Chapter 5
The cursed Presbyterian crew
Was then put to the flight,
Some did fly by day,
And others run by night.
In barns and stables they did cant,
And every place they could,
He made them remember,
The spilling royal blood.
‘King Charles the Second’s Restoration, 29 May’ – a ballad, 1660
The Prince of Wales had learnt of Cromwell’s death with disbelief. In the mid-1650s, Charles Stuart’s existence had diminished to one of impoverished despair. Cromwell had successfully insisted, by the terms of a treaty with France, that the family of Charles I be exiled from French territory. The Prince had moved for two years to Cologne, ‘whilst,’ one of his companions recalled, ‘all the princes of Europe seemed to contend amongst themselves who should most eminently forget and neglect him’.1 He was in the countryside of what is now Belgium when his father’s nemesis died. He moved immediately to Brussels, eagerly awaiting possibilities.
In 1655 a false report of Cromwell’s death, and his replacement by Major General Lambert, had reached the Royalists in exile. Secretary Nicholas had written at the time: ‘If Cromwell should be dead, and Lambert chosen in his place, he or any other who had not actually a hand in the murder of the late King may be treated with and pardoned, so as to restore the King on good conditions, which is the only hope I expect from such a change.’2 Now, with Oliver Cromwell’s death confirmed, it was welcome news that Monck had become the most powerful man in the country: he had played no part in Charles I’s execution. It was possible to negotiate with such a man.
At first, the Royalists received no word from Monck. Indeed, his early actions were discouraging for Charles, and reassuring to those who wanted to perpetuate the Commonwealth. Monck stated his intention was to serve Parliament, and its members were happy to take him at his word, and use him as their sword arm. When the City of London refused to grant desperately needed funds until a free Parliament was called, the members asked Monck to intervene. He took his troops into the City and, to the consternation of the Royalists, arrested the ringleaders there. Monck then broke the gates that marked, and the portcullises that symbolised, the City’s independence. When the Prince of Wales heard this, his confidant Clarendon recalled, ‘All the little remainder of his hope was extinguished, and he had nothing left before his eyes but a perpetual exile.’3
The following day Praise-God Barebone attacked the Stuarts in Parliament, his petition insisting that only those who took an oath rejecting the line of Charles I should be allowed to hold public office. Even to mention restoration, Barebone urged, should result in a charge of high treason. Monck realised that he would be among the first called upon to make this oath of renunciation. He would very soon be forced to declare his hand.
Meanwhile Monck made quiet contact with Sir Charles Coote, Lord President of Connaught, the western province of Ireland. Like Monck, Coote had been a Royalist officer who had switched allegiance during the First Civil War to fight for Parliament. Coote appreciated that the tide had suddenly and definitely turned in favour of the Stuarts. He was desperate not to be punished for his treachery, or for his actions as a Parliamentary commander. Coote was keen to capture Edmund Ludlow, one of the most prominent regicides in Ireland, so he could deliver him up to Charles as a demonstration of his rediscovered loyalty to the Crown. This, he hoped, would result in his being pardoned. Ludlow was too wary to be trapped, though, so Coote next settled on catching John Cook, the lead prosecutor at Charles I’s trial.
Coote invited Cook to come from his home in Waterford, to a meeting in Dublin. The lawyer and his wife were troubled by this summons, and considered fleeing to the American colonies. But Cook eventually decided to accept, and headed towards Dublin. He was picked up en route by Coote’s men, and thrown in prison.
Coote now rounded up a handful of others involved in Charles I’s death: Colonel John Jones, Cromwell’s brother-in-law; Sir Hardress Waller, who had been so pivotal in the success of Pride’s Purge; Colonel Matthew Tomlinson, who had guarded the King in his final days; and Colonel Hercules Huncks and Lieutenant Colonel Robert Phare, two of the officers who had been on duty on the scaffold when the execution was carried out. As the possibility of Stuart restoration turned into likelihood, there was a scramble for redemption among Parliamentarians. The regicides were quickly identified as especially vulnerable pawns, to be bartered in return for forgiveness.
Fear at the consequences of a royal return became clear in the House of Commons by mid-March 1660, with dissolution looming, and the future unsure but threatening. Those who had stood against the late King wanted to lay down a clear marker between their conduct, and that of those who had been behind the judicial death of Charles I. John Crew, MP for Brackley during the Long Parliament, had been an eager opponent of the Royalists during the first two Civil Wars. However, he had been one of the members excluded by Pride’s Purge, and now was his moment for revenge. He moved that, before this Parliament voted itself into extinction, it must bear witness against those responsible for the infamous execution, which prompted many members to declare their hands innocent of the King’s blood.
The return to royal rule was not yet guaranteed. On 12 April there was a reigniting of republican hope with the news that John Lambert was free again: he had escaped the Tower of London with the help of his chambermaid, who took his place in his prison bed, wearing his nightcap and managing a gruff goodnight to the guards from behind the bed curtains. Lambert let himself down from his window by a rope made from bound sheets. On reaching the ground, six of his followers spirited him away by barge. When the gaoler unlocked the cell door the next morning, all he could say was, ‘In the name of God, Joan, what makes you here?’4
Lambert wanted a return to the days when an irresistible Parliamentary army controlled the land. He planned a rendezvous, on Easter Day 1660, of like-minded nostalgics at Edgehill, Warwickshire – chosen because of its central geographical position, and also because this was where the first great battle of the Civil War had taken place. Ripples spread through the army, as they recalled the days of triumph. Parliament declared Lambert a rebel, offered £100 for his capture, and dispatched a force under Colonel Richard Ingoldsby to bring him in, dead or alive.
