The King's Revenge (7 page)

Approaching the execution block, Charles realised it was so low that to place his head upon it he would have to lie flat on
his belly. He asked if it could be raised up so he could at least have the dignity of kneeling, but was told it could not.
It seems this was not some final, mean-spirited humiliation of the king. The executioner had brought a small block he could
easily carry.

The king instructed the executioner not to strike until he saw him signal by thrusting his hands forward. The headsman consented.
Charles lay down and placed his head on the block. As the executioner stooped to move a wayward wisp of hair sticking out
from under the king’s cap at the nape of his neck, the king nervously asked a second time if he understood to wait for the
signal. This was no small matter. Charles wanted to make sure the blade did not fall
until he had composed himself. A severed head with staring eyes would be a bad image for a martyr. Certain that the headsman
understood his instruction, Charles lay down and placed his head on the block. After a brief prayer, he thrust out his hands.
When the executioner’s assistant held up the severed head for the crowd to see, Charles’s eyes were modestly closed and the
expression the very look of a royal martyr.

Instead of shouting the traditional words, ‘Behold the head of a traitor!’ the assistant threw the head down with such force
that the right cheek was bruised. Among the vast crowd, many groaned, while others cheered. Some rushed forward to dip handkerchiefs
in the blood running off the block, either as mementoes or as talismans. Soldiers, it was said, dipped their swords in the
royal blood.

Immediately after the execution there arose much speculation (which has continued to the present day) as to the identity of
the executioners. It is likely that the main executioner was the ‘common hangman’, Richard Brandon. The king’s head was expertly
severed by a heavy blow that sliced cleanly through the neck’s fourth vertebra.

Brandon did not survive long after the king’s execution. Five months later, on 20 June 1649, following Brandon’s death, an
anonymous tract appeared claiming to be his confession.
⁶
The tract claimed that it came to be written after Brandon confessed all to ‘a young man of his acquaintance’. According
to the published confession, Brandon was paid £30 for the job – and told his wife it was ‘the deerest money that ever he earn’d
in his life, for it would cost him his life’. Brandon soon lapsed into a fever and ‘lay raging and swearing, and still pointing
at one thing or another, which he conceived to appear visible before him’. The tract also quoted ‘a neighbour’ who said that
Brandon had told him that at the very moment he was about to strike the blow to execute the king, a great pain struck him
in his neck that had continued ever since; and that he had been so troubled by the fact that the king would not give him forgiveness
for what he was about to do that he had never slept quietly since. Of course, it may be
that the tract was entirely made up in order to cash in on the death of the notorious hangman, or designed to muddy the waters
and divert suspicion from other candidates for the role.

Within two days of the execution, royalist pamphlets were circulating, describing the unjust killing of the king. Word of
Charles’s death began to filter through to the Continent. At first, no one knew whether to believe the stories or not. Queen
Henrietta was in Paris with two of their children waiting fearfully for word. Two hundred miles to the north in The Hague,
the Prince of Wales and his brother and sister also waited. Rumours were circulating in both cities, but neither queen nor
prince would have firm news about events in London for several days.

The news finally reached The Hague and the Royal Palace on 4 February. William of Orange broke the sad news to his wife of
her father’s death by execution. Mary was too shaken to undertake the task of breaking the news to her brothers. The burden
therefore fell to a senior member of the small Stuart retinue, Dr Stephen Goffe, an ardent royalist who as a chaplain to Charles
I had carried secret messages for the king after he had been taken into captivity. When the situation became too dangerous
for the clerical agent he had taken a boat for the Continent and was now chaplain to the Prince of Wales. Goffe’s family had
split over the question of king or Parliament. Stephen’s brother William was a colonel in the parliamentary army and would
later become revered in America as an upholder of liberty.

