Behind the Palace Doors

by Michael Farquhar

  Whether by design or not, Arbella had won from the reluctant king an extended respite in Barnet. She did not waste the opportunity. With the help of her maternal aunt Mary Talbot, she began amassing money for an extraordinarily ambitious, if not impossible, plan: to free herself from the clutches of the bishop of Durham while her husband made a simultaneous escape from the Tower of London; then to sail away together to the Continent, where they would live forever free of the vengeful king. It almost worked.

  On Monday, June 3, 1611, Arbella, disguised as a man and accompanied by her gentleman servant, slipped out of Barnet, headed for the town of Blackwall on the Thames. There she was to meet her husband after his own escape from the Tower. Because of her rank and station, and because she was supposedly sick, Arbella had not been held in close confinement. Escape was relatively easy, therefore. She just got on a horse and, riding like a man, took off.

  William Seymour was held in similarly loose confinement at the Tower, where he was free to move about the complex and enjoyed a furnished suite of rooms above Traitor’s Gate. And though his escape was certainly nerve-wracking enough—he might have been exposed at any moment—in the end it was really, like Arbella’s, just a matter of walking away in disguise.

  Yet despite the relative ease of their escapes, the plan was treasonous and exposed them to extreme dangers—torture and execution among them. Furthermore, freeing themselves was only the first step. They still had to connect at Blackwall, and that would prove agonizing.

  Arbella arrived first, and with no sign of her husband, she waited. Hours went by and no William. He had been delayed and, because it was getting late, decided to go straight to the port of Leigh, where they were to board a ship to France. Arbella had no way of knowing this, however, and, after waiting in Blackwall until it became too dangerous to stay there any longer, sadly moved on to Leigh herself. There she and her small party found the boat that was to take them to Calais. William wasn’t on it. Arbella was in despair, but with the winds turning, they had to be off. She didn’t know that her husband had connected with another ship and had set sail as well. Only one of them would ever make it to France.

  King James was wild with fury when he heard that the couple had slipped away. Not only had his authority been flaunted, but he believed his throne was at stake should Arbella ally herself with a foreign power. Catholics were rooted out as potential enemies, and Bess of Hardwick was arrested. A royal proclamation demanded the return of the fugitives who had committed “divers great and heinous offences,” while foreign courts were alerted to the news in the most urgent terms. The chase was on.

  “James always reacted with near-hysteria to the thought of any threat,” wrote Sarah Gristwood—“a legacy of that youth of alarums, excursions and abductions, when the assassin’s dagger was never far away. To his ever-fearful imagination, this was not a romantic escapade. It was a political threat—an enormity.”

  A small armada was sent to search for the runaways in the English Channel. Griffen Cockett, captain of the pinnace Adventure, spotted Arbella’s ship off the coast of Calais, where she had insisted it stop to wait for William. The captain of her ship, a Frenchman by the name of Tassin Corvé, tried to run from the Adventure, but the winds were against him. Cockett opened fire, which, after some time, finally convinced Arbella to surrender. Still defiant, she was “not so sorry for her own restraint as she should be glad if Mr. Seymour might escape,” reported Sir John Moore.

  William Seymour did indeed escape, to Bruges. It was “a thing of no such consequence,” Robert Cecil sniffed. Arbella was the real prize. And now she took her husband’s place in the Tower—never to emerge again.

  There was no heroic end to the story, no dramatic last stand from the woman who had defied the will of two monarchs. Held in rigid confinement, alone and all but abandoned, Arbella gradually gave up hope, took to her bed, and slowly faded away. Four years later, on September 25, 1615, she died, having refused to eat or drink. “Her death is deplored by a great number of the chief of the people,” the Venetian envoy reported. “The king has not said a word about it.”

