‘The Mariners of several of the Royal ships set forth in this last summer’s fleet, being by the cunning insinuation of men ill affected to the Peace of this Kingdom seduced, have treacherously revolted from their duty, and do still persist in their disobedience, by which horrid and detestable act in breach of their trust, they have much blemished the honour and credit of the Navigation, and Mariners of this Kingdom.’
‘A Declaration of the Lords and Commons’, 14 July 1648
A short-lived, uncoordinated reignition of Royalist resistance in parts of England and Wales flared up in 1648. Despite its brevity, the Second Civil War was an intense affair, whose repercussions were felt across Britain. Parliamentarian propagandists had sensed the coming of renewed warfare and lashed out at those behind it: ‘Blush for shame ye bastards of England,’ fumed The Lamentation of the Ruling Lay-Elders, in July 1647, ‘(for legitimate children ye cannot be) that prosecute such horrid actions, and hatch such Crocodiles eggs of Rebellion and murder, that the very Infidels, Pagans, Turks, Saracens, and no Nation though never so barbarous and cruel but would shame to own.’[fn1]
Loyalty to the Crown remained, to many people, not so much a matter of political choice, but rather a cornerstone of personal creed. As long as the king lived, he would always have supporters. A contemporary pamphlet involved an imaginary interchange between an old Cavalier and an interrogator:
Question: ‘Then it seems you have been for the King?’
Answer: ‘I have, Sir, and am still, with all my heart to wish his honour and safety, and I hold it my duty to do so.’[fn2]
The Second Civil War began in the spring of 1648 with a rising in Kent led by Goring’s father, Lord Norwich. His force soon combined with a similar one from Essex, commanded by Sir Charles Lucas — who had fought bravely at Powick Bridge and had helped identify the Royalist dead at Marston Moor. When the New Model Army appeared in strong numbers, the Royalists fell back to Colchester, whose sturdy defensive walls were accentuated by a hilltop position and the protective waters of the River Colne. The garrison prepared for a siege they were confident they could withstand until help arrived.
The king must have greeted news of the rising with hope and relief, for his position was extremely precarious. He had attempted to flee the country, getting as far as the Isle of Wight before being imprisoned there, in Carisbrooke Castle. By now his repeated untrustworthiness had eroded his enemies’ patience and his confinement took on a more restrictive air: ‘The King is now kept from destructive Councils,’ the House of Commons heard in mid January. ‘His Majesty is sad, and spends much time in writing, and at his books.’[fn3]
The Moderate Intelligencer gauged the tone and the scope of Charles’s island captivity: ‘Here is a melancholy Court. Walking the round is the daily recreation’.[fn4] The king was denied his choice of worship: Episcopalianism was not permitted, so he refused to take Communion. Charles was constantly at loggerheads with his chief gaoler, Colonel Hammond, a servant of Parliament and an enemy of monarchy.
In London, it was believed that the coming year would be a decisive one for the king, yielding up freedom or death. A ditty of the time went:
Poor Charles pursu’d in forty-one,
Un-king’d in forty-seven;
The eighth will place him on his Throne,
In Earth, or else in Heav’n.[fn5]
When, thanks to Digby’s slanders, Charles had been most questioning of Rupert’s integrity, the prince had concluded a letter to the king with a declaration of infinite loyalty:
Wherever I am, or how unhappy soever, and by your will made so, yet I shall ever retain that duty to your Majesty which I have ever, as
Your Majesty’s most humble, and most obedient Nephew, and faithful humble servant,
Rupert[fn6]
The outbreak of the Second Civil War gave the prince a chance to honour his word. He hoped to join Prince Charles as he set off for Scotland, but Lauderdale urged Charles not to bring over a man, ‘against whom both kingdoms have so just cause of exceptions’.[fn7]
However, the disjointed rebellion against Parliament on land led to a spectacular result at sea: the majority of the navy, which had lent such important support to Parliament in the Great Civil War, now declared for the king and sailed for Holland. Its sailors had been alienated by the increasing political and religious extremism of the government, and of the army.
