Killers of the King

by Charles Spencer

  Edmund Ludlow heard with disgust that Harrison had not only to contend with an apparently predetermined guilt, but also faced the basest form of intimidation from his accusers. ‘I must not omit,’ he wrote, ‘that the executioner in an ugly dress, with an halter [noose] in his hand, was placed near the major general, and continued there during the whole time of his trial, which action I doubt whether it was ever equalled by the most barbarous nations.’35

  Harrison was now presented, one after the other, with the names of those who might sit in the jury to hear his case. He refused the first seven, which provoked laughter in the public gallery. The major general was unflustered. It was not until the twelfth candidate that he found a juror he would accept. Not long afterwards, he had used up his entire quota of thirty-five objections.

  Five witnesses for the prosecution were sworn. The first four told how they had seen Harrison sitting as a judge in the High Court of Justice – some of them had taken note of those commissioners attending on each of the days. Each agreed that Harrison had been there on the final day of the King’s trial. They recalled seeing him rise to his feet with the others, in approval of the sentence of death.

  The fourth witness, James Nutley, added colour to the picture. He remembered Harrison as a leading participant in the trying, then killing, of the King. Nutley was the junior colleague of John Cook, who had tearfully begged Cook not to take part in the prosecution of the King. Nutley had been a frequent presence in Westminster before and during the trial. He remembered seeing Harrison sitting in a committee in the Exchequer Chamber, a few days before the trial, as the charge was being crafted. ‘I do remember well, it was in the evening, they were lighting of candles, they were somewhat private,’ Nutley said, before gesturing towards Harrison. ‘This gentleman was there, I saw him.’

  Nutley recalled Harrison regaling everyone present with an account of his conversation with Charles, after the King asked if the intention was to murder him. Harrison told his audience that he had informed the King that this was not their plan – it was, rather, to have Charles be ‘a public example of Justice’.

  This evidence was enough in itself to confirm Harrison’s damnation in the court’s eyes. Nutley recollected that some on the committee felt that the wording of the royal impeachment was overlong. ‘They were offering some reasons to contract it, and I heard this Prisoner at the Bar vent this expression: “Gentlemen, it will be good for us to blacken him, what we can – Pray, let us blacken him”, or words to that purpose. I am sure “blacken” was his word.’36

  A sixth witness was now produced, and sworn. Lord Newburgh, who had been the King’s host at Bagshot Park during his brief, distressing, visit, spoke of the tight guard Harrison had placed around the monarch: ‘When the King had dined, he [Harrison] carried him to Windsor, and appointed several of his officers to ride close to the King, as he was riding, lest he should make his escape from them.’37 The prosecution reminded the jury that such an imprisonment of the monarch would, on its own, be enough to constitute high treason.

  Wadham Wyndham had been appointed a sergeant-at-law earlier in the month. He now brought forth the papers that would seal the fate of many: the first related to the convening and summoning of the High Court of Justice; the second was the warrant for execution. With the bar set so low for guilt for treason that even imagining the deed could lead to conviction and execution, signed and sealed documents that confirmed the accused’s intentions in tangible, legible, form constituted unshakable evidence. Isabell Hacker had produced the warrant in the misguided hope that it would excuse her husband. Instead, it established his guilt, and that of all of its signatories, beyond any doubt.

  Meanwhile a man called Jessop, a junior bureaucrat at the House of Commons, produced the forms relating to the convening of the High Court of Justice. He explained that, on the instructions of Henry Scobell, the recently deceased clerk of Parliament, he had carefully filed away all records relating to Charles I’s trial. Jessop was a meticulous and obedient man: all the paperwork was there, relating to the preparation, conduct and conclusion of the proceedings. The bulk of this was passed to one side, to be sifted through in time.

  The production of the two key documents – Hacker’s warrant, and the summoning of the High Court of Justice – caused immediate consternation: their implication was clear. Yet Harrison was matter of fact. ‘I desire to see the Instrument,’ he said. Looking at his signature on the form, he confirmed, ‘I believe it is my own hand.’ He was then shown the execution warrant, and said, ‘I do think this is my hand, too.’ Realising he now had his man for sure, Wyndham added, ‘If you think it, the jury will not doubt it. That’s the bloody Warrant for Execution. And we desire they may both be read.’