  * Catherine’s spouse, Edward Seymour, was the son of the Duke of Somerset, the Lord Protector, who was executed for treason during the reign of his nephew Edward VI (see Chapter 2). Catherine was already pregnant when she entered the Tower and had her son there. Then, apparently with the connivance of the Lieutenant of the Tower, Catherine and Edward managed to get together and produce another boy, much to Queen Elizabeth’s displeasure. The enraged monarch permanently separated the couple when she sent her cousin away to live under house arrest. Catherine died of tuberculosis five years later, in 1568, after which Edward Seymour was released from the Tower.

  10

  Charles I (1625–1649): With His Head Held High

  I would know by what power I am called hither.

  —KING CHARLES I

  The reign of Charles I, who succeeded his father, James I, in 1625, was marked by frequent clashes between the king and Parliament that culminated in civil war. Charles and his Royalist supporters were eventually defeated by Parliamentarian forces in 1649, after which the king was tried and executed for treason.

  King Charles I had little in common with his father. Where James I had been rather crude, with a fondness for drink and pretty young men, Charles was dignified in every degree, a connoisseur of fine art, and completely devoted to his wife. Nevertheless, father and son did share one dominant trait: an exalted view of kingship. “The state of monarchy is the supremest thing upon earth,” James I had rhapsodized, “for kings are not only God’s lieutenants upon earth and sit upon God’s throne, but even by God himself they are called gods.” Charles I tenaciously adhered to this principle, and in the end it cost him his head.

  History has not been kind to the second Stuart monarch, and with much cause. Charles was an exceedingly small man who brooked no opposition and reacted violently to any perceived intrusion upon his royal prerogative. His worldview was essentially medieval, with the king atop an ordered hierarchy where power trickled down. Parliaments, he believed, were merely instruments to carry out his will. In this Charles was woefully out of synch with the evolving political order, and his inability, or unwillingness, to recognize it had terrible consequences.

  Though the precise causes of the bloody civil wars that ravaged Britain in the 1640s will forever be debated, the policies of Charles I certainly played no small part. Compromise was anathema to this king, and he was unwilling to listen to legitimate grievances over his arbitrary rule. To concede anything would be to diminish his high office and the established order. “I will rather die than yield to these impertinent and damnable demands,” Charles wrote with characteristic obstinacy, this time in response to resistance to the religious policies he sought to impose in Scotland, “for it is all one, as to yield to be no King in a very short time.” To defend his prerogatives, Charles I was willing to wage war in his own kingdom.

  It might be argued, charitably, that Charles’s stance was principled, grounded as it was in his belief that law and order in the realm depended upon a strong king and obedient subjects; that anything less would inevitably lead to anarchy. But he betrayed his own elevated view of monarchy by consistently reneging “on the word of a king.” Whenever he was trapped, Charles simply lied to extricate himself and to regain the upper hand. This is what ultimately doomed him. Indeed, by the time compromise might have saved his life, the word of the king meant nothing.

  Charles I was, in short, a bad king. Yet for all his many flaws, he managed to redeem himself when all was lost. A transformation took place during his trial and subsequent execution that actually made him great. “His death gave his life a tragic dignity,” wrote historian Charles Carlton. “In dying he showed grandeur in place of meanness, resolve instead of vacillation, honesty where duplicity had often been the norm.”

  On January 20, 1649, King Charles, defeated in war and now a prisoner, was led into Westminster Hall to stand tria
l for treason. It was in this same hall, almost twenty-three years before, that the king sat regally upon his throne, attended by the nation’s great nobles, as he prepared for his coronation. Now, facing the assembled tribunal alone, without counsel, he heard the charges against him.

  The king, it was declared, had “caused and procured many thousands of this nation to be slain” in the civil wars. “All which wicked designs, wars, and evil practices of the said Charles Stuart have been and are carried on for the advancement and upholding of a personal interest of will, power and pretended prerogative to himself and his family, against the public interest, common right, liberty, justice and peace of the people of this nation.” And for having caused the wars, the charges continued, Charles was “guilty of all the treasons, murders, rapines, burnings, spoils, desolations, damages and mischiefs” that arose from them.

