Concerned that vengeance might appear in the shape of the dead King’s two older sons, in March it was declared that Charles, Prince of Wales, and James, Duke of York, should die without mercy, wherever they might be found.
In mid-December 1650, William Say passed the trial documents to clerks for safe storage, noting, ‘That the persons instructed in that great service had discharged their trust with great courage and fidelity.’42 They were filed away with customary efficiency by the Parliament bureaucrats, nobody realising that they gave a forensic account of proceedings that, under another regime, and through other eyes, might be viewed as the embodiment of that most heinous of charges – high treason.
Chapter 3
The Republic
And whereas by the abolition of the kingly office provided for in this Act, a most happy way is made for this nation (if God see it good) to return to its just and ancient right, of being governed by its own Representatives or national meetings in council, from time to time chosen and entrusted for that purpose by the people.
Act of Parliament, 17 March 1649
Weeks after Charles’s death, the Rump declared that, ‘The office of a King in a nation, and to have power thereof in a single person, was unnecessary, burdensome, and dangerous to the liberty, safety, and public interest of the people, and therefore ought to be abolished.’1 England, for the first time in many hundreds of years, was a republic. It was named the Commonwealth.
This change was celebrated by the Crown’s bitterest enemies, but left others feeling distinctly nervous about what would happen next. John Evelyn, a conservative Royalist, heard about the execution from his brother George, who had been one of its thousands of eyewitnesses. Evelyn wrote in his diary: ‘The villainy of the Rebels proceeding now so far as to try, condemn, and murder our excellent King, the 30th of this month, struck me with such horror that I kept the day of his martyrdom a fast, and would not be present, at that execrable wickedness.’2
The trial and execution had taken place (not surprisingly, given the profession of many of those sitting in judgment) with military efficiency and ruthlessness. Among those who felt the loss of the King most deeply, there was now a rush to give him the aura of Christ-like suffering: parallels were found in both figures having been mocked by soldiers during their torment, and having behaved with humble submission at their end. Clarendon would write of Charles’s ‘saint-like behaviour, and his Christian courage and patience at his death’.3 A beautifully written book, Eikon Basilike (‘Image of the King’), appeared after the execution, which many at the time believed to be the King’s own work. It added to the image of a gentle and spiritual man having been cruelly put to death for his principles, on behalf of his people. Within a year of Charles’s death, fifty editions of it had appeared in a variety of languages.
When further incarnations of the High Court of Justice sentenced prominent Royalist leaders from the Second Civil War to execution, the Duke of Hamilton – leader of the force from Scotland, defeated at Preston – asked the executioner if the axe he saw awaiting him was the one that had dispatched the King. Informed that it was, the duke kissed it in homage, before presenting his neck to the same blade.
The execution of the King had removed the man the army felt to be dangerous, and knew to be untrustworthy. It could not, though, bring harmony to a deeply divided nation. Nor could it dictate how other countries would react. The Scots were particularly appalled at the death of their King: Parliament had guaranteed it would not allow him to be put to death, when he was sold to them. The Scots now used ‘high language and invective against the late proceedings in England’,4 and proclaimed the Prince of Wales as the new ‘King of Scotland’. The Commonwealth heard reports, ‘that in Scotland are many English officers and soldiers, who expect employment when their new King cometh’.5
Meanwhile much of Continental Europe joined in the outrage at the royal beheading. A dangerous attack on those responsible for the killing came in a much-read Latin treatise, Defensio Regia pro Carlo Primo (‘The Royal Defence of Charles I’), whose rapid dissemination around Europe caused huge concern among the new rulers of England. For those still struggling to make sense of such a shocking episode as the execution of a king, in what was regarded as the most exemplary of monarchies, this fiery tract provided plausible answers. It also dissuaded the Commonwealth’s neighbours from engaging with the new English republic, in terms of trade or diplomacy.
The perpetrators of the ‘miserable and amazing marvellous murder’ were, the anonymous author said, ‘savage, sternly steeled and stony-hearted’. He railed against the regicides as ‘sons of the soil, persons scarce of the nobility at home, scarce known to their own countrymen’, who had taken it upon themselves to judge, then execute, a king. ‘But with those judges that were chosen from the lower House were joined even judges from the army; soldiers never, though, had a right to sit in judgment upon a citizen.’ The author gave an emotive and one-sided account of Charles’s final two or three years: ‘They put him to several sorts of torments . . . They removed him from prison to prison, often changing his guards. Sometimes they gave him hopes of liberty – sometimes even of restoring him to his crown upon articles of agreement.’ In the end, after enduring ‘buffetings and kicks that were given by common soldiers’, ‘he suffered death as a robber, as a murderer, as a parricide, as a traitor, as a tyrant’. This was the crime of these cruel and despicable men, who had the gall to ‘toss kings’ heads like balls, play hoop with crowns, and make no more of imperial sceptres than of fools’ bauble-sticks with heads atop’.
This published assault gained further appeal when the anonymity of its author was penetrated, and it was established that it was the work of one of the most respected professors teaching in the Dutch academic hothouse of Leiden. Claude Salmasius, a Burgundian, was of a Protestant creed that was closer to the Presbyterians than to the Puritans of England. Given the acclaim Defensio Regio received, and Salmasius’s eminence (Queen Christina of Sweden invited him to be a guest at her court, where he was deluged with honours), a rebuttal was required to justify the King’s death.
The regicides’ champion was the poet John Milton, who in the two weeks before the King’s execution had written the Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, a justification for the calling to account, and even the execution, of a tyrant. Two months after the King’s beheading, Milton was given the post of Secretary of Foreign Tongues, on behalf of the freshly hatched republic. Installed in an official apartment in Whitehall, his rooms hung with pictures he had selected from the confiscated royal collection, his duties ranged from the translation of documents received from overseas, to writing propaganda against the Irish – whom he condemned as the most savage of barbarians, undeserving of mercy.
His prime responsibility now became the rebuttal of written attacks against those responsible for Charles’s death. Milton was, he said, happy ‘to render this never-to-be-regretted assistance to the valiant liberators of my country’. He dissected the arguments that had swayed the well-read of a continent, determined to expose them as lies, while defending the regicides in terms of motive, justification and background.
First, he claimed that Charles Stuart had abdicated his right to be viewed as a King, ‘For a tyrant is no real King; he is but a player-King, the mere mask and spectre of a King.’ This, Milton claimed, explained why, ‘The whole army and a great part of the people from almost every county in the kingdom cried out with one voice for justice against the King as the very author of all their calamities.’ Charles, he continued, ‘had been taken a prisoner of war, and found incurable’. As a result, ‘Can anyone fail to see that the preservation of any one man to the destruction of all others is utterly contrary to nature?’
Salmasius may have looked down on the bloodlines of the men who judged the tyrant-King, but Milton pointed to the distinguished ancestry of some, while ‘others, being as it were their own ancestors, tread the path to true nobility by way of industry and personal worth, and are c
omparable with any of the noblest soever’. Merit, he claimed, could trump the showiest of family trees.
Above all, Milton applauded the regicides as heroes. ‘No men ever undertook with a loftier courage,’ he wrote, ‘and, as our adversaries themselves confess, with a more tranquil mind, an action so distinguished, so worthy of heroic ages – an action whereby they ennobled not only law and its enforcement, which thenceforth seem restored to all men equitably, but Justice’s very self, and rendered her after so signal a judgment more glorious, more august, than ever she had been before.’
The clash of creeds championed by Salmasius and Milton demonstrated the passion and the division of the times. Those responsible for the death of the King – those who had presented the case against him; those who had found him guilty and applied their signatures and seals to his death warrant; or those who had stood on the scaffold supervising the moment of death – were all aware that their actions attracted horror, as well as praise. Salmasius had announced in his tract the need for retribution, writing, ‘These men’s injustice, impiety, perfidy, cruelty, I will cry out unto heaven and earth; themselves the perpetrators I will turn over to posterity convicted, and transfix the culprits.’
In fact, the vengeance had already begun.
Dr Isaac Dorislaus, the Dutch junior counsel, had, in the end, not been called upon to take a prominent role in the great trial. Joseph Herne, present at the High Court of Justice on the hearing’s second day, recalled seeing Solicitor General Cook deep in conversation with Dorislaus even after Charles was seated in readiness for proceedings. Lord President Bradshaw had had to interrupt their legal tête-à-tête, to enquire what Cook required of the court. Dorislaus otherwise remained in the shadows, poised to cross-question the King if he had pleaded not guilty, busying himself with notes and advice, eager to see the tyrant condemned.
After the trial Dorislaus told friends that the King’s fatal error had been a refusal to plead: if he had done so, the doctor calculated, Charles might well have survived, for he might then have drawn out proceedings indefinitely – until the conclusion of the single month that constituted the High Court’s permitted lifespan. Such a delay could have left the judgment incomplete. In addition, this extra time would have given supporters of the Crown time to galvanise, and come to the King’s aid. Charles’s curt and absolute rebuttal of his judges had played into the hands of those who wanted him rapidly dealt with.
Friendless and isolated, the new republic in England was keen to establish alliances abroad: it was feeling vulnerable, particularly to the threat of a further Scottish invasion, while Ireland was seething with enemies too. France was sheltering Henrietta Maria, one of its own princesses, and the widow of the beheaded King. The Commonwealth would need to look elsewhere for political acceptance and profitable trade.
The Prince of Wales and his younger brother James had found sanctuary with their sister Mary and brother-in-law William, the Princess and Prince of Orange, at The Hague, in the Netherlands. The Orange family was the leading Dutch dynasty, but it lacked the supreme power enjoyed by many of Continental Europe’s monarchies, and faced strong and established political opponents. Some of these were hostile to the support shown to the beleaguered Stuart princes. Noting this, as well as the shared Protestantism of England and the Netherlands, and relying on the Dutch reputation for putting trade before all else, the new English republic explored possible diplomatic and commercial ties.
First to be approached as ambassador was Bulstrode Whitelocke, a Puritan lawyer who was a friend of Cromwell. However, Whitelocke was one who preferred discretion to valour, as had been shown by his refusal to engage in the prosecution of the King. He was aware that many displaced Royalists had followed their exiled leader across the North Sea to the Netherlands. Rather than become vulnerable to them, he turned down the diplomatic post.
Dr Dorislaus was less concerned about threats to his safety, having positive memories of his previous mission to the Dutch provinces. The States-General, the federal representatives that helped govern the seven Dutch provinces, had received him in the summer of 1648. For several months he had assisted Walter Strickland, Parliament’s ambassador general to the Dutch since the outbreak of the Civil War. Dorislaus spent much of his time spying on the rogue squadron that had broken away from the Parliamentary navy to form a Royalist fleet under Charles’s nephew, Prince Rupert of the Rhine.
Dorislaus had returned to England that winter, working on the case against the King, before turning his attention the next month to the prosecution of other prominent Royalists. This had resulted in the execution of Lord Capel, the Duke of Hamilton and the Earl of Holland, despite the last two having surrendered on guarantees that their lives would be spared. (The Earl of Holland had perhaps exhausted all reasonable expectation of mercy, having, over the previous decade, fought in turn for Parliament, the King, then Parliament again, before his final, fatal, dabble with Royalism.)
When asked by the new governing body in London, the Council of State, to return to his native land on its behalf, Dorislaus agreed to do so, despite the dangers. His request in return was that, after he had completed his spell as Resident of Parliament at The Hague, he might be allowed to retreat to academic backwaters, and be appointed Keeper of the Library of St James, which, a contemporary boasted, contained ‘choice books and manuscripts . . . and there were not the like to them, except only in the Vatican, in any other library in Christendom’.6 This was, therefore, to be his last mission, before a gentle semi-retirement in scholastic heaven.
