Chapter 7
The doctors did prescribe at last
To give ’em this potation,
A vomit or a single cast,
Well deserved, in purgation;
After that to lay them down,
And bleed a vein in every one,
As traitors of the nation.
Anonymous Restoration ballad, 1660
Hanging, drawing and quartering had been the prescribed form of execution for high treason since the thirteenth century. Previously the sentence had tended to be just hanging, without macabre additions. There had been a time when throttling the life out of an offender had been considered enough, but Henry III wanted the guilty sent on their way with more of a flourish, and an unimaginable amount of pain, so as to deter others from attempting this king of crimes. A would-be assassin of Henry’s, and later the man behind the plot, both suffered hanging, drawing and quartering, in 1238 and 1240 – but they were disembowelled after death.
Early forms of the sentence involved the condemned being dragged through the street on the end of a rope. But the resulting repetitive impact of the head on the ground could result in near death before the gallows – the fulcrum of suffering – had been reached. It therefore became normal practice for the victim to be transported to his place of death on a low hurdle, or sledge, on which he would receive the projectiles of the crowds, but arrive intact.
On reaching the gallows, the condemned man (women guilty of high treason were burnt at the stake) was allowed to address the people. He was urged by the presiding sheriff to confess his crime and to incriminate accomplices. A priest encouraged a final search for forgiveness which, it was promised, would give the condemned a chance of seeing Heaven, rather than the otherwise inevitable descent into Hell. There was then time for praying aloud. The only clothes worn by the prisoner were his shirt, and a cap that would be drawn down over the eyes just before the drop.
The executioner would ask for forgiveness from his charge. It was wise to concede on this difficult point, and also to offer a financial gift, for the way in which the killing was performed was largely at the discretion of this master of suffering. He could favour you by allowing you to hang until dead; or he could cut you down after the ‘short drop’ (which garrotted the throat, but left neck and spine intact), then continue to the sharp end of proceedings – the chopping off of genitals, then the disembowelling with a red-hot metal gouge – while keeping the screaming victim alive, leaving his vital organs till last.
The crime was defined by the Treason Act of 1351, passed during the reign of Edward III. This was the law that Sir Orlando Bridgeman had selectively highlighted to the grand jury before the regicides were brought before it. He had quoted the part of the Act relating to, ‘When a Man doth compass or imagine the Death of our Lord the King’, as the basis for this capital trial. The savagery of the sentence was meant to deter subjects from killing leading male members of the royal family, or from defiling their queens, ‘companions’ and princesses.
Celebrated victims of this vicious and protracted style of execution included Guy Fawkes, who in 1605 had prepared to blow up King James and the House of Lords during the State Opening of Parliament. Caught near his bank of gunpowder, Fawkes endured relentless torture as the King’s agents sought to extract the names of co-conspirators from him. Broken and bloody, Fawkes was condemned to a traitor’s death. But on the allotted day he cheated the executioner by throwing himself from the scaffold, and dying instantly from a broken neck.
Behind each phase of the execution lay more than just sadism: this was a symbolic process that led the criminal to oblivion. The drawing through the streets provided a final, degrading journey from the living world. Hanging was the normal mode of dispatch for condemned criminals – the swift cleanness of beheading was generally reserved as a privilege for nobility and royalty.
The implement for castration was a sharp blade which not only cropped a man’s masculinity, but also symbolically terminated his power. The removal of sexual organs also underlined that the children of the dying man were disinherited: all possessions of those executed for treason were confiscated. The disembowelling related to medically ignorant and religiously superstitious medieval beliefs about the composition of the body and the spirit. Corrupt people were thought to harbour their malice in their hearts and in their innards. In tearing into the bowel with red-hot implements, to excavate these infected parts, the executioner was aiming to negate their evil through incineration in a purifying fire.
The head was cut off, not only as a mark of the conclusion of the sentence’s course, but also because it was believed to be the repository of the evil designs that had formed and flourished there. Along with the heart, the head was customarily raised high by the executioner, to mark the subject’s eventual death.
The head would be stuck on a pike, and placed with its dead eyes cast in the direction of the site of the crime. It was often encased by a metal brace, to hold it together for a little longer during putrefaction. Ravens were famed for picking the flesh, and feasting on the eyeballs, of those executed at the Tower of London.
