The King's Revenge (20 page)

A start was made with Oliver Cromwell’s property. The Council of State ordered the seizure of the late Protector’s team of
horses and the ‘grand coach’ which he had commissioned before his death. This was followed later by moves to take back from
the Cromwells the great estate in Monmouthshire that Parliament had voted to Oliver for his military achievements. Cromwell’s
widow Elizabeth was the first to suffer. She was rumoured to have planned to finance life in exile with a cache of valuables
– gold, jewels and paintings – that were allegedly royal property. The hoard was supposedly hidden in a Thameside warehouse
owned by a friend of the widow. In a report dated 12 May, the
Parliamentary Intelligencer
announced that the council was ‘following up information that there were several of His Majesty’s goods at a fruiterers’
warehouse near the Three Cranes in Thames Street London which were there kept as the goods of Mrs Eliz Cromwell, wife of Oliver
Cromwell deceased, sometimes called Protector’. The report added: ‘it being not very improbable that the said Mrs Cromwell
might convey away some such goods, the council ordered persons to view the same.’ There was a follow-up report in
Mercurius Publicus
on 16 May: ‘Amongst goods that were pretended to be Mrs Cromwell’s at the fruiterers’ warehouse are discovered some pictures
and other things belonging to His Majesty.’ What the pictures and ‘other things’ were was never revealed.

A few weeks later, a much larger repossession exercise began after a list was produced of properties formerly owned by Henrietta
Maria, the Queen Mother. They ranged from the palace of Somerset House, which the Commonwealth had used as a barracks, to
a string of stately manor houses sequestered by the state and sold to government supporters. The buyers had included John
Lambert, now in the Tower, Edward Whalley, now on his way to America, and Edward Dendy, probably in Rotterdam. All the properties
and everything
else they owned were liable to be seized from their families. It was the same for every attainted fugitive.

A line of men-o’-war bearing Charles and his brothers James and Henry hove to at Dover on 23 May. The royal party was carried
on what had been the flagship
Naseby
, but was now
The Charles
. During their passage across the Channel the king had ordered not only her name but those of four similar vessels to be changed:
The Richard
became
The James, The Dunbar
became
The Henri, The Lambert
became
The Henrietta
, and
The Speaker
became
The Mary
.

George Monck was first to greet his sovereign. He began to bow, making as if to prostrate himself, only to be swept into an
embrace by the king, who kissed him. After that there unfolded scenes of fawning comparable to those envisaged by John Milton.
Dignitaries jostled to kiss the hems of Charles’s garments and to deliver the most humble and joyous declarations. A leisurely
progress to London followed, interrupted by a three-day stopover at Canterbury where a new royalist council was appointed
and Monck was invested with the Order of the Bath, the first of many gifts to him from the grateful king.

While the king paused, the destruction of republican symbols went on. In New Palace Yard, Westminster, in Cheapside and at
the Old Exchange, copies of the Solemn League and Covenant were ceremoniously burned by the common hangman. ‘The executioner
… did his part perfectly well’, reported the
Kingdom’s Intelligencer
,

The king and his two brothers rode through cheering multitudes and were hailed outside London by a reported fifty thousand
troops drawn up on Blackheath. This was the prelude to a magisterial parade into London that enthralled the crowds and sickened
republicans. As David Masson wrote:

No doubt the excited rush and bustle made it easier for furtive men going the other way. It is believed that Thomas Scot and
John Okey managed to leave the country somewhere during the period around Charles’s return. Scot’s was a heart-stopping escape.
He claimed not to have feared arrest but murder: ‘Some unreasonable men designed no less than a bloody assassination upon
me,’ he said.
¹⁷
An assassin would have found it easy to track him down. A well-known figure, he lived ostentatiously with his family in a
wing of Lambeth Palace across the river from Whitehall. In May or June a
passage to the Continent was arranged for him, probably from Portsmouth. His vessel set off, but her route was through waters
notorious for the presence of pirates and sure enough Scot’s vessel was boarded. According to Scot’s own account, the pirates
‘plundered’ him and set him ashore somewhere on the Hampshire coast. The hunt for regicides must have been in full swing by
now, but somehow Scot avoided capture. He got aboard another vessel, this one shipping Spanish prisoners of war back to the
Spanish Netherlands. It is more than possible that Scot’s friendship with the Spanish envoy in London helped him secure a
berth on the ship.