Parliament was rattled. The Lords and Commons condemned the defectors, while offering an amnesty to all who returned to their service within twenty days: ‘But if they shall after the said time prefixed expired persist still in their disobedience, then the Houses will proceed to the reducing of them by force, and doubting not of a good success by the blessing of Almighty God.’[fn8] At the same time the two Houses offered a generous inducement to those seamen who had remained loyal: they would each receive two months’ wages as a bonus, once the renegades were defeated.
In July, rumours circulated London that the Prince of Wales had left Calais in a Dutch ship of thirty-five guns. Charles was sailing at the head of five lesser vessels, which some feared were destined for the north of England. ‘But those of better judgements’, wrote one correspondent, ‘suppose that he is rather gone towards Holland. And it is more likely because diverse English officers are gone by land towards Holland.’[fn9] Heading the list of those believed to be accompanying the heir to the throne was ‘Prince Rupert, the Palsgrave’s brother’.
Rupert, still recovering from his serious head wound, had quit Louis XIV’s service to rejoin the Royalist cause. The prince had, in the words of his private papers, ‘been plied over again with the repeated offer of any conditions in the French service, before his going for Holland’.[fn10] However, he had always insisted that, if the chance arose to serve his uncle once more, he would feel obliged to take it.
Arriving at The Hague, Rupert found that Charles had been reunited with his younger brother, James, Duke of York. The teenager had escaped house arrest in St James’s Palace during a game of hide and seek. He had slipped away and disguised himself as a girl, wearing a wig and a lady’s cloak. He had then succeeded in crossing from Gravesend to Holland, his arrival giving a fillip to the court-in-exile and embarrassing his former captors.
James bore the title of Lord High Admiral. He hoped that he would be called upon to lead the ships that, like him, had recently quit England. However, Prince Charles insisted on commanding the squadrons himself. The royal heir led the fleet into the Downs, off the southeastern English coast, eager for action. Princes Rupert and Maurice were by his side.
The expedition was not a success. The Prince of Wales’s ships were poorly provided for: the English sailor of the mid seventeenth century endured harsh conditions, in return for limited but inalienable rights. Of prime importance to him was his daily food allowance. This comprised 1 lb of bread, 1/2 lb of cheese, and 1/4 lb of butter. He also expected adequate clothing. Prince Charles had neither the money nor the logistical support to see that these basic needs were met, and the men became mutinous. They insisted in putting to shore near Deal, in the hope of finding food and booty, but the foray was a shambles and a detachment of Parliamentary cavalry saw off the raiders. ‘Upon this repulse,’ Rupert’s papers recorded, with disappointment, ‘disorders and discontents increasing in the fleet, and all disadvantages being artificially improved, it was thought … best to return to Holland.’[fn11]
On their way back across the North Sea, the Royalists met Batten and Jordan, two enemy naval commanders who professed loyalty to the Crown. This was especially surprising of Batten, a figure of hate among the king’s supporters since firing on Henrietta Maria as she landed on the Yorkshire coast at the start of the Civil War. Now, to Rupert’s bewilderment, the queen’s son chose to knight the rebel vice-admiral. Batten assured his new allies that, if they waited where they were, he would ensure that they received supplies from London. None came.
Some of the Royalists now suggested sailing to the relief of Colchester, while others advocated joining up with the Scots in the north. Rupert believed these plans to be of secondary importance when the chance remained of rescuing the king from the Isle of Wight. However, the seamen were less interested in strategy than in self-enrichment. They busied themselves taking prizes: picking off the colliers returning from London to the northeast was particularly lucrative, since they carried the money earned selling coal to the capital.
