During his final moments, Scroope clearly had his nemesis very much in mind, but preferred to leave him anonymous. ‘I say once more,’ Scroope continued, ‘the Lord forgive him; I shall not name him, for I came not here to reflect on any man’s person.’11
In reference to the cruel reversal that had seen his initial penalty – the payment of a fine equivalent to one year’s rent from his estate – replaced by the imminent agony of a barbaric death, Scroope spoke passionately about the purity of God’s justice, contrasting it wistfully with the sad fallibility of the judgment of Man. Scroope had shown the same concern during his trial, which he had faced unprepared, after six weeks’ close imprisonment. He had attempted to justify his conduct then, reminding the court that he had not been a Member of Parliament, but rather part of a commission summoned by Parliament, a body that he had not felt able to disobey since it was at that point ‘accounted the supreme authority of the nation’. This was a point absolutely rejected by the court.
Scroope had been provoked to utter the great unspoken truth, under which the regicides’ trial was conducted. Looking round at the many former Parliamentarians sitting in judgment, he offered, ‘I could say, but I think it doth not become me to say so, that I see a great many faces at this time that were misled as well as myself; but that I will not insist upon.’12
It was a point that he had expanded upon, after a witness called Kirke confirmed to the court that he had been surprised to see Scroope sitting as one of the commissioners in the High Court of Justice on the day of sentencing. Addressing the Lord Chief Baron, Scroope had said, ‘In all humbleness I do speak it to your Lordships, that your Lordships will please to consider that if he [Kirke] had any employment in that business himself, how fit a witness he is against me?’ The judge replied, ‘Much fitter.’
Accepting how the cards were stacked against him, Scroope replied with a shrug, ‘If it be so, I have done.’13 He maintained that, if he was guilty of anything, it was an error of judgment, not malice.
At the conclusion of his case, the Lord Chief Baron turned to the jury and conceded: ‘Mr Scroope, to give him his right, was not a person as some of the rest; but he was unhappily engaged in that bloody business, I hope mistakenly, but when it comes to so high a crime as this, men must not excuse themselves by ignorance, or misguided conscience.’14 The jury agreed, and declared Scroope’s guilt.
In his final speech, from the executioner’s ladder, Adrian Scroope claimed no great compliment should be paid to him, other than he hoped that he would be remembered as ‘a tender-hearted father’. His was another valiant death that added lustre to the Good Old Cause of Parliament, and brought further quiet consternation to the avenging Royalists. Lucy Hutchinson noted that the colonel ‘had the honour to die a noble martyr’.15
The same description applied to Jones, who had remained remarkably accepting of his fate ever since his gentle arrest in Finsbury. He greeted the sight of the sledge that was to pull him to his death with a joke: ‘It is like Elijah’s fiery chariot – only it goes through Fleet Street!’16 He told those who loved him not to mourn, but to take this opportunity to ‘take off your mind from me, and fix it immovably upon your eternal relation with the Lord Jesus Christ, in whose glorious and blessed presence we shall meet ere long, to our eternal rejoicing’.17 By the time that Jones was put to death, the executioner was, according to eyewitnesses, so sated with blood that he stood down, allowing his apprentice to castrate, gut, behead and quarter the old colonel.
Jones met his death with such courage and faith that minor miracles were believed to have occurred that day in his honour: among them, despite it being autumn, a crab apple tree was said to have come into bloom on his family’s estate in Merioneth. (These lands were now confiscated by the King and his brother, the Duke of York.)
