Killers of the King

by Charles Spencer

  Barkstead looked back with regret and shame on his time as Lieutenant of the Tower, and was particularly conscious of his cruelty to Fifth Monarchy prisoners. One of the points he was keenest to pass on to his friends in his final days was the need to accept all Christian beliefs, and to be free from religious prejudice. He felt that the intensity of his ordeal – comprising arrest, close imprisonment and imminent death – was granting him a clear, divine perspective that he needed to share, as part of his legacy, with those still caught up in earthly concerns.

  The night before his execution, Barkstead and his wife dined with their family and friends. Mrs Barkstead asked her husband to wash his hands before eating; Barkstead refused, telling her that the next day would see his hands impaled on spikes above the City gates, ‘and then the rain would save him that labour’.29 Then he asked another of his relatives to air what he referred to as the last shirt he would ever wear. The humour may have been macabre, but it helped him to make the grim reality of what would happen the next day somehow acceptable.

  Meanwhile, sympathetic pamphleteers had Corbet justifying his case to the end. ‘The day before his death,’ Ludlow recorded, ‘he assured his friends, that he was so thoroughly convinced of the justice and necessity of that action for which he was to die, that if the things had been yet entire, and to do, he could not refuse to act as he had done, without affronting his reason, and opposing himself to the dictates of his conscience.’30 Aged sixty-seven, Corbet told friends that he was old enough to be approaching the inevitability of a natural death, and pointed out that he was lucky to have outlived many of his contemporaries: ‘Alas! I might have died long since of some noisome disease, or lingering sickness; might have lain long weltering, and at last been as it were smothered to death in a feather-bed, and perhaps with the loss of my senses too, and the use of my reason and memory, as it happens to many that die in age.’ Instead, he was set ‘to become a seasonable, holy and lively sacrifice unto God: and as for the pain of it, I reckon it far less than what is usually felt in an ordinary sickness.’31 When friends suggested that he give the executioner a bribe, so that he would act with compassion, Corbet would have none of it. ‘Let him be as cruel as he will,’ he said, ‘the more bloody he is, the better for me.’32 He calculated that an angry hangman would do his work roughly, and so speed him to his death.

  As for his capture, which had led to his return to England, he claimed to welcome it. ‘Had I continued abroad,’ he said, ‘I might have died in obscurity, and have been carried out into some hole in a dust basket, where my death would have signified nothing.’ He had just one concern: ‘All my desire is, that I may not faint, nor any way dishonour the Cause that I am to suffer for, by my weak and unworthy carriage, which I confess I am afraid of, and therefore earnestly desire the prayers of friends on my behalf, that God will be pleased to support me, and carry me well through this so hard and difficult task.’33

  Corbet slept until two in the morning the night before his day of execution, followed by two further, brief naps before his wife, Mary, appeared in his cell at six o’clock. She had endured much on account of her husband’s allegiances, having long been libelled by enemy propagandists, who enjoyed portraying the leading Parliamentarians’ wives (particularly Oliver Cromwell’s wife, Elizabeth) as voraciously promiscuous. Even before the King’s trial, a Royalist writer had taunted Corbet with the pretence that he knew a man who would ‘rather go to your house than a bawdy house, because it is a great deal cheaper’.34

  The evening before her husband’s execution Mary Corbet stayed in a room in the Tower, kept awake all night by her dread of what the morning must bring. The couple prayed together for an hour, before breakfast arrived. According to one account, Corbet drank a glass of burnt claret, then picked at the food on offer, concluding with a hardboiled egg; he threw its shell away with the words, ‘Farewell, creature comforts, I shall use you no more.’35

  At eight o’clock in the morning of 19 April – just three days after their trial, and thirty-six hours since they had been informed of the time of their execution – the prisoners heard the rattle on the cobblestones as their sledges arrived in the courtyard, the sound of the horses’ hooves resonating round the walls.

