Chapter 10
The first sight of your handwriting filled my eyes with such floods of tears, that for some hours I could not recover my sight to read it; yet at last to reading I went, but then every line, yea every word called back my tears, and so overwhelmed my affections, that I could not get through it till between one and two of the clock that night.
Colonel John Barkstead, writing to a friend in London, while in hiding in the Netherlands
On 11 October 1660, during the trial of the twenty-nine regicides, Sir Heneage Finch had addressed the court with words of warning for those men who had so far evaded the reach of Charles II: ‘Some eighteen or nineteen have fled from Justice, and wander to and fro; about the world with the Mark of Cain upon them, a perpetual trembling, lest every eye that sees them, and every hand that meets them, should fall on them.’1
Just before his execution, Colonel John Jones had written to a friend: ‘O dear hearts, in what a sad condition are all our dear friends beyond sea, where they may be hunted from place to place, and never be in safety, nor hear the voice of the turtle dove. How much have we got the start of them, for we are at a point, and are now going to heaven.’2 Jones preferred the certainty of imminent death, followed by eternal paradise, to a life on the run.
From his Swiss sanctuary, Ludlow kept track of the whereabouts and fates of his fellow commissioners from the High Court of Justice of January 1649. He learnt that four of the court’s other military men – Colonels Valentine Walton, John Dixwell, John Barkstead and John Okey – had managed to get to apparent safety in Germany.
Walton had served as a captain in his brother-in-law Oliver Cromwell’s regiment: in 1617, aged twenty-four, he had married the sixteen-year-old Margaret Cromwell. The Waltons lost their eldest surviving son at the battle of Marston Moor in 1644, when a Royalist cannonball shattered his leg and desperate surgery could not save him. Around this same time Margaret died, after which Walton married again. In 1646 he co-authored the letter to Parliament from Norfolk, recording sightings of the fugitive Charles I and his chaplain, Michael Hudson, as they attempted to reach the Scots.
A committed republican, Walton had been keen for Charles I to stand trial in 1649. He attended many of the sittings, and signed the death warrant without hesitation. After the royal beheading, Walton became a prominent figure, sitting on all five councils of state during the Commonwealth. He was one of the numerous committed Parliamentarians who fell out with Cromwell when he ruled as Lord Protector. Further disillusioned by what he had seen of the army’s role, in the late 1650s, Walton sided with the House of Commons against the military. He secretly communicated with Monck, but as soon as Monck was made commander-in-chief he took away the Puritan Walton’s command of a cavalry regiment, and gave it, tellingly, to a Catholic Royalist officer instead.
When Walton realised that Monck was working to restore the monarchy, he was quick to flee. According to Ludlow, though, he only ‘narrowly escaped’3 overseas. Walton travelled to Hanau, a walled metropolis on a river near Frankfurt am Main that contained two separate entities. One of these, ‘new Hanau’, established a couple of generations earlier, included a large population of Calvinist émigrés from France and the Spanish Netherlands (modern-day Belgium). Many of these were successful merchants. They demanded and gained religious tolerance and other privileges from the reigning count, Frederick Casimir, on whose land their new settlement stood. The count was a Lutheran, impoverished by the ravages of the Thirty Years War (during which Hanau’s impressive defensive walls withstood its one attempted siege with ease), as well as by his own personal extravagance. Frederick Casimir had travelled to Britain as part of his Grand Tour during the English Civil War, and so understood something of the conflict whose aftershocks had brought this trickle of refugees to his city.
Walton became a burgess of Hanau, which entitled him to the city’s protection; but he remained deeply concerned for his safety. He was troubled by reports that the Royalists were sending forces after the escaped regicides, to assassinate them or take them back to England: he knew that accused men, such as himself, who had fled, were seen to have acknowledged their guilt. They were no longer eligible for trial. If caught, they would simply be formally identified, and then brutally dispatched.
Walton decided that the safest course was no longer to remain as a respected but recognisable guest of this independent German city, but rather to disappear quietly into obscurity. This he succeeded in doing: he became a humble gardener in the Lowlands and is believed to have died soon afterwards, possibly in 1661.
