Killers of the King

by Charles Spencer

  The House of Commons was informed of this arrest on 26 May, along with the welcome news that a book had been discovered on Clements, detailing his possessions and business interests. Because those guilty of high treason forfeited all their worldly goods, as well as their lives, this was a significant find. Given the woeful finances of Parliament and the King, it made his hopes of pardon distinctly poor.

  On 31 May, the House was told of the successful escape of another regicide: that of Miles Corbett, previously MP for Great Yarmouth, and one of the officials who had reported on Charles I when the King had been with his chaplain in Norfolk en route for the Scottish army after fleeing Oxford. Two local men, James Puckle and Thomas Ellis, were found to have rented Corbett ‘a vessel, and otherwise, assisted in the conveying away, into the Parts beyond the Seas’,24 and were summoned to Parliament for interrogation.

  In early June, a Cornish MP reported how John Carew, who was considered second only to Harrison in the Fifth Monarchy sect, had similarly slipped away by boat. A customs officer from the port of Looe, named Henry Chubb, admitted to having assisted in the escape unwittingly, despite the recent insistence that all ports be closed to fugitives. Chubb acknowledged that he had received the order, but claimed that Carew had said he had no intention to go overseas, before setting sail. Chubb also pointed out that the warrant relating to Carew had misspelt his name ‘Carey’. Chubb joined the list of those heading to Parliament to explain himself, while attempts to locate Carew – wherever he might then be – were redoubled.

  Parliament decided at this point that an orderly system needed to be established whereby the regicides would be brought in and dealt with. A draft proclamation was sent for the King’s approval on 2 June, which he tinkered with, then issued from Whitehall four days later. It summoned those ‘named who sat, gave judgment, and assisted in that horrid and detestable Murder of His Majesty’s Royal Father of blessed memory, to appear and render themselves within fourteen days, under pain of being excepted from Pardon’. Forty-four regicides were then individually identified – most of them signatories to the death warrant, with a handful of the prosecution’s legal officers added – who ‘have out of the sense of their own guilt lately fled and obscured themselves, whereby they cannot be apprehended and brought to a personal and legal Trial for the said Treasons according to Law’. They were instructed to hand themselves in to the Speaker of either House of Parliament, to the lord mayor of London, or to a county sheriff. The decree ended with a sharp reminder: ‘That no person or persons shall presume to harbour or conceal any of the persons aforesaid, under pain of Misprision of high Treason.’25

  Meanwhile decisions were taken, established on the findings of recent interrogations. On the basis of the questioning of John Cook that had taken place in Dublin a month before, the Commons confirmed on 7 June that not only would he be tried for his life and estate, but so would his legal colleagues Andrew Broughton (who had read the charge against Charles at the opening of the trial) and Edward Dendy. The answers given by one Leonard Watson, on the frenzied question of the identity of the two executioners on the scaffold, resulted in the arrest being ordered of Hugh Peters, the charismatic preacher who had led the King from Windsor Castle to his judgment in London, and of Cornet Joyce, who had commanded the soldiers who had removed Charles from Parliament’s custody at Holdenby, and taken him into the army’s charge.

  On 16 June, John Milton – who had passionately attacked Charles I as a tyrant, and defended the actions of the regicides – was also placed on the list of those to be taken into custody. Milton, by now blind, had gone into hiding the previous month in the house of a friend in West Smithfield. While the Royalists hunted for him, a proclamation was made regarding his books. The public hangman incinerated them at the Old Bailey in late August. Later Milton would be imprisoned for a few weeks in the Tower, and lose his financial savings. Many felt him extremely lucky to escape with his life.