Among those riding with Lambert as he moved through Northamptonshire towards Warwickshire were Colonels Okey and Axtell, both of whom had had a hand in the king’s death. Other regicides were slow to help – a matter for later regret. One of those who had organised Lambert’s escape from the Tower went to see Lieutenant General Edmund Ludlow, imploring him to raise troops in the west, and bring them across as reinforcements. ‘But,’ Ludlow would later apologetically admit, ‘I thought it not prudent to engage my friends in so public a manner, till I should see some possibility of making a stand.’5
A stand of sorts was made near Daventry but, with only 300 cavalry and forty infantry, Lambert’s force was no match for Ingoldsby’s. Lambert tried to escape, but his Berber horse was built for speed and agility, not the Northamptonshire plough. He surrendered to Ingoldsby, without resistance. Trying to find a way of keeping the cause afloat and himself at liberty, Lambert offered his services in the reinstatement of Ingoldsby’s patron and cousin, Richard Cromwell. Ingoldsby made it clear that he was not there to negotiate, but merely to take Lambert prisoner. ‘Pray, my lord,’ said Lambert, ‘let me escape; what good will my life, or perpetual imprisonment, do you?’6
Ingoldsby, like Coote in Ireland, knew the answer to that question. It seemed certain the Stuart line would soon be restored and he needed to accrue credit or be held to account for his past conduct. Although Ingoldsby had not sat in judgment of the King, his signature was on the death warrant, and in the period between the conclusion of the First Civil War and Charles I’s execution his regiment had been one of the most radical, demanding the King be judged for shedding the blood of his people. Ingoldsby returned Lambert to London, and the Tower. It was not immediately obvious, but with Lambert’s renewed incarceration went the last hope of the regicides to halt the tide towards Royalism. Ingoldsby was pleased to accept the thanks of Parliament for his ‘late great and eminent services to this Nation’.7 He hoped that this gratitude would manifest itself in redemption and pardon.
All the surviving regicides now focused on their likely fates, as the reign of another Charles Stuart beckoned. During Lambert’s time on the loose, Colonel Hutchinson sought advice from his friend Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, who had disagreed so forcefully with Oliver Cromwell over the ability of a king to be judged at all, let alone by a legal entity as contentious as the High Court of Justice, and had refused to take part in the trial.
Hutchinson knew Cooper was an intimate of Monck’s, and asked him what his all-powerful friend’s aims were. It was a crucial enquiry, wrote Lucy Hutchinson, in order that ‘both he and others might consider their safety, who were likely to be given up for a public sacrifice. Whereupon Cooper denied to the death any intention besides a commonwealth. “But,” said he, with the greatest semblance of reality that can be put on, “if the violence of the people should bring the King upon us, let me be damned, body and soul, if ever I see a hair of any man’s head touched, or a penny of any man’s estate, upon this quarrel.” ’8 Colonel Hutchinson passed this reassuring message on to several of his fellows. However, it was quickly clear that things would not be as Cooper had claimed.
Parliament was dismissed in mid-April 1660. Some of the sitting regicides were not prepared to go quietly. ‘Upon the last day of our sitting,’ Major General Browne, the lord mayor elect, recalled later, ‘Mr Scott seeing the House must break, said, “Their heads must be laid to the block if there were a new Parliament, for I confess I had a hand in the putting the King to death, and I desire all the world may take notice of it, and I desire when I die it may be written on my tomb. I do not repent of any thing I have done; if it were to do, I could do it again.” ’ When it became clear that these appeals had been ignored, and that this Parliament would cease to be, Thomas Scott added, ‘Being it is your pleasure to have it so, I know not how to hinder it; but when that is done, I know not where to hide this hated head of mine.’9 Hearing of plans to assassinate him, Scott fled abroad, in disguise.
There was widespread joy at the Long Parliament’s eventual passing, and excitement that a new order would emerge in its place. Army officers who had committed all to the cause looked with disgruntled distaste at public celebrations marking the change. Some involved bonfires on which, with simple symbolism, rumps of beef were burnt. At the same time insults were directed at an overbearing military, finally brought low.
Colonel Hacker, who had been the commanding officer on the scaffold at Charles’s execution, was at this point stationed with his regiment in Nottingham. The taunting his troops received from the young men of the town, who beat drums and paraded in a mock military manner, tipped over into aggression when Hacker’s troops moved to confiscate their instruments and banners. Forty of Hacker’s men were hurt in the resulting hail of thrown stones. His troops opened fire, killing two onlookers: one was an ageing academic, the other a respected munitions officer from Nottingham Castle’s wartime garrison. The violent clash between the army and the local people had claimed the life of a man who had risked all for Parliament – slain by his former comrades-in-arms.
In the face of this chaos, Nottingham’s Presbyterian preachers now openly called for the restoration of the Stuart royal line: it at least promised a return to stability. When Hacker learnt of this, he led his men in a plundering spree against those he considered disloyal. It was only the intervention of the regicide Colonel Hutchinson, whose family had strong local interests, that prevented Hacker turning his raid into a bloodbath.
Augustine Garland, who had also sat in judgment of the King, would later refer to this time as one ‘when the Government was . . . tossed, and turned, and tumbled, and I know not what’.10 As anarchy threatened the nation, Monck began to communicate in earnest with the Prince of Wales. He advised Charles to move from the Spanish Netherlands to Dutch territory, since communications from an enemy Catholic land would not endear him to politicians in London. Monck also highlighted the key issues that the Prince needed to address if a royal restoration was to become palatable. Charles had expected that he would need to agree to severe limitations on his royal powers, such as his father had faced during his final negotiations on the Isle of Wight, but he instead found Monck preoccupied less by concessions and more by the need for reassurances.