Ludlow continued to hang on. He even watched the king’s entry into the city, the soldier idealist in him quailing at the sight.
He wrote:

He then reflected bitterly on the changed role of the army he had been proud to lead. ‘It was a strange sight to me, to see
the horse that had formerly belonged to our army, now put upon an employment so different from that which they had at first
undertaken … they had not been raised out of the meanest of the people, and without distinction, as other armies had been;
they … had engaged themselves from a spirit of liberty.’

Edward Hyde, Charles’s Chancellor, was equally struck by the welcome, though from a different perspective. ‘At Whitehall the
two Houses of Parliament cast themselves at his feet with all vows of affection to the world’s end. Well might the King exclaim,
as he saw
the fervency of welcome, It had been his own fault he had been absent so long; for he saw nobody that did not protest he had
ever wished for his return.’
¹⁸

The pageantry went on for days. Across the country there was a ‘delirium of joy … peals of bell-ringing, bonfires and shouting
mobs, public feasts, wine running from the spouts for the general benefit’ and burnings of Oliver Cromwell in effigy, usually
accompanied with effigies of the Devil.
¹⁹

The exodus of judges would go on too.

May—September 1660

While the country celebrated, a hue and cry was unloosed for the men who had judged the king. A decision was taken to attach
the terrible label ‘regicide’ to those who had been present in the High Court as Charles I’s death sentence was pronounced
and from their number to select the death list of seven. Thirty-seven of these men were still alive, and the order went out
to sheriffs and other law officers across the country to seize them and seize their property.

The seven were deemed to be unpardonable and were wholly ‘excepted’ from the Bill of Indemnity. They could expect the full
savagery of a traitor’s death – hanging, castration and disembowelment before the victim was beheaded and the trunk quartered
so parts could be displayed across the land.

The remaining judges were to be on a list of men who could expect severe future punishment short of death; the phrase used
was ‘pains, penalties, and forfeitures’. What that punishment was to consist of would be decided by Parliament at a later
stage. For a lucky few this would turn out to mean a fine and perhaps a bar from future public office; for most it would mean
incarceration for life and the seizure of their estate and property by the king.

A rhetorical blast from the Speaker, Sir Harbottle Grimston, let Parliament know how the regicides were to be viewed. In judging
them, Sir Harbottle told the Commons, they ‘were looking over a long, black, prodigious, dismal roll and catalogue of malefactors
… monsters, guilty of blood, precious blood, precious royal blood, never to be remembered without tears’. There was, he thundered,
an absolute necessity to except such men from pardon ‘that they may be made Sacrifices to appease God’s Wrath, and satisfy
Divine Vengeance’.
¹

The first of the judges to be selected for execution was the flamboyant Fifth Monarchist Thomas Harrison. On 4 June Parliament
announced that he was to be ‘excepted out of the Act of general pardon for life and estate’. The choice of General Harrison
was no surprise. Apart from his several roles at the trial of the king, his status at the head of the Fifth Monarchists made
him look the most dangerous of surviving republican leaders and a man for royalists to be rid of.

A day after Harrison was named, six more judges, major figures from the republican past, were listed with him as wholly beyond
pardon. They were the military men John Jones and John Barkstead, the lawyer John Lisle and the parliamentary politicians
Thomas Scot, Cornelius Holland and William Say. Edmund Ludlow narrowly escaped inclusion after George Monck received a letter
alleging a plot by Ludlow to mount an insurrection. Ludlow managed to put down that nonsensical claim and Barkstead, the once
feared military governor of the Tower, was voted in by a narrow margin as the seventh man on the death list.
²

The list was supposed to stop at seven, the number of men that Parliament had agreed should bear the guilt of King Charles’s
death by being totally excepted from pardon. However, that restriction was immediately disregarded. On 8 June, three days
after announcing the identities of the seven, the Commons put five more on the list: the prosecutor, John Cook, one of the
clerks of court, Andrew Broughton, the sergeant-at-arms, Edward Dendy, and the two so far unidentified executioners.

The same day, Parliament decided to add men other than judges to the list of partial exceptions – individuals who, though
not stained by the guilt of the king’s death, had shown such ‘mischievous activity’ in the recent troubles they deserved to
suffer. The Commons voted that there should be ‘twenty and no more’ on this list.

