On Thursday 11 August 1664, John Lisle was walking to the church of St François in Lausanne, wearing the robes of the Chancellor of England: this distinctive attire rather undermined his caution in having recently taken a pseudonym – ‘Mr Field’.
A man in a less eye-catching cape emerged from the barber’s shop where he had been lurking. Seeing Lisle approach, he walked towards him, and greeted him as he passed. When Lisle entered the churchyard this man followed him, and, according to a contemporary news-sheet, pushed back his cloak and pulled out a musketoon, a short carbine with a flared barrel. He shouted out Lisle’s name and ordered him, by the authority of the King of England, to surrender or die. ‘Whereupon,’ the report continued, ‘Lisle with some of the rest presented their pistols, but one of the gentlemen was too quick for him, and shot him into the body with 5 bullets out of a musqueton, so that he fell dead upon the place.’17 Chaos ensued. As Lisle collapsed, mortally wounded, the assassin, having discharged his blunderbuss, tripped and fell. Shouting, ‘Vive le roi d’Angleterre!’ the murderer got back to his feet, then ran towards a mounted accomplice, who threw him the reins of the spare horse by his side. The pair turned towards the nearby city gate, and disappeared at a gallop.
Lisle had been alerted to the suspicious pair in town. They had been spotted waiting outside a church service earlier in the day, scanning the faces of the members of the congregation for someone in particular. One of them had reportedly been heard to say, ‘The bastard won’t be coming’, before sloping off. Lisle had been warned not to go to his regular place of worship: it was too dangerous to stick to a predictable routine with such people about; but he had refused to listen, reminding friends that he had committed his safety into God’s hands. He added that he also considered his life safe while Edmund Ludlow lived, since the lieutenant general was the Royalists’ prime target. Only when Ludlow was slain would he take extra care, since he would then, he accepted, become the most wanted of the remaining runaways.
According to Ludlow, the assassins had not gone two miles when they came across workers in a vineyard. They bid them thank the governors of Lausanne for helping them in their task that day, and said they would drink their health that night. There was never any proof of complicity between the Swiss officials and the assassins, and this may have been an attempt by the killers to leave discord in their wake. They were pursued by a large force on horseback, but eventually reached safety in Gex, just over the French border.
The Newes of London on 8 September 1664 reported: ‘This signal act of just vengeance is applauded by all people that have any sense of generosity, and [is] looked upon as a most remarkable manifestation of God’s displeasure against these wretches, to see them pursued into their securest retreats, and cut off by the stroke of divine justice in the very arms of their protectors. (To their shame be it spoken, that harboured them, and made a Protestant canton a sanctuary for such impious parricides.)’18
The regicides in Switzerland were left deeply shocked by the loss of one of their leading figures, in broad daylight, while guarded: none of them could now feel safe. A report from Paris summed up their fears: ‘However these regicides may for a while trifle with the blood of kings, and outface their wickedness, we see that Divine vengeance finds them out at last.’19
Chapter 12
Vengeance at Last
We have considered the Nature of Your Majesty’s Declaration from Breda; and are humbly of opinion, that Your Majesty ought not to be pressed with it any further; because, it is not a Promise in itself, but only a gracious declaration of Your Majesty’s intentions.
Address of the House of Commons to Charles II, 27 February 1663
In London, there was ambivalence about what to do with the remaining regicides. There were those who felt the thirteen public executions comprised enough of a blood sacrifice to atone for the years of civil war; others pushed for further acts of retribution, among them the King and his inner circle of advisers who used the supposed threat of a republican resurgence in their drive to extract more revenue from Parliament.