In April 1660, Charles addressed these points from his Dutch quarters, in letters that were edited into the Declaration of Breda. This was a proclamation skilfully constructed by Charles’s key advisers, promising religious toleration, recognition of property rights and pay for the military. More specifically, ‘a liberty to tender consciences’ was reserved for those whose faith did not disturb the peace. Meanwhile any who had materially benefited under the Commonwealth would keep possession of estates accumulated during and since the Civil Wars. Equally importantly, there was a commitment to meet arrears for those soldiers who acknowledged Monck’s command. The Declaration was, essentially, an acknowledgement that retribution was impossible, when so many people had stood against the Crown during the previous two decades:
And to the end that fear of punishment may not engage any, conscious to themselves of what is past, to a perseverance in guilt for the future, by opposing the quiet and happiness of their country, in the restoration of King, Peers and people to their just, ancient and fundamental rights, we do, by these presents, declare, that we do grant a free and general pardon, which we are ready, upon demand, to pass under our Great Seal of England, to all our subjects, of what degree or quality so ever, who, within forty days after the publishing hereof, shall lay hold upon this our grace and favour, and shall, by any public act, declare their doing so, and that they return to the loyalty and obedience of good subjects . . .
The next words in the declaration were less straightforward:
. . . excepting only such persons as shall hereafter be excepted by Parliament, those only to be excepted.
Then, the Declaration returned to tones of comforting clemency:
Let all our subjects, how faulty so ever, rely upon the word of a King, solemnly given by this present declaration, that no crime whatsoever, committed against us or our royal father before the publication of this, shall ever rise in judgment, or be brought in question, against any of them, to the least endamagement of them, either in their lives, liberties or estates or (as far forth as lies in our power) so much as to the prejudice of their reputations, by any reproach or term of distinction from the rest of our best subjects; we desiring and ordaining that henceforth all notes of discord, separation and difference of parties be utterly abolished among all our subjects, whom we invite and conjure to a perfect union among themselves, under our protection, for the resettlement of our just rights and theirs in a free Parliament, by which, upon the word of a King, we will be advised.11
It was a general reconciliation, with problematic passages for those involved in Charles I’s trial and execution: in particular the ominous words ‘as far forth as lies in our power’, and ‘a free Parliament . . . by which . . . we will be advised’. The Prince of Wales was guaranteeing his kingly forgiveness, emblazoned with the Great Seal of England; yet he was quietly making it clear that a new Parliament would of course have its own views on matters, which he would be forced to listen to, and act on. While the majority of those who had acted against the Crown, and profited from its fall, could rest easy, there remained scope for Royalist revenge against the most extreme Parliamentarians – clearly, though they were not named, those responsible for the late King’s beheading. For these, forgiveness was intimated, rather than guaranteed.
Three weeks after the declaration was made, a ‘free’ Parliament was formed, one that was not called by the King (for there was none), but was rather summoned by the will of the people. It was known as the Convention Parliament, and it immediately accepted Charles’s reassurances, even declaring that he had been King since the moment of his father’s execution.
The ruthlessness that Cromwell had exhibited in Ireland, and to a lesser extent in Scotland, had rarely been glimpsed during his rule of England. One of the new King’s greatest confidants, Clarendon, conceded that the Lord Protector
was not a man of blood, and totally declined Machiavelli’s method, which prescribes upon any alteration of a government, as a thing absolutely necessary, to cut off all the heads of those, and extirpate their families, who are friends to the old. And it was confidently reported, that in the council of officers it was more than once proposed that there might be a general massacre of all the royal party, as the only expedient to secure the government, but Cromwell would never consent to it; it may be, out of too much contempt for his enemies.12
Whatever the reason, Cromwell had allowed a large body of Royalists to survive. The prince and his court were left to live unmolested in exile; prominent Royalists, courtiers and men of power had also been allowed to flee abroad. Cowed and humiliated by their banishment during his Protectorate, they were eager not only to restore the Stuart line but also to avenge the years of defeat, and the death of their King.
These men formed a clear majority in the Convention Parliament. They granted the new King generous sums of money, and invited him to return to England. Six days later the large bronze of Charles I was erected once more in the Guildhall, and the emblems of the Commonwealth were removed from public view. The City of London proclaimed its duty to Charles, as did the navy. Charles’s courtiers dryly noted the large number of Englishmen arriving in Breda, falling over themselves to parade their loyalty to a man they had ignored for so long. Now came gifts of gold, with which Charles was able to pay his cash-starved retainers. There were also, Clarendon recalled, ‘some being employed to procure pardons for those who thought themselves in danger’.13 The Earl of Northampton spoke on behalf of Colonel Ingoldsby, Lambert’s captor, passing on Ingoldsby’s wish that: ‘your pardon and forgiveness of his former errors are all that he aimed at’.14
Ingoldsby was clever to get in an early good word on his behalf. The Convention Parliament was quick to settle its gaze on the regicides, and made its view clear. On 14 May, with the King’s return imminent, the Commons resolved, ‘That all those Persons who sat in Judgment upon the late King’s Majesty, when the Sentence was pronounced for his Condemnation, be forthwith secured.’15
When, at the end of May, Charles Stuart was conveyed back to England, it was not on the Naseby, the newly built flagship of the Commonwealth navy, but on the renamed HMS Royal Charles, the laurel-crowned figurehead of Oliver Cromwell having been removed before she set sail for the Dutch coast. As the King disembarked at Dover, he was accompanied, amongst others, by the diarist Pepys and the former Parliamentarian Sir Harbottle Grimston, who had signed the document asking Charles to return. England was, Charles and his retinue quickly appreciated, in a frenzy of Royalist fervour. The vast majority were determined to do anything they could to demonstrate their passionate loyalty to the Crown. It was an opportune time for vengeance. The King came first for the lawyers John Cook, Andrew Broughton, John Phelps and Edward Dendy, as well as for the two masked executioners, whose identity remained a mystery. At the same time, for completeness’s sake, the Commons asked for a full list of all the King’s judges.
Cook, the former solicitor general, was summoned from Ireland to answer for his actions. He set off under guard, accompanied by his wife Mary. Cook claimed he was happy to be leaving a country where the people were more interested in drinking and swearing than in religious devotion. However, he was shocked by his rough reception in England, where he estimated he was cursed a thousand times on his journey from Chester to London. On arriving in the capital, on 18 June, he was placed in an open cart along with three soldiers accused of high treason: two of the army officers who had overseen the royal beheading, and William Hewlet, who was suspected of wielding the axe. They were all committed to the Tower of London.
