Chapter 2
And if the Parliament and Military Council do what they do without precedent, if it appear their duty, it argues the more wisdom, virtue, and magnanimity, that they know themselves able to be a precedent to others.
John Milton, ‘The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates’, 1649
The army and their hand-sorted Members of Parliament, known as the Rump, had opted for the high-risk option of a public trial; but no King of England had been tried in open court before.* Indeed, procedure in legal cases had the accused being challenged in the name of the Crown. To prevent a descent into confusion and farce, it was essential that the legality of the proceedings be established, as best it could. The format, the charge, the dignity of the court – all needed to be respectable. Crucially, his accusers needed to show on what basis they were entitled to hold a king to account.
This was a many-pieced jigsaw that took shape, day by day, during the first three weeks of January 1649. On New Year’s Day, the Rump declared that it was treason for the King of England to wage war against Parliament and the kingdom. The House of Lords unanimously rejected this impeachment on 2 January, at the same time rebuffing the ordinance for the King’s trial. The Lords thought they could delay matters by adjourning for a week, but the Rump was not to be detained. When the Lords returned to their chamber, they found its doors padlocked: given their stance, they would not be allowed to be part of this delicate and unprecedented process.
The Rump reasserted its aims in the Commons on 3 January, and was pleased the next day to hear from Augustine Garland, one of the many lawyers in the House, the name of the body that was to sit in judgment of Charles: ‘the High Court of Justice for Trial of the King’. It had a weighty ring to it, given added ballast by the bold assertion that, ‘The Commons of England assembled in Parliament declare that the people under God are the origin of all just power. They do likewise declare that the Commons of England assembled in Parliament, being chosen by and representing the people, have the supreme authority of this nation.’1
The actual definition of ‘Parliament’ was the trinity of Crown, Lords and Commons. This declaration of unilateral power by one House – the first of its kind in English history – made it clear that the Rump was prepared to stand as the sole law-making body. The King, the Lords and the excluded members of the Commons were placed to one side, impotent and irrelevant.
On 6 January, the Rump passed an Act for Charles’s trial, claiming that:
Charles Stuart, the now King of England . . . had a wicked design totally to subvert the ancient and fundamental laws and liberties of his nation, and, in their place, to introduce an arbitrary and tyrannical government; and that, besides all other evil ways and means to bring this design to pass, he hath prosecuted it with fire and sword, levied and maintained a cruel war in the land against the Parliament and Kingdom, whereby the country hath been miserably wasted, the public treasure exhausted, and infinite other mischiefs committed.2
One hundred and thirty-five commissioners were appointed to the High Court of Justice that day. ‘All the chief officers of the army were named, and accepted the office,’ the Royalist Earl of Clarendon later wrote, ‘and such aldermen and citizens of London as had been most violent against peace, and some few country gentlemen whose zeal had been taken notice of for the cause, and who were like to take such a preferment as a testimony of the Parliament’s confidence in them, and would thereupon embrace it.’3 Only twenty of these men needed to be present at any one time for the court to function, which was helpful since its work had to be completed quickly: the ordinance declared that this High Court of Justice should enjoy its powers for just one month.
The commissioners were instructed to meet in the Painted Chamber of the Palace of Westminster on 8 January, the first of sixteen such meetings that were held there for the preparation and management of the trial. Throughout this time of tension and fear, the vaults beneath the Painted Chamber were frequently searched for explosives.
There proved to be a dearth of leading lawyers prepared to lead the revolutionary court. Several of the most eminent, whether dissatisfied with the legality of the process, frightened of future retribution, or with an eye to both concerns, decided to make themselves scarce. John Selden and Bulstrode Whitelocke retired from London. Meanwhile Lord Chief Baron Wilde, Chief Justice Henry Rolle and Chief Justice Oliver St John refused to serve in the High Court of Justice.
On 10 January the commissioners chose as their lord president – the officer who would act as their spokesman, questioning witnesses and controlling the King’s proposals – John Bradshaw, a man not in the first flight of lawyers. Bradshaw had initially declined the position. He only made himself available after braving a tirade from his wife, who was furious that he would think of accepting a role that would invite danger into his and their family’s lives.
Bradshaw had a reputation for competence, for efficiency, for pleasing litigious clients who visited his Gray’s Inn chamber – and for being incorruptible. The poet John Milton, ever vocal against the Crown, was proud to call Bradshaw a friend, and a brave one at that, given that the position he agreed to take ‘was great and fearful, almost surpassing all example, marked out as he was by the daggers and threats of so many ruffians’.4 Bradshaw was provided with a sizeable bodyguard, not only for his protection, but to enhance his status – it was essential to inflate his apparent importance, since he was to sit and judge a king. His official residence became the dean’s house at Westminster. He was called ‘lord president’ outside the courtroom, as well as in it.
The High Court of Justice had already chosen its counsel for the prosecution, Attorney General Anthony Steel. Alongside him they ran Solicitor General John Cook. Clarendon, himself a lawyer at the time, characterised this pair as ‘eminent for nothing but their obscurity, and . . . they were men scarce known or heard of in the profession’.5 There was some truth in Clarendon’s haughty remarks. Cook was the son of a Leicestershire farmer. He had studied theology in Switzerland, cared deeply about the plight of the poor, and had served Charles’s most unpopular lieutenant, the Earl of Strafford. But he was by now no friend to the King: in 1647 he wrote of his belief that only the army could implement the changes necessary for England to find a peaceful post-war settlement.
Friends and colleagues tried to make Cook rethink his prominent involvement in such a singular and fraught business. James Nutley, a young student in the Temple, remembered going to Cook at this time: ‘I desired him to consider the dangerous consequences of such a proceeding; I may say I did with tears in my eyes, for I had a very good respect to the Gentleman for his profession’s sake, being learned therein: truly my lord he did answer me thus, “I acknowledge it is a very base business but they put it upon me, I cannot avoid it, you see they put it upon me.” ’6 Nutley was adamant that, at this early stage, Cook said the King’s life was in no danger, and that the High Court of Justice simply wanted Charles to submit to Parliament.
