by Jordan, Don
Aristocratic bloodlust was anything but sated by the lengthening death list which the peers were building, apparently with royal approval. The Lords took up the Penruddock campaign and found more victims there: ‘In the House of Lords, much striving there is of several parties to increase the number excepted,’ Edmund Ludlow recorded. ‘Mrs Penruddock and Dr Hewitt’s widow and several others solicit for particular satisfaction for the death of their relations … And much ado they make.’ Still greater ado was created when an altogether more celebrated widow, the Countess of Derby, joined in. She was bent on vengeance for the execution of her husband, the Earl of Derby, who was beheaded with other Cavaliers after a court-martial at Chester in 1652.
When she surrendered a stronghold on the Isle of Man upon receiving the news of her husband’s death, Lady Derby had earned the distinction of being the last royalist commander in the British Isles to submit to Cromwell’s Commonwealth. Man was effectively a fiefdom of the earldom and, come the restoration, Lady Derby took revenge on the local Roundhead leader on the island who had besieged her, exercising her power as de facto queen of Man by executing him. Then she targeted the four members of her husband’s court-martial, which included Colonel Harry Bradshaw, a brother of John Bradshaw. A petition from the countess prompted the House of Lords to summon Bradshaw and accuse him of breach of privilege. Grasping at the furthest reaches of their prerogative, the Lords held that for commoners to condemn a peer to death was unlawful. Luckily for Harry Bradshaw, he managed to convince their Lordships that he had tried to save the earl from the block.
The Lords turned to other aristocratic ‘martyrs’ executed on Parliament’s orders in 1649 – the Duke of Hamilton, the Earl of Holland and Lord Capel. Justices, prosecutors and others involved in their trials, and in Derby’s trial too, were arrested and hauled before the House to face the most vindictive proposal so far – that a kinsman of each dead peer pick one of their judges or prosecutors to be executed. Clarendon called it an ‘odious’ and ‘disgusting’ course of action.
The battle of the death lists came to a head in mid-August, when the Commons addressed the Lords’ final version of the Indemnity Act. The solicitor-general, Sir Heneage Finch, was dispatched to seek a compromise. It was hard going. Their Lordships now wanted a total of forty-three of the judges to be completely excluded from pardon, also Vane, Haselrig, Lambert, Hacker and Axtell. The Lords insisted furthermore on exacting vengeance for the four executed aristocrats by executing a man for each of them. At first the peers wouldn’t budge on anything. Indeed, on the last matter it was claimed that the peers were showing their moderation by taking ‘no more than one a-piece’.24
‘Blood requires blood,’ asserted Heneage’s namesake Lord Finch, the Lords’ spokesman, referring to the forty-three regicides. ‘The shedding of royal blood had brought infamy upon the nation’ and their Lordships ‘did not think it fit nor safe for this kingdom, that they should live.’ They could not live in England and would be a danger to the Kingdom if allowed to live abroad. The negotiators conferred and reported back again and again throughout a highly charged week.
A compromise heavily favouring the Lords was eventually forged. The Lords dropped their demand for eye-for-an-eye vengeance and in return the Commons retreated on much more. They acquiesced to the total exception of thirty judges and agreed to the exception of Lambert, Vane, Axtell and Hacker too. However, what appeared to be a life-saving deal was made for Vane and Lambert. In return for putting them on the death list, the Commons secured the Lords’ agreement to a joint petition to the king to remit execution in the event of the two men being attainted and facing death. The king agreed. The House of Lords Journal for 8 September records the Lord Chancellor reporting that ‘His Majesty grants the desires in the said petition.’ Charles was not to keep his word.
Sir Arthur Haselrig avoided the death list thanks to a letter from George Monck, explaining his pledge made six months earlier to save Haselrig’s life. This time the great dissembler kept his word and Sir Arthur survived. After a rancorous debate, the Commons voted by 141 to 116 not to except him. It made little difference. Haselrig died a prisoner in the Tower before the year was out.
