes, and sentence upon Saturday last was pronounced against him by this court to be put to death by the severing of his head from his body, of which sentence execution yet remaineth to be done, these are therefore to will and require you to see the said sentence executed in the open street before Whitehall, upon the morrow, being the thirtieth day of this instant month of January, between the hours of ten in the morning and five in the afternoon of the same day, with full effect. And for so doing, this shall be your sufficient warrant. And these are to require all officers, soldiers, and others, the good people of this nation of England, to be assisting unto you in this service.

  It was on the Monday evening that Gideon took himself to Colonel Okey's house.

  Okey had a ship's-chandler's business near the Tower of London and his local church was St Giles in the Fields. He lived in Mare Street, Hackney, out on the eastern edges of London, at the opposite end from the enormous mansions of grander men who clustered near Westminster and Whitehall. Okey's chosen location, not far from London Fields, was a large, leased three-storeyed gabled house, called Barber's Barn. It stood among pasture and pleasant lanes, close enough to London to do business in the city, yet countrified. Gideon borrowed Robert's horse and rode out there, full of curiosity and as keen as always to be associated with any historic event.

  'Yet another!' exclaimed Susanna Okey, the colonel's wife. She was soberly dressed in the Baptist style. She cannot have seen much of her husband during the latter years of their marriage. When Gideon introduced himself, she herself led him to Okey, as if to get him out from under her feet.

  There were uniformed soldiers already in the house. In civilian dress, Gideon was taken past them, receiving odd glances. Okey was in tense conversation with a second man; they looked up sharply on Gideon's entrance to the room. A tray of bread and butter and beer, the staples of Parliamentarian housewives when they were suddenly called upon to feed committees, stood half-demolished on the table near to them. A jumble of papers covered the rest of the board.

  'Come in, lad — this is Captain Jukes, who served under me. Colonel John Fox, commander of Bradshaw's guard in court.'

  The man was a stranger to Gideon, unlike others congregated in London for the trial, familiar faces from the old campaigns. 'I held a garrison near Birmingham, in Warwickshire,' he said, perhaps rather stiffly.

  'Edgbaston.' Gideon astonished the colonel, and was pleased by it. He gave no sign he knew Fox had been nicknamed the Jovial Tinker. 'I worked for Sir Samuel Luke, Essex's scoutmaster. We had your despatches often through our hands.'

  'I tried to give good intelligence.'

  'Your work was always valued, sir.'

  'Would that the paymasters gave me some credit!'

  Like Okey, Fox looked to be in his forties, though he could be younger. He was self-confident, bouncy and a little too open for Londoners to take him well, with an untuneful Midlands accent. Gideon found it whining. Someone had once told him that was how Shakespeare would have sounded — and if those were the terrible vowels of England's greatest playwright, he was glad to have abandoned any connection with the theatre.

  The two colonels resumed their conversation. Gideon rapidly grasped its urgency. Richard Brandon, the public executioner, had refused to kill the King. He had cut off the heads of Strafford and Laud, but baulked at this.

  'Does it have to be Brandon? Or does anybody else have the expertise?' Gideon asked, catching up with the implications. Once a mere captain would have stayed silent, but the war had changed that. He spoke the unthinkable. 'Must the King be beheaded?'

  'Shortening it is!' Fox's grin confirmed that Midlanders had an odd sense of humour.

  Okey shrugged restively. 'We cannot hang, draw and quarter a monarch, Captain Jukes. For the nobility, an axe is traditional. Besides,' he added glumly, with the bent logic of any man recently mired in bureaucracy, 'the death warrant is written now'

  Always realistical, Gideon accepted they could not swing King Charles on a gibbet like a horse-thief.

  'We need surgical despatch. You ask about expertise,' Colonel Fox dropped his laconic derision and spoke as if he had looked into this rather practically. 'The prisoner's neck must be severed correctly, with a heavy, single blow through the fourth vertebra. When the Queen of Scots was beheaded at Fotheringhay Castle, it was terribly mangled — we cannot have such butchery tomorrow. The King of England will not run around the scaffold bleeding like a half-dead capon.'

