Chapter 3
And whereas by the abolition of the kingly office provided for in this Act, a most happy way is made for this nation (if God see it good) to return to its just and ancient right, of being governed by its own Representatives or national meetings in council, from time to time chosen and entrusted for that purpose by the people.
Act of Parliament, 17 March 1649
Weeks after Charles’s death, the Rump declared that, ‘The office of a King in a nation, and to have power thereof in a single person, was unnecessary, burdensome, and dangerous to the liberty, safety, and public interest of the people, and therefore ought to be abolished.’1 England, for the first time in many hundreds of years, was a republic. It was named the Commonwealth.
This change was celebrated by the Crown’s bitterest enemies, but left others feeling distinctly nervous about what would happen next. John Evelyn, a conservative Royalist, heard about the execution from his brother George, who had been one of its thousands of eyewitnesses. Evelyn wrote in his diary: ‘The villainy of the Rebels proceeding now so far as to try, condemn, and murder our excellent King, the 30th of this month, struck me with such horror that I kept the day of his martyrdom a fast, and would not be present, at that execrable wickedness.’2
The trial and execution had taken place (not surprisingly, given the profession of many of those sitting in judgment) with military efficiency and ruthlessness. Among those who felt the loss of the King most deeply, there was now a rush to give him the aura of Christ-like suffering: parallels were found in both figures having been mocked by soldiers during their torment, and having behaved with humble submission at their end. Clarendon would write of Charles’s ‘saint-like behaviour, and his Christian courage and patience at his death’.3 A beautifully written book, Eikon Basilike (‘Image of the King’), appeared after the execution, which many at the time believed to be the King’s own work. It added to the image of a gentle and spiritual man having been cruelly put to death for his principles, on behalf of his people. Within a year of Charles’s death, fifty editions of it had appeared in a variety of languages.
When further incarnations of the High Court of Justice sentenced prominent Royalist leaders from the Second Civil War to execution, the Duke of Hamilton – leader of the force from Scotland, defeated at Preston – asked the executioner if the axe he saw awaiting him was the one that had dispatched the King. Informed that it was, the duke kissed it in homage, before presenting his neck to the same blade.
The execution of the King had removed the man the army felt to be dangerous, and knew to be untrustworthy. It could not, though, bring harmony to a deeply divided nation. Nor could it dictate how other countries would react. The Scots were particularly appalled at the death of their King: Parliament had guaranteed it would not allow him to be put to death, when he was sold to them. The Scots now used ‘high language and invective against the late proceedings in England’,4 and proclaimed the Prince of Wales as the new ‘King of Scotland’. The Commonwealth heard reports, ‘that in Scotland are many English officers and soldiers, who expect employment when their new King cometh’.5
Meanwhile much of Continental Europe joined in the outrage at the royal beheading. A dangerous attack on those responsible for the killing came in a much-read Latin treatise, Defensio Regia pro Carlo Primo (‘The Royal Defence of Charles I’), whose rapid dissemination around Europe caused huge concern among the new rulers of England. For those still struggling to make sense of such a shocking episode as the execution of a king, in what was regarded as the most exemplary of monarchies, this fiery tract provided plausible answers. It also dissuaded the Commonwealth’s neighbours from engaging with the new English republic, in terms of trade or diplomacy.
The perpetrators of the ‘miserable and amazing marvellous murder’ were, the anonymous author said, ‘savage, sternly steeled and stony-hearted’. He railed against the regicides as ‘sons of the soil, persons scarce of the nobility at home, scarce known to their own countrymen’, who had taken it upon themselves to judge, then execute, a king. ‘But with those judges that were chosen from the lower House were joined even judges from the army; soldiers never, though, had a right to sit in judgment upon a citizen.’ The author gave an emotive and one-sided account of Charles’s final two or three years: ‘They put him to several sorts of torments . . . They removed him from prison to prison, often changing his guards. Sometimes they gave him hopes of liberty – sometimes even of restoring him to his crown upon articles of agreement.’ In the end, after enduring ‘buffetings and kicks that were given by common soldiers’, ‘he suffered death as a robber, as a murderer, as a parricide, as a traitor, as a tyrant’. This was the crime of these cruel and despicable men, who had the gall to ‘toss kings’ heads like balls, play hoop with crowns, and make no more of imperial sceptres than of fools’ bauble-sticks with heads atop’.
This published assault gained further appeal when the anonymity of its author was penetrated, and it was established that it was the work of one of the most respected professors teaching in the Dutch academic hothouse of Leiden. Claude Salmasius, a Burgundian, was of a Protestant creed that was closer to the Presbyterians than to the Puritans of England. Given the acclaim Defensio Regio received, and Salmasius’s eminence (Queen Christina of Sweden invited him to be a guest at her court, where he was deluged with honours), a rebuttal was required to justify the King’s death.
