by Simon Parke
Epilogue
A wood-turner called Nehemiah Wallington sat in the London suburb of Clerkenwell.
He’d made his way back from the execution with little difficulty. The promised disturbance had not occurred; there’d been no rage or riot. If anything, an air of politeness had suffused the streets, solidarity with the moment and those who had shared it. He’d been one of those forced up to the Charing Cross by soldiery, after which he’d turned right down the Strand, marvelling at the new houses appearing. How long before little Clerkenwell was consumed by this leviathan of a city?
But for all that he’d witnessed and all that he saw, Nehemiah had walked home with contentment in his bones, and now sat with his pipe, looking again at the last recorded words of his brother-in-law Gerard. Gerard had been murdered eight years ago, in 1641, by the Irish rebels – rebels supported by Charles. And shortly before his death, Gerard wrote this: ‘If the sundry rumours prove true, that these godless rebels act with the king’s commission, then surely the Lord will not suffer the king, nor his posterity, to reign.’
And so it had come to pass.
Wallington put down his pipe and gazed through his small window on the street below. It was like a Sabbath out there, like the Lord’s day: quiet conversations and no trade, apart from the preachers and pie-sellers. He picked up a notebook and wet his quill. He was a keen recorder of events, a man of many notebooks. And in his book today, he wrote: ‘30 January 1649, King Charles beheaded on a scaffold at Whitehall.’
In himself, he was weary of politics and hardly for parliament or army any more. He’d once been enthused and certain, but no longer; he was for no one these days. Yet the killing of the king was just settlement, this was quite clear – both judgement and prophecy fulfilled.
‘Rest in peace, Gerard,’ he said, as he closed his little book. That was enough writing for today.
Author’s notes
Charles I: No one could accuse Charles I of pandering to the public. In his endless twists, turns and deceits, he remained constant in one thing: the divinity of his appointment and the divine rights this gave him. Death made both a martyr and a saint out of Charles; his spiritual work Eikon Basilke became a bestseller and a spiritual classic for royalists.
His two youngest children, Princess Elizabeth and Henry, Duke of Gloucester, remained prisoners in England after his death. In August 1650 they were taken to Carisbrooke Castle where their father had been held. Elizabeth fell ill after being caught in the rain on the castle bowling green, built for her father’s entertainment, and died in September 1650 aged fifteen. Henry continued in captivity until 1653 when he was allowed to join his family abroad. Charles’ eldest son Charles returned to England from European exile in 1660, when the monarchy was restored to much cheering in the streets of London . . . though the journaller Nehemiah Wallington will not have been pleased.
Colonel Robert Hammond was replaced as governor of the Isle of Wight by Colonel William Sydenham, whose watch would prove less interesting than that of his predecessor. Hammond disappears from view in the early years of the Commonwealth, after the king’s execution. But perhaps surprisingly, given their differing views on the captivity of Charles, he and Cromwell appear to have remained on good terms. In August 1654, Cromwell – by this time Lord Protector – made him a member of the Irish Council. Hammond travelled to Dublin to take up his post but died of a fever there in October 1654.
Jane Whorwood suffered for her close relations to Charles, which became an embarrassment to all. The royalist cause wanted a martyr, not an adulterer, and so Jane found herself erased without mercy from the royal records. She returned home to Holton Hall in 1651 after a brief imprisonment, but in 1657 Jane left home permanently, fearing for her life. Brome, her abusive husband, went on to become an MP.
Jane died in 1684 aged seventy-two. Concerning her support for the royalist cause (wholly unacknowledged during the Restoration period), she wrote: ‘My travels, the variety of accidents (and especially dangers) more become a Romance than a letter.’ Indeed.
Whorwood’s significance has been overlooked, and it lay not in her presence at Henry Ireton’s wedding. Her work for the king was tireless and remarkable, in both energy and inventiveness, and for many years her affair with the king was an under-reported secret. But she also had a role in his downfall. Like Henrietta Maria, she colluded with Charles in his stubborn belief that he could simply go on bluffing and eluding his parliamentary and army enemies. She offered him a parallel universe in which to scheme; but perhaps not one that touched reality.
Tragedy also touched her only son, Brome. On 5 September 1657, aged twenty-two, wishing to travel with a friend from Hampshire to the Isle of Wight, he ‘did hire a vessel that was leaky, which sunk by the time they were halfway in their journey’, and was drowned. Jane was buried at Holton Hall, with her husband Brome and his mistress, Katharine.
With the death of Charles, Oliver Cromwell became the single most powerful man in England. He went on to become Lord Protector in 1653, and proved a benevolent ruler to those who opposed him, never vindictive. (Unless you were Irish.) He was also a major player in the cause of religious toleration, particularly the Jews – though he did struggle to tolerate parliament. He was finally offered the crown by parliament in 1657. There was much in him that favoured acceptance, but he was concerned how it would sit with his army support and so declined.
He died the following year and was given a magnificent state funeral, but matters soon turned sour. Charles II, on his accession, had his body dug up and hanged at Tyburn. After hanging ‘from morning till four in the afternoon’ his body was cut down and the head placed on a twenty-foot spike above Westminster Hall. In 1685, a storm broke the pole holding Cromwell’s head, after which it fell – literally – into the hands of private collectors and museums, until 25 March 1960, when it was buried at Sidney Sussex College in his homeland of Cambridge.
