The King's Revenge (37 page)

In America, the exiled regicides were to be hailed as apostles of liberty. Edward Whalley and William Goffe remained hidden
with the Reverend Russell for another ten years, until Whalley’s death around 1674 or ’75. Goffe was to live on and become
the centre of a hugely dramatic story – the legend of the Angel of Hadley, the white-haired stranger who in September 1675
appeared brandishing a sword, rallied the settlers, beat off an Algonquin attack and prevented a massacre, before disappearing
as miraculously as he had come. The superstitious people of Hadley decided their saviour must have been a supernatural being.
Ninety years after the incident, the president of Harvard, Ezra Stiles, wrote: ‘The inhabitants
could not account for the phenomenon, but by considering that person as an Angel sent of God on that special occasion for
their deliverance.’

By the nineteenth century the angel incident was presented as fact and so too was William Goffe’s role as the angel. The story
inspired many writers. The first to make use of the tale was Walter Scott, who based his novel
Peveril of the Peak
upon the legend of the Angel. He was followed by James Fenimore Cooper and Nathaniel Hawthorne. The cave that sheltered Goffe
and Whalley is now a tourist attraction and bears a bronze plaque stating, ‘Opposition to Tyrants is Obedience to God’.

In Whitehall, the question of the remaining fugitives ran like a secret river beneath the more pressing concerns of the kingdom’s
domestic and foreign policies, only occasionally bobbing up into the light of day. One of these moments occurred in 1670.
Despite the years that had elapsed since the events of 1648–9, some names still had the power to rankle with the king. One
was that of George Joyce, he who as a lowly Cromwellian cornet had taken Charles I into the custody of the army and who had
since fled with his family to Holland. Apart from his role in securing the late king, there had also been a rumour spread
by the ludicrous gossip and astrologer William Lilly that Joyce had been one of the king’s executioners. Deciding it was best
to remain abroad, Joyce had declined to accept London’s invitation to Cromwellian exiles to return and be pardoned. From the
fate of others who had ‘come in’, he guessed he would at best be imprisoned and at worst hanged, drawn and quartered.

Now, in 1670, the diplomat and politician Sir William Temple was dispatched on a secret mission to Holland, ‘charged to seize
and secure Cornet Joyce, the person that removed by force King Charles I from Holmby Castle, who lived in Rotterdam’.
¹⁰
The mission was clearly sanctioned by Charles himself for Sir William moved in the king’s inner circles. Charles must have
been very anxious for the success of Sir William’s mission to abduct the fugitive, ‘for the
transporting of whom to England one of the King’s yachts had been purposely sent to Holland’.

Although Sir William had the king’s own ship lying ready to take his captive away, he was unsuccessful. On one occasion, he
sat up through two consecutive nights keeping fruitless watch for Joyce. When he asked for the assistance of the Dutch authorities
– as George Downing had done eight years before in the cases of Miles Corbet and his colleagues – help was unforthcoming.
The Rotterdam magistrates declared that Joyce ‘was a kind of mad, extravagant fellow that having long resided in their town,
could be guilty of nothing against his majesty unless it were of words; and amounted not to a crime that was thought to deserve
imprisonment’. The Dutch magistrates ruled that by vociferously denouncing the king Joyce was only exercising freedom of speech.
This was not an argument that would have stood up well in the legal atmosphere in Restoration England, where courts ruled
that words signalled intent and intent was enough to condemn a man for treason.

Sir William wrote to Charles’s spy chief, Lord Arlington, that he had failed despite pursuing Joyce ‘with all imaginable zeal
and diligence’. Arlington, a confidant of the king (he was one of only two courtiers who knew of Charles’s secret intention
to convert to Roman Catholicism to secure a pact with France), replied that he suspected ‘there was foul play as well as difficulty
of form in the hindering’ of Temple’s mission. Having involved two such senior and trusted members of his circle in the task
to capture Joyce, Charles would have been disappointed at their failure. Unfortunately for us, none of his courtiers thought
to commit details of their king’s true feelings to print. Samuel Pepys was sadly in orbit in a lower social circle, just below
those who circled around Charles himself.

Following the Joyce debacle, attempts to capture or assassinate the fugitive regicides began to slip down the royal agenda.
Pressing domestic issues included questions over the succession, for although
Charles had by now fathered many male children, none of them were the offspring of the queen. His heir was therefore his brother
James, Duke of York, who was openly Catholic. If this were not enough, word leaked out of the king’s secret pact with the
ancient enemy, France. In 1677, partially to help quell public anxiety over his Protestant identity, Charles arranged the
marriage of his niece Mary to William of Orange.

That same year, Algernon Sidney scented the political wind blowing from England and decided to end his exile. All would go
well until six years after his return, when he was swept up in an extraordinary conspiracy which culminated in his death.
A plot was hatched to ambush and kill Charles II and his brother James on their way home from the races. Among those arrested
for alleged involvement were the most prominent of the king’s political opponents. Through his friendship with one of them,
Sidney was also arrested, and was tried for treason on very flimsy evidence – Sidney complained it came from only one witness.
The prosecution’s response was that it had another source – the manuscript of Sidney’s unpublished republican writings.
¹¹
The court argued that his words were an ‘overt act’ – putting Sidney in the bizarre situation of having become his own chief
prosecution witness.
¹²
He was beheaded on 7 December 1683.

