Chapter 6
We deal not with men, but monsters, guilty of blood, precious blood, royal blood, never to be remembered without tears.
Sir Harbottle Grimston, Speaker of the House of Commons
At first the captured regicides’ only visitors in the Tower were officials involved in their prosecution, as well as a committee of three – Secretary Morris, Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper and Arthur Annesley – charged with finding the true identity of ‘the person in the frock’ who had cut off the head of the King. This trio paid particular attention to Colonel Hercules Huncks, John Cook and Captain William Hewlet, but several others were interrogated roughly in an attempt to resolve the mystery.
Huncks gave up Colonels Hacker and Axtell at this point, preserving his life by offering damning evidence against his former colleagues – an irony, Axtell would note, given that ‘Colonel Huncks . . . was the uncivillest of all about the late King, and yet he comes in as a witness against us’.1
Francis Hacker received no warning of his arrest. He had remained in charge of his regiment of horse guards in the City of London for several weeks after Charles’s return, reassured by General Monck that he would be excused any past wrongs. Hacker was at home on his Leicestershire estate when he was summoned to London. On arrival, on 4 July, he went to see Monck, ‘who could not be ignorant of the design that was against him’, Edmund Ludlow believed, ‘yet received him with as much show of affection as ever, enquiring of him with much kindness where he lodged. But the next day after he was thus caressed, he was seized, examined, [and] sent to the Tower of London.’2 Hacker was taken into a small room in the Tower where, he later recalled, ‘the Gentlemen were very strict with me’.3
Colonel Hacker’s problems stemmed from the original death warrant of the King: he had kept it safe throughout the Commonwealth years. Hacker’s wife, Isabell, mistakenly believed she could now spare her husband by presenting the document, trusting its words demonstrated that the colonel had only been obeying orders. However, Mrs Hacker had in fact produced incontrovertible proof not only of her husband’s direct involvement in the killing of the King, but also that of all of the warrant’s signatories. On 1 August the Lords added Hacker’s name to the list of those to be treated without mercy.
Hacker and his fellow prisoners in the Tower had much time to contemplate what might happen to them. They tried to make sense of what they assumed to be imminent execution. John Cook found comfort in a rational breakdown of his condition. He calculated that, being aged fifty-two, ‘I can expect to do little more for God. I am three parts dead (seventy being divided into four), the shades of evening are upon me and aches and pains are inseparable companions.’4 Meanwhile, Colonel John Jones reminded his distressed well-wishers that he had had no right to survive a particularly savage storm at sea during a crossing to Ireland, years earlier; so every day of his life since then should be counted as a bonus and a blessing. But these were brave words for outward consumption; Cook, for one, admitted that his spirit was frequently cast into the depths by the horror and hopelessness of his situation.
Colonel Henry Marten, regicide, republican and roué, handed himself in on 20 June 1660, on the proclamation of Charles II, sure that such a surrender would guarantee his life. As bitterness towards the regicides mounted, and the thirst for reprisals grew, Marten found himself one of nineteen men excepted from pardon: they would be tried, their only hope being the mercy of Parliament. The colonel remarked with grim humour that this was the first royal proclamation that he had ever obeyed, and he very much hoped he would not be hanged for having trusted the word of the King.
In a letter that he intended for publication, to gain his jury’s sympathy, Marten addressed the charges he faced, mixing self-serving justification with remarkable broadmindedness. He acknowledged where the desire to try him and his companions stemmed from: ‘Upon serious consideration (it seems to me) the Royal party could contrive no one sacrifice so proper to appease the ghost of their often soiled cause, both in point of revenge & interest, as the persons who had the boldness to make an example of their Ring-leader.’ He was quick to recognise how difficult a task he and his fellow commissioners of the High Court of Justice now faced in escaping condemnation, given the skill of the legal minds arrayed against them: he and his co-defendants would, he wrote, have to ‘fence for their lives with Masters in the Art’.5
Marten shared his sorrow at having been instrumental in helping to start the Civil War: ‘Could I have foreseen how dearly public freedom must be bought, and how hardly it can be kept, I would have used only my passive valour against all the late King’s oppressions, rather than voted, as I did, any War at all, though a defensive one.’ He was insistent that the fighting, and the King’s trial and execution, could not be seen as separate events, ‘for you must understand that this act,’ he stated, ‘whether its name be Treason and Murder, or Reason and Justice, its Parent was a Civil War.’
