The King's Revenge (32 page)

Another display of punishment, had been ordered a few months earlier, to mark the anniversary of the day when the death sentence
was passed on the king. Three of his judges were roped to sledges, each with a halter round his neck, and dragged through
the streets from the Tower to Tyburn – then back again. None of the three – Sir Henry Mildmay, Viscount Monson and Robert
Wallop – had signed the death warrant or had been present when sentence was pronounced, so they didn’t qualify as regicides.
Indeed all three insisted that they agreed to act as judges in order to help the king. That cut no ice. The trio had all been
ardent republicans and they were all sentenced to life and, on top of that, to the humiliating trip to Tyburn. According to
Pepys it was to be an annual excursion.
³

Though regicides like Sir Henry Mildmay and Harry Marten were saved from death, there were two heads which the Cavalier Parliament
and the court still seemed determined to have. Neither Sir Harry Vane nor John Lambert was a regicide. But they were regarded
as the most dangerous men in the realm: Lambert for his popularity among the thousands of discharged soldiers wandering the
country, Vane because of his rhetorical power and appeal to the extremist Fifth Monarchists. Both had been prisoners since
1660, Vane in the castle of St Mary on the Scilly Isles, Lambert on Guernsey in the Channel Islands. The fresh intake of MPs
was determined to execute them and circumvent the deal done to save their lives in 1660. That convoluted three-way arrangement
had allowed the Lords to claim that it had condemned the two men to death while supposedly ensuring that a death sentence
would never be carried out. It involved the two houses jointly excluding Vane and Lambert from pardon and the king pledging
to save them if ever they were attainted and faced execution. A joint petition from Parliament embodying the deal went to
the king on 5 September 1660. It read:

The Lord Chancellor reported that the king had agreed: ‘That he had presented the petition of both Houses to the King, concerning
Sir Henry Vane and Colonel Lambert; and His Majesty grants the desires in the said petition.’
⁵
Apparently the two were safe. But, three days after the executions of John Okey and his friends, Vane and Lambert were ‘delivered
up’ into the hands of Sir John Robinson, governor of the Tower of London, preparatory to trial. The Duke of York had dispatched
ships to pick up Vane from the Scilly Isles and Lambert from the Channel Islands. The Venetian resident rubbed his hands in
anticipation. ‘It is believed that when they arrive parliament will make them pay with their lives for their crimes,’ he told
the Doge.
⁶

As the trial approached, Charles was preoccupied with domestic
matters. Two months earlier he had married. His queen was a buck-toothed but pretty Portuguese princess, Catherine of Braganza.
After greeting his bride-to-be in Portsmouth, the thirty-two-year-old king had rhapsodised over her. ‘She has as much agreeable
in her looks as ever I saw and if I have any skill in physiognomy which I think that I have, she must be as a good a woman
as ever was born,’ he wrote to Clarendon. ‘I cannot easily tell you how happy I think myself. I must be the worst man living
(which I hope I am not) if I be not a good husband.’

He was still more captivated by his mistress Barbara Castlemaine, who made the king eat his words. Determined to assert her
presence at court, Lady Castlemaine persuaded Charles to have her appointed first lady to the queen’s bedchamber. The tearful
and indignant Catherine resisted and Clarendon urged the king to back down. At this Charles exploded. In a letter worthy of
a lovesick boy, he warned Clarendon:

The issue was still unresolved when Charles was forced to give attention to John Lambert and Harry Vane. On 6 June 1662 the
two were charged in Westminster Hall, the scene of past triumphs for each of them. Neither was given advance notice of the
indictment nor given a copy in court, and both must have been shocked when the charges were read out to them. They referred
not to the 1640s but to 1659 and rested on the novel assertion that Charles II had been
de jure
king of England at the time, even though he was in fact a wandering exile. John Lambert, who had helped reinstate the Rump
and led its troops into battle that year, was indicted for stirring up
rebellion against the king. Sir Harry Vane, the politician, was accused of ‘compassing and imagining the King’s death’, contriving
‘to subvert the ancient Frame of Government’ and preventing the king from ‘the exercise of his regal authority’.

