It was said the common hangman of London had refused the task of beheading his king, swearing ‘he would be shot… rather than do it’.22 Known as ‘Young Gregory’, after his father and namesake who had held the post before him, he had already beheaded Strafford and Laud and was extremely skilled at a difficult job. The type of axe used for English executions was designed to chop and shape logs, as the French doctor who had attended the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, had noted with dismay. It had a slant in the blade, to shave wood. If you didn’t know what you were doing with such an axe the blow would not strike where it was intended, but fall askew, landing on the skull or the back. The king’s life could easily end in crude butchery.
Charles walked to the middle of the scaffold and looked ‘very earnestly’ at the block. There were ropes and chains in case he struggled. The block itself was scarcely more than a hewn log on the ground, eighteen inches long by six in height.23 He would have to lie flat. Charles balked at that and asked ‘if there was no higher’.24 It was explained that this was what an efficient block looked like. Mollified, he took out the notes for his speech. ‘I shall be very little heard of anybody here, I shall therefore speak a word unto you,’ he said to those on the scaffold. He still wished to make the final defence he had been denied in court. He was innocent, he said, of starting the war and before God he had never wished to take Parliament’s privileges. On the contrary, Parliament had taken his privileges, beginning with the militia. God was punishing him, not for the war, but for his role in another unjust sentence, ‘that I suffered to take effect’. He did not mention Strafford’s name. He did not need to.
For his own death he forgave those who were ‘the chief causers… Who they are God knows. I do not desire to know.’ He hoped, however, that they would repent, ‘for indeed they have committed a great sin’: not only rebellion against a divinely ordained ruler, but regicide.
As Charles talked on, a soldier restlessly shifted his position and brushed against the axe. Charles paused and turned, rebuking him, ‘Hurt not the axe that may hurt me.’ A blunt blade, even in the hand of an expert, would end with the executioner hacking and hewing. Such had been the fate of Mary, Queen of Scots, whose ladies-in-waiting had witnessed the axe being used to saw at the last sinews that secured her head to her shoulders.
As Charles continued, his speech recalled the words on the standard he had raised at Nottingham in 1642 at the outbreak of civil war: give Caesar his due. ‘God will never prosper you, until you give him his due, the king his due (that is my successors) and the people their due… I desire their liberty and freedom as much as anybody whomsoever’, but, ‘I must tell you’ that true liberty and freedom lay in the rule of law, ‘by which their life and good may be their own. It is not for having a share of government, sirs, that is nothing pertaining to them. A subject and a sovereign are clean different things.’ Yet it was for his subjects that he would die: ‘I am a martyr of the people.’
Charles stopped, but Juxon now reminded him that he had yet to say something on the Church of England. ‘I had almost forgotten it!’ Charles exclaimed, with the relief of a schoolboy whose recital was almost over. ‘I declare before you all that I die a Christian according to the profession of the Church of England as I found it left me by my father.’ Turning to the officer in charge of the execution Charles asked, ‘Take care that they do not put me to pain.’
He then turned to a second soldier, who again was clumsily pushing against the axe, and this time a febrile concern was more evident. ‘Take heed of the axe, pray, take heed of the axe,’ he repeated. Then he instructed the executioner. ‘I shall say but a very short prayer and then thrust out my hands.’ Having called Juxon for his nightcap he put it on. ‘Does my hair trouble you?’ he asked the executioner. It did, and the man helped tuck his hair away. Charles did not seem to mind his killer’s touch. ‘There is but one stage more,’ Juxon reassured his king. ‘I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown where no disturbance can be,’ Charles observed. ‘It is a good exchange,’ Juxon confirmed. Charles was prepared. His last words would be for Juxon alone.
Charles took off his cloak and handed his onyx George to the bishop. Every new knight was admonished, at his installation, ‘in all just Battles and War… strongly to fight, valiantly to stand, and honourably to have the victory’. Seeking that victory was now to be the burden of his heir. ‘Remember,’ he said to Juxon. The king’s George depicting the slaying of the dragon of rebellion was for the new sovereign of the Order.