The regicides seem initially to have been expecting to be hanged, or beheaded, as relatively orderly exits from the world: Scott had famously claimed in the Commons that an ending of the Long Parliament would see his and other heads on the block, and Cook had spent much time trying to make logical sense of his fate. This had included dwelling on the likely method of his dispatch, and the ordeal that they represented: he calculated that, ‘The axe or the halter [noose] will be less pain than the pangs of childbirth.’1
There had been examples of people being similarly condemned, within the previous decade and a half. After a failed plan to capture Dublin Castle, Connor Maguire, Baron of Enniskillen, had been captured and found guilty by the Parliamentarians in London of being ‘the chief contriver of the late Irish Rebellion and Massacre of the Protestant English’. After sentencing, the twenty-nine-year-old nobleman wrote a humble letter to the Commons that ‘showeth that your petitioner stands condemned for his life, and adjudged to be drawn, hanged, and quartered: the performance whereof (he humbly conceives) in some more favourable manner, will be satisfactory to justice’.2 Maguire pointed out that, given his rank, he should be afforded a quicker, more dignified, end. The Commons denied him, and he was hanged, drawn and quartered in February 1645, bullying officials and Protestant priests repeatedly interrupting his final prayers because they despised his Catholic words of comfort and supplication.
Thirteen years later, Cromwell insisted that a new High Court of Justice be set up to try the fourteen principal conspirators in a freshly unearthed Royalist plot. They were condemned to death for treason. Three of them – the brother of an earl, a knight and a priest – were granted the swift end offered by beheading. Another three, who were colonels, ‘were treated with more severity’, Clarendon reported, ‘and were hanged, drawn, and quartered, with the utmost rigour, in several great streets in the city, to make the deeper impression upon the people’. But the ghastliness of the procedure was too much, and ‘all men appeared so nauseated with blood, and so tired with those abominable spectacles, that Cromwell thought it best to pardon the rest who were condemned; or rather to reprieve them’.3
While the Royalists had loudly complained at the barbarity of hanging, drawing and quartering when it had been used against their own, they now insisted on it as the correct form of punishment for the killers of their late King. They were delighted Harrison would be the first to sample the agony and the humiliation of it all. ‘No man in the kingdom was regarded with so much detestation as this, by all parties,’ remarked the Reverend Mark Noble, an eighteenth-century biographer of the regicides, ‘except the few remaining fanatics, who looked upon him as a saint and martyr, and firmly believed to see him arise – to see, rather his mangled scattered remains re-unite in glory amongst them.’4
From the moment he had been sentenced, Thomas Harrison had shown an astonishing bravery nurtured by his religious intensity. Led from the court, he was immediately surrounded by a crowd howling with delight at what lay in store for him. In reply to the gloating taunts, he shouted, ‘Good is the Lord for all this! I have no cause to be ashamed of the cause that I have been engaged in!’5
Harrison remained upbeat during the two days between his being sentenced and his execution. He stayed unshakeable in his conviction that the ordeal he and his fellow regicides were facing was part of God’s plan, before the imminent Second Coming. He greeted the confiscation of his entire £17,000 estate by bequeathing to his wife the one object that remained to him – his Bible. This, he maintained, was an object with a value far beyond human understanding.
On 13 October he emerged from his cell, was tied to a sledge and was then pulled from Newgate prison, along Fleet Street, towards his place of execution. Charing Cross had been the site of one of the twelve Christian crosses erected in the late thirteenth century by Edward I, in memory of his dead and much-mourned wife Queen Eleanor. Parliament had destroyed this memorial to romance and royalism in 1647. Now some of its cause’s most ardent supporters would be slain on this same spot, within sight of Whitehall, where the King had been beheaded.
The crowd was seething and hostile. ‘Where is your good old cause now?’ one man taunted, as the major general rattled past on his hurdle. ‘With a cheerful smile,’ Ludlow recorded, Harrison ‘clapped his hands on his breast and said, “Here it is, and I go to seal it with my blood.” ’6
Far from being cowed by terror, Harrison presented a brave and defiant farewell to those who had come to celebrate his end. When he stood on the scaffold, about to give his final speech, it was noticeable that his legs were shaking. This provoked coarse heckling from those convinced he was quaking with fear. But the major general would have none of it, shouting out that his many wounds in battle had left him with a legacy of quivering limbs. He delivered his words within sight of the rope that would hang him, and of the instruments that would tear him apart.
There was to be no last-minute repentance of his part in the death of the King. Instead, Harrison chose his final moments to justify his actions: ‘The finger of God hath been amongst us of late years in the deliverance of his people from their oppressors, and in bringing to judgment that who were guilty of the precious blood of the dear servants of the Lord.’ To any sympathisers in the crowd, he gave this rallying cry: ‘Be not discouraged by reason of the cloud that now is upon you, for the Sun will shine and God will give a testimony unto what he hath been doing in a short time.’7 There must have been many former Parliamentarians present who felt a tingle of satisfaction at their soldier’s heartfelt defiance.
When the moment came for him to be put to death, Harrison recalled achievements from the past, while entrusting his future to God: ‘I have served a good Lord and Creator; he has covered my head many times in the day of battle: by God I have leapt over a wall, by God I have run through a troop, and by God I will go through this death and He will make it easy for me. Now into thy hands, O Lord Jesus, I commit my spirit.’8
He was hanged with the short drop, to ensure no easy departure from this world, and only when the frantic thrashing had stopped was he cut down. As Harrison regained consciousness his shirt was pulled away. The executioner used his knife to cut off Harrison’s genitals, which were presented to him before being tossed into a bucket. He was then held down while red-hot metal bored into his belly.