John Dixwell had wrong-footed his enemies in England, pretending that he was on the point of surrendering, while in fact sorting out his finances before fleeing. He was, for now, content to reside in Hanau. Another ‘friend’ in the city was Colonel John Barkstead, the unpopular but effective Lieutenant of the Tower, who was also steward to Oliver Cromwell’s household. The manner in which he profiteered from prisoners in the Tower during his seven years in charge there had scandalised even his own side, and he had been fortunate to escape punishment during Richard Cromwell’s brief Protectorate. After being named as the seventh regicide to be executed, he escaped, but he found exile an unbearable separation from those he loved, replying to a letter from London:
My dear friend,
I am very sensible of my great neglect of that duty which is incumbent upon me . . . that I had not long before this given you an account how it has been with me, and what the Lord hath done for me his poor unworthy servant since I last saw you; that I have been a stranger in a strange land I need not tell you, I am persuaded you will judge favourably of me till you understand how it hath pleased the Lord to deal with me. The truth is, my condition in some respect may resemble the dove that Noah sent out of the Ark that could find no place to set the sole of her foot on, thus hath it been for some months with me, so that I could not with any consistency (because of those that bear an evil will to Zion) write to you; but my dear friend though I have been absent from you in the body, yet I can say truly I have not been so in my spirit; the Lord knows how my soul hath both night and day longed after you and all the rest of my Christian friends in Christ Jesus . . .4
Barkstead eventually settled in Hanau: the free city was an important centre for jewellery manufacture and the working of gold – an attraction for Barkstead, who before the Civil Wars had been, along with his father and brother, a prosperous London goldsmith. Barkstead also had some German roots, his grandfather having emigrated from there to Staffordshire. He felt he could make a home in Hanau, but looked forward to his wife coming to join him there.
John Okey also encouraged his wife to quit England for a new life with him in Hanau. During the Civil War he had risen from being a quartermaster to command of the New Model Army’s sole regiment of dragoons. He and his men had performed with gallantry throughout the Civil Wars, their flanking fire troubling the sweeping charge of Prince Rupert’s Royalist cavalry at Naseby. In the Second Civil War they were among the victorious Parliamentarians at St Fagans, and at the taking of Pembroke Castle. A ready judge at Charles I’s trial, he also signed the death warrant, before helping to oversee the military arrangements surrounding the execution.
Okey was opposed to Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate. In the autumn of 1654 he was one of those to draw up The Humble Petition of Several Colonels of the Army, which was designed to rein in Cromwell’s ambitions and return a parliament free from his meddling. This resulted in Okey’s trial for sedition, and he was sentenced to death. Cromwell commuted this to the loss of his commission, and enforced retirement. During this he lived off the income from the property he had acquired during his years in power. Okey reappeared in public life in 1657, joining those opposed to the calls for Cromwell’s coronation.
There was a brief resurrection of his military career after the fall of Richard Cromwell. At the end of 1659 he was among the soldiers who tried forcibly to stop the secluded members from gaining access to Parliament. Monck lost no time in taking his new regiment from him. Okey’s last stand as a soldier was an ignominious one, fleeing from Major General Lambert’s side when surprised by Ingoldsby near Daventry.
Mrs Barkstead and Mrs Okey had agreed to travel through the Netherlands to Hanau. They knew that theirs was a one-way journey into a lifetime of exile: they would not be able to return to England, once they had settled with their condemned husbands overseas. The two colonels wanted to meet their wives in the Netherlands, in order to reunite with them as quickly as they could, and so as to help them on their way to Germany. They received ‘encouragement to undertake the voyage from a friend whom they had employed to solicit some of the States-General’, a friend wrote, ‘that they might abide for a short time within their jurisdiction unmolested’.5
Okey and Barkstead knew Charles II’s envoy to the Netherlands: he was a former colleague of theirs. A devout Parliamentarian who had aided the soldiers of the New Model Army, George Downing was a figure whose background extended to both sides of the Atlantic. His maternal uncle was John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Downings were encouraged by their relatives to move to Massachusetts, and settled in Salem, where their preacher was Hugh Peters.
In 1640, Downing entered the first year of undergraduates at Harvard College. Two years later he passed out in the inaugural class, taking second place academically. At the end of 1643 he was taken on to Harvard’s teaching staff, receiving £4 per year ‘to read to the Junior pupils as the President shall see fit’.6 But Downing was restless. His thirst for travel led him to become a ship’s chaplain in the Caribbean. From there he crossed to England, arriving in 1646 in poverty – Ludlow recalled that Downing at this time ‘was not worth a groat’7 – to find a nation torn apart by civil war. John Okey had taken the destitute Downing in as chaplain and preacher to his regiment. Reacquainted with Hugh Peters, the men worked alongside one another, urging Parliament’s troops on towards final victory.