In March 1662, Charles II summoned the Commons to Whitehall: ‘Gentlemen,’ he said,
I need not put you in mind of the miserable effects which have attended the wants and necessities of the Crown: I need not tell you, that there is a Republical Party still in the Kingdom, which have the courage to promise themselves another Revolution: and, methinks, I should as little need to tell you, that the only way, with God’s Blessing, to disappoint their hopes, and indeed to reduce them from those extravagant hopes and desires, is, to let them see that you have so provided for the Crown, that it hath wherewithal to support itself, and to secure you; which, I am sure, is all I desire, and desire only for your preservation.1
The continued punishment of those who had killed Charles I was crucial in reminding everyone how terrible things had been, and could be again, if his son was left inadequately funded. Meanwhile Nature was steadily reducing the number of those who needed to be held to account.
At the Restoration the majority of the regicides were in their fifties and sixties. Grim prison conditions and the stress of their situations added to a steady cull, of whom the defiant Sir John Bourchier had been an early example. Simon Mayne, a Buckinghamshire MP who was related to six other regicides – including Oliver Cromwell and Henry Marten – had concealed himself in a hideaway in his family seat, Dinton Hall, before surrendering in June 1660. He claimed at his trial that Thomas Chaloner had forced him into signing the death warrant, threatening that if he failed to do so his estate would be confiscated. Mayne’s health was never robust; he had been granted a special dispensation in the mid-1630s, allowing him to eat meat instead of the statutory fish on Fridays, because of his ‘notorious sickness’. Condemned to death, he cheated the executioner by succumbing to gout, complicated by fever and convulsions, in the spring of 1661. His body was released to his family, provided he was buried ‘without ostentation’.
The rotund Colonel Vincent Potter had cut a very sorry figure at the regicides’ trial. A founding member of the Massachusetts Bay Company, he had fought in the Pequot War in the 1630s, when English settlers in conjunction with Native American allies attacked the Pequot tribe. The strict Puritan had returned to England in time for the Civil War. He took an active role as a cavalry officer in Parliament’s army, before finding his true calling: controlling military logistics. Potter’s particular contribution to the cause was insisting that the New Model Army pay its way when on campaign, so that it did not alienate the local inhabitants, something the King’s forces were often guilty of.
Potter had signed not only Charles’s death warrant, but also those of the Royalist lords who followed him to the block after the Second Civil War. Arrested at the Restoration, Potter arrived in court in anguish at his plight – ‘I pray that the passing [of] the sentence for execution may be suspended’ – and racked with severe pain from kidney stones – ‘My Lord, my condition requires ease for my body.’ His request for permission to be excused from the courtroom so he could urinate was cruelly denied: the Lord Chief Baron allowed only that a chair be brought for him. When it arrived the shackled Potter was instructed to sit. ‘I hope I may be freed from irons,’ Potter continued, ‘I am in pain, and a man of bulk.’2 Pleading for mercy, his appearance in court was frequently punctuated by tears. It ended in the inevitable guilty verdict and death sentence. He was spared hanging, drawing and quartering by dying of natural causes within a year.
Christmas Day 1661 saw the death in prison of Owen Rowe, a silk merchant who also had trade ties to the American colonies: he dealt in tobacco from Virginia, and was another early investor in the Massachusetts Bay Company. Rowe had long intended to emigrate to New England, but events kept him rooted to London where he simultaneously served as a colonel of militia and arranged rich supplies for the Parliamentary cause. From his trading activities in the Atlantic, Rowe reported that the people of Bermuda remained vehemently opposed to the late King’s execution.
He had countered this by effectively taking control of the colony. After casting himself on Charles II’s mercy – ‘I have heard he is a gracious King, full of lenience and mercy, [and] so I hope I shall find it’3 – he died, aged sixty-nine, in the Tower.
