The Tyrannicide Brief

by Geoffrey Robertson

  On Monday morning, the judges confronted and accepted the awesome finality of their decision. A servant of Henry Marten claimed to have seen some face-painting in the Painted Chamber (‘I did see a pen in Mr Cromwell’s hand and he marked Mr Marten in his face with it and Mr Marten did the like to him’), an episode so bizarre that it may well be true and suggestive of some release of nervous tension at the conclusion of ‘the great business’.32 Most of the commissioners believed they were instruments of the law and of the will of God – the King’s fate was an act of providence to which they willingly set their hand. General Fairfax was ambivalent about executing the man he had tried so often to kill on the battlefield, but consoled himself in verse:

  But if the Power Divine permitted this,

  His will’s the law and ours must acquiesce.33

  Little wonder that Fairfax was soon to hire a real poet, Andrew Marvell, to tutor his daughter. Notwithstanding his reservations about the death penalty, and the excitable outbursts attributed to his wife, the general played the straightest of bats throughout the trial, which owed much to his steadfastness – his adjutant delivered the daily orders from his Whitehall headquarters to the officers supervising events at Westminster Hall. The soldiers were unquestioningly loyal to Fairfax, their supreme commander, and not to Cromwell: they would have obeyed any order by Fairfax to halt the King’s trial or execution. His ‘command responsibility’ was deliberately covered up at the regicide trials, and many histories still naively portray him as the innocent dupe of Cromwell. Fairfax had turned up for the first meeting of the court in the Painted Chamber but then absented himself to run the country. As acting head of state, he chaired a special meeting of the army council on Sunday evening (it had to be very special for them to meet on the Sabbath) to receive the ambassadors from the Dutch government, who had rushed to England to intercede for the King’s life. He fobbed them off with the explanation that he could not intervene except with the approval of Parliament, which did not meet until the next day.

  The Dutch government was too powerful and too dangerous to be insulted, so the Commons listened politely to their protestations – spoken in Dutch, which the MPs did not understand. The ambassadors, invited to have it translated, returned on Monday evening with a petition in English, which was very politely sent off to a committee for consideration. A protest from the Scots was ignored and a petition from the Presbyterian ministers of London was treated with contempt. The Commons did not even bother to open a letter from the Prince of Wales which was widely (but wrongly) believed to contain a signed blank sheet of paper on which they could name their terms for saving his father’s life. The only force that could save the life of Charles I was General Fairfax, who was in thrall to the will of the Power Divine. He was also aware of the will of the great majority of his soldiers and officers, who wanted execution done on the man whom they blamed for the deaths of so many of their comrades. As supreme commander, he was all too conscious of the national security situation and the need for a resolution of ‘the problem of the King’ before the expected royalist invasion to restore him. And he could think of no other resolution.

  The King, meanwhile, was preparing for death and for glory, with the sagacious assistance of Bishop Juxon. He was much helped by the kindness of his executioners. They had provided him with a companion – Sir Thomas Herbert – a rather dim parliamentary sympathiser who was sensible enough, after the Restoration, to prepare an account of the King’s last days that was to ascribe saintliness to his conduct throughout them. He was allowed to say farewell to his children – Elizabeth (aged thirteen) and Henry (eight) – a heartrending occasion written up by Herbert and, more movingly, by Elizabeth herself (or by a skilful propagandist in her name – the authenticity of her memo has never been established). Her account contains a striking passage (also striking for being absent from Herbert’s account) in which the King instructs his small son that ‘You must not be a king so long as your brothers Charles and James do live: for they will cut off your brothers’ heads (when they can catch them) and cut off your head too, at last; therefore I charge you, do not be made a king by them.’ (‘I will be torn to pieces first,’ the child responded to this rather terrifying paternal farewell.) If not invented, it shows the depth of the King’s opposition to the only parliamentary proposal which could have saved his life – namely his agreement (and necessarily that of his older sons, Charles and James) to allow little Henry to accede to the throne (under the tutelage of a ‘Lord Protector’) to reign as a limited constitutional monarch – Henry IX.

  The most disastrous decision for long-term public relations was to have the King executed in public – on a black-draped scaffold outside the banqueting house in Whitehall. Perhaps they had Strafford’s much celebrated execution in mind, but that was an occasion for popular rejoicing at the destruction of the evil councillor of a beloved King. The destruction of the beloved King was a different matter. Almost everything that was done conduced to his martyrdom. Troops of Horse Guards surrounded the funereally draped scaffold, on which someone (Peters, it was rumoured, although he convincingly denied it) had thoughtlessly decided to drive in some rails and manacles, to which the prisoner could be tethered in the event of any resistance.