  Questions were raised as to whether the documents should be read out as evidence, but Harrison overruled such objections on the basis that he had nothing to hide: ‘I do not come to be denying any thing, that in my own judgment, and conscience, I have done, or committed; but rather to be bringing it forth to the Light.’38

  Wyndham summed up his evidence to the jury, stressing Harrison’s leading role in the King’s death: ‘You see this prisoner was no ordinary actor in it: his hand is in at all games, taking of him, imprisoning of him, bringing him to London, and setting guards on him. You see also his malice, “Let us blacken him”, for they knew his innocence would shine forth, unless it was blackened by their imputations.’ In a crescendo of outrage, Wyndham concluded, ‘He sat many times, as you hear, and sentenced him, and assented to that sentence by standing up, and likewise by concluding the catastrophe of that sad beginning of our sufferings, his making a warrant for his execution, and accordingly you know what did follow. I think a clearer evidence of a fact can never be given, than is for these things.’

  The irresistible confidence of the prosecutor’s close made the public gallery buzz in excited anticipation. Bridgeman was appalled: ‘Gentlemen, this humming is not at all becoming the gravity of this court. Let there be free-speaking by the Prisoner and Counsel. It is more fitting for a stage-play, than for a Court of Justice.’39 It was now time for Harrison to speak. The arguments he had formed during his six months in prison blended with his profound religious beliefs to form a defence that he believed to be robust. He began by reiterating that the King’s fate ‘was not a thing done in a corner’, but was rather of international renown. Harrison claimed that he had examined his conscience, in tears and through prayer, many times. His all-powerful, all-knowing God had consistently assured him he had done no wrong, and Harrison warned the court that God would soon appear to the world, to explain that which might seem inexplicable to the human mind.

  In the meantime, Harrison would justify his actions through the revisiting of events that all were familiar with. ‘You know,’ he told the court, ‘what a contest hath been in these nations for many years. Diverse of those, that sit upon the bench, were formerly as active.’

  Harrison was daring to speak the truth: that many of the jurors and legal officers present had actively sided against the King in the previous two decades. What they had done was also treason, by the court’s own definition: the breaking of the Oath of Supremacy, the armed opposition to God’s anointed. Yet it was a subject not to be touched upon, a crime not to be prosecuted: rather, it was to be quietly forgotten, a veil pulled over it, while the regicides alone were pushed forward for sacrifice.

  ‘Pray, Mr Harrison,’ the judge cut in; ‘do not thus reflect on the court. This is not to the business.’40

  Realising he was to be denied use of this, his most compelling claim, the major general redirected his defensive fire. He claimed he had acted out of conscience, and in the belief that he had been doing God’s bidding, rather than out of any personal conviction. Harrison also pointed to the status quo in England eleven years earlier: ‘I say what was done was done by the authority of the Parliament, which was then the Supreme Authority, and that those, that have acted under them are not to be questioned by any power l
ess than them . . . And whereas it hath been said, we did assume, and usurp an authority, I say, this was done rather in the Fear of the Lord.’

  This provoked an explosion from Bridgeman: ‘Away with him! Know where you are, sir! You are in the Assembly of Christians. Will you make God the author of your treasons and murders?’41

  Harrison had nowhere to go, now the court had demolished the two main struts of his defence: that all that had been done had been at the bidding of a Parliament of England, and that no other organisation could question that supreme body’s authority. The solicitor general dismissed these interlocking points with equal contempt, insisting that the defendant’s reference to them comprised a fresh act of treason, which on its own demanded the death sentence.

  Now the various other legal figures joined in the destruction of Harrison’s attempted justifications. Sir Arthur Hazlerig asked mockingly, why, if he held Parliament in such very high esteem, had he pulled the Speaker from his chair during Cromwell’s termination of the Rump Parliament seven years earlier? Harrison made his final, forlorn, counterattack. ‘I would not willingly speak to offend any man,’ he began, ominously, ‘but I know God is no respecter of persons. [The King’s] setting up his standard against the people—

  ‘Truly, Mr Harrison,’ interjected Bridgeman, ‘this must not be suffered! This doth not at all belong to you!’