Goffe steeled himself for the task. As the oldest member of the household and a chaplain to two generations of the royal family,
it was his duty. Entering the prince’s chamber, he got to the heart of the matter at once by addressing the eighteen-year-old
prince as ‘Your Majesty’. Grasping the significance, Charles burst into tears and fled from the room. The prince’s reaction,
according to his advisor Edward Hyde, was of understandable shock: ‘The barbarous stroke so surprised him that he was in all
the confusion imaginable and all about him were almost bereft of their understanding.’
⁷

Charles was now a penniless king without a kingdom. Nine weeks later, his first son was born to his mistress Lucy Walter,
the first of many children born out of wedlock as the prince sought to obliterate the world in sex and personal pleasure.
On the surface, Charles still seemed as frivolous and charming as ever, but to those who knew him something seemed to harden
inside him after his father’s death.

By the time news reached Holland of the execution, the king had not yet been buried. Thomas Herbert recorded that immediately
after Charles’s death, he met Fairfax in the Long Gallery of Westminster Palace. Herbert was surprised when Fairfax asked
him how things went with the king. Next, Herbert met Oliver Cromwell, also coming along the Long Gallery. Cromwell was much
more to the point and told Herbert that he would have ‘orders for the King’s burial speedily’.
⁸
The interesting point here is that when the axe fell, both men were supposedly in a prayer meeting together, yet one appeared
aware of exactly what had happened on the scaffold and the other did not. Since all of London knew that Charles had been executed,
it is most unlikely that the supreme army commander did not. One may suppose that Fairfax was in some form of denial, or else
he had shut himself away so that he might genuinely not know the precise time of the execution, thereby distancing himself
from the business. An alternative explanation is that Fairfax may have believed that an appeal he had made earlier in the
day for a postponement of the sentence had been successful. His future actions, however, would reveal much more about the
commander-in-chief’s changes of mind.

Odd though this seemed at the time – and still does today – the king left no specific instructions for his burial. Despite
this, those close to him had begun planning his funeral some time before his execution. When his head and body were carried
indoors from the scaffold, everything was ready to embalm the corpse and place it in a wooden coffin. A thin lead casing was
formed around the coffin to seal it and it was wrapped in a dark velvet covering.
⁹

The king’s close allies, including Bishop Juxon, decided he should be buried in Westminster Abbey, a traditional burial place
of England’s kings and queens. They wished him to be placed in the chapel of Henry VII, from whom he was descended, and where
his father and brother were buried, along with Edward VI, Mary Queen of Scots and Queen Elizabeth. Thomas Herbert applied
to the new governing council for permission for burial in the abbey. Unsurprisingly, it was denied, the reason given that
it would be ‘inconvenient’. Having a newly martyred king buried right in the centre of the nation’s spiritual power was the
last thing the republicans wanted.

Herbert and Juxon decided the best way forward was to apply for permission to bury the king at Windsor Castle. Charles had
been fond of the castle and also held the Chapel of St George in high regard. The crypt of the chapel housed the remains of
several kings: Henry VI, Henry VIII and Edward IV, who had rebuilt the chapel in English Perpendicular splendour. This time,
their application was successful. On 6 February, Parliament authorised Herbert to bury the king at Windsor.

The following day, six horses covered in black pulled a black hearse from the courtyard of St James’s Palace and headed for
Windsor. Four carriages followed, carrying Herbert and the bishop, along with various retainers who had served the king since
he was taken into army captivity. Upon arrival, the coffin was first taken to the Dean’s House and then laid in Charles’s
old bedroom while Herbert and the rest of them went to look at the chapel. They decided the best resting place was the vault
in which Edward IV was interred on the north side of the choir.

As with almost everything relating to the king’s final days, even the choice of a resting place for his corpse would not be
straightforward. While Herbert and his companions were inspecting the vault, a group of royalist nobles came in, among them
the Duke of Richmond, the Earl of Southampton and the Earl of Lindsey. This group insisted upon viewing all the options for
themselves. While
this was going on, one of them beat with his staff on the paving stones, which rang with a hollow sound. According to Herbert,
the paving was removed and earth dug up to reveal a vault that ran under the choir. The nobles descended and discovered that
the vault contained two coffins, one of which was ‘very large of antique form, the other little’.
¹⁰
These coffins, they surmised, surely contained the bodies of Henry VIII and his third wife, Jane Seymour, who was known to
be buried beside her husband (this was confirmed by research 160 years later).
¹¹
The nobles agreed that the vault was the place to bury the king.

