The Orphanmaster

Also by Jean Zimmerman

Love, Fiercely

The Women of the House: How a Colonial She-Merchant
Built a Mansion, a Fortune, and a Dynasty

Made from Scratch: Reclaiming the Pleasures of the American Hearth

Raising Our Athletic Daughters: How Sports Can Build Self-Esteem
and Save Girls’ Lives
(with Gil Reavill)

Tailspin: Women at War in the Wake of Tailhook

For the both of us

Our inheritance is turned to strangers, our houses to foreigners. We are orphans and fatherless, our mothers are as widows.

—
Lamentations
5:2–3

Prologue

Part One: Prince Maurice’s River

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Part Two: The Stadt Huys

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Part Three: The Place of Stones

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Part Four: The Crown Province of New York

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Epilogue

Author’s Note

October 8, 1663

O
n the same day, two murders.

In Delémont, in Switzerland’s Jura, the regicide William Crawley lived with his sister, hiding in plain sight in a
pension
on Faubourg des Capucins, near the hospital.

As the bells of Saint-Marcel sounded vespers, Crawley’s sister Barbara watched the dark descend upon the town from the second-floor terrace off the kitchen. Although ever vigilant, she failed to notice three figures slip from the Rue des Elfes, come through the black backyards across the street and approach the ground-floor entry of the
pension.

A Saint Martin summer, unseasonably hot. Barbara went into the kitchen, stood at the sink, sopped her face with water from the basin. As she bent over, holding a cooling rag to her neck, they grabbed her from behind, muffling a shriek of alarm.

Crawley, working at his desk upstairs in the cramped and stifling third-floor garret, heard the disturbance. A crash of crockery.

“Barbara?” he called, rising to his feet. He went to the stairwell and saw them coming up toward him, taking the steps three or four at a time, a pair of blade-thin men in identical black waistcoats and small caps.

“No!” Crawley shouted, lunging backward into his attic study, groping for his dog-lock
pistolet
, kept at hand on a shelf near his desk.

They were too quick. They burst in on him, the first attacker wrenching the barrel of Crawley’s gun upward. The hammer dry-fired, the powder pan fizzled, then finally exploded. But the lead ball embedded itself impotently in the garret’s low ceiling, showering them all with plaster dust and bits of lath.

Thus he was caught, fourteen years, eight months and eight days after he affixed his seal (“
Ego, Hon Wm Crawley
”) to a document that doomed Charles I, a sitting king sentenced to have his head separated
from his body. Puritan zealots, appalled by the Catholicism infecting the monarchy, demanded royal blood. The death warrant Crawley signed gave it to them.

On execution day, January 30, 1649, the condemned monarch wore two shirts, lest he shiver and seem to betray fear. The king of England, France and Ireland, the king of Scots, the Defender of the Faith, et cetera, asked the executioner, “Does my hair trouble you?” Charles I tucked the royal locks away from his neck beneath a cap, uttered a prayer, then splayed out his arms and received the blade.

And, inevitably, the revenge. It took a while. Charles Stuart, the murdered monarch’s son, escaped (barely) the Puritan furies on his trail, slipped across the Channel to the Continent and entered into a decade of exile. Unimpressed by the young man’s chances to regain his kingship, European royals turned their backs on him. Impoverished and ignored, he wandered, mostly in France and the Low Countries, anguished by his father’s execution, feeling bruised by history.

But the dynastic destiny of the Stuarts took a turn. On September 3, 1658, Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, rebel ringleader and “brave bad man” (Clarendon’s phrase), died while attempting to pass a kidney stone. After two more years of succession chaos, the English Parliament invited Charles II to return home and assume the throne.

As a gesture of royal largesse and reconciliation, the newly restored young monarch issued the Indemnity and Oblivion Act, pardoning all former rebels against the crown.

All except the fifty-nine judge-commissioners who signed the death warrant of his father, Charles I.

Some of those fifty-nine had already died. These had their bodies exhumed, propped up in their cerements before the bar at the Old Bailey, judged, condemned and, in the singular phrase of the day, “executed posthumously.” Cromwell’s corpse hung in chains from Tyburn gallows while his head rotted on a spike at Westminster.

The living signatories, William Crawley among them, were hunted down like outlaws. Located by men of the king’s chancellor, George Hyde, the Earl of Clarendon, who had them assiduously tracked to the provinces, Scotland, the Continent, America, to wherever in the world
they attempted to hide themselves. Puritan protectors of the regicides made the task difficult as well as dangerous.

In this case, an agent of the crown named Edward Drummond beat the bushes of Europe to turn up the king-killer Crawley, following his spoor from Scotland to Paris, Münster and finally Switzerland. It was no simple task, finding a single needle in the haystack of the Continent, but Drummond made short work of it. The man, Clarendon believed, worked miracles. Without his efforts, the murderer Crawley would never feel the lash of the crown’s revenge.

Clarendon could not ask a gentleman such as Drummond to perform the execution himself. He had other men for that, lean and hungry low-born men. After Drummond located the regicide, Clarendon sent out the assassins. Drummond was long gone by the time they arrived.