Oliver Cromwell recognised Downing’s qualities: in 1649, the year of Charles I’s execution, he made him his scoutmaster-general in Scotland. There he directed Parliamentary spies, gathering intelligence and transmitting it to London. He also used his powerful position to start the building of that personal wealth which was to become one of his most remarkable achievements. This quest was assisted by his marriage to Lady Frances Howard, an aristocratic beauty.
In January 1657, the first public proposal was made to have Cromwell take the Crown. It was George Downing who seconded the motion with enthusiasm. Later that year, perhaps in gratitude, Cromwell gave him the important diplomatic role of Agent in the Netherlands. In August 1658, Downing was writing to London, with terror, of rumours that Walter Whitford, the Royalist who had murdered Dr Dorislaus, had returned to The Hague to kill him.
Downing’s self-preservation and canniness made him a speedy defector to the Prince of Wales in the run-up to the Restoration. He wanted Charles to know that he ‘wished the promoting of your Majesty’s service, which he confessed he had endeavoured to obstruct . . . alleging to be engaged in a contrary party by his father who was banished to New England, where he . . . had sucked in principles that since his reason had made him see were erroneous’.8 As proof of his newly Royalist loyalties, Downing forwarded a letter he had that day received in code from Thurloe, Cromwell’s intelligence chief, which contained fresh and secret military information. He was happy to turn his back on a failing cause.
Whatever Charles II thought of this old enemy, who had revealed himself to be a shameless and opportunistic turncoat, he was too useful to punish, too cunning to leave unemployed. The new King kept Downing in the Netherlands as his own man, hoping to profit from the diplomat’s underhand effectiveness. Downing had shared some of his successes with his secretary, the diarist Samuel Pepys, who recorded of his master: ‘He had so good spies, that he hath had the keys taken out of [the Dutch leader] De Witt’s pocket when he was a-bed, and his closet opened and the papers brought to him and left in his hands for an [hour], and carried back and laid in the place again and the keys put in his pocket again.’9 Downing was a man who would stop at nothing to achieve his goals.
Fleeing regicides were passing into and through the Netherlands. Thomas Chaloner, Marten’s fellow bon viveur among the ranks of prim Puritans who had signed away Charles I’s life, had fled England on learning that he was to be denied the mercy of the Act of Indemnity. Dutch sympathisers wrote of him at this stage as being ‘an old man, full of grey hairs; a thick, square man’.10 His age and poor health meant he enjoyed only the briefest of freedoms that summer, dying in mid-August 1660. Chaloner’s body was committed to the graveyard of the Old Church at Middelburg, the assumed name of ‘George Sanders’ carved on his gravestone in order to protect his remains from desecration.
Meanwhile, Sir Michael Livesay, who had been an MP and a regimental commander before sitting every day on the High Court and signing Charles’s death warrant, was known to be in the Netherlands in the autumn of 1660: reports that he had then been pulled apart by a murderous mob of vengeful Royalists proved to be incorrect, but there was no doubt that he was somewhere on Dutch territory, in hiding.
Downing lay ready to pounce on any of Chaloner and Livesay’s comrades, should they stray within his reach. He was nervous of revealing his plans to the Dutch because he felt sure they would block the abduction of foreign refugees on their soil. ‘I am very much afraid lest that if I should go to De Witt, or any other, for an order to seize them,’ he wrote home in early July 1661, ‘it should somehow or other be discovered; for I know the humour of these people; and therefore if I might have my own way, I would in such a case employ three or four resolved English officers, and seize them, and then immediately give notice to the burgomasters of the place, and States General. Or, if the King would adventure, without more ado, if possible, to get them aboard some ship. Let me know the King’s pleasure herein.’11
A week later his network of spies had sent reports of the scurrying regicide activity along and around the corridors he controlled. It became clear they were heading for Germany: ‘Dendy is yet at Rotterdam and I am put in hopes of finding Corbet. I hear that Okey and some others of them are at Strasbourg, and have purchased their freedom there publicly; and that Hewson is sick, but intends thither also with one or two more by the first occasion.’12
Edward Dendy had followed his father as serjeant-at-arms to the Commons. On 8 January 1649 he had proclaimed the establishment of Charles I’s trial. Miles Corbet was a constitutional lawyer who had served as Lord Chief Baron of Ireland. He had meanwhile been one of Norfolk’s MPs for thirty-seven years. It was in that capacity that Corbet had written to Parliament, in 1646, relating sightings of Charles I in disguise with his chaplain, after the King had slipped away from beleaguered Oxford. A busy bureaucrat, Corbet had been an effective chairman of the Committee of Examinations, helping to suppress Royalist propaganda news-sheets. That, and his chairing of the committee that drew up the capital prosecution against Archbishop Laud, had marked out Corbet as one of a handful of fellow Parliamentarians (the others were Cromwell, Ireton, Scott, Marten and Peters) subjected to those publications’ coarsest broadsides. Corbet’s sallow complexion prompted his attackers to virulent anti-Semitism, calling him a ‘bull-headed, splay-footed member of the circumcision’, and a ‘bacon-faced Jew’.13 The fact that Corbet was the most devout of Christians was irrelevant: in the minds of bigots, his physical appearance fitted that of the stereotype of the Jew.