As for regrets, he was happy to admit that he had some, but he was adamant that they centred around Cromwell, not the cause he had fought for: ‘Had I suspected that the Axe which took off the late King’s head, should have been made a stirrup for our first false General, I should sooner have consented to my own death than his.’ Further, he felt obliged to concede, ‘I am satisfied in my conscience that the said King thought in his conscience he died unjustly.’6 This was a great sadness to the colonel.
When it came to the King’s trial, the lawyer in Marten made him agree that Parliament was not the place for a person to be tried, since its responsibilities were legislative, never judicial. ‘My opinion is,’ he continued, ‘that the . . . trial by Commissioners without a Jury was yet more irregular, for he ought not to have been put into a worse condition than the meanest Englishman, who may claim to be tried in a known Judicatory before sworn Judges, and by a Jury of twelve men, all agreeing; if it be for his life, by two Inquests upon oath one after another.’7
Despite the shortcomings of the legal process, Marten was adamant that, ‘In all this I take no murder to myself, nor Treason, as being sure I had no murderous nor treasonable intent about me in what I did.’ He saw an absolute distinction between the deed of judgment itself, and the interpretations that could be placed on that deed. ‘My plea therefore is, that I judged the late King.’8
Henry Marten had, according to a contemporary, ‘lived from his wife a long time. If I am not mistaken, she was sometime distempered by his unkindness to her.’9 This was his second wife, the first, Elizabeth, having died in childbirth in 1634, when young. At the time of the King’s execution he had taken a permanent mistress – ‘Mary Marten’, as she styled herself – and had three daughters with her: Peggy, Sarah and Henrietta (the last two he nicknamed ‘Poppet’ and ‘Bacon-hog’), in addition to the six children from his two marriages. Through his private letters to Mary we can see the ups and downs of Marten’s hopes and fears, as well as his reliance on their love to keep him focused on happier thoughts than imminent trial for high treason. Before his detention in the Tower he wrote to her: ‘As for news, it cannot be worth the gaping after (any more than the weather) the worst will come soon enough; the best is like to be welcome whensoever it comes.’ But, he admitted, ‘I confess what I hear is not very good.’ What kept him consoled in such perilous times is the intimacy they share, when he and Mary are ‘snug like a snail within our own selves, that is, our minds, which nobody but we can touch’.10
In another letter Marten was distressed to hear that Mary had been unwell. ‘I am afraid I can guess too right at the greatest part of thy disease,’ he wrote, ‘or at least, the ground of it, which is melancholy and thoughtfulness for things which I can apply no remedy to.’ Marten reminded his lover not to underestimate his ability to bounce back from disaster: ‘I have been on bare board a thousand times in my life, and yet still found a twig or something to hold me up,’11 he boasted.
His main hope at this time of terrible uncertainty remained Charles’s word that those who handed themselves in would have their lives spared. ‘Tomorrow morning,’ he reported, ‘we are all to appear at the House of Commons, to show cause why the sentence given against us should not be executed. I think we can show a very good one, wherein the King’s honour and the Parliament is concerned,’ before adding, less optimistically, ‘if they think otherwise, who can help it?’12
Marten sustained Mary and their children with all the provisions he could afford: ‘a leg of mutton, two loaves, a peck of flour . . . and four bottles of William Parker’s Lemon Ale’, one day; ‘a piece of cake, and some Bergamot pears from Hollingbury, a piece of sturgeon, and a bottle of liquor’,13 as well as venison and cheese, on another. He asked frequently about their daughters (his ‘pesky rogues’): ‘Now I care for nothing but knowing how my three biddies do,’ he declared. Elsewhere, he took a father’s pride in the attributes the girls had inherited from him: ‘Look upon my little brats, and see if thy dear be not among them; has not one of ’em his face, another his brains, another his mirth?’14
When the news came that he was, after all, going to be tried, Marten wrote to let Mary know with startling honesty, while reassuring her that all would work out well in the end:
My sweet Dear, brave gallant Soul,
Now stand thy ground; I was told on Tuesday night, that the House of Commons had given us all up on Monday, and had appointed a Committee to bring in a bill for that purpose, which cannot require much time, and if I wish any thing in the world, it is, that thou hadst been with me, when the tidings came, and ever since, to see if thou couldst find any alteration in me, sleeping or waking . . .