It was while his innards were being burnt in front of him that Harrison summoned up his remaining strength, and swung a punch that caught the executioner off-guard. This brought an abrupt end to the major general, as he was immediately dispatched by the irate and embarrassed hangman. Harrison’s head was severed, his heart cut out, and then his body was cut up into four.
One who witnessed this blood-drenched ordeal was Samuel Pepys. The diarist was a Parliamentary sympathiser who was adapting to life under the Restoration. ‘I went out to Charing Cross, to see Major General Harrison hanged, drawn, and quartered; which was done there, he looking as cheerful as any man could do in that condition. He was presently cut down, and his head and heart shown to the people, at which there was great shouts of joy. Thus it was my chance to see . . . the first blood shed in revenge for the blood of the King at Charing Cross.’9
There was plenty more to come.
The trials had continued during Harrison’s final days. At the end of 12 October, with Scroope, Scott, Carew, Jones and Clements found guilty, Judge Bridgeman encouraged them to face up to ‘the foulness of this horrid offence’, in advance of appearing before ‘God’s tribunal’. He said he was sad to see the fatal fall of such men, several of whose qualities he knew personally. He painted Charles I’s reign before the Civil Wars as a period of unmatched peace and prosperity, and attacked the five men for being among those who had condemned a monarch who he believed to possess extraordinary personal virtues: ‘I urge this unto you, only that you would lay it to your hearts, that you would consider what it is to kill a King, and to kill such a King.’10
Bridgeman was at great pains to distinguish between the King’s Parliamentary adversaries, and those directly involved in his conviction and execution: ‘They were not guilty, but some few ambitious, bloody, guilty persons, who contrived the same, and others misled by them.’11 Sir Orlando refused to allow fanciful religious beliefs to forgive earthly conduct, declaring, ‘There is a spiritual pride, men may overrun themselves by their own holiness, and they may go by pretended revelations . . . You must not think that every fancy and imagination is conscience; the Devil doth many times appear like an Angel of Light.’12
When thirty-eight-year-old John Carew learnt the tone of Bridgeman’s comments, he said that he would be the first to follow Harrison, for he shared the same Fifth Monarchy beliefs that the Court and the Crown were identifying as a particular menace.
Carew was regarded as second only to Harrison in the sect, and had suffered similarly under the Protectorate, after (like Harrison) some prominence in the years immediately after Charles’s execution: he had represented Devon during the experiment of Barebone’s Parliament. However, he came to believe that Cromwell’s personal ambitions flouted God’s will, prompting him to write a tract that included the accusation: ‘There are those who suspect you’ll King it, and procure your Heir to succeed it.’13 For this, and other acts that Cromwell viewed as sedition, Carew had been imprisoned in Pendennis Castle in Cornwall.
The Restoration would provide no respite for Carew. He had become one of Charles I’s judges by accident, his name not featuring in the original list of commissioners, but being added later – seemingly as an afterthought. Carew had asked to be excused the responsibility, but eventually agreed to sit when satisfied as to the authority of the High Court of Justice. Aside from his status as a regicide, Carew was a figure of special contempt in Royalist circles for not having attempted to plead for mercy for his half-brother, Sir Alexander Carew. Sir Alexander had been condemned to death for trying to betray the port of Plymouth to the King during the Civil War: he was beheaded in December 1644. One of Charles II’s supporters asserted, ‘It is no wonder that he was one of the Judges of the King, who was consenting to the death of his own brother.’14 The Commons voted for John Carew to be excluded from the Act of Indemnity by a majority of eighty votes to seventy.
Carew had been the focus of public displays of intense hatred on his journey from Cornwall to the Tower of London. Contrary to the reports that had troubled the Commons earlier in the year he had not tried to flee abroad, even though he had had the opportunity to do so. He shared Harrison’s belief that running away would denote the abandonment of an honourable and blessed cause. He also swore by the apocalyptic Scriptures, and held dear a verse in the Book of Revelation that resonated with his beliefs: ‘And I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the Word of God, and which had not worshipped the Beast. And they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years.’15 He believed he could be certain of a place among the Elect.
