The King's Revenge (19 page)

That evening the House of Lords ordered the restitution of all statues of the dead king and of the blue and gold royal coat
of arms of the Stuarts. A statue of George Monck was also proposed.

Goffe and Whalley had booked their passages under the names of Edward Richardson and William Stephenson, but their real identities
became known to some of their fellow passengers quite quickly. Fortunately these other passengers were sympathisers. New England
was a bastion of Puritanism and admirers of Cromwell, and most of the passengers on the
Prudent Mary
would have been no different. The fugitives made friends on board with two prominent colonists who were en route for home,
Captain Daniel Gookin of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and William Jones of New Haven Colony. They would prove godsends in
the troubled years ahead.
¹⁰

A third judge, John Dixwell, would later join Goffe and Whalley in America. Most of the other fugitives either attempted to
hide in England or made for Europe.

Cornelius Holland and John Barkstead, both of them also judges, fled for the Dutch coast. The Netherlands was an obvious place
in which to lose themselves. The great trading city of Amsterdam was the base of numerous English merchants, most of them
Puritan and sympathetic to the Good Old Cause. There were numerous other
potential havens in the country too. The great university city of Leiden was one of a dozen or more places with substantial
English and Scots populations. These émigré enclaves had first grown up during the Spanish war, when garrisons from both countries
were stationed throughout the Low Countries. A by-product of this military presence was the provision by treaty of churches
for British subjects in Dutch towns. These were non-episcopal and nonconformist and enjoyed the same privileges as the Dutch
Reformed Church. In Leiden, the pastor received at least part of his salary from the municipality, while the town magistrates
provided a meeting house for use by the English-speaking congregation.

Barkstead appears to have reached a Dutch port without trouble. Cornelius Holland, on the other hand, was nearly caught. He
later told how he had planned to stop in his native town of Colchester on his way to the coast and on arriving took rooms
at an inn. He explained that he had come to collect money owed him by a friend, a local merchant. One assumes he needed every
penny he could get to fund his life in exile. Holland left his horse at the inn while seeking out the merchant. Mysteriously,
he then vanished from sight until the early hours of the following morning. Someone at the inn appears to have become suspicious
of the absent guest, and Colchester’s major of militia was brought out of bed by news that a suspected person might have booked
in at the inn. There was excited talk of it being John Lambert, though of course Lambert was being held in the Tower. At around
4 a.m., Holland’s rooms were raided in his absence. Holland heard of the raid and did not return for his horse. His friend
smuggled him out of town. Eventually he escaped across the Channel and joined other exiles at Lausanne in Switzerland.

John Milton chose to hide, realising correctly that although he had no direct role in the king’s death, Cavaliers would be
after his blood. He left his home in Petty France on 7 May, borrowed the tidy sum of £400 for emergencies and went to ground
in a house near Smithfield. Friends are said to have dissuaded constables from
making a thorough search for him by putting out a story that he was dead. They even held a pretended funeral. The poet avoided
arrest for nearly four months.

Edmund Ludlow stuck around precariously, spending much of his time on the run. He had ‘timely warning’ of the order to arrest
all who had signed the death warrant, and the night before it was issued he quit his house in London to stay with the first
of a long line of relatives and friends who would shelter him till he finally left the country. A day later a warrant for
his arrest was circulated throughout the land. He breathed in relief that he hadn’t followed his usual route. If his way had
taken him near the Guildhall, he would have seen the statue of Charles being re-erected and, outside the Courts of Justice,
the installation of the royal arms.