Perhaps the bill will not pass when it comes in, perhaps the Lords will not pass it, when it comes there; perhaps the King has given way to his friends to set this on foot, on purpose to have the whole honour of pardoning to himself; perhaps some names may be excepted in one House, or in the other; and thy Dear may be one of them. He that has time, has life; a thousand things happen betwixt the cup and the lip; and it is some comfort that we can still send to each other . . .
I was not so hasty to send thee this news yesterday; I believe I had not now neither, but that I was afraid thou wouldst hear it from another hand, that would make it worse . . .
Pluck up thy strength, my good Heart, conquer this brunt, and thou art a man for ever.
Marten was sent to the Tower with the others who would be on trial for their lives. There, gossip was rife. He wrote to Mary that he had heard that two of his fellow accused would be pardoned, while he and the rest would be sent into exile. All he could hope for, he said, was time to prepare himself for this journey overseas.
While waiting to see where he would be sent, Marten fed his lover snippets about life in the Tower. He had heard that various of Charles II’s courtiers wanted ‘to set up a trade of granting leave to visit prisoners’ – something that Lambert and Heveningham’s wives had suggested. Meanwhile his critical, womanising eye led him to fault the drab appearance of one of his fellow inmates’ daughters. At the same time Marten explained how each prisoner’s wellbeing in the Tower was dependent on the attitude of his individual guard: ‘This Keeper of mine,’ he wrote, ‘is a very civil person to me when he is with me, and swears he will visit thee, and bring thee to me whatever it cost; but he is just the worst Keeper in the Tower for keeping his times, when he is from me, that he makes me so uncertain in sending [letters] to thee, whereas all other prisoners are unlocked before 7 in the morning; he makes me stay till 8, 9, 10, and past; it is almost 9 now, yet I am fast.’15
The one piece of news that neither Marten nor any of his fellow regicides could communicate was the date of their trial, for none of them knew when that would be. That choice was down to their accusers.
The trial was committed to senior Royalist lawmen, who were aware of what was expected of them after five months of escalating antagonism towards the regicides. Alongside them were fifteen men who had actively been for Parliament against the late King. Many of their former comrades were aghast at the shameless way in which they had become not just turncoats, but also leaders of the retribution being meted out against their own kind. ‘Colonel George Monck being commissionated to be of this number,’ Ludlow wrote, ‘was not ashamed to sit among them, any more than Mr Denzil Holles and the Earl of Manchester.’ Holles and Manchester had been two of the six men that Charles I had sought to arrest, in person, just before the Civil War broke out. Ludlow remembered how they were ‘therefore personally concerned in the quarrel, had contributed the utmost of their endeavours to engage divers of the gentlemen (upon whom they were now to sit as judges) on that side, [and] were not contented to abandon them in this change, but assisted in condemning them to die for their fidelity to that cause, which [they] themselves had betrayed’.16
The senior judge in the case against the regicides was Sir Orlando Bridgeman, a man of sharp eyes and hollow cheeks, who had recently been created Lord Chief Baron of His Majesty’s High Court of Exchequer. Bridgeman’s father had been chaplain to King James, and one of his brothers would become a bishop. Bridgeman had long shone as a lawyer. By the time he was thirty-one he had served as solicitor general to Charles when Prince of Wales. He entered Parliament, where he was a forthright Royalist. However, when Charles I’s controversial favourite, the Earl of Strafford, was impeached, Bridgeman voted in favour of the charge. When it became clear that a majority in the Commons were after Strafford’s life, wanting him charged with treason, Bridgeman argued vigorously that it was inappropriate to attach a capital penalty to the charges against the earl. Although unsuccessful – Strafford was executed – Bridgeman had at an early age become adept at discerning precisely what treason was, and what it was not. This would be crucial in the trial of the regicides.
Bridgeman had served the King faithfully during the Civil Wars, at first in and around the important city of Chester, before joining the King’s parliament in Oxford. Charles relied on him during failed peace negotiations with Parliament in 1645, and he was again one of the King’s legal advisers during the final attempt at a treaty, during Charles’s imprisonment on the Isle of Wight. It seems likely that he was one of those to counsel the King not to recognise the court, if and when he was brought to trial.
