The Tyrannicide Brief

by Geoffrey Robertson

  The usher cried for the court to adjourn, ending with a loud ‘God Bless King Charles’. The two condemned men, Cooke and Peters, were chained to each other and led by guards, whose torches lit the gloom, through the pen and across the street to Newgate prison.

  19

  A Trembling Walk with God

  IN NEWGATE ON Saturday night, all the talk was of the courage of Colonel Harrison, who had been executed that morning at Charing Cross. He had gone to his death with a bravado that had astonished many of the crowd, who had thought to deride him and enjoy his humiliation. ‘Where is your Good Old Cause now?’ someone jeered. ‘It is here,’ he announced with a smile as he clamped his manacled hands to his breast, ‘and I am going to seal it with my blood.’ He went up the gallows ladder with a spring in his step, ‘looking as cheerfully as any man could do in that condition’, so Pepys, who was present, reported.1 His scaffold speech – a ritual allowed to all traitors – exulted that he, a ‘poor base vile worm’ should be accounted worthy to suffer:

  I have served a good Lord and Creator; he has covered my head many times in the day of battle: by God I have leapt over a wall, by God I have run through a troop, and by God I will go through this death and He will make it easy for me. Now into thy hands, O Lord Jesus, I commit my spirit.

  With these fighting words Cromwell’s fine colonel jumped from the ladder, as he had jumped into the breach of castle walls: when his prancing in thin air seemed to stop, the hangman cut the rope and Harrison collapsed on to the scaffold. They picked him up and pulled their red-hot instruments out of the brazier and wrenched the bowels out of his fundament to burn them in front of his eyes which opened and with what seemed to the crowd to be superhuman strength (although it was probably a muscular spasm) he hit the hangman around the ears before doubling up and dying. Harrison’s Fifth monarchy beliefs about the imminence of the second coming gave him extraordinary valour in facing death. John Carew, who shared them, told Cooke and Peters on their return to Newgate that his turn would be next, and he asked them to pray that he could share Harrison’s strength. Members of his family were begging him to repent and petition for a reprieve but ‘death is nothing to me, let them quarter my body none so much, God will bring all these pieces together’. It was with semi-mystical psychological boosts of this sort that the regicides occupied their minds, but the horrible reality must at moments have struck all of them with terror.

  None more so than Hugh Peters, who was very far from a state of grace. He confided to Cooke his fear that he could not go through the coming ordeal without breaking down. He was the weak link among men who were well aware of the importance to the cause in England and abroad that they should die as martyrs to it without betraying fear or despair. Cooke asked the two Anglican divines sent to minister to the condemned prisoners to intercede with the King to grant Peters a stay of execution: his depressive condition made him unfit to die. The ministers agreed, although they were shocked that Cooke remained so loyal to his old friend, whom he extolled as once ‘the brightest example of holiness’. How could he ‘vindicate and defend this wretch’, the future Archbishop of York asked the next Dean of St Paul’s, as they left Newgate, shaking their heads over the object of Cooke’s Christian charity.2

  On what they knew would be their last Sabbath on earth, the convicted men were visited in Newgate by family and friends, who reported that Cooke had taken the lead in devising consoling perspectives on their plight. When one tried to comfort him with the thought that life was brief anyway, he replied, ‘Why say that? This might be suitable talk if I was sick from a fever, but we must talk at a higher level now. If I had the choice, I would choose this death rather than death from fever, which is painful for days but here a man is well when he goes up the ladder and is out of all pain in a quarter of an hour.’ To other visitors, he played the joker: ‘We are going to heaven, and we are leaving you in the storm.’3

  This may have provided some relief on a day that must otherwise have been sad beyond measure. Children visited their fathers and the prison yard resounded to their sobs. Taking one of Adrian Scroop’s weeping daughters by the hand, Colonel Jones said tenderly, ‘You are weeping for your father, but if he were to become King of France tomorrow, and you had to stay here, would you weep? He is going to reign with the King of Kings, in everlasting glory.’ Jones meant it and may have convinced the girl. To others, he could display a talent for irony: ‘The sledge that will carry me to execution is like Elijah’s fiery chariot, except that it goes through Fleet Street.’

