The King's Revenge (22 page)

Later that month, two more of the leading Covenanters, Sir John Swinton of that ilk and James Guthrie, the minister of Stirling,
were seized. An attempt was made to arrest the other great Covenanter, Archibald Johnston, Lord Wariston, but he escaped to
Germany and while there he was safe. A fifth Scot, one William Giffen (or Govan), was also seized, upon a false allegation
that he was one of the king’s executioners.

Edmund Ludlow spent these fearful summer days mainly in hiding, although he made fleeting appearances in London, and kept
occasional contact with the sergeant-at-arms to show that he hadn’t fled. He retained the dreamer’s hope that the storm would
abate and that he yet might be able to protect his family from the sequestration of his estates. ‘I found it difficult to
resolve what to do,’ he confessed, as he weighed up his chances of survival if he were to give himself up to the sergeant-at-arms
and present a petition to Parliament arguing his case. Others among the king’s judges, including normally courageous men,
had submitted grovelling, sometimes tearful apologies to the House for their opposition to monarchy. Needless to say, Edmund
Ludlow intended to apologise for nothing. The nearest he came to expressing regret in his petition was to claim that he had
always acted with ‘as much tenderness to those of the contrary party as my fidelity to the parliament would permit’. The petition
was shown by Ludlow’s wife Elizabeth to his old friend Arthur Annesley, who was close to the king. He told her that her husband
‘should do better to say nothing’.

Of all the fugitive judges, Thomas Scot was probably the most wanted. If his prominence in republican government had not until
now made him the top target, his suicidal outburst just weeks earlier justifying the king’s execution ensured it. He did,
however, seem to be safe in Brussels when he eventually reached the city after his brush with pirates. Scot’s luck was not
to hold. A gloating pamphlet put out later in 1660 by a royalist MP reports his capture after just six days in Brussels.
¹⁷
According to this account, Scot was seen visiting the house of Don Alonso Cardenca, the former Spanish ambassador in London.
The authorities were approached by royalists and authorised Scot’s arrest. He was duly seized, but a stand-off developed when
Don Alonso intervened on Scot’s behalf. It is not clear what happened next, but the story goes that the British resident in
Brussels, Sir Henry de Vic, eventually persuaded Scot to return to England and give himself up. The timing suggests that,
like others, Scot may have been misled by the wording in the king’s deadline proclamation – which called on the wanted men
to surrender within fourteen days ‘under pain of being excepted from any pardon or indemnity for their respective lives and
estates’ – into believing that compliance with the deadline would bring mercy. It seems that Sir Henry de Vic encouraged him
to think so.

The clear implication of those sixteen words was that those surrendering on time would be treated with clemency, but the position
was not spelled out. Years later, the likely author of the document, Edward Hyde, later Earl of Clarendon, admitted in his
autobiography to an ‘ambiguity of expression’. He lamented that because of it, ‘acts of retributive justice to which otherwise
few could have objected were sullied with the imputation of a breach of faith’.

It is hard to escape the conclusion that the ambiguity was deliberate, worded carefully to deceive the fugitives into the
Stuart net. Whether deliberate ploy or carelessly drafted phrase, the lure worked. At the expiry of the deadline the House
was told that twenty of the regicides till then at large had surrendered themselves. They
included Henry Marten, Lord Monson, John Carew and – according to the sergeant-at-arms – Edmund Ludlow and John Dixwell. Neither
of the last two had physically handed themselves in, but both had given assurances that they would do so. Most of the other
eighteen who had surrendered were held in Lambeth House. According to Lucy Hutchinson in her memoir of her husband, they had
an eminent visitor there. George Monck, who had just been ennobled as Duke of Albemarle, ‘came gloatingly’ to look them over.
¹⁸

Eleven of the fugitives preferred not to trust their lives with the king and stayed away. They were added to the primary death
list, bringing the total to twenty-three. Edmund Ludlow would soon be added to the list. But for the moment he was reported
to have surrendered and so was neither a wanted nor a condemned man.