Elizabeth Cromwell was the daughter of Sir James Bourchier of Felsted in Essex, who was a wealthy London leather merchant. When Oliver married her, he was marrying into money he didn’t have himself. Their marriage appears a warm one, evidenced in the caring letters Cromwell wrote to her while away on his military campaigns. The royalists hated her as an extension of her husband, accusing her of drunkenness, adultery and frugality. Only the third slander possessed any truth and Elizabeth would have regarded it as a compliment; she had no wish to emulate the spendthrift Henrietta Maria.
If Cromwell was ambitious – a matter for debate – Elizabeth was not. She was keen that her husband place one of Charles’ sons on the throne, rather than himself. Her feelings on the matter were such that most of her offspring were royalists as well; there’s no evidence for the charge that she was ambitious for her husband.
After the death of Oliver, she retired to Wales until things settled down, after which she returned to England, moving to the house of her son-in-law at Norborough in Northamptonshire, where she died in November 1665.
Henry Ireton: In 1647, amid heated exchanges at the Putney debates, the Levellers accused Ireton of servility to the king, denouncing his dealings with Charles as a betrayal of the soldiers and people of England. But after the second civil war, Ireton’s disdain for the king was the single most powerful force in England. In the autumn of 1648, with Cromwell up north and Fairfax dithering, it was Ireton who set in motion events that led to the trial and execution of Charles.
He was appointed Lord-Deputy in Ireland by Cromwell during the Commonwealth, but, exhausted by military campaigns, he contracted a fever and died in Limerick, aged forty. His body was returned to England for a state funeral in Westminster Abbey, where a grand monument was raised in his memory. Many Puritans were offended at this extravagance and probably the austere Ireton would have agreed. The monument was destroyed after the Restoration, and Ireton’s corpse was exhumed and hanged at Tyburn in 1661, along with the bodies of Cromwell and Bradshawe. Hi
s head was exhibited at Westminster for at least twenty-four years.
He had four children with Bridget, who all survived into adult life. On his death, Bridget married another one of Cromwell’s officers and confidants, Charles Fleetwood.
William Lilly was a controversial character with powerful friends and enemies, a penniless northerner who walked south to fame and fortune. He attracted the attention of many MPs through Sir Bulstrode Whitelocke, to whom he dedicated his book Christian Astrology, published in 1647.
Christian Astrology is one of the classic texts for horary astrology, which either predicts future events or investigates hidden elements in current affairs, based on an astrological chart. Jane Whorwood went to him for advice concerning Charles’ escape plans, as well as seeking information about the procurement of acid. She was either unaware of his political leanings or happy to ignore them.
When his first wife Ellen died, he remarried – but in this matter his astrological foresight failed him. He described his second wife, Jane, as ‘of the nature of Mars’. The unhappy marriage lasted until her death in 1654, at which Lilly ‘shed no tears’. His third marriage, to Ruth Needham, was the happiest of all, she being ‘signified in my Nativity by Jupiter in Libra and . . . so totally in her condition, to my great Comfort’.
After the Restoration, Lilly quickly fell from grace, his politics not helping his cause. He predicted the Great Fire of London in 1666; that may not have helped either, for some thought it made him a suspect in starting it.
Sir William Hopkins was bankrupted by his hospitality to Charles and his court during the Newport negotiations; in consequence, he had to sell his house and leave the island. He did not live to see the Restoration of the monarchy. His house later became a pub, the Sun Inn.
After his ceaseless attempts to free Charles from Carisbrooke, Henry Firebrace (a conflation of two characters in Charles’ service) returned to a quieter life in the service of the Earl of Denbigh. After the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Charles II made him Clerk of the Kitchen. In 1689 Henry retired to Stoke Golding, where he died in 1691 aged seventy-one.
John Bradshawe, despite remaining an ardent republican, fell out with Cromwell during the protectorate years. He disagreed with Cromwell’s treatment of parliament and was therefore excluded as an MP, until his final year. He died in 1659 of malaria. On his deathbed he said that if called upon to try the king again he would be ‘the first man in England to do it’, despite his wife being unhappy with the idea. His dead body received the same treatment as those of Cromwell and Ireton at the Restoration.
Only two of the regicides were pardoned in the Restoration, one of whom was Richard Ingoldsby. Remarkably, Charles II chose to believe him when he said that Cromwell had forced his hand to sign. Others in our story were not so fortunate. Thomas Harrison, the preacher Hugh Peter and the prosecutor John Cook were all hanged, drawn and quartered. Isaac Ewer, another signatory, died in 1651 in Ireland.
Many regicides fled to Europe, where some of them were murdered. Edmund Ludlow was the last surviving regicide, dying in Vevey, Switzerland in 1692.
The following liberties have been taken with known history.
While Hammond, keen to improve his table, did employ his mother in the kitchens at Carisbrooke after the arrival of the king, there is no evidence that he sacked her. She was a staunch Independent, however, and may well have been less accommodating of the king than her son.
We do not know that Cromwell made contact with Charles after the trial, although it would be strongly in character to do so. There was no opponent or adversary he did not seek reconciliation with.
Equally, we are not certain that Jane made contact with Charles after the trial, but there is strong hearsay to suggest that a meeting did take place. It would not have been a meeting well recorded by royalists, for obvious reasons.
Jane’s post-trial conversations with Hammond and Cromwell are also imagined.
The only fictitious character in this story is Anthony Wood, the spymaster.