The King's Revenge
Also by Don Jordan and Michael Walsh
:
Van Hoogstraten: Blood and Retribution
White Cargo: The Forgotten History of
Britain’s White Slaves in America
Published by Hachette Digital
ISBN: 9780748126545
Copyright © Don Jordan and Michael Walsh 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
Hachette Digital
Little, Brown Book Group
100 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DY
To Dian and to Eithne
Also by Don Jordan and Michael Walsh
2
‘That Man of Blood’
January 1647–January 1649
3
A Wicked Design
8 January–27 January 1649
4
Execution
29 January–7 February 1649
5
Propaganda and Assassination
January 1649–October 1651
6
‘The Honour of Dying for the People’
April 1653–August 1658
7
After Oliver
September 1658–October 1659
8
The Invader
October 1659–February 1660
9
The Round-up Begins
February–April 1660
11
Death List
May–September 1660
12
‘The Guilt of Blood’
8–12 October 1660
13
Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t
13–19 October 1660
14
Disinterred
November 1660–April 1661
15
Bloodhounds
May–September 1661
16
On the Word of a King
September 1661–July 1663
17
The Tightening Net
1663–1665
18
Plans to Invade and Hopes Dashed
1665–1692
19
Epilogue: the Legacy of the Regicides
The fate of the men who dared to sit in judgment upon King Charles I has intrigued us ever since we began work on our previous
book,
White Cargo
. During our research we came across a curious folk tale from New England which made us wonder if we had spotted the tip of
a more significant story. This is how we came to write
The King’s Revenge
.
The folk tale, dating from the early English settlements in Massachusetts, was of the Angel of Hadley. The story goes that
the remote pioneer village of Hadley was attacked by an overwhelming force of Algonquin warriors and faced certain annihilation.
When all seemed lost, a mysterious figure appeared with flowing white hair and beard, brandishing a sword. Exhibiting considerable
military prowess, the stranger marshalled the townsfolk into an effective fighting force. The enemy was repelled and the town
saved. As soon as the battle was over, the stranger disappeared as quickly as he had come. Afterwards, the God-fearing people
of Hadley put their rescue down to an avenging angel sent by God.
Today, there is debate about whether the attack took place or not. But what interested us was that there existed a real-life
candidate for the angel – a former Cromwellian general by the name of William Goffe, who had sat as a judge in the court that
sentenced King Charles I to death. Following Charles II’s ascension to the throne, the general became a wanted man and fled
to Massachusetts. British
troops were dispatched to find him and bring him back to face trial for treason. Unknown to the people of Hadley, their Puritan
pastor hid the runaway in the attic of his house for many years. If the attack really occurred, then the former Civil War
officer would have been the ideal candidate to lead the townsfolk in battle.
This story led us to wonder about all sixty-nine men who had determined the execution of King Charles I. How many, like the
soldier in Massachusetts, had fled? Where did they run to and were they pursued? How many stayed in England to state their
case and face the probability of death? How many were executed? How many were imprisoned? These were among the questions thrown
up by the tale of the avenging angel. We decided to follow our lead and research the fate of the men who became known simply
as the regicides. We discovered that their stories had never been gathered together into one coherent whole.
Several months after the execution of Charles I in 1649, his eldest son, Charles, the Prince of Wales, wrote from exile in
Holland, vowing vengeance on those blamed for his father’s death: ‘… we shall therein by all ways and means possible endeavour
to pursue and bring to their due punishment those bloody traitors who were either actors or contrivers of that unparalleled
and inhuman murder’.
Of course, the prince had no means by which to carry out his threat. He lived on the charity of the ruling families of Europe
and, as continental states gradually came to terms with republican England, was increasingly isolated. This all changed in
the summer of 1660 when Charles was invited to return and take up the throne. Catapulted into power, he could at last do something
about those who had brought about his father’s death.
The story of the ensuing retribution is essentially that of an unrelenting manhunt for everyone who had signed Charles I’s
death warrant, plus a few more whom Charles II wanted rid of.