  Harrison persevered. ‘Under favour, this doth belong to me. I would have abhorred to have brought him to account; had not the blood of English men, that had been shed—’

  Wyndham cut in. ‘Me thinks he should be sent to Bedlam, till he comes to the Gallows to render account of this!’

  Turnor added his disgust. ‘My Lords, this man hath the plague all over him! It is pity any should stand near him; for he will infect them.’42

  Harrison now returned to less inflammatory talk, settling on the evidence against him. He denied that he had sought to ‘blacken’ the King, during his trial. He maintained that he had brought Charles from the Isle of Wight out of obedience to the orders of his commander-in-chief, Fairfax. He persisted in saying he had acted under the umbrella of Parliamentary authority. He expressed his grave disappointment that his lines of justification had been closed to him by the deliberate obstruction of the Court.

  When Harrison had finished, the judge addressed the jury. He noted of the accused: ‘He hath been so far from denying, that he hath justified these actions. The evidence is so clear, and pregnant, as nothing more. I think you need not go out.’43 The jurors huddled together, very briefly, at the bar.

  Their foreman was Sir Thomas Allen, part of the Restoration establishment. Five months earlier, as lord mayor of London, he had greeted the King on his return to the capital. Allen now stood to deliver the inevitable, unanimous, verdict: ‘Guilty.’

  The court was eager to deal with its first victim. The solicitor general asked for the sentence against Harrison to be carried out as quickly as possible. ‘His demeanour hath been such,’ he claimed, ‘that he doth not deserve a reprieve for so many days, that you are like to spend in this session.’44

  Harrison was given one final chance to speak. He had nothing further to say, since the Court refused to consider his defence. The judge then pronounced the sentence that would loom over all the accused:

  You, that are the Prisoner at the Bar, you are to pass the Sentence of Death, which sentence is this. The Judgment of this Court is, and the Court doth award, that you be led back to the place, from whence you came, and from thence to be drawn upon an hurdle to the place of execution, and there you shall be hanged by the neck, and being alive shall be cut down, and your privy members to be cut off, your entrails to be taken out of your body, and (you living) the same to be burnt before your eyes, and your head to be cut off, your body to be divided into four quarters, and your head, and quarters, to be disposed of at the pleasure of the King’s Majesty: and the Lord have mercy upon your soul.45

  Chapter 7

  Men of God

  The doctors did prescribe at last

  To give ’em this potation,

  A vomit or a single cast,

  Well deserved, in purgation;

  After that to lay them down,

  And bleed a vein in every one,

  As traitors of the nation.

  Anonymous Restoration ballad, 1660

  Hanging, drawing and quartering had been the prescribed form of execution for high treason since the thirteenth century. Previously the sentence had tended to be just hanging, without macabre additions. There had been a time when throttling the life out of an offender had been considered enough, but Henry III wanted the guilty sent on their way with more of a flourish, and an unimaginable amount of pain, so as to deter others from attempting this king of crimes. A would-be assassin of Henry’s, and later the man behind the plot, both suffered hanging, drawing and quartering, in 1238 and 1240 – but they were disembowelled after death.

  Early forms of the sentence involved the condemned being dragged through the street on the end of a rope. But the resulting repetitive impact of the head on the ground could result in near death before the gallows – the fulcrum of suffering – had been reached. It therefore became normal practice for the victim to be transported to his place of death on a low hurdle, or sledge, on which he would receive the projectiles of the crowds, but arrive intact.

  On reaching the gallows, the condemned man (women guilty of high treason were burnt at the stake) was allowed to address the people. He was urged by the presiding sheriff to confess his crime and to incriminate accomplices. A priest encouraged a final search for forgiveness which, it was promised, would give the condemned a chance of seeing Heaven, rather than the otherwise inevitable descent into Hell. There was then time for praying aloud. The only clothes worn by the prisoner were his shirt, and a cap that would be drawn down over the eyes just before the drop.