Edmund Ludlow’s time was up. His memoirs do not mention the date on which he decided to escape, but it must have been late August. Ludlow asked his wife Elizabeth to seek the advice of friends. This led to a rancorous exchange with one of them, no less than the Speaker, Sir Harbottle Grimston, who urged Elizabeth to make Ludlow give himself up. Ludlow’s memoirs describe the argument after she pointed out that there was no guarantee of Ludlow’s life if he physically surrendered to the authorities. Ludlow wrote:
The Speaker seemed much offended with this discourse, and going down the stairs with her, told her he would wash his hands of my blood, by assuring her, that if I would surrender myself, my life would be as safe as his own; but if I refused to hearken to his advice, and should happen to be seized, I was like to be the first man they would execute, and she to be left the poorest widow in England.
Others advised flight. ‘Another of my friends who was well acquainted with the designs of the court, and had all along advised me not to trust their favour, now repeated his persuasions to withdraw out of England, assuring that if I stayed I was lost; and that the same fate attended Sir Henry Vane and others.’
When Ludlow finally departed, his preparations were typically thorough. He had grown a beard as a disguise; a guide and horses were laid on at a rendezvous south of the river; a merchant in the port of Lewes was to lay on a ship to take him to Dieppe. There was a choice of safe houses in Dieppe and arrangements with banks provided access to plentiful funds in Europe. But, as we know, it nearly went wrong. In Lewes, which he reached in the early hours of the morning, searchers boarded the vessel hired to take him. Thanks to the weather, Ludlow wasn’t aboard. A violent thunderstorm had prompted him to seek better cover in another boat and this vessel drifted on to a sandbank with the lieutenant-general in it. None of the search party bothered with the beached boat and Ludlow could relax. Two days later his vessel set sail, braving the still stormy Channel successfully to land him in Dieppe.25 He learned that the same craft had taken Richard Cromwell into exile some weeks earlier. He stayed there for several days until letters arrived from England. One included a printed proclamation offering a £300 reward for his arrest. Ludlow decided to make for somewhere far distant from England – Geneva. Switzerland would become his base and within two years was the Mecca for republican opponents of the Stuarts.
On 29 August Charles signed the Bill and it became law. The legislation divided the ‘regicides’ into living and dead. First were the dead: Bradshaw, Cromwell, Ireton, Pride and twenty others who had died since 1649, all of whose ‘lands, tenements, goods, chattels, rights, trusts, and other hereditaments’ were to be subject to such ‘pains, penalties, and forfeitures’ as should be specified by another Act of Parliament.
Then came the living. The Act set out a readjusted death list of thirty-two men. Twenty-three were among the king’s judges: John Barkstead, Daniel Blagrave, John Carew, William Cawley, Thomas Challoner, Gregory Clement, Cornelius Holland, Miles Corbet, John Dixwell, William Goffe, Thomas Harrison, John Hewson, John Jones, John Lisle, Sir Michael Livesey, Nicholas Love, Edmund Ludlow, John Okey, William Say, Thomas Scot, Adrian Scroop, Valentine Walton and Edward Whalley. The remaining nine comprised officials, officers and those said to be culpable in other ways: Daniel Axtell, Francis Hacker, John Cook, Andrew Broughton, Edward Dendy, William Hulet, Hugh Peters, and those two persons ‘who, being disguised by frocks and visors, did appear upon the scaffold erected before Whitehall’. All thirty-two were to be absolutely excepted from pardon ‘for life and estate’.
A further nineteen living regicides – those who surrendered by the deadline believing they would be treated mercifully – were excepted with a saving clause. The Act stated that if any of them be ‘legally attainted for the horrid treason and murder’, they would be executed
only after a special Act of Parliament.
It was now September 1660 and the first trials were to be in October. But first another of the fugitives was captured – the hapless preacher Hugh Peters.