There were few opportunities to fight battles. When the Earl of Warwick emerged with Parliament’s fleet, Rupert noticed that Batten was extremely nervous about the prospect of fighting his former comrades. The prince’s suspicions heightened when Batten took to carrying a large white napkin, which he claimed he needed for mopping sweat from his chin. Rupert felt sure that Batten was instead using the napkin to signal to the enemy, but Charles dismissed his cousin’s concerns as the workings of an overactive imagination. Rupert conceded that he had no proof of Batten’s treachery, ‘But,’ he vowed, ‘if things go ill, by God, the first thing I will do is to shoot him.’[fn12]
The chance never arose: a storm broke when the two forces were about to engage, forcing all the ships to drop anchor. When the winds slackened, Warwick declined combat. The Prince of Wales, his crews’ provisions and morale both running low, ordered a return to Holland. ‘At night,’ Prince Rupert’s Logbook recalled, ‘the Prince standing upon the deck in the Constant Reformation, Patison (the master of the ship) cried out to his Highness that he saw a light, and asked what he should do.’[fn13] Rupert was convinced that the light belonged to a ship from a Parliamentary fleet — a conclusion that Patison and the other officers endorsed. Batten revealed a suspicious reluctance to pursue this possible enemy sighting. ‘Sir,’ he said to the Prince of Wales, ‘whither do we steer? Will your Majesty have him [Rupert] run out of the way for every collier that he sees?’[fn14] Prince Charles bowed to Batten’s scepticism and ordered his ships to continue their course for the Netherlands.
However, Rupert had been correct. The light he had seen twinkling in the distance belonged to a vessel from Parliament’s Portsmouth fleet, which had been looking to throw in its lot with the king. Batten’s curious advice scuppered this plan and the fleet went back to Portsmouth, and to Parliament’s service. Meanwhile, the Royalists returned to Holland with little to show for their efforts.
Disappointment and failure stoked the smouldering faction fighting in the Stuart court. Rupert’s longstanding dislike of Culpepper was cleverly played on by Sir Edward Herbert, the manipulative attorney general. Herbert knew, as Clarendon put it, that Rupert: ‘did not, upon many old contests in the late war, love the Lord Culpepper, who was not of a temper to court him’.[fn15] Culpepper’s temper was, if anything, hotter than Rupert’s. The two men clashed with increasing aggression in Prince Charles’s council. One day, the council met at the lodgings in The Hague shared by the Lord Treasurer and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, to discuss who should dispose of the cargo of a recently taken prize ship. Clarendon recorded:
Prince Rupert proposed, ‘That one Sir Robert Walsh (a person too well known to be trusted) might be employed in that affair’: it was to sell a ship of sugar. No man present would ever have consented that he should have enjoyed; but the Lord Culpepper spoke against him with some warmth, so that it might be thought to reflect a little upon Prince Rupert, who had proposed him. Upon which, he asking ‘What exceptions there were to Robert Walsh, why he might not be fit for it’; Culpepper answered with some quickness, ‘That he was a known cheat’; which, though notoriously true, the Prince seemed to take very ill; and said, ‘He was his friend, and a gentleman; and if he should come to hear of what had been said, he knew not how Lord Culpepper could avoid fighting with him’. Culpepper, whose courage no man doubted, presently replied, ‘That he would not fight with Walsh, but he would fight with His Highness’; to which the Prince answered very quietly, ‘That it was well’; and the Council rose in great perplexity.[fn16]
Prince Charles was determined to prevent a duel between his cousin and one of his family’s most loyal servants. Clarendon took Culpepper for a walk outside and urged him to ask for Rupert’s pardon. But Culpepper’s temper was ablaze and he refused to back down, unless Rupert did so too. It took several days for Culpepper to calm himself and appreciate that nobody of influence was supporting him.
Culpepper went to Rupert’s lodgings and apologised. Sir Edward Herbert had tried to dissuade him from forgiving the effrontery, but Rupert received Culpepper and his apology with grace. Herbert then worked on Sir Robert Walsh, telling him that, now Prince Rupert had given way, it was up to Walsh to defend his own honour. Herbert broke the confidentiality of the council, by quoting Culpepper’s slurs word for word.