  The executioner would ask for forgiveness from his charge. It was wise to concede on this difficult point, and also to offer a financial gift, for the way in which the killing was performed was largely at the discretion of this master of suffering. He could favour you by allowing you to hang until dead; or he could cut you down after the ‘short drop’ (which garrotted the throat, but left neck and spine intact), then continue to the sharp end of proceedings – the chopping off of genitals, then the disembowelling with a red-hot metal gouge – while keeping the screaming victim alive, leaving his vital organs till last.

  The crime was defined by the Treason Act of 1351, passed during the reign of Edward III. This was the law that Sir Orlando Bridgeman had selectively highlighted to the grand jury before the regicides were brought before it. He had quoted the part of the Act relating to, ‘When a Man doth compass or imagine the Death of our Lord the King’, as the basis for this capital trial. The savagery of the sentence was meant to deter subjects from killing leading male members of the royal family, or from defiling their queens, ‘companions’ and princesses.

  Celebrated victims of this vicious and protracted style of execution included Guy Fawkes, who in 1605 had prepared to blow up King James and the House of Lords during the State Opening of Parliament. Caught near his bank of gunpowder, Fawkes endured relentless torture as the King’s agents sought to extract the names of co-conspirators from him. Broken and bloody, Fawkes was condemned to a traitor’s death. But on the allotted day he cheated the executioner by throwing himself from the scaffold, and dying instantly from a broken neck.

  Behind each phase of the execution lay more than just sadism: this was a symbolic process that led the criminal to oblivion. The drawing through the streets provided a final, degrading journey from the living world. Hanging was the normal mode of dispatch for condemned criminals – the swift cleanness of beheading was generally reserved as a privilege for nobility and royalty.

  The implement for castration was a sharp blade which not only cropped a man’s masculinity, but also symbolically terminated his power. The removal of sexual organs also underlined
that the children of the dying man were disinherited: all possessions of those executed for treason were confiscated. The disembowelling related to medically ignorant and religiously superstitious medieval beliefs about the composition of the body and the spirit. Corrupt people were thought to harbour their malice in their hearts and in their innards. In tearing into the bowel with red-hot implements, to excavate these infected parts, the executioner was aiming to negate their evil through incineration in a purifying fire.

  The head was cut off, not only as a mark of the conclusion of the sentence’s course, but also because it was believed to be the repository of the evil designs that had formed and flourished there. Along with the heart, the head was customarily raised high by the executioner, to mark the subject’s eventual death.

  The head would be stuck on a pike, and placed with its dead eyes cast in the direction of the site of the crime. It was often encased by a metal brace, to hold it together for a little longer during putrefaction. Ravens were famed for picking the flesh, and feasting on the eyeballs, of those executed at the Tower of London.

  The regicides seem initially to have been expecting to be hanged, or beheaded, as relatively orderly exits from the world: Scott had famously claimed in the Commons that an ending of the Long Parliament would see his and other heads on the block, and Cook had spent much time trying to make logical sense of his fate. This had included dwelling on the likely method of his dispatch, and the ordeal that they represented: he calculated that, ‘The axe or the halter [noose] will be less pain than the pangs of childbirth.’1

  There had been examples of people being similarly condemned, within the previous decade and a half. After a failed plan to capture Dublin Castle, Connor Maguire, Baron of Enniskillen, had been captured and found guilty by the Parliamentarians in London of being ‘the chief contriver of the late Irish Rebellion and Massacre of the Protestant English’. After sentencing, the twenty-nine-year-old nobleman wrote a humble letter to the Commons that ‘showeth that your petitioner stands condemned for his life, and adjudged to be drawn, hanged, and quartered: the performance whereof (he humbly conceives) in some more favourable manner, will be satisfactory to justice’.2 Maguire pointed out that, given his rank, he should be afforded a quicker, more dignified, end. The Commons denied him, and he was hanged, drawn and quartered in February 1645, bullying officials and Protestant priests repeatedly interrupting his final prayers because they despised his Catholic words of comfort and supplication.