In several towns that he passed through on his way to London there had been calls to hang or shoot Carew there and then, rather than let him live a day longer. ‘He had a gracious presence of the Lord with him,’ recalled a Puritan witness to his journey; ‘Otherwise the many reproaches and hard usage in the way had been sufficient to have troubled his spirit.’16
Carew remained calm but forthright during his trial. He readily admitted his presence at the King’s prosecution, and confessed his signature on both of the key documents. He justified his actions as being in tune with God’s will. ‘As for that I can say in the presence of the Lord, who is the searcher of all hearts,’ he offered, ‘that what I did was in his fear; and I did it in obedience to his holy and righteous laws.’ This provoked high excitement in the public gallery, but Bridgeman allowed Carew to continue, reminding the court and the accused, ‘Go on, he stands for his life, let him have liberty . . . Go on, you shall not be interrupted.’17
There was less tolerance of Carew’s secondary defence: that he had acted under the authority of Parliament, when sitting in judgment of the King. Mr Justice Foster reminded Carew that there was no precedent for the House of Commons to act in such a way, to which Carew calmly countered, ‘Neither was there such a war, or such a precedent.’18 It was a brilliantly telling point, and he refused to retract it: ‘Gentlemen of the Jury, I say I shall leave it with you. This authority I speak of is right, which was the supreme power, it is well known what they were.’19 This was an argument that the Royalist court repeatedly disparaged, but never convincingly rebutted. Fellow regicide Edmund Ludlow referred to the Court’s counter-arguments on this point as being so flimsy that they were no more than mere ‘cobweb-coverings’.20
At the end of the day, when Bridgeman asked the five who had been found guilty if they had anything further to say before he proceed to sentence, the other four cast themselves on the King’s mercy, while Carew bypassed earthly authority altogether. ‘I commit my cause unto the Lord,’21 he said. His family begged him to reconsider and seek clemency: then, even though his life may remain forfeited, they might have a chance of retaining his property. But he refused to compromise his most closely held beliefs for their material benefit.
When the time came for his execution, everyone noticed how happy Carew looked. ‘Coming down Newgate stairs to go into the sledge,’ wrote an eyewitness, ‘in a very smiling and cheerful manner, his countenance shining with great glory, he uttered words to this effect: “My Lord Jesus endured the Cross, whose steps I desire to follow.” ’22 Royalist reporters, deeply troubled by another demonstration of pious bravery so soon after Harrison’s, wrote that Carew’s demeanour should be put down to drunkenness rather than courage: they claimed he had downed three pints of sack – fortified wine – before setting off for his execution. This, the Royalist scribes maintained, explained Carew’s excessive sweating that day, which even his handkerchief could not assuage.
The day had started with threatening autumnal clouds hanging low, and they released their drops as Carew mounted the scaffold. He gave a fiery speech in the rain, warming the hearts of the Fifth Monarchists watching. He then met his death with a serene defiance and acceptance that drew reluctant admiration from many who had come to watch a wretched fanatic suffer.
Part of the thinking behind the regicides’ trials had been the hope of drawing attention to what contemptible beings the defendants were. But the courage and piety of Harrison and Carew had drawn admiration from the watching crowds, and news of their stoicism spread quickly. The remaining doomed men aspired to match the example of the Fifth Monarchy duo for grit and dignity, when their time came.
But another Man of God was finding the imminent prospect of excruciating death too much to bear. Hugh Peters was sixty-two, and in poor health. Eleven years earlier he had led Charles in triumph from Windsor to London for his trial, and had since combined his religious calling with command of a regiment during Cromwell’s Irish campaigns. Peters came from a well-to-do background: his father was an émigré from Antwerp who settled with Peters’s maternal family in Fowey, on the Cornish coast. A Cambridge graduate, Peters was filled with religious fervour as a young man, inspired by an electrifying sermon during a visit to London. It was a potent enough dose to last a lifetime.
Peters’s certainty in his beliefs made him an outspoken opponent of royal policy and religion. He had been imprisoned in 1627 after openly condemning Charles’s French queen, Henrietta Maria, for the ‘idolatry and superstition’23 of her Roman Catholicism. His licence to preach was suspended, prompting him to move to the greater tolerance of the Netherlands. There he served as a military chaplain, before briefly becoming a prominent pastor in Rotterdam. Even there, the long arm of the Anglican Church caught up with him, pricked by his outspokenness. Peters decided to join the Puritan trek towards the far-flung, colonial communities of America’s eastern seaboard. An ocean away from Europe, they offered the chance of political and religious liberty.
Peters had been intrigued by possibilities across the Atlantic for some time. He was an early investor in the New England Company, which bought a grant of land between the Charles and Merrimack Rivers (which makes up much of the central part of present-day New England). The settlers forcibly colonised land that had been home to the Massachusett, Nauset and Wampanoag tribes, who lost much of their population to disease as a consequence.
In 1629 the trading body changed its identity to the Massachusetts Bay Company, acquiring a royal charter from Charles I that recognised it as being ‘one body corporate and politic’, able to pass its own laws provided they were ‘not contrary’ to those of England.24 Now it carried the quiet hopes of many who were eager to create a refuge from religious intolerance in England. This was the one English colonial body in America that did not require its board members to meet in the motherland, meaning that control of company stock provided a unique measure of independence.