On 10 January, the commissioners instructed their legal team to prepare the charge. John Aske and Isaac Dorislaus were to assist the attorney general, as junior counsel. Aske was a relative of Lord Fairfax, the commanding officer of the New Model Army. Dorislaus was a Dutchman, born to a deeply Calvinist father: his two brothers were named Abraham and Jacob.
Dorislaus came to England as the first lecturer in History at Cambridge University. His inaugural lecture caused a sensation. He took as his theme ‘The Power of the People under the Kings’, and claimed that it was possible for kings to be subject to the law and that they must only exercise legitimate authority. This he followed with a speech declaring that the good citizen was he who resisted the tyrant, basing his argument largely on the writings of the Roman historian Tacitus. Serious questions were asked about this dangerous rhetoric. Matthew Wren, the Master of Peterhouse, was particularly concerned that Dorislaus seemed to be making the case for republicanism and regicide (the killing of a king), which, he dared fancy, were ‘appliable [sic] to the exasperations of these villainous times’.7 Aghast at Dorislaus’s politics, Wren ensured that the university delayed his appointment to the doctorate that was his entitlement, for four years.
During the First Civil War, Dorislaus had served as Advocate of the Army. He was active in the suppression of conspiracies that aided the Crown, and had tried to introduce martial law to facilitate his dealings with suspects. The Second Civil War saw him appointed Judge of the Admiralty. He was also sent to his native Netherlands to see if he could persuade his compatriots to join with Parliamentary England in a Protestant alliance against Charles. Dorislaus was highly regarded by Oliver Cromwell, and it was he who approved the Dutchman being brought in to help frame the charges against the King.
Meanwhile perhaps Anthony Steel had received similar warnings to those urged on Cook; for, two days before the case began, the attorney general suddenly claimed grave illness and insisted he was incapable of discharging his duties. With Steel’s withdrawal from the case, it was decided that Dorislaus would lead the prosecution, once the King had – as was anticipated – pleaded not guilty.
MPs now busied themselves in laying the foundations for this unique legal enterprise. A committee of eight was appointed, any two of whom could act together to oversee the preparation and management of the trial. The lawyer Augustine Garland, who had presented the ordinance for the ‘Erecting of a High Court of Justice’, acted as the committee’s chairman until Bradshaw’s appointment as lord president came into effect.
Another significant figure in the framing of the trial was Nicholas Love. He was a son of the headmaster of Winchester College and a protégé of William Lenthall, the Speaker of the House of Commons. Love, a lawyer of Lincoln’s Inn, would be included in four of the committees that prepared the ground for the trial. He believed, before proceedings got under way, that they would inevitably end in Charles’s favour, the charge being ‘nothing, but what he knew the K[ing] could clearly acquit himself of’.8
Also on the committee was Sir John Danvers, a sixty-five-year-old veteran of Parliament. As a younger man he had been so physically beautiful that, when he was touring France and Italy, ‘people would come after him in the street to admire him’.9 Danvers returned to England with an equal appreciation of continental aesthetics, particularly in the area of landscaping. ‘’Twas Sir John Danvers of Chelsea,’ a grateful contemporary recorded, ‘who first taught us that way of Italian gardens.’10
Insatiably extravagant, Danvers had taken as his first wife a wealthy widow twice his age, who was the mother of ten children. His family had suffered mixed fortunes through its dealings with the Crown. His oldest brother had been beheaded at the instruction of Elizabeth I, after taking part in the Earl of Essex’s rebellion. Another brother had been created Earl of Danby, early in Charles’s reign, and remained something of a royal favourite. Sir John had also enjoyed the King’s esteem, serving as a senior courtier. However, when civil war broke out he sided with Parliament, serving in its army as a colonel.
The Puritan Sir Henry Mildmay had been a loud critic of the King during his last, ultimately doomed, negotiations with Parliament, warning that Charles was ‘no more to be trusted than a lion that hath been caged, and let loose again at his liberty’.11 A courtier with particular responsibility for the royal jewels, Mildmay was able to deliver up the Sword of State for the King’s trial. Borne in front of Bradshaw, it gave proceedings added solemnity, and an air of authenticity.
John Lisle also sat on this key committee. They said he was ‘bred to the law’.12 An experienced legislator in the Commons, he was also a proven ally of Cromwell. His hostility to the King had reached new heights when the contents of the royal baggage train had been read after their capture at the battle of Naseby. The correspondence proved Charles’s willingness to bring foreign troops to his aid in the Civil War. While Parliament felt justified in seeking Scottish support, it deemed the Crown’s recruitment of men from overseas, to kill Englishmen, to be a grievous betrayal. Lisle would go on to be Bradshaw’s busy assistant in the trial of the King, sitting next to him so he could communicate legal points to the lord president as the case progressed.
The committee was completed by a trio of highly intelligent men whose colourful private lives scandalised their straitlaced colleagues with behaviour more generally associated with the despised enemy Cavaliers. Gilbert Millington, a barrister, had an appetite for committee work, mainly in his native Nottinghamshire. He possessed a reputation for professional thoroughness, and also for personal laxness: he frequented taverns and brothels, and further shocked contemporaries when, on the death of his wife, he married a sixteen-year-old barmaid.
Similarly, Thomas Chaloner was, according to the contemporary academic, John Selden, ‘as far from a Puritan as the East from the West’.13 Chaloner was a hard-drinking womaniser, who counted among his lighter weaknesses a delight in practical jokes. One of his favourites was to go early to Westminster Hall and drop a ridiculous tidbit into conversation, before returning later the same morning to see how far his piece of nonsense had spread. He enjoyed hearing how much it had gained in the retelling.
