The King's Revenge: Charles II and the Greatest Manhunt in British History

by Jordan, Don

  Those who had not been present to relish the spectacle were told by Mercurius Publicus: ‘The heads of those three notorious regicides, Oliver Cromwell, John Bradshaw, and Ireton are set upon poles on the top of Westminster Hall by the common hangman.’ And there the Protector’s head remained for at least a century.

  Charles’s coronation was set for 23 April. London prepared for the most lavish week of celebrations. The ceremony was not without its dangers. The authorities were concerned that ‘fanatics’ might use the distraction it provided to strike a blow against the king. With this in mind, Sir Edward Nicholas sent word to Sir William Davidson, a Scottish merchant based in Amsterdam who also acted as a royalist agent, to watch for coronation plots. Sir Edward would not have been reassured by a report that regular émigré meetings involving John Desborough were taking place in Sedan, where the talk was of taking revenge ‘for the blood of God’s servants’ by the overthrow of the king.

  Ten days before coronation day, Nicholas took precautions. A dozen ex-officers were arrested and all former soldiers were ordered to keep twenty miles from London until May. If there had been a threat, it vanished now. A week of fabulous celebration went ahead undisturbed.

  The celebrations began with the making of knights and other ceremonial in Windsor, where the display had the Venetian ambassador drooling over the ‘pomp and magnificence’ of it all. Those events were inevitably outmatched by the coronation a few days later. A two-day affair, this began with a vast ceremonial procession from the Tower of London that clattered along the ancient route through the City and on to Whitehall. It had been raining steadily for a month, wrote the royalist James Heath, ‘but on this and the next day it pleased God that not one drop fell on the king’s triumph’.16

  The City had been unstinting with the decorations. Oriental carpets disguised ramshackle houses, flowers and gravel covered filthy streets and on every corner was a tableau or display saluting monarchy, all to the sound of trumpets or beat of drum. The procession was magnificent. It was headed by the king’s law officers, the masters of chancery and judges; next were sixty-eight Knights of the Bath in crimson robes, followed by the great aristocrats and other lords according to their rank; then crowds of dignitaries in bejewelled finery, each outdoing the last in opulent display.

  Unsubtle but stirring images of royalist propaganda dotted the route. Four triumphal arches, designed around large allegorical paintings depicting Charles directly or showing him taking vengeance on his father’s killers, had been constructed. One had him as the emperor Augustus exacting vengeance on Caesar’s assassins. Another portrayed ‘usurpation’ as a many-headed Gorgon with Cromwell’s as one of the heads. Yet another featured a collection of severed regicides’ heads stuck high in the air on the end of long poles. When, next day, Charles was crowned, he must have been a happy man.

  Other heads would soon be going up on poles, this time in Edinburgh. The next high-profile targets of the king’s revenge were the Presbyterians who had forced him to accept the Covenant as the price of crowning him king of Scotland in January 1651. Their leader ‘King’ Campbell, the formidable Marquis of Argyll, who had placed the crown on Charles’s head a decade earlier, was now in prison awaiting trial in Edinburgh for treason.

  He went on trial before the Scottish Parliament at the end of February 1661. It was a protracted, bitter affair which lasted nearly three months. The book was thrown at him by the royalists. Among the charges were complicity in the king’s death and allegations that he had betrayed Scotland to the English. Argyll’s defence was so persuasive that acquittal seemed a real possibility – until Argyll himself was betrayed by no less than the Duke of Albemarle, George Monck. Argyll and Monck had worked well together when the Englishman was in command in Scotland and there was considerable correspondence between them. As the trial neared its conclusion in May 1661, Monck sent a selection of Argyll’s letters to Edinburgh. They revealed Argyll collaborating with the English against Scots royalists, thus shattering Argyll’s defence. The great Campbell was duly convicted of treason. Bishop Burnet called Monck’s intervention an act of ‘inexcusable baseness’.