On 5 February 1685 the king had a seizure and died at the age of fifty-four. He was succeeded by his brother James, a Roman
Catholic. Four months later, Charles’s eldest illegitimate son, James Scott, the Duke of Monmouth, launched a rebellion. Scott
was the son of Lucy Walter, Charles’s first love. His rebellion was crushed at the Battle of Sedgemoor.

Following the uprising there was one last act of vengeance against a relative of one of the regicides. The widow of the assassinated
regicide John Lisle was condemned to death for harbouring one of the Duke of Monmouth’s supporters. The officer who led the
search for the fugitive hidden by Lady Lisle had an axe to grind. His father,
John Penruddock, had been executed following a treason trial presided over by Lady Lisle’s husband John in 1655. Alice Lisle
was beheaded in Winchester on 2 September, so completing the tragic history of the Lisles, husband and wife. By the 1680s
there were few of the regicides or of their pursuers left.

The regicide William Cawley died at Vevey in 1667, followed there is 1671 by fellow regicide Cornelius Holland and, three
years later, by the former sergeant-at-arms Edward Dendy. By now, the little community in Vevey was becoming very small and
its members very old. Nicholas Love had lived on until 1682, while Andrew Broughton succumbed to old age five years later.

Of the other runaways, Thomas Challoner, the fifty-fourth signatory to the king’s death warrant, had escaped to Middelburg
in the Netherlands, only to die there in August 1660. Valentine Walton escaped retribution to die in Hanau, Germany, in 1661.
Sir Michael Livesey died in the Netherlands in 1665, where William Say died the following year. Daniel Blagrave died in Aachen
in 1668. George Joyce was last heard of in the Netherlands with Sir William Temple’s failed attempt to kidnap him. Perhaps
he moved into deeper obscurity to avoid further attempts on his liberty.

In all, twenty regicides and their associates were executed. Many escaped that fate by the skin of their teeth. Edmund Ludlow
and others had several close shaves in Switzerland, George Downing’s agents narrowly missed capturing John Hewson and George
Joyce in the Netherlands, and in America, Goffe, Whalley and Dixwell only evaded an exhaustive manhunt thanks to the help
of Puritan settlers.

Of the regicides who remained in England, two evaded execution due to ill health. Sir John Bourchier was too ill in 1660 to
be put on trial and died later that year, while Vincent Potter was sentenced to death but died before the sentence could be
carried out. Many more were thrown in prison for the rest of their lives.

Some of the latter had been sentenced to death but reprieved. Sir
Hardress Waller escaped the scaffold thanks to the intercession of his cousin Sir William Waller, who changed sides after
the wars to support the royalist faction during the Commonwealth and Protectorate. Sir Hardress died imprisoned on Jersey
in 1666. Henry Smith, an ardent republican, was reprieved after pleading ‘youthful ignorance’ and sentenced to imprisonment
for life, dying in Jersey around 1668. Robert Tichborne, a London merchant who helped organise the king’s trial, was reprieved
for having interceded to save the lives of Cavaliers condemned to death during the Protectorate. He died in the Tower in 1682.

Others who were sentenced to life imprisonment included Owen Rowe, who died in the Tower on Christmas Day 1661; Peter Temple,
who died in the Tower two years later; Colonel John Hutchinson, who died in Sandown Castle in 1664; and Harry Marten, the
republican
bon viveur
who was imprisoned in Chepstow Castle where, attended by the love of his life, Mary Ward, he died in 1680.

The most illustrious of the supporters of the regicides, John Milton, died peacefully at home in London in 1674. He continues
to be one of the most lauded of poets and is considered to be as quintessentially English as the monarchy itself.

And what of the men who pursued the regicides? Charles II converted to Catholicism on his death bed in 1685, having left no
legitimate male heir. Heneage Finch died the year before the king; William Prynne died in 1669; George Monck, the most eminent
of the century’s turncoats, died in 1670; George Downing, who turned a lesser though useful coat, in 1684; and Richard Ingoldsby,
who turned his coat to save his skin, died in 1685. James II outlived them all. Having been deposed from the English throne
by William of Orange in 1688, he died peacefully at his chateau at St-Germain-en-Laye near Paris fifteen years later.

While both enemies and friends dropped away, Edmund Ludlow lived on by the shore of Lake Geneva with his wife Elizabeth. In
1688, following the Glorious Revolution – a term he would have
hated for being entirely erroneous – he felt it was at last safe to return home. Almost immediately, he was recognised and
denounced as a regicide. A proposal was made in Parliament to have him arrested. So, at the age of seventy-two, Ludlow escaped
once more and sailed away for the last time. Four years later, in 1692, with Elizabeth by his side, he died in his bed at
49 Rue du Lac – the last of the regicides.