  Barkstead, who had been chosen to be the first to meet the hangman at Tyburn, asked his wife to help button up his cloak. He was led to the door of the lieutenant’s lodgings, where he had once lived in supreme command of the Tower with an annual income of £2,000. Without looking at his former seat of power, Barkstead allowed himself to be secured to the sledge, then headed off for his degrading and agonising end.

  The colonel maintained the appearance of brave and proud acceptance throughout his final hours: ‘When he was brought to confirm with the testimony of his blood that cause for which he had fought, he performed that part with cheerfulness and courage, no way derogating from the character of a soldier and a true Englishman.’36 As his sledge turned out of the Tower he looked back and spied his wife in a window above, waving at him with her handkerchief. He removed his hat in a final farewell, shouting up to her, ‘To Heaven, to Heaven, to Heaven, my Love, and [I] leave you in the storm!’37

  Barkstead was the victim of much abuse throughout his final journey, and it continued while he stood on the cart awaiting his two companions at the place of death. A Royalist lord was heard to shout out, ‘Goodbye, Barkstead, goodbye!’ in a tone of mock distress, to which the colonel replied, ‘Sir, you are no gentleman, to triumph over a dying man.’ Another onlooker – one of the King’s courtiers – ridiculed him for taking fortifying swigs from a flask of alcohol. ‘O Barkstead,’ he jeered, ‘you have got the comforter!’38 Barkstead countered by saying that it was God who was his true comforter.

  One of the guards escorting Barkstead thought he looked so ill that day that he suspected the prisoner had poisoned himself. This soldier shouted out, ‘He is almost dead; if he be not quickly hanged, he will be dead before: therefore hang him, hang him, before he be quite dead: see how he looks!’39 But the hangman said he would hang the trio together. Barkstead waited, clearly unwell, till his comrades joined him.

  Okey was the first to arrive. As he dismounted his sledge at Tyburn, a friend asked him how he was feeling. ‘I bless the Lord, I am very well,’ he replied, holding up his hand, ‘and do no more value what I am now going about, than this straw. I have made many a charge in my time,’ the veteran colonel continued, ‘but now I have but one charge more to make, and then I shall be at rest.’40 Half an hour after Barkstead’s arrival the hurdle bearing Corbet drew up. He was clutching a Bible, and wearing new gloves – a final gift from his wife. She had clung to him as he had been summoned from the Tower crying, ‘Oh my dear husband! My precious husband! What an husband shall I now lose! Whom I have not prized, whom I have not improved as I ought and might have done!’ Corbet had tears in his eyes as he said his last consoling words to her, before turning to his son. He held the young man’s hands, and blessed him. Corbet asked a close friend to stay behind, to comfort his wife and son. He then turned on his heels and strode purposefully towards his sledge, eager to escape the howls of distress of those he loved most, and determined to see through his terrible ordeal.

  There were so many come to see the executions that the condemned men had each been forced to get off their sledges and be escorted by foot through the throng, to the executioner’s cart. There, their hands were tied with black ribbons, their wigs were removed, and caps were placed on their heads. They were told that they would be permitted to address their final words and prayers to the crowd, but that any attempted justification of what they had done would not be tolerated. The three men stood in the executioner’s cart, onto which others had clambered, eager to catch their last words.

  The speeches were long enough to irritate the sheriff, who was keen to be done with his duties. Okey asked forgiveness from any he had ever wronged. He clearly remained deeply perplexed by Downing’s hand in his capture and death. ‘Whoever hath procee
ded against my life,’ he said, near the conclusion of his speech, ‘either in England or Holland (for there was one – who formerly was my chaplain – that did pursue me to the very death, where I remained but two nights, and was going back again, for I had done my business). But both him, and all others upon the Earth, I forgive as freely as I desire the Lord to forgive me. I have no malice either to judge or jury, but desire that the Lord would forgive them; as also those in Holland, that sent us over, contrary to what they did engage to my friends.’41

  Okey assured the crowd witnessing his end that, if he had as many lives as he had hairs on his head, he would happily risk all of them for the good of his cause. But he also admitted his crime, and encouraged all present to submit to the returned house of Stuart.