To tell the story required our starting with the actions that led to the hunt, the trial and execution of the king. It also
required the creation of a narrative that encompasses a series of individual biographies. Of
necessity, these biographies must play second fiddle to the narrative. Hence they cannot all be given the depth of attention
they might each merit on their own. It is the greater story that we are after here and we have had to make judgments with
which others might disagree. Those who wish to discover more on any one person will find the general bibliography at the end
of the book a useful starting point.
Today we know a great deal about the frivolous side of Charles II but we know less about his more ruthless side, which saw
him callously send his political enemies to the scaffold. Fresh insights into his character may still be found. Contemporary
parliamentary records reveal a new role for Charles: that of the interrogator. In late 1660, just a few months after ascending
to the throne, the king went to the Tower and interrogated prisoners accused of treason. According to reports, the notoriously
lazy monarch was a dab hand at drawing out confessions. Fortunately for the modern researcher and writer, the seventeenth
century saw the explosion of the written and printed word: official records of all types, contemporary memoirs, newspapers,
propaganda sheets, personal diaries and letters, plays and poems. All these and more flowed from pens and presses. We are
grateful to have been able to access these precious documents, chiefly at the British Library and the Public Record Office.
Thanks to this desire to record events, we have a greater idea of the struggle some men faced: a struggle with their consciences
and their impulse for self-preservation. For example, at the last Parliament to be held before the return of Charles II, Thomas
Scot effectively signed his own death warrant by declaring he was proud they had killed Charles I. By contrast, Thomas Fairfax,
who commanded the New Model Army in its defeat of the royalist forces, provided a white horse for Charles II to ride at his
coronation. Fairfax was not alone in changing sides. For most this was a simple matter of survival. Many of our most important
characters did not, however, change their allegiance. They are interesting precisely because they stood up for their beliefs.
Perhaps most exhilaratingly of all, seventeenth-century records bring to life a world of espionage. From papers held at the
Public
Record Office at Kew, spymaster Sir George Downing – ‘that perfidious rogue’, as Samuel Pepys described him – is revealed
to us in all his brilliant treachery. We see him plan with ruthless efficiency to go to the Continent and kidnap his former
friends and bring them back to be executed for treason. We see a honeytrap set by Aphra Behn, the Mata Hari of her day, successfully
turn a republican exile into a spy for the House of Stuart.
Some characters are interesting simply because they were
there
– and wrote down what they saw and thought. Hence the larger-than-life legal grandee Bulstrode Whitelocke who wrote in his
memoirs that he evaded trial for his participation in the republic’s affairs by bribing, among others, Edward Hyde, a former
fellow parliamentarian and friend. Hyde was by then Charles II’s Lord Chancellor and much given to moralising and lecturing
the king about his mistresses, but not above extracting a small fortune from a former ally in need. Hyde’s more punctilious
side allowed him to write a brilliant history of those turbulent years.
The surviving documentation of the time also reveals the unsavoury side of statecraft and the law. One account of the court
that was set up to judge the alleged regicides reveals that it was fixed, sending men to their deaths on specious charges
and insufficient evidence. In a fit of hubris, the king’s counsel John Kelying wrote a legal memoir in which he recalled how
judges and the prosecutors got together beforehand to rig the rules in order to meet their own ends.
In dealing with our large cast, we have had to be wary of the sometimes misleading nature of the accounts. For example, Lucy
Hutchinson’s famous memoir of her husband, Colonel John Hutchinson, one of the men who signed Charles I’s death warrant, needs
to be approached with caution. It gives a sanitised version of how her husband evaded the death penalty after the restoration.
Edmund Ludlow’s published memoirs were thought to be entirely by his own hand until his original manuscript, titled
A Voyce from the Watchtower
, was discovered at Warwick Castle in 1970. Thanks to the
detective work of Dr Blair Worden, we now know this was a large part of Ludlow’s original manuscript and that the memoirs
as previously published were a radically rewritten version by a different hand in order to present Ludlow as more of a late-seventeenth-century
Whig and less of the religious radical he was in real life.
Sometimes historical characters are fascinating because of their opacity. By far the most impenetrable character was George
Monck, a professional soldier who first plied his trade for the House of Stuart. He later became one of Cromwell’s most trusted
commanders. After Cromwell’s death, his career took a further twist: he helped to crush all parliamentary and army opposition
in order to pave the way for the return of Charles II. It is hardly surprising that opinions differ on Monck’s motives. The
reader will see we have reached our own conclusions.