Now the tables were turned. The accused would be confronted by a bevy of the King’s appointed judges, performing their professional duties against the backdrop of calls for vengeance. Some sincerely wanted the killers of the late, venerated, King held to account. Others, who had supported Parliament against Charles, but now welcomed his son as their King, were happy for a few dozen men to be scapegoats for half the kingdom. As Lucy Hutchinson noted, ‘Many who had preached and led the people into [fighting the King], and of that Parliament who had declared it to be treason not to advance and promote that cause, were all now apostasised, and as much preached against it, and called it rebellion and murder, and sat on the tribunal to judge it.’17
The attorney general was Sir Geoffrey Palmer, at sixty-two, eleven years older than Bridgeman, but his contemporary when entering the Commons in 1640, and his equal in outspokenness. A bon viveur, famed for his hospitality on his Midlands estates and at his Hampstead home, Palmer’s legal speciality was not treason, but conveyancing: he had an eye for detail. Ludlow tracked his methods during the trials of the regicides and called Palmer one of ‘the tyrant’s bloodhounds at the bar’.18
Sir Heneage Finch, the solicitor general, was one of those who had spoken on Colonel Hutchinson’s behalf in the Commons, in the mistaken belief that Hutchinson’s pardon was the King’s secret wish. Finch had lived quietly during the Commonwealth because of his widely known Royalist sympathies. He resided with his wife and fourteen children in Kensington House, which would become the principal royal palace in London from 1689 until 1760. Before the trials, Finch had chaired the committee that decided who would be covered by the Act of Indemnity. He had therefore already examined the individual cases of each of the prisoners in great detail. To legal historians, Finch is known as ‘the father of equity’,19 the legal principles whereby strict rules of law are subject to modification, where appropriate. The unyielding laws of treason allowed no such latitude.
Sir Edmund Turnor had helped to ease the Restoration, after professional disappointment. Passed over as Speaker of the Commons in favour of Harbottle Grimston, he used his consolation position as Chairman of the Elections Committee to ensure that, in the many disputed elections for the Convention Parliament, the Royalist candidate was returned at the expense of his Presbyterian rival, wherever possible. Turnor was known for his cloying servility to the Crown, and for his vindictiveness. His was not a welcome face to those on trial.
The proceedings against the accused opened on 9 October in Hicks Hall, the sessions house in Clerkenwell that was the judicial and administrative centre of Middlesex. On the first day, Sir Orlando Bridgeman addressed the twenty members of the grand jury without the defendants present. He gave a full and clear statement of the case, which included a ringing definition of high treason: ‘By the Statute of the twenty fifth of Edward the Third (a Statute or Declaration of Treason) it is made High Treason to compass, and imagine, the Death of the King.’20 Bridgeman confirmed that this was the only crime in English Law where just imagining or ‘compassing’, without actually committing an offence, could result in punishment. He explained: ‘Then what is an imagination, or compassing the King’s death? Truly, it is any thing which shows what the imagination is. Words in many cases, they are evidences of his imagination: they are evidences of the heart.’21 The judge also made clear the guilt attached to all involved in any stage of the crime of high treason: ‘If two, or more, do Compass, or Imagine the King’s Death, if some of them go on so far, as to consultation; if others of them go further, they sentence, and execute, put to death: in this case they are all guilty; the first consultation was treason.’22
Bridgeman made clear why the death of a King was such a uniquely heinous crime: ‘The reason of it is this, in the case of the death of the King, [it is] the head of the Commonwealth that’s cut off: and what a trunk, an inanimate lump, the body is, when the head is gone, you all know.’ Sir Orlando then harked back to the ancient laws that Charles I had in mind when justifying his dogged belief in the Divine Right of Kings. Bridgeman touched on statutes from the late eleventh century, through to Tudor times:
How do they style the King? They call Him, ‘The Lieutenant of God’, and many other expressions, in the Book of Primo Henrici Septimi states that book there: ‘The King is immediate from God, and hath no superior.’ The Statutes say: ‘The Crown of England is immediately Subject to God, and to no other Power.’ ‘The King’ (says our books) ‘He is not only Caput Populi, the Head of the people; but Caput Reipublicae, the Head of the Commonwealth, the three Estates.’23
Bridgeman anticipated the likely defence of those on trial: that they had acted under the authority of Parliament. ‘Gentlemen,’ he advised, ‘if any person shall now come, and shroud himself under this pretended authority, or such a pretended authority, you must know, that this is so far from an excuse, that it is an height of aggravation.’24