Well-travelled, well-mannered and well-read, Chaloner’s famed sense of humour did not extend to his view of the King. The Crown had reneged on promised payments to the Chaloners on acquiring the family’s alum mines. Charles aggravated this shabby treatment by passing the benefit of the mines to his courtiers at a further profit. This, Chaloner could never forgive.
Chaloner’s partner in flamboyant loose-living was Henry Marten, the republican son of a judge, whose quick wit brightened debates in the Commons. The King found Marten altogether less amusing: indeed, Charles and Marten held one another in mutual contempt. The King was, one of his close circle recalled, ‘so great an example of conjugal affection, that they who did not imitate him in that particular did not brag of their liberty’.14 Meanwhile a contemporary recorded what everyone knew: Marten was ‘a great lover of pretty girls’.15 This moral mismatch reached its defining moment before the Civil Wars, when both men were attending horse races in London’s Hyde Park. Spotting Marten nearby, Charles ordered: ‘Let that ugly rascal be gone out of the park, that whoremaster, or else I will not see the sport.’16
Marten quit the royal presence, but he never forgot nor forgave such a crushing humiliation. The King had made a lifelong enemy of this fiercely intelligent and charismatic politician, one of the first to write public tracts in the mid-1640s in which Charles was removed from his royal pedestal and addressed as a common man – one who deserved to be put to death, like any other, if found guilty of murder. During the Second Civil War, Marten raised a regiment of irregulars, many of them republican Levellers, who marched under the uncompromising banner, ‘For the People’s Freedom against all tyrants whatsoever’.17
Marten had a knack for coining pithy phrases. Charles’s Great Seal – effectively, his badge of office – showed him sitting in wisdom and splendour on his throne on one side, while on the reverse he was charging bravely into battle. His God-given kingship and his defence of Protestantism were proclaimed on both sides. On 4 January a committee was formed to design a fresh Great Seal, to lend heft to the new status quo. Millington helped, but it was Marten who, contemporaries recorded, did most of the work. He it was who composed the winning construct: Exit Tyrannus Regum ultimus – ‘The last tyrant of kings has gone’. When the assembled commissioners and their lawyers were ensconced in the Painted Chamber, trying to establish in whose name the charge against the King should be made, it was Marten who stood up, with the winning line, ‘In the name of the Commons and Parliament assembled, and all the good people of England.’18 It was the final call to arms before the commissioners rose to begin the judgment of their King.
While Marten thrilled at the prospect of a republic being established, there were others among the commissioners, even those with republican leanings, who believed that public trial by part of Parliament was not the correct way to deal with the King. The young MP Algernon Sidney, a hero of the victory on Marston Moor (where he was wounded) and the governor of Dover Castle, recalled the sharp exchange he had with Oliver Cromwell over the legal soundness of the High Court of Justice. ‘First,’ he told Cromwell, ‘the King could be tried by no court; secondly . . . no man could be tried by that court.’ Cromwell would have none of it: ‘I tell you,’ he replied, ‘we will cut off his head with the Crown upon it!’19 Sidney departed, refusing to have anything to do with a process he viewed as being flawed constitutionally, and in point of law.
By 20 January, Cook, Dorislaus, Aske and their helpers had compiled the charge, the preamble probably owing much to the Dutchman, since its themes resonate so closely with the declaration of independence all of his educated compatriots knew so well. This was the Act of Abjuration submitted by the Netherlands against their hated Spanish ruler, Philip II, in 1581, which opened with:
As it is apparent to all that a prince is constituted by God to be ruler of a people, to defend them from oppression and violence as the shepherd his sheep; and whereas God did not create the people slaves to their prince, to obey his commands, whether right or wrong, but rather the prince for the sake of the subjects (without which he could be no prince), to govern them according to equity, to love and support them as a father his children or a shepherd his flock, and even at the hazard of life to defend and preserve them. And when he does not behave thus, but, on the contrary, oppresses them, seeking opportunities to infringe their ancient customs and privileges, exacting from them slavish compliance, then he is no longer a prince, but a tyrant, and the subjects are to consider him in no other view.20
The charge against Charles began:
That the said Charles Stuart, being admitted King of England, and therein trusted with a limited power to govern by and according to the laws of the land, and not otherwise; and by his trust, oath, and office, being obliged to use the power committed to him for the good and benefit of the people, and for the preservation of their rights and liberties; yet, nevertheless, out of a wicked design to erect and uphold in himself an unlimited and tyrannical power to rule according to his will, and to overthrow the rights and liberties of the people, yea, to take away and make void the foundations thereof, and of all redress and remedy of misgovernment, which by the fundamental constitutions of this kingdom were reserved on the people’s behalf in the right and power of frequent and successive Parliaments, or national meetings in Council; he, the said Charles Stuart, for accomplishment of such his designs, and for the protecting of himself and his adherents in his and their wicked practices, to the same ends hath traitorously and maliciously levied war against the present Parliament, and the people therein represented . . .21
The assertion that government was a contract, in which the people surrender some of their rights to a sovereign unless or until that sovereign breaches their trust, was at loggerheads with Charles’s sincere and unshakeable view that he was God’s anointed – that he therefore could not be answerable to anyone but God. Believers in this philosophy, the Divine Right of Kings, pointed to the passage in the Old Testament in which King David erred by lusting after the beautiful Bathsheba, and consequently arranged the death in battle of her husband, so he could have her for himself. David, in Psalm 51, admitted his shameful guilt, but he was in no doubt where any judgment could come from, or to where any apology was due: ‘Against thee, thee only, have I sinned,’ he told the Lord.
The duel between these contrary views was to take place in a setting chosen by the King’s former custodians, Colonels Whalley and Harrison, in consultation with Sir Hardress Waller, Pride’s collaborator in the purge; Colonel Deane, whose artillery had pounded Basing House before its fall; Robert Tichborne, a republican linen-draper from the City who had long wanted Charles brought to trial; as well as Cromwell, whose influence was everywhere at this time.