  'Any hitch will suggest that the deed is not well done,' Gideon agreed. 'This must not be botched.'

  'We have a bright axe specially brought from the Tower,' Okey said anxiously, trying to reassure himself.

  'Colonel Hewson has sworn his officers to secrecy and offered a hundred pounds to the man who will do the job.' Fox was calming Okey. Hewson was one of the officers charged with fulfilling the death warrant. 'He has identified two possibles, Hulet and Jackson. He says Sergeant Hulet is well-metalled.'

  'If Hulet is up for the business,' Gideon suggested, 'he should be our fallback — call him an understudy — take the part of the axeman's assistant — '

  'An assistant?' queried Fox.

  'It is normal,' said Okey.

  'It would be a lonely profession otherwise,' Gideon commented. 'This works to our advantage. A man we trust can be standing by, in case at the last moment Brandon fails. But the main man must be Brandon. He has practised a few times — ' They all laughed, a little hoarsely.

  There was a short silence.

  'If he is afraid, he should be offered anonymity,' Gideon continued quietly. 'He could be masked, like an actor in the theatre. He can be assured that his name will never be revealed. Indeed, I think it right it should not be.'

  'And he will be well paid,' added Fox, who had blunt standards. Gideon remembered Tinker Fox's reputation for extracting money by illegal methods.

  'Well,' Okey decided, 'Colonel Axtell will take a troop to Brandon's house first thing in the morning and bring him.'

  Gideon and Colonel Fox exchanged glances. They seemed to have formed an unlikely alliance. 'It must not look as if the executioner is our prisoner,' warned Fox. 'Besides, duress will make him unreliable.'

  'Someone should first try patiently to win Brandon over.' After seeing how Axtell had run affairs at the King's trial, Gideon thought the man too brutal for this. Axtell was the coarse colonel with the straight-line moustache who had had muskets aimed at women in the gallery, then encouraged his men to blow smoke at the King and insult him.

  Fox agreed. 'Not Daniel Axtell. He would lower the tone of a curate's breakfast… I sup
pose I shall volunteer!' he said, with the lugubrious world-weariness of his home district. 'Where does this Brandon live?'

  'By the Tower of London.' Okey sounded unhappy. 'St Katharine's by the Tower… 'Rosemary Lane.' Gideon pulled a face.

  'You know this street?' Fox turned and asked him.

  'Rough!' exclaimed Gideon.

  Again their eyes met. Colonel Fox nodded. 'Be here at first light, mounted. You shall be my guide, Captain Jukes.'

  It was a bitterly cold morning. The strangely matched pair rode south from Hackney through mists and near darkness, down past the tenter-fields where newly dyed cloth was hung on endless parallel ropes. Robert's horse was a knock-kneed grey called Rumour, a city horse, puzzled by the sight of growing grass; he preferred to amble over cobbles, with time to look in shop windows. At one point he stopped dead unexpectedly. There had been nothing to cause him fear. In this weather most of the tenter-lines were empty. Nothing flapped at him; the few lengths of pegged-out cloth were frozen solid.

  'Rumour flies… My partner, who is a whimsical spirit, named his horse in irony' Fox looked on, while Gideon struggled. This curmudgeonly nag knows his way to a certain inn in King Street at Westminster, then he knows his way home to the stable even with his rider beery — ' Drowsiness from overwork, Robert always claimed. 'But he despises me and he hates strange places.'

  'He wants a carrot.'

  'Well, he is not getting one!' snarled Gideon. Wishing he had worn a cloak against the cold, he kicked up the beast — though he did it warily because he knew that in the back yard behind the print shop Amyas had been naughtily training Rumour to rear up suddenly on his back legs and perform an upright levade, as if carrying a marquis in full armour, posing for Van Dyke. 'I am in the wrong suit for portraiture!' muttered Gideon in Rumour's ear, as the horse for no reason moved off and now trotted sedately.