The regicides’ champion was the poet John Milton, who in the two weeks before the King’s execution had written the Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, a justification for the calling to account, and even the execution, of a tyrant. Two months after the King’s beheading, Milton was given the post of Secretary of Foreign Tongues, on behalf of the freshly hatched republic. Installed in an official apartment in Whitehall, his rooms hung with pictures he had selected from the confiscated royal collection, his duties ranged from the translation of documents received from overseas, to writing propaganda against the Irish – whom he condemned as the most savage of barbarians, undeserving of mercy.
His prime responsibility now became the rebuttal of written attacks against those responsible for Charles’s death. Milton was, he said, happy ‘to render this never-to-be-regretted assistance to the valiant liberators of my country’. He dissected the arguments that had swayed the well-read of a continent, determined to expose them as lies, while defending the regicides in terms of motive, justification and background.
First, he claimed that Charles Stuart had abdicated his right to be viewed as a King, ‘For a tyrant is no real King; he is but a player-King, the mere mask and spectre of a King.’ This, Milton claimed, explained why, ‘The whole army and a great part of the people from almost every county in the kingdom cried out with one voice for justice against the King as the very author of all their calamities.’ Charles, he continued, ‘had been taken a prisoner of war, and found incurable’. As a result, ‘Can anyone fail to see that the preservation of any one man to the destruction of all others is utterly contrary to nature?’
Salmasius may have looked down on the bloodlines of the men who judged the tyrant-King, but Milton pointed to the distinguished ancestry of some, while ‘others, being as it were their own ancestors, tread the path to true nobility by way of industry and personal worth, and are comparable with any of the noblest soever’. Merit, he claimed, could trump the showiest of family trees.
Above all, Milton applauded the regicides as heroes. ‘No men ever undertook with a loftier courage,’ he wrote, ‘and, as our adversaries themselves confess, with a more tranquil mind, an action so distinguished, so worthy of heroic ages – an action whereby they ennobled not only law and its enforcement, which thenceforth seem restored to all men equitably, but Justice’s very self, and rendered her after so signal a judgment more glorious, more august, than ever she had been before.’
The clash of creeds championed by Salmasius and Milton demonstrated the passion and the division of the times. Those responsible for the death of the King – those who had presented the case against him; those who had found him guilty and applied their signatures and seals to his death warrant; or those who had stood on the scaffold supervising the moment of death – were all aware that their actions attracted horror, as well as praise. Salmasius had announced in his tract the need for retribution, writing, ‘These men’s injustice, impiety, perfidy, cruelty, I will cry out unto heaven and earth; themselves the perpetrators I will turn over to posterity convicted, and transfix the culprits.’
In fact, the vengeance had already begun.
Dr Isaac Dorislaus, the Dutch junior counsel, had, in the end, not been called upon to take a prominent role in the great trial. Joseph Herne, present at the High Court of Justice on the hearing’s second day, recalled seeing Solicitor General Cook deep in conversation with Dorislaus even after Charles was seated in readiness for proceedings. Lord President Bradshaw had had to interrupt their legal tête-à-tête, to enquire what Cook required of the court. Dorislaus otherwise remained in the shadows, poised to cross-question the King if he had pleaded not guilty, busying himself with notes and advice, eager to see the tyrant condemned.
After the trial Dorislaus told friends that the King’s fatal error had been a refusal to plead: if he had done so, the doctor calculated, Charles might well have survived, for he might then have drawn out proceedings indefinitely – until the conclusion of the single month that constituted the High Court’s permitted lifespan. Such a delay could have left the judgment incomplete. In addition, this extra time would have given supporters of the Crown time to galvanise, and come to the King’s aid. Charles’s curt and absolute rebuttal of his judges had played into the hands of those who wanted him rapidly dealt with.
Friendless and isolated, the new republic in England was keen to establish alliances abroad: it was feeling vulnerable, particularly to the threat of a further Scottish invasion, while Ireland was seething with enemies too. France was sheltering Henrietta Maria, one of its own princesses, and the widow of the beheaded King. The Commonwealth would need to look elsewhere for political acceptance and profitable trade.
The Prince of Wales and his younger brother James had found sanctuary with their sister Mary and brother-in-law William, the Princess and Prince of Orange, at The Hague, in the Netherlands. The Orange family was the leading Dutch dynasty, but it lacked the supreme power enjoyed by many of Continental Europe’s monarchies, and faced strong and established political opponents. Some of these were hostile to the support shown to the beleaguered Stuart princes. Noting this, as well as the shared Protestantism of England and the Netherlands, and relying on the Dutch reputation for putting trade before all else, the new English republic explored possible diplomatic and commercial ties.
First to be approached as ambassador was Bulstrode Whitelocke, a Puritan lawyer who was a friend of Cromwell. However, Whitelocke was one who preferred discretion to valour, as had been shown by his refusal to engage in the prosecution of the King. He was aware that many displaced Royalists had followed their exiled leader across the North Sea to the Netherlands. Rather than become vulnerable to them, he turned down the diplomatic post.