Although appointed to the High Court of Justice, Corbet had refused to sit in judgment of the King during its preliminary phases, arguing against the trial’s validity in law. But a verse from the Book of Revelation kept coming to him, pricking his conscience: ‘The fearful and unbelieving shall have their part in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone.’14 Corbet felt compelled to answer his summons to sit as a commissioner, and on the day of sentencing he went to assure himself as to the legality of the proceedings. Satisfied that all was in order, he added his signature to the death warrant.
Colonel John Hewson, a former shoemaker, was a fellow signatory. He had served in Ireland with uncompromising vigour, losing an eye during the siege of Kilkenny in 1650, before being made governor of Dublin later that year. In 1659 he had become deeply unpopular for attacking demonstrators in London when they called for a free Parliament: some had died during his troops’ heavy-handed suppression of the protest, and Hewson was blamed.
That August, after some delay, Downing secured a blank arrest warrant from the representatives of the Dutch States-General. By the time he was ready to use it, his quarry had scattered. Dendy had slipped away, alerted, as Downing had predicted, by powerful Dutch friends that his capture was imminent. Dendy would join the growing band of regicides settling in Switzerland. Corbet temporarily disappeared. Hewson melted away for ever, the place and time of his eventual death unrecorded.
Clarendon wrote consolingly to Downing: ‘I do not know that you could do more than you did in the case of Dendy; yet it is plain that upon the granting of any such warrant notice will be given them [the regicides]; but I like your design well,’ the chancellor urged, ‘of causing any of them to be arrested, and afterwards they will not so easily get from you.’15
Confident that its time would come, Downing filed away the blank arrest warrant for future use.
John Okey, ‘little thinking,’ as a friend wrote, ‘that his New England tottered chaplain whom he clothed, and fed at his table, and who dipped with him in his own dish should prove like the Devil among the twelve to his Lord and Master’,16 assumed that he and Barkstead would be left alone during their travels through the Netherlands. He quickly checked through an intermediary that this would be the case, and received assurances of their wellbeing from Downing, who claimed that he had no orders to look out for them.
The travellers were also confident in the Dutch as guarantors of safe passage. Theirs was a country that had come into being after ridding itself of the oppressive rule of the Spanish – its prize for enduring, then winning, the bruising Eighty Years’ War. They prided themselves on their tolerance, and they enriched themselves through trade. The Dutch were famed for putting commerce before all else – and that included not bothering themselves overmuch with the religious, political or criminal concerns of their neighbours. Okey and Barkstead were unaware, however, that at the time of their expedition, the Dutch were interested in forming a trade alliance with Charles II’s England. To secure this, they might be prepared to sacrifice something of their famed reputation for tolerance.
Ignorant of the danger they were in, Okey and Barkstead started out for Delft, the southern Dutch city that was still being rebuilt after an enormous, accidental gunpowder explosion in 1654: more than a hundred citizens had been killed, and thousands injured. The two men set off expecting a speedy reunion with their wives.
On reaching Delft the pair settled into their lodgings. There they were visited by Miles Corbet, happy to see friendly faces after spending much of his time in exile in prayer, meditation and reading the scriptures. During those times of quiet he had examined his conscience about his role in Charles I’s execution – an event he referred to as ‘that necessary and public Act of Justice’. A chronicler later recorded of Corbet that ‘he did never repent at all that he had a hand in it, nor, after all the searchings of heart about it, did see cause to do so, when at any time he had the most serious and calm reflections upon it’.17
Corbet would also recall the lack of food that he endured during his time in hiding in the Netherlands, ‘and yet,’ he claimed, ‘I found God all sufficient to me, even in my short commons.’18 More challenging was the fear of being discovered, which meant that he ‘did the best to secure myself, and was careful not wilfully to run into any danger’.19 As part of his strategy of self-preservation he had not dared to send a letter to his wife for eight months. He went to see Bradshaw and Okey to learn how he could safely communicate with her in future, without compromising his liberty.
