The King's Revenge (25 page)

The court’s first task was to bring the prisoners to the bar in batches and ask them how they pleaded. The first batch consisted
of Sir Hardress Waller, Thomas Harrison and William Heveningham. Almost immediately, Harrison said, ‘My Lord, if you please,
I will speak a word.’ It was an uncomfortable echo of the opening of the king’s trial. Sir Orlando would have none of it and
told Harrison he would be heard in due course. Harrison capitulated and the clerk read out the indictment, stating that the
three men at the bar, ‘instigated by the devil, traitorously compassed and imagined to take away the life of Charles Stuart,
late King of England; and in pursuance of
that intent and design, assembled and sat upon, judged, tried, and condemned, his said late Majesty of blessed memory, and
also signed a warrant for killing and executing him’.

The first to be asked how he pleaded was Waller. According to Ludlow, this was because he was a man known to be liable to
say anything to save his life. The clerk asked, ‘How sayest thou, Sir Hardress Waller; art thou guilty of the treason whereof
thou standest indicted, or not guilty?’

The once decisive military leader shilly-shallied around the question. ‘My Lords, I dare not say “not guilty” but since that
in a business of this nature we have no counsel or advice and being not able to speak to a matter of law …’

In his ineffectual way, Waller was trying to introduce important issues that could affect whether or not he received a fair
trial. The prisoners had been kept in solitary confinement without access to legal advice and had only been informed of the
trial the night before it began. Bridgeman cut sharply across Waller, saying in a sarcastic tone, ‘I am loath to interrupt
you, but this is the course … you must plead guilty or not guilty. There is no medium. Guilty or not guilty?’

After some verbal exchanges, Sir Hardress replied, ‘Insomuch as I said I dare not say not guilty, I must say guilty.’

The clerk sought to conclude the affair. ‘You admit the indictment?’ he asked.

Beaten down, Sir Hardress answered feebly, ‘Yes.’ He was told to stand down.

The court had bludgeoned the first defendant into pleading to charges he had only just heard, charges he had been allowed
no time either to consider or to consult a lawyer about. When Sir Hardress and his colleagues had put Charles I on trial,
the king had been able to plan his defence in advance and had then been given several chances to enter a plea spread over
several days.

After that sad spectacle, the court called to the bar an altogether tougher defendant – General Thomas Harrison. The clerk
asked him if he was guilty of the treason he stood indicted for, or not guilty.

Harrison answered, ‘My Lords, have I liberty to speak?’

The judges realised it was going to be a long day. Harrison was instructed that he could say no more than ‘guilty’ or ‘not
guilty’. But Harrison was not to be bullied. He succeeded in making the complaint that Sir Hardress had stumbled over. He
had, he said, been held in prison for three months in solitary confinement without access to a lawyer. He had only heard the
charge against him at nine o’clock the night before, and he wanted to discuss with the court the law on what he termed ‘this
special case’.

The fact that Harrison and Waller sought to raise similar issues indicated that they had been schooled, probably in haste,
by John Cook. Cook was the best qualified among the accused to put together some kind of defence. After all, he had written
the charge against Charles I. Now he created a legal defence for the regicides based on similar legal arguments to those he
had used to claim the legitimacy of the Rump Parliament’s trial of the king.

Cook’s labours were in vain. The court refused to budge an inch. Seeing this, Harrison accepted the rules and pleaded not
guilty.

As the contests between the court and the previous two defendants worked their way to their conclusion, William Heveningham
had stood by and taken note of all that had happened. When it was his turn to stand at the bar and plead, he did so immediately,
pleading not guilty in the correct manner and saying he would be tried by God and country. Once that was done, the court allowed
Sir Hardress Waller to present a written petition, entitled ‘To the King’s majesty and the Parliament’. The document was laid
aside, unread. Waller and his fellow prisoners were led from the court.

No doubt relieved to have finished with the first batch of defendants, the court called the next group. This comprised six
men: Isaac Pennington, Harry Marten, Gilbert Millington, Robert Tichborne, Owen Rowe and Robert Lilburne. Pennington was the
first to be called. He held up his hand in answer and pleaded swiftly not guilty. He was followed by Harry Marten, who attempted
to say
he was not excepted from the Act of Pardon, because the name that appeared was Henry Marten, not Harry Marten. The individual
named in the Act, he argued, was some other person.
¹⁰
This novel defence was beaten down by Sir Heneage Finch, the solicitor-general.

The rest of the prisoners all pleaded not guilty, except for General George Fleetwood, who said, ‘I must confess I am guilty.’
He then presented a petition addressed to the king. Fleetwood claimed he had been pressed by Oliver Cromwell into signing
the king’s death warrant. Monck interceded for him and his sentence was commuted to imprisonment. He was later sentenced to
transportation to Tangiers, though it is not known whether he actually went. Some accounts say he died there in 1672, while
others say he was released and went to America.
¹¹

When all had pleaded, the process was adjourned, for evidence to commence in the morning. Samuel Pepys recorded his reaction
to the day. Although a senior government official and a royalist, he was not entirely happy with the selection of a few men
to stand trial when so many had opposed the king:

On 11 October, the trial began in earnest. John Evelyn recorded the event tersely: ‘The regicides who sat on the life of our
late king,
were brought to trial in the Old Bailey, before a Commission of oyer and terminer.’
¹³
As a fervent royalist, Evelyn would not be so abrupt when he came to describing the suffering on the scaffold. Six defendants
were called to account: Thomas Harrison, Adrian Scroop, John Carew, John Jones, Gregory Clement and Thomas Scot.
¹⁴
They were considered the most hard-line of the republicans; all of them had signed the king’s death warrant, and so were
excepted from the Act of Oblivion to be executed.