Sixty-two-year-old Gilbert Millington, the MP from Nottinghamshire, who had previously married a sixteen-year-old ‘alehouse wench’, had said in mitigation at his trial, ‘My Lord, I am an ancient man and deaf.’4 This had not been enough to gain mercy, but his subsequent grovelling apology to the King would spare his life, if not his property. He was sent to Mont Orgueil Castle on the east coast of Jersey, where he died within a few years – certainly before the autumn of 1666, but no record of the exact date survives. He was joined in this, Jersey’s main prison, by four fellow regicides: Thomas Waite, Rutland’s MP and commander of militia (who had hacked the hands off, and killed, Charles I’s chaplain, Hudson); Henry Smith, a Leicestershire MP and infantry colonel; James Temple, an MP and the New Model Army’s governor of Arundel Castle; and Sir Hardress Waller, one of Oliver Cromwell’s most loyal cronies, who had played a central part in Pride’s Purge, and who had been first to plead guilty to high treason at trial.
George Fleetwood, brother of General Charles Fleetwood, had expected to be pardoned: he had refused to take part in Lambert’s last rising; Monck had entrusted him with a regiment in the months leading up to the Restoration. When sentenced to death he had pleaded for mercy, pointing to his youth and reluctant endorsement of the death warrant: he had only been twenty-five and, he insisted, had been bullied into signing by Cromwell. Monck’s support saw Fleetwood’s sentence commuted to life imprisonment, and confiscation of his property. In 1664 an order was drawn up for him to be transported to Tangier, the North African territory that had come to Charles II as part of the dowry of his Portuguese wife, Catharine of Braganza. Prison life there was hot and hellish, the regicides’ families fearing it as a ‘barbarous and distant’5 destination for their loved ones. It is not certain if Fleetwood died there, or whether the pleading of his second wife, Hester, managed, as some claim, to secure his secret freedom; according to this version Fleetwood crossed to America and lived in Boston for the rest of his life.
The lawyer Augustine Garland had been chairman of the committee behind the King’s trial – something he tried to explain to his own judge by pointing to the chaos of the time: ‘My Lord, I did not know which way to be safe in any thing, without doors was misery, within doors was mischief.’6 Garland had been accused of being the man who spat in Charles I’s face during his trial, a charge he categorically rejected. Given his prominence in the proceedings, and the astonishing disrespect he had allegedly shown the martyred King, Garland was lucky to have his death sentence quashed. He was instead given life imprisonment. In 1664 he was transported to Tangier. He was ordered to be returned to Portsmouth’s grimly utilitarian Southsea Castle in 1677, at which point he drops out of sight.
Others who had been men of enormous power, but who eked out their final years in imprisoned anonymity, included Robert Lilburne. Monck’s predecessor as commander-in-chief of Scotland, Lilburne had surrendered in the statutory two-week period in June 1660. He was sent to Drake’s Island in Plymouth Sound the next year, where he died four years later.
It was a similar tale with John Downes, who had pleaded with the High Court of Justice to hear Charles I before he was condemned – an intervention that had drawn Cromwell’s intense anger. Downes claimed at his own trial that he had only signed the King’s death warrant under duress, during a time of military dominance. ‘When those times were,’ Downes explained, ‘how impetuous the soldiers, how not a man that durst either disown them or speak against them, I was threatened with my very life, by the threats of one that hath received his reward, I was induced to it.’7 Downes was spared execution and committed to the Tower. He came close to release in early 1662, but was disappointed. Downes was still on the roll-call of prisoners in late 1666, yet when he died after that is not recorded.
For some the sentences that sent them into nameless obscurity were punctuated by deliberate, public, humiliation. ‘We walked with thousands of people to Tyburn,’ wrote the visiting Dutch artist William Schellinks on 27 January 1662, ‘and saw there Lord Monson, Sir Henry Mildmay and Mr Wallop lying in their tabards on a little straw on a hurdle being dragged through under the gallows, where some articles were read to them and then torn up. After that they were again dragged through the streets back to the Tower. Their sentence is that they are to be dragged through under the gallows on this day every year.’8 The House of Commons had handed down this punishment to the trio, each of whom was a former MP, six months earlier. All of them were spared execution because they had neither been in court on the day of the King’s sentencing, nor signed the death warrant. But they were told they had done enough wrong by sitting as commissioners of the High Court of Justice to forfeit their freedom for ever, and also that they would have to undergo the annual humiliation witnessed by Schellinks. Their appeal to the Lords against this ‘most ignominious’ ordeal was dismissed.