At ten o’clock on the morning after his reconciliation with the prince, Culpepper was intercepted by Walsh as he walked to the council. He spoke with quiet menace, leaving Culpepper in no doubt that he knew what he had said and that he would get his revenge. Culpepper replied that he would happily fight Walsh, but that he would not be drawn on what had or had not been said in council, since such matters were secret. At this, Walsh punched Culpepper powerfully in the face and then drew his sword. However, seeing that Culpepper was unarmed, he left him bleeding heavily and walked away.
Culpepper remained confined to his room, embarrassed and outraged by the wound to his face. Prince Charles, shocked at this violence against his confidant, asked the authorities in The Hague to take urgent action. They were not particularly interested in a spat among their royal guest’s retinue, but eventually banned Walsh from their city. The whole business was unattractive and reflected poorly on the Royalist community-in-exile.
*
After a brief stay ashore, Rupert rejoined the fleet. There were rumours that Parliament was sending a force to occupy Helvoetsluys, a harbour that the Royalists planned to make their Dutch maritime headquarters. The two navies dashed for the port, Lord Warwick despatching his fastest frigate to secure its prime berth. Inside the harbour wall, the rebel frigate seemed sure to win a frantic rowing race with Rupert’s vessel. However, when Warwick’s men threw their rope to an apparently friendly figure on the shore, he turned out to be one of Rupert’s officers, Captain Allen. Allen let the rope slip through his hands, into the water. He then assisted the prince’s craft, tying it fast to the quay. The rest of the Royalist ships pulled in alongside, the race for Helvoetsluys narrowly won.
Warwick’s fleet was forced to hover outside, waiting for the Royalists to reappear. The Dutch forbade any fighting in the harbour and posted a squadron of their own ships between the two enemy fleets, promising to open fire on whichever side breached the peace first. They could not, however, stop Warwick’s men from infiltrating Helvoetsluys, where they mocked the harsh conditions endured by the Royalists and told them of the plentiful supplies that Parliament provided for its fighting men.
These claims left Rupert’s crews ‘mutinous and distracted’, as well as vulnerable to ‘flatteries and moneys from several of Warwick’s agents that were dispersed there ashore’.[fn17] Morale was further undermined by reports from England. By September 1648, the Second Civil War was already effectively over. Cromwell had defeated the Scots in Lancashire in mid August. More shockingly, after Colchester had been starved into submission, Sir Charles Lucas and his deputy were ‘in cold blood barbarously murdered’,[fn18] victims of a hastily convened firing squad.
During the weeks that followed Rupert spread his most loyal officers equally among his ships, in an effort to control his increasingly disaffected men. The one vessel that gave particular, repeated problems was the Antelope, whose crew wanted an immediate return to England. Rupert decided to confront the ringleaders in person. Gathering the ship’s company together, he told them that anyone who was unhappy was free to go — he could easily find others, who would be proud to serve their king. The sailors were determined not to be intimidated by the prince’s presence, but were unsure of how to react to this unexpected offer. In the event, apathy prevailed: most of the men stayed on in unhappy service.
Later in the year, trouble flared up on the Antelope once more. The prince had sent to them for twenty men, to help with the de-rigging of one of the larger ships before winter set in. When the sailors refused to obey his order, Rupert again elected to deal with the problem in person. The crew crowded menacingly round him, one of the seamen trying to spark a mutiny by shouting out, ‘One and all!’ Rupert seized him, pinned his arms back, and dangled him over the side of the ship, threatening to drop him into the sea. ‘The suddenness of this action wrought such a terror upon the rest’, the prince’s private papers recorded, ‘that they returned forthwith to their duty.’[fn19]
*
The Royal fleet was no use to the king cooped up in a Dutch port. Rupert hoped that poor winter weather would force Warwick to head home, allowing the Royalists to sail to Ireland, where the Marquess of Ormonde was struggling to keep Charles’s cause alive. Warwick, though, had guessed Rupert’s scheme and planned to stay outside the harbour for as long as possible. When the Dutch squadron left Helvoetsluys for other duties, its leaders extracted a promise from Warwick that his men would not violate the port’s neutrality. However, Parliament’s ships took advantage of the new space in the harbour and sailed in to berths that were near to their enemies.