All that now remains of the little group of Englishmen and women who once lived in the pretty town by Lake Geneva are their
graves and some memorials in the church of St Martin, the very church to which Ludlow once walked while carrying
a sword, in fear of a king’s revenge.

If Britain did have a ‘Glorious Revolution’, it took place not in 1688–9 but forty years earlier in 1649. On that date, the
rule of an absolutist king was ended and the supremacy of Parliament was established. At the same time, the rule of law was
confirmed and wider social freedoms than ever before granted, censorship lifted and relative freedom of worship assured. Despite
a generally bad press, the regicides were men of principle who stood for many of the liberties that today we take for granted.
The Glorious Revolution merely restored some of what the men who judged Charles I had achieved. Modern Britain has much to
thank them for.

The trial of Charles I grew out of the exasperation of men who wanted his powers to be tempered by a representative Parliament
that could make laws and raise taxes. This was the constitutional monarchy drawn up by John Lambert and Henry Ireton in 1647
and turned down flat by the king. Due to Charles’s desire to raise taxes as he wished and to rule without Parliament (‘Call
no Parliaments’, his father James I had advised), two bruising wars were fought between
1642 and 1648. Constitutional reform – rather than hatred of the king himself – was at the heart of the programme proposed
by those who opposed the king. Finally, the conflicts led to Britain’s first and only written constitution.

The king’s judges were an odd coalition: hereditary landowners, parliamentarians, professional soldiers, lawyers, businessmen.
Holding a broad sweep of political and religious views, from the conservative to the revolutionary, they ranged from those
who, like Cromwell and his son-in-law Henry Ireton, tried to achieve a working relationship with Charles I to republicans
like Edmund Ludlow and Harry Marten who sympathised with giving the vote to working men. Thanks to the intransigence of the
king, England ended up with a republic even though what had been fought for was a monarchy with powers circumscribed by Parliament.

Whatever their individual views, the regicides as a body held that people had the right to worship as they chose (though,
being sons of the Reformation, they were strongly opposed both to the papacy and bishops). They believed men had a duty to
work together within society to improve the lot of mankind. An absolutist king clinging to notions of divine prerogative and
an unreformed religion was seen as inimical to progress.

The regicides have bequeathed a series of reforms which underpin a good deal of the structure of Britain today. Thanks to
John Lambert, we have the blueprint for today’s political system. In 1653 he created Britain’s only written constitution,
in which the Lord Protector was advised by a Council of State and all legislation had to be passed by Parliament – how similar
to today’s parliamentary democracy with Cabinet government this is.

They had much to offer on the legal front. First, they reasserted the freedoms established under Magna Carta and common law.
Through freedom of speech and the rule of law they ensured that the people had the sort of rights and freedoms that have developed
into a modern liberal democracy.

At a more specific legal level, thanks to John Bradshaw and John
Cook, a defendant in court had the right not to incriminate himself the right to silence. Cook proposed the ‘cab rank’ rule
for barristers, by which advocates had the duty to take a case, and he proposed a scheme to fund cases for the poor – an early
form of legal aid. Both these reforms survive today, ensuring that society’s poorest can obtain legal representation. During
the Commonwealth, English was made the language of the courts and of the law books. Cook also proposed reforms of a social
nature, including the introduction of free health care for the poor.

On the wider political front, the writings of Algernon Sidney, that convert to the regicide cause, enthused John Adams and
Thomas Jefferson and helped inspire the American Constitution. Though derided in their own land, in America the men who judged
the king and found him wanting are lauded as apostles of liberty.

What would they make of modern Britain? They would marvel that the monarchy has been stripped of all active power but is kept
on largely for ceremonial purposes. They would exult in the manner in which orderly elections are held and how defeated governments
give way without violence. They would be astounded that women and even the unemployed have the vote. One would like to think
that once they saw how well this broad enfranchisement appears to work, they would become reconciled to it.

Coming from an age of political fervour, they would be saddened at how few of the electorate bother to vote. At first they
would be baffled by the common complaint that all the main political parties are somehow ‘all the same’. On closer inspection,
the regicides would notice there was something in this and wonder if it might be due to the fact that guiding moral principles
now play so little part in politics.

One aspect of British public life would cause them immense concern – that there is hardly ever a mention of God. They would
be dismayed to learn that the only avowedly religious prime minister of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries,
Tony Blair, is a convert to Catholicism.

So, the seventeenth-century regicides, puritanical, often brutal, yet defiantly reformist, would find much to like and much
to criticise. They would see that an excellent job has been made of building on the foundations they put down in the seventeenth
century but notice there are still some flaws in the design. They would certainly like to make a few suggestions.

And what of the king’s revenge? As British history is habitually told via the stories of kings and queens, tales of Charles
II and his wonderfully corrupt and licentious court have unfairly obscured the histories of the men who killed a king in order
to let freedom live. As John Cook wrote shortly before he was executed: ‘We fought for the public good and would have enfranchised
the people and secured the welfare of the whole groaning creation if the nation had not more delighted in servitude than in
freedom.’