Mildmay was one of the most unlikely to have his life spared: he was a significant enemy of the Crown, having assisted Thomas Scott as Parliamentary spymaster, and he had loudly opposed any compromise with the King in the weeks preceding Charles’s trial. In 1664 it was ordered that he be imprisoned in Tangier, but he died en route in Antwerp.
Monson had been given his Irish title in the third year of Charles I’s reign, but he had opposed the Crown for years, before siding with Parliament during the Civil Wars. He attended the first three days of the King’s trial and then declined to take any further part. This change of heart saved his life, after he surrendered himself in June 1660. But his claim that he had only taken part in the High Court of Justice in order to save Charles by preventing ‘that horrid murder’9 was rejected. He was stripped of his titles and possessions, and sent to the Fleet prison, an institution he knew well, having been locked up there during the Commonwealth when convicted as a debtor. This was where he died in the early 1670s.
Robert Wallop, a Hampshire MP, was a cousin of Monson’s. Wallop had mounted a similar defence to that of his relative, maintaining that he had sat as a commissioner ‘only at the request of his Majesty’s friends, in order to try to moderate their furious proceedings’.10 The Commons disregarded this excuse and he was imprisoned in the Tower, dying there in 1667.
Colonel John Hutchinson had been quickly forgiven by the Commons, thanks to the carefully pitched speech in which he presented himself as having had a reluctant and insignificant role in the drama of the King’s trial. He had also benefited from the campaign of vocal support orchestrated by his wife and by his brother-in-law, Sir Allen Apsley, one of Charles II’s hard-living set. Attention in mid-1660 had been on finding just seven scapegoats to atone for the days of rebellion against the Crown, and this Nottinghamshire gentleman-soldier was never going to warrant inclusion in such a select number.
His forgiveness was secured in that tiny window between Charles’s restoration becoming inevitable, and the insistence that all involved in his father’s death should be punished. In retrospect, many believed Hutchinson’s pardon to have been over-hasty, ill-considered and incorrect. The chancellor, the Earl of Clarendon, rated him one of the most dangerous men in the kingdom. When bureaucrats retrieved the trial records from the bowels of Parliament it quickly became clear that Hutchinson had been intricately involved in its procedure. He was seen to have sat on key committees, and to have been present during most of the hearings. As the net had widened, and every signatory to the death warrant had been found answerable for his hand in Charles I’s demise, so Hutchinson’s escape became increasingly galling. When Scroope’s initial forgiveness was overturned, thanks to later testimony, many wondered if Hutchinson would be similarly up-ended.
Much would depend on Hutchinson’s attitude: the Royalists wanted to see him openly and sincerely repent for his part in the King’s trial and
death. Also, with the rest of the regicides coming to trial, he was expected to repay the leniency shown to him by assisting in their prosecution.
But Hutchinson felt guilt, not gratitude, at escaping the fate being prepared for his comrades. He had come to resent his wife for having persuaded him to purchase his life with what had, at heart, been a lie. He had obeyed her in a moment of understandable weakness, but he remained proud of his cause, and his profound religious beliefs made his conscience prickle at his dishonest path to mercy. He took to reading his Bible more, finding in it many passages that confirmed his belief that what he had done in the cause of Parliament – including being one of the King’s judges – had been correct, and should be a source of pride, not shame.
Sir Geoffrey Palmer, the attorney general, summoned Hutchinson from his Nottinghamshire estate to help him prepare for his case against the twenty-nine men that were now held in custody. At their meeting Palmer suddenly produced the King’s death warrant and urged Hutchinson to share his eyewitness account of what had happened at its signing: he wanted to build a picture of each regicide’s attitude and actions at that critical event.
Killers of the King Page 26