  The preordained verdict was death, for that was the only reason the court had been assembled in the first place. The veneer of a fair and open trial was merely a pretense for judicial murder. “I tell you we will cut off his head with the crown upon it,” roared Oliver Cromwell, leader of the king’s enemies in Parliament.

  There was no precedent for putting a monarch on trial, and certainly no mandate. Such a thing was inconceivable for many who believed the king was the Lord’s anointed and at the apex of an ordered society. Indeed, only a small faction of extremists in the House of Commons had called for the trial; the majority of members opposed had been forcibly debarred by the army. And the House of Lords had withheld its approval entirely. Ironically, then, a king charged with tyranny against his own people was himself being tried in an unrepresentative, entirely illegal proceeding.

  Confronting what historian Michael B. Young described as a “makeshift court … assembled to engineer his execution,” Charles I managed to shine. He refused to legitimize the charade by offering a defense. Instead, he challenged the court’s legitimacy. “I would know by what power I am called hither,” the king said in refusing to answer the charges against him, as had been demanded.

  I would know by what authority, I mean lawful; there are many unlawful authorities in the world; thieves and robbers by the highways.… Remember, I am your King, your lawful King, and what sins you bring upon your heads, and the judgement of God upon this land. Think well upon it, I say, think well upon it, before you go further from one sin to a greater.… I have a trust committed to me by God, by old and lawful descent, I will not betray it, to answer a new unlawful authority; therefore resolve me that, and you shall hear more of me.… Let me see a legal authority warranted by the Word of God, the Scriptures, or warranted by the constitutions of the Kingdom, and I will answer.

  For once the king was taking a worthy stand. He knew he was doomed, but by emphasizing the illegality of the proceedings against him, he made a much broader appeal to the rule of law. If a small, unrepresentative group of men could grab power and subvert all legal authority to try him, then ultimately no one was safe. Or, as Charles said it, “if power without law may make laws, may alter the fundamental laws of the Kingdom, I do not know what subject he is in England, that can be sure of his life, or anything that he calls his own.”

  The king concluded:

  This many a day all things have been taken away from me, but that I call more dear to me than my life, which is my conscience, and my honour: And if I had a respect to my life more than the peace of the Kingdom, and the liberty of the subject, certainly I should have made a particular defence for myself; for by that at leastwise I might have delayed an ugly sentence, which I believe will pass upon me.… Now, sir, I conceive, that an hasty sentence once passed, may sooner be repented of than recalled; and truly, the self-same desire that I have for the peace of the Kingdom, and the liberty of the subject, more than my own particular ends, makes me now at last desire … before sentence be given, that I may be heard … before the Lords and Commons.… If I cannot get this liberty, I do protest, that these fair shows of liberty and peace are pure shows, and that you will not hear your King.

  Charles’s eloquent arguments flustered the commission but did not deter it from its mission to kill him. Less than a week after convening, the court pronounced Charles guilty and condemned him to death. He tried to make a statement after the sentence was delivered but was silenced. “I am not suffered for to speak,” he said as he was led away. “Expect what justice other people will have.”

  Some of the soldiers present in the hall spat on the king as he passed; others blew tobacco smoke in his face. “Execution!” they cried. “Justice! Execution!” Three days later they would be satisfied.

  On the eve of his death, Charles met with two of his younger children, Elizabeth and Henry, who were essentially prisoners of Parliament.* The king sat the young ones on his lap and, in a highly emotional scene, gently counseled them. “You are not to grieve or torment yourself for me,” he told his thirteen-year-old daughter, “for it will be a glorious death I shall die, for it is for the laws and liberties of this land. I have forgiven all my enemies and I hope God will forgive them also. And you and all the rest of your brothers and sisters must forgive them. Tell your mother that my thoughts have never strayed from her and my love for her will be the same to the last.”