The judge pointed first to the pledges that those in authority had taken. In particular, he reminded the grand jury that anyone sitting in the Commons or the Lords was obliged to take the Oath of Supremacy before taking their seats: ‘They that take the Oaths of Allegiance, and Supremacy, they swear, that they will, to their power, assist, and defend all Jurisdictions, Privileges, Preeminences, and Authorities, granted, or belonging to the Kings, His Heirs, and Successors, or annexed to the Imperial Crown of this Realm.’ He next quickly dispensed with the idea that a king could be placed on trial: ‘I must deliver to you for plain, and true, Law; that no authority, no single person, no community of persons, nor the people collectively, or representatively have any coercive power over the King of England.’25
Bridgeman deviated from the specifics of the case with emotional passages, designed to remind the grand jury of the uniqueness of the case they were to hear: ‘No story, that ever was, I do not think any Romance, any Fabulous Tragedy, can produce the like.’26 He also pointed to the individual qualities of the late King, as compounding the tragedy of his loss, especially when, Bridgeman recalled, he had agreed to concede so much in the treaty agreed on, the month before his execution, while prisoner on the Isle of Wight. The calamity was compounded by the place of the King’s beheading, ‘before his own door, even before that place, where he used in Royal Majesty to hear ambassadors, to have his honourable entertainments’.27
‘To conclude, you are now to enquire of Blood, of Royal Blood, of Sacred Blood; Blood like that of the Saints under the Altar, crying . . . “How long, O Lord,” etc. This Blood cries for Vengeance, and it will not be appeased without a Bloody Sacrifice.’28
The jurors can have been left in no doubt as to what was expected of them.
The twenty-nine prisoners were told at nine o’clock that night that the following day would see them in court, facing charges that they had yet to learn.
They were woken by their guards early on 10 October, before being handed over at six o’clock in the morning by Sir John Robinson to the sheriff. He transported them – Harrison, Marten, Scroope, Scott, Jones, Clements, Cook, Peters, Axtell and twenty others – in a convoy of carriages, with a strong, mixed guard of cavalry and infantry, to Newgate, the notoriously grim prison on the edge of the City of London. At nine o’clock, after making brief and shocking acquaintance with the squalor of Newgate, they found themselves ushered across to the sessions house of the Old Bailey – a shuffling column of elderly men in chains, hobbling towards their destiny.
The accused were divided into five groups, the first of which, the smallest, comprised just Sir Hardress Waller, William Heveningham and Thomas Harrison. On being told to approach the bar, they were instructed to raise their right hands. Harrison interjected, ‘My Lord, if you please, I will speak a word . . .’ The court was quick to establish its authority: ‘Hold up your hand, and you shall be heard in due time. Mr Harrison, the course is, that you must hold up your hand first.’29
The defendants listened to the indictment that imperilled their lives, delivered by the clerk of the Crown, Edward Sheldon. It accused them, among other wrongs, of ‘not having the fear of God before [their] eyes, and being instigated by the Devil’; of acting ‘contrary to . . . due allegiance, and bounden duty’; and of ‘signing and sealing the warrant for the late sovereign’s execution’. The indictment read, the three prisoners were asked in turn to plead guilty, or not guilty. Sir Hardress Waller was shaken by the starkness of the choice, which resulted in much dithering. ‘My Lord, I do desire some time to consider of it, for it is a great surprisal.’ He was told he had to plead one way or the other, and that he must not drift off into irrelevant asides. ‘Shall I be heard, my Lord?’ implored Waller.
‘Yes, upon your trial. There is but two ways. Plead “Not Guilty”, or confess it. Sir Hardress Waller, we would not have you be deceived. If you confess, and say, you are guilty: there is nothing then, but Judgment. If you say “Not Guilty”: then you shall be heard with your evidence.’
Waller’s claim that his case differed to that of all the other defendants, because he had been in Ireland for so many years, was rejected by the court. The clearly bewildered Waller then pleaded, ‘In as much as I have said, I dare not say “Not Guilty”. I must say “Guilty”.’30
The prisoners seem to have assumed that they would be given the chance to speak freely, before pleading. Harrison and Robert Lilburne protested that being held close prisoner had deprived them of any legal advice. The majority pleaded not guilty, most likely because they now understood the finality of opting for ‘guilty’, which left the mercy of Parliament as their only hope. Pleading not guilty seemed to offer a prospect of salvation, a chance to be heard.