Dr Dorislaus was less concerned about threats to his safety, having positive memories of his previous mission to the Dutch provinces. The States-General, the federal representatives that helped govern the seven Dutch provinces, had received him in the summer of 1648. For several months he had assisted Walter Strickland, Parliament’s ambassador general to the Dutch since the outbreak of the Civil War. Dorislaus spent much of his time spying on the rogue squadron that had broken away from the Parliamentary navy to form a Royalist fleet under Charles’s nephew, Prince Rupert of the Rhine.
Dorislaus had returned to England that winter, working on the case against the King, before turning his attention the next month to the prosecution of other prominent Royalists. This had resulted in the execution of Lord Capel, the Duke of Hamilton and the Earl of Holland, despite the last two having surrendered on guarantees that their lives would be spared. (The Earl of Holland had perhaps exhausted all reasonable expectation of mercy, having, over the previous decade, fought in turn for Parliament, the King, then Parliament again, before his final, fatal, dabble with Royalism.)
When asked by the new governing body in London, the Council of State, to return to his native land on its behalf, Dorislaus agreed to do so, despite the dangers. His request in return was that, after he had completed his spell as Resident of Parliament at The Hague, he might be allowed to retreat to academic backwaters, and be appointed Keeper of the Library of St James, which, a contemporary boasted, contained ‘choice books and manuscripts . . . and there were not the like to them, except only in the Vatican, in any other library in Christendom’.6 This was, therefore, to be his last mission, before a gentle semi-retirement in scholastic heaven.
Dorislaus arrived in the fishing port of Scheveningen, near The Hague, on 29 April, taking lodgings at an inn, De Swaen, which was run by friends. One of his first visitors was Strickland, who urged him to come to stay with him and his family, where he could be better protected. So nervous was Strickland about his own security that he had publicly pretended that his mission was concluded: he was now in the Netherlands, he claimed, in an unofficial capacity, owing to his Dutch wife wanting to spend time with her family. Dorislaus declined Strickland’s invitation, staying on at the inn with a small retinue of armed guards.
Soon afterwards a man arrived posing as a member of Strickland’s staff, bearing instructions for Dorislaus to follow him to a meeting. Dorislaus suspected a trap and refused to go. This was fortunate because, as Strickland reported to London, ‘diverse rogues were ready to have killed him had he come out’.
The next night a friend warned Dorislaus of the rumour that he, Dorislaus, had been one of the two masked men who performed the King’s execution, either the one who had wielded the axe, or his assistant who had held the King’s severed head aloft. And now the Royalists wanted him dead.
Dorislaus found it laughable that he, a bookish academic, might have been involved in something as brutally physical as the beheading. He told his companions not to worry: even if he was attacked, he was confident in his bodyguards’ protection.
In the spring of 1649, Walter Whitford, a colonel in the King’s defeated army, found himself among the many Royalists sheltering in the Netherlands. Whitford’s father had been Bishop of Brechin before his support for Charles I’s religious beliefs had seen him expelled from Scotland. Charles had found him a parish in Northamptonshire as compensation, but Whitford senior had remained open in his sympathies for the Crown. This had made his last years ones of hardship at the hands of Parliament: they had expelled him from his living a year before his death, in 1647.
Colonel Whitford was one of many seeking to avenge the King’s death, and no doubt to strike a blow on behalf of his father. Brought up in a religious household, he went to seek guidance from the English priest acting as Catholic confessor to the Portuguese ambassador: was it a sin, he asked, to slay a man who had killed your King? What happened next gives us a clue as to the probable answer.
Late one evening, Whitford led eleven men to De Swaen. One of the Royalist gang knocked at the door, pretending that he wanted to buy some wine; when the inn staff admitted him, Whitford and his men poured in behind, snuffing out the lights in the entrance, then fanning out to hunt down Dorislaus. The Dutchman’s bodyguards rushed forward to block the intruders while the startled group dining with Dorislaus urged him to run to a prearranged secure room.
Dorislaus’s servants swore afterwards that their master never managed to find the door. The Dutch authorities, who made their own investigations, concluded that Dorislaus reached it, but for some reason failed to open it – maybe through terror, or perhaps because it was locked. Either way, Dorislaus’s guards were overwhelmed, with two of them seriously wounded in the scuffle. Whitford and his main force surged forward, informing all in the inn to calm down: they were only there for the King’s murderer. One of the guests, a man called van Valkenstein, made a sudden start, and, momentarily mistaken for Dorislaus, received a serious wound that led to a lingering death.
Now the assassins found Dorislaus, hiding under a chimney. He tried to keep his attackers at bay with a chair, but it was hopeless: his head was spliced by Whitford’s broadsword, before another slash ripped him open, the wound running from heart to liver. One of the attackers shouted, ‘Thus dies one of the King’s judges!’7
Accounts of the murder were trumpeted everywhere, their details sometimes changing in the retelling. Clement Walker – an MP who had been expelled in Pride’s Purge, and whose continued resistance to the Commonwealth would lead to his death, without trial, in the Tower of London – wrote, ‘about 18 Scotsmen (friends to [the Duke of] Hamilton) repairing to [Dorislaus’s] lodging, 6 of them made good the stair-foot, where expostulating with him concerning the unjust condemnation and execution of the duke, they stabbed him to death, and escaped’.8 Bulstrode Whitelocke reported, with more accuracy: ‘Letters from the Hague, that twelve English Cavaliers in disguise came into a room where Dr Dorislaus, who was a public minister there for the Parliament, was with others at supper, that they murdered him by stabbing him in several places, and cut his throat.’9 The particulars may have varied, but the horror among Parliamentarians was uniform.