Others who were persuaded to surrender included Sir Hardress Waller and Adrian Scroop, the latter of whom would turn out to
be the most ill served of the judges. The former republican governor of Bristol, Scroop was rumoured to have helped snatch
the king from Holmby House and had been an ardent attender at the king’s trial, two reasons why royalists might hate him.
Nevertheless, after he handed himself in on time, the Commons examined his plea and voted to deal lightly with him. Scroop
was fined the value of a year’s rent on his estate, banned in perpetuity from holding office and released. However, when the
Lords began reviewing the Bill of Indemnity a few weeks later, they insisted on arresting and wholly excepting him. He had
talked too freely to Richard Browne, once a Cromwellian major-general, now Lord Mayor elect of London and a supposed friend.
Browne reported that in a private conversation Scroop appeared to justify the king’s execution; he had suggested to Scroop
that the death of Charles I was a sad affair, but Scroop had refused to pronounce it murder, observing, ‘Some are of one opinion,
and some of another.’ The Commons fought briefly for his removal from the death list but eventually gave him up.

Thomas Scot’s fate was not quite sealed after he was persuaded to return to England. As intelligencer for Cromwell and more
recently for the Rump, he had a wealth of information with which to bargain for his life. On 12 July the House of Commons
excepted him from pardon, but ‘some promise of life’ seems to have been made to him if he would unmask the men who betrayed
royalist plans to him. Scot appears to have baulked at that, but did disgorge some titbits. He answered questions from Sir
William Morrice and Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper and submitted a note on his activities, telling them of the men who kept him
abreast of Charles’s negotiations with the Presbyterians, of the Dr Jansen in France who offered to ‘have the King brought
into my power’, of one or two other agents around Europe including the Anglo-Irish adventurer Joseph Bampfield, who spied
for everyone, and of the amazing cipher breaker, Dr Waller of Oxford, who deciphered all the mail, apparently for the fun
of it. The doctor ‘never concerned himself on the matter but only in the art and ingenuity’. Scot called him ‘a jewel for
a prince’s use’.
¹⁹

Like Ludlow, Scot was not a man to apologise. He would not retract his parting words in Parliament, confessing only to ‘rash
and over-lavish language’ and ‘an intemperate tongue’, which could be blamed, he said, ‘on a misguided conscience which I
heartily repent’. It was not enough to save the former spymaster. He was already on the death list, absolutely excluded from
pardon, and he remained on it. One wonders what went through the mind of Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, the future Earl of Shaftesbury,
as he left Scot in the Tower after the interrogation. Only months before he and Scot had been comrades, and more recently
Ashley Cooper had reassured another worried republican that no lives would be lost when the king returned. He’d ‘be damned
body and soul if ever I see a hair of any man’s head touched … upon this quarrel’.

June had been a month of roistering and ceremonial as well as of the compilation of death lists. At night the king and his
two brothers were relentlessly feasted. Monck led the way, laying on for them a
‘great supper at his residence in the Cockpit’. There followed a nightly round of banquets in the mansions of triumphant royalists
like George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, and more nervous aristocrats like Philip Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, who needed to
convince the king that his support for Parliament in the Civil Wars was much-regretted madness. This first round of celebration
climaxed at the Guildhall with an elaborate pageant, ‘London’s Glory Represented by Time, Truth, and Fame’, followed by a
City feast. John Evelyn saw ‘his Majesty go with as much pomp and splendour as any Earthly prince could do’.
²⁰

By day, Charles was intent on re-establishing the mystique of royalty. He reintroduced the Ceremony of the Royal Touch, in
which a brush of the hand from the monarch was supposed to cure the diseased, principally of scrofula (the disease known as
‘the King’s Evil’). On 19 June
Mercurius Publicus
reported that crowds ‘of poor afflicted creatures … many brought in chairs and baskets’ flocked to the Banqueting House,
where the king in a chair of state

The following month it was announced that in future, the king would perform this service only on Fridays, and to crowds of
no more than two hundred, and they had to apply to the Royal Surgeon for tickets.