Predictably the proceedings that followed were as loaded against the defendants as the show trials of 1660 had been against
their friends. Not only were they given no copy of the indictments, but counsel was denied them, the jury was packed with
royalists, and they were allowed neither sufficient time to find their own witnesses nor the right to question those who did
appear.

Cool but apologetic, Lambert made no challenge to the charges but stressed his loyalty. Described by a foreign observer of
the trial as ‘trying to excuse and justify the crimes of which he was accused’, he was ‘for all the world not upset about
them and did not speak to deny his deeds, but tried all the time to make them appear less serious, and appealed to the King’s
Mercy, by which he won the judges’ hearts’.
⁷
Lambert was nevertheless found guilty of treason and sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered.

Vane took the prosecution on and argued every point. Everything he had done was ordered by Parliament, he insisted, and Parliament,
not the absent Charles, was sovereign at the time. It was not possible to commit treason against a king not in possession
of the crown. The prosecution accused him of insolence, telling him that his own defence ‘was a fresh charge against him,
and the highest evidence of his inward guilt’.
⁸

On the second day of the trial Charles decided to break his word and deny Vane a pardon. He wrote to Clarendon about Vane:
‘He is too dangerous a man to let live, if we can honestly put him out of the way.’ The king was reported to have been particularly
incensed by Vane’s insistence that he could not be regarded as de facto monarch when in exile. Sir Harry was duly found guilty
and sentenced to the tortured death of a traitor. Charles refused the promised royal pardon and an equally tortured way was
found to show that the king’s honour was intact despite his broken word. Lord Chief Justice Foster
announced that the gift of mercy did not abide with the king but with God, and God intended mercy only for the penitent. Vane,
of course, remained thoroughly unrepentant.

Charles did, however, keep his promise to John Lambert. He was spared death and returned to Guernsey, initially to be held
in close confinement, but later he was allowed to buy a house there and live with his wife Frances. Guards were told to shoot
him if he was ever found colluding with enemies of the king.

In the end, Sir Harry Vane was spared a traitor’s death. Charles, perhaps in recompense for his broken pledge, agreed to his
being beheaded. On 14 June, Vane stood on the scaffold before a vast crowd on Tower Hill and began to deliver his last speech.
The sheriff standing nearby attempted to snatch his notes but Vane evaded him and began to speak. Immediately a thunder of
drums beneath his feet drowned out his words. An array of drummers and trumpeters were stationed under the scaffold. Since
Thomas Harrison’s unexpected oratory at Charing Cross, the authorities had learned new tricks about information management.
Every time Sir Harry began a sentence the cacophony sounded.

Vane died unheard by most in the crowd but he died well. ‘In all things,’ wrote Pepys, ‘he appeared the most resolved man
that ever died in that manner.’
⁹
To the chagrin of the court, a copy of the speech which Vane had tried to give above the drumming and trumpeting was smuggled
out. It was as impressive as the authorities feared.

While the captive regicides might now be spared death, that did not hold for the dozen or more fugitives abroad. Catching
and killing them – or just killing them – remained a priority. In the next two years the hunters would score in France and
Switzerland.

In France, they tracked down Archibald Johnston, Lord Wariston. After the Marquis of Argyll, Johnston was probably the Scot
most hated by the supposedly forgiving Charles. He was the leading Covenanter, who had imposed humiliating terms on Charles
when he sought support in 1650 and 1651. But that was not all. Wariston,
the epitome of the stern Calvinist, is said to have been horrified at the unabashed licentiousness of the young king. In one
incident Wariston upbraided Charles for reportedly forcing himself on a noblewoman. It is said that the alleged royal rapist
never forgave Wariston for his temerity.
¹⁰