Royalists viewed the killing as justified retribution for the death of the King. Sir Edward Nicholas, who had served as one of Charles’s most measured and trusted advisers, had been living in impoverished exile since the fall of Oxford in 1646. He allowed his customary reserve to slip, writing triumphantly of Dorislaus’s end being ‘the deserved execution of that bloody villain’.10
The consternation among the Commonwealth’s heavyweights was great. The King had only been dead for a little more than three months, but already one of the key figures in his trial had been slain in an act of brutal vengeance. In London, as a warning that such acts against the regicides would not be tolerated, Parliament decided to execute a prominent Royalist prisoner in return; but Sir Lewes Dyves, selected as the sacrifice, managed to escape.
The dismay at Dorislaus’s slaying quickly turned to anger and suspicion. It was noted with concern by the Council of State that the killers had got away, the Dutch being seen as either unable or unwilling to help in tracking them down. (In fact, Whitford had slipped over to the Spanish Netherlands, part of present-day Belgium, thanks to the help of the Portuguese ambassador, which would have made his apprehension extremely difficult.) The regicide, Edmund Ludlow, commented: ‘Though this action was so infamous and contrary to the right of nations, yet the Dutch were not very forward to find out the criminals, in order to bring them to justice.’11 The Commonwealth urged the Dutch now to make doubly sure of Strickland’s safety.
Dorislaus’s naked body was laid out on a table in his lodgings. The corpse attracted huge, ghoulish interest, a constant stream of people passing through De Swaen. But nobody provided help in tracking down or even identifying Whitford* and his men, despite a huge reward of 1,000 guilders for information, and a threat of death for any who harboured the fugitives. This would remain a diplomatic grievance between the two nations, as relations deteriorated through the following years, a period of mutual distrust that eventually led to warfare.
The new English republic was determined to honour one who had been murdered for his part in bringing a tyrant to justice. Dorislaus’s body was returned to London, embalmed, then lay in state in Worcester House, one of a series of grand mansions on the Strand overlooking the Thames. The perpetrators of the ‘Horrid Murder’ might not be known by name, but the Council of State concluded the culprits clearly came from ‘that party from whom all the troubles of this nation have formerly sprung’12 – the Royalists. In compensation for their loss, £500 was awarded to each of Dorislaus’s daughters, while an annual pension of £200 was granted to his son.
Dorislaus was given a lavish funeral, before burial in Westminster Abbey. John Evelyn noted: ‘This night was buried with great pomp Dorislaus, slain at The Hague, the villain who managed the trial against his Sacred Majesty.’13 A Royalist balladeer – mindful that Charles had been granted the most modest of funerals, having been quietly transported to Windsor for a simple interment, in the presence of a handful of loyal supporters – gloated at the grief of the distinguished mourners at Dorislaus’s committal:
Now pray observe the Pomp, the Persons, State
That did attend This Alien Reprobate:
Here, went Lieutenant General Crocodile,
And’s Cubs, bred of the Slime of our Rich Nile:
Who weep before they kill, and whose False Tears
Trickle from Blood-shed eyes of Murderers . . .14
Behind the tears – crocodile or otherwise – was genuine fear. The Parliamentary army officers who had sent Sir George Lisle and Sir Charles Lucas to die in front of a firing squad, after the siege of Colchester, had reprieved a third Royalist, Sir Bernard Gascoigne, when they discovered that Gascoigne was a Tuscan. It had been immediately agreed that adding such a man to the list of the condemned could place the Parliamentarians and their families at risk when travelling abroad. He was spared.
This same sense of self-preservation was foremost in the mind of Anthony Ascham. An Eton and Cambridge Scholar, Ascham had been tutor to the King’s second son, James, during the boy’s time in Parliament’s custody. After the young duke’s escape from London to Holland, disguised as a woman, Ascham had published an influential treatise justifying the political supremacy of the army during a time of confusion and revolution.15 He then became a diplomat, serving the Commonwealth in Hamburg, before, as the State Papers for 16 January 1650 record, ‘Anthony Ascham [was] approved to go as resident to the King of Spain and to have notice to go in the fleet going southward.’16 He left on this mission, extremely concerned about the murderous intent of Royalist exiles.