Meanwhile, four of those to be condemned for the late King’s execution were named: Bradshaw, Oliver Cromwell, Ireton and Pride – a quartet of the dead. Major General Thomas Harrison was the first among the surviving regicides to be selected for punishment. He was readily linked with the King’s death. At the same time many of the members would not forgive his helping Cromwell to turn them out of the Commons. Tales circulated, alleging that Harrison had treated the King with great rudeness on his final humiliating journey from the Isle of Wight to Windsor and London.
It was seven years since the peak of Harrison’s power, when, at Cromwell’s bidding, he had forced Speaker Lenthall from his chair. Harrison’s uncompromising Fifth Monarchy beliefs, together with his disillusionment and clashes with Cromwell, had made the intervening years difficult: he had been imprisoned four times during the six years of the Protectorate.
By the spring of 1660, Harrison’s life was a simple, pious, domestic one. He lived in Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire, with his wife Mary. Their three offspring had died in childhood. Harrison had not been called on by Lambert, during his failed rebellion. Neither, more surprisingly, had he followed General Charles Fleetwood: long ago he had served with distinction as a major in Fleetwood’s regiment. Only forty-four years old now, Harrison’s spells in prison, together with the many wounds he had received in battle, added to the agony of the loss of his children, left him an ailing, sidelined relic from the days of hot contest – military and political.
But Harrison remained as uncompromising as ever in his beliefs, refusing to apologise for his past, or to counter the ever-increasing likelihood that he would be forced to pay for them with his life and possessions. He stayed strong in his religious fervour, a pamphlet of the time recording his chief occupation as being, ‘Looking for the immediate reign of our Saviour upon Earth.’16 It was a lonely but heartfelt vigil.
Harrison was warned that he would soon be taken prisoner but, as Ludlow recorded, he refused ‘to withdraw himself from his house, accounting such an action to be a desertion of the cause in which he had engaged’.17 At the end of April they came for him, a body of militia under Colonel John Bowyer, an influential member of the Convention Parliament. They confiscated his weapons, sent his impounded horses to the Royal Mews in London, and took him into custody.
So important was news of the detention of this leading regicide, that it was the first piece of business for the Commons to consider after its opening prayers on 11 May 1660. The members resolved that Harrison ‘be delivered by the Officers and Soldiers who have him in Custody to the Charge of such Person or Persons as shall be appointed by the lord general to receive him’.18 He was sent to the Tower of London, where he was kept ‘close prisoner’, bound in leg irons and chains, forbidden from receiving visitors or legal advice, with guards in his cell at all times to prevent suicide or escape. He was attended by a solitary servant who had to share his master’s misery.
The charge would be high treason, a capital offence. Harrison was not only certain he would be put to death, but – after it was swiftly confirmed that he would not be considered for mercy – seemed to relish the prospect. He felt sure he would be returning to Earth in 1666, serving God in his army of the Second Coming with the pious fidelity and courage he knew had been his trademark during his country’s Civil Wars.
Throughout the spring and summer of 1660 the Commons heard almost daily reports of the regicides’ actions as they faced the possibility of condemnation.
On 20 May a letter from the Earl of Winchelsea was read out, stating that he had captured one of the King’s judges, Sir Henry Mildmay, as he and his servants tried to board a ship in the Channel port of Rye. Mildmay had been a prominent courtier to the previous Stuart kings, James and Charles I. His responsibilities to them included custody of the royal Jewel House, and he exploited his positions aggressively enough to set the foundation of a considerable fortune. However, his Puritanism put him at odds with Charles before the Civil War broke: Mildmay was a Congregationalist, who acted as patron to clerics of a similar creed, including Leonard Hoar, a president of Harvard College (where Mildmay’s son was educated). During the fighting, Sir Henry assisted Thomas Scott’s intelligence service. After its conclusion, Mildmay sat as a judge at the royal trial in 1649: he was a less than diligent attendee, but was involved with the preliminary committee work. For the capture of an unpopular turncoat, Lord Winchelsea was thanked, and his soldiers rewarded. Mildmay’s progress to the coast led to a parliamentary order, ‘to the end that none of those who are ordered to be apprehended, as having sat in Judgment upon the late King’s Majesty, may make Escape beyond the Seas’.19
Gregory Clements had been a more conscientious judge of the late King, attending all four days of his trial, and entering his signature on the death warrant: it had been written in, apparently over an erased name. Clements had had a chequered life, mainly as a merchant, working in India as a young man (where he was dismissed from a good job for bad behaviour), before making a fortune trading with the American colonies. His business interests extended from new ventures in the Bahamas, to the accumulation of a large estate in Ireland. While in England he bought up a patchwork of confiscated Church and Royalist lands. ‘He had no good elocution,’ conceded Edmund Ludlow, a political ally, ‘but his apprehension and judgment were not to be despised.’20
Clements had been dismissed from the Commons in May 1652, damned in the eyes of pious colleagues after being caught in flagrante with a maidservant – the sexual transgression was recorded as ‘carriage offensive and scandalous to Parliament’.21 For eight years he had cleverly tended his financial affairs, accumulating a fortune out of the public view. But when the Stuarts returned he knew his actions of eleven years earlier would be looked upon with a critical eye, and so he went into hiding. He settled in a ‘mean house in Purple Lane near Gray’s Inn’.22 The Royalists learnt he was in that area, but did not know exactly where to find him. In the end, his expensive tastes betrayed him: when particularly fine food was seen being delivered to his modest address, the authorities surrounded the house, before forcing their way in to conduct a search.