At the end of the long day, the court was told to reconvene at seven the next morning. Any jurors or witnesses who were late or absent would be fined £100. Samuel Pepys committed his view of these early proceedings to his diary: ‘At night comes Mr Moore, and tells me how Sir Hardress Waller (who only pleads guilty), Scott, Cook, Peters, Harrison, &c., were this day arraigned at the bar of the Sessions House, there being upon the bench the mayor, General Monck, my Lord of Sandwich, &c., such a bunch of noblemen as had not been seen in England. They all seem to be dismayed, and will all be condemned without question . . . Tomorrow they are to plead what they have to say.’31
Now the trial proper started, with Harrison, Scroope, Carew, Jones, Clements and Scott brought forward. It proved impossible for these six men to agree on who should be selected for their jury, out of the pool of eighty-six candidates, so Sir Orlando Bridgeman ordered that they should be tried individually. He selected Harrison as the first to be brought to the bar.
Finch, the solicitor general, gave the opening address. This must have been galling for the defendants: Finch had himself been accused of treason, twenty years earlier, and had only saved himself by fleeing his accusers, several of whom were now on trial for their lives.
In his account of the trials, the regicide Edmund Ludlow referred to Finch with loathing – a common reaction among Puritans, scandalised by his immoral ways. Ludlow variously described him as ‘that grey-haired traitor and inveterate enemy to the good of the public’, ‘the old fornicator’, and as a man ‘old in wickedness as well as years’. Finch began by leading the court through the enormity of the crime of which he had once been accused, but which he now lay at the feet of others. ‘These things were not done in a corner’, he claimed, for ‘every true English Heart still keeps within itself a bleeding register of this story.’32
Now, Finch asserted, those who had overseen these infamous deeds must be punished: ‘My Lords, the actors in this tragedy were many, very many, so many, that sure their name is legion, or rather many legion.’ He then calculated who, and how many, comprised the body that could be termed as ‘regicides’: ‘The judges, officers, and other immediate actors in this pretended court, were in number about fourscore. Of these some four, or five, and twenty are dead, and gone to their own place.’ He calculated that another eighteen or nineteen had fled abroad, in a state of constant fear that they would be hunted down and brought to justice. Therefore, Finch concluded, ‘Twenty-nine persons do now expect your Justice.’33
Sir Edmund Turnor followed Finch, opening with a biblical reference to how Amaziah, King of Judah in the 8th century bc, had avenged his father King Joash’s death by slaying ten thousand victims. Turnor claimed that it was a sign of Charles II’s great mercy that he wanted only this select group of miscreants to stand trial for their lives. Turnor made it clear that the conviction of the accused was both vital and inevitable. He then turned his attention from the pack, to the singular figure of Harrison: ‘and so we shall call our witnesses, and doubt not, but to prove, that this man at the bar was the first, and not the least of these offenders’.34
Edmund Ludlow heard with disgust that Harrison had not only to contend with an apparently predetermined guilt, but also faced the basest form of intimidation from his accusers. ‘I must not omit,’ he wrote, ‘that the executioner in an ugly dress, with an halter [noose] in his hand, was placed near the major general, and continued there during the whole time of his trial, which action I doubt whether it was ever equalled by the most barbarous nations.’35
Harrison was now presented, one after the other, with the names of those who might sit in the jury to hear his case. He refused the first seven, which provoked laughter in the public gallery. The major general was unflustered. It was not until the twelfth candidate that he found a juror he would accept. Not long afterwards, he had used up his entire quota of thirty-five objections.
Five witnesses for the prosecution were sworn. The first four told how they had seen Harrison sitting as a judge in the High Court of Justice – some of them had taken note of those commissioners attending on each of the days. Each agreed that Harrison had been there on the final day of the King’s trial. They recalled seeing him rise to his feet with the others, in approval of the sentence of death.
The fourth witness, James Nutley, added colour to the picture. He remembered Harrison as a leading participant in the trying, then killing, of the King. Nutley was the junior colleague of John Cook, who had tearfully begged Cook not to take part in the prosecution of the King. Nutley had been a frequent presence in Westminster before and during the trial. He remembered seeing Harrison sitting in a committee in the Exchequer Chamber, a few days before the trial, as the charge was being crafted. ‘I do remember well, it was in the evening, they were lighting of candles, they were somewhat private,’ Nutley said, before gesturing towards Harrison. ‘This gentleman was there, I saw him.’
Nutley recalled Harrison regaling everyone present with an account of his conversation with Charles, after the King asked if the intention was to murder him. Harrison told his audience that he had informed the King that this was not their plan – it was, rather, to have Charles be ‘a public example of Justice’.