  The net was cast ever wider, now. A committee of five members was established, to pore over all the records, and so determine who had sat as judges on each of the days of the trial: previous focus had been on 27 January, the day of the death sentence. It was decided that, apart from those already denied the possibility of pardon for their life and estate, a further twenty would suffer ‘Pains, Penalties, and Forfeitures’, but would not be in danger of losing their lives. This was put to a vote, and passed by the close majority of 153 votes to 135. The full list was presented to the House the following day, along with news that William Heveningham had been the first to surrender himself, under the terms of the recent proclamation. Heveningham, a Hampshire MP, had sat in judgment of the King, but had refused to sign his death warrant.

  Fifty-two regicides who had signed it were now publicly ‘excepted out of the General Act of Pardon and Oblivion, for, and in Respect only of such Pains, Penalties and Forfeitures, (not extending to Life) as shall be thought fit to be inflicted on them by another Act, intended to be hereafter passed for that Purpose’.26 This declaration seemed clearly to promise that all who handed themselves in would be spared capital punishment. That was certainly how a dozen of the judges read it: Sir John Bourchier; Colonels Roe, Lilburne, George Fleetwood (brother of General Charles Fleetwood), Scroope, Harvey, Marten and Sir Hardress Waller; Aldermen Penington and Tichborne; as well as James Temple and Henry Smith. They surrendered to the authorities, expecting to be fined but to have their lives spared.

  Others were unconvinced by the King’s promises of amnesty. Colonel John Dixwell quietly sold part of his family estate and sent a message to the Speaker claiming that he had been unwell: he would be surrendering himself as soon as he was restored to health, he lied, for he was eager to benefit from the King’s proclamation. He would not be able to turn himself in within the stated timeframe, he explained. The House granted Dixwell an extension, while he made plans to escape England at the earliest possible opportunity.

  Colonel Richard Ingoldsby was keen to build on the credit he had accrued by capturing Lambert. His eagerness to extract a pardon from Parliament led him to lie to it. In a tearful speech to the Commons he claimed that his cousin Oliver Cromwell had physically bullied him into signing the death warrant. Ingoldsby said Cromwell was laughing as he forced the pen into his fingers, then held his hand tight as the signature was forcibly formed.

  Nobody at the time had witnessed Ingoldsby being anything other than a willing signatory. His writing on the parchment was well defined, showing no sign of force. Next to it was the Ingoldsby family seal, neatly applied. But Ingoldsby hoped his recent achievement would make people overlook the evidence, and gain him mercy. His speech delivered, he withdrew from the chamber, distraught, to await the Commons’s verdict on his plea.

  Colonel Hutchinson arrived at Parliament while Ingoldsby was pleading his case for clemency. Immediately afterwards, another regicide started to appeal for his own forgiveness and a member leant over to suggest to Hutchinson that this would be a suitable time for him to follow suit.

  Hutchinson gave a polished speech. He explained that any errors he had made should be put down to his youth and lack of judgment at the time (when he had been thirty-three). He was adamant that his actions were on behalf of the country, and were without malice towards the late King. That said, he offered himself as a sacrifice, if the House believed his death and the confiscation of his property useful. However, he pointed out that his family’s estate lay in ruins, and nobody could accuse him of having acted for his own advancement or financial advantage. He reassured the House that his feelings about the King’s death were those of an Englishman, a Christian and a gentleman.

  When Hutchinson sat down, a member rose to say that it seemed that Hutchinson was more concerned about the personal consequences of what he had done, rather than being truly sorry for taking part in the most shocking of crimes. Another defended the colonel, reminding all present of the convention that when two interpretations of a man’s words exist, a gentleman must select the one t
hat reflects better on the speaker.

  Hutchinson then joined Ingoldsby in an ante-room, to await the verdict. A red-eyed Ingoldsby embraced him and said, ‘Oh, did I ever imagine we could be brought to this? Could I have suspected it, when I brought Lambert in the other day, this sword should have redeemed us from being dealt with as criminals by that people for whom we had so gloriously exposed ourselves.’27 Hutchinson replied coolly that he had known since Cromwell had ejected the Rump Parliament in 1653, and enthroned himself, that their business could end no other way. However, Hutchinson told Ingoldsby that he had no regrets: he had acted throughout with integrity, and ‘this made him as cheerfully ready to suffer as to triumph in a good cause’.28

  These two regicides were suspended from Parliament that day. They then looked to Monck to speak on their behalf, as he had promised he would. But, in the face of the Convention’s thirst for vengeance against the King’s killers, Monck went back on his word and remained silent.