  The King played the martyr’s part almost to perfection. The public nature of the occasion left eye-witnesses to his iconic last hours: his wearing of two shirts, lest his shivers from the cold seem like trembling with fear; the long walk through St James’s Park ahead of a troop of drummers morbidly beating time; his steps to the scaffold through the Banqueting House with its Rubens ceiling which showed him as an infant, nursed by the goddess of wisdom. During the march through the park, the trees bare and the ground covered with frost, he requested Colonel Tomlinson to delay his burial because his son was coming back to England and would organise a proper funeral. This was an indication of his unworldliness, and that his delaying tactics at the trial were because he really thought that deliverance was at hand. On this day, it was Parliament that delayed, because it had the same concern: he was made to wait for several hours while it rushed through an Act making it treason for anyone to proclaim the Prince of Wales as Charles II, the new King of England. Charles I meanwhile took a glass of claret and a piece of bread to settle his nerves for the final walk to the gallows.

  It was 2 p.m. when he stepped out onto the scaffold, a frail but undeniably noble presence now, set against the red-coated soldiers and the pantomime figures of the two executioners wrapped in outlandish dresses and wearing masks and ill-fitting wigs – one grey, the other flaxen – to disguise their identity for all time.34 The bright axe was in pride of place, and when an army officer made to move it, Charles jested, ‘Hurt not the axe that may hurt me.’ His use of the conditional tense suggests he may have half-hoped for some deus ex machina – a golden chariot from the clouds as in his masques, or a last-minute reprieve from Fairfax – as he took out his notes and began his pre-execution address. He asserted his innocence and forgave ‘all the world, and even those in particular that have been the chief causers of my death. Who they are God knows. I do not desire to know. I pray God forgive them.’ He had been face to face with John Cooke and the judges in Westminster Hall, and his lack of knowledge of them had been the chief cause of his death. He spoilt the graciousness of his final speech by stubborn reassertion of his right to absolute rule: the paternalistic political philosophy by which he had lived and fought again and again hung heavily on his dying breath:

  For the people I must tell you, that their liberty and freedom consist in having of government, those laws by which their life and their goods may be most their own. It is not for having a share in government, Sirs: that is nothing pertaining to them. A subject and a sovereign are clean different things, and therefore, until they do that, I mean, that you do put the people in that liberty as I say, certainly they will never enjoy themselves.

  The people had been warned: they would enjoy themselves under a king but never under their ow
n representatives. ‘I tell you that I am the Martyr of the people,’ Charles declared to Bishop Juxon, who nodded and then prompted the denouement35 by handing Charles his nightcap. The King put it on and said to the executioner, ‘Does my hair trouble you?’ The executioner and the bishop then helped him tuck his untidy locks under the nightcap and Charles turned to Dr Juxon for a final blessing:

  KING: I have a good cause and a gracious God on my side.

  DRJUXON: There is but one stage more. This stage is turbulent and troublesome. It is a short one. But you may consider it will soon carry you a very great way, it will carry you from earth to heaven and there you shall find to your great joy the prize. You haste to a crown of glory.

  KING: I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown where no disturbance can be.

  DR JUXON: You are exchanged from a temporal to an eternal crown, a good exchange.

  Then the King took off his cloak and the blue sash with his silver medallion of St George, handing them to Juxon with the word ‘Remember’ (i.e. to give them to the Prince of Wales). He turned to the executioner; ‘I shall say but very short prayers, and then thrust out my hands.’ Then he stooped down, as if to look for the tip of his cane, but this time to lay his neck upon the block. After a short pause, he stretched out his hands, and the executioner at one blow severed his head from his body.

  At this point, chroniclers of the scene invariably quote a doleful spectator, Philip Henry: ‘At the instant when the blow was given there was such a dismal universal groan amongst the thousands of people that were within sight of it as it were with one consent, as he never heard before and desired he might never hear again.’ Henry, then aged nineteen, was son to the most loyal servant of Charles I; he was writing many years later as a courtier of Charles II. Thousands of people did not in fact see the beheading – it took place on a low block, just six inches high, behind the black-draped railings of the scaffold. The ‘dismal universal groan’, essential to royalist mythmaking, is mentioned by no other spectator, including the schoolboy voyeur Samuel Pepys.36 The astonishing fact was that the execution, like the trial, went unopposed and uninterrupted. It was as if the country had failed to catch up with the events in Westminster: they heard of them unfolding, in a sort of awe. When the shock wore off it would be different. But on Tuesday 30 January the shops remained open, the public went about its business, the King was not immediately missed.