Ironically, their chosen venue had been built to advertise that magnificent power of the Crown that the commissioners were now determined to deny. Westminster Hall had been constructed by William II in the final years of the eleventh century. It was the most impressive public room in England – some said in Europe. Its walls were six foot thick, enclosing an interior of 17,000 square feet. This was where kings and queens were crowned. The centrepiece of the ceremonial space was the King’s Table, a mark of the continuity of monarchy, a symbol of royal might, and the setting for the celebration banquets that followed coronations. Charles had hosted embassies and receptions here, in the days before civil warfare overwhelmed his reign. Its associations had always been historic. Now it was to be the setting of something truly momentous.
The areas used by the King’s Bench and the Chancery Courts, at the upper west end of Westminster Hall, were cleared for the trial. A barrier was set up in the middle of the court arena to hold back the crowds who would flock to witness the proceedings. At the centre of the ranks of scarlet benches and seats reserved for the judging commissioners was Bradshaw’s chair, situated behind a desk on which a cushion rested. Both the chair and the cushion were swathed in crimson velvet.
The King was carried in a closed sedan chair from St James’s to Whitehall, then transported by barge along the Thames, accompanied by a strong guard under his custodian, Colonel Matthew Tomlinson. Charles’s holding pen while awaiting the lord president’s summons to appear before him would be the home of the late Sir Robert Cotton, near Westminster’s Old Palace Yard. This had a garden that led up from the river, and a library of rare books (which included two original copies of Magna Carta) that had provided scholarly support to Cotton when he had written tracts attacking arbitrary royal power. Charles had imprisoned Cotton, and confiscated his books, as a result of these criticisms: although released in an amnesty celebrating the birth of the King’s eldest son, Cotton was never reunited with his library – a decision that blighted his final years. Now the King was the prisoner, a degraded and unwilling guest in his old adversary’s home.
Royalists were still, at this stage, unsure what the enemy was planning to do with the King. Purbeck Temple, a gentleman of Surrey, had been charged by friends sympathetic to the Crown with trying to find out. On what would be the first day of the trial, he bribed an officer to let him into the corridors outside the Painted Chamber. Here he found a nook where there was a hole in the wall, through which he witnessed the commissioners arrive to finalise their plans for the day. ‘When their prayer was over,’ he recalled, ‘there came news that the King was landing at Sir Robert Cotton’s Stairs, at which Cromwell ran to a window, looking on the King as he came up the Garden, he turned white as the wall, returning to the board he speaks to Bradshaw and Sir Henry Mildmay, how they and Sir William Brereton had concluded on such a business, then turning to the board, said thus, “My Masters, he is come, he is come, and now we are doing the great work, that the whole Nation will be full of.”’22
The lord president entered his courtroom, behind sixteen halberdiers, the bearer of the Sword of State, and the sergeant-at-arms who carried Parliament’s mace. In his wake strode sixty-seven of his fellow commissioners and their legal officers. The gates of the hall were opened, and the public flowed in until there was room for no more. Silence was ordered, and the King sent for.
He arrived fifteen minutes later, with a twenty-strong guard under the command of Colonel Francis Hacker – a distinguished New Model Army officer from an otherwise Royalist family, who had twice refused enticements to switch to the King’s side during the Civil Wars. A handful of royal attendants found seats near their master, but not next to him: Bradshaw had insisted that, rather than being placed to one side, as was customary for a defendant, the King must sit alone in a chair in the centre of the courtroom, directly opposite the scores of men who had come to judge him.
Charles looked slowly around, taking in the spectacle, spotting the few familiar faces among the commissioners. It was evident that he was coming to terms with the forum he found himself in, and the fight he faced. He looked calm to his supporters, stern to some recording the proceedings, and arrogant to his foes. Edmund Ludlow, one of the main forces behind Pride’s Purge, wrote of the King that, ‘He looked with as impudent a face as if he had not been guilty of the blood that hath been shed in this war.’23 Charles sat down, before rising to his feet again to turn and look at the public in the gallery. He would have seen that they were divided into two bodies by a line of soldiers, the better to keep control. More troops stood on either side of the commissioners, and along the newly built barrier. Others guarded the entrance of each door to the hall.
The prisoner had not been informed of the charges he would face. Neither had he been granted access to legal counsel. However, Charles had thought hard about what was likely to be put to him, and had taken what advice he could, before entering this cockpit: his twin defence would be an insistence on the inability of his subjects to try their King, and the impossibility of one house of Parliament (let alone one fraction of a house, whose election had taken place more than eight years earlier) sitting as a place of judgment at all. His defiance was immediately obvious in his refusal to remove his hat: to do so would be to show respect for his accusers, and acknowledgement of the court they had concocted. Similarly, the judges sat with their hats on, making it clear that deference towards his royal status had no place in this setting: he was simply the prisoner at the bar.
After the Act of Parliament for the trying of the King was delivered, the names were read out of the commissioners present. Bradshaw’s was first: he rose to confirm his presence. Next came the name of Lord Fairfax. There was no answer. It was repeated, to renewed silence. As all present began to appreciate the astonishing fact that Parliament’s military commander had absented himself from the trial, a lady’s voice rang out from a box in the gallery that extended high above the hall: ‘He had more wit than to be here!’24 Fairfax had ordered Charles’s removal from the Isle of Wight to London, and had sat in meetings preliminary to the trial, but he would take no part in the court proceedings once he realised the commissioners would be pushing for much more than Charles’s exile.