It was a bloody week. Friday 19 October saw the end of two army officers intricately involved in Charles I’s trial and execution. Colonel Daniel Axtell and Colonel Francis Hacker had been found guilty of ‘imagining and compassing’ the death of the late King. Axtell had been tricked into arrest in July, when a Royalist posing as a potential purchaser of some of the colonel’s property requested a meeting with him. There, he revealed his true purpose, taking Axtell prisoner, ‘who being thus betrayed into the hands of this bloody enemy, who had creatures enough in both houses to gratify his lust’, according to a contemporary, ‘he procured them to except [Axtell] out of the Act of indemnity; by which means . . . he came to be thus inhumanely and cruelly treated’.18
Axtell offered the legal defence proposed to him in Newgate prison by John Cook. ‘May it please your Lordships,’ he said, ‘my case differs from the rest of the Gentlemen.’19 Axtell stated that, whereas the others were being tried for their actions, he was only accused of using words against the late King. In any case, he claimed to have acted under the authority of Parliament, insisting that, ‘if the House of Commons who are the representatives of the whole nation, may be guilty of treason, it will follow that all the people of England, who chose them, are guilty also, and then where will a jury be found to try this cause?’20 The colonel presented himself as a simple soldier, who had merely obeyed the orders of his superiors: his presence in Westminster Hall had not been voluntary, he pointed out, but by command. If that obedience to Parliament made him guilty of anything, he maintained, then similarly culpable was the Earl of Manchester, and several of the other Parliamentary military leaders now sitting in judgment of this case.
This was an embarrassing line for many to hear. The court rejected such a defence out of hand. Axtell was hated by the Royalists, in particular for his cold-blooded murder of prisoners of war during Cromwell’s Irish campaigns, and they wanted him dead.
Axtell was condemned for whipping up the soldiers in Westminster Hall, so that they influenced proceedings by calling for ‘Justice!’ and then ‘Execution!’. He was also convicted for being in charge of the soldiers who oversaw the King’s beheading. Testimony given by Colonel Hercules Huncks, who had rejected Cromwell’s command to sign the order for executing Charles, proved to be devastating. (Huncks, who had been well known as a passionate supporter of Parliament’s cause, would be pardoned three months later for having given his evidence.) There was the added problem for Axtell that Huncks had suffered no harm for refusing to comply with his orders, which undermined Axtell’s claim that disobedience would have inevitably resulted in his being shot.
Colonel Hacker must have felt the least fortunate of all those sentenced to death. As Lucy Hutchinson wrote, ‘Poor Mrs Hacker, thinking to save her husband, had brought up the warrant for execution, with all their hands and seals.’21 It was damning enough evidence to allow the court’s Serjeant Keeling to claim, in a vivid image of guilt, that Hacker ‘had the axe in his hands’.22
Hacker had admitted his role in keeping Charles guarded prior to his execution. Under questioning he was obliged to go further, conceding that he had also marched the King to the scaffold, and signed the order to the executioner to carry out his duties. Sir Orlando Bridgeman thought Hacker an especially blameworthy defendant. ‘Either he is guilty of compassing the death of the King, or no man can be said to be guilty,’23 he directed. The jury had no need to retire, instead forming a whispering huddle in court, before the foreman swiftly returned the guilty verdict.
Axtell was in his cell when he heard Scott, Clements, Scroope and Jones being led to their execution sledges. He was barred from saying farewell in person to the quartet, so shouted out their names, with blessings: ‘The Lord go with you! The angel of his presence stand by you!’24 Axtell was pleased to hear later that the four had died ‘cheerfully’. He asked how the executions had been performed. When told from a ladder, he seemed content, choosing to see this as a manifestation of the Old Testament tale of Jacob’s ladder.