  Argyll was on his knees as the sentence of death was pronounced. He rose to his feet and said, ‘I had the honour to place the crown on the King’s head and now he hastens me to a better crown than he owns.’17 On 27 May, just forty-eight hours after the verdict, Argyll was beheaded at Edinburgh’s Mercat Cross. His most prominent ally, James Guthrie, was executed in the same place four days later, along with a Captain William Govan who had deserted the Scottish army and joined Cromwell and who some suspected of being on the scaffold in January 1649. Argyll’s head, stuck on top of the city gate known as the Netherbow Port, greeted visitors to Edinburgh for the next four years.

  15

  BLOODHOUNDS

  May–September 1661

  The spring of 1661 was significant not only for the crowning of the king or for the Marquis of Argyll’s execution. Hitherto Charles had paid little attention to the capture of regicides abroad, but that was about to change. As carpenters sweated over the erection of those magnificent coronation arches with their dual themes of royal triumph and revenge, Charles unleashed his bloodhounds in America and Europe. Two royalists set out from Boston to lead a hunt across New England for Whalley and Goffe, and the most ruthless operator in the king’s service was drafted in to spearhead a search across Europe for Ludlow and the other nineteen regicides who had escaped in 1660.

  The American manhunt was launched on 6 May by John Endecott, governor of Massachusetts. Endecott had received an arrest order from the king which, dispensing with flowery courtesies, had been brutally curt:

  Trusty and well-beloved,

  We greet you well. We being given to understand that Colonel Whalley and Colonel Goffe, who stand here convicted for the execrable murder of our Royal Father, of glorious memory, are lately arrived at New England, where they hope to shroud themselves securely from the justice of our laws; our will and pleasure is, and we do hereby expressly require and command you forthwith upon the receipt of these our letters, to cause both the said persons to be apprehended, and with the first opportunity sent over hither under a strict care, to receive according to their demerits. We are confident of your readiness and diligence to perform your duty; and so bid you farewell.1

  The abrupt tone reflected Charles’s fury at the welcoming reception accorded the regicides in America. Their unchallenged presence was not only an insult but a danger that threatened to undermine still further Britain’s fragile hold on the colony. The two men were openly enjoying their freedom, sometimes challenged by the odd royalist, but admired and welcomed by the majority Puritans. In London the Council of Foreign Plantations was told that the two were holding public meetings, praying and preaching and justifying the killing of the king. Whalley was quoted as saying that ‘if what he had done against the King were to be done again, he would do it again.’2

  All changed after May 1661. Having received the menacing royal command, John Endecott had to be seen to respond decisively. He commissioned two ardent royalists to conduct a manhunt right across the territory. The two men – a young Boston merchant called Thomas Kirk and Thomas Kelland, an English sea captain – were furnished with the governor’s authority to impress all the men and horse they needed and with letters requesting help to the governors of other English colonies. There was also one for Peter Stuyvesant, the governor of the neighbouring Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, a bolt-hole for people fleeing the English colonies. The search party set off on 25 May, launching a hue and cry that would fade then sound again for years.3

  The hunters had the outward support of the most senior colonial officials like Endecott. But it was a reluctant backing, and they could scarcely have known when they set out the depth of the opposition they would encounter.

  They had a good idea of their quarry’s whereabouts when they left Boston. On receipt of Endecott’s commission, they secured warrants from the governor of Con
necticut and made directly for New Haven. Their target was the house of the millennialist pastor John Davenport, founder of the New Haven colony. Since their arrival on the Prudent Mary the previous summer, Davenport had become perhaps the fugitives’ greatest ally. A man with a mesmerising personality, Davenport had been followed by five hundred Puritans when he left London in the 1630s to establish his ministry in the New World. He built there a fiercely independent bastion of Calvinist zealotry.4 In New Haven, Mosaic law held sway – only church members judged predestined to be saved by God could vote, own land or hold office. Quakers and other outsiders were turned away at the colony’s borders (even at the beginning of the nineteenth century Jews and Catholics were barred from setting foot on New Haven green). There was no argument when Whalley and Goffe came knocking in the early months of 1661. They were greeted as ‘Godly’ people and allowed in.5

  Whalley was put up in Davenport’s house while a neighbour, Thomas Jones, offered his home to Goffe. Jones had more reason than most to sympathise with the two men, for he was the son of regicide John Jones. Young Thomas had been a fellow passenger with the two fugitives on the Prudent Mary the previous summer. Three months after they disembarked on the Boston quayside, the older Jones had been hanged, drawn and quartered in the Strand. Of course, anyone aiding Whalley and Goffe in New England faced the same. A proclamation outlawing the regicides warned that none ‘should presume to harbour or conceal any [of] the persons aforesaid under pain of misprision of high treason’.