Charles lay down flat and put his head on the low block. A doctor, who had a good view, said he caught the king’s eye, which was ‘quick and lively’.25 After a short moment Charles thrust out his hands. The fishnet only minimally obscured the executioner’s view. The axe fell clean. His assistant picked up the rolling head and held it high, ‘the usual words uttered: behold the head of a traitor’.26
A Royalist, writing much later, said the crowd then gave up a ‘groan as I have never heard before and I desire I may never hear again’. In truth not everyone was saddened. The soldiers showed delight, taking their plunder, and ‘round the armed bands / Did clap their bloody hands’.27 An officer cut the diamond garter from Charles’s left leg. ‘His hair was cut off. Soldiers dipped their swords in his blood’ and swore at his body.28 After Charles’s corpse was taken to a room at the back of Whitehall to be embalmed, the soldiers continued to hack at the wood on the scaffold, hoping to sell the bloodstained chips, along with the locks of Charles’s hair, either as items of curiosity or as holy relics–they did not much care which.29
Their brothers in arms broke up the crowd and the executioner was whisked off to be smuggled away on a barge. The waterman remembered the man seemed terrified and that ‘he shook every joint of him’. His name remains a mystery, but the professional efficiency with which Charles was dispatched suggests it was, after all, Young Gregory himself.
Princess Elizabeth and little Henry were at the Earl of North-umberland’s Syon House when their father was beheaded. It must have been a comfort for the grieving children when the Dutch envoys of their elder sister Mary, Princess of Orange, visited them. The envoys found no signs of a household in mourning. Only the children were in black. The countess greeted the envoys dressed as for any other day.30 The information the spy Thomas Herbert had passed to his political masters ensured that anything of value that Charles had given Elizabeth and Henry had been confiscated and would be up for sale, along with the onyx George that Charles had bequeathed to the new Charles II.* Larger goods destined for auction, such as Charles’s paintings, furniture and tapestries, were stacked up at Denmark House where, for the first time, soldiers, clergymen, lawyers and other ordinary folk could now see great European art.
It was possible also to see the corpse of the king who had collected this art. Parliament and the army had to ensure there was no doubt that Charles was dead. There had been uncertainty in the past over the fate of overthrown monarchs. Had Richard II survived imprisonment at Pontefract Castle in 1400? Had the Princes in the Tower escaped in 1483? Such questions had fuelled revolt against the rule of their successors. A surgeon had therefore been employed to embalm the king’s corpse and sew his head back in place. He described the task as like stitching the head back on a goose. People paid a ha’penny to view his work and Charles’s body at Whitehall.31 In the days that followed others then queued to see it at St James’s Palace.32
A contemporary image has a sheet pulled up to Charles’s chin, as if he were lying in bed. A fanciful story emerged in the eighteenth century that even Cromwell came to see the body one night, and was heard muttering ‘Cruel necessity.’ A contemporary witness later span another legend, claiming the dead king was smiling as ‘perfectly as if he were alive’.33 In fact, far from smiling his face was bruised. The executioner’s assistant, who had held up the decapitated head for the crowd, had dropped it heavily.34 But the bodies of martyrs are said to defy the brutality of their end, and it was as a martyr
this witness was remembering his king.
On the streets Charles’s last testimony, the Eikon Basilike, was running off the presses. The first copies were already on sale, promoting him as a ‘martyr of the people’, who had died for liberties and the Protestant religion. It sold in huge numbers. There would be forty impressions and issues in 1649 in England alone, and twenty more in Latin, Dutch, French, German and Danish.
Henrietta Maria was dining in the Louvre when she learned that her ‘Dear Heart’ was dead. The blow left her utterly stunned. She sat ‘without words, without action, without motion, like a statue’, her women weeping around her until night began to fall. It was at the Louvre that they had met over quarter of a century before. Now, as Charles’s widow, she was ‘able to see all she had lost and what she owed to the memory of a king who had loved her much’.35 As the candles flickered in the gloom, her sister-in-law, the Duchesse de Vendôme, at last raised her up and led her from the room.36
The future James II, who was in Paris with his mother, would never speak or write of what had occurred, even in his memoirs of the civil war. It was too personal and too painful. In The Hague Mary was reported to be extremely bitter. Her eldest brother, the new Charles II, had learned of his father’s death only when he was addressed by his new title. He broke down and wept.