Inevitably, brawls broke out between the rival crews. The discipline of Rupert’s men continued to unravel, and the Royalists soon gained a reputation for aggression and wildness that drew protests from the Dutch authorities. The prince had so great a fear of the enemy, and so little control over his men, that he was forced to move artillery from his ships to form onshore batteries. The guns’ muzzles were directed as much at his own ships as at Warwick’s.
Despite his tough stance, Rupert was unable to stem the flow from his ranks to those of his opponents. Eventually, taking advantage of confusion in the harbour, the bulk of the Royalist ships sailed off to join Warwick. The earl now sailed back to England, sure that he had rendered the king’s remaining naval force little more than an irrelevance. The prince was left with just eight ships. Four were frigates, while the other four — the Constant Reformation, Convertine, Antelope, and Swallow — were larger warships.
The exiled Royalists had, in the main, fled England with insufficient money and chattels to fund themselves. Their houses and estates had been confiscated by a Parliament eager for money to pay an increasingly uneasy New Model Army, whose salary was £1 million in arrears. The desire to keep the flag flying for the king was arguably secondary to this financial imperative. There was little hope of further military action in England; the Royalists there had been violently suppressed and there was an inability or unwillingness among Charles’s fellow rulers to come to his aid. Even those with blood or marital ties to the Stuarts failed him.
Charles’s daughter Mary was wed to the Prince of Orange, yet the republican politicians in the States-General, the Dutch parliament, stopped him from giving aid to his father-in-law. In France, Louis XIV was preoccupied with domestic ructions, while his war with Spain continued: he could give shelter and a small pension to his exiled cousins, but he had no troops or ships to spare. There was notional support for Charles in Russia, but it never amounted to practical assistance. The Duke of Lorraine offered help, but required the Channel Islands of Guernsey and Jersey as surety. The Duchess of Savoy had given the Prince of Wales 50,000 crowns on his arrival in France, but this had soon be spent. Scotland was unable to lend its forces overseas, or on the seas, though the Covenanters remained concerned by the rise of Puritanism in England, which oppressed their religious fellow travellers, the Presbyterians.
The exiled council of war persuaded Prince Charles to equip his ships for the taking of enemy prizes. Their contents could be sold, and the resulting funds could support the court. At the same time, the Royalist navy should inconvenience and attack Parliament’s interests wherever possible. Parliament began to tarnish the enemy’s fleet with negative propaganda, similar to that used so often and so effectively against the Cavaliers in the Great Civil War. It was to be expected, the two Houses warned merchants and ship owners, ‘that the Revolters will endeavour to maintain their defection by rapine and violence’.[fn20]
There were no volunteers to be admiral of the miniscule, poorly equipped Royalist fleet. Batten and Jordan, the twin turncoats, had proved to be unreliable. The Prince of Wales asked Rupert if he would assume the role, with Maurice as his vice-admiral. Options for the two princes were limited. The Peace of Westphalia, signed in October 1648, marked the conclusion of the Thirty Years’ War. Its provisions made dispiriting reading for Frederick V’s children: they had hoped for a full restoration to their former titles, powers, and possessions, thanks to the support of Queen Christina of Sweden — Gustavus Adophus’s only child and a Wittelsbach cousin. However, French diplomats were determined to block a Palatine restoration and they persuaded the Swedish mediators that Charles Louis should only receive a fraction of what he sought. His electorate was no longer to be viewed as more important than those of his peers. Furthermore, Charles Louis was to rule only the Rhenish Palatinate: the Upper Palatinate became Bavarian, while the Elector of Mainz received the Bergstrasse. Charles Louis’s brothers and sisters had assumed they would be provided for, once harmony returned to Europe, but the Peace of Westphalia gave them next to nothing.