  Kirk and Kelland pushed south through New England’s rugged highlands and reached Guildford, the capital of the New Haven colony, in three days. This put them a mere eighteen miles from the town of New Haven and their target. There was time enough that day to reach their men, but they needed warrants from William Leete, the colony’s governor. It was here that their problems began, for Leete smoothly sabotaged their mission.

  An account of what transpired was later sent to Endecott by the two royalists. They arrived in Guildford on a Saturday and Leete received them courteously enough. Then things began to go wrong. To their great discomfort, the governor insisted on reading the king’s proclamation aloud while locals clustered around, so ruining the royalists’ hopes of surprising the fugitives. Leete then asserted that the two colonels had left New Haven nine weeks before. This was untrue, as Kirk suspected after questioning locals. Several claimed that the regicides were still in New Haven and named the Reverend Davenport as their protector. Probing further, Kirk heard that Leete was well aware of this.

  The royalists went back to the governor, demanding warrants to search and arrest and fresh horses to get them to Davenport’s home. Much delay and evasion ensued. The horses were provided but Leete apologetically refused any search and arrest warrant. Before he could issue the document he would have to consult the New Haven magistrates. This, unfortunately, couldn’t be done quickly because the next day was Sunday, and nothing was allowed to move in New Haven on the Sabbath. On Monday the magistrates did convene, but they came to no decision. After agonising for much of the day, they announced that the freemen of the colony would have to be summoned. That would take another four days, the increasingly angry royalists learned.

  Needless to say, the birds had long flown. On the day that Kirk and Kelland led their search party into Guildford, a Native American rode through the night to warn Davenport, Jones and their guests. The two colonels were quietly shifted to a secure, if uncomfortable, hiding place not far away, though well hidden from inquisitive eyes. This was a cave halfway up a rocky escarpment a few miles beyond New Haven. It is said that on that Sunday the Reverend Davenport’s sermon drew from the book of Isaiah and his favourite proverb: ‘Hide the outcasts, betray not him that wandereth. Let mine outcasts dwell with thee.’6

  The royalists heard about the night ride of the Native American and demanded to interview him or that Leete question him. The governor refused, insisting there were no grounds to do so. They then asked him to authorise raids on the homes of Davenport and Jones. In the absence of a decision by the freemen, this was also refused.

  Searches were at last conducted and Davenport was reported to have been ‘very ill used’ when they got to his house. The searches were of course fruitless. However, all kinds of stories have been handed down through the generations suggesting prolonged searching during which the royalists came very near to their prey. One story has a search party coming through the front door while Whalley and Goffe ran out of the back. Another has them almost cornered and hiding under a bridge as their pursuers thundered over it. Yet another has them deciding to surrender in order to save Davenport from arrest but being dissuaded by their friends. According to one tale, Governor Leete hid them in his own cellar, which invites one to wonder whether they were there, listening even as their whereabouts were being discussed upstairs by their host and the two frustrated royalists.

  After weeks of frustration, Kirk and Kelland switched their attention to the south, disappearing across the border into New Amsterdam, presumably after another tip-off. There they secured the co-operation of the Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant, but to no avail. They returned some weeks later bitter and vengeful. Their report to Massachusetts’ Governor Endecott called the New Haven authorities ‘obstinate and pertinacious in their contempt of his Majesty’.