  It was a busy day: the Newgate keepers were well paid by well-wishers taking their leave of men who, for all the displays of public hatred, were part of loving congregations whose members were not ashamed to visit them and report their good cheer. ‘Company so exhausts me that I can write no more’, said Cooke at the end of an uncharacteristically short letter to his brother-in-law. He reported his own trial in one bitter but accurate sentence: the court decided that everything done by Parliament since 1642 was treason, and they were to be the scapegoats for it. He was angry at the unfairness, but not consumed by it: if anything it rekindled the twin Puritan passions – the belief in God and in liberty – that had carried them through the revolution, and carried the revolution through. By dying like the saints in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, they would prove to others, and most importantly to themselves, that they were of ‘the elect’. Buoyed up by their faith and in an ecstasy of anticipation, they were martyrs in waiting who did not have long to wait.

  The sled came for John Carew, as he predicted, on Monday morning. The prisoners yet to be tried had already trooped past his dungeon at dawn, shouting farewells as they went to the Old Bailey. It was a cold and wet morning and the sheriff was late but Carew was smiling as his fetters and chains were removed and he could lead his guards down the Newgate steps to the sledge, a platform drawn by horses to which the prisoner, facing upwards and backwards, was tethered. Carew was cursed and spat upon as he was dragged through Ludgate, Fleet Street and the Strand to Charing Cross. It began to rain as he mounted the ladder but his final speech was defiant and his final prayer exultant, inflaming the Fifth monarchy men who had gathered around the scaffold to see him off. Their republicanism was grounded upon the simple proposition that there could be no King other than King Jesus. The barbaric execution, far from deterring regicide, in their case actually encouraged it. They went direct from the scaffold to their meeting hall in Coleman Street, and planned an armed uprising for 6 January, the anniversary of the Ordinance for the King’s trial. (Some fifty Fifth Monarchy men were killed, or later executed like their heroes: an early reminder that capital punishment incites rather than deters political crime.)

  Meanwhile, back in the Old Bailey, Colonel Daniel Axtell was proving the doughtiest forensic fighter of them all, thanks to his advice from a certain ‘learned judge’ – undoubtedly, Judge Cooke. Sunday had not been spent entirely in prayer, but also in arming Axtell for a legal battle that others had lost too easily. He had first become friendly with John Cooke in Ireland, where his administrative abilities had been recognised by Cromwell and he had been made governor of Kilkenny. He was loathed by royalists because of the avidity of his seizures of their properties in Ireland and by the Presbyterian grandees because he had presented the army’s petition against their ‘rotten members’ back in 1648. Two of the men he had then accused of corruption were now his judges – Denzil Holles and Arthur Annesley.

  Axtell was not guilty of high treason. He had, under orders from Fairfax, commanded the soldiers who kept order in Westminster Hall. He had threatened a masked lady, who had shouted from a gallery that Oliver Cromwell was a traitor, but as he rightly said, ‘If a lady will talk impertinently, it is no treason to bid her hold her tongue.’ He encouraged the soldiers to chant ‘Justice’ as the King was led away on the first day and ‘Execution’ when he was led away on the last, but these shouts were made after the court had risen. He had sent a troop of horse to collect Brandon, the common
hangman, on the day of the King’s execution, but he was still acting under Fairfax’s orders. The prosecution pardoned Hercules Hunks in return for giving evidence that Axtell had urged him to sign the execution warrant, but Axtell denied it and the court refused his request that the other two witnesses be called to contradict Hunks, although Hacker was only a few yards away in the pen of the court (since he was next to be tried) and Phayre was in the Tower.4

