When Hutchinson’s letter was discussed in Parliament, such sycophants presented it as proof of Hutchinson’s moderation, humility and repentance. First to speak on the colonel’s behalf was Roger Palmer – whose new wife, Barbara Villiers, was Charles’s primary mistress at the time – and Heneage Finch, MP for Canterbury. Their testimonies opened a floodgate of support in Hutchinson’s favour, ‘and,’ recalled his wife, ‘there was not at that day any man that received a more general testimony of love and good esteem of all parties than he did.’31 He was ‘cleared by vote’.
Hutchinson was informed that he was safe from the threats of capital punishment or imprisonment. His penalty was merely to be dismissed from public office for ever, including his seat in Parliament. A levy would also need to be paid. Hutchinson wrote such an emotive letter (the Commons recorded that it was one of ‘signal repentance’32), in gratitude for this generosity, that he was then informed that there would be no fines or confiscations against his property either. It was an outcome beyond anything that he could reasonably have hoped for. Aware that names were still being added to and removed from the Act of Indemnity, Hutchinson lay low, staying out of sight from those who were making these life or death decisions. Eager for tangible proof of his sympathetic treatment, he sent a letter to the Commons requesting they write to ‘confirm that favour and mercy’33 granted him.
It was as well that he did. As more and more documents were unearthed by Parliament’s clerks, so the number of men held responsible for the killing of the King increased. Records appeared detailing the members of the various committees that were involved in the intricacies of the King’s trial: the sourcing of chairs, the selection of cushions, the formalities of the procedure. Hutchinson had been pardoned as a reluctant, obscure, bit player in it all: that was how he had presented himself. ‘But as soon as they had passed their votes for his absolute discharge,’ Lucy Hutchinson wrote, ‘he was found not to have been one day away from the trial.’34 The question was, what could be done to bring this willing and attentive regicide to justice, now that he had been pardoned? There was a precedent for overturning such decisions, after all.
Adrian Scroope was one of nineteen regicides to surrender to the royal proclamation of 4 June 1660, confident that by doing so he would be assured of his life. The cavalry colonel was allowed to present his defence, after which he had quickly been released on parole, having been fined a year’s income from his estate.
However, the House of Lords refused to agree to his pardon. On 20 July the Upper House sent a message to the Commons: ‘They desire,’ it was announced in the chamber, ‘that this House will be pleased to send the instrument under the Hands and Seals of those Persons who gave Judgment against the King; and what other Evidences you have, to inform their Lordships touching that Matter.’35
The Lords had decided to arrest all regicides. With regard to Scroope, they wanted him named specifically as excepted from pardon, as they had learnt of a conversation between him and Major General Browne. This had taken place earlier in the summer, outside the Chamber of the Speaker of the House of Commons. Scroope had introduced himself to Browne. Realising that he was talking to a regicide, Browne said, ‘What a sad case have we brought this Kingdom unto?’ Scroope asked him why he said that. ‘You see,’ continued Browne, ‘how it is ruined now the King is murdered.’
Scroope replied, ‘Some are of one opinion, and some of another.’
Browne then asked, ‘Sir, do you think it was well done to murder the King?’
To which Scroope replied, ‘I will not make you my confessor, Sir.’36
Despite the Commons’s wish to spare Scroope, the Lords refused to grant him leniency. Report of his exchange with Browne was enough to have Scroope’s merciful treatment overturned. On 28 August he was added to the list of those to be tried for their life; this would be the very last day on which that list was being composed. He was committed to the Tower, where he was kept a close prisoner, awaiting trial.
The Tower of London had been the grimmest of gaols since 1100, when Ranulf Flambard (who had overseen the building of Westminster Hall, where the King was tried) became its first escapee, thanks to a rope smuggled in to him in a cask of wine. It certainly proved to be a miserable prison for the regicides. Its garrison in the early 1660s included Colonel William Legge’s regiment. Legge had suffered several times as a prisoner of Parliament, enduring a spell in the Tower in 1659 for high treason. Many of his men were Irish Catholics, who held raw memories of the New Model Army’s massacres in their homeland. These were not men who were likely to be gentle on their charges.