The problem was, none of those present knew Clements by sight. They therefore took the suspicious man that they found in the house for interview by the militia’s local commissioners. The one examining official there who recognised the suspect was an acquaintance of Clements, who wished him no harm. After a short interview this officer told his colleagues that he did not know who the man before them was, but he certainly was not Clements. ‘But as he was about to withdraw,’ it was recorded, ‘it happn’d that a blind man who had crowded into the room, and was acquainted with the voice of Mr Clement [sic], which was very remarkable, desired he might be called in again; and demanded, if he was not Mr Gregory Clement.’23 The commissioners insisted that he answer the blind man’s question, at which Clements admitted his true identity. He was sent to the Tower.
The House of Commons was informed of this arrest on 26 May, along with the welcome news that a book had been discovered on Clements, detailing his possessions and business interests. Because those guilty of high treason forfeited all their worldly goods, as well as their lives, this was a significant find. Given the woeful finances of Parliament and the King, it made his hopes of pardon distinctly poor.
On 31 May, the House was told of the successful escape of another regicide: that of Miles Corbett, previously MP for Great Yarmouth, and one of the officials who had reported on Charles I when the King had been with his chaplain in Norfolk en route for the Scottish army after fleeing Oxford. Two local men, James Puckle and Thomas Ellis, were found to have rented Corbett ‘a vessel, and otherwise, assisted in the conveying away, into the Parts beyond the Seas’,24 and were summoned to Parliament for interrogation.
In early June, a Cornish MP reported how John Carew, who was considered second only to Harrison in the Fifth Monarchy sect, had similarly slipped away by boat. A customs officer from the port of Looe, named Henry Chubb, admitted to having assisted in the escape unwittingly, despite the recent insistence that all ports be closed to fugitives. Chubb acknowledged that he had received the order, but claimed that Carew had said he had no intention to go overseas, before setting sail. Chubb also pointed out that the warrant relating to Carew had misspelt his name ‘Carey’. Chubb joined the list of those heading to Parliament to explain himself, while attempts to locate Carew – wherever he might then be – were redoubled.
Parliament decided at this point that an orderly system needed to be established whereby the regicides would be brought in and dealt with. A draft proclamation was sent for the King’s approval on 2 June, which he tinkered with, then issued from Whitehall four days later. It summoned those ‘named who sat, gave judgment, and assisted in that horrid and detestable Murder of His Majesty’s Royal Father of blessed memory, to appear and render themselves within fourteen days, under pain of being excepted from Pardon’. Forty-four regicides were then individually identified – most of them signatories to the death warrant, with a handful of the prosecution’s legal officers added – who ‘have out of the sense of their own guilt lately fled and obscured themselves, whereby they cannot be apprehended and brought to a personal and legal Trial for the said Treasons according to Law’. They were instructed to hand themselves in to the Speaker of either House of Parliament, to the lord mayor of London, or to a county sheriff. The decree ended with a sharp reminder: ‘That no person or persons shall presume to harbour or conceal any of the persons aforesaid, under pain of Misprision of high Treason.’25
Meanwhile decisions were taken, established on the findings of recent interrogations. On the basis of the questioning of John Cook that had taken place in Dublin a month before, the Commons confirmed on 7 June that not only would he be tried for his life and estate, but so would his legal colleagues Andrew Broughton (who had read the charge against Charles at the opening of the trial) and Edward Dendy. The answers given by one Leonard Watson, on the frenzied question of the identity of the two executioners on the scaffold, resulted in the arrest being ordered of Hugh Peters, the charismatic preacher who had led the King from Windsor Castle to his judgment in London, and of Cornet Joyce, who had commanded the soldiers who had removed Charles from Parliament’s custody at Holdenby, and taken him into the army’s charge.
On 16 June, John Milton – who had passionately attacked Charles I as a tyrant, and defended the actions of the regicides – was also placed on the list of those to be taken into custody. Milton, by now blind, had gone into hiding the previous month in the house of a friend in West Smithfield. While the Royalists hunted for him, a proclamation was made regarding his books. The public hangman incinerated them at the Old Bailey in late August. Later Milton would be imprisoned for a few weeks in the Tower, and lose his financial savings. Many felt him extremely lucky to escape with his life.
The net was cast ever wider, now. A committee of five members was established, to pore over all the records, and so determine who had sat as judges on each of the days of the trial: previous focus had been on 27 January, the day of the death sentence. It was decided that, apart from those already denied the possibility of pardon for their life and estate, a further twenty would suffer ‘Pains, Penalties, and Forfeitures’, but would not be in danger of losing their lives. This was put to a vote, and passed by the close majority of 153 votes to 135. The full list was presented to the House the following day, along with news that William Heveningham had been the first to surrender himself, under the terms of the recent proclamation. Heveningham, a Hampshire MP, had sat in judgment of the King, but had refused to sign his death warrant.
Fifty-two regicides who had signed it were now publicly ‘excepted out of the General Act of Pardon and Oblivion, for, and in Respect only of such Pains, Penalties and Forfeitures, (not extending to Life) as shall be thought fit to be inflicted on them by another Act, intended to be hereafter passed for that Purpose’.26 This declaration seemed clearly to promise that all who handed themselves in would be spared capital punishment. That was certainly how a dozen of the judges read it: Sir John Bourchier; Colonels Roe, Lilburne, George Fleetwood (brother of General Charles Fleetwood), Scroope, Harvey, Marten and Sir Hardress Waller; Aldermen Penington and Tichborne; as well as James Temple and Henry Smith. They surrendered to the authorities, expecting to be fined but to have their lives spared.
Others were unconvinced by the King’s promises of amnesty. Colonel John Dixwell quietly sold part of his family estate and sent a message to the Speaker claiming that he had been unwell: he would be surrendering himself as soon as he was restored to health, he lied, for he was eager to benefit from the King’s proclamation. He would not be able to turn himself in within the stated timeframe, he explained. The House granted Dixwell an extension, while he made plans to escape England at the earliest possible opportunity.
Colonel Richard Ingoldsby was keen to build on the credit he had accrued by capturing Lambert. His eagerness to extract a pardon from Parliament led him to lie to it. In a tearful speech to the Commons he claimed that his cousin Oliver Cromwell had physically bullied him into signing the death warrant. Ingoldsby said Cromwell was laughing as he forced the pen into his fingers, then held his hand tight as the signature was forcibly formed.