Today, the House of Stuart is remembered chiefly for its sexual scandal, a wonderful art collection and the formation of the
Royal Society. Its Puritan adversaries are remembered almost solely as king killers and for Irish atrocities. They have been
described as dangerous fanatics or, at best, foolhardy men who carried out a heinous deed. This is a shame, for among them
were remarkable men. They played a critical role in British history, formulating forward-looking social, political and legal
ideas that still hold good today, yet they have few monuments and, in the case of those who were executed, no graves. The
remarkable struggle between Charles II and his recalcitrant subjects led to the longest-running manhunt in British history
– a story worthy of a new and wider audience.
THE WATCH TOWER
The middle-aged man who climbed the hill to the church above the little town on the shores of Lake Geneva had a heft and strut
that marked him out as an old soldier. He carried a sword and wore a breastplate under his cloak. A casual observer might
have marvelled at the vanity of a man trying to recapture the martial glories of his youth, but the truth was that the old
soldier feared for his life.
A plot to assassinate him had been thwarted only by the vigilance of his landlord, who on his way to church early one Sunday
had spotted two ‘ruffian like fellows, desperados with long cloaks and carbines under them’.
1
He returned home and told his tenant he thought the men were up to no good. Taking a chance, the old soldier crept out to
catch a surreptitious glimpse of the rogues. What he saw confirmed his landlord’s fears. After that, he went to church well
armed.
Though he generally shunned company, to anyone who asked he introduced himself as Edmund Phillips, an Englishman who had chosen
to travel and live abroad for a while. In reality he was a fugitive with a price on his head, unable to return home on pain
of death, branded a traitor and compelled to live in exile under an assumed name.
His real name was Edmund Ludlow. Born into minor gentry in Wiltshire, he was a veteran of the British Civil Wars. Before his
enforced exile he had been a high-flyer: scholar of Trinity College, Oxford, attorney at the Inner Temple, Member of Parliament,
Lieutenant-General of Cavalry, Commander-in-Chief of the Commonwealth Army in Ireland, High Sheriff of Wiltshire and member
of the Commonwealth’s Council of State (the Cabinet).
A portrait of him in later life shows a square sort of fellow with a large face and a determined yet small mouth above a large
chin. He wears a full wig, a lace ruff and full armour befitting his status as a lieutenant-general.
2
But the old soldier’s real claim to fame – or infamy – was that he had royal blood on his hands. He was a regicide, a king-killer,
one of sixty-nine judges who tried Charles I for treason and sentenced him to death by beheading.
The sixty-nine men who found Charles guilty of treason were a varied lot. What they shared was the belief that Charles had
a view of monarchy at odds with the spirit of the age, pursuing autocratic decision-making and promoting religious policies
that stifled freedom of conscience. Most of the sixty-nine were members of the House of Commons – or, rather, remnants of
Parliament after royalist sympathisers had been ejected in a military
coup d’état
in late 1648. The aim of this had been to create a Parliament composed purely of radically minded men who would agree to
put the king on trial for treason for having waged war against his people. Senior officers of the New Model Army (the Parliament’s
victorious military force) including its creator, Oliver Cromwell, also sat as judges. The rest of the bench was made up of
radical lawyers and wealthy merchants serving as aldermen, elected councillors, of London. To begin with, Parliament appointed
153 commissioners to try the king. The trial was so contentious that half refused to sit. Those who did voted unanimously
to have the king executed for high treason.
*
By killing a king and establishing a republic, the king’s judges not only changed the course of English history but altered
their own futures beyond their imagining. Following eleven years of experiments in government unparalleled in British history,
the son of the executed king returned to England to rule as Charles II. He had left England fourteen years before when, at
the age of sixteen, he fled into exile at the tail end of the Civil War.
Charles II grew up in warfare and came of age in a foreign country, without a father. He joined his mother’s court in exile
at St Germain near Paris, provided for by her French royal relatives. In the seventeenth century the age of sixteen was regarded
as adulthood, though thanks to growing up in war-torn England, Charles could at times be socially awkward. To the eyes of
the refined French royal court, he was even
gauche
, though not completely a lost cause. One of his mother’s grand relatives described him as ‘Swarthy, with fine black eyes
and a wide, ugly mouth … his head was noble, his hair black, his complexion brown, his person passably agreeable.’