Wariston was the one Covenanter leader to escape the dragnet ordered by Charles in July 1660 after Argyll’s arrest. Wariston
fled to France and then Germany, where he established himself in Hamburg. One year later, in May 1661, a decree of forfeiture
and death was issued against him in Edinburgh. He was accused of high treason in accepting office from Cromwell, sitting in
the upper house after having been appointed King’s Advocate by Charles I, and of persecuting royalists.
¹¹

Wariston was finally traced after his name was mentioned during the panic over the so-called Tong Plot in the autumn of 1662.
This was yet another alleged assassination plot against the king involving the seizure of Windsor Castle. Once again informants
alleged that Edmund Ludlow was involved, Sir Ralph Verney reporting that Ludlow was to have led a rising on Lord Mayor’s Day
in London, ‘about noon, when all were busy, or at night when all were drunk’. Hundreds were hauled in for questioning. The
most talkative was an ex-halberdier in Oliver Cromwell’s regiment who poured out names with blood-curdling examples of what
fellow ex-soldiers were saying they would do to the king.
¹²
He accused in particular Captain Robert Johnston, another ex-halberdier. What he had to say prompted the authorities to arrest
Johnston on suspicion of treason and led Charles himself to attend his interrogation.

This was not the king’s first trip to the Tower to see alleged traitors face to face and quiz them himself, nor would it be
his last. He had led the interrogations of the men entangled in the White Plot at the outset of his reign in 1660 and would
continue to personally question men thought to threaten the throne. Among those he was to face in the future was the odious
Titus Oates, author of the fictitious Popish Plot in 1678.

In the assessment of historian Alan Marshall, Charles was ‘rather good at it’, judging from his interrogation of Titus Oates
more than a decade later. ‘The King had the blend of wit and nastiness in his character that would have been valuable in such
an area.’
¹³
It certainly appears to have worked on Johnston, who poured out the names of dissidents, among them that of Wariston. Johnston
told Charles that the Covenanter leader was in Hamburg but had recently travelled to Holland. It is unclear what happened
next, but papers in the National Archives show that within the month Johnston was acting as a government informer, though
a deeply reluctant one.
¹⁴

Johnston’s reports reveal him homing in on Wariston’s wife, who was in London. He appears either to have become, or already
to have been, very close to her. Given that he shared a surname with the Waristons, the suspicion arises that he was a family
member. He told his handler: ‘Wrote her letters and knew all her secrets.’ Through Lady Wariston he got to hear of her close
circle of friends, which included the wives of other fugitive republicans, among them Frances Goffe and Mary Whalley. In one
undated note he wrote: ‘Mrs Cawley whose husband was one of the King’s judges not yet discovered [found] lodges at her brother’s
in Red Cross Street [and] is intimate with the wives of Ludlow, Goffe and Whalley and might know where they live.’ Another
wife in the circle – now a widow – was Lady Vane.
¹⁵

Late in 1662, Johnston discovered that Lady Wariston planned to meet her husband in Rouen. This risky trip was apparently
undertaken following the king’s rejection of a plea for clemency sent on Wariston’s behalf. The couple hadn’t seen each other
for over two years and Wariston was an ill man. Evidently he was willing to take the risk of leaving the safety of Hamburg
to see his wife. One Alexander Murray, commonly called Crooked Murray, was assigned to follow her. Unwittingly she led Murray
straight to her husband in Rouen. Wariston had allowed ‘a great bushy beard’ to grow and wore a periwig as a disguise, but
he was easily identified. Murray’s men seized him while he was at prayer.

Unlike the Dutch republicans, the French under Louis XIV provided no impediment to the extradition of fugitives from the Stuarts.
The king’s council debated the case and thought of refusing extradition, but on Louis’s orders allowed Murray to depart with
his prisoner. Wariston was lodged in the Tower in January 1663 and held for six months, before being shipped to Edinburgh
to hear in the Scottish Parliament the sentence passed on him in his absence.