Sir Heneage Finch opened the prosecution with a lesson on the divine right of kings and their sanctity throughout history:
‘We bring before your Lordships into judgment this day the murderers of a King. A man would think the laws of God and men
had so fully secured these sacred persons that the sons of violence should never approach to hurt them. For, my Lord, the
very thought of such an attempt hath ever been presented by all laws, in all ages, in all nations, as a most unpardonable
treason.’

Had Isaac Dorislaus been alive he might have sought to put Sir Heneage right on a few points, chiefly by explaining that the
killing of kings and tyrants had an ancient pedigree. Milton, if he had been able, might have pointed out that kings were
anything but sacred. Despite his uncertain history, there was nothing shaky about Sir Heneage’s legal acumen. Homing in on
the key aspects of the charge necessary to find the defendants guilty, he informed the jury that the indictment was for ‘compassing
the death of the king’ – in other words, for devising and bringing about the execution, though not actually carrying it out
in person. This was a key point, as Sir Heneage explained:

‘The rest of the indictment … the assembling, sitting, judging, and killing of the King, are but so many several
overt acts
to prove the intention of the heart … as the encouraging of the soldiers to cry out, “Justice, Justice!” … this may be given
in evidence to prove the compassing and imagining the King’s death.’

Even though the verdict was a foregone conclusion, Sir Heneage employed all his rhetorical skills for the jury, describing
the king as
‘blessed’ and sacred: ‘My Lords, when they had thus proceeded to … try, sentence, condemn, and kill, I had almost said crucify,
him, whom they could not but know to be their King.’

Next, the prosecutor set out the background to the numbers of defendants selected to stand before the court. ‘The judges,
officers, and other immediate actors in this pretended court, were about fourscore: of these some four or five and twenty
are dead, and gone to their own place. Some six or seven of them, who were thought to have sinned with less malice, have their
lives spared indeed, but are like to be brought to a severe repentance by future penalties.’

During his successful career as an attorney, Sir Heneage had gained a reputation for oratory. He demonstrated his old skills
now: ‘Some eighteen or nineteen have fled from justice, and wander to and fro about the world with the mark of Cain upon them,
and perpetual trembling, lest every eye that sees, and every hand that meets them, should fall upon them.’

Thomas Harrison was brought to stand at the bar. Turning directly to him, Sir Heneage proclaimed, ‘The first that is brought
is the prisoner at the bar, and he deserves to be the first; for if any person now left alive ought to be styled the conductor,
leader, and captain of this work, that is the man. He, my Lord, brought the King up a prisoner from Windsor. He sat upon him,
sentenced him.’

It says much for the butcher’s boy from Newcastle that he was chosen to be first. Everything about him marked him out: his
style and confidence, his Fifth Monarchist beliefs, his role in escorting Charles I to London and his part in the trial, and
– perhaps most unforgettably – his place in history as the man who called Charles a ‘man of blood’.

Four witnesses were called to testify that they had seen Harrison stand in court to indicate his agreement with the king’s
death sentence. Among them was MP James Nutley, who had been elected to the Protectorate Parliament in 1659. Nutley’s improbable
testimony could not have been more fortunate for the prosecution.

He testified that, thanks to his friendship with the court clerk Phelps, he had been admitted to a private committee hearing.
When he slipped into the Painted Chamber he heard Harrison discussing his conversation with the king over supper in Fareham
on his way to Windsor. According to Nutley, Harrison said that when the king had asked, ‘What do they intend to do with me
– whether to murder me or no?’ he had replied, ‘The Lord hath reserved you for a public example of justice.’

Next to come under scrutiny were Harrison’s actions when they stopped at Lord Newburgh’s house for lunch. Newburgh gave evidence
of the plan he had hatched to free the king by giving him a swift horse on which to speed off. He claimed that, sniffing a
plot, Harrison had posted guards at all the doors of Newburgh’s house and had commanded his soldiers to ride ‘close’ to the
king when they set off towards Windsor. According to the prosecution, these actions constituted imprisonment of the king and
amounted to treason. Next, the court was shown two documents: the first had been drawn up to convene the High Court of Justice
to try the king; the second was the king’s death sentence. Harrison asked to see the documents and agreed that his signatures
were on them.

The evidence quickly completed, Harrison was allowed to speak. He said he was proud of his actions and that the trial of the
king had ‘not been done in a corner’ – meaning it was no clandestine or underhand thing, but was carried out in the full light
of day and before the public. He then tried to raise the changed allegiances of many of the judges: ‘Divers of those that
sit upon the bench were formerly as active …’

Bridgeman cut him short: ‘Pray, Mr Harrison, do not thus reflect on the court. This is not the business.’

Harrison was not easily deflected. He continued that he now loathed many who had once been the apple of his eye but had changed
their allegiance: ‘Rather than turn as many did, that did put their hand to this plough [meaning the restoration], I chose
rather to be separated from my wife and family.’

Harrison turned to make a defence based on the argument that he had acted constitutionally: ‘this that hath been done was
done by a parliament of England, by the Commons of England assembled in parliament; and this being so, whatever was done by
their commands or their authority is not questionable by your lordships …’

Harrison then found himself under an onslaught from three judges. Bridgeman, Holles and Annesley castigated him for daring
to claim that the Rump Parliament constituted a legal authority. Harrison would have liked to have had a barrister to argue
that his actions were ordered by the de facto supreme law of the land – Parliament. The court ruled that since the Rump Parliament
was not truly the supreme authority – lacking the completeness of the full Commons and the House of Lords – the argument was
void.

When Harrison tried to raise the point that both the Commons
and
the Lords had decided to go to war against the king in 1642, he was prevented from continuing. Soon he discovered that he
had no arguments left. ‘The things that have been done,’ he concluded, ‘have been done upon the stage, in the sight of the
sun.’