3
Charles reached maturity as an impecunious prince without a state, flitting between the courts of Europe, selling his silver
plate and keeping his demons at bay with a growing passion for sex that would propel him to take on a succession of mistresses
in ensuing years. When the throne was suddenly and unexpectedly awarded to him, he seized the opportunity to make up for lost
time with an instinctual thirst for luxury and excess – and an understandable desire for revenge upon those who had put him
through hell by killing his father.
The end of fourteen years of exile for Charles marked the beginning of a life of exile for many of his father’s enemies, including
Edmund Ludlow. Prime movers behind the revolution – ‘the good old cause’ as they called it – including Oliver Cromwell and
his son-in-law Henry Ireton, only evaded retribution by dying before the accession of the new king. Ludlow watched as parliamentarians,
lawyers, members of the oldest families in England, were imprisoned and charged with treason.
Ludlow realised he had become a wanted man. Sooner or later, officers of the Tower would come to arrest him. He moved to the
home of friends he could trust. When he learned the two Houses of Parliament were debating who should be placed on lists for
trial and execution, he quietly left the city, travelling up-river at night towards Richmond. To match his new renegade status
he changed his habits and his appearance. The former government minister grew a beard and flitted in and out of London on
foot, joining the robbers, prostitutes, homeless and other unfortunates who kept their watch on the city by night. Ludlow
knew it was risky to frequent the city but he was anxious to keep in touch with events and in contact with his family and
those who could help him.
To decide upon his future, Ludlow risked convening a meeting of close friends and relatives at a house in Westminster. ‘A
friend and kinsman’ advised him that he should ‘withdraw out of England … assuring if I stayed I was a dead man’. Ludlow was
told he would only have to go abroad for a short while and that ‘he supposed within three or four months the hate and rage
would be over’.
4
Ludlow hoped that some form of the pre-restoration Parliament might be re-established, but ‘not believing that it was yet
a tyme to expect deliverance, I resolved to hasten my departure.’
5
His wife and friends arranged notes of credit to be sent ahead to France, and guides and accomplices to get him out of the
city and across the Channel to Dieppe.
On the appointed night, his wife and some other relations arrived at his safe house with a coach. They crossed London Bridge
and made through Southwark to the church of St George the Martyr. Here a guide was waiting with two horses to take the fugitive
statesman to the coast.
‘I tooke my leave of my deare relations, my poore wife and another friend accompanying me,’ wrote Ludlow.
6
His old life was over for good. He and his guide rode through the night along the least frequented roads to Lewes, where
a merchant loyal to the parliamentary cause was expecting him. For three days he ‘lay as privately as I
could’ until word came that a ship was ready at the coast. Stormy weather delayed the boat’s departure and Ludlow was almost
apprehended when searches were carried out among ships waiting to leave. Fortunately, he was hidden on a craft which the agents
thought not worth searching as it lay aground on a sandbank.
The next day he got away to Dieppe and afterwards made his way to Paris, then Lyons, and ultimately towards Geneva, all the
while trying to evade the royalist spies who watched out for him through Europe. Only when he arrived at Geneva – ‘Calvin’s
City’ – did he feel safe. Finally, he moved to a small, out-of-the-way town on the shores of Lake Geneva.
Years before, Charles II and Ludlow had faced one another in battle, though neither realised it at the time. It was on 23
October 1642, at the first pitched battle of the Civil War at Edgehill in Warwickshire. Twelve-year-old Charles, then Prince
of Wales, was present with his father, Charles I, and his younger brother, James. Edmund Ludlow was twenty-five and a member
of the life guard of the parliamentary army’s commander-in-chief, the 3rd Earl of Essex, Robert Devereux. The earl bore a
famous name – that of Elizabeth I’s one-time favourite. Unlike his flamboyant and headstrong father, the 3rd Earl was a dour
fellow, a cuckold and a laughing-stock at court.