At the beginning of June only three of the twelve men on the death list were in government hands – Harrison, John Cook and
John Jones. The last two had been seized by Sir Charles Coote in Ireland back in February. Coote had held Cook until a few
weeks earlier when George Monck ordered his return to England. John Jones had been released about the same time only to be
picked up after a few weeks, this time in England. Jones evidently expected the worst, for he spent the time after his release
putting his affairs in order. He was found by constables ‘taking the air’ in a London park.

Of the other nine on the list, the two executioners were still unidentified, while the remaining seven men had slipped away
to Europe. A stop on the ports had been ordered in mid-May and thorough searches were undertaken. However William Say, John
Lisle, Cornelius Holland and Andrew Broughton escaped through the net and were either in, or on the way to, Switzerland, while
Thomas Scot was in Brussels, Edward Dendy was probably in the Netherlands and John Barkstead in Germany.

Others of the king’s judges who, fearing the worst, scattered abroad included John Hewson, the apprentices’ hate figure in
London who ended up in Germany; Sir Hardress Waller, who had also been held in Ireland by Sir Charles Coote but was now in
France; and Edward Whalley and William Goffe, who must have been more than halfway across the Atlantic. All told, nineteen
of forty-four men whose arrest had been ordered were abroad, seemingly out of Charles’s reach. The rest remained in England
to brave it out.

Around them the country boiled with righteous animosity against all those described as regicides. As recently as April, royalists
had issued public declarations disdaining ‘any thoughts of rancour or
revenge’ once the king was restored. The pledge was forgotten immediately Charles was back in England. His return saw a deluge
of bloodthirsty royalist broadsheets inciting action against the ‘phanatics’ who had ‘murdered’ the king.
A Hue and Cry after the High Court of Injustice
set out the names of the ‘traitors’ and the estates they owned.
Lucifer’s Lifeguard
listed ‘the anti-Christian imps who have been murderers and destroyers of the best religion, the best government and the
best King that ever Great Britain enjoyed’.
The Royal Martyrs
listed ‘Lords and Gentlemen that were slain in … defence of their King’ and
Royal and other Innocent Blood
called to heaven ‘for dire vengeance’.

At this stage the number of captured regicides could be counted on one hand. After Harrison, Cook and Jones the next to be
seized was sixty-four-year-old Gregory Clement, whose signature on the death warrant was number fifty-four. He was caught
at the end of May hiding in London, in what was described as a mean house near Gray’s Inn. Clement had never been a discreet
individual and this characteristic was his downfall. In 1653 he had been discharged from the House of Commons for ‘offensive
and scandalous’ behaviour after being discovered in bed with a maidservant. Now he made the mistake of not acting the poor
man in a poor man’s neighbourhood. He ordered in provisions only the well-to-do could normally afford, and a suspicious neighbour
reported him. The militia was called out and Clement was brought from the house to be questioned by officers in front of a
gaping crowd. One of the interrogators knew him but was evidently a friend, for he failed to divulge Clement’s identity. Clement
survived the questioning and the militia were eventually prevailed upon to let him go. But Clement had a very distinctive
voice and the story is that before he could get away, a blind man in the crowd recognised it and challenged him. At this,
Clement evidently broke down and admitted his identity. He was sent to the Tower.
³

Colonel Daniel Axtell was betrayed by a friend who had agreed to hide him. Axtell had been on the run since John Lambert’s
fiasco at
Daventry six weeks earlier, having stuck loyally with Lambert till the moment the latter allowed himself to be arrested by
the eager Richard Ingoldsby. Only then did Axtell make his own escape. Even without the Lambert connection, Axtell would have
been a prime royalist target. It was he who had allegedly roused the halberdiers under his command to shout ‘Justice, justice’
as the king passed by during his trial; it was claimed, too, that he had ordered his men to shoot the masked woman in the
gallery – identified by many as Lady Fairfax – who had barracked the judges. The friend who betrayed Axtell agreed to hide
him, but thought better of it: as soon as the search for regicides was launched he contacted the nearest constable and turned
his guest in.