Axtell’s daughter came to visit her father, bringing questions from friends who remained troubled by his bloody record in Ireland. ‘I can say with all humility that God did use me
as an instrument in my place for the suppressing [of] the bloody enemy,’ he said, in justification; ‘And when I considered their cruelty in murdering so many thousand Protestants and innocent souls, that word was much upon my heart, “Give her blood to drink for she is worthy.” And sometimes we neither gave nor took quarter, though preservation might have said, “Give that which ye might expect to have.”’25
Axtell and Hacker prayed together, attended by preachers, on the morning of their deaths. They were taken on a single sledge three miles west of the City, to Tyburn: the inhabitants of Charing Cross had complained about the foul stench of burning bowels during the earlier executions, prompting this return to the traditional site of London’s executions. At Tyburn, the condemned mounted the executioner’s cart. It was noted how quiet and respectful the crowd was: Ludlow learnt that when two present shouted out, ‘Hang them, hang them, rogues, traitors, murderers! Hangman, draw away the cart!’, one who was more in tune with the general mood that day countered, ‘Gentlemen, this is not civil. The Sheriff knows what he hath to do.’26
Axtell spoke to a muted audience. During his speech, which lasted several minutes, he earned a sharp reprimand from the sheriff after saying, ‘I was fully convinced in my conscience of the justness of the war, and thereupon engaged in the Parliament’s service, which as I did and do believe was the cause of the Lord. And I adventured my life for it, and now die for it.’27
Hacker, a man of few words, read out a carefully written statement in which he also expressed his pride at having served the cause of Parliament. ‘And as for that for which I am condemned, I do freely forgive both judges, jury and witnesses, yea all others,’ he continued. ‘And I thank the Lord to whom I am now going, at whose tribunal I must render an account, I have nothing [that] lies upon my conscience as guilt, as to that for which I am condemned, and do not doubt but to have the sentence reversed.’ He urged his friends to pray, ‘that I may have a sweet passage from this mortal life to that which is immortal’.28 Hacker then asked that Axtell pray aloud for both of them, since he had no pretences as an orator.
When he had finished, Axtell thanked the sheriff for allowing him to speak. He then turned to his fellow sufferer, and the two colonels embraced. Their caps were pulled over their eyes and Axtell, expecting the cart to be pulled away from beneath them, shouted, ‘Lord Jesus, receive my spirit!’ But the cart failed to budge. Axtell then implored, ‘Into thy hands, O Father, I commend my spirit!’ Again, the cart did not move. The carman, whose duty it was to draw the cart away, was refusing any part in the death of the two men. The hangman then jumped down, and led the horse forward. Axtell gave a third cry to God, before the drop.
While Axtell was hanged, drawn and quartered, Hacker was, ‘by his Majesty’s great favour’, simply hanged, then, as John Evelyn noted, ‘given entire to his friends, and buried’.29 This may have been thanks to Monck’s unease at having promised Hacker his safety, before having him seized and sent to the Tower.
John Evelyn had been travelling frequently to and from London during the week of these executions, the electrifying buzz surrounding such public sufferings matched by the mundaneness of the reason for being in town: he was there to be sworn in as Commissioner of Sewers. On 17 October he recorded in his diary:
This day were executed those murderous Traitors at Charing Cross, in sight of the place where they put to death their natural Prince, & in the presence of the King his son, whom they also sought to kill: taken in the trap they laid for others. The Traitors executed were Scott, Scroope, Cook, Jones. I saw not their execution, but met their quarters mangled and cut and reeking as they were brought from the Gallows in baskets on the hurdle: O miraculous providence of God; Three days before suffered Axtel, Carew, Clements, Hacker, Hewson and Peters for reward for their iniquity.30
Evelyn’s dates were wrong. Less surprisingly, so was his identification of some of the chopped-up limbs and torsos in the baskets: indeed, Colonel Hewson had not been killed, having escaped to the Continent. But the pungent odour of the freshly butchered corpses was real, and the Royalist delight at this rich harvest of revenge was truer still. There had been around sixty regicides alive at the Restoration. In just a few days, ten of these had been dispatched. The remaining fifty were acutely aware that the fierce appetite for retribution was roaring still, and that their lives were in the gravest of danger.
Chapter 9
Surrender or Else . . .
Upon His Majesty’s gracious declaration from Breda, and the votes of Parliament, and His Majesty’s proclamation, published by the advice of the Lords and Commons then assembled in Parliament, they did render themselves, being advised that they should thereby secure their lives; and humbly craved the benefit thereof, and the mercy of the Houses, and their mediation to His Majesty in their behalves.