* One day it would come in very useful.
* The seals Charles had left Elizabeth and Henry were amongst the things listed for sale. The George, purchased for £70, would be sold on to Charles II by one of the officers who had attended the king’s execution–a Colonel Thomlinson. A brother of Cromwell’s son-in-law, Ireton, would purchase the garter Charles wore on his knee on the scaffold for £205, well above its valuation of £160. Its 412 diamonds were broken up for profit and resale.
25
RESURRECTION
IT WAS JUDGED ‘UNSAFE AND INCONVENIENT’ FOR CHARLES TO BE buried in Westminster Abbey, alongside his parents King James and Anna of Denmark, and the infant children he and Henrietta Maria had lost. In such a public spot his tomb could too easily become a place of pilgrimage.1 Instead, on 7 February 1649, Charles’s body was sent out of London, ‘without pomp or noise’, on a simple bier drawn by six horses, each trapped in black velvet.2 Its destination was the garrisoned castle at Windsor. Charles’s plain coffin rested that night in his former bedchamber. The next day, MPs granted four of his former noble servants permission to oversee his burial in the security of St George’s Chapel: the earls of Lindsey and Southampton, the Marquess of Hertford, and Charles’s cousin, the Duke of Richmond.
Richmond had been made a Gentleman of the Bedchamber when he was only thirteen and had become amongst the most glamorous members of Charles’s court. Van Dyck had painted Richmond many times–twice with his favourite hound, a huge, sharp-faced, elegant dog, gazing up at his master. Dogs symbolise fidelity and Richmond had certainly proved faithful to Charles through all that had brought him here. He had three younger brothers killed in action, and aged only thirty-six he was already in breaking health and destined for an early grave.
The four great peers were allowed to take three servants each and permitted to spend up to £500: a tenth of what had been spent on the funeral of the Parliamentarian general Essex in 1646.3 They arrived at Windsor that afternoon, together with William Juxon. Richmond wore the insignia of the Order of the Garter, St George killing the dragon: that symbol of sin and of rebellion. The chivalric virtues the Order exalted–of a band of brothers bound to each other and their prince under God–had lain at the heart of Charles’s view of kingship. Putting on his own George had been Charles’s first action every morning, and taking it off was the last of his life.
As the men now entered the chapel where the Order was celebrated they saw that the impressive tomb of Charles’s ancestor, Edward IV, lay open.4 The vault was easily accessible and it had seemed an appropriate choice of burial spot to the military governor of the castle, Colonel Whitchcote. Parliament’s latest orders were, however, that Charles be buried more anonymously, ‘in H. VIII. his chapel, or the quire there’.5
Henry VIII had intended that a great mausoleum be built for him here, but the terror he had evoked had died with him and his orders had been ignored. The popish statues and ironwork destined for his tomb had lain abandoned in the junk room known as his ‘chapel’ for decades. In 1646 they had at last been sold or destroyed. Henry VIII’s body lay instead in an unmarked grave beneath the stone floor between the quire stalls, and the exact spot was long forgotten. The noblemen now helped search for Henry’s lost tomb in the narrow space of the quire, one tapping the ground with a staff, the others stamping with their boots. At last there was a hollow ring. The stones and earth were removed and Richmond stepped down into the gloom.
In the torchlight Richmond saw two coffins near each other, ‘the one very large of antique form, the other little’. It was clear whose they were: Henry VIII and his third queen, Jane Seymour, the mother of his son. Each was covered with velvet cloth, perfectly preserved.6
Richmond ordered a girdle of lead be made for Charles’s coffin, engraved ‘KING CHARLES’, along with the year of his death. The sexton was then asked to ensure the chapel was locked for the night.