Hugh Peters took up his new life in New England in 1635, bringing energy and ideas to the colony. He used knowledge gleaned from his youth in Cornwall to advise the settlers on how to develop both their fishing trade and their shipbuilding. He helped spread the gospel among the Native Americans, later claiming that as a result of their newfound godliness, ‘in seven years among thousands there dwelling, I never saw any drunk, nor heard an Oath, nor any begging, nor Sabbath broken’.25
Peters was one of 17,000 Puritans who had migrated to New England by the mid-1630s. The preacher was among those anxious that this growing community of godliness should be led by suitably trained clergy. He became a prime mover in the establishment of Harvard College, by vote of the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in 1636. Harvard was established to provide an annual harvest of spiritual leaders. At the end of the same year Peters became pastor of the first church in Salem, which was, along with Boston, one of the two main settlements in the colony. He asserted his authority over the community, combining strong leadership with a compelling example of simple living. In the process he earned considerable respect and popularity.
There was consternation in his congregation when it was learnt that Peters would be part of a three-man delegation from the colony to England, in 1641, ‘to negotiate for us . . . both in furthering the work of reformation of the churches there which was now like to be attempted, and to satisfy our countrymen of the true cause our engagements there have not been satisfied this year’.26 It was an important mission, and demanded the vivid oratory of the passionate preacher. Peters promised to return to New England, which he would from now on frequently refer to as ‘home’. However, to his bitter regret, this was not to be. Years later, when facing death, Peters would write: ‘It hath much lain to my heart above any thing almost, that I left the people I was engaged to in New England, it cuts deeply, I look upon it as a Root-evil.’27
Peters arrived to find England ‘embroiled in troubles and War’, and was pressured to join the other leading ministers on campaign. The preacher quickly found himself in Ireland, before being assigned to ministry in the fleet. He was in demand from the great men of the cause: his particular patron was the Earl of Warwick, commander of the Parliamentary navy, and a colonial pioneer in North and Central America. Peters was also a valued presence in the retinues of successive lords general – the Earl of Essex, Lord Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell. These immensely powerful figures valued Peters’s extraordinarily infectious words, which could rouse men to fight with a courage reserved for those utterly confident in God’s blessing.
Peters whipped up New Model Army troops before battle, or in the prelude to attack on a besieged position. He was then repeatedly chosen to report their resulting victories to Parliament: he could be relied on to fire his audience, raise morale and stiffen resolve. ‘In all which affairs I did labour to persuade the Army to do their duty,’28 was how he coyly recorded the impact of his remarkable eloquence. Often, and intentionally, his triumphant reports resulted in increased money being allocated by Parliament to their troops in the field.
During the build-up to the King’s trial, Peters was busy. He addressed congregations in London that included a high proportion of soldiers, and persuaded them that a king was eligible for trial and condemnation, if his actions demanded punishment. A Mr Beaver would recall how, in December 1648 (he could remember the date exactly, because it was while Parliament was observing a fast), he had listened to Hugh Peters preaching in the church of St Margaret’s, Westminster. Peters’s New Testament text that day was the story of the freeing of the criminal Barabbas in place of Jesus – an error by the misled mob that had led to that greatest of historical wrongs – Christ’s crucifixion.
From the pulpit Peters chided those who might repeat the travesty, and allow the wrong man to escape justice now. He reserved particular condemnation for London’s merchants, accusing them of being prepared to reach a shameful compromise with the defeated King in order to line their pockets. Beaver remembered Peters’s words: ‘ “I have been in the City,” he said, “which may very well be compared to Jerusalem in this conjuncture of time, and I profess these foolish citizens, for a little trading and profit they will have Christ” (pointing to the redcoats on the pulpit stairs) “crucified, and that great Barabbas at Windsor released . . . O Jesus, what should we do now?” with such like strange expressions, and shrugging of his shoulders in the pulpit.’29 Beaver heard Peters continue in this melodramatic vein for two or three hours, justifying and encouraging the King’s execution, while warning the military that if they failed to see the appropriate sentence passed they would invite destruction on themselves.