The newly installed Lieutenant of the Tower was Sir John Robinson, who also had personal reasons for hating his regicide inmates: he was a nephew of Archbishop Laud, Charles I’s premier churchman who had been tried and executed by Parliament in 1645. Indeed one of the prisoners now in Robinson’s charge was Isaac Penington, who had been Lieutenant at the time of Laud’s execution, and had overseen the Archbishop’s beheading on Tower Hill.
Described by Pepys as a ‘talking bragging bufflehead’, Robinson helped himself to funds that were earmarked for the prisoners’ supplies, and treated them with casual cruelty. When one of the imprisoned colonels and his retainer were suffering from violent dysentery, Robinson denied them access to their latrine, despite there being two further doors beyond it, blocking any hope of escape. Many of the regicides had been stripped of all their property on arrest. They were unable to pay the high charges Robinson set for basic provisions, and so ‘he gave them none’, recalled the wife of one who suffered under him, ‘but converted what the King allowed to his own use, and threatened some of the prisoners with death if they offered to demand it; and suffered others, at twelve of the clock at night, to make such a miserable outcry for bread that it was heard in some parts of the city, and one was absolutely starved to death for want of relief, although the King at that time told a prisoner that he took more care for the prisoners than for his own table.’
Inmates who could usually afford Robinson’s outrageous charges, but from time to time were late with payments, found their prison conditions made suddenly even harsher. Meanwhile Robinson insisted on keeping the wealthiest regicides in his lodgings, so he could charge them directly for any services received. The rest had to rely on the charity of friends, who sent them food. A lot of this was pilfered before reaching those it was intended for.
The warders found common cause with the prisoners, through their mutual loathing of Robinson. He had a reputation for being a nasty drunk, who harangued them and who frequently withheld their wages – this, while charging them extortionate rents for their modest accommodation. The warders ‘pitied the poor gentlemen that were so barbarously used’, recalled the same regicide’s wife, ‘and whether out of humanity or necessity or villainy . . . they would offer the prisoners many courtesies, and convey letters between them’.37 The brutality of the place could take its toll. John Downes was so despondent after three years in the Tower that he asked Robinson if he could be ‘thrust into some hole where he might silently be slain’.38
There had originally been approximately eighty regicides, when the fifty-nine who had signed the death warrant were added to the legal team that had tried the case, as well as to those on the scaffold who oversaw and administered the execution. Of these, more than a quarter were dead by the time Charles II returned in glory to England: Cromwell, Bradshaw, Pride, Deane and Dorislaus; also the quartet who had perished during active service in Ireland: Ireton, Ewer, Horton and Moore; as well as Danvers and Lord Grey of Groby. Others who escaped royal vengeance by dying before the Restoration were a trio of Yorkshire army officers: John Alured, Sir William Constable and Sir Thomas Mauleverer, and seven politicians: John Blakiston, Humphrey Edwards, Sir Gregory Norton, Peregrine Pelham, William Purefoy, Anthony Stapley and John Venn.
Retribution could still be exacted from the dead, however. The Commons heard with satisfaction, on 31 May 1660, of the seizure of some of
Blakiston’s property by the Sheriff of County Durham. Blakiston, one of the most powerful Parliamentarians in the north of England and a great radical, had been an eager member of the High Court of Justice. However, he only outlived the monarch he helped to condemn by four months. The Commons had granted his widow and children £3,000 on his death, and now the Convention Parliament wanted to reclaim that sum, as well as whatever else it could confiscate from his estate. Many of the other dead regicides had their family wealth seized – though Pelham had died so poor, ruined by the withholding of debts owed to him and by the Civil War, that he had been unable even to pay the doctor that had tended him at the end.
Now it was time for the Royalists to have a closer look at the remaining sixty regicides, and see which of them could be put on trial not just for their possessions, but for their lives.
Chapter 6
A Bloody Sacrifice
We deal not with men, but monsters, guilty of blood, precious blood, royal blood, never to be remembered without tears.