This evidence was enough in itself to confirm Harrison’s damnation in the court’s eyes. Nutley recollected that some on the committee felt that the wording of the royal impeachment was overlong. ‘They were offering some reasons to contract it, and I heard this Prisoner at the Bar vent this expression: “Gentlemen, it will be good for us to blacken him, what we can – Pray, let us blacken him”, or words to that purpose. I am sure “blacken” was his word.’36
A sixth witness was now produced, and sworn. Lord Newburgh, who had been the King’s host at Bagshot Park during his brief, distressing, visit, spoke of the tight guard Harrison had placed around the monarch: ‘When the King had dined, he [Harrison] carried him to Windsor, and appointed several of his officers to ride close to the King, as he was riding, lest he should make his escape from them.’37 The prosecution reminded the jury that such an imprisonment of the monarch would, on its own, be enough to constitute high treason.
Wadham Wyndham had been appointed a sergeant-at-law earlier in the month. He now brought forth the papers that would seal the fate of many: the first related to the convening and summoning of the High Court of Justice; the second was the warrant for execution. With the bar set so low for guilt for treason that even imagining the deed could lead to conviction and execution, signed and sealed documents that confirmed the accused’s intentions in tangible, legible, form constituted unshakable evidence. Isabell Hacker had produced the warrant in the misguided hope that it would excuse her husband. Instead, it established his guilt, and that of all of its signatories, beyond any doubt.
Meanwhile a man called Jessop, a junior bureaucrat at the House of Commons, produced the forms relating to the convening of the High Court of Justice. He explained that, on the instructions of Henry Scobell, the recently deceased clerk of Parliament, he had carefully filed away all records relating to Charles I’s trial. Jessop was a meticulous and obedient man: all the paperwork was there, relating to the preparation, conduct and conclusion of the proceedings. The bulk of this was passed to one side, to be sifted through in time.
The production of the two key documents – Hacker’s warrant, and the summoning of the High Court of Justice – caused immediate consternation: their implication was clear. Yet Harrison was matter of fact. ‘I desire to see the Instrument,’ he said. Looking at his signature on the form, he confirmed, ‘I believe it is my own hand.’ He was then shown the execution warrant, and said, ‘I do think this is my hand, too.’ Realising he now had his man for sure, Wyndham added, ‘If you think it, the jury will not doubt it. That’s the bloody Warrant for Execution. And we desire they may both be read.’
Questions were raised as to whether the documents should be read out as evidence, but Harrison overruled such objections on the basis that he had nothing to hide: ‘I do not come to be denying any thing, that in my own judgment, and conscience, I have done, or committed; but rather to be bringing it forth to the Light.’38
Wyndham summed up his evidence to the jury, stressing Harrison’s leading role in the King’s death: ‘You see this prisoner was no ordinary actor in it: his hand is in at all games, taking of him, imprisoning of him, bringing him to London, and setting guards on him. You see also his malice, “Let us blacken him”, for they knew his innocence would shine forth, unless it was blackened by their imputations.’ In a crescendo of outrage, Wyndham concluded, ‘He sat many times, as you hear, and sentenced him, and assented to that sentence by standing up, and likewise by concluding the catastrophe of that sad beginning of our sufferings, his making a warrant for his execution, and accordingly you know what did follow. I think a clearer evidence of a fact can never be given, than is for these things.’
The irresistible confidence of the prosecutor’s close made the public gallery buzz in excited anticipation. Bridgeman was appalled: ‘Gentlemen, this humming is not at all becoming the gravity of this court. Let there be free-speaking by the Prisoner and Counsel. It is more fitting for a stage-play, than for a Court of Justice.’39 It was now time for Harrison to speak. The arguments he had formed during his six months in prison blended with his profound religious beliefs to form a defence that he believed to be robust. He began by reiterating that the King’s fate ‘was not a thing done in a corner’, but was rather of international renown. Harrison claimed that he had examined his conscience, in tears and through prayer, many times. His all-powerful, all-knowing God had consistently assured him he had done no wrong, and Harrison warned the court that God would soon appear to the world, to explain that which might seem inexplicable to the human mind.
In the meantime, Harrison would justify his actions through the revisiting of events that all were familiar with. ‘You know,’ he told the court, ‘what a contest hath been in these nations for many years. Diverse of those, that sit upon the bench, were formerly as active.’