  Turning to his eight-year-old son, Charles explained what was going to happen the next day and quietly admonished the boy not to become a pawn of the forces aligned against the royal family. “They are going to cut off your father’s head,” he told Henry. “Mark, child, what I say, they will cut off my head and perhaps make you a king. But you must never be king while your brothers Charles and James are alive. For they will cut off your brothers’ heads, when they catch them; and cut off your head too, at the last. And so I charge you: You must never let them make you King.”

  “I will be torn to pieces first,” young Henry replied, trying hard to be brave.

  Satisfied, Charles gave what little treasure he had left to the tearful children, kissed and blessed them, then finally bid them farewell.

  The next day, the appointed day, was bitterly cold. The king asked for an extra shirt to wear, loath to be seen shivering on the scaffold and have that mistaken for fear. “I would have no such imputation,” he said. “Death is not terrible to me; I bless my God I am prepared.” A knock on the door signaled that it was time to leave St. James’s Palace, where Charles had been confined during his final days, and walk the short distance to the execution site at Whitehall Palace.

  The scaffold had been erected just outside the palace’s Banqueting House, a superb edifice designed by Inigo Jones (and all that remains of the original palace). Walking through that grand structure, Charles passed under the ornate ceiling paintings by Rubens glorifying the Stuart dynasty. How poignant the irony, then, that the king who commissioned this vibrant celebration of monarchy, and long held court beneath it, was about to actually lay his head upon a chopping block just outside.

  The day had become brilliantly sunny when Charles stepped through a window of the Banqueting House and onto the black-draped scaffold. There, in the center, he saw the block, with chains nearby to bind him in the event that he struggled and refused to submit to the axe. A cheap coffin was off to one side, ready to receive his remains. The king remained composed, but the low height of the block seemed to disconcert him. “It can be no higher, sir,” one of the two hooded executioners said without explanation.

  Charles was permitted to speak, but the large crowd gathered to witness the grisly spectacle was kept so far back from the scaffold that he realized he would not be heard. He opted instead to address the people directly around him. Removing a small piece of paper from his pocket that contained some brief notes, he remarked that he would have been happy to remain silent, “but I think it is my duty, to God first, and to my country, to clear myself both as an honest man, a good King, and a good Christian.”

  He went on to insist that he was not responsible for the civil wars that had ravished the country, and that the sentence he
received was illegal. Nevertheless, he acknowledged that the injustice of his fate was proper punishment from God for having shamefully submitted earlier in his reign to Parliament’s demand for the head of his loyal servant Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Stafford.† “God forbid that I should be so ill a Christian as not to say God’s judgments are just upon me,” the king said. “Many times He does pay justice by an unjust sentence. That is ordinary. I will only say that an unjust sentence that I suffered for to take effect is punished now by an unjust sentence upon me.”

  Though he professed to forgive his enemies, Charles still emphasized what he saw as their dangerous lawlessness and defended his own view of the proper order. “For the people, truly I desire their liberty and freedom as much as anybody whatsoever,” he maintained. “But I must tell you their liberty and freedom consists in having government—those laws by which their life and their goods may be most their own.” And that government, he reasserted, was maintained by the monarch, as it had been for centuries.

  “Sirs,” he continued, “it is for this that I am now come here. If I would have given way to an arbitrary power, for to have all laws changed according to the power of the sword, I need not have come here. And therefore I tell you—and I pray God it not be laid to your charge—that I am a martyr of the people.”

  Having concluded his speech with an affirmation of his Christian principles, Charles prepared for death. “I go from a corruptible to an uncorruptible crown,” he said to his confessor, “where no disturbance can be, no disturbance in the world.” The king then proceeded to distribute the last of his possessions, after which he stood silently for a moment in prayer. Finally he removed his cloak, lowered himself down to the block, and, after a few seconds, stretched out his arms as a signal to the headsman. In a flash his head was severed and held up to the crowd. With that, one witness reported, the gathered people gave “such a groan as I have never heard before, and I desire I may never hear again.”