Sir Harbottle Grimston, Speaker of the House of Commons
At first the captured regicides’ only visitors in the Tower were officials involved in their prosecution, as well as a committee of three – Secretary Morris, Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper and Arthur Annesley – charged with finding the true identity of ‘the person in the frock’ who had cut off the head of the King. This trio paid particular attention to Colonel Hercules Huncks, John Cook and Captain William Hewlet, but several others were interrogated roughly in an attempt to resolve the mystery.
Huncks gave up Colonels Hacker and Axtell at this point, preserving his life by offering damning evidence against his former colleagues – an irony, Axtell would note, given that ‘Colonel Huncks . . . was the uncivillest of all about the late King, and yet he comes in as a witness against us’.1
Francis Hacker received no warning of his arrest. He had remained in charge of his regiment of horse guards in the City of London for several weeks after Charles’s return, reassured by General Monck that he would be excused any past wrongs. Hacker was at home on his Leicestershire estate when he was summoned to London. On arrival, on 4 July, he went to see Monck, ‘who could not be ignorant of the design that was against him’, Edmund Ludlow believed, ‘yet received him with as much show of affection as ever, enquiring of him with much kindness where he lodged. But the next day after he was thus caressed, he was seized, examined, [and] sent to the Tower of London.’2 Hacker was taken into a small room in the Tower where, he later recalled, ‘the Gentlemen were very strict with me’.3
Colonel Hacker’s problems stemmed from the original death warrant of the King: he had kept it safe throughout the Commonwealth years. Hacker’s wife, Isabell, mistakenly believed she could now spare her husband by presenting the document, trusting its words demonstrated that the colonel had only been obeying orders. However, Mrs Hacker had in fact produced incontrovertible proof not only of her husband’s direct involvement in the killing of the King, but also that of all of the warrant’s signatories. On 1 August the Lords added Hacker’s name to the list of those to be treated without mercy.
Hacker and his fellow prisoners in the Tower had much time to contemplate what might happen to them. They tried to make sense of what they assumed to be imminent execution. John Cook found comfort in a rational breakdown of his condition. He calculated that, being aged fifty-two, ‘I can expect to do little more for God. I am three parts dead (seventy being divided into four), the shades of evening are upon me and aches and pains are inseparable companions.’4 Meanwhile, Colonel John Jones reminded his distressed well-wishers that he had had no right to survive a particularly savage storm at sea during a crossing to Ireland, years earlier; so every day of his life since then should be counted as a bonus and a blessing. But these were brave words for outward consumption; Cook, for one, admitted that his spirit was frequently cast into the depths by the horror and hopelessness of his situation.
Colonel Henry Marten, regicide, republican and roué, handed himself in on 20 June 1660, on the proclamation of Charles II, sure that such a surrender would guarantee his life. As bitterness towards the regicides mounted, and the thirst for reprisals grew, Marten found himself one of nineteen men excepted from pardon: they would be tried, their only hope being the mercy of Parliament. The colonel remarked with grim humour that this was the first royal proclamation that he had ever obeyed, and he very much hoped he would not be hanged for having trusted the word of the King.
In a letter that he intended for publication, to gain his jury’s sympathy, Marten addressed the charges he faced, mixing self-serving justification with remarkable broadmindedness. He acknowledged where the desire to try him and his companions stemmed from: ‘Upon serious consideration (it seems to me) the Royal party could contrive no one sacrifice so proper to appease the ghost of their often soiled cause, both in point of revenge & interest, as the persons who had the boldness to make an example of their Ring-leader.’ He was quick to recognise how difficult a task he and his fellow commissioners of the High Court of Justice now faced in escaping condemnation, given the skill of the legal minds arrayed against them: he and his co-defendants would, he wrote, have to ‘fence for their lives with Masters in the Art’.5
Marten shared his sorrow at having been instrumental in helping to start the Civil War: ‘Could I have foreseen how dearly public freedom must be bought, and how hardly it can be kept, I would have used only my passive valour against all the late King’s oppressions, rather than voted, as I did, any War at all, though a defensive one.’ He was insistent that the fighting, and the King’s trial and execution, could not be seen as separate events, ‘for you must understand that this act,’ he stated, ‘whether its name be Treason and Murder, or Reason and Justice, its Parent was a Civil War.’