At the beginning of September, Peters was reported to be in Southwark and two royal heavies, ‘messengers of His Majesty’s chamber’, were dispatched to apprehend him.26 Peters was being sheltered in the house of a Quaker family called Mun. A lurid account in Mercurius Publicus describes how the officers arrived and searched the house, and how Peters escaped detection by hiding in the bed of his host’s daughter. She had given birth two days before, and the royal messengers were described as too delicate to enter her room, thus allowing Peters to go undetected. Rashly, he decided to stay on in the house, and when the searchers returned several days later they forced their way in to discover him in a room upstairs. A struggle followed and, according to Mercurius Publicus, it took the combined efforts of the two officers, the local constable and a number of neighbours to restrain Peters. He hotly denied that he was Peters and pleaded with his captors not to allude to him publicly by the name. ‘For, said he, if it be known that I am Hugh Peter, the people in the street will stone me.’ He eventually only agreed to go along with the officers after being allowed to down two quarts of ale, the paper sneered.27
Hugh Peters did not receive a fair showing in the press, and he would be treated no better in his trial the following month – nor would those tried with him.
12
‘THE GUILT OF BLOOD’
8–12 October 1660
The trial of the regicides was a sensation even before it opened. London talked of nothing else: a mass trial of those who only months before had ruled the land and were now accused of treason for killing the king. Thanks to meticulous preparation behind the scenes, it was to be a political show trial. Medieval law was invoked to frame watertight charges, and ancient rules of evidence were cast aside to ensure convictions. As each prisoner was brought before the court – and before a word of evidence was heard – the public hangman came and stood beside him holding a noose.1 The public entered into the sense of theatre. When the elderly cleric Hugh Peters stood trial and invoked the name of God, the crowd shrieked with laughter – hardly normal behaviour in a religious and superstitious age.
In one respect, the regicides were not the only ones to be tried: many of those who sat in judgment were also on trial, or at least their loyalty was on trial. Men like George Monck sat on the judges’ bench to condemn their former colleagues to a slow and agonising death, thereby proving to their new king that they were now royalists through and through.
Of those regicides appearing on the death list finally agreed by the Houses of Parliament and excluded from pardon, sixteen avoided being sent for trial thanks to a good word from well-placed allies, or by having shown themselves to be amenable to the new regime. The death list was, of course, fleshed out with the names of some who were not actual regicides, including John Cook, the attorney-general, and Colonels Axtell and Hacker, who commanded the guard during the trial and execution. As we have seen, at one stage the king’s masked executioners were added to the list even though their identity was at best uncertain.
In the midst of the excitement and expectation, the king grew silent. A Cavalier Parliament, watched over by the king’s brothers and his parliamentary contacts, had drawn up the list of those to be tried. Charles’s placemen had done their jobs in other ways, too; the highest lawyers in the land, all royal appointees, had designed the trials in such a way that there could only be one possible outcome. Yet we have no record of what Charles thought as he watched these preparations. He must have recalled his father’s death and his own reactive declaration of bloody retribution. But none of those who knew him well or had close contact with him chose to record the king’s thoughts or feelings regarding this key event.
Among the few letters we have from Charles about this time are two written shortly before and after the trial to his Chancellor, Edward Hyde. The first tells Hyde he needs to have some letters prepared for signature by noon as the king is going to play tennis; the second asks him when affairs of state will allow Charles the time to visit his sister in Tonbridge.2 Prior to the trial, Charles did have one very serious matter to attend to – the secret marriage of his brother James to Anne Hyde, Edward’s pregnant daughter, thus taking the duke out of the running for any suitable royal marriage that might cement or strengthen an alliance. The marriage was a great surprise to many – including the king – for James was known to be every bit as much a womaniser as his elder brother. Although the duke and his friends dreamed up many scandalous stories about the girl in their endeavours to get him out of the marriage, Charles declared that his brother had made his marital bed and would have to lie in it – which was more than he would ever do himself.