  General Fairfax – the regicide commander – had his true role covered up by the prosecution. He was a national hero and he had supported the restoration of Charles II when Monck met him en route to London. So it became a central tenet of royalist faith that all blame for the King’s trial rested with Cromwell, who must therefore be assumed to have duped or detained General Fairfax. To assist this rewriting of history, Clarendon identified Lady Fairfax as the masked lady who shouted ‘Nol Cromwell is a traitor!’ at the King’s trial. Whether the masked lady was indeed the General’s wife is not at all clear: witnesses at Axtell’s trial, including the owner of the gallery who sold her the ticket, did not identify her as Lady Fairfax other than by rumour.5 Axtell, commanding the guard in the body of the court, certainly did not think the interjector was his General’s wife – a woman he must have known well. He had looked up and growled, ‘Who is that whore who disturbs the court?’ and ordered his men to raise their muskets. They lowered them when it became apparent that there was no threat. Axtell sent Sergeant Dendy to make some enquiries at the house which led to the gallery. From a fair reading of all the evidence, Axtell did a reasonable job of keeping order in a potentially dangerous situation. The prosecution case, however, was simply that he commanded the guard which coerced the King, and on that basis alone was guilty of treason.

  Axtell’s defence, crafted by Cooke, was that the army in which he had served obediently throughout the King’s trial was lawfully raised by Parliament in 1642, led first by the Earl of Essex and subsequently – and at all material times – by Lord General Thomas Fairfax. The Long Parliament had raised this army by vote of both Commons and Lords; it was an authority which throughout the civil war had been obeyed in England and recognised by foreign states: its leader was General Fairfax, who gave Axtell his daily orders to keep decorum in the courtroom. As Axtell put it,

  I am only charged for being an officer in the army – if that be so great a crime, I conceive I am not more guilty than the Earl of Essex or Fairfax or the Earl of Manchester or his Excellency Lord Monck who acted by the same authority . . .

  At last: a defendant had stuck it to his judges, and they had no answer. Manchester and Monck, sitting on the bench in front of him, had on Bridgeman’s rulings been traitors. Fairfax had been an arch-traitor, defeating and capturing the King and authorising his trial and execution. Axtell was not going along with the cover-up: he protested that he would have been cashiered for disobeying orders, and probably shot – Fairfax was a harsh disciplinarian, as his merciless executions after the Cork Bush Field and Burford mutinies had shown. But Annesley and Holles rose to his provocative mention of their own hypocrisy. Annesley, an MP excluded by Pride’s Purge, shouted that the Presbyterians would have brought the nation peace by negotiating the Newport Treaty, but for Axtell’s army ‘whose trade it was to live by war – when they had felt too much of the sweet of war they would not suffer the people to enjoy peace’.6 This was an outrageous allegation – the army had acted, rightly or wrongly, to prevent a third civil war, and not to enjoy the ‘sweet’ of further bloodshed.

  Annesley was sitting as a judge, looking down at a wretched prisoner, but malice from the past rose in his gorge: ‘You cannot forget that you yourself were one of the army members that came to offer accusations against the majority of the Commons, calling them “rotten members”.’ Denzil Holles became apoplectic at the memory: ‘. . . you came to the bar of the House – I think it was you yourself, Axtell – and charged eleven of us as rotten members. These men were forced away. You know your general had no commission to do this – it was a violation of your general’s commission.’7 Holles let the cat out of the bag, just for one second: General Fairfax was really to blame. There was coughing and shuffling on the bench, and Bridgeman quickly intervened to change the subject. But there was no doubt that some judges wanted Axtell convicted, not for killing the King but for accusing Holles and Annesley of corruption. Bridgeman told the jurors it was really an open-and-shut case. ‘They met in a traitorous assembly about the King’s death. I shall say no more: you need not I think go from the bar.’ They did not.

  Axtell was replaced by Colonel Hacker, who had been directed to supervise the execution by a warrant, and had made the mistake of holding on to it as a keepsake. His wife, thinking to help her husband, handed it in to the House of Lords – just in time for it to be used to convict him. Hacker scarcely bothered to defend himself: his case was similar to that of Axtell, so there really was no point. The prosecution pardoned Colonel Tomlinson in return for evidence against Hacker, but his testimony disappointed iconographers who wanted to liken Charles’s suffering at the hands of soldiers to that of Christ bullied by the centurians: Tomlinson said that the only inconvenience the King had suffered was that they smoked tobacco in the royal apartments. What had not been discovered, despite a lengthy search, was the warrant Hacker himself had signed appointing the executioner, and he stoutly refused to remember its addressee. Arthur Annesley and Secretary of State Morris, who were sitting as judges, had examined him in the Tower, and both were called to testify to his confession that he had appointed the two executioners and to his obviously false claim that he could not remember any names.7 Even by the standards of this court, it was grotesque for judges to step down from the bench to give sworn evidence against the prisoner they were trying. The jury were directed to convict, which they did without bothering to deliberate.8