Nobody at the time had witnessed Ingoldsby being anything other than a willing signatory. His writing on the parchment was well defined, showing no sign of force. Next to it was the Ingoldsby family seal, neatly applied. But Ingoldsby hoped his recent achievement would make people overlook the evidence, and gain him mercy. His speech delivered, he withdrew from the chamber, distraught, to await the Commons’s verdict on his plea.
Colonel Hutchinson arrived at Parliament while Ingoldsby was pleading his case for clemency. Immediately afterwards, another regicide started to appeal for his own forgiveness and a member leant over to suggest to Hutchinson that this would be a suitable time for him to follow suit.
Hutchinson gave a polished speech. He explained that any errors he had made should be put down to his youth and lack of judgment at the time (when he had been thirty-three). He was adamant that his actions were on behalf of the country, and were without malice towards the late King. That said, he offered himself as a sacrifice, if the House believed his death and the confiscation of his property useful. However, he pointed out that his family’s estate lay in ruins, and nobody could accuse him of having acted for his own advancement or financial advantage. He reassured the House that his feelings about the King’s death were those of an Englishman, a Christian and a gentleman.
When Hutchinson sat down, a member rose to say that it seemed that Hutchinson was more concerned about the personal consequences of what he had done, rather than being truly sorry for taking part in the most shocking of crimes. Another defended the colonel, reminding all present of the convention that when two interpretations of a man’s words exist, a gentleman must select the one that reflects better on the speaker.
Hutchinson then joined Ingoldsby in an ante-room, to await the verdict. A red-eyed Ingoldsby embraced him and said, ‘Oh, did I ever imagine we could be brought to this? Could I have suspected it, when I brought Lambert in the other day, this sword should have redeemed us from being dealt with as criminals by that people for whom we had so gloriously exposed ourselves.’27 Hutchinson replied coolly that he had known since Cromwell had ejected the Rump Parliament in 1653, and enthroned himself, that their business could end no other way. However, Hutchinson told Ingoldsby that he had no regrets: he had acted throughout with integrity, and ‘this made him as cheerfully ready to suffer as to triumph in a good cause’.28
These two regicides were suspended from Parliament that day. They then looked to Monck to speak on their behalf, as he had promised he would. But, in the face of the Convention’s thirst for vengeance against the King’s killers, Monck went back on his word and remained silent.
Up until this point, Lucy Hutchinson had reassured her husband that the restoration of the King would not threaten his life or property, or that of any of the regicides. However, she now judged the situation to be ever more perilous. She recognised at the same time that her husband was preparing to become a martyr to a cause that he felt had been betrayed by Cromwell, and which now, through the bewildering reversal that had thrown up a new Stuart King, was lost. Lucy Hutchinson’s writings show that she considered herself an otherwise obedient wife; but this, she acknowledged, was the one occasion on which she deliberately flouted her husband’s will. She insisted he leave home and stay quietly with friends until Parliament had settled on whom it would punish for the late King’s execution. While he was in hiding, she made clear, he must prepare an escape plan in case it transpired that he was on the list of those who must suffer. Meanwhile, she busied herself by calling in favours and using her family connections.
Her brother, Sir Allen Apsley, was of the King’s party, and proved particularly useful. Apsley had served as a Royalist cavalry colonel in the Civil War, where he saw action in several of the great battles and sieges, and also as governor of Barnstaple, in Devon. He managed to surrender the town on terms that spared his life, but left him liable for an extremely large fine. Colonel Hutchinson worked hard to have this reduced, pointing out that much of Apsley’s property in fact belonged to his wife. In 1647, Apsley paid Parliament £434, a fraction of what had originally been demanded. Since then, in exile, Apsley had become one of the future Charles II’s drinking friends. At the Restoration he was given a court role, Master of the King’s Hawks, that provided a generous annual income of £1,200. He was also elected MP for Thetford, in Norfolk. This favoured and influential figure was in a good position to pay back his brother-in-law’s great efforts on his behalf, now the two men’s situations had been reversed.
For two months in the summer of 1660 the question of who would be punished for their part in Charles I’s death was ever present. There would be an Act of ‘Free and General Pardon, Indemnity and Oblivion’, by which the lands of the Crown and the Anglican Church would be restored, and all but a few named men would be pardoned for their actions during the years 1638–60. At this, Colonel Henry Marten (who had been shamed and dismissed from the King’s presence for his scandalous reputation and then been so active in the preparations for Charles’s trial at the London horse races), wrote to his mistress: ‘I shall now give some comfort to thy little heart, having lately perused the King’s Speech and the Chancellor’s, either I am very much mistaken in them, or they signify no great danger to us, whose faults are almost as old as our selves.’29
Parliament’s first conclusion was that a few of the regicides must be held to account, while the rest could be treated with mercy. It decided that seven sacrifices would suffice: after the Civil War, Parliament had sought the same number of deaths from among the upper echelons of the King’s supporters. Charles II, realising how unsettling it would be for all involved in his father’s execution not to know if they were one of the seven, insisted that they should be quickly named. They were: Major-General Harrison; William Say, who had been one of the forces behind Charles’s trial, but who managed to slip across to the Continent; Colonel John Jones, an ardent republican; Thomas Scott, the Civil War spymaster; John Lisle, one of the key lawyers at the trial; Cornelius Holland, the MP for New Windsor, who was believed to have been one of the main hands in drawing up the charges against Charles I; and – after much debate between contending factions – John Barkstead, despised by the Royalists for his cruelty and corruption when in charge of the Tower of London. Parliament then referred the King to his promise to listen to their thoughts on this matter, and Charles conceded: he allowed the lawyers John Cook, Andrew Broughton and Edward Dendy to be added to the list of those denied mercy. These names were revealed in early June. All others, the King said, must come in to seek their pardon, when their lives would be spared, and their property secured.