Corbet was so happy to be reunited with these English friends that he delayed his planned journey home that evening, and stayed with them late into the night. The three men were at last saying their farewells when Downing and his henchmen pounced: cornered, the fugitives were quickly rounded up, placed in chains and assaulted by their captors, before being escorted to prison. There they were again treated roughly, their wrists and ankles manacled, before they were committed to a dungeon, where the only place to sleep was on the wet floor.
Early the next afternoon a delegation of Dutch politicians came to visit them. Their leader conducted the examination, asking them to explain why they had been taken, and what their roles had been in England before their self-imposed exile. Barkstead answered most of these questions. He spoke clearly, convincingly and well, appealing to his audience’s liberal, republican, sympathies. The three regicides were relieved to hear the Dutchmen confirm that they would be granted a public hearing in Delft, before there was even a possibility of their being handed over to their Royalist compatriots for extradition.
Downing, though, had other ideas – he would later be called by the French first minister ‘the greatest quarreller of all the diplomats in Europe’20 – and now he displayed his combative streak. Having finally caged three of his prey, he was not prepared to contemplate their release. He bullied the Dutch officials, insisting on his jurisdiction over men who had killed his royal master’s father, and insinuating dark consequences if he did not get his way. He pointed to his blank arrest warrant, and insisted it had been granted him precisely for this sort of eventuality. The Dutch capitulated, a disbelieving friend of the regicides writing, ‘By order from the States-General at two o’clock in the morning [the three men were] taken out of prison, and thrust into a vessel lying at Delft, and from thence conveyed into one of the King of England’s frigates provided for the purpose, and so in a few days were brought for England, where they arrived at the Tower of London upon the Lord’s Day in the evening.’21 There, they were led to separate cells.
Barkstead was treated vindictively. The Royalists enjoyed the delicious vengeance of placing the hated former Lieutenant of the Tower, who had been such a cruel gaoler to their comrades, in despicable accommodation. He managed to smuggle out a letter to a friend, detailing the conditions in which he was kept:
I being now a close prisoner in the Tower, in one of the (as they conceive) meanest and securest Prison lodgings, in which when it rains I have no place to sit dry but in a high window, being attended with a life guard of two warders and two soldiers day and night, and denied the use of pen, ink, and paper; so that what I write is so by stealth, and that so by bits, that I am forced sometimes before I have writ two lines to tear what I have written, and with much trouble to secure my paper, ink and pen; but yet I have adventured on a line or two to you, to let you know that I received your welcome letter.22
Barkstead’s health soon faltered because of the rain and cold, but he told his friend that his resolve was such, that ‘the dungeon, chains, bolts and manacles have not had the least hardness in them; no, I must say again, through free Grace, the Lord hath not only made them easy, but pleasant, yea kickings and buffetings, when in irons, by some of Downing’s men, yet the Lord strengthened me’.23
On 16 April 1662, the prisoners were transported up the Thames to the bar of the King’s Bench in Westminster for judgment. This area had formed part of the courtroom for Charles I’s trial. The three were asked in turn to confirm their identities, which was the only formality required before sentencing. Yet, when it was put to them that they were the Barkstead, Corbet and Okey who did ‘maliciously, wickedly, and traitorously imagine, contrive or endeavour to murder the late King’, the lawyer Corbet said he could not admit to being one who had acted maliciously to Charles I, therefore he must not be the man mentioned in the charge. He offered that there must be many others who also shared those names, and maybe one of those had possessed the malice referred to?
The court, keen to be done with its work, summoned a jury. The three accused were not allowed to challenge any of its members, since this was not a trial for treason, but rather a process to prove their identities. The jury promptly ascertained that the three well-known men before them were indeed the signatories of Charles I’s death warrant named in the charge. Judgment was given, and the sentence of hanging, drawing and quartering passed. The condemned were returned to the Tower to await imminent death.