The manhunt began to focus on its quarry on 12 May, nearly two weeks before the king stepped back on English soil. That day,
extracts from the official report on his father’s trial, dated December 1650, were read aloud in the Commons. The ten-year-old
report congratulated ‘the persons entrusted in this great service, of the trial of the late King’ for having ‘discharged their
trust in them reposed with great courage and fidelity’. Four or five of the men in the new Convention Parliament had been
among the king’s judges. They sat uncomfortably as the praise accorded them was quoted ten years later. The record states
that several of these former judges rose to their feet to ‘express how far they were concerned in the said proceedings’.
¹¹
What they said is not recorded, but as David Masson puts it: ‘Happy were those who could say that, though named among the
commissioners for the trial, they had never sat in the court, or had discontinued their sittings before the fatal close.’
¹²

Passions began to run so high that, according to Edmund Ludlow, men dared not show moderation lest it be called disaffection
to the king. Yet in private, he says, various members of both houses declared in favour of a general indemnity covering everyone
without exception. Ludlow’s memoirs quote the gout-ridden Lord Fairfax as asserting that if any man must be excepted, ‘he
knew no man that
deserved it more than himself, who being general of the army at that time, and having power sufficient to prevent the proceedings
against the king, had not thought fit to make use of it’.

On the opening day of debate on the Bill, Sir John Lenthall, son of the former Speaker, roused fury when he tried to spread
blame beyond the judges. ‘He that first drew his sword against the King committed as high offence as he that cut off the King’s
head,’ Sir John declared. Strictly that was true, but his words prompted an outraged rebuke from his father’s successor as
Speaker, Sir Harbottle Grimston. There was ‘much poison’ in young Lenthall’s words, Grimston claimed. They were spoken out
of a design to ‘set the house on fire’. Lenthall was forced to withdraw the words and was briefly imprisoned.

The first principle dealt with was numbers – how many were to die, how many to be imprisoned for life. Monck, careful not
to stir up opposition needlessly, had discussed the matter with Charles’s envoys, urging the king to forgo vengeance and pardon
everyone. Not so merciful as claimed, the prince was not to be persuaded. Monck then accepted that there should be up to five
‘exceptions’ from pardon – meaning executions – among the judges. In an increasingly bloodthirsty atmosphere, five deaths
was considered inadequate and almost immediately it was agreed to raise the total of judges excluded from pardon to seven.
This unlucky handful, together with whoever among the wider community Parliament chose to make examples of, would constitute
an initial death list. There was also to be a much longer list of men subject to heavy punishment short of death. However,
none of this would be set in stone before the Bill was enacted. Until that happened there would be a desperate struggle to
have enemies included on the two lists and friends removed. Behind the almost non-stop celebrations of the returning royals
and their supporters, dozens of life and death struggles would be waged.

A bulging House of Commons committee of fifty-two members handled the Bill after the preliminaries. William Prynne and the
solicitor-general, Heneage Finch, headed the hard-liners pushing for harsh, widespread punishment, while Arthur Annesley,
a late convert to royalism, was the leading moderate.

All the known paperwork from 1648–9 was transferred to Prynne and John Bowyer, the man who had arrested General Harrison.
Prynne ferreted endlessly through it to produce evidence on who exactly had done what in the prelude to the trial and beyond.
Whole libraries seem to have been sent to him to burrow through. Later he was appointed Keeper of Records at the Tower of
London, a post he called ‘most suitable to my genius’. In a letter to the Speaker, Sir Harbottle Grimston, he wrote: ‘whilst
you are sucking in the fresh country air, I have been almost choked with the dust of neglected records (interred in their
own rubbish for sundry years) in the White Tower; their rust eating out the tops of my gloves with their touch, and their
dust rendering me, twice a day, as black as a chimney sweeper.’
¹³

Meanwhile, the king’s legal officers were dispatched to load the dice against the regicides by weakening the rules of evidence
that were to apply when they were brought to trial. A series of secret meetings with senior judicial figures took place in
the Inns of Court. They were attended by the king’s attorney, Sir Geoffrey Palmer, and his solicitor, Sir Heneage Finch, together
with the Duke of York’s attorney, Sir Edward Turner, the Chief Baron of the Exchequer, Sir Orlando Bridgeman, and three senior
judges. These lawyers agreed to charge the alleged regicides under the ancient law of treason, which made ‘imagining’ the
death of the king or his heir punishable by death. ‘Imagining’ could cover a range of acts from direct involvement in a royal
death to advocating it. They then agreed to drop the requirement under common law for two witnesses to prove an action. In
the forthcoming trials one witness was to be deemed sufficient.