The following morning, Charles’s coffin was brought down into St George’s Hall in readiness for the internment. There was a delay after it was discovered there had been a break-in at the vault. A soldier from the garrison was found carrying a piece of Henry VIII’s skeleton. He said he had intended to whittle the bone into a handle for a knife.7 The war had made plunder a way of life. Even Colonel Whitchcote had taken images connected with the Garter from the chapel.8
It was almost three o’clock in the afternoon when Charles’s coffin was at last carried out of the hall. Thomas Herbert recalled a ‘serene and clear day’, the coffin borne by ‘gentlemen that were of quality and in mourning’ and the four peers carrying a black velvet pall.9 Behind them Juxon led a short procession of their servants. As they stepped forward, however, it began to snow and the spinning flakes soon ‘fell so fast, as by that time they came to the west end of the royal chapel, the black velvet pall was all white’.10 The ‘colour of innocence’ was how Herbert later described it, and recalled Charles as ‘the White King’ who, it was said, was crowned in white. The loyal servant of Parliament surely did not believe in Charles’s innocence that day and the snow may be a myth.* Yet Herbert’s image fills the void where otherwise there is only the slow tramp of men walking. This was not a funeral, merely a burial. Colonel Whitchcote had refused Juxon permission to use the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer, reminding him it was ‘put down’ by Parliament.
No prayers were read as Charles’s mourners gathered in the chapel, and it was in silence that his coffin was lowered into the blackness of the vault.
Two days after Charles was buried, the trial of Henry Rich, Earl of Holland, began. Once a client of the royal favourite George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, Holland had become, as Groom of the Stool, Charles’s closest body servant. Yet he had betrayed Charles to play a leading role in the outbreak of the first civil war. Holland had twice returned to the king’s cause. His last adventure now looked set to cost Holland his life. Aging and ill, Holland stood accused of treason, but he remained as unrepentant of turning coat against Parliament as he had been about his earlier betrayal of the king.
The rebellion Holland had joined against the king in 1642 was a conservative revolt led by the political heirs of his uncle, Elizabeth I’s last favourite, the 2nd Earl of Essex. He insisted his career was marked not by betrayal, but by his loyalty ‘to the public and very particularly to Parliament’. He had hoped they would quickly secure Parliament’s rights in a ‘mixed monarchy’ and the restoration of the Church of England’s Calvinist credentials. It was the cause that had changed. As it became ever more radical it had ‘carried them further than I thought reasonable, and, truly, there I left them’, he admitted. ‘But there is nothing I have said or done or profess
ed… which has not been very constant and clear… to serve the King, Parliament, Religion.’11
On 6 March Holland’s trial concluded in a guilty verdict. His role during the Eleven Years’ Tyranny, when he had raised money for the king through Forest fines, and so aided Charles’s bid to rule without Parliament, and his ‘misstep’ in 1643 when he had deserted Parliament’s cause to join Charles at Oxford, both told against him. So did his breaking of his word not to betray Parliament again, and instead attempting to raise an army in 1648. John Bradshawe, who had pronounced the death sentence on the king, did the same on Holland.
Over the following three days Holland prepared for his death with prayer. Warwick, General Fairfax, his wife and friends pleaded with MPs to grant Holland mercy. His death sentence was, in the end, confirmed by a majority of only one: ‘So his life was lost by that small part of a man’s breath,’ a relative recorded sadly.12 On 9 March 1649, Holland was escorted to the scaffold outside Westminster Hall in New Palace Yard. He gave his speech explaining his actions, standing in the blood from the beheading earlier that morning of the Scottish commander, the Duke of Hamilton.
Holland, famous for his elegant dress, was ready now to ‘outbrave death’ in a good suit. It was a perk for an executioner to have the right to sell the clothes of the prisoner he had executed. Holland, however, had thought of this. ‘Here, my friend,’ he said to the executioner, handing him a bag of gold, ‘let my clothes and my body alone. There is £10 for thee.13 That is better than my clothes I am sure of it.’ He was preparing to lie down on the low block, when he spoke to the executioner again: ‘Friend, do you hear me, if you take up my head do not take off my cap.’ He was about to lose his head. He did not want his head also to lose its hat.
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