That day a friend visited Okey to find him ‘not in the least disquieted’ by his sentence, ‘but thankfully owned the Providence of God in bringing them from the place where they were beyond the sea, to their present condition, wherein he professed himself to be much satisfied, and declared he had rather lay down his life here, than to have been buried in another nation’.24
There were moments of profound sadness. Okey was refused permission to see the daughter from his first marriage on the day of his sentencing. He wrote to her:
My dear daughter,
. . . I am something troubled at the cruelty of wicked men that will not let me see you in such a day as this is; but it’s not to be wondered at, for you know what the Scripture saith, The mercies of the ungodly are cruelty itself. But blessed be our good God, though they can keep our relations from us, they cannot keep us from coming to our heavenly father; within a few days we shall be out of their hands, where they shall afflict us no more . . . I thank you for your love to me as much as if I had seen you: and although we are kept one from another in the body, yet we are not so in the spirit, but do rejoice in one another.
Okey asked her to pray for him to be brave at his end, ‘that I may not dishonour the Lord, nor bring a reproach to the glorious Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, and his cause, which the Lord hath from Heaven so gloriously owned, by scattering of his enemies so often as he hath in the sight of the sun, in bringing many of them to justice, so that the sound of it is gone through the whole world’.25 After apologising for not being able to leave her an inheritance, and having asked her to be kind to his wife (his daughter’s stepmother), and a good example to her children, he signed off: ‘Your loving father, in bonds for the Cause of God and his People, till death.’26
Barkstead admitted to those visiting him in his final days that he had been deeply troubled by ‘the greatness of the sufferings I was yet to go through’, but he too found solace in religion. He settled on biblical passages that made him accept his human weakness, and left his heart ‘filled with ravishing joys and rejoicings’.27 Later in his brief imprisonment he was recorded as saying:
Certainly if I had known the comforts of this sweet communion with God in a prison before, I had run to a prison long ago. If I had suffered when my brethren did suffer, I had had little or no blood in my body to have spilt for Jesus Christ in this good Cause; but God carried me into Germany, and there made us to sow a good seed, which will never die; and now God hath brought me back again, with more strength to suffer for his name and cause; indeed, the Lord hath made me in some measure now fit to go through sufferings for him, and it is indeed He alone who hath done this.28
Barkstead looked back with regret and shame on his time as Lieutenant of the Tower, and was particularly conscious of his cruelty to Fifth Monarchy prisoners. One of the points he was keenest to pass on to his friends in his final days was the need to accept all Christian beliefs, and to be free from religious prejudice. He felt that the intensity of his ordeal – comprising arrest, close imprisonment and imminent death – was granting him a clear, divine perspective that he needed to share, as part of his legacy, with those still caught up in earthly concerns.
The night before his execution, Barkstead and his wife dined with their family and friends. Mrs Barkstead asked her husband to wash his hands before eating; Barkstead refused, telling her that the next day would see his hands impaled on spikes above the City gates, ‘and then the rain would save him that labour’.29 Then he asked another of his relatives to air what he referred to as the last shirt he would ever wear. The humour may have been macabre, but it helped him to make the grim reality of what would happen the next day somehow acceptable.
Meanwhile, sympathetic pamphleteers had Corbet justifying his case to the end. ‘The day before his death,’ Ludlow recorded, ‘he assured his friends, that he was so thoroughly convinced of the justice and necessity of that action for which he was to die, that if the things had been yet entire, and to do, he could not refuse to act as he had done, without affronting his reason, and opposing himself to the dictates of his conscience.’30 Aged sixty-seven, Corbet told friends that he was old enough to be approaching the inevitability of a natural death, and pointed out that he was lucky to have outlived many of his contemporaries: ‘Alas! I might have died long since of some noisome disease, or lingering sickness; might have lain long weltering, and at last been as it were smothered to death in a feather-bed, and perhaps with the loss of my senses too, and the use of my reason and memory, as it happens to many that die in age.’ Instead, he was set ‘to become a seasonable, holy and lively sacrifice unto God: and as for the pain of it, I reckon it far less than what is usually felt in an ordinary sickness.’31 When friends suggested that he give the executioner a bribe, so that he would act with compassion, Corbet would have none of it. ‘Let him be as cruel as he will,’ he said, ‘the more bloody he is, the better for me.’32 He calculated that an angry hangman would do his work roughly, and so speed him to his death.