  When the three men had completed their speeches and their public prayers, the executioner told all others to dismount the cart. He then pulled the prisoners’ caps down over their eyes, and waited for them all to lift their hands as a sign that they were ready for the execution to take place. As the cart was drawn away, Barkstead shouted: ‘Lord Jesus, receive our souls!’

  There were none of the triumphant cries that had accompanied earlier executions of the regicides. Chroniclers commented rather that the overriding emotion at the death of these three captured fugitives was one of great sadness.

  They remained hanging for fifteen minutes, before being cut down and quartered in the same order that they had earlier left the Tower: Barkstead first, followed by Okey, and then Corbet. In late afternoon their bodies were taken to Newgate, where they were boiled. Barkstead’s head was placed on a spike overlooking the Tower of London, where once he had been supreme, but, more recently, where he had been its lowliest prisoner.

  As a reward for Okey’s welcome message of obedience to the restored monarchy, the King allowed his family to have his head and quartered body returned for Christian burial, where they thought fit. His widow planned to have the colonel interred in Stepney, next to his first wife, in a family vault that he had bought as his final resting place. But, while Okey’s butchered carcass rested near to Newgate prison, awaiting its final journey, news of his funeral buzzed through the City, and a vast crowd (sympathetic pamphleteers claimed improbably that it numbered 20,000 people) assembled. Some were curious, others respectful, while still more were nostalgic for the age of the republic. The throng threatened to turn into an immense and unruly procession that would trail the colonel’s remains all the way to his tomb. This support for a slain traitor led to consternation at court, and a swift about turn by the King.

  Secretary of State Nicholas wrote to the sheriffs of London, ‘The King having observed that the relations of Col. Okey, abusing his clemency, are making preparations for a solemn funeral, and intend a great concourse of people to attend it, desires that his head and quarters when given to his relations, be privately interred in the Tower, and that the names of those who have designed the said solemnity and tumultuous concourse be inquired into.’42 The five parts of Colonel Okey were buried that night in the grounds of the Tower of London, in a private ceremony conducted by Mr Glendon, the parish priest of Barking.

  Charles II’s advisers could not help but note the public display of support at Okey’s planned funeral. The grisly ritual of hanging, drawing and quartering had been acceptable in October 1660, when the great majority wanted to celebrate the royal return, and were happy to send unpopular republicans to die in the most terrible manner. However, Bishop Burnet, who was a young man during the early 1660s, wrote much later that:

  In one thing the temper of the nation appeared to the contrary to severe proceedings. For, though the Regicides were at that time odious beyond all expression, and the trials and executions of the first that suffered were run to by vast crowds, and all people seemed pleased with the sight, yet the odiousness of the crime grew at last to be so much flattened by the frequent executions, and most of those who suffered dying with such firmness and show of piety, justifying all they had done, not without a seeming joy for their suffering on that account, that the King was advised not to proceed farther, at least not to have the scene so near the Court at Charing Cross.43

  Charles remained determined to make the killers pay for his father’s death. As the public scaffold was producing a succession of sympathetic martyrs, he began to look to other means by which he could catch up with the remaining fugitives.

  Chapter 11

  A Swiss Sanctuary

  Having been constrained by the late extraordinary revolution of affairs in England, the place of our birth, for avoiding the storm that threatened us and the good people there, to quit that land, after we had used our utmost endeavours for the advancement of God’s glory and the good of our country, we find cause to admire the goodness of the Almighty, for inclining your Excellencies to succour and protect us in this time of our distress . . .

  Address by English refugees to the Lords of Berne, 1663

  Samuel Pepys wrote with a mixture of wonder and disgust at the conduct of George Downing, the man who tricked, then trapped, John Okey, his former commanding officer and generous benefactor. The diarist called Downing ‘a perfidious rogue; though the action is good and of service to the King, yet he cannot with any good conscience do it’.1 Delighted with his three-man haul, and eager to encourage further hunting down of escaped regicides, Charles II awarded Downing a baronetcy the following year, and added to the diplomat’s growing finances: soon he was buying up London property, part of which would become the street bearing his family name, which would in time leave a first-rate traitor for ever linked to the official address of British prime ministers.