Some people placed boundless faith in the king’s messianic powers of healing. John Aubrey’s
Miscellanies
featured an Avis Evans who had a ‘fungus nose and said it was revealed to him that the King’s hand would cure him. And at
the first coming of King
Charles II into St James Park he kissed the King’s hand and rubbed his nose with it which disturbed the King but cured him’.
The following April, Charles claimed to have touched between fifteen and sixteen thousand people, but no longer. He announced
that on his physicians’ advice he was ‘to forbear for the present to touch anyone’.

Charles was besieged with petitioners. The state archive is stacked with petitions dated May 1660 from aspiring state servants
– among them would-be chamberlains, clerks of the Mint, clerks of the Exchequer, tellers, messengers of the chamber or council,
masters of requests, clerks of the Pells, comptrollers, coiners and engravers. John Evelyn’s diary records how he arrived
at Whitehall with letters from Henrietta Maria to deliver to the palace, but was unable to get through the human scrum. ‘It
was indeed intolerable as well as inexpressible, the greediness of all sorts of men, women and children to see His Majesty
and kiss his hands in so much as he had scarce leisure to eat for some days, coming as they did from all parts of the nation.’

In July and August, the demands for retribution reached a peak – and not only retribution for the king. Across the country
royalists demanded redress or revenge for their own individual losses, human and material, at the hands of Parliament. None
were more persistent and passionate than Arundel Penruddock, whose sense of injustice at the execution of a beloved husband
would leave its mark not just on Charles’s reign but on that of his successor too.

Arundel Penruddock had petitioned unsuccessfully for her husband’s life five years earlier. Now she was back, along with the
widows of some of her husband’s men, petitioning for retribution over their deaths. The similar wording of the petitions suggests
that this was a coordinated campaign. Full of anger and bitterness, the petitions were targeted at the officer who, the widows
said, had promised their men quarter and the members of the Cromwellian judiciary who tried and condemned them. These included
the Lord Chief Justice Lord Rolle and the regicide John Lisle. The widows wanted them
excepted from pardon and pressed for their arraignment for murder and high treason. They took their campaign to the House
of Lords, a still more vengeful place than the Commons, and they were to find eager allies there.

On 9 July the Commons finalised the Bill of Indemnity and passed it on to the Lords. The death list had leapt again and again
as the Bill passed through the Commons. The list of five proposed by George Monck in May, which had become seven, and then
twelve in June, now stood, with the addition of those who had vanished abroad, at twenty-five. But that was not blood enough
for the young Cavaliers in the Lords, and perhaps not for the young king either.

The hand of Charles was felt from the moment that the Lords began debating the Bill. He dispatched a letter to the peers which
damned Daniel Axtell, the halberdier colonel who had been on duty in Whitehall with his men on the day that Charles was beheaded.
The letter was from an old servant of Charles I, expressing surprise that Axtell was to escape with life. The writer said
that he could testify to having heard Axtell incite his soldiers in Westminster Hall to cry out for the king’s execution.

A second piece of evidence against Axtell was then submitted by the Council of State, in effect by the king. This was an allegation
that Axtell had been talking treasonably in prison. He had forecast that ‘Monck’s reign would be short’, and that the king
and council ‘would involve the kingdom again in blood’. Axtell’s journey to the block had begun; after this nudge from the
throne, the Lords voted to wholly except him from pardon.

During the rest of July and most of August, the political temperature reached boiling point as the Lords listed more individuals
they wanted to be excepted. On 23 July they discovered the whereabouts of the smoking gun, the warrant for the king’s execution.
This bore the bold signatures of John Bradshaw, Lord Grey and Oliver Cromwell at the top and of fifty-six more beneath them.
It was unearthed after peers asked for the paperwork on the trial and
learned that the warrant had been left in the keeping of another of the officers present at the execution, Colonel Francis
Hacker. He had already been arrested, and so his wife was asked to go home and retrieve the forgotten piece of parchment.
Alas for both of them, she complied and dutifully returned with the warrant. On the back of the document, held today in the
House of Lords, there is written in a seventeenth-century hand, ‘The bloody Warr[an]t for murthering the King’. On the other
side, in addition to the judges’ signatures it carries that of Hacker, authorising the execution. On noting his name, the
Lords voted to exclude him too from all hope of pardon – ensuring that he would in turn be attainted and executed with his
wretched wife left destitute.
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