  He guided them on, through Brick Lane and into the airy pleasaunce of Spitalfield, where many small cottages with gardens occupied lanes beyond the city wall among the fields and bowling alleys around the great road that came in from Essex to Aldgate. At this hour, most roads were deserted. They saw maybe one milkmaid and a couple of men up to no good in an apple orchard; there was no one from whom to ask directions, had Fox come alone. But he was in good hands with Gideon.

  As Captain Jukes found his way so confidently, Colonel Fox weighed him up. Gideon was in his once-red New Model Army coat. That meant his britches were too tight under the crotch and the usual gap was widening just above his belt, so his back was freezing. As well as his odd appearance, he was full of London swagger and with a dubious way of manoeuvring himself into positions of trust. Still, on the whole, the man from the Midlands accepted his motives were reliable. Fox would not have brought him on this delicate errand otherwise. Their association could go one of two ways during this ride — either they would take to one another fast, or a wall of dislike would rise up between them and perpetuate itself every time one of them spoke.

  'I hear you were at Holmby, Captain.' Fox had made enquiries overnight. Had Okey told him? 'So — answer the question everybody wonders: did Cornet Joyce have direct orders from Oliver Cromwell?'

  Gideon was terse. 'He never said.'

  'You never asked?'

  'None of us. Our commission was in our hearts.'

  People would always be fascinated by that incident. Speculating happily, Fox filled in for himself: 'There was a meeting in a garden. At Cromwell's London house. Long June nights — minutes are not taken. No need for a secretary even to be there — so no chance of some disloyal clerk later making his reputation by spilling all… You all swore an oath of secrecy?'

  'No, sir, we did not need to.' Gideon changed the subject curtly. 'So what brings you all the way from Warwickshire, Colonel Fox?'

  'My garrison was closed down last May, despite my hearty resistance.' The man was disgruntled, on the verge of obsession about his lost command. He reminded Gideon of how Sir Samuel Luke, that other great passionate Parliamentary volunteer, had resented being told to resign. 'I have four thousand pounds in arrears to chase up — and I came to London for my wedding. My new wife is Lady Angelica Hasteville.' Fox sounded impressed by that himself. Gideon could not imagine how this rough-and-ready self-made soldier from the shires had encountered a lady on terms where they might ally in bed and board. Perhaps she possessed money. 'We were joined at St Bartholomew the Less in October.'

  Then Colonel John Fox glanced down at his saddle pommel momentarily, as if embarrassed by his feelings. Gideon took back his scepticism. Even in the midst of war and trouble, he had glimpsed the human heart.

  The dark bulk of the Tower of London suddenly lay ahead of them. With a grimace, Gideon brought them into Rosemary Lane. 'Now, sir, we must keep our wits about us.'

  He heard Fox draw a sharp breath. He can have seen nothing like this in sleepy, rural Warwickshire. Gideon knew what to expect, though he never frequented such districts. This was the kind of sink, where unnumbered souls festered, that thin-faced Solicitor-General John Cook wanted to eliminate.

  Rosemary Lane was a reeking little haven of abject poverty. It lay outside the city wall in the ward of Portsoken. It had sinister alleys, tiny cottages, dark taverns, and one forlorn old church. It teemed with totters and their tat, so in finer weather both sides of the muddy lane would be lined with barrows and mats, displaying for sale the meanest type of old clothes, holed shifts, crinkled left boots and chipped dishes. Suits, or half-suits, that had passed through nine generations of owner and were held together only by stiff grime and patches. Dented pots in metal so base it hurt Gideon's teeth to look upon them. Piles of crumpled linen, most of it stolen from washing lines, linen in curious shades of drab that were unknown to any fuller. Wardrobes of dead old ladies who had had no friends or family. Sheets that looked as if they had been stripped from week-old cadavers. Drowned sailors' hats.