  Up until this point, Lucy Hutchinson had reassured her husband that the restoration of the King would not threaten his life or property, or that of any of the regicides. However, she now judged the situation to be ever more perilous. She recognised at the same time that her husband was preparing to become a martyr to a cause that he felt had been betrayed by Cromwell, and which now, through the bewildering reversal that had thrown up a new Stuart King, was lost. Lucy Hutchinson’s writings show that she considered herself an otherwise obedient wife; but this, she acknowledged, was the one occasion on which she deliberately flouted her husband’s will. She insisted he leave home and stay quietly with friends until Parliament had settled on whom it would punish for the late King’s execution. While he was in hiding, she made clear, he must prepare an escape plan in case it transpired that he was on the list of those who must suffer. Meanwhile, she busied herself by calling in favours and using her family connections.

  Her brother, Sir Allen Apsley, was of the King’s party, and proved particularly useful. Apsley had served as a Royalist cavalry colonel in the Civil War, where he saw action in several of the great battles and sieges, and also as governor of Barnstaple, in Devon. He managed to surrender the town on terms that spared his life, but left him liable for an extremely large fine. Colonel Hutchinson worked hard to have this reduced, pointing out that much of Apsley’s property in fact belonged to his wife. In 1647, Apsley paid Parliament £434, a fraction of what had originally been demanded. Since then, in exile, Apsley had become one of the future Charles II’s drinking friends. At the Restoration he was given a court role, Master of the King’s Hawks, that provided a generous annual income of £1,200. He was also elected MP for Thetford, in Norfolk. This favoured and influential figure was in a good position to pay back his brother-in-law’s great efforts on his behalf, now the two men’s situations had been reversed.

  For two months in the summer of 1660 the question of who would be punished for their part in Charles I’s death was ever present. There would be an Act of ‘Free and General Pardon, Indemnity and Oblivion’, by which the lands of the Crown and the Anglican Church would be restored, and all but a few named men would be pardoned for their actions during the years 1638–60. At this, Colonel Henry Marten (who had been shamed and dismissed from the King’s presence for his scandalous reputation and then been so active in the preparations for Charles’s trial at the London horse races), wrote to his mistress: ‘I shall now give some comfort to thy little heart, having lately perused the King’s Speech and the Chancellor’s, either I am very much mistaken in them, or they signify no great danger to us, whose faults are almost as old as our selves.’29

  Parliament’s first conclusion was that a few of the regicides must be held to account, while the rest could be treated with mercy. It decided that seven sacrifices would suffice: after the Civil War, Parliament had sought the same number of deaths from among the upper echelons of the King’s supporters. Charles II, realising how unsettling it would be for all involved in his father’s execution not to know if they were one of the seven, insisted that they should be quickly named. They were: Major-General Harrison; William Say, who had been one of the forces behind Charles’s trial, but who managed to slip across to the Continent; Colonel John Jones, an ardent republican; Thomas Scott, the Civil War spymaster; John Lisle, one of the key lawyers at the trial; Cornelius Holland, the MP for New Windsor, who was believed to have been one of the main hands in drawing up the charges against Charles I; and – after much debate between contending factions – John Barkstead, despised by the Royalists for his cruelty and corruption when in charge of the Tower of London. Parliament then referred the King to his promise to listen to their thoughts on this matter, and Charles conceded: he allowed the lawyers John Cook, Andrew Broughton and Edward Dendy to be added to the list of those denied mercy. These names were revealed in early June. All others, the King said, must come in to seek their pardon, when their lives would be spared, and their property secured.