Officers caught Sir Henry Mildmay as he tried to escape through Rye on the Sussex coast. Keeper of the King’s Jewels under
James I and Charles I, Mildmay had retained his post to become a disposer of royal treasure under the Commonwealth having
taken Parliament’s side in the Civil War. Enemies accused him of growing rich by dipping into the treasures he was supposed
to be guarding. In fact he sold them all on Parliament’s orders, but in the way of such office holders probably secured a
goodly cut. Although not a signatory to the death warrant, he attended several sessions of the trial, which was enough to
damn him in royalist eyes. On the report of his arrest, the Council of State, sniffing royal gold, ordered his captors to
take particular care to guard whatever ‘monies and goods’ he and his servants had about them.

Two wanted men from the New Model Army completed the government catch in May. The brilliant general John Desborough, the hard
man of the Wallingford House group, was caught on the Essex coast, and the bluff, unbribable cavalry officer Francis Hacker,
another who commanded the guards at the king’s trial, was arrested in London.

June saw the search launched for the two masked executioners. William Prynne chaired a parliamentary probe into their identities,
while Charles’s secretaries of state made their own enquiries. The
first suspect investigated in England was the most obvious, the Common Hangman of London himself, Richard Brandon, who had
died six months after the king. At that time one rumour had it that he was paid £30 for the execution; another put his fee
at £300 to do the grisly work. At Brandon’s burial later in 1649 crowds had packed the churchyard yelling abuse – among other
things threatening to quarter the corpse in retaliation for the killing of the king.
⁴

Prynne’s committee uncovered witnesses who claimed that Brandon had admitted to being the headsman. One recalled him saying,
‘God forgive me I did it, and I had forty half-crowns for my pains.’ Prynne found a waterman on the Thames who claimed to
have been forced by soldiers to ferry the hangman away from Whitehall immediately after the execution. Apparently his passenger
was terrified of the crowd spotting him – and so was the waterman:

Another witness told an intriguing story about Brandon’s next major engagement, the beheading of the Earl of Holland, Lord
Capel and the Duke of Hamilton in Palace Yard, Westminster. The witness heard Lord Capel ask the hangman: ‘Did you cut off
my master’s head?’

The evidence against Brandon was considered inconclusive and two well-known republicans – George Joyce and Hugh Peters – were
canvassed as alternative suspects. Both were named by Cromwell’s favourite astrologer, William Lilly, when he was brought
in to Westminster on 2 June to be questioned by William Prynne and two others. Lilly himself was in danger of being excepted
from pardon. A rival astrologer, John Gadbury, charged that he had promoted Charles’s execution through his almanacs and other
writings, specifically
Observations on the Life and Death of King Charles
, in which Lilly justified Parliament’s stance against the king.

Predictably, he was given a rough ride by younger members of the overwhelmingly royalist House of Commons when he arrived
to meet Prynne, and he must have been a frightened man. ‘At my first appearance, many of the young members affronted me highly,
and demanded several scurrilous questions,’ he wrote. Prynne quizzed him for an hour before the astrologer was allowed to
say his piece. It was sensational. He told Prynne that a week or so after the execution he had hosted a supper at which Robert
Spavin, Oliver Cromwell’s secretary, was a guest. The talk that evening was taken up with speculation and gossip about the
identity of the man who swung the axe, with the most unlikely names being floated alongside serious candidates. When the eating
was done Spavin drew Lilly aside and said, ‘These are all mistaken; they have not named the man that did the fact; it was
Lieutenant-Colonel Joyce. I was in the room when he fitted himself for the work – stood behind him when he did it – when done,
went in again unto him. There’s no man knows this but my master [Cromwell], Commissary Ireton, and myself.’
⁵

George Joyce was hated by royalists. He was the bumptious young junior officer who could be said to have sealed Charles’s
fate
in 1647, two years before the king was put on trial, when he lay in ‘protective custody’ at Holmby House in Northamptonshire.
Joyce was a lowly cornet of horse, the most junior rank of officer in the army. Sent with five hundred troopers to take charge
of weaponry in Oxford, the royalist capital in the Civil Wars, Joyce instead collected the king, diverting his column to Holmby
House in order to seize the monarch. On his arrival he allegedly barged into the king’s bedroom and curtly informed him that
he was being moved to army headquarters at Newmarket. The king protested and asked to see the officer’s commission. Joyce
pointed to the troopers behind him. ‘There is my commission. I hope that will satisfy your majesty.’