Dorislaus arrived in the fishing port of Scheveningen, near The Hague, on 29 April, taking lodgings at an inn, De Swaen, which was run by friends. One of his first visitors was Strickland, who urged him to come to stay with him and his family, where he could be better protected. So nervous was Strickland about his own security that he had publicly pretended that his mission was concluded: he was now in the Netherlands, he claimed, in an unofficial capacity, owing to his Dutch wife wanting to spend time with her family. Dorislaus declined Strickland’s invitation, staying on at the inn with a small retinue of armed guards.
Soon afterwards a man arrived posing as a member of Strickland’s staff, bearing instructions for Dorislaus to follow him to a meeting. Dorislaus suspected a trap and refused to go. This was fortunate because, as Strickland reported to London, ‘diverse rogues were ready to have killed him had he come out’.
The next night a friend warned Dorislaus of the rumour that he, Dorislaus, had been one of the two masked men who performed the King’s execution, either the one who had wielded the axe, or his assistant who had held the King’s severed head aloft. And now the Royalists wanted him dead.
Dorislaus found it laughable that he, a bookish academic, might have been involved in something as brutally physical as the beheading. He told his companions not to worry: even if he was attacked, he was confident in his bodyguards’ protection.
In the spring of 1649, Walter Whitford, a colonel in the King’s defeated army, found himself among the many Royalists sheltering in the Netherlands. Whitford’s father had been Bishop of Brechin before his support for Charles I’s religious beliefs had seen him expelled from Scotland. Charles had found him a parish in Northamptonshire as compensation, but Whitford senior had remained open in his sympathies for the Crown. This had made his last years ones of hardship at the hands of Parliament: they had expelled him from his living a year before his death, in 1647.
Colonel Whitford was one of many seeking to avenge the King’s death, and no doubt to strike a blow on behalf of his father. Brought up in a religious household, he went to seek guidance from the English priest acting as Catholic confessor to the Portuguese ambassador: was it a sin, he asked, to slay a man who had killed your King? What happened next gives us a clue as to the probable answer.
Late one evening, Whitford led eleven men to De Swaen. One of the Royalist gang knocked at the door, pretending that he wanted to buy some wine; when the inn staff admitted him, Whitfor
d and his men poured in behind, snuffing out the lights in the entrance, then fanning out to hunt down Dorislaus. The Dutchman’s bodyguards rushed forward to block the intruders while the startled group dining with Dorislaus urged him to run to a prearranged secure room.
Dorislaus’s servants swore afterwards that their master never managed to find the door. The Dutch authorities, who made their own investigations, concluded that Dorislaus reached it, but for some reason failed to open it – maybe through terror, or perhaps because it was locked. Either way, Dorislaus’s guards were overwhelmed, with two of them seriously wounded in the scuffle. Whitford and his main force surged forward, informing all in the inn to calm down: they were only there for the King’s murderer. One of the guests, a man called van Valkenstein, made a sudden start, and, momentarily mistaken for Dorislaus, received a serious wound that led to a lingering death.
Now the assassins found Dorislaus, hiding under a chimney. He tried to keep his attackers at bay with a chair, but it was hopeless: his head was spliced by Whitford’s broadsword, before another slash ripped him open, the wound running from heart to liver. One of the attackers shouted, ‘Thus dies one of the King’s judges!’7
Accounts of the murder were trumpeted everywhere, their details sometimes changing in the retelling. Clement Walker – an MP who had been expelled in Pride’s Purge, and whose continued resistance to the Commonwealth would lead to his death, without trial, in the Tower of London – wrote, ‘about 18 Scotsmen (friends to [the Duke of] Hamilton) repairing to [Dorislaus’s] lodging, 6 of them made good the stair-foot, where expostulating with him concerning the unjust condemnation and execution of the duke, they stabbed him to death, and escaped’.8 Bulstrode Whitelocke reported, with more accuracy: ‘Letters from the Hague, that twelve English Cavaliers in disguise came into a room where Dr Dorislaus, who was a public minister there for the Parliament, was with others at supper, that they murdered him by stabbing him in several places, and cut his throat.’9 The particulars may have varied, but the horror among Parliamentarians was uniform.
Killers of the King Page 7