  Axtell and Hacker knew the secret the government was desperate to discover: the names of the two masked men, wearing ill-fitting frocks and false grey beards, who had executed the King. The obvious candidate for axe man was Richard Brandon, the public hangman who died back in June 1649, having executed Strafford and Laud and Hamilton. He had confessed to his wife and friends that he beheaded the King. But royalists were unconvinced: their spies had heard Axtell say ‘We would not employ persons of low spirits that we did not know’ and rumours abounded that Cromwell, Peters, Joyce or Pride – or even John Cooke – had undertaken the momentous task, which is why Annesley and Morris had interrogated Cooke and other prisoners in the Tower. Their suspicions eventually settled upon William Hulet, a sergeant in Colonel Hewson’s regiment, who was the next prisoner called up to the bar to be tried.9

  It was at this point that a dramatic change came over the bloody assize: it briefly metamorphosed into a fair trial, of a man in whose guilt and innocence there was genuine interest and real doubt. The prosecution proved that on the day before the King’s death, Colonel Hewson offered £100 and promotion to any of his officers who would act as executioner: all refused, but subsequently Hulet was promoted and Hewson would jokingly call him ‘Father Grey-Beard’. This was circumstantial evidence – little more than regimental gossip. The judges allowed evidence in Hulet’s defence, that Brandon had been brought to Whitehall on the morning of 30 January with his ‘instruments’. Shortly after the execution, troopers delivered him to a boat which took him across the Thames and the hangman ‘shook every joint of him’ when asked by the boatman whether he had wielded the axe. Bridgeman summed up the conflicting evidence with scrupulous fairness and for the first and only time in these trials actually asked the jury to retire to consider their verdict. It was ‘guilty’ of course – the jurors were programmed to convict everyone – but the judges were unconvinced and Hulet was subsequently pardoned, in the hope that evidence might later emerge to confirm the rumours of a more notorious beheadsman.

  The identity of Charles I’s executioner has caused almost as much speculation as the identity of Jack the Ripper. But for those famil
iar with that obnoxious character the English hangman, it is inconceivable that Brandon would have refused a duty that crowned his career. He had been born to the grisly trade and was immersed in its arcane rituals. The army brought him to Whitehall that morning because it wanted the execution to go off without a hitch: Brandon could (and did) execute it faultlessley, while a botched beheading would signify to the groundlings that ‘the great business’ had been wrong from the start. In case Brandon refused to go through with it, there had to be a back-up soldier trusted to take over and complete the job, and in all probability Hulet was the army understudy, the executioner’s disguised assistant. His alibi (that he was under arrest at the time because he had refused scaffold duty) was not credible in light of his subsequent promotion. The axe-man performed with an expertise that could not have been attained without practice: Brandon knew to tuck the King’s hair down under his cap and to bend for forgiveness. His assistant, however, behaved exactly as a soldier who hated Charles would act – grabbing the head and waving it aloft, and forgetting the traditional cry (‘Behold the head of a traitor’) because he had never made it before. Hacker and Axtell knew the truth and could have traded it for their lives: to protect a very ordinary soldier, they remained tight-lipped.

  At Newgate that evening, the regicides were wondering which of them would be next for the scaffold. They would know soon enough: the warden had two death warrants for the morrow and he read them – first to Hugh Peters, who collapsed in despair, and then to John Cooke. They were shackled together and taken down to the dungeon, where condemned men had to spend their last night and where they were permitted to write their last letters. Freelove was a baby: she would read it years later, from a father whose love she would not remember and who would be allowed no grave at which she could mourn, but whose infamy she would bear as ‘daughter of the regicide’. Puritans usually hid emotions behind Polonius-like precepts: John Cooke’s last letter to his daughter was short and sweet: