Killers of the King

by Charles Spencer

  The charge against Charles began:

  That the said Charles Stuart, being admitted King of England, and therein trusted with a limited power to govern by and according to the laws of the land, and not otherwise; and by his trust, oath, and office, being obliged to use the power committed to him for the good and benefit of the people, and for the preservation of their rights and liberties; yet, nevertheless, out of a wicked design to erect and uphold in himself an unlimited and tyrannical power to rule according to his will, and to overthrow the rights and liberties of the people, yea, to take away and make void the foundations thereof, and of all redress and remedy of misgovernment, which by the fundamental constitutions of this kingdom were reserved on the people’s behalf in the right and power of frequent and successive Parliaments, or national meetings in Council; he, the said Charles Stuart, for accomplishment of such his designs, and for the protecting of himself and his adherents in his and their wicked practices, to the same ends hath traitorously and maliciously levied war against the present Parliament, and the people therein represented . . .21

  The assertion that government was a contract, in which the people surrender some of their rights to a sovereign unless or until that sovereign breaches their trust, was at loggerheads with Charles’s sincere and unshakeable view that he was God’s anointed – that he therefore could not be answerable to anyone but God. Believers in this philosophy, the Divine Right of Kings, pointed to the passage in the Old Testament in which King David erred by lusting after the beautiful Bathsheba, and consequently arranged the death in battle of her husband, so he could have her for himself. David, in Psalm 51, admitted his shameful guilt, but he was in no doubt where any judgment could come from, or to where any apology was due: ‘Against thee, thee only, have I sinned,’ he told the Lord.

  The duel between these contrary views was to take place in a setting chosen by the King’s former custodians, Colonels Whalley and Harrison, in consultation with Sir Hardress Waller, Pride’s collaborator in the purge; Colonel Deane, whose artillery had pounded Basing House before its fall; Robert Tichborne, a republican linen-draper from the City who had long wanted Charles brought to trial; as well as Cromwell, whose influence was everywhere at this time.

  Ironically, their chosen venue had been built to advertise that magnificent power of the Crown that the commissioners were now determined to deny. Westminster Hall had been constructed by William II in the final years of the eleventh century. It was the most impressive public room in England – some said in Europe. Its walls were six foot thick, enclosing an interior of 17,000 square feet. This was where kings and queens were crowned. The centrepiece of the ceremonial space was the King’s Table, a mark of the continuity of monarchy, a symbol of royal might, and the setting for the celebration banquets that followed coronations. Charles had hosted embassies and receptions here, in the days before civil warfare overwhelmed his reign. Its associations had always been historic. Now it was to be the setting of something truly momentous.

  The areas used by the King’s Bench and the Chancery Courts, at the upper west end of Westminster Hall, were cleared for the trial. A barrier was set up in the middle of the court arena to hold back the crowds who would flock to witness the proceedings. At the centre of the ranks of scarlet benches and seats reserved for the judging commissioners was Bradshaw’s chair, situated behind a desk on which a cushion rested. Both the chair and the cushion were swathed in crimson velvet.

  The King was carried in a closed sedan chair from St James’s to Whitehall, then transported by barge along the Thames, accompanied by a strong guard under his custodian, Colonel Matthew Tomlinson. Charles’s holding pen while awaiting the lord president’s summons to appear before him would be the home of the late Sir Robert Cotton, near Westminster’s Old Palace Yard. This had a garden that led up from the river, and a library of rare books (which included two original copies of Magna Carta) that had provided scholarly support to Cotton when he had written tracts attacking arbitrary royal power. Charles had imprisoned Cotton, and confiscated his books, as a result of these criticisms: although released in an amnesty celebrating the birth of the King’s eldest son, Cotton was never reunited with his library – a decision that blighted his final years. Now the King was the prisoner, a degraded and unwilling guest in his old adversary’s home.