Charles’s coffin was carried from his bedroom down to St George’s Hall, where it was placed for a time under a black velvet
pall. A small entourage gathered to carry the king to the chapel under a clear blue sky. No sooner had they left the hall
than snow began to fall, turning the pall white. As the bishop opened his copy of the Book of Common Prayer to read from it
the order for the burial of the dead, there was another crisis. The governor of the castle, Colonel Whitchcott, intervened,
saying the Book of Common Prayer was no longer allowed. And so Charles Stuart went to his grave without even the words he
would have wished for to be read over his body. Thomas Herbert recorded that the total cost of the funeral was £229 5s, of
which £130 was paid to pall bearers and others he described as ‘seventeen gentlemen and other inferior servants for mourning’.
¹²

And so England entered a new era without a king – except, of course, that there was one, of sorts. Across the water in Holland,
the followers of Charles, Prince of Wales, declared him king. All he had to do was find a kingdom. The problem facing him
was that while he had little material support, those who had brought his father to the scaffold had one of the finest armies
ever seen. So how was he to find his way back, if at all?

January 1649—October 1651

On the day Charles Stuart was executed, pamphlets appeared on the streets of London proclaiming the Prince of Wales as Charles
II. A few copies of a small book also passed furtively from hand to hand. Four days later, street hawkers were selling it
on the streets.
¹
The book carried no publisher’s marks or printer’s name but was purported to have been written by Charles I himself. Its
message was that the king had died the death of a holy martyr. The book played a major role in bolstering royalist resistance,
turning shock and dismay to outrage and the desire for revenge against Cromwell and all the other representatives of the new
republic.
²

As soon as the new government appreciated the incendiary nature of the publication, they moved to ban it. But it was too late
– it quickly appeared on the Continent, spreading the cult of the martyr king. It became the biggest selling book of the century.
³

The book was titled in Greek,
Eikon Basilike
(‘The King’s Image’). It contained a series of short essays in which Charles justified his actions during the last decade
of his reign. Each essay was followed by a prayer. The king’s enemies were never blamed for his
misfortunes – they were not even mentioned by name. Instead, the king asked God for forgiveness and instructed his eldest
son to be forgiving also. Naturally, the Prince of Wales and his supporters were in no mood for forgiveness.

Eikon Basilike
was a propaganda coup. So many editions were rushed out that the zinc plate carrying the frontispiece of Charles the Martyr
had to be re-engraved eight times.
⁴
There was no doubt that public opinion, already swaying in the aftermath of his execution, was beguiled by the notion of
a martyred king. For the men who put Charles on trial and set up the republic,
Eikon Basilike
smacked of the Counter-Reformation. It was a Puritan’s nightmare.

Arguments persist about the exact authorship of
Eikon Basilike
. It appears that Charles began the book some time in 1647 or 1648, as a justification of his actions leading up to and throughout
the Civil Wars. When it became clear he would be tried and possibly executed, the work was completed either by Charles or
another hand. Likely candidates as ghost writers include the Bishop of Worcester, John Gauden, former royal chaplain Jeremy
Taylor, and Dr William Juxon, the Bishop of London.
⁵
Whoever had a hand in its creation, its power has been well put by Andrew Lacey: ‘This little book, perhaps more than anything
else, not only fixed the image of the martyr in the public mind, but also demonstrated the power of conservative, royalist
and Anglican patterns of thought and allegiance which survived the republic and emerged triumphant in 1660.’
⁶

Charles the victim became more attractive than Charles the monarch had ever been. What regal power and robes could not give
him, humility and suffering could. In a modest house in High Holborn near Lincoln’s Inn Fields, a forty-one-year-old writer
read the book with growing alarm. This was John Milton, the greatest poet of the age, and a participant in radical political
circles. Milton saw right away that an upsurge of sentiment in favour of hereditary monarchy could stop social and religious
reforms in their tracks. A
counter-blast was urgently needed – and Milton would write it. Though he was outwardly meek – he had been taunted at Oxford
for appearing somewhat feminine – inside was a will of iron.