As for his capture, which had led to his return to England, he claimed to welcome it. ‘Had I continued abroad,’ he said, ‘I might have died in obscurity, and have been carried out into some hole in a dust basket, where my death would have signified nothing.’ He had just one concern: ‘All my desire is, that I may not faint, nor any way dishonour the Cause that I am to suffer for, by my weak and unworthy carriage, which I confess I am afraid of, and therefore earnestly desire the prayers of friends on my behalf, that God will be pleased to support me, and carry me well through this so hard and difficult task.’33
Corbet slept until two in the morning the night before his day of execution, followed by two further, brief naps before his wife, Mary, appeared in his cell at six o’clock. She had endured much on account of her husband’s allegiances, having long been libelled by enemy propagandists, who enjoyed portraying the leading Parliamentarians’ wives (particularly Oliver Cromwell’s wife, Elizabeth) as voraciously promiscuous. Even before the King’s trial, a Royalist writer had taunted Corbet with the pretence that he knew a man who would ‘rather go to your house than a bawdy house, because it is a great deal cheaper’.34
The evening before her husband’s execution Mary Corbet stayed in a room in the Tower, kept awake all night by her dread of what the morning must bring. The couple prayed together for an hour, before breakfast arrived. According to one account, Corbet drank a glass of burnt claret, then picked at the food on offer, concluding with a hardboiled egg; he threw its shell away with the words, ‘Farewell, creature comforts, I shall use you no more.’35
At eight o’clock in the morning of 19 April – just three days after their trial, and thirty-six hours since they had been informed of the time of their execution – the prisoners heard the rattle on the cobblestones as their sledges arrived in the courtyard, the sound of the horses’ hooves resonating round the walls.
Barkstead, who had been chosen to be the first to meet the hangman at Tyburn, asked his wife to help button up his cloak. He was led to the door of the lieutenant’s lodgings, where he had once lived in supreme command of the Tower with an annual income of £2,000. Without looking at his former seat of power, Barkstead allowed himself to be secured to the sledge, then headed off for his degrading and agonising end.
The colonel maintained the appearance of brave and proud acceptance throughout his final hours: ‘When he was brought to confirm with the testimony of his blood that cause for which he had fought, he performed that part with cheerfulness and courage, no way derogating from the character of a soldier and a true Englishman.’36 As his sledge turned out of the Tower he looked back and spied his wife in a window above, waving at him with her handkerchief. He removed his hat in a final farewell, shouting up to her, ‘To Heaven, to Heaven, to Heaven, my Love, and [I] leave you in the storm!’37
Barkstead was the victim of much abuse throughout his final journey, and it continued while he stood on the cart awaiting his two companions at the place of death. A Royalist lord was heard to shout out, ‘Goodbye, Barkstead, goodbye!’ in a tone of mock distress, to which the colonel replied, ‘Sir, you are no gentleman, to triumph over a dying man.’ Another onlooker – one of the King’s courtiers – ridiculed him for taking fortifying swigs from a flask of alcohol. ‘O Barkstead,’ he jeered, ‘you have got the comforter!’38 Barkstead countered by saying that it was God who was his true comforter.
One of the guards escorting Barkstead thought he looked so ill that day that he suspected the prisoner had poisoned himself. This soldier shouted out, ‘He is almost dead; if he be not quickly hanged, he will be dead before: therefore hang him, hang him, before he be quite dead: see how he looks!’39 But the hangman said he would hang the trio together. Barkstead waited, clearly unwell, till his comrades joined him.
Okey was the first to arrive. As he dismounted his sledge at Tyburn, a friend asked him how he was feeling. ‘I bless the Lord, I am very well,’ he replied, holding up his hand, ‘and do no more value what I am now going about, than this straw. I have made many a charge in my time,’ the veteran colonel continued, ‘but now I have but one charge more to make, and then I shall be at rest.’40 Half an hour after Barkstead’s arrival the hurdle bearing Corbet drew up. He was clutching a Bible, and wearing new gloves – a final gift from his wife. She had clung to him as he had been summoned from the Tower crying, ‘Oh my dear husband! My precious husband! What an husband shall I now lose! Whom I have not prized, whom I have not improved as I ought and might have done!’ Corbet had tears in his eyes as he said his last consoling words to her, before turning to his son. He held the young man’s hands, and blessed him. Corbet asked a close friend to stay behind, to comfort his wife and son. He then turned on his heels and strode purposefully towards his sledge, eager to escape the howls of distress of those he loved most, and determined to see through his terrible ordeal.