  Royalists were still, at this stage, unsure what the enemy was planning to do with the King. Purbeck Temple, a gentleman of Surrey, had been charged by friends sympathetic to the Crown with trying to find out. On what would be the first day of the trial, he bribed an officer to let him into the corridors outside the Painted Chamber. Here he found a nook where there was a hole in the wall, through which he witnessed the commissioners arrive to finalise their plans for the day. ‘When their prayer was over,’ he recalled, ‘there came news that the King was landing at Sir Robert Cotton’s Stairs, at which Cromwell ran to a window, looking on the King as he came up the Garden, he turned white as the wall, returning to the board he speaks to Bradshaw and Sir Henry Mildmay, how they and Sir William Brereton had concluded on such a business, then turning to the board, said thus, “My Masters, he is come, he is come, and now we are doing the great work, that the whole Nation will be full of.”’22

  The lord president entered his courtroom, behind sixteen halberdiers, the bearer of the Sword of State, and the sergeant-at-arms who carried Parliament’s mace. In his wake strode sixty-seven of his fellow commissioners and their legal officers. The gates of the hall were opened, and the public flowed in until there was room for no more. Silence was ordered, and the King sent for.

  He arrived fifteen minutes later, with a twenty-strong guard under the command of Colonel Francis Hacker – a distinguished New Model Army officer from an otherwise Royalist family, who had twice refused enticements to switch to the King’s side during the Civil Wars. A handful of royal attendants found seats near their master, but not next to him: Bradshaw had insisted that, rather than being placed to one side, as was customary for a defendant, the King must sit alone in a chair in the centre of the courtroom, directly opposite the scores of men who had come to judge him.

  Charles looked slowly around, taking in the spectacle, spotting the few familiar faces among the commissioners. It was evident that he was coming to terms with the forum he found himself in, and the fight he faced. He looked calm to his supporters, stern to some recording the proceedings, and arrogant to his foes. Edmund Ludlow, one of the main forces behind Pride’s Purge, wrote of the King that, ‘He looked with as impudent a face as if he had not been guilty of the blood that hath been shed in this war.’23 Charles sat down, before rising to his feet again to turn and look at the public in the gallery. He would have seen that they were divided into two bodies by a line of soldiers, the better to keep control. More troops stood on either side of the commissioners, and along the newly built barrier. Others guarded the entrance of each door to the hall.

  The prisoner had not been informed of the charges he would face. Neither had he been granted access to legal counsel. However, Charles had thought hard about what was likely to be put to him, and had taken what advice he could, before entering this cockpit: his twin defence would be an insistence on the inability of his subjects to try their King, and the impossibility of one house of Parliament (let alone one fraction of a house, whose election had taken place more than eight years earlier) sitting as a place of judgment at all. His defiance was immediately obvious in his refusal to remove his hat: to do so would be to show respect for his accusers, and acknowledgement of the court they had concocted. Similarly, the judges sat with their hats on, making it clear that deference towards his royal status had no place in this setting: he was simply the prisoner at the bar.

  After the Act of Parliament for the trying of the King was delivered, the names were read out of the commissioners present. Bradshaw’s was first: he rose to confirm his presence. Next came the name of Lord Fairfax. There was no answer. It was repeated, to renewed silence. As all present be
gan to appreciate the astonishing fact that Parliament’s military commander had absented himself from the trial, a lady’s voice rang out from a box in the gallery that extended high above the hall: ‘He had more wit than to be here!’24 Fairfax had ordered Charles’s removal from the Isle of Wight to London, and had sat in meetings preliminary to the trial, but he would take no part in the court proceedings once he realised the commissioners would be pushing for much more than Charles’s exile.

  Bradshaw now presented a preliminary distillation of the charge to the prisoner:

  Charles Stuart, King of England, the Commons of England assembled in Parliament being deeply sensible of the calamities that have been brought upon this nation, which is fixed upon you as the principal author of it, have resolved to make inquisition for blood; and according to that debt and duty they owe to justice, to God, the kingdom, and themselves, and according to the fundamental power that rests in themselves, they have resolved to bring you to Trial and Judgment; and for that purpose have constituted this High Court of Justice, before which you are brought.25

  Bradshaw then looked to Cook to proceed. The solicitor general was standing to the right of the King, and as he started to speak Charles tapped him two or three times on the shoulder with his cane, in an effort to stop him so he could speak instead. Bradshaw instructed Cook to ignore these distractions, and proceed.