Harrison was daring to speak the truth: that many of the jurors and legal officers present had actively sided against the King in the previous two decades. What they had done was also treason, by the court’s own definition: the breaking of the Oath of Supremacy, the armed opposition to God’s anointed. Yet it was a subject not to be touched upon, a crime not to be prosecuted: rather, it was to be quietly forgotten, a veil pulled over it, while the regicides alone were pushed forward for sacrifice.
‘Pray, Mr Harrison,’ the judge cut in; ‘do not thus reflect on the court. This is not to the business.’40
Realising he was to be denied use of this, his most compelling claim, the major general redirected his defensive fire. He claimed he had acted out of conscience, and in the belief that he had been doing God’s bidding, rather than out of any personal conviction. Harrison also pointed to the status quo in England eleven years earlier: ‘I say what was done was done by the authority of the Parliament, which was then the Supreme Authority, and that those, that have acted under them are not to be questioned by any power less than them . . . And whereas it hath been said, we did assume, and usurp an authority, I say, this was done rather in the Fear of the Lord.’
This provoked an explosion from Bridgeman: ‘Away with him! Know where you are, sir! You are in the Assembly of Christians. Will you make God the author of your treasons and murders?’41
Harrison had nowhere to go, now the court had demolished the two main struts of his defence: that all that had been done had been at the bidding of a Parliament of England, and that no other organisation could question that supreme body’s authority. The solicitor general dismissed these interlocking points with equal contempt, insisting that the defendant’s reference to them comprised a fresh act of treason, which on its own demanded the death sentence.
Now the various other legal figures joined in the destruction of Harrison’s attempted justifications. Sir Arthur Hazlerig asked mockingly, why, if he held Parliament in such very high esteem, had he pulled the Speaker from his chair during Cromwell’s termination of the Rump Parliament seven years earlier? Harrison made his final, forlorn, counterattack. ‘I would not willingly speak to offend any man,’ he began, ominously, ‘but I know God is no respecter of persons. [The King’s] setting up his standard against the people—
‘Truly, Mr Harrison,’ interjected Bridgeman, ‘this must not be suffered! This doth not at all belong to you!’
Harrison persevered. ‘Under favour, this doth belong to me. I would have abhorred to have brought him to account; had not the blood of English men, that had been shed—’
Wyndham cut in. ‘Me thinks he should be sent to Bedlam, till he comes to the Gallows to render account of this!’
Turnor added his disgust. ‘My Lords, this man hath the plague all over him! It is pity any should stand near him; for he will infect them.’42
Harrison now returned to less inflammatory talk, settling on the evidence against him. He denied that he had sought to ‘blacken’ the King, during his trial. He maintained that he had brought Charles from the Isle of Wight out of obedience to the orders of his commander-in-chief, Fairfax. He persisted in saying he had acted under the umbrella of Parliamentary authority. He expressed his grave disappointment that his lines of justification had been closed to him by the deliberate obstruction of the Court.
When Harrison had finished, the judge addressed the jury. He noted of the accused: ‘He hath been so far from denying, that he hath justified these actions. The evidence is so clear, and pregnant, as nothing more. I think you need not go out.’43 The jurors huddled together, very briefly, at the bar.
Their foreman was Sir Thomas Allen, part of the Restoration establishment. Five months earlier, as lord mayor of London, he had greeted the King on his return to the capital. Allen now stood to deliver the inevitable, unanimous, verdict: ‘Guilty.’
The court was eager to deal with its first victim. The solicitor general asked for the sentence against Harrison to be carried out as quickly as possible. ‘His demeanour hath been such,’ he claimed, ‘that he doth not deserve a reprieve for so many days, that you are like to spend in this session.’44
Harrison was given one final chance to speak. He had nothing further to say, since the Court refused to consider his defence. The judge then pronounced the sentence that would loom over all the accused:
You, that are the Prisoner at the Bar, you are to pass the Sentence of Death, which sentence is this. The Judgment of this Court is, and the Court doth award, that you be led back to the place, from whence you came, and from thence to be drawn upon an hurdle to the place of execution, and there you shall be hanged by the neck, and being alive shall be cut down, and your privy members to be cut off, your entrails to be taken out of your body, and (you living) the same to be burnt before your eyes, and your head to be cut off, your body to be divided into four quarters, and your head, and quarters, to be disposed of at the pleasure of the King’s Majesty: and the Lord have mercy upon your soul.45