Bradshaw now presented a preliminary distillation of the charge to the prisoner:
Charles Stuart, King of England, the Commons of England assembled in Parliament being deeply sensible of the calamities that have been brought upon this nation, which is fixed upon you as the principal author of it, have resolved to make inquisition for blood; and according to that debt and duty they owe to justice, to God, the kingdom, and themselves, and according to the fundamental power that rests in themselves, they have resolved to bring you to Trial and Judgment; and for that purpose have constituted this High Court of Justice, before which you are brought.25
Bradshaw then looked to Cook to proceed. The solicitor general was standing to the right of the King, and as he started to speak Charles tapped him two or three times on the shoulder with his cane, in an effort to stop him so he could speak instead. Bradshaw instructed Cook to ignore these distractions, and proceed.
‘My Lord,’ said Cook, ‘I am commanded to charge Charles Stuart, King of England, in the name of the Commons of England, with Treason and High Misdemeanours; I desire the said charge may be read.’26
As Andrew Broughton, clerk of the court, delivered the charge, Charles interjected: ‘I am not entrusted by the people, they are mine by inheritance.’27
When Broughton referred to him as ‘a Tyrant and Traitor’, the King’s stern demeanour disintegrated into laughter. Ominously, during the reading of the charge, it was noted that the head of Charles’s cane broke off and fell to the floor. He paused – perhaps in the expectation that somebody would pick it up for him – but was eventually forced to bend and retrieve it for himself.
When the charge claimed to be presented in the name of ‘all the good people of England’, the female voice that had jeered in appreciation of Fairfax’s absence chimed in again: ‘Not half the people; it is false!’ it cried. ‘Where are they or their consents?’28
This was a raucous disruption of the dignity of the court, as well as a grave challenge to its validity. Colonel Daniel Axtell, in charge of the troops in the hall, was enraged, pointing to the offending box and shouting at his men: ‘Down with the whores! Shoot them!’29 It was fortunate that they disobeyed, for although they could not have missed their target, they would have shot Lady Fairfax, the wife of the army’s lord general, who was guilty of both interruptions.
After the charge was completed, Bradshaw directed Charles to respond to it. ‘I would know by what power I am called hither,’ the King countered: ‘I was not long ago in the Isle of Wight; how I came there is a longer story than I think it fit at this present time for me to speak of; but there I entered into a Treaty with both houses of Parliament, with as much public faith as it is possible to be had of any number of honourable lords and gentlemen, and treated honestly and uprightly; I cannot say but they did very nobly with me, we were upon the conclusion of the Treaty.’ It was noticeable throughout his trial that Charles spoke with fluency, his customary stammer never in evidence.
Charles demanded to know the basis of his accusers’ power: ‘I would know by what authority I was brought from thence, and carried from place to place, and I know not what: and when I know what lawful authority [that is], I shall answer.’ He then warned those daring to sit in judgment of him: ‘Remember I am your King, your lawful King, and what sins you bring upon your heads, and the judgment of God upon this land; think well upon it, I say, think well upon it, before you go further from one sin to a greater.’ Next, he drew up the defensive lines from which he would not budge throughout the remainder of the proceedings: ‘I shall not betray my trust; I have a trust committed to me by God, by old and lawful descent; I will not betray it, to answer to a new unlawful authority.’ He again asked for the authority of the court to be justified.
Bradshaw was undaunted. ‘If you had been pleased to have observed what was hinted to you by the Court,’ he replied, ‘you would have known by what authority; which authority requires you, in the name of the People of England, of which you are elected King, to answer them.’
Charles bridled at this startling assertion: ‘England was never an elective kingdom, but an hereditary kingdom for nearly these thousand years . . . I do stand more for the liberty of my people, than any here that come to be my pretended judges.’
Asking Charles if he had any further reply to make before he order the court into recess so the judges could consider the best way forward, Bradshaw prompted the King’s most defiant response yet:
Sir, I desire that you would give me, and all the world, satisfaction in this: let me tell you, it is not a slight thing you are about. I am sworn to keep the peace, by that duty I owe to God and my country, and I will do it to the last breath of my body: and therefore ye shall do well to satisfy first God, and then the country, by what authority you do it: if you do it by an usurped authority, you cannot answer. There is a God in Heaven, that will call you, and all that give you power, to account.
It was Saturday afternoon. The court was adjourned until Monday. As the King left Westminster Hall, Colonel Axtell cajoled some of his men to call out: ‘Justice! Justice!’ Eyewitnesses recalled Axtell beating those soldiers who were slow to pick up the refrain. Others in the hall shouted out: ‘God save the King!’30
Before the Monday session the commissioners met in the Painted Chamber. They applauded Bradshaw’s conduct on the first day of the trial, and confirmed that Charles must not be allowed to question the jurisdiction of the High Court of Justice. The second session opened with Cook’s demand: ‘That the prisoner may be directed to make a positive answer, either by way of confession, or negation; which if he shall refuse to do, that the matter of the charge may be taken pro confesso [in place of a confession], and the Court may proceed according to justice.’
The King and the lord president locked horns again, both of them stubborn in defence and aggressive in attack, the creeds that had helped fuel a war reverberating round the packed amphitheatre. Bradshaw was clear in confirming the commissioners’ absolute confidence in their authority, which he said came from ‘the Commons of England – and all your predecessors, and you, are responsible to them’. When Charles continued his challenge, Bradshaw lost patience: ‘Sir, you are not to be permitted to go on in that speech and these discourses.’ The King persisted, presenting himself as the defender of ‘the liberty and freedom of all his subjects’.
‘Sir,’ admonished Bradshaw, ‘you are not to have the liberty to use this language: how great a friend you have been to the laws and liberties of the people, let all England and the world judge.’
The lord president declared the session closed. Charles was escorted back to Sir Robert Cotton’s house, indignant at being treated as a common prisoner, perplexed that he was being overruled by one of his subjects.
Charles was remanded once more, and told to return to the court for a third day, on 23 January. The stalemate recurred, and Bradshaw barked his anger at the King’s continued defiance: ‘Sir, this is the third time you have publicly disowned this court and put an affront to it . . . For truly, sir, men’s intentions are used to show by their actions. You have written your meaning in bloody characters throughout the whole kingdom . . . Clerk, record the default! And, gentlemen, you that brought the prisoner, take him back again.’