Peters also worked on the King’s judges. The diarist John Evelyn recorded on 17 January 1649: ‘I heard the rebel Peters incite the Rebel powers met in the Painted Chamber, to destroy his Majesty and saw that arch traitor Bradshaw, who not long after condemned [the King].’30 Four days later Peters preached to a congregation of the commissioners of the High Court of Justice, taking as his text Psalm 149, verse 8, which exhorted, ‘Bind your Kings with chains, and your Nobles in fetters of iron.’ Warming to his theme, Peters said, ‘What, will ye cut off the King’s head, the head of a Protestant Prince and King? Turn to your Bibles and you shall find it there, “Whosoever sheds man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed” . . . and I see neither King Charles, nor Prince Charles, nor Prince Rupert, nor Prince Maurice [Rupert and Maurice were nephews and leading generals of the King], nor any of that rabble excepted out of it . . . This is the day that I and many saints of God besides have been praying for these many years.’31
A man named Chase recalled Oliver Cromwell laughing while Peters preached that day, apparently in appreciation of Peters’s eccentric style of delivery: it was theatrical to the point of absurdity. To worldly observers it was all a bit much: Samuel Pepys would later record listening to a learned but overblown sermon by Dr Creeton, a chaplain to Charles II, pronouncing him ‘the most comical man that ever I heard in my life. Just such a man as Hugh Peter[s].’32
But the extravagant delivery enchanted the less sophisticated. A historian of Salem noted of Peters that, ‘his language was peculiar to himself. He had a power of associating his thoughts in such a manner, as to be sure to leave them upon the memory. If his images were coarse they were familiar, and never failed to answer his purpose.’33 His purpose in early 1649 was to push on to condemnation of the King. Thomas Richardson would say of Peters, after the first day of the royal trial, ‘I heard him commend Bradshaw, the carriage of him in the trial of the King, and another, Cook’s carriage: to be short, Mr Peters holding up his hands said, “This is a most glorious beginning of the work.” ’34 Sir Jeremy Whitcot remembered Peters’s rapturous delight as the High Court of Justice gathered steam towards its goal of convicting the King. ‘I cannot but look upon this Court with a great reverence,’ he heard Peters say, ‘for it doth resemble in some measure the trial that shall be at the end of the world by the Saints.’35
On three occasions, Peters recalled, he had spoken with Charles I, advising him on how to achieve salvation, and offering to preach to him the true word of God. ‘The poor wretch would not hear me,’36 Peters said, with pity.
In the early years of the Commonwealth, Peters seems to have enjoyed being a prominent figure at the execution of leading Royalists. He had arranged the surrender of the Duke of Hamilton to Parliament at Uttoxeter in 1648, and was with him on the scaffold the following year, when the duke was seen to embrace Peters warmly, before he was beheaded. He also delighted in saving others from execution, including the Earl of Norwich.
Peters’s years in the Netherlands, the American colonies and Ireland gave him a very broad perspective. He had deep knowledge of Ireland, and was sympathetic to the plight of its Protestants. He also assisted the oppressed Protestant minority in Catholic Piedmont. Peters’s strong attachment to the Netherlands led to his disagreeing fiercely with Cromwell about the Anglo-Dutch War – Peters feeling strongly that the two Protestant powers should work together, not blow one another apart on the seas.
At the death of his master, the Lord Protector, Peters had given the sermon, taking as his text, ‘My servant Moses is dead.’ His steps in Cromwell’s funeral procession were the prelude to his retirement: his health was poor. Peters was heard from intermittently after that, most vocally when recording his dismay at Richard Cromwell’s fall. He rose again from his sickbed in January 1660, when Parliament instructed him to intercept Monck with words of guidance during the general’s advance towards London. He caught up with Monck at St Albans, delivering a poorly received address in the daytime, which he followed with an equally ill-judged prayer that evening. These blunders would remain fresh in the minds of the new regime, after the Restoration.
Peters seems to have remained strangely oblivious of the approaching danger. Confident that he would live out his days in peace, he wrote to Monck reminding him that he was chronically ill, while pointing to his having abstained from public life in the year since the collapse of Richard Cromwell’s Protectorate. Peters hoped his total submission would guarantee his future safety.
But the Restoration provided the perfect opportunity for reprisal against those whose unpopularity matched their former power. Peters was a symbol of the republican, Puritan, decade that now demanded total rejection. In January 1660 the infirm preacher was banished from his set of rooms at Whitehall. Four months later he was relieved of the library that had been entrusted to him in 1644: it had belonged to William Laud, Charles I’s Archbishop of Canterbury, who had been executed for his role as the King’s religious henchman. Also in May, a spate of cartoons and ballads greeted the order for Peters to be apprehended: the masses were baying for his blood. Effigies of Peters were burnt in public, along with Cromwell’s. He was suspected of being one of the King’s brace of executioners. On 19 June a pamphlet appeared detailing an alleged confession by Peters to his doctor, in which he was presented as a more than willing hand in the King’s trial and execution.
On 18 July, Peters learnt that his application for the royal mercy offered in the Act of Indemnity had been rejected. This unexpected news sent him into hiding, from where he composed a robust defence of his actions, and submitted it to the House of Lords. His self-justification was later published as The Case of Mr Hugh Peters, Impartially Communicated to the View and Censure of the Whole World, and opened with a complaint at the overwhelming prejudice he faced without even being heard. ‘Before his holy Majesty, Angels and Men,’ Peters swore he had nothing whatsoever – whether in thought, or by action – to do with Charles I’s death. He reminded his readers that he had helped Royalists during the Commonwealth, while admitting, ‘It is true, I was of a Party, when I acted zealously, but without malice or mischief.’37 It is clear that he thought this lack of forgiveness from the new King was a mistake, ‘unless my evil be only for acting with such a Party’.38 Surely this was not possible, he said, for it would lead to half the nation remaining unpardoned, and vulnerable to reprisal.