Arriving in the southern Spanish town of Puerto Santa Maria in late May, Ascham was ‘in so much alarm for his safety that he would not stir from the port . . . until he had a Maestro di Campo [senior regimental officer] and three or four soldiers to guard and accompany him.’17 Next to his chest he wore an oval-shaped lucky talisman, engraved with the image of regicide: a sword thrusting downwards through a crown. Within a day of his arrival in Madrid, though, the charm had failed, and Ascham had followed Dorislaus as the victim of a gang of sword-wielding Royalists. This time, the perpetrators were arrested. Although contemporary accounts vary, it seems likely that they had stumbled upon Ascham by chance, and had wrongly identified him as John Aske, the barrister assisting Cook and Dorislaus at the King’s trial.
John Milton, the regicides’ propagandist-in-chief, recalled the King’s last word to Juxon on the scaffold: the bishop had been interrogated so as to establish what Charles’s final instruction to him – ‘Remember!’ – had meant. The browbeaten Juxon had eventually revealed: ‘The King ordered me, if I could ever get to his son, to carry him this last command of a dying father, that, should he ever be restored to his kingdom and his power, he would pardon you the authors of his death: this is what the King charged me again and again to remember.’18 Milton publicly berated the Prince of Wales for his failure to honour this, his father’s final wish: ‘But in what manner has he paid obedience to it, when either by his order or by his authority, two of our ambassadors, one in Holland, the other in Spain, have been murdered; the latter without even the slightest suspicion of being accessory to the King’s death?’19 This shrill outrage revealed the level of Parliamentary anxiety at the murder of their vulnerable diplomats.
It was not just the regicides that were under threat; it was also their families, exactly as John Bradshaw’s wife had warned him would be the case when he had accepted the lord presidency – against her strongest advice. Indeed, one of their near relatives was targeted for royal revenge.
In December 1652, Richard Bradshaw, nephew of the lord president, was sent from his regular ambassadorial posting in Hamburg on a special mission to Denmark. The Danish royal family was closely linked to the Stuarts: Princess Anne of Denmark had been wife to James I and mother to Charles I. The current ruler of Denmark, Frederick III, was therefore first cousin to the executed English King. After the beheading, the Danes had joined with the Swedes in working on the Dutch government ‘to join with them in assisting the King of Scots to gain his birthright’.20
Richard Bradshaw was ‘a bold fellow’,21 who had served as a quartermaster general during the civil war. His brief now was to gain an audience with Frederick, with the aim of securing the release of twenty-two English merchant ships that had been impounded in Copenhagen. The vessels carried valuable naval provisions, including large quantities of hemp, used in the manufacture of rope.
The Danish King was in no hurry to meet the favourite nephew of the man who had judged and condemned his cousin. He sent word that he would not receive Richard Bradshaw’s mission until Christmas had been celebrated.
Thomas Whyte, one of the King of Denmark’s naval lieutenants, was in Norway when he learnt that Bradshaw would soon be arriving in Copenhagen. According to an anonymous Commonwealth spy, Whyte declared Richard Bradshaw a rebel, and vowed that he would ‘shoot a brace of bullets into him’.22 The informant reported to Parliament that he had been unsure at that stage whether Whyte was being serious or not, so pretended to agree with this plan in order to find out more. Whyte then started to plan the killing in earnest, saying he would gather a group of men to help him see it through.
On the night of Tuesday 4 January, 1653, Whyte arrived in the Danish port of Elsinore, where foreign shipping had to pay toll money for passing through the straits between Denmark and Sweden. Having established that Bradshaw’s nephew was also in Elsinore, Whyte shared his plan with his companion – who he had no idea was a Commonwealth spy. London soon learnt the structure of the plot: to ‘have the said resident killed in his own lodging, upon a Sunday night, as he sat at supper. At which time the said Whyte said, there were no lights abroad. And that the nature of the people at Copenhagen was such, that, when any quarrel happened at such a time, the people would shut their doors.’23 The Danes’ reluctance to get involved in unexpected drama would, Whyte hoped, assist in the assassins’ escape.
Whyte decided that the murder would not, after all, involve the blast of the ‘brace of bullets’ originally envisaged. Instead he and his companions would rely on silent weapons: axes. What could be more suitable for the near relative of the man who had ordered the late King’s beheading? The would-be killers travelled by wagon from Elsinore to Copenhagen, arriving there late on 6 January, intending to strike quickly. Meanwhile the Commonwealth spy slipped off to warn Richard Bradshaw of the plan against his life. When he learnt about it, Bradshaw encouraged the informant to urge Whyte on: he would be ready, when he came for him.
Whyte, meanwhile, appears to have been so excited by his mission that he became torn about which method of assassination would work best. The plan involving the axe was now left to one side, as he vacillated between shooting Bradshaw with a musket through the windows of his lodgings, and slaying him face to face with a pistol. One day he was going to kill his man in Denmark; the next he was planning to wait till he had returned to Hamburg. Whyte shared every, shifting, detail with the man he thought was his friend, but who was in fact reporting all to London – even down to how Whyte planned to cut off the dead man’s fingers and steal his valuable rings. Meanwhile, throughout January, nothing happened.