  Ludlow and the other regicides in Switzerland were shaken when they learnt of the Dutch hand in Barkstead, Corbet and Okey’s repatriation for execution. They feared that Louis XIV of France – Charles II’s first cousin, and commander of Europe’s mightiest army – might pressure the Swiss into giving them up, too. But Monsieur Voisin, the chief governing officer of Geneva, offered some reassurance: he quietly promised the refugees that he would not only protect them, but also pass on any letters received if they contained threats to their safety. He also undertook that, if the regicides were suddenly in danger in the night, he would use his key to the watergate, and so provide them with that safe passage out of the city. If a threat occurred in the daytime, they would be free to exit by any of the city’s gates. Further, he pledged to work with his colleagues to make the Englishmen’s lodgings as safe as they could be.

  This was reassurance enough for Ludlow and several of his comrades. However, John Lisle and William Cawley (who had taken as their aliases, respectively, ‘John Ralpheson’ and ‘William Johnson’) still felt vulnerable, and chose to press for a public commitment from the Council of Geneva that it would defend them, whatever the cost. Despite the overwhelming sympathy of the Swiss representatives, this was not something they could agree to, and so Lisle and Cawley hired a boat to take them away.

  Shortly afterwards Ludlow had a very uncomfortable audience with Voisin, who was disappointed that his previously private dealings on the regicides’ behalf had been made public. He made it clear to Ludlow that, with Charles II now inevitably aware of these engagements, and likely to act, Geneva could no longer guarantee any of the exiles’ safety. Ludlow decided to follow Lisle and Cawley to Lausanne. He was named alongside them in the Act of Protection quickly passed by the Lords of Berne.

  Lausanne was now a rare safe haven for the fugitives. The Netherlands, so weak over Barkstead, Corbet and Okey, were now actively dangerous, having signed a treaty with Britain: one of its conditions was the extradition of any of Charles I’s judges.

  Meanwhile it was clear there would be no let-up in the manhunt for the regicides. Tales arrived from England of state-orchestrated campaigns to break potential enemies to the Crown. The exuberance that surrounded the Restoration had dissolved into disenchantment at the immorality of the returned court. This included unease at the political influence that Charles I
I’s pre-eminent mistress, Barbara Palmer, Lady Castlemaine, and her faction, had over the King, who Pepys recorded, ‘hates the very sight or thoughts of business’.2

  There was also the perceived failure of the monarch to uphold the best interests of the people. The King’s popularity plunged on news that he had, in October 1662, sold the French port of Dunkirk to Louis XIV for £320,000, in order, critics claimed, to pay for his glaring personal extravagance. English merchants were furious at the gratuitous loss of this important continental foothold, which had been secured by Cromwell shortly before his death: they correctly foresaw that Dunkirk would revert to its historic role as a base for enemy privateers, from which their shipping would be attacked.

  Keen to distract critics of the Crown, and eager to draw their sting should matters deteriorate further, Charles’s subordinates pointed to a series of contrived and fictional plots against the King. Major General Browne, who had testified so devastatingly against Scroope and Scott, now busied himself in flushing out potential rebels in the army through crude subterfuge. Middlemen bearing arms and cash led the gullible to believe a rising was imminent, which would be led by Ludlow, with Charles II’s death its initial objective. This was appealing to some of Cromwell’s former soldiers, particularly those struggling to make a living after the disbanding of their units. There was, in truth, little threat of a serious rebellion at this time. ‘However,’ Ludlow noted, ‘this served the Court for a pretence to seize five or six hundred persons; to disarm all those they suspected; to require those they had taken to give bonds of £200 each, not to take up arms against the King, and to increase their standing guards.’3