‘Contention of the Regicides who came in upon the Proclamation of Charles II’
Edmund Ludlow had been anxious about what the return of the Stuarts might entail, long before the Restoration transpired. He realised that vengeance would be an integral part of the process, when and if the cause fell, and he assumed that he would be among the most vulnerable to such a sea change. Ludlow was an extremely important figure in the cause of Parliament: politically, he was a radical republican who had been a prime mover behind Charles I’s trial; militarily, he was a heavyweight in the New Model Army, serving lately as a lieutenant general of cavalry. Of all the surviving regicides he was the most capable of successfully leading armed resistance against the new order.
When it had become clear that the dead King’s son would be gifted the vacant crown, Ludlow had hoped that the extent of royal retribution might be limited to token action against the fallen figureheads of republicanism. In the spring of 1660 this had seemed possible, when the talk was of Cromwell and Bradshaw being the posthumous recipients of revenge. Soon afterwards there had been rumours of a plan for one or two of the surviving judges to be made examples of: the new King was concerned that to do nothing against those who had, so outrageously, put his father to death would mark him from the outset as a weak ruler.
Ludlow was wily and well connected. He had friends in the Royalist camp. He also had, in his loyal Welsh wife, a willing intermediary, eager to protect her husband. Elizabeth Ludlow was happy to talk to whoever might act as political barometers in the aftermath of the Restoration – this unexpected storm that had hurled republicanism onto the rocks. Meanwhile Ludlow quickly assumed a low profile; unseen, he watched his triumphant enemies intently, the better to fathom their purpose. In May, out of the windows of his home in Holborn he had viewed, with disgust, the new King’s triumphant return to London. From his lonely vantage point he had become a disbelieving eyewitness to the wave of Royalist sycophancy that seemed to have engulfed all, including many who had, he knew, until recently spoken of ‘Charles Stuart’ with dismissive contempt.
It sickened the lieutenant general to see the men of his once committed and proud cavalry squadrons riding in joyful, servile escort to the resurrected Stuarts. He recalled how these units had been raised to fight for the civil rights and religious beliefs that the new King’s father was seen to imperil. Ludlow wrote with sad acceptance that these troops had ‘been corrupted under the tyranny of Cromwell, and kept up as a standing force against the people’, so ‘they had forgotten their first engagements, and were become as mercenary as other troops are accustomed to be’.1
Ludlow resolved never to join in this betrayal of the cause to which he remained proudly devoted. Earlier that month he had made a dangerous and deliberate stand, refusing to have anything to do with the appointment of the commissioners sent by Parliament to acknowledge the exiled Prince of Wales as the new monarch. His election as an MP was annulled soon afterwards: none of the late King’s judges were to be allowed to continue in public office. Feeling the net closing in on him, Ludlow felt a responsibility to avoid punishment, not just out of self-preservation, but also in the hope that he could be useful to the cause
, when it rose again.
Ludlow’s excellent contacts warned him that he was being considered for one of the quartet of vacant names in the Bill of Indemnity that had demanded the death of seven regicides. He knew he had enemies, and that they would be happy to see him suffer. He learnt that one of these had written to General Monck, falsely claiming that Ludlow had led two or three hundred men into hiding, planning to rise up against the new order when the time was right. It seemed most likely that, on the back of this misinformation, Ludlow would become one of the fated seven. But, out of the blue, Parliament was suddenly adjourned: this was the first of several lucky breaks that came his way.
A Royalist acquaintance indebted to Ludlow used this interlude to coordinate a group of sympathisers in the Commons, who would do all they could to block Ludlow’s condemnation. This ally sent Ludlow a message through his sister-in-law: if this plan was to have a chance of success, Ludlow must immediately confirm that he was no longer in armed resistance to the Crown. The sister-in-law took it upon herself to offer that reassurance there and then, without the delay of referring back to Ludlow.
Killers of the King Page 20
