Chapter 15
And they acted their parts like men; they set themselves against the unruly wilfulness, the rage, the secret designs of an embittered King; they held the common liberty and safety before their own.
John Milton, ‘Defence of the People of England’, 1651
Of the regicides whose fates we can follow to the end, Edmund Ludlow was the last survivor. From time to time there had been other attempts on his freedom and on his life; but the wily old soldier’s instinct to remain in familiar territory, surrounded by faces he knew, rather than flee into the unknown and be at the mercy of anonymous assassins, proved a sound strategy to the end.
In late 1680 he learnt of the death of Henry Marten. Despite his central role in the preparation of Charles I’s trial, and his stern republicanism, Marten managed to escape execution: there was an element of reluctance in Royalist circles to make such a well-known figure into a martyr. There was also an acknowledgement that Marten’s advocacy had spared the lives of some of their own number after the King’s execution.
Marten’s fear of being exiled overseas came to nothing. He was sent first to Holy Island, off the Northumberland coast, before a move to Windsor Castle in 1665. But Charles II baulked at having a regicide kept so near to him and – in an echo of Marten’s famous dismissal from the late King’s presence, at the racecourse in London – he ordered his removal. From 1668, Marten was imprisoned in Chepstow Castle, accompanied by his mistress, Mary, while his wife remained behind at the marital home in Berkshire. In his late seventies this man of boundless sensual appetites died, choking on his dinner.
Ludlow’s companions in Switzerland all predeceased him. William Cawley, who had been frail at the time of his flight from Restoration England, died in Vevey in 1667, aged sixty-five. He had been one of the commissioners for ‘demolishing superstitious pictures and monuments in London’,1 whose brief had culminated in the destruction of the stained-glass windows of Henry VII’s Chapel in Westminster, and of Queen Henrietta Maria’s chapel in Somerset House; her altarpiece, designed by Rubens, was cast into the Thames. Cawley was laid to rest in the handsome, unfussy Protestant church of St Martin, set back from Lake Geneva on a gentle hill.
Nicholas Love had felt sure before the great trial of January 1649 that Charles I would be acquitted and, when proved wrong, had become rich through the acquisition of confiscated royal and Church property. While friends decided to trust the clemency seemingly promised by the Declaration of Breda, Love wisely fled, ‘being resolved not to trust the mercy of enraged beasts of prey’.2 He died aged seventy-four, at the end of 1682, and was buried near to William Cawley.
Andrew Broughton, one of the clerks at Charles’s trial, had arrived in Switzerland in 1662 after initially hiding in Hamburg with Nicholas Love. He, Love and Ludlow had travelled to an audience with the Lords of Berne to present the regicides’ thanks to the senators for their protection from Royalist revenge. Broughton died in 1687, aged eighty-five, after quarter of a century in Vevey. He was also committed for burial in St Martin’s.
These deaths left Ludlow as the solitary Swiss exile to hear of the death of Charles II, and the even more thrilling news of James II’s overthrow. He had remained fascinated by events in Britain, and still maintained an alluring charisma to those who regarded him as the ultimate invincible opponent of the British Crown. In the mid-1660s, the Dutch had sounded out Ludlow to see if he would aid them in their conflict against Charles II. But Ludlow never forgave the Dutch for their betrayal of Barkstead, Corbet and Okey, which he believed left them tarnished with bloodguilt. He refused to help them, despite their common cause.
In 1684, the year before Charles II’s death, Ludlow was the man that plotters turned to, asking him to raise the standard against the Stuarts in the west of England. He declined, claiming that he was in ‘no ways disposed to the thing, saying he had done his work, he thought, in this world, and was resolved to leave it to others’.3
Such a rebellion took place in the southwest of England the following year. It was led by the Duke of Monmouth, Charles II’s favourite illegitimate son. Monmouth had been a popular figure in England, as well as commander of its army, before overreaching himself and being banished abroad. On the death of his father he returned to England, hoping that people would flock to his Protestant cause in a stand against his Catholic uncle, James II. But the invasion was premature and poorly planned: the new King had yet to provoke huge unpopularity, and only a ragtag force of 4,000 – many armed with pitchforks – followed the duke. Monmouth resorted to a desperate nocturnal attack on the superior Royalist forces on Sedgemoor, but the element of surprise was lost when a pistol was discharged into the night. James II’s favourite, John Churchill, led the King’s forces in a complete rout of the rebels, while his commanding officer, Lord Feversham, was delayed from appearing on the battlefield because – it was said – he insisted on eating his breakfast first. (Feversham was further waylaid through problems straightening his wig and cravat.)