His brother’s problems apart, everything went well for Charles II in the run-up to the trial. His anxiety to expedite the Indemnity Bill had reflected his need to clear the Parliamentary way for two other crucial matters to be settled, and now they were settled. The first was the dismantling of the New Model Army, and its replacement by a Cavalier-officered militia. The army numbered some forty thousand men and, despite George Monck’s regimental purges, it remained the Cavaliers’ nightmare, a hotbed of republicanism whose existence was a threat to the throne. A Bill to disband the army was tabled two days after the Indemnity Bill became law. A poll tax was to be levied to pay off the men and George Monck was earmarked to help oversee what could be an explosive process. The second matter which the King urgently wanted resolved was settled four days later – the royal stipend, the issue that had bedevilled so many monarchs, not least his father. This too went Charles’s way. Parliament, still in that mood of heady generosity towards its young master, voted him £1.2 million a year, which was 50 per cent more than his estimated annual income under existing provisions.
As the trial opened, most of London had thoughts of little else. The king was often otherwise engaged; he was spending increasing amounts of time with his new mistress, the very beautiful and willing Barbara Villiers, with whom he was totally infatuated. It was said that their relationship ‘did so disorder him that often he was not master of himself nor capable of minding business, which in so critical a time, required great application’.3 Hyde, a fastidious man, found Charles’s philandering a considerable irritation. He was also infuriated by the king’s general lack of attention to matters of state; but Charles’s inattentiveness and apparent laziness were traits developed over long years of exile and futility and were to prove fixed within his character.
Around the country, trials were being held to silence other dissident voices, though with all attention focused on events in London they went largely unremarked. In Bedford, the trial of an obscure Baptist preacher was held unnoticed by the weekly news sheets. The preacher was one of hundreds of nonconformists who resisted the legislation barring anyone except ordained Anglican ministers from preaching. His name was John Bunyan.
At his trial, Bunyan admitted he was a persistent offender, but said he intended to remain so. The judge urged him to stop preaching and so save himself from years in prison and his wife and family from penury. Bunyan refused and the judge sentenced him to six years, saying: ‘I strongly suspect that we have heard the last we shall ever hear from Mr. John Bunyan.’ He could not have been more wrong. After serving his six years, Bunyan continued preaching and received six more years. In prison, he sat down to write the book that became the best-selling work of fiction of the century. The Pilgrim’s Progress has never been out of print since.4
The London trials began five weeks after Bunyan’s first court appearance. Twenty-eight men were on trial. If found guilty, they faced death by the grisly form of torture known as hanging, drawing and quartering. The most important of these were twenty-four who had sat as judges at the king’s trial. Most of them had played other key roles in bringing the king to trial. Sir Hardress Waller had participated in Pr
ide’s Purge before sitting in judgment. He signed the king’s death warrant and helped organise the execution. Of Thomas Harrison we have already heard a good deal. Colonel Adrian Scroop was a member of the Oxfordshire gentry who also supported Pride’s Purge. He helped organise the king’s trial before sitting in judgment and signing the death warrant. Gilbert Millington was a wealthy barrister and one of the few senior lawyers willing to put aside personal interest for what he saw as the national good. He took part in the trial and voted for the king’s death. In 1660, men like these represented a purely symbolic threat to the resurgent monarchy.* The purpose of the trial was revenge against the few, so that many others who had fought against the king could pretend they had always supported the House of Stuart. A truly vindictive arraignment was that of Hugh Peters, the Puritan preacher who had become a target because he publicly preached in favour of the king’s trial and execution.
On 8 October, in the absence of the accused, the court sat for preliminary business at Clerkenwell in Hick’s Hall, the session house of the county of Middlesex. We are lucky today to know anything of what occurred during the trial. In contrast to the trial of the king, it appears no clerks were employed to keep a verbatim record. According to the Oxford antiquary Anthony Wood, the court record was kept by the prosecutor Sir Heneage Finch, and later edited by Sir Orlando Bridgeman. This might explain how both men come over so well in the published report.5 Although the accuracy of this account cannot be entirely relied upon, it contains a remarkable amount of detail and dialogue that rings true. The account was supplemented by reports in the news sheets and pamphlets as well as a contemporary compendium of speeches by the regicides.6