He rushed to finish his work,
The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates
. Right from the beginning, he took on the cult of the divine right of kings in the bluntest of words: ‘No man who knows ought
can be so stupid to deny that all men were naturally born free.’
⁷

As a student at Cambridge, Milton had intended to become an Anglican priest, but turned away from it, feeling the Church was
taking a rigid and doctrinaire path. He also came to the conclusion that monarchy as practised by the Stuarts was authoritarian
and allied himself with the anti-monarchist cause. He began work on a treatise justifying the theoretical trial and sentencing
of a tyrant or unjust ruler. This became
The Tenure of Kings
. Milton maintained that a king’s right to rule did not come from God but from the people. Therefore, the people had the right
to remove a king.
⁸

What Milton set out was a theoretical basis for getting rid of hereditary monarchy. From earliest times, he said, people had
needed to work together or suffer the ‘destruction of them all’. To prevent organisational chaos, they had chosen one person
above the rest ‘for the eminence of his wisdom and integrity’. This person was called a king. The king was not the people’s
lord and master but their representative, and so could not be selected by inheritance.

To ensure the king would not abuse his powers, laws were invented, including a contract between the king and the people. If
the king forgot his duty to the people, the people could break their contract with the king. To put a limit on the king’s
power, the people decided to create parliaments, for ‘the Parliament was set as a bridle to the King’.
⁹

Finally, Milton turned his cold eye on Charles himself:

Was Milton present at the king’s trial? We don’t know; but he was making the arguments that were not made publicly during
the trial. Because Charles refused to recognise the court, John Cook had been unable to deliver his prepared justifications
for the trial. Though the trial has often been criticised, Milton’s arguments reveal the actions of the Rump Parliament and
the king’s judges in a clearer light, as indeed did Cook’s own arguments when they were published shortly after the trial.

Milton’s contention that kings could be deposed was extremely controversial at the time. The king’s authority was seen as
the bedrock of a peaceful and ordered society – Charles had argued as much during his trial. Other powerful minds agreed:
the philosopher and social theorist Thomas Hobbes for one. When Hobbes saw how the country was hurtling into civil war in
1641 he quickly reworked and strengthened a treatise he was writing on government and had it circulated.
¹⁰
Contrary to Milton, Hobbes maintained that once the people passed power to a ruler, it should stay there. His reasoning was
that if a ruler could be deposed, society might collapse into anarchy at any time.
¹¹
As he was famously to write, life would be ‘nasty, brutish and short’.
¹²
Hobbes’s concerns proved only too real – the social breakdown he feared came to pass in civil war. But while Hobbes was a
timid man, inherently scared of conflict, others embraced it, seeing it as the only way to resolve the power struggle between
king and Parliament. Interestingly, during the Prince of Wales’s early exile in Paris, Hobbes had briefly been his tutor,
specifically engaged to teach him mathematics. It would not have hurt either party that they shared a belief in absolute monarchy.

At The Hague in early 1649, the young Prince of Wales suddenly became a significant figure in European politics. While dealing
with his grief, he also had to decide how to win back his father’s crown. It would become apparent to Charles that most continental
powers would wait to see which way the wind was blowing. This meant that the immediate choice of countries from which to try
to launch an invasion was limited to Ireland and Scotland. Due to the Stuarts’ two-hundred-year association with the latter,
it seemed the better option. The prospective king would try his luck there. As for England, he would hope that widespread
shock at the overthrow of the country’s ancient certainties would prepare the ground for a triumphant homecoming.

Since the beginning of the Civil Wars, propaganda had played a major part in the fate of the Stuarts. The war of words had
begun during the early 1640s when newspapers blossomed in England. The conflict brought about a huge surge in the production
of pamphlets extolling the virtues of the opposing sides and lambasting the vices of their enemies.