  To buy off the two royalists, the Massachusetts authorities presented each with a juicy land grant. At the same time Edward Rawson, secretary of the colony’s council, warned Governor Leete that his own future and that of New England was imperilled:

  I am required to signify to you … that the non-attendance, with diligence to execute the King’s warrant, for the apprehending of Colonels Goffe and Whalley, will much hazard the present state of these colonies, and your own particularly, if not some of your persons … there remains no way to expiate the offence, and preserve yourselves from the danger and hazard, but by apprehending the said persons, who, as we are informed, are yet remaining in the colony, and not above a fortnight since were seen there: all which will be against you.7

  In the event, Leete survived unscathed, and so did John Davenport. Having preached so bravely from Isaiah, he sent Secretary of State Sir William Morrice a grovelling denial that he or his colony had ever aided the two fugitives. The colonists had ‘wanted neither will nor industry to have served His Majesty in apprehending them, but were prevented and hindered by God’s overruling providence … The two Colonels, who only stayed two days in the Colony, went away before they could be apprehended, no man knowing how or whither.’

  Another attempt to catch the two was promised. Thomas Temple, a future governor of Nova Scotia, let London know that the fugitives were in the south of New England and pledged to uproot them. A note in the archives says of him: ‘Has joined himself in a secret design with one Pinchin, and Capt. Lord, two of the most considerable persons living in those parts, resolving to use their uttermost endeavour to apprehend and secure those Colonels, and has great hopes to effect it if they are in those parts. Will hazard his life and fortune in his Majesty’s service.’8

  Nothing came of Temple’s pledge. Judging from the archive there was a feeling in London that the two men were no longer on the other side of the Atlantic. There were reports of them being seen with Ludlow and in the Netherlands. Apparently they were amused to see other reports that they’d been killed.

  Whalley and Goffe stayed in the cave during the summer of 1661. When the hullabaloo died down, they were quietly moved to Milford, another Puritan settlement eight miles away. This time their hiding place was a cellar and they would spend the next two years ‘in utter seclusion without so much as going into the orchard’. Not until 1664 was there another threat to them.

  On the other side of the Atlantic, things would not prove so easy for the regicides in 1661. As Kelland and his partner were being thrown off the scent in New England, a man of far more menacing and astute calibre was being appointed to lead the European hunt. This was a former Roundhead, Sir Georg
e Downing, who had been posted as envoy extraordinary to the Netherlands in 1661. Over the next year this burly, quick-witted man would serve the ends of his royal master Charles II so well that he would be granted a baronetcy, huge monetary reward and the plot of land next to Whitehall Palace that forever commemorates him – Downing Street. He would also gain a reputation as an odious, treacherous turncoat: Andrew Marvell likened him to Judas; his former clerk, Samuel Pepys, labelled Downing a ‘perfidious rogue’; and in his native New England ‘an arrant George Downing’ became an epithet for anyone betraying a trust.

  Until a year earlier, Downing could have been counted as a convinced republican. He was born to a God-fearing family of Puritans in Dublin who settled in New England in the 1630s. Like the Puritans of New Haven, the Downings had opted for the New World to escape the Anglican straitjacket which Charles I wanted to impose. Their son George, it seems, flourished there. He became one of the first students to gain a degree at Harvard, the recently established college in Boston, and after that began to make his mark as a preacher. Then came news of the Civil War in England. Like many other young Puritans, Downing was drawn to it, taking ship to England and joining a parliamentary regiment of dragoons as chaplain. Downing’s commanding officer was the dour, radical Puritan Colonel John Okey; he became the chaplain’s mentor, enthusiastically pushing his career. That career was meteoric, but not as a preacher. Downing gave up his chaplaincy during the first Civil War and became an expert in intelligence gathering for the parliamentary armies. So good at this was he that at the age of twenty-six he was appointed ‘scoutmaster general’ – the chief field intelligence officer – of Oliver Cromwell’s all-conquering army in Scotland. It was the equivalent to being a major-general. Come peacetime, Downing breathlessly maintained his success, accumulating sinecures from Cromwell’s government, marrying a beautiful moneyed aristocrat from the Howard family and being elected to Parliament. The clever young parvenu from Massachusetts personified the confident, new, and supposedly godly world of republican England. Yet it could be argued that deep down he believed in monarchy – Downing, always a sycophant to the right people, led the clamour in Parliament for Cromwell to take the crown.9