Many of the regicides had already taken flight. Dixwell was now safely across the Channel, and Thomas Scott had fled the country twice, in April 1660, having heard rumours that he was about to be assassinated. During the first attempt, pirates captured his ship and he was stripped of his possessions, before being discarded on the Hampshire coast. Friends helped to arrange his second escape, to Flanders. He lived there in disguise, before being recognised. Royalists seized him and planned to return him to London, but Scott escaped to the protection of an old friend from his days of diplomatic sway, Don Alonso de Cardenas, the former Spanish ambassador to London.
Scott was in a perilous position: he was a figure of particular hatred, not only for the evident pride he had in his part in the killing of the King, but also for having caused the Royalists such anguish during his days as a highly effective intelligence chief. Added to that, he had been a destructive figure in Commonwealth London, being amongst those who took over Lambeth Palace. There he had the bones of Archbishop Parker, a sixteenth-century champion of Anglicanism, dug up and thrown into a rubbish tip. Although Scott had fallen out with Oliver Cromwell and had no respect for the succeeding Lord Protector, Richard (‘I have cut off one tyrant’s head,’ he had threatened, ‘and I hope to cut off another’30), Scott was a marked man.
The Spanish could not guarantee his long-term safety, now his true identity was known, and so Scott decided to take his chance back home. He applied for royal clemency during the advertised fortnight time limit, and surrendered to Sir Henry de Vic, Charles’s ambassador to Brussels. On 12 July, as soon as he arrived back in England, he was committed to the Tower. It was made clear to Scott that his only hope of salvation lay in giving up the names of all the agents he had employed against the Stuarts, when spymaster. His efforts in this regard were half-hearted at best, and the apologies he offered for his incendiary words in Parliament also fell short. Scott awaited his trial, which would be alongside a growing band of those who had been denied a pardon, or who had been successfully hunted down.
In Colonel John Jones’s case, it was not so much a hunt as a gentle gathering. The Welshman, married to Cromwell’s sister Catherine, had been released on parole in January 1660, following his arrest in Ireland. Jones was now picked up while walking the newly laid gravel paths of Finsbury Fields, outside the City of London. The colonel had been a prominent enemy, helping to subdue the Royalist stronghold of Anglesey, and he had been a scourge of the Crown and Catholicism in Ireland. He was a long-time correspondent with Harrison, whose Fifth Monarchist beliefs he shared. Jones must have known the dangerous attention that all the regicides were receiving. Perhaps his declining to flee can be put down to the same refusal to apologise for a cause he believed in, and the same cussed fatalism, as Harrison had demonstrated? Or maybe he miscalculated, placing too much importance on his earlier parole? Either way, he now joined the number of imprisoned regicides awaiting punishment.
Colonel Hutchinson was not one of the publicly condemned ten. His relieved friends told him to take advantage of the offer of royal clemency, and turn himself in as soon as he could. Hutchinson agreed that this was sensible, but his wife thought otherwise. She refused to trust the new regime, even when the colonel and his friends thought her misgivings ridiculous. In the end, the couple compromised: Hutchinson consented to test the sincerity of the offered pardon through a ploy that would keep him out of Parliament’s hands, while not alienating the resurgent Royalists.
On his wife’s advice, Hutchinson wrote politely to the Speaker, saying that he was inconvenienced, and therefore unable to surrender himself into a general custody. That said, he would of course stand ready to make himself available if and when his presence was required. In the meantime, he would give his word not to abscond. While his letter was being digested, Lucy Hutchinson built up a bloc of goodwill towards her husband. It was constructed upon the social ambitions of a man at court to whom her brother, Sir Allen Apsley, had promised an introduction to the new King. Excited by the promise of this favour, the pushy courtier took it upon himself to act as Colonel Hutchinson’s unofficial advocate, spreading the false rumour that Charles very much wished the colonel excused of his crimes. Those eager to ingratiate themselves to royalty heard this with great interest.
When Hutchinson’s letter was discussed in Parliament, such sycophants presented it as proof of Hutchinson’s moderation, humility and repentance. First to speak on the colonel’s behalf was Roger Palmer – whose new wife, Barbara Villiers, was Charles’s primary mistress at the time – and Heneage Finch, MP for Canterbury. Their testimonies opened a floodgate of support in Hutchinson’s favour, ‘and,’ recalled his wife, ‘there was not at that day any man that received a more general testimony of love and good esteem of all parties than he did.’31 He was ‘cleared by vote’.
Hutchinson was informed that he was safe from the threats of capital punishment or imprisonment. His penalty was merely to be dismissed from public office for ever, including his seat in Parliament. A levy would also need to be paid. Hutchinson wrote such an emotive letter (the Commons recorded that it was one of ‘signal repentance’32), in gratitude for this generosity, that he was then informed that there would be no fines or confiscations against his property either. It was an outcome beyond anything that he could reasonably have hoped for. Aware that names were still being added to and removed from the Act of Indemnity, Hutchinson lay low, staying out of sight from those who were making these life or death decisions. Eager for tangible proof of his sympathetic treatment, he sent a letter to the Commons requesting they write to ‘confirm that favour and mercy’33 granted him.
It was as well that he did. As more and more documents were unearthed by Parliament’s clerks, so the number of men held responsible for the killing of the King increased. Records appeared detailing the members of the various committees that were involved in the intricacies of the King’s trial: the sourcing of chairs, the selection of cushions, the formalities of the procedure. Hutchinson had been pardoned as a reluctant, obscure, bit player in it all: that was how he had presented himself. ‘But as soon as they had passed their votes for his absolute discharge,’ Lucy Hutchinson wrote, ‘he was found not to have been one day away from the trial.’34 The question was, what could be done to bring this willing and attentive regicide to justice, now that he had been pardoned? There was a precedent for overturning such decisions, after all.