The next morning was spent in examining witnesses against the king, in the Painted Chamber. There were more than thirty of these, all male, from Charles’s three kingdoms. They ranged from Londoner Arthur Young, a twenty-nine-year-old barber and surgeon, to George Cornwall, a fifty-year-old ferryman from Herefordshire. Many of them were Royalists, obliged to recount episodes when they had seen Charles rallying or leading his troops during the Civil Wars, in order to establish the King’s direct involvement in the bloodshed of his people.
Their testimony was laced with other damning evidence, including a dramatic presentation by Thomas Chaloner of some of the King’s captured letters. This reminder of Charles’s double-dealing, even extending to employing foreign troops in the war against his subjects, was devastating. Edmund Ludlow, sitting as a commissioner, recalled ‘that it was obvious to all men, the King himself had proved, by the duplicity of his dealing with the Parliament; which manifestly appeared in his own papers taken at the battle of Naseby, and elsewhere’.31 As the case progressed, some of those opposed to the King found their anger turn into contempt. Astonished onlookers observed one man spit in Charles’s face. The King reached for his handkerchief and silently wiped himself clean.
Meanwhile, Ludlow and others of the God-fearing judges looked for divine guidance as to how to proceed. A passage from the Book of Numbers began to resonate with them in their deliberations. It was a well-known verse, which had been deployed a few years before by Parliament in the trial for high treason of an Irish lord: ‘That blood defileth the land, and the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it.’32 It seemed to speak of the need to make the King pay in person for the loss of life that had ensued, since he had raised his royal standard as a military rallying point in the summer of 1642. ‘And therefore I could not consent to the counsels of those who were contented to leave the guilt of so much blood upon the nation,’ Ludlow concluded, ‘and thereby to draw down the just vengeance of God upon us all; when it was most evident that the war had been occasioned by the invasion of our rights, and open breach of our laws and constitution on the King’s part.’33 If England were to return to divine favour, Charles’s life would need to be offered up in sacrifice.
The King’s attitude throughout the trial made the contemplation of spilling royal blood more palatable: it was clear that, if the possibility ever arose, Charles would seek full vengeance against his enemies. ‘The gentlemen that were appointed his judges,’ wrote Lucy Hutchinson, whose husband was one of the commissioners, ‘and divers others, saw in him a disposition so bent to the ruin of all that had opposed him and all of the righteous and just things they had contended for, that it was upon the consciences of many of them that if they did not execute justice upon him, God would require at their hands all the blood and desolation which should ensue by their suffering him to escape, when God hath brought him into their hands.’34
Many of the commissioners had assembled to try the King in the expectation that he would either be excused the charges, or be punished in a way that did not extend to the ending of his life. However, they now all agreed to proceed to the death sentence on the basis that Charles was ‘a tyrant, traitor, murderer, and public enemy to the Commonwealth’.35 The majority of the judges seem to have been motivated by a sincere belief that they were doing what needed to be done, rather than acting out of a hatred for the King himself. ‘Concerning myself,’ recorded Edmund Ludlow, ‘I bear no [more] malice to the man’s person, than I do to my dear father; but I hate that cursed principle of tyranny that has so long lodged and harboured within him, which has turned our waters of law into blood.’36
Preparation of the precise terms of the warrant was left to Harrison, Ireton, Marten, Lisle, Love, Say and the Parliamentary spymaster Thomas Scott, with the manner of execution left blank for now. Eager to share responsibility for this act of regicide, the commissioners in Westminster sent urgent instructions to all their absent colleagues to join them immediately.
On the morning of Saturday 27 January, the commissioners assembled in the Painted Chamber to agree the final version of the sentence. Once formulated, it would be sent for publication in key points of the capital. It was agreed that all that could have been done, had been done: that the King had been given ample opportunity to defend himself against the charge. Once condemned, he must not be allowed by Bradshaw to speak, for he would be ‘dead in law’. To demonstrate the unanimity of the judges, they would all stand once the sentence had been read.
On his final appearance, that afternoon, Charles once more refused to acknowledge the court. He seems to have appreciated that judgment against him was imminent, and asked if he might make a proposal in front of a combined assembly of the Lords and Commons; it would, he promised, reconcile all parties, and return peace to the three kingdoms. Ludlow, one of the better-informed commissioners, heard rumours that the King would have offered his abdication in favour of his eldest son, Charles, Prince of Wales, upon terms to be agreed.
The King had not realised that his trial would be ended quite so abruptly. When he made to speak he was silenced by Bradshaw. One of the judges, John Downes, protested that this was too heartless, and urged that the accused must be heard. He was determined and loud enough to force a recess.
The judges withdrew to the Inner Court of Wards to consider the King’s proposal, and Cromwell now turned on Downes, attacking him for his ill-timed intervention. Downes was reduced to tears by this dressing-down. The commissioners considered the King’s proposed meeting of both Houses of Parliament for half an hour, but decided it was too late for anything positive to come of it: they would press on. They returned to the courtroom, and the sentence was pronounced. After recapping, at length, the charge, the judges’ definition of kingship, the evidence and the King’s obstructive attitude throughout the trial, it concluded: ‘For all which treasons and crimes this Court doth adjudge that he, the said Charles Stuart, as a tyrant, traitor, murderer, and public enemy to the good people of this nation, shall be put to death by the severing of his head from his body.’37
After standing up in acknowledgement of their unanimous support of the sentence, the commissioners adjourned to the Painted Chamber. They chose five of their regimental commanders – Waller, Harrison, Dean, Okey and Ireton – to find a suitable and secure place of execution, and to advise when this should take place. They concluded that the King should be executed on a scaffold in front of Whitehall on Tuesday 30 January, and that the officers to oversee the execution would be Colonel Francis Hacker, Colonel Hercules Huncks and Lieutenant Colonel Robert Phare. To these three officers was addressed the death warrant:
Whereas Charles Stuart, King of England, is and standeth convicted, attainted, and condemned of high treason and other high crimes, and sentence was pronounced against him by this Court, to be put to death by the severing of his head from his body, of which sentence execution yet remaineth to be done: These are therefore to will and require you to see the said sentence executed, in the open street before Whitehall, upon the morrow, being the thirtieth of this instant, month of January, between the hours of ten in the morning and five in the afternoon of the same day, with full effect. And for so doing, this shall be your sufficient warrant. And these are to require all officers and soldiers, and other good people of this nation of England, to be assisting unto this service. Given under our hands and seals.