Three of the accused regicides swiftly wriggled off the hook. Richard Ingoldsby was the first of them, quick to capitalise
on his capture of John Lambert. Before Charles was even proclaimed Ingoldsby’s friend, the Earl of Northampton was lobbying
the king on
his behalf. In a letter to Charles dated 29 April, the earl portrayed Ingoldsby as a deeply honourable man misled by others
but now a real convert to the crown. The letter asserted that no one else in the army could have crushed Lambert with so small
a force. He wanted no reward, only ‘His Majesty’s pardon and forgiveness of his former errors’.

The repentant Ingoldsby was summoned before Parliament on 14 May. In tears he presented himself as horrified at what he had
been part of. He claimed that, although he had been named as one of Charles I’s judges, he attended none of the sessions,
‘always abhorring the action in his heart’. The day after the pronouncement of what he called ‘the horrid sentence’, he had
come across Cromwell and other judges in the Painted Chamber where they assembled to sign the warrant. His story was that
Cromwell saw him and ran to him, forcing him over to the table and saying that although he had escaped the trial he would
be made to sign the warrant along with the rest. Ingoldsby claimed to have refused, saying that he was forcibly held while
‘Cromwell, with a loud laugh, taking his hand in his, and putting the pen between his fingers, with his own hand wrote Richard
Ingoldsby.’
¹⁴
His performance was called a ‘whining recantation’. It served its purpose, however. Ingoldsby would be made a baronet. It
is worth noting that his signature on the warrant is bold and florid.

Another judge to be freed early in the hunt was Colonel Matthew Tomlinson, the man whose courtesy and attentiveness in guarding
the king to and from the court each day had so impressed Charles that he presented the officer with a gold toothpick. Luckily
for Tomlinson, Charles had let others know of his considerate behaviour.

The third of the judges to get off relatively lightly was Colonel John Hutchinson, the former governor of Nottingham Castle
who had just been returned as a member of the Convention Parliament. Hutchinson, the well-connected son of a baronet, had
been as zealous as anyone in killing the king, attending every day of the trial as
well as signing the death warrant.
¹⁵
He escaped retribution eleven years later after, like Ingoldsby, providing support for George Monck in the critical months
of January and February. But there were – and still are – unanswered questions about the man and his escape from the scaffold.
After his death four years later, his wife Lucy wrote an adulatory memoir about him, casting him as an unflinching embodiment
of honour. He was hardly regarded as such by former comrades at the time, for he sent to the Speaker an abject letter that
grovelled in apology for his part in the king’s death. ‘I acknowledge myself involved in so horrid a crime as merits no indulgence,’
it said. The letter went on to claim a ‘real, and constant repentance’ arising from ‘a thorough conviction’ of his ‘former
misled judgment and conscience’, not from a regard for his own safety. He also seems to have produced a wealth of supportive
testimony from kinfolk and aristocratic friends that he had aided the royalist cause at a much earlier date. He had, he asserted,
‘endeavoured to bring the King back’.

The day after interviewing Hutchinson, the committee examined the list of sixty-seven judges, dead and alive, who had attended
the last session of the trial and heard the sentence of death pronounced. Those most hated by the royalists were dead of course
– Oliver Cromwell, Henry Ireton, John Bradshaw and Thomas Pride. The committee took the first step towards punishing them
posthumously. It voted to except them from pardon and ‘attaint’ them as traitors. Attainder was medieval England’s great disincentive
to treason. It was seen by many as a punishment equally dire as execution. As well as condemning the individual to a traitor’s
death, it condemned his bloodline to ruin by declaring all titles, property and estate held at the time of the treason forfeit
to the crown. The near-contemporary historian Roger Coke described the punishment facing the judges as ‘terrible … for tho’
they did not all suffer in their Persons, scarce any of them but forfeited their Estates’. Pauper-making went with widow-making.

An Act of Parliament conferred the regicides’ estates on the king’s
brother James, Duke of York. One of the recurring matters occupying parliamentary time in the months ahead was the nodding
through of land and property transfers to the future James II.