  ‘My Lord,’ said Cook, ‘I am commanded to charge Charles Stuart, King of England, in the name of the Commons of England, with Treason and High Misdemeanours; I desire the said charge may be read.’26

  As Andrew Broughton, clerk of the court, delivered the charge, Charles interjected: ‘I am not entrusted by the people, they are mine by inheritance.’27

  When Broughton referred to him as ‘a Tyrant and Traitor’, the King’s stern demeanour disintegrated into laughter. Ominously, during the reading of the charge, it was noted that the head of Charles’s cane broke off and fell to the floor. He paused – perhaps in the expectation that somebody would pick it up for him – but was eventually forced to bend and retrieve it for himself.

  When the charge claimed to be presented in the name of ‘all the good people of England’, the female voice that had jeered in appreciation of Fairfax’s absence chimed in again: ‘Not half the people; it is false!’ it cried. ‘Where are they or their consents?’28

  This was a raucous disruption of the dignity of the court, as well as a grave challenge to its validity. Colonel Daniel Axtell, in charge of the troops in the hall, was enraged, pointing to the offending box and shouting at his men: ‘Down with the whores! Shoot them!’29 It was fortunate that they disobeyed, for although they could not have missed their target, they would have shot Lady Fairfax, the wife of the army’s lord general, who was guilty of both interruptions.

  After the charge was completed, Bradshaw directed Charles to respond to it. ‘I would know by what power I am called hither,’ the King countered: ‘I was not long ago in the Isle of Wight; how I came there is a longer story than I think it fit at this present time for me to speak of; but there I entered into a Treaty with both houses of Parliament, with as much public faith as it is possible to be had of any number of honourable lords and gentlemen, and treated honestly and uprightly; I cannot say but they did very nobly with me, we were upon the conclusion of the Treaty.’ It was noticeable throughout his trial that Charles spoke with fluency, his customary stammer never in evidence.

  Charles demanded to know the basis of his accusers’ power: ‘I would know by what authority I was brought from thence, and carried from place to place, and I know not what: and when I know what lawful authority [that is], I shall answer.’ He then warned those daring to sit in judgment of him: ‘Remember I am your King, your lawful King, and what sins you bring upon your heads, and the judgment 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.’ Next, he drew up the defensive lines from which he would not budge throughout the remainder of the proceedings: ‘I shall not betray my trust; I have a trust committed to me by God, by old and lawful descent; I will not betray it, to answer to a new unlawful authority.’ He again asked for the authority of the court to be justified.

  Bradshaw was undaunted. ‘If you had been pleased to have observed what was hinted to you by the Court,’ he replied, ‘you would have known by what authority; which authority requires you, in the name of the People of England, of which you are elected King, to answer them.’

  Charles bridled at this startling assertion: ‘England was never an elective kingdom, but an hereditary kingdom for nearly these thousand years . . . I do stand more for the liberty of my people, than any here that come to be my pretended judges.’

  Asking Charles if he had any further reply to make before he order the court into recess so the judges could consider the best way forward, Bradshaw prompted the King’s most defiant response yet:

  Sir, I desire that you would give me, and all the world, satisfaction in this: let me tell you, it is not a slight thing you are about. I am sworn to keep the peace, by that duty I owe to God and my country, and I will do it to the last breath of my body: and therefore ye shall do well to satisfy first God, and then the country, by what authority you do it: if you do it by an usurped authority, you cannot answer. There is a God in Heaven, that will call you, and all that give you power, to account.

  It was Saturday afternoon. The court was adjourned until Monday. As the King left Westminster Hall, Colonel Axtell cajoled some of his men to call out: ‘Justice! Justice!’ Eyewitnesses recalled Axtell beating those soldiers who were slow to pick up the refrain. Others in the hall shouted out: ‘God save the King!’30

  Before the Monday session the commissioners met in the Painted Chamber. They applauded Bradshaw’s conduct on the first day of the trial, and confirmed that Charles must not be allowed to question the jurisdiction of the High Court of Justice. The second session opened with Cook’s demand: ‘That the prisoner may be directed to make a positive answer, either by way of confession, or negation; which if he shall refuse to do, that the matter of the charge may be taken pro confesso [in place of a confession], and the Court may proceed according to justice.’

  The King and the lord president locked horns again, both of them stubborn in defence and aggressive in attack, the creeds that had helped fuel a war reverberating round the packed amphitheatre. Bradshaw was clear in confirming the commissioners’ absolute confidence in their authority, which he said came from ‘the Commons of England – and all your predecessors, and you, are responsible to them’. When Charles continued his challenge, Bradshaw lost patience: ‘Sir, you are not to be permitted to go on in that speech and these discourses.’ The King persisted, presenting himself as the defender of ‘the liberty and freedom of all his subjects’.

  ‘Sir,’ admonished Bradshaw, ‘you are not to have the liberty to use this language: how great a friend you have been to the laws and liberties of the people, let all England and the world judge.’

  The lord president declared the session closed. Charles was escorted back to Sir Robert Cotton’s house, indignant at being treated as a common prisoner, perplexed that he was being overruled by one of his subjects.

  Charles was remanded once more, and told to return to the court for a third day, on 23 January. The stalemate recurred, and Bradshaw barked his anger at the King’s continued defiance: ‘Sir, this is the third time you have publicly disowned this court and put an affront to it . . . For truly, sir, men’s intentions are used to show by their actions. You have written your meaning in bloody characters throughout the whole kingdom . . . Clerk, record the default! And, gentlemen, you that brought the prisoner, take him back again.’

  The next morning was spent in examining witnesses against the king, in the Painted Chamber. There were more than thirty of these, all male, from Charles’s three kingdoms. They ranged from Londoner Arthur Young, a twenty-nine-year-old barber and surgeon, to George Cornwall, a fifty-year-old ferryman from
Herefordshire. Many of them were Royalists, obliged to recount episodes when they had seen Charles rallying or leading his troops during the Civil Wars, in order to establish the King’s direct involvement in the bloodshed of his people.

  Their testimony was laced with other damning evidence, including a dramatic presentation by Thomas Chaloner of some of the King’s captured letters. This reminder of Charles’s double-dealing, even extending to employing foreign troops in the war against his subjects, was devastating. Edmund Ludlow, sitting as a commissioner, recalled ‘that it was obvious to all men, the King himself had proved, by the duplicity of his dealing with the Parliament; which manifestly appeared in his own papers taken at the battle of Naseby, and elsewhere’.31 As the case progressed, some of those opposed to the King found their anger turn into contempt. Astonished onlookers observed one man spit in Charles’s face. The King reached for his handkerchief and silently wiped himself clean.

  Meanwhile, Ludlow and others of the God-fearing judges looked for divine guidance as to how to proceed. A passage from the Book of Numbers began to resonate with them in their deliberations. It was a well-known verse, which had been deployed a few years before by Parliament in the trial for high treason of an Irish lord: ‘That blood defileth the land, and the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it.’32 It seemed to speak of the need to make the King pay in person for the loss of life that had ensued, since he had raised his royal standard as a military rallying point in the summer of 1642. ‘And therefore I could not consent to the counsels of those who were contented to leave the guilt of so much blood upon the nation,’ Ludlow concluded, ‘and thereby to draw down the just vengeance of God upon us all; when it was most evident that the war had been occasioned by the invasion of our rights, and open breach of our laws and constitution on the King’s part.’33 If England were to return to divine favour, Charles’s life would need to be offered up in sacrifice.