  12

  ‘Stone Dead Hath No Fellow’

  ‘THE FOURTH CERVICAL vertebrae was found to be cut through its substance transversally, leaving the surfaces of the divided portions perfectly smooth and even, an appearance which could have been produced only by a heavy blow, inflicted with a very sharp instrument.’1

  Thus did a very post (1813) post-mortem examination describe the King’s neck after his embalmed body was discovered in a vault at Windsor Castle next to the remains of Henry VIII. The head of the corpse was loose and on inspection the dark brown hair at the back of the head had been cut soon after death ‘to furnish memorials of the unhappy King’ in the form of clipped locks for surreptitious sale. The blood of the royal martyr had an immediate value – soldiers at the scaffold allowed relic hunters to mop up the haemoglobin with handkerchiefs and to purchase pieces of the wooden flooring which had been spattered with royal gore. One soldier was quoted as saying: ‘I would we had two or three more majesties to behead, if we could but make such use of them.’2 There are several accounts of Cromwell inspecting the corpse of the King before its burial (muttering the epitaph ‘cruel necessity’) while Sir Purbeck Temple claimed to have given a half crown piece to a soldier to permit inspection of the body in order to describe it to Jane Whorwell, rumoured to be the King’s mistress: ‘I saw the head of the blessed martyr King . . . which smiled as perfectly as if it had been alive’ – a smile which evidently faded by the time of the 1813 post-mortem.3

  The army leaders were astute to avoid unnecessary publicity after the execution and it is likely that the lid of the King’s coffin remained firmly shut after it left the embalmers. They refused Herbert’s request for burial in King Henry VII’s chapel in Westminster Abbey: Herbert relates that ‘His request was denied, this reason being given, that probably it would attract infinite numbers of people of all sorts hither’ which was judged unsafe and inconvenient.4 So the royal chapel of St George in Windsor Castle was chosen and on the afternoon of 9 February a small procession of devoted retainers carried the coffin to its secret resting place. Herbert memorably relates – to the inspiration of many Victorian artists – that

  The sky was serene and clear, but presently it began to snow, and fell so fast, by the time they came to the West End of the royal chapel the black velvet pall was all white (the colour of innocency) being thick covered over with snow. So went the white King to his grave . . .

  Other than snowing on the cortège, the skies did not fall after execution was done on Charles I. The King was dead, and Parliament had made it a capital offence to cry ‘Long Live the King!’ Few disobeyed – if they did, like one luckless Presbyterian minister, a Reverend Causton, they were sent to Messrs Cooke and Steele to consider prosecution for an offence against the new Treason Act.5 The most astonishing consequence of the trial was that the revolution it accomplished met with no opposition. The cavaliers, whose personal courage was unquestionable, had made no move of any kind to rescue their endangered leader; the Presbyterian politicians and City fathers lifted neither finger nor voice against the republic while for a short time even the Levellers fell uncharacteristically silent. The judges and the great lawyers returned as soon as the trial was safely concluded, in order to jockey for places in the Republic. Steele, the Attorney-General, made a sufficiently speedy recovery to join Solicitor-General Cooke in prosecuting the Duke of Hamilton. The trial had not only effected the revolution, but had made it acceptable, at least for the time being, through its use of traditional procedures and the authority of its verdict.

  The King’s death was not the matter of political expediency it has subsequently appeared to many historians: it was perceived at the time as a matter of right and of justice. Charles Stuart was a defendant who deserved to die as punishment for his crimes, rather than for the kind of realpolitik reasons that had been used to justify the elimination of Strafford and Laud. Although the trial had been deficient as a fact-finding exercise because of the King’s refusal to plead, Cooke had invoked the law’s interpretation of that tactic as a confession which automatically triggered the conviction and execution. It was the inevitability of the verdict and sentence that impressed: this was the result of a law which was no respecter of persons – its consequences could not be avoided by wealth or power or station.

  Since the court’s proceedings had been solemn and the King had been given a fairer hearing than any other defendant charged with treason, this High Court of Justice appeared to live up to its name, certainly to Puritans who believed its result must have been ordained by God. Royalists could find no such solace in the outcome, other than as a punishment for their own sinful failure to stop it or even to protest against it. As one of their penitential poets put it,

  Though Pontius Bradshawe did in judgement sit,

  And Cooke dress hell-bred sophistry with wit,

  To drain the blood,

  Of Charles the good

  And strike the royal heart,

  Not by evidence but art.

  These were but the fire and wood!

  But who did bring?

  Or where’s the lamb for a burnt-offering?

  Let every penitent loyalist now cry,

  T’was sinful England! and most sinful I.6

  On the day they entombed ‘the White King’, his nemesis ‘White Cooke’ was hard at work: as Solicitor-General he had to prepare for the prosecutions of Hamilton and the lords captured at Colchester, and also advise the Commons about how to transform this ex-kingdom into a republic. His first task, on execution day itself, had been to dispatch a letter post-hast
e to all sheriffs in England, informing them that the sentence of the court had been carried out and ordering them to announce ‘in all market towns and other public places’ the Act passed that day Prohibiting the Proclaiming of any person to be King of England or Ireland or the dominions thereof. At about 3 a.m. the next morning he was woken to be told that the Duke of Hamilton had escaped from Windsor Castle. The Solicitor-General authorised the issue of a warrant for the duke (with a £500 reward) and a few hours later troops arrested a disguised Hamilton as he was trying to hire a carriage to Dover. (The duke, as inept in peace as in war, did not disguise his Scottish accent or hide his diamond ring.) The Commons, on hearing of his apprehension, determined that he should face a speedy trial and immediately appointed a new High Court of Justice under Judge Bradshawe to conduct it.7