There were so many come to see the executions that the condemned men had each been forced to get off their sledges and be escorted by foot through the throng, to the executioner’s cart. There, their hands were tied with black ribbons, their wigs were removed, and caps were placed on their heads. They were told that they would be permitted to address their final words and prayers to the crowd, but that any attempted justification of what they had done would not be tolerated. The three men stood in the executioner’s cart, onto which others had clambered, eager to catch their last words.
The speeches were long enough to irritate the sheriff, who was keen to be done with his duties. Okey asked forgiveness from any he had ever wronged. He clearly remained deeply perplexed by Downing’s hand in his capture and death. ‘Whoever hath proceeded against my life,’ he said, near the conclusion of his speech, ‘either in England or Holland (for there was one – who formerly was my chaplain – that did pursue me to the very death, where I remained but two nights, and was going back again, for I had done my business). But both him, and all others upon the Earth, I forgive as freely as I desire the Lord to forgive me. I have no malice either to judge or jury, but desire that the Lord would forgive them; as also those in Holland, that sent us over, contrary to what they did engage to my friends.’41
Okey assured the crowd witnessing his end that, if he had as many lives as he had hairs on his head, he would happily risk all of them for the good of his cause. But he also admitted his crime, and encouraged all present to submit to the returned house of Stuart.
When the three men had completed their speeches and their public prayers, the executioner told all others to dismount the cart. He then pulled the prisoners’ caps down over their eyes, and waited for them all to lift their hands as a sign that they were ready for the execution to take place. As the cart was drawn away, Barkstead shouted: ‘Lord Jesus, receive our souls!’
There were none of the triumphant cries that had accompanied earlier executions of the regicides. Chroniclers commented rather that the overriding emotion at the death of these three captured fugitives was one of great sadness.
They remained hanging for fifteen minutes, before being cut down and quartered in the same order that they had earlier left the Tower: Barkstead first, followed by Okey, and then Corbet. In late afternoon their bodies were taken to Newgate, where they were boiled. Barkstead’s head was placed on a spike overlooking the Tower of London, where once he had been supreme, but, more recently, where he had been its lowliest prisoner.
As a reward for Okey’s welcome message of obedience to the restored monarchy, the King allowed his family to have his head and quartered body returned for Christian burial, where they thought fit. His widow planned to have the colonel interred in Stepney, next to his first wife, in a family vault that he had bought as his final resting place. But, while Okey’s butchered carcass rested near to Newgate prison, awaiting its final journey, news of his funeral buzzed through the City, and a vast crowd (sympathetic pamphleteers claimed improbably that it numbered 20,000 people) assembled. Some were curious, others respectful, while still more were nostalgic for the age of the republic. The throng threatened to turn into an immense and unruly procession that would trail the colonel’s remains all the way to his tomb. This support for a slain traitor led to consternation at court, and a swift about turn by the King.
Secretary of State Nicholas wrote to the sheriffs of London, ‘The King having observed that the relations of Col. Okey, abusing his clemency, are making preparations for a solemn funeral, and intend a great concourse of people to attend it, desires that his head and quarters when given to his relations, be privately interred in the Tower, and that the names of those who have designed the said solemnity and tumultuous concourse be inquired into.’42 The five parts of Colonel Okey were buried that night in the grounds of the Tower of London, in a private ceremony conducted by Mr Glendon, the parish priest of Barking.
Charles II’s advisers could not help but note the public display of support at Okey’s planned funeral. The grisly ritual of hanging, drawing and quartering had been acceptable in October 1660, when the great majority wanted to celebrate the royal return, and were happy to send unpopular republicans to die in the most terrible manner. However, Bishop Burnet, who was a young man during the early 1660s, wrote much later that:
In one thing the temper of the nation appeared to the contrary to severe proceedings. For, though the Regicides were at that time odious beyond all expression, and the trials and executions of the first that suffered were run to by vast crowds, and all people seemed pleased with the sight, yet the odiousness of the crime grew at last to be so much flattened by the frequent executions, and most of those who suffered dying with such firmness and show of piety, justifying all they had done, not without a seeming joy for their suffering on that account, that the King was advised not to proceed farther, at least not to have the scene so near the Court at Charing Cross.43
Charles remained determined to make the killers pay for his father’s death. As the public scaffold was producing a succession of sympathetic martyrs, he began to look to other means by which he could catch up with the remaining fugitives.