Early in February, Whyte presented his latest plans to one of Frederick III’s heralds, who reported ‘that the King of Denmark would be glad this business were done, to wit, the killing of Lord Resident Bradshaw; but was unwilling to have it done in his land’.24 So it was that Richard Bradshaw escaped assassination – partly because of Whyte’s procrastination, and partly because of this royal request not to have the murder committed on his soil. However, when reports of Whyte’s plots reached the remaining regicides in England, they were reconfirmed in their fear that, one day, they might suffer death at the hand of Charles I’s avengers.
Those who had been most openly engaged in the trial and execution of Charles were soon adapting to life under a republic, where the army remained a formidable force. Having been infrequently paid for a long time, the soldiers now demanded that Parliament make good its debts. This it attempted through the sale of land and chattels belonging to the late King and his Royalist supporters.
Although one of the intentions of killing the King had been to stop further risings in favour of the Crown, the execution made the Prince of Wales the new focus of opposition. The Marquess of Ormonde, the leading Irish Royalist, proclaimed Charles Stuart ‘the King of Ireland, Scotland and England’. Meanwhile, the Scots – for so long divided by Charles I’s uncompromising religious convictions – began to unify after the King’s death and explore ways of uniting behind his heir. The Commonwealth, England’s new republic, geared itself up for further action in the Third Civil War.
Cromwell took command of the Commonwealth forces headed for Ireland, a country known to be a grim place to wage war, with its uncompromising enemy, thick mud and disease-ridden bogs. Some English soldiers had mutinied at being sent there in 1647, and they would do so again now. Meanwhile the Parliamentarians who had been fighting against Royalists and Catholics in Ireland since the beginning of the decade were low in morale, supplies and funds: Sir Charles Coote, leading Parliamentary troops in the north of Ireland, reported that the men of his six regiments ‘have had but eight months’ pay in eight years, and a peck [2 gallons] of oatmeal a week’.25
The New Model Army had twenty-eight regiments. It was decided that eight of these – four regiments of foot and four of cavalry – would suffice for the invasion. The choice as to who would be sent on this bleak campaign was decided, after prayer, by lot: ‘Ten blanks and four papers with “Ireland” writ in them were put into a hat, and, being all shuffled together, were drawn out by a child, who gave to an officer of each regiment in the lot the lot of that regiment; and being [done] in this impartial and inoffensive way, no regiment could take exception at it.’26
Six of the eight regiments were commanded by regicides: Henry Ireton, Richard Deane, John Hewson, Thomas Horton, Isaac Ewer and Adrian Scroope (Scroope who had captured the Earl of Holland during the Second Civil War, then helped organise security in Westminster Hall during the King’s trial). They departed in the knowledge that this would be a dangerous assignment: learning he would be crossing the Irish Sea to fight, Isaac Ewer wrote his will, ‘not knowing,’ as he said, ‘whether God may ever bring me back’.27 He would be one of several men closely involved in Charles’s execution destined to die in Ireland. Indeed, Colonel Horton, hero of St Fagans, died of dysentery very soon after landing there. Colonel John Moore, a former governor of Liverpool who had helped to sign the King’s life away, would follow soon after, from fever.
The English invaders headed for a land that had been at war since 1641, when Irish Catholics rose against Protestant settlers from England and Scotland. Parliamentary pamphlets claimed that 200,000 Protestants were massacred then, although the actual figure was perhaps 4,000, with another 8,000 perishing from cold and disease after being driven from their homes in winter. This black propaganda, stoked by the tracts of John Milton and the sermons of their Puritan preachers, combined to form a black hatred of the Irish Catholics, and their Royalist cause, in the hearts of Cromwell’s soldiers. Colonel Hewson, a signatory of Charles’s death warrant, spoke for his fellows when he said that, if the Irish failed to surrender, ‘the Lord by his power shall break them in pieces like a potter’s vessel’.28 The New Model Army, with its uncompromising professionalism, reinforced by religious passion, was just the tool for this job.
In the meantime, the force it faced lacked training and harmony. It was made up of Anglo-Irish Royalists, Catholic Confederates, Munster Protestants and Ulster Scots. The Confederates had come into being in 1642, and comprised two-thirds of the population. Led by native Catholic noblemen, clergy and army officers, they resented being expected to serve under the Marquess of Ormonde, who was a general of modest abilities, a Protestant convert, and their former enemy commander. The Confederates reluctantly provided him with troops because, in return, he, with equal reluctance, promised toleration for Irish Catholics. The other forces under Ormonde joined him with similarly grave misgivings.
Given its natural divisions, credit should go to Ormonde’s diplomacy in holding this dysfunctional military force together. However, militarily, he failed: he oversaw the loss of Ireland to Cromwell in just nine months. His strategy and tactics were flawed from the start. Ormonde had surrendered Dublin to the Parliamentarians during the summer of 1647, preferring then for his English enemies to have the city than for the Irish Catholics to gain it. He now failed in his attempt to recapture the city. Not only that, but the besieged garrison boldly seized the initiative, attacking Ormonde’s lines at Rathmines on 2 August 1649 with great success. The marquess’s troops were scattered, and his artillery captured. Thirteen days later, Cromwell was able to land near Dublin, unopposed.