  Many of the regicides had already taken flight. Dixwell was now safely across the Channel, and Thomas Scott had fled the country twice, in April 1660, having heard rumours that he was about to be assassinated. During the first attempt, pirates captured his ship and he was stripped of his possessions, before being discarded on the Hampshire coast. Friends helped to arrange his second escape, to Flanders. He lived there in disguise, before being recognised. Royalists seized him and planned to return him to London, but Scott escaped to the protection of an old friend from his days of diplomatic sway, Don Alonso de Cardenas, the former Spanish ambassador to London.

  Scott was in a perilous position: he was a figure of particular hatred, not only for the evident pride he had in his part in the killing of the King, but also for having caused the Royalists such anguish during his days as a highly effective intelligence chief. Added to that, he had been a destructive figure in Commonwealth London, being amongst those who took over Lambeth Palace. There he had the bones of Archbishop Parker, a sixteenth-century champion of Anglicanism, dug up and thrown into a rubbish tip. Although Scott had fallen out with Oliver Cromwell and had no respect for the succeeding Lord Protector, Richard (‘I have cut off one tyrant’s head,’ he had threatened, ‘and I hope to cut off another’30), Scott was a marked man.

  The Spanish could not guarantee his long-term safety, now his true identity was known, and so Scott decided to take his chance back home. He applied for royal clemency during the advertised fortnight time limit, and surrendered to Sir Henry de Vic, Charles’s ambassador to Brussels. On 12 July, as soon as he arrived back in England, he was committed to the Tower. It was made clear to Scott that his only hope of salvation lay in giving up the names of all the agents he had employed against the Stuarts, when spymaster. His efforts in this regard were half-hearted at best, and the apologies he offered for his incendiary words in Parliament also fell short. Scott awaited his trial, which would be alongside a growing band of those who had been denied a pardon, or who had been successfully hunted down.

  In Colonel John Jones’s case, it was not so much a hunt as a gentle gathering. The Welshman, married to Cromwell’s sister Catherine, had been released on parole in January 1660, following his arrest in Ireland. Jones was now picked up while walking the newly laid gravel paths of Finsbury Fields, outside the City of London. The colonel had been a prominent enemy, helping to subdue the Royalist stronghold of Anglesey, and he had been a scourge of the Crown and Catholicism in Ireland. He was a long-time correspondent with Harrison, whose Fifth Monarchist beliefs he shared. Jones must have known the dangerous attention that all the regicides were receiving. Perhaps his declining to flee can be put down to the same refusal to apologise for a cause he believed in, and the same cussed fatalism, as Harrison had demonstrated? Or maybe he miscalculated, placing too much importance on his earlier parole? Either way, he now joined the number of imprisoned regicides awaiting punishment.

  Colonel Hutchinson was not one of the publicly condemned ten. His relieved friends told him to take adva
ntage of the offer of royal clemency, and turn himself in as soon as he could. Hutchinson agreed that this was sensible, but his wife thought otherwise. She refused to trust the new regime, even when the colonel and his friends thought her misgivings ridiculous. In the end, the couple compromised: Hutchinson consented to test the sincerity of the offered pardon through a ploy that would keep him out of Parliament’s hands, while not alienating the resurgent Royalists.

  On his wife’s advice, Hutchinson wrote politely to the Speaker, saying that he was inconvenienced, and therefore unable to surrender himself into a general custody. That said, he would of course stand ready to make himself available if and when his presence was required. In the meantime, he would give his word not to abscond. While his letter was being digested, Lucy Hutchinson built up a bloc of goodwill towards her husband. It was constructed upon the social ambitions of a man at court to whom her brother, Sir Allen Apsley, had promised an introduction to the new King. Excited by the promise of this favour, the pushy courtier took it upon himself to act as Colonel Hutchinson’s unofficial advocate, spreading the false rumour that Charles very much wished the colonel excused of his crimes. Those eager to ingratiate themselves to royalty heard this with great interest.