As for regrets, he was happy to admit that he had some, but he was adamant that they centred around Cromwell, not the cause he had fought for: ‘Had I suspected that the Axe which took off the late King’s head, should have been made a stirrup for our first false General, I should sooner have consented to my own death than his.’ Further, he felt obliged to concede, ‘I am satisfied in my conscience that the said King thought in his conscience he died unjustly.’6 This was a great sadness to the colonel.
When it came to the King’s trial, the lawyer in Marten made him agree that Parliament was not the place for a person to be tried, since its responsibilities were legislative, never judicial. ‘My opinion is,’ he continued, ‘that the . . . trial by Commissioners without a Jury was yet more irregular, for he ought not to have been put into a worse condition than the meanest Englishman, who may claim to be tried in a known Judicatory before sworn Judges, and by a Jury of twelve men, all agreeing; if it be for his life, by two Inquests upon oath one after another.’7
Despite the shortcomings of the legal process, Marten was adamant that, ‘In all this I take no murder to myself, nor Treason, as being sure I had no murderous nor treasonable intent about me in what I did.’ He saw an absolute distinction between the deed of judgment itself, and the interpretations that could be placed on that deed. ‘My plea therefore is, that I judged the late King.’8
Henry Marten had, according to a contemporary, ‘lived from his wife a long time. If I am not mistaken, she was sometime distempered by his unkindness to her.’9 This was his second wife, the first, Elizabeth, having died in childbirth in 1634, when young. At the time of the King’s execution he had taken a permanent mistress – ‘Mary Marten’, as she styled herself – and had three daughters with her: Peggy, Sarah and Henrietta (the last two he nicknamed ‘Poppet’ and ‘Bacon-hog’), in addition to the six children from his two marriages. Through his private letters to Mary we can see the ups and downs of Marten’s hopes and fears, as well as his reliance on their love to keep him focused on happier thoughts than imminent trial for high treason. Before his detention in the Tower he wrote to her: ‘As for news, it cannot be worth the gaping after (any more than the weather) the worst will com
e soon enough; the best is like to be welcome whensoever it comes.’ But, he admitted, ‘I confess what I hear is not very good.’ What kept him consoled in such perilous times is the intimacy they share, when he and Mary are ‘snug like a snail within our own selves, that is, our minds, which nobody but we can touch’.10
In another letter Marten was distressed to hear that Mary had been unwell. ‘I am afraid I can guess too right at the greatest part of thy disease,’ he wrote, ‘or at least, the ground of it, which is melancholy and thoughtfulness for things which I can apply no remedy to.’ Marten reminded his lover not to underestimate his ability to bounce back from disaster: ‘I have been on bare board a thousand times in my life, and yet still found a twig or something to hold me up,’11 he boasted.
His main hope at this time of terrible uncertainty remained Charles’s word that those who handed themselves in would have their lives spared. ‘Tomorrow morning,’ he reported, ‘we are all to appear at the House of Commons, to show cause why the sentence given against us should not be executed. I think we can show a very good one, wherein the King’s honour and the Parliament is concerned,’ before adding, less optimistically, ‘if they think otherwise, who can help it?’12
Marten sustained Mary and their children with all the provisions he could afford: ‘a leg of mutton, two loaves, a peck of flour . . . and four bottles of William Parker’s Lemon Ale’, one day; ‘a piece of cake, and some Bergamot pears from Hollingbury, a piece of sturgeon, and a bottle of liquor’,13 as well as venison and cheese, on another. He asked frequently about their daughters (his ‘pesky rogues’): ‘Now I care for nothing but knowing how my three biddies do,’ he declared. Elsewhere, he took a father’s pride in the attributes the girls had inherited from him: ‘Look upon my little brats, and see if thy dear be not among them; has not one of ’em his face, another his brains, another his mirth?’14
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