Monmouth, despite tearful pleadings, was sentenced to death. He was beheaded in a flurry of inept axe blows on Tower Hill, the first strike a glancing wound that made the duke look up in disbelieving pain. At this Jack Ketch, the executioner, lost his nerve, his repeated hacks failing to do the job. He eventually threw down his blade in defeat, before being forced by the irate crowd to complete his task with the retrieved axe, and then with a knife.
James II was determined to make an example of all the rebels and sent Judge George Jeffreys, Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, into the southwest to dispense vengeance in his name. One of those arrested was Dame Alice Lisle, the elderly widow of the regicide John Lisle, who had been felled by a blunderbuss in that Swiss churchyard twenty-one years earlier. She was accused of harbouring fugitive rebels on her property: Richard Nelthorp was discovered hiding behind the chimney in her family home, Moyles Court. John Hicks, a Nonconformist preacher, was also found on her land.
Dame Alice was a lady of some standing in the community. A mother of eleven children, she was in her late sixties when Monmouth invaded. As judge, Jeffreys was of course supposed to remain detached. However, on 27 August 1685, as the case against Dame Alice was heard in Winchester Castle, he revealed himself to be an eloquent addition to the prosecution. He reminded the jury of what the dame’s late husband had been guilty of – ‘I will not say what hand her husband had in the death of that blessed martyr, she has enough to answer for . . . and I must confess it ought not one way or other to make any ingredient into this case what she was in former times’4 – but it was clear that Jeffreys was eager to underline her connection by marriage to the shocking execution of King James’s father.
The jurors, troubled by the sight of the old lady repeatedly falling asleep while on trial for her life, tried to persuade the judge that they had enough doubt about her guilt to make conviction impossible. But Jeffreys would have none of it, insisting, ‘There is as full proof as proof can be; but you are judges of the proof, for my part I thought there was no difficulty in it.’5 The jury remained in an agitated huddle for fifteen minutes before finally and unhappily declaring Dame Alice’s guilt.
She was sentenced to be burnt at the stake, a punishment that, on appeal, was commuted to beheading. Some say she gave a dignified speech from the scaffold, hastily erected in Winchester market square, while others reported her as being ‘old and dozy’, and reported that she ‘died without much concern’.6 The killing of this venerable pillar of the community appalled many, and while Judge Jeffreys went on to dispatch a further 300 people connected with Monmouth’s rebellion, the stain of Dame Alice’s blood has clung to his reputation with particular stubbornness. The regicide’s widow has the unwanted distinction of being the last woman ever to have been beheaded by order of a court in English history.
Three years later the invasion by William of Orange resulted in the bloodless Glorious Revolution. In 1689 the new regime was looking to suppress support in Ireland for the exiled James II. Ludlow’s name was again discussed as a possible leader of the English force: his effectiveness there, thirty years earlier, was recalled with admiration.
Ludlow said goodbye to friends in Switzerland, feeling it was at last time for him to return to England and help the latest manifestation of God’s cause. He was greeted with joyful nostalgia by other survivors from the glory days of the New Model Army and the Republic of the Commonwealth. His lodgings in London bustled with family and old colleagues. But there were still powerful enemies for the lieutenant general to contend with.
Ludlow’s confiscated estate had been granted to Sir Edward Seymour, an arrogant and unpopular Speaker of the House of Commons. Concerned that Ludlow would look to reclaim his property, Seymour’s brother-in-law, Sir Joseph Tredenham, launched a pre-emptive attack in Parliament. Tredenham was quick to remind MPs that Ludlow’s arrest warrant was still live: he must, therefore, be punished for high treason. ‘To what can these persons pretend,’ Tredenham said, in reference to returning exiles like Ludlow, ‘but to bring us into the same anarchy as formerly?’7 While sympathisers tried to delay a vote on his fate, Ludlow slipped away to the Netherlands. Soon afterwards King William announced that Ludlow must indeed be held to account for his part in Charles I’s death, and offered a reward of £200 for his arrest.
Ludlow returned to Vevey. He died there in late 1692 at the age of seventy-two. His widow had a Latin inscription borrowed from the works of Ovid placed over the door of their home: ‘Omne solum forti patria quia patris’. It applies equally to the many other pious regicides – those courageous men who dared to kill a king in the hope of bringing peace to their traumatised land; who were forced to live overseas, or face agonising and degrading death at home. Translated, it reads: ‘To the brave man every land is a fatherland, because God his father made it’.