Ormonde now went on the defensive, ordering his forces to hold fast in a string of key towns, hoping the invaders would succumb to hunger and sickness during protracted sieges. But the New Model Army set about cracking the strongholds, one by one, with a speed that made Ormonde’s plans irrelevant.
The first to receive Cromwell’s lethal attention, in early September 1649, was Drogheda. Thirty miles north of Dublin, the town guarded the coastward march up into Ulster. Its defending commander, Sir Arthur Aston, had boasted that it would be easier to capture Hell than Drogheda, but the high, thin walls he so admired were suited to an earlier period of warfare. They were no match for Cromwell’s eleven 48lb siege guns. Drogheda held out for just eight days.
Cromwell had offered terms of surrender to the garrison, which had been scorned. Angered by the casualties his forces had subsequently endured, and seeking vengeance for the Catholic massacre of Protestants in 1641, he stormed the town with 12,000 men, ordering that none of the defending troops should be spared. Two of those who had signed the King’s death warrant were among the four regimental commanders to distinguish themselves in this, the bloodiest of assaults: Colonel John Hewson and Colonel Isaac Ewer.
Hewson – a former cobbler who had fought for Parliament since the outbreak of hostilities in 1642, and whose bravery had been rewarded with speedy promotions – was in his element. He had played an important part in the Second Civil War, leading his regiment with determination during the storming of Maidstone in Kent. A fellow regicide, Major General Edmund Ludlow, recalled of that engagement: ‘The dispute growing hot, he [Hewson] was knocked down with a musket; but recovering himself, he pressed the enemy so hard, that they were forced to retreat to their main guard.’29 Hewson was just the sort of gritty officer the New Model Army prospered by. His famed toughness unsettled the enemy and made him feared by civilians: it was Hewson who, in the immediate aftermath of the King’s execution, had ridden through London, forbidding any to mourn Charles, on pain of death.
Ewer had been on the council of war that had ordered the summary execution of Lisle and Lucas after the fall of Colchester. Known for his outstanding loyalty to the cause, he had subsequently been sent to oversee the removal of Charles from vulnerable Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight to the solid security of Hurst Castle: there had been doubts about Charles’s custodian, Colonel Hammond, at that time, but there were never doubts about Ewer. He had attended every day of the King’s trial and was an enthusiastic regicide. Now, aware that Ireland might well be his graveyard, he showed similar fervour in battle.
Around 2,000 of the 2,800 defenders of Drogheda were killed, along with an estimated 750 civilians. Cromwell ordered that any priests or friars found in the town should be treated as combatants, and must be ‘knocked on the head’ – that is, be bludgeoned to death. This was also the fate of Aston, the Royalist commander. He had surrendered Millmount Fort, a small but doughty defence, to Colonel Axtell, on the promise that he and his men would be spared. This was the same Daniel Axtell who had been in charge of troops in Westminster Hall during the King’s trial, ordering his men to fire on the loudly intrusive Lady Fairfax, and forcing them to bay for justice, then for execution, at the height of the proceedings.
Axtell had the Royalist prisoners disarmed, then led to a mill, where, within the hour, they were murdered in cold blood. Aston was beaten to death with his wooden leg, which his killers then split open: there had been a rumour that this was where he stored gold coins. This gossip proved to be false.
It was a bloody day all round. When a hundred Royalist soldiers sought sanctuary in the Church of St Peter, Cromwell ordered Hewson to flush them out with fire: thirty were burnt to death, while fifty were killed as they fled the flames.
Cromwell sent news of his blood-drenched success to John Bradshaw, who was in nominal charge of the Commonwealth’s executive: John Evelyn wrote of him being, in that summer of 1649, ‘then in great power’.30 Cromwell passed to Bradshaw an unashamed account of his ruthlessness. ‘It hath pleased God to bless our endeavours at Treda [Drogheda] . . . I believe we put to the sword the whole number of the defendants. I do not think thirty of the whole number escaped with their lives.’31 The few survivors were transported to Barbados, to work the plantations in a state akin to slavery.
The Irish campaign continued to be bloody, and one-sided. Three weeks after Drogheda, the New Model Army sacked the town of Wexford while terms for surrender were being negotiated. Again, artillery played an important role, siege guns being brought along the coast for Cromwell by the ships of Richard Deane, who had bombarded Basing House four years earlier, before judging, and signing the death warrant of the King. Deane was now a general-at-sea – an admiral – in the Commonwealth navy.
Hundreds of women and children were put to death, or drowned in the River Slaney, while attempting to flee the indiscriminate massacre of the Wexford garrison. Again, Cromwell felt little compassion, justifying this suffering as fair vengeance for the shedding of Protestant blood at the start of the decade, and pointing to the loss of just twenty Commonwealth troops as proof of God’s continuing favour.