Peters panicked, in the face of terrible and unforeseen danger. He seems to have chosen to forget the public nature of his attacks on the King – the whipping up of congregations and assemblies, so they would contemplate putting Charles I on trial for his life; the riding at the head of the crowd-drawing procession that hurried the King from Windsor to St James’s – and tried to pretend that things had not been as they had appeared.
This involved some nimble reinventions. He maintained that he had not been party to Pride’s Purge when, in truth, he had been one of the few preachers to support it; that he had never profited from the war, despite receiving not just Laud’s library, but also an annuity from Parliament, as well as confiscated Royalist property; and he vigorously dismissed the many reports that he had been unfaithful (‘unclean’, in the language of the time) to his mentally ill wife – a particularly serious accusation, since in the Puritan colony where he was alleged to have strayed, adultery was a capital offence. He pointed to his Christian creed, and his status as a gentleman, to lend weight to his version of events, before swearing to be loyal to Charles II, and ‘to be passive under Authority, rather than impatient’.39
This failed to satisfy his enemies, and the hunt for the preacher continued. It ended in success on 2 September when Peters was found hiding under the bed of some Quaker friends in their Southwark home. The man who had urged the New Model Army to perform brave deeds discovered quickly that he was not, himself, a man of courage. There was a tangible desperation about his addled remarks in Court that betrayed his disbelieving terror at the very real prospect of a traitor’s death.
At his arraignment, on 10 October, when asked to plead, he replied in consternation, ‘I would not for ten thousand worlds say, I am guilty. I am not guilty.’ When asked how he would be tried, the controversial preacher offered, ‘By the Word of God.’ Those in the public gallery recognised this as an erroneous reply, put forward by a defendant desperate to wrap himself in protective religious clothing, and erupted in derisive laughter. The question was put to him again, and Peters was obliged to reply, this time, correctly, ‘By God, and the Country.’40
During his trial, on 13 October – the day Harrison was castrated, gutted and chopped into five parcels of flesh – Sir Edward Turnor told the court not to be misled by Peter’s priestly status, for, ‘He did make use of his profession, wherein he should have been the minister of peace, to make himself a trumpeter of war, of treason and sedition in the kingdom.’41
A devastating witness was produced, who illuminated the deep hatred for the King and the royal family that lurked within Peters. Dr William Young had looked after the preacher when he had been desperately ill with dysentery in Ireland. It took Peters a week to get over the worst of his sickness, and he then convalesced for nine further weeks in the physician’s home. During those two months in 1648, the priest had been open with his thoughts, often staying up till the early hours to dissect the minutiae of recent wars. ‘Many times I should hear him rail most insufferably against the Blood Royal,’ Young told the court, ‘not only against our Martyred King, but against his Royal offspring.’ Peters had also shared with Young his true and secret purpose for returning home from New England: ‘He told me that for the driving on of this interest of this Reformation, he was employed out of New England for the stirring up of this war, and driving it on.’42
Dr Young next recounted that Peters told him that it was the King’s being taken by the army from Holdenby, when he moved from Parliament’s control to that of the military, which had led to thoughts of executing the monarch. Oliver Cromwell had learnt that Parliament was plotting to have him arrested. He and Peters had escaped from London to Ware. The two men concluded there that the only way to restore peace was through the trial and death of the King. Young believed that it was Peters who originally proposed this plan, and it was Cromwell who agreed to it.
This theory was given further substance through the testimony of Sir Jeremy Whitcot, who recalled hearing Peters ‘speak very scurrilously of the King. Among the rest, he was making some kind of narration of Cromwell making an escape, and that he [Cromwell] was intended to be surprised, “that if he had not presently gone away, he had been clapped up in the Tower and declared a traitor”. He said there was a meeting of the officers of the Army, where he used this expression, “And there we did resolve to set aside the King.”’43
Other witnesses were called, who spoke of Peters’s presence at meetings where the agenda was hostility to the King. Wilbert Gunter, who drew ale at The Star pub in Coleman Street, recalled seeing Peters sitting with Cromwell and others for many hours after the King’s arrest, and heard Peters referring to the monarch repeatedly and dismissively as ‘Charles Stuart’.
It was shown that Peters had long been an outspoken critic of the King. George Starkey came from Windsor, the birthplace of the New Model Army. Starkey’s family lived near the castle, and their home had been requisitioned as lodgings by Henry Ireton. It contained a large room that the Council of War used for meetings. It was in this that Starkey frequently saw Cromwell, Ireton and Peters, together with two others whose names he did not know, sitting up till two or three in the morning, talking with intensity and passion.