There then followed seven columns of signatures, the first three those of Bradshaw, Lord Grey of Groby (the only titled nobleman present) and Cromwell. Also present among the fifty-nine signatories prepared to endorse the King’s execution were Charles’s former custodians, Whalley and Harrison; the organisers of the purge of the Commons, Pride and Waller; the arch-republicans Ludlow and Marten; the Civil War heroes Goffe, Barkstead and Okey; the spymaster Scott; and the Parliamentary stalwarts, Corbet and Carew. Next to their signatures they pressed their seals into hot melted wax. During the signings, Cromwell and Henry Marten were in such high spirits that they flicked ink at one another from their pens, like naughty schoolboys.
These fifty-nine were now fully signed-up regicides – a term that would be extended by the Royalists to include the officers of the court during Charles’s trial, and those involved in the act of execution. In all, there would be around eighty men who were considered directly responsible for killing the King.
The officers in the Tower of London were ordered to deliver up the ‘bright execution axe for the executing [of] malefactors’, which would be used for the beheading. Lieutenant Colonel Goffe was told to furnish the King with suitable puritanical preachers, to prepare him for the afterlife. Charles chose instead to be tended by William Juxon, Bishop of London, who had previously served him as a royal chaplain, and as lord high treasurer of England.
The Royalist Clarendon maintained that, though not the best of kings, Charles I was ‘the best husband, the best father and the best Christian that the age in which he lived had produced’.38 It was a side of his character acknowledged by his enemies, Ludlow recalling Cromwell saying that ‘he had lately seen the tenderest sight that ever his eyes beheld, which was, the interview between the King and his children; that he wept plentifully at the remembrance thereof’.39 Three of the King’s children, Charles, James and Mary, were safely out of Parliament’s reach, overseas. The two younger ones – eight-year-old Henry, Duke of Gloucester, and thirteen-year-old Princess Elizabeth – were now brought to say their final farewell to their father. They burst into tears on seeing him. Elizabeth recalled much of the subsequent conversation clearly, writing soon afterwards:
He bid us tell my mother that his thoughts had never strayed from her, and that his love would be the same to the last. Withal, he commanded me and my brother to be obedient to her; and bid me send his blessing to the rest of my brothers and sisters, with communications to all his friends. Then, taking my brother Gloucester on his knee, he said, ‘Sweetheart, now they will cut off thy father’s head.’ And Gloucester looking very intently upon him, he said again, ‘Heed, my child, what I say: they will cut off my head and perhaps make thee a King. But mark what I say. Thou must not be a King as long as thy brothers Charles and James do live; for they will cut off your brothers’ heads when they can catch them, and cut off thy head too at the last, and therefore I charge you, do not be made a King by them.’ At which my brother sighed deeply, and made answer: ‘I will be torn in pieces first!’
And these words, coming so unexpectedly from so young a child, rejoiced my father exceedingly. And his majesty spoke to him of the welfare of his soul, and to keep his religion, commanding him to fear God, and He would provide for him. Further, he commanded us all to forgive those people, but never to trust them; for they had been most false to him and those that gave them power, and he feared also to their own souls. And he desired me not to grieve for him, for he should die a martyr, and that he doubted not the Lord would settle his throne upon his son, and that we all should be happier than we could have expected to have been if he had lived; with many other things which at present I cannot remember.40
The King gave Elizabeth and Henry his remaining jewels, before the children were taken from their father. The deeply devout Charles countered the agony of their final parting with prayer.
The scaffold was erected outside the Banqueting House, a new doorway being knocked through the building’s external wall to allow direct access to the place of execution. It was covered in black cloth, the block and the axe placed together at its centre. Elsewhere a coffin was prepared, trimmed with black velvet.
On the winter morning of his execution, so bitter that the Thames had frozen over, Charles is said to have chosen to wear two shirts beneath his doublet to counter the cold in case he shivered: he would not have his enemies say he had trembled in fear. At ten in the morning, Charles was escorted from St James’s to Whitehall on foot, a New Model Army regiment in attendance, flags flying, drums beating, marching before and behind the condemned man. The King remained in conversation with Colonel Tomlinson, who had proved to be a kind and respectful custodian, while Bishop Juxon followed, offering Christian platitudes as comfort during his final ordeal.
Some reports have Jane Whorwood rushing into her lover’s arms during this procession to the scaffold, though this is not certain. What is for sure is that, with customary ingenuity, she had managed to communicate with the King in the days between his death sentence being proclaimed and carried out.
Charles noted various figures in the crowd, including one of his servants, sobbing wildly as his master passed. Another, Parliamentary, man mocked the King as he went by.
In Whitehall, Charles remained composed. He spent time praying, declined to dine, but – as his wait extended – at around noon he picked at some bread and sipped on a glass of claret.
Two hours later the King was taken through to the scaffold, Juxon by his side. Charles looked around, seeing the enormous multitude that had come to witness his death. Between them and the scaffold were thick knots of soldiers, guarding against any last-minute rescue attempt or disruption. The King then focused on the scene directly in front of him. He was troubled by the height of the block where he would soon lay his head: it was only six inches high. When he asked Colonel Hacker, the senior officer present at the execution, if a higher one might be brought in its place, his request was politely brushed off. Around the block were four pins, with pulleys attached: these were to be used to secure the King if, when it came to it, he physically resisted his fate.