During the autumn of 1648, it looked as though there would be fewer siblings to provide for. The worrying news from Berlin was that Rupert’s elder sister Princess Elizabeth was ill with smallpox. She had long suffered from depression and had been treated with the waters at Spa. However, now she battled a deadly disease that, even if she were lucky enough to survive it, threatened to ravage her features. As she recovered, she wrote to her brother Charles Louis, without vanity or self-pity: ‘I have been persecuted by this wretched illness, and though the fever has left me and with it the peril of my life, I am still quite covered with it and can use neither my hands nor my eyes. They feed me like a little child, but the doctors would persuade me I shall not be disfigured, which I leave to their faith, since I have none of my own on the subject; but at the worse I console myself that the illness will only have the effect of three of four years, at the end of which age would have rendered me ugly enough without its aid.’[fn21]
With the Thirty Years’ War concluded, and hopes of a reasonable inheritance dashed, Rupert had few alternatives but to continue as a warrior. He agreed to lead the Royalist navy, assuming all the responsibilities of supreme authority, while insisting that he remain nominally junior to the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York, out of respect for their superior social rank. A letter written by Prince Charles from The Hague, on 5 January, confirmed this arrangement and so began Rupert’s career as an admiral.
The army and the navy, at this stage of their evolution, were not the distinct entities of later centuries: admirals were commonly referred to as ‘generals at sea’ and marines were frequently land troops occasionally deployed on ship. Naval tactics were essentially rudimentary, with battleships looking to close with each other before disgorging their firepower to maximum effect. Plans of battle were basic, with admirals struggling to control their fleets once an action was underway: the commander looked to win advantage of wind and tide, and then led his ships into actions that were brutal free-for-alls. The effect of cannon balls, musket fire, and splintering timber could be devastating.
Rupert was a professional soldier who had no experience as a sailor, although as a boy, he had enjoyed watching the activities of Dutch boat-yards. The Earl of Arundel, sent by Charles I in 1633 to invite Elizabeth of Bohemia to England after Frederick’s death, noted Rupert’s excitement when aboard his uncle’s vessels, ‘and the gladness your Highness Prince Rupert showed when you took to help to row towards them’.[fn22] Likewise, Phineas Pett, from a dynasty that had overseen shipbuilding in England for a century, recalled Rupert and Charles Louis’s great excitement as they witnessed the launch of two pinnaces in 1637, during their visit to Charles I. Youthful enthusiasm aside, his knowledge of the sea was limited to a few voyages shuttling back and forth across the Channel and North Sea.
Rupert, though, was temperamentally suited to seventeenth-century naval command. As Granger observed, in his Biographical History of England, the prince ‘possessed, in a high degree, that kind of courage, which is better to attack than defend; and is less adapted to the land service than that of the sea, where precipitate valour is in its element’.[fn23] Only the bravest men could hope to prosper in a theatre of war so unforgiving, that it provided no hiding places.
Furthermore, naval service became Rupert because its isolation brought with it independence. Years later he shocked Samuel Pepys with his candid observation: ‘God damn me, I can answer but for one ship, and in that I will do my part; for it is not in that as in an army, where a man can command everything.’[fn24] No courtiers could undermine his position, or obscure his focus, once he was under sail for communications were slow and unreliable. Whatever trepidation the prince may have felt as he set off on his first mission as admiral, the relief of autonomous command was rich compensation.