  Amidst this squalor wandered dazed-looking paupers. Drabs with diseased noses made vague offers that Fox and Gideon did not even acknowledge. The few people who were up and setting off for occupations laboured in sweatshops or as ballast-heavers and coal-haulers — bad, backbreaking, dirty work that would eventually kill them. Occasional sad men relieved themselves against a wall, looking as if they had been in the streets all night; dark humps in doorways showed where other vagrants were still sleeping — or had died of cold unnoticed. There were of course far too many taverns, of the lowest kind.

  'The biggest cities have the highest dunghills!' muttered Fox.

  Here, close by the Tower of London where he normally would carry out state executions, in a mean lodging among his frightened family, lurked Richard Brandon. He was a typical Rosemary Lane inhabitant, poor, feckless, aware of the need for secrecy, yet somehow reeking of unreliability. His calm acceptance of the grim trade he had inherited from his father was chilling. He relished its supposed mysteries but took the fact that he was employed to kill prisoners with a coldness and hardness that Gideon found troubling. His father, John, had once told him public hangmen were strange men. Lambert claimed to have met one, or an assistant, while drinking in a particularly frightful tavern. Gideon had never expected to encounter such a being. He decided to let Colonel Fox take the lead, but when Brandon proved unwilling to trust a Midlander, it became necessary to convince him in the language and custom of East London.

  A conversation occurred. It was longer than they wanted, but short enough. They would meet their appointment. Clinging to a bag with unexplained tools of his trade, Brandon was taken to a meeting-point beside the Tower. Colonel Axtell was waiting with a cavalry escort and a spare horse.

  They did not bother to root out Brandon's usual assistant, Richard Jones, a rag-and-bone man, although he lived on the same lane. Fox noticed Gideon's disappointed expression. 'I would think it neat,' Gideon murmured regretfully, 'if the King's head was severed from his body by a ragman.'

  'You are a true Leveller, Captain Jukes!' Colonel John Fox laughed. It was
impossible to deduce whether he was sympathetic.

  In a rattle of urgent hoofbeats, the horsemen swept away from Tower Hill. Frost on the cobbles slowed them up later, but while London was still sleeping they rode through the City, past Temple Bar and St Paul's Cathedral, out through Ludgate, down the Strand to Charing Cross and into Whitehall. Everywhere was full of soldiers by the time they arrived. Shopkeepers were opening up — not all, but most. Like the puritans' Christmas, this was designated a working day, not special. Crowds were already gathering outside the Banqueting House. Heavy grey clouds lowered above them, the solemn sky of a freezing dawn in the dead of English winter.

  They could hear the loudly beaten drums as Colonel Tomlinson came with the escort party at a fast walking pace across St James's Park, bringing his prisoner, the King.

  Chapter Fifty-Seven — Whitehall: 30 January 1649

  They went in through a back door and found the place packed. They nodded to the guards. So many soldiers were milling about, nobody paid any attention. There was no difficulty slipping through. The undercroft was seething. As usual in crowds, most noticed only their immediate neighbours. Surreptitiously, Gideon managed to locate a private room, where Fox and he stowed their charge. To keep Brandon occupied, they sent a soldier to find him breakfast. 'And some for us,' pleaded Fox, clearly not expecting it would happen.

  Upon arrival, Brandon insisted he must be given a written order for today's work. It was the rule, and of course was for his protection. They had chosen him because he was professional.

  Colonel Axtell bustled off to see Cromwell about it, leaving Gideon and Colonel Fox to ensure the hangman stayed put. A true printer, Gideon wondered whether the Brandon family owned a cache of tattered warrants for all the traitors and political misfits they had beheaded. Robert would have wondered whether a memoir could be made of it, but by tradition the public hangman led a life of secrecy. He was a non-person; his experiences were not for public consumption, however great the public's lust for lurid snippets from the block. Robert would claim public interest — always his excuse for printing's more soiled commerce — but Gideon remained sceptical about sensational tracts.