The sparkling royalist news sheet
Mercurius Aulicus
(Court Mercury) was a good example. It made its first appearance in Oxford at the beginning of 1643, disseminating news about
King Charles’s war effort. But its genius lay in satirising the opposition. This was a breakthrough in contemporary journalism.
Before
Mercurius
appeared, news sheets had restricted themselves to publishing the news in a more or less factual manner. Now, they let go
of reality and lampooned the enemy.
¹³
Mercurius
was printed in Oxford and smuggled into London to undermine parliamentary support at a penny a time.
¹⁴

News sheets played an important role in the propaganda war on both sides. The parliamentary paper
Mercurius Britannicus
scored a propaganda coup when it published Charles’s private papers, captured at the Battle of Naseby in 1645. These revealed
the king’s plans to bring foreign mercenaries and an Irish (i.e. Catholic) army to fight against Parliament.

One of the oddest pieces of parliamentary propaganda was a tract by Francis Cheynell, a Presbyterian radical. Cheynell conjured
up an imaginary horror state ruled by Charles II – surely a preposterous eventuality!
¹⁵
Between 1647 and 1650, some fifty different titles were published, both royalist and parliamentary, with more than five hundred
actual editions.
¹⁶
Wives were not exempt from satirical attack: Elizabeth Cromwell and Lady Fairfax were portrayed fighting over which of their
husbands should be king.

In the face of changing fortunes, royalist propagandists decided to home in on one man – Oliver Cromwell. His military successes
had marked him out as the man to watch. His appearance was a gift to these early satirists; his lank hair, rugged features
and facial warts were exaggerated to portray him as an uncouth, untrustworthy type. Propaganda made the jump from satire to
the advocacy of murder in 1645. An edict appeared that purported to come from the Prince of Wales in exile, calling for some
gallant to murder Cromwell. This communication, most likely a forgery, was intercepted by Parliament’s intelligence chief,
John Thurloe.
¹⁷

In their efforts to render him ever more unattractive, royalist satirists accorded Cromwell the raffish trade of brewer and
dubbed him Nol – a diminutive of Oliver. They revelled in the fact that Cromwell’s great-grandfather had been a brewer who
ran a pub in Putney. Following Pride’s Purge, a royalist news sheet lampooned the Rump Parliament as ‘Nol’s Brew-house’, satirising
it as a group of brewers under Cromwell’s leadership: ‘The devil’s in the beer-brewers (I think).’ Among the central characters
only Colonel Pride had been a brewer, but the beery imagery allowed Cromwell’s enemies to savage his abilities, his probity
and his social qualifications for leadership, all at once.

People with a ready wit were much in demand on both sides during and after the wars. Writers even turned to verse and drama.
In 1647,
Craftie Cromwell
appeared, asking sarcastically if posterity would forget ‘Nol and his levelling crew’:

Mercurius Melancholicus
, by John Taylor, known as the Water Poet, concluded that the parliamentarians would surely not be forgotten but remembered
for their treachery:

All this knockabout fun stopped with the death of the king. Days later, followers of the Prince of Wales proclaimed him King
Charles II. Within weeks, Charles issued a bloodthirsty battle-cry against those who had sat in judgment of his father: ‘We
are firmly resolved, by the assistance of almighty God, to be severe avengers of the innocent blood of our dear father … to
chase, pursue, kill and destroy as traitors and rebels, and chiefly those bloody traitors who had any hand in our dear father’s
murder.’
¹⁹

The difference in tone from
Eikon Basilike
could not have been greater. As Jason Peacey has said of Charles’s pronouncement, ‘Such language of revenge … seems directly
responsible for the reign of terror instigated by exiled royalists upon representatives of the Rump posted to Europe during
1649–50.’
²⁰
In truth, for the bloodshed that followed, there were two agents: one inanimate in the form of
Eikon Basilike
, and the other the extremely animated form of Charles II, who would prove true to his word many years later. In the meantime,
his bloody rallying call and his father’s posthumous influence together provided a mixture as inflammable as air and petrol.

In the weeks and months following the king’s execution, English communities in northern European cities became hot with outrage
and revenge fever. In Hamburg, feeling ran so high that even those who had seen Charles as a despot were deeply affected.
A parliamentary spy reported: ‘The king’s death is strangely taken here by all sorts of people; we can scarce walk in the
streets. Tis scarce credible how bitterly the vulgar and better sorts of people do resent it, though few of them hold him
less than a tyrant.’
²¹