Charles had prepared notes on stubs of paper, to help him with his final speech. He soon realised that the crowd was too far away, beyond the soldiers, to hear his words, but insisted on speaking to those on the scaffold, rather than have his silence misinterpreted as an acceptance of guilt. The King directed the majority of his words directly at Tomlinson, perhaps because he thought him most likely to give an honest recollection of what had been said. Meanwhile, reporters stood behind the King and wrote down his last words.
Charles was determined to talk of his innocence, particularly on the greater charges against him: he insisted with disdain that he had not begun the war with Parliament, pointing instead to how his opponents had taken his militia from him; that had been, he said, the first act of the hostilities. He also insisted that he had not encroached upon Parliament’s privileges: ‘That is, so far as I have said, to show you that I am an innocent man.’
Charles now turned to those who were responsible for his imminent execution – his regicides: ‘I have forgiven all the world, and even those in particular that have been the chief causes of my death. Who they are, God knows, I do not desire to know, God forgive them. But that is not all, my charity must go further. I wish that they may repent, for indeed they have committed a great sin in that particular. I pray God, with St Stephen, that this be not laid to their charge.’ Instead, he urged these sinners to dedicate themselves to the peace of the kingdom.
His attention turned to the best way ahead for his people, in terms of government and religion. He broke off when he saw a man touching the axe, fearing he might dull the blade: ‘Hurt not the axe, that may hurt me,’ he implored. He was keen to avoid a terrible end such as that suffered by his grandmother, Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1587. She had had to endure three strokes of the axe, before her head was severed from her body: it was said her lips had twitched for fifteen minutes after the stubborn gristle was finally cut through.
Resuming his speech, Charles repeated his wish for the people to enjoy liberty and freedom. To the end, he was adamant that this could not be achieved through a share in kingly government. ‘Sir, that is nothing pertaining to them. A subject and a sovereign are clean different things,’ he maintained.
Charles was proud of the stand he had made, believing it correct, despite its fatal consequences for him: ‘If I would have given way to an arbitrary way, for to have all laws changed according to the Power of the Sword, I needed not to have come here. And therefore I tell you, and I pray God it be not laid to your charge, that I am the martyr of the people.’
He thought that he had said all he wanted to, but Bishop Juxon prompted him to reaffirm his Christian faith. This he did, briefly, before addressing Colonel Hacker. ‘Take care that they do not put me to pain,’ he implored, ‘and, sir, this, and it please you –’ before breaking off again, having spied someone else toying with the axe. ‘Take heed of the axe,’ he repeated, ‘pray, take heed of the axe.’
The King now dealt with the practicalities of preparing for execution. ‘I shall say but very short prayers,’ he told the axeman – the leader of the two masked executioners present: ‘and when I thrust out my hands . . .’ That would be the signal that he was ready to die. He asked Juxon for his nightcap, and pushed some of his hair up into it. ‘Does my hair trouble you?’ he asked the executioner. It did: he and the bishop tucked all of it up beneath the white satin, so the King’s neck could be presented clean. ‘I have a good cause,’ Charles reassured himself, ‘and a gracious God on my side.’
‘There is but one stage more,’ soothed Juxon. ‘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 a great deal of cordial joy and comfort.’
Charles persisted with this heartening thought: ‘I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown; where no disturbance can be, no disturbance in the world.’
‘You are exchanged from a temporal to an eternal crown,’ the old bishop concurred, ‘a good exchange.’
The King checked his hair once more, before turning to Juxon, pressing the George – the jewelled medal, symbolic of high and courtly honour – into his hand, and saying to him, forcefully: ‘Remember!’41 On the scaffold, they took this to be a reminder that the George be passed on to the Prince of Wales.
Charles took off his doublet, draped a cloak around his shoulders for warmth, and asked the executioner to set the block fast, before again asking for a higher one to be brought. The executioner was polite but clear: the block was fast, and it was of the necessary height.
After raising his arms and eyes to the skies, the King lay down in prayer, his head on the low block, the executioner tucking some unruly hair back under the nightcap.
Charles soon stretched out his arms in the agreed manner and the axe fell. Death was delivered in one powerful blow, the head severed at around the third/fourth vertebra. It was held high by the masked second executioner. The shock of the sight of the bloodied top of the freshly killed King drew a groan from many in the crowd, who could scarcely believe what they had seen. In a posthumous vindication of Charles’s belief in the Divine Right of Kings, some rushed forward to dip their handkerchiefs in the royal blood, believing it to have sacred properties.
Immediately after Charles’s execution, Colonel John Hewson, one of the signatories of the death warrant, rode through the centre of London from Charing Cross to the Royal Exchange. Clattering behind him went a squadron of cavalry, as he rushed to spread a clear and uncompromising message: anyone, he declared repeatedly, who so much as questioned the justice of Charles Stuart’s death would in turn forfeit their own lives. For many Londoners this was a heavy-handed postscript to an already overwhelming day. The following week Bradshaw approved payment to the guards on the scaffold, for the care they had taken, and the cheerfulness they had shown while performing their duties.
Concerned that vengeance might appear in the shape of the dead King’s two older sons, in March it was declared that Charles, Prince of Wales, and James, Duke of York, should die without mercy, wherever they might be found.
In mid-December 1650, William Say passed the trial documents to clerks for safe storage, noting, ‘That the persons instructed in that great service had discharged their trust with great courage and fidelity.’42 They were filed away with customary efficiency by the Parliament bureaucrats, nobody realising that they gave a forensic account of proceedings that, under another regime, and through other eyes, might be viewed as the embodiment of that most heinous of charges – high treason.