Adrian Scroope was one of nineteen regicides to surrender to the royal proclamation of 4 June 1660, confident that by doing so he would be assured of his life. The cavalry colonel was allowed to present his defence, after which he had quickly been released on parole, having been fined a year’s income from his estate.
However, the House of Lords refused to agree to his pardon. On 20 July the Upper House sent a message to the Commons: ‘They desire,’ it was announced in the chamber, ‘that this House will be pleased to send the instrument under the Hands and Seals of those Persons who gave Judgment against the King; and what other Evidences you have, to inform their Lordships touching that Matter.’35
The Lords had decided to arrest all regicides. With regard to Scroope, they wanted him named specifically as excepted from pardon, as they had learnt of a conversation between him and Major General Browne. This had taken place earlier in the summer, outside the Chamber of the Speaker of the House of Commons. Scroope had introduced himself to Browne. Realising that he was talking to a regicide, Browne said, ‘What a sad case have we brought this Kingdom unto?’ Scroope asked him why he said that. ‘You see,’ continued Browne, ‘how it is ruined now the King is murdered.’
Scroope replied, ‘Some are of one opinion, and some of another.’
Browne then asked, ‘Sir, do you think it was well done to murder the King?’
To which Scroope replied, ‘I will not make you my confessor, Sir.’36
Despite the Commons’s wish to spare Scroope, the Lords refused to grant him leniency. Report of his exchange with Browne was enough to have Scroope’s merciful treatment overturned. On 28 August he was added to the list of those to be tried for their life; this would be the very last day on which that list was being composed. He was committed to the Tower, where he was kept a close prisoner, awaiting trial.
The Tower of London had been the grimmest of gaols since 1100, when Ranulf Flambard (who had overseen the building of Westminster Hall, where the King was tried) became its first escapee, thanks to a rope smuggled in to him in a cask of wine. It certainly proved to be a miserable prison for the regicides. Its garrison in the early 1660s included Colonel William Legge’s regiment. Legge had suffered several times as a prisoner of Parliament, enduring a spell in the Tower in 1659 for high treason. Many of his men were Irish Catholics, who held raw memories of the New Model Army’s massacres in their homeland. These were not men who were likely to be gentle on their charges.
The newly installed Lieutenant of the Tower was Sir John Robinson, who also had personal reasons for hating his regicide inmates: he was a nephew of Archbishop Laud, Charles I’s premier churchman who had been tried and executed by Parliament in 1645. Indeed one of the prisoners now in Robinson’s charge was Isaac Penington, who had been Lieutenant at the time of Laud’s execution, and had overseen the Archbishop’s beheading on Tower Hill.
Described by Pepys as a ‘talking bragging bufflehead’, Robinson helped himself to funds that were earmarked for the prisoners’ supplies, and treated them with casual cruelty. When one of the imprisoned colonels and his retainer were suffering from violent dysentery, Robinson denied them access to their latrine, despite there being two further doors beyond it, blocking any hope of escape. Many of the regicides had been stripped of all their property on arrest. They were unable to pay the high charges Robinson set for basic provisions, and so ‘he gave them none’, recalled the wife of one who suffered under him, ‘but converted what the King allowed to his own use, and threatened some of the prisoners with death if they offered to demand it; and suffered others, at twelve of the clock at night, to make such a miserable outcry for bread that it was heard in some parts of the city, and one was absolutely starved to death for want of relief, although the King at that time told a prisoner that he took more care for the prisoners than for his own table.’
Inmates who could usually afford Robinson’s outrageous charges, but from time to time were late with payments, found their prison conditions made suddenly even harsher. Meanwhile Robinson insisted on keeping the wealthiest regicides in his lodgings, so he could charge them directly for any services received. The rest had to rely on the charity of friends, who sent them food. A lot of this was pilfered before reaching those it was intended for.
The warders found common cause with the prisoners, through their mutual loathing of Robinson. He had a reputation for being a nasty drunk, who harangued them and who frequently withheld their wages – this, while charging them extortionate rents for their modest accommodation. The warders ‘pitied the poor gentlemen that were so barbarously used’, recalled the same regicide’s wife, ‘and whether out of humanity or necessity or villainy . . . they would offer the prisoners many courtesies, and convey letters between them’.37 The brutality of the place could take its toll. John Downes was so despondent after three years in the Tower that he asked Robinson if he could be ‘thrust into some hole where he might silently be slain’.38
There had originally been approximately eighty regicides, when the fifty-nine who had signed the death warrant were added to the legal team that had tried the case, as well as to those on the scaffold who oversaw and administered the execution. Of these, more than a quarter were dead by the time Charles II returned in glory to England: Cromwell, Bradshaw, Pride, Deane and Dorislaus; also the quartet who had perished during active service in Ireland: Ireton, Ewer, Horton and Moore; as well as Danvers and Lord Grey of Groby. Others who escaped royal vengeance by dying before the Restoration were a trio of Yorkshire army officers: John Alured, Sir William Constable and Sir Thomas Mauleverer, and seven politicians: John Blakiston, Humphrey Edwards, Sir Gregory Norton, Peregrine Pelham, William Purefoy, Anthony Stapley and John Venn.
Retribution could still be exacted from the dead, however. The Commons heard with satisfaction, on 31 May 1660, of the seizure of some of Blakiston’s property by the Sheriff of County Durham. Blakiston, one of the most powerful Parliamentarians in the north of England and a great radical, had been an eager member of the High Court of Justice. However, he only outlived the monarch he helped to condemn by four months. The Commons had granted his widow and children £3,000 on his death, and now the Convention Parliament wanted to reclaim that sum, as well as whatever else it could confiscate from his estate. Many of the other dead regicides had their family wealth seized – though Pelham had died so poor, ruined by the withholding of debts owed to him and by the Civil War, that he had been unable even to pay the doctor that had tended him at the end.
Now it was time for the Royalists to have a closer look at the remaining sixty regicides, and see which of them could be put on trial not just for their possessions, but for their lives.