The prince’s ships were in poor order, owing to the neglect of their previous Parliamentarian owners. ‘I protest to God’, Clarendon wrote, after seeing their condition, ‘if I know anything, the Prince is in the most lamentable condition of want that any gentleman hath been acquainted with.’[fn25] Rupert paid for a thorough refit of his motley force by selling the brass cannon of the unreliable Antelope. When further money was needed to complete the task, he persuaded his mother to pawn her jewellery. He also maximised the few resources he had to hand: while the larger ships were being attended to, a pair of frigates was sent to forage in the North Sea. They returned with £800 taken from a collier and ‘a ship from Hamburg richly laden, taken out of Yarmouth road, as she lay there at anchor’.[fn26]
There had been disquiet among the prince’s critics, when he had first been mooted for naval command. A correspondent wrote from London to say that many Presbyterians were minded to support the king, but only in the interest of establishing lasting peace throughout the nation. ‘Rupert’s very name’, he objected, ‘hath a sound of war in it, and therefore it is hoped he may not be employed.’[fn27]
The prince, aware of this resistance, pushed his case with Charles, who confirmed his cousin’s appointment. Many hoped that he would fail. Culpepper was foremost among the Prince of Wales’s courtiers in undermining Rupert’s efforts. However, Rupert’s unstinting labours to prepare the navy for action won over the sceptics. From The Hague, Clarendon wrote on 21 January 1649:
I presume the fleet will be with you before this comes to your hands; the preservation whereof must be entirely ascribed to Prince Rupert, who seriously hath expressed greater temper and discretion in it than you can imagine. I know there is, and will be, much prejudice to the service of his being engaged in command, you will believe me, and not be without that prospect, both by your own observation and the information we every day received from England. But, the truth is, there was an unavoidable necessity in it. Batten and Jordan played the rogues with us … In this distress Prince Rupert took the charge, and with unwearied pains and toil, put all things in reasonable order, it being then resolved that the Duke of York should go with the fleet to Ireland. But, to our amazement, his old Presbyterian counsellors wrought so on his Royal Highness, that in express terms he refused it. So you see the necessity of what is done, and really I believe the Prince will behave himself so well in it, that nobody will have cause to be sorry for it.[fn28]
Rupert’s first action was in response to a letter brought to him by Will Legge from the king, on the Isle of Wight. Dated 28 October 1648, it was an abrupt and succinct call for help, which Legge was able to amplify in person: Charles needed to be removed from his increasingly perilous situation as soon as possible. Rupert immediately sent a ship, which remained off the Isle of Wight for nearly a week, waiting for a signal to land. But none came.
*
On 30 January 1649, William Juxon, Bishop of London, read Morning Service to Charles, before the two men walked to Whitehall. After a brief wait, the colonel of the guard came to escort the king to his death. He had been sentenced after a brief trial, the result of which was a foregone conclusion. Thomas Webb had written to Lord Craven, two weeks earlier: ‘I have very little hope of the king’s life, all seeming to be resolved.’[fn29] Charles had convinced Cromwell that he could not be trusted and that England’s security lay in his death.
On the day of execution Juxon was prostrate with grief, while Charles remained composed, helping the bishop to his feet. The two men proceeded to the scaffold outside the Banqueting House, the king wearing an extra shirt to ward off shivers that might be misinterpreted as signs of fear. He was determined to remain a picture of dignity throughout his final ordeal, and in this he succeeded.
Reaching the scaffold, the king was disappointed to note Parliament’s soldiers were holding the crowd at a distance from him. He was therefore forced to make his final, prepared address to those on the scaffold. He told them that he saw his fate as just reward for weakly agreeing to Stafford’s execution — ‘an unjust sentence that I suffered to take effect is punished now by an unjust sentence on me’.[fn30] The king’s long hair was teased into a cap while he heard the bishop’s assurances: ‘There is but one stage more, which though turbulent and troublesome, is a very short one; you may consider, it will soon carry you a very great way, it will carry you from Earth to Heaven, and there you shall find to your great joy the prize you hasten to, a Crown of Glory.’ Juxon’s last words of comfort were: ‘You are exchanged from a temporal to an eternal crown, a good exchange.’ Charles’s final comment to his priest was, ‘Remember!’[fn31] He then knelt in prayer by the executioner’s block, before lifting his arms as a signal of readiness.
Onlookers recalled that there was no cheering after the axe had fallen, but rather a shocked groan. The executioner raised his arm to the crowd, holding his dripping trophy for all to see, and astonishment greeted the uniquely disturbing sight of a king’s severed head. They had witnessed the slaying of the man who, most still believed, was God’s Anointed. All present knew the significance of the moment was so enormous as to be unfathomable.