The seasons were now changing ominously: Wexford was so badly mangled by the attack that it could not serve as the English winter quarters. Illness was rife in the cold, the mud and the effluence of the makeshift military camps. But with spring came further triumphs, the capture of Kilkenny and Clonmel effectively ending the campaign. Leaving Ireton to hold down Ireland, with Ludlow his second-in-command, Cromwell was now urgently called back to England.
Ireland had been a running sore for years; but now, for the first time, the various factions in Scotland were ready to unite behind the Prince of Wales. Charles Stuart would need to make compromises of conscience that his father had rejected to the end. However, this he eventually agreed to do, urged on by his mother and the French court to settle with the Scots on any terms, since they presented the only hope of recovering his father’s throne. Charles therefore promised to support the imposition of Presbyterianism in England, once his southern crown had been reclaimed.
To ensure Scottish support, the Prince even allowed the ill use and sacrifice of some of his family’s most loyal supporters. Its bravest general in the north, the charismatic and brilliant Duke of Montrose, who had resurrected his campaigns in Scotland to avenge the death of Charles I, was now betrayed after defeat and – testimony to the hurt his previous successes had caused his enemies – was denied the nobleman’s customary death of beheading. Instead, in May 1650, he was led in an open cart through the streets of Edinburgh, his hands tied fast so he could not shield himself from the crowd’s missiles. Montrose conducted himself with a dignity so remarkable at his end, that it was said to have been of more use to the Royalist cause than all his years of military gains. He was hanged, before his body was mutilated – his head stuck on a high spike, his limbs sent off to four important Scottish cities as a warning to others. The same month, twenty-one-year-old Charles Stuart was formally proclaimed King of Scotland.
Cromwell’s army was half the size of that of his enemy, but his men were united and disciplined, while the Scots’ loyalties were pulled in many directions, many of their men reluctant to serve. Lord Fairfax, an isolated and unhappy figure since Charles’s execution, now stood down from command of the army, claiming he could not in good conscience invade Scotland, whose people had been his allies in the First Civil War.
Fairfax was replaced by Cromwell, fresh from Ireland. He gathered his forces, then headed towards Berwick-on-Tweed. Thomas Harrison, the Puritan dandy who had escorted Charles from the Isle of Wight towards his trial, and had been promoted major general, was left in charge of military forces throughout the rest of England.
The able Scottish commander, General David Leslie, had the better of two skirmishes near Edinburgh, but his plans were then hampered by interference from the Kirk party – radical Presbyterians who were nicknamed ‘Whigs’. With Cromwell’s men within striking distance, the Kirk suddenly ordered a three-day pause in hostilities so it could purge the army of the ‘ungodly’. Eighty officers and 3,000 troops were replaced by religiously correct, but militarily inferior, men. On 3 September 1650, confident in supreme command, and focused on the task in hand, Cromwell pulled off perhaps his finest victory, at the battle of Dunbar. The New Model Army annihilated the Scots, despite being outnumbered two to one.
Cromwell, repeatedly succumbing to serious illness – perhaps malaria contracted in Ireland – spent the next eleven months manoeuvring to capture Leslie’s strongholds. Deciding to strike at Perth at the end of July 1651, Cromwell warned Harrison to stand ready in defence, in case the Scots took this opportunity to march south into England. This they did, King Charles of Scotland at the head of thirty regiments, confident he could reclaim his primary throne, and eager to hold to account those who had put his father to death. He and his men covered 150 miles in their first week.
The Scottish invasion caused terror in the south. There was particular consternation in the Council of State, many of whose members had royal blood on their hands. ‘Bradshaw himself,’ wrote Lucy Hutchinson, ‘as stout-hearted as he was, privately could not conceal his fear; some raged and uttered sad discontents against Cromwell.’32 Panic even made them question the new lord general’s loyalty.
Cromwell quickly took Perth, and then wheeled south, sending some of his cavalry under the outstanding young major general, John Lambert, to harry the Scottish force from the rear. Meanwhile Harrison had defused many of those in England who might rise in support of a Stuart restoration. There were raids on suspects’ homes, when their private armouries were confiscated, and the more worrisome among them were taken into custody. Harrison marched slowly back southwards, his retreating footsteps mirroring those of the advancing Royalists, watching them closely while refusing to be brought to battle.
Colonel Robert Lilburne, a Baptist Leveller who had been the forty-seventh of the fifty-nine to sign Charles’s death warrant, brought about the first major reverse of Charles’s invasion. He defeated the Royalist Earl of Derby at the Battle of Wigan Lane in Lancashire, in late August. The main Stuart army was now out on a limb, its northern wing defeated, the hoped-for support for the Crown not materialising.
On 3 September 1651, the first anniversary of his triumph at Dunbar, Cromwell struck. At the battle of Worcester he led 31,000 men of the New Model Army against the 16,000 men in Charles Stuart’s predominantly Scottish army. Cromwell lost only 200 men that day, while killing 3,000 and capturing 10,000 of the enemy. The Royalist military cause was shattered, and the Third (and final) Civil War was over. Victory rescued the Commonwealth. It also saved the necks of the regicides – for now.