Both sides expected the action at Edgehill to be the deciding action of the war. The king, confident of victory, had brought
his sons along to watch. Up to this time, the princes had lived in pampered comfort. As heir to the throne, Charles had his
own court at Richmond quite separate from the establishments of his parents at Whitehall. Since the age of eight he had been
in the care of a series of aristocratic lords who acted as his governors. The first had been the unutterably grand Earl of
Newcastle, who had little or no interest in looking after someone else’s boy, prince or otherwise. Newcastle was a cultured
man and a fine horseman whose idea of instructing the prince seems to have consisted of a series of didactic letters interspersed
with short visits for a spot of archery or hunting.
In the earliest letter that has come down to us, the prince writes to his governor, ‘I ride every day, and am ready to follow
any other directions from you. Make haste to return to him that loves you.’
7
According to contemporary reports, Newcastle taught the prince to ‘ride leaping horses and such as would overthrow others’.
8
On more academic matters, the earl wrote perceptive letters of advice. ‘What you read, I would have it history that so you
might compare the dead with the living; for the same humours is now as was then, there is no alteration but in names.’
9
The earl’s dry wit may have rubbed off on the boy, for the letter contains something of the cynicism with which the adult
Charles was later to view his fellow creatures.
In 1641, having spent £40,000 of his own money running the prince’s court, the earl decided the honour of being governor to
the prince was one he could no longer shoulder. The dubious honour was handed on to the equally grand Marquis of Hertford,
a bookish man with no interest in outdoor pursuits and none whatever in passing on his considerable wealth of knowledge. Like
Newcastle, he carried out his task largely by remote control and lasted two years in the job. The prince thus had an easy-going
upbringing, with a personal tutor and various ladies of the court for company and a few friends of his own age such as the
sons of the Duke of Buckingham. It was a life with a little culture, a little academic effort, a little learning of field
pursuits and a great deal of pleasure.
Charles was growing up to be a confident if moody boy who was, like his father, an accomplished horseman. When war broke out,
his education took a practical turn with first-hand observation of the many sides of humanity under stress – the weaknesses,
the prevarications, the bravery, self-interest, shrewdness and more.
For the battle at Edgehill, the young prince was given the purely honorary command of a cavalry regiment. The king’s physician,
William Harvey (famous for having discovered the circulation of blood), was put in charge of young Charles and his brother.
As the fight progressed, Harvey forgot about his charges, who were placed at
a field medical station. When the parliamentary forces attacked the right flank of the royalist army, the Prince of Wales
took his command seriously and tried to lead a charge, shouting ‘I fear them not!’ He was prevented from heading into battle
by members of the royal party who grabbed his horse’s reins. When the parliamentary forces seized an advantage and pushed
through the flank of the royalist army, Charles and his brother were in great danger of being captured. Once more, quick action
directed the princes away from the fighting and prevented a disaster.
As for Ludlow and his fellow life guards, they made something of a hash of their first military action. By the end of the
day, thanks to tactical blunders on both sides, the battle was inconclusive. War would drag on for six more years. The heir
to the throne would find himself experiencing a great deal very quickly, though after his spirited action at Edgehill, in
future he was kept well away from the scene of combat.
In early 1645, Charles I made his eldest son commander-in-chief of all royalist forces in the West Country. This meant that
he would now be separated from his father. He was just turning fifteen. The campaign in the west was in turmoil but the king
hoped the nominal title of command would help his son grow to manhood. This it most certainly did, in more ways than one.
In the spring, the prince and his council moved to the royalist stronghold of Bridgwater in Somerset. Here, Charles was reunited
with his former governess, the beautiful and pushy Christabella Wyndham. According to a contemporary account, Charles was
‘diverted by her folly and petulancy’. Even when the company surrounding the prince was most numerous, Christabella would
‘run the length of the room and kiss him’.
10
There were rumours the beautiful ex-governess introduced the prince to the joys of sex. The fun and games did not last long;
the war was running against the royal cause. On Christmas Day the prince received a letter from his father telling him to
leave England and not delay one hour.
11
The prince lingered until he could disobey no longer and sailed from
Land’s End to the Scilly Isles on the night tide of 2 March 1646. From there, he went to Jersey and then to Paris to be reunited
with his mother. He would never see his father again.