Starkey had a clear memory of Peters’s relentlessly poor opinion of Charles I: ‘I remember some of his expressions were these, that he was a tyrant, that he was a fool, that he was not fit to be King or bear that office; I have heard him say, that for the office itself (in those very words which shortly after came into print) that it was a dangerous, changeable, and useless office.’44 Starkey told the court how his elderly, Royalist father had quietly seethed with resentment at the presence of his compulsory houseguests. But when news came of the King’s imprisonment on the Isle of Wight, it was too much for the old man: he vowed to make his true feelings known. His first act of defiance was to hide the key to his wine cellar. Then, while saying grace at dinner that night, he dared to throw in an impudent barb: ‘God save the King’s most excellent Majesty,’ he said, ‘and preserve him out of the hands of all his enemies.’ At this, Peters turned deliberately towards his elderly, reluctant host, and coldly declared: ‘Old gentleman, your idol will not stand long.’45
Peters’s guilt as to ‘contriving’ the death of the King was established under this great weight of evidence. What remained unproven was the suspicion that he was one of the two royal executioners – either the man who swung the axe, or the one who then held high the King’s dripping head. Richard Nunneley swore that he had seen Peters prior to the beheading, busy round the scaffold. Nunneley specifically remembered Peters summoning a carpenter from Houndsditch named Tench, whom he instructed to beat four iron staples into the floor of the scaffold. These were to be used for securing the King, if he refused to submit to death.
Nunneley maintained that Peters disappeared from view an hour before the King walked on to the scaffold. It was not until after Charles’s head had been severed that he spotted Peters again – wearing a black cloak and wide-brimmed hat, in conversation with the hangman. Nunneley swore that he later saw the two men drinking water together.
Peters excitedly rebutted this evidence, claiming that he had been confined to bed at home during the execution, too ill to move. He produced a servant to back up this version of events; but this witness was, the judge would conclude, deeply unsatisfactory.
Although the identity of the two men on the scaffold has never been proven, there were eyewitness accounts – including that of a waterman, whose job it was to taxi people along the River Thames – that the man who swung the axe so expertly that day was the regular hangman, Richard Brandon. According to the waterman, Brandon was in his boat later that day, in a terrible state, his conscience in turmoil at the thought of having beheaded the Lord’s anointed.
It seems unlikely that Peters, who was accustomed to chronic ill health, had absented himself from a moment of such unique magnitude as the death of the King. This was by some distance the most sensational event that this busy, fervent, involved preacher would ever witness – the thrilling collision of his devout religious theories with his radical political aims.
On a practical level Parliament needed the execution to be performed clinically, so that it did not descend into bloody chaos. The man most likely to deliver death in one clean stroke was Brandon, the seasoned axeman. But, even with added financial inducements, Brandon was conscience-stricken by the task in hand. What better comfort for a God-fearing executioner than to give him a preacher as a scaffold companion? Might not Peters have been the man to hold aloft Charles I’s severed head?
Despite his role in the execution remaining unproven, there was no escape for Peters at trial. In his summing-up, the solicitor general said: ‘What man could more contrive the death of the King than this miserable priest hath done? . . . For many come here, and say they did it “in the fear of the Lord” – and now you see who taught them.’ After sentencing, Peters admitted that the testimony he had presented had not been as truthful as he would have liked: ‘I will submit myself to God, and if I have spoken anything against the Gospel of Christ, I am heartily sorry.’46 Regret was soon replaced by terror, as Peters plunged into a gloom of despair.
Peters had been tried alongside the lawyer John Cook, who had mounted a brilliant legal defence that led to awkward questions as to the validity, the procedure and the content of the charges against him.
Cook claimed he had only accepted the case against the late King because he needed the fee: he assured the court that he had no malice in helping the prosecution; rather his involvement was down to avarice. This raised the vital question as to whether a lawyer paid to represent a cause could be condemned for doing so, since he was performing his professional duties. With similar ingenuity Cook stated that he could not be guilty of contriving or plotting the death of the King, since he was only engaged as solicitor to the court the day after the charges against Charles I were proclaimed.
On a more mundane level he also pointed out that the charge against him had been drawn up in the name of ‘I. Cooke’, not ‘J. Cooke’. This sort of administrative error could, Cook knew from experience, lead to cases being dismissed.
But none of Cook’s clever points could penetrate the all-enveloping hostility of this Royalist court. They had come to condemn the prime movers in the death of the King, and the case’s lead prosecutor could not be allowed to elude them. Additionally, Cook had been a legal pioneer who had tried to straighten out some of the abuses of his profession, and who had recommended that lawyers should donate one-tenth of their fees to the poor. Accordingly, as Ludlow noted, ‘The malice towards this gentleman was very great from those of his own robe.’47 He was not going to receive any favours from disgruntled colleagues.
Cook and Peters received their death sentence at the same time. They were manacled together and escorted back to prison.