Killers of the King

by Charles Spencer

  Throughout his long exile Dixwell had remained steadfast in his beliefs, writing that, ‘the Lord will appear for his people, and the good old cause for which I suffer, and that there will be those in power again who will relieve the injured and oppressed’.16 His dreams seemed to have come true with the Glorious Revolution of November 1688: Charles II had died suddenly of a kidney infection in 1685 and been succeeded by his brother, the Duke of York, who reigned as James II.

  James’s fervent Roman Catholicism was his downfall. It could perhaps be tolerated while his heirs were Protestant, as were the daughters of his first marriage; but the arrival of a son in 1688, whose mother was a Catholic, brought matters to a head. Deserted by his daughters, and by key courtiers and generals, James was forced into exile in a bloodless coup. He was replaced by William of Orange, whose mother had been one of Charles I’s daughters, and by William’s wife, Mary, who was James II’s eldest child.

  Dixwell died of the dropsy – a disease of the vital organs, which resulted in swelling caused by excess fluid – in New Haven on 18 March 1689, after twenty-nine years in exile, before news of the change in ruler in England reached him. He left instructions that his gravestone be vague, so his enemies could not disturb his remains. It read:

  ‘J.D., Esq.,

  Deceased March the 18th,

  In the 82nd Year of His Age,

  1689’

  During his final illness he was tended by the preacher John Pierpoint, a long-standing friend and neighbour. Aware that he was dying, Dixwell told Pierpoint to open the chest containing his private papers. There he would find confirmation of his true identity.

  Dixwell was perhaps the most successful of the regicides, reaching a great age after living in clear sight, leading a normal existence, and leaving behind a family. This was in glaring contrast to Goffe and Whalley, whose terror of being hauled back to England for hanging, drawing and quartering obliged them to endure a succession of miserable confinements, ‘banished from all human society’.17 Dixwell avoided that fate.

  The New England regicides are remembered in New Haven, Connecticut, today: there you will find Dixwell Avenue, Goffe Street and Whalley Avenue – with rather more ease than the English redcoats ever had in locating the three gentlemen in question.

  Chapter 15

  To the Last Man

  And they acted their parts like men; they set themselves against the unruly wilfulness, the rage, the secret designs of an embittered King; they held the common liberty and safety before their own.

  John Milton, ‘Defence of the People of England’, 1651

  Of the regicides whose fates we can follow to the end, Edmund Ludlow was the last survivor. From time to time there had been other attempts on his freedom and on his life; but the wily old soldier’s instinct to remain in familiar territory, surrounded by faces he knew, rather than flee into the unknown and be at the mercy of anonymous assassins, proved a sound strategy to the end.

  In late 1680 he learnt of the death of Henry Marten. Despite his central role in the preparation of Charles I’s trial, and his stern republicanism, Marten managed to escape execution: there was an element of reluctance in Royalist circles to make such a well-known figure into a martyr. There was also an acknowledgement that Marten’s advocacy had spared the lives of some of their own number after the King’s execution.

  Marten’s fear of being exiled overseas came to nothing. He was sent first to Holy Island, off the Northumberland coast, before a move to Windsor Castle in 1665. But Charles II baulked at having a regicide kept so near to him and – in an echo of Marten’s famous dismissal from the late King’s presence, at the racecourse in London – he ordered his removal. From 1668, Marten was imprisoned in Chepstow Castle, accompanied by his mistress, Mary, while his wife remained behind at the marital home in Berkshire. In his late seventies this man of boundless sensual appetites died, choking on his dinner.

  Ludlow’s companions in Switzerland all predeceased him. William Cawley, who had been frail at the time of his flight from Restoration England, died in Vevey in 1667, aged sixty-five. He had been one of the commissioners for ‘demolishing superstitious pictures and monuments in London’,1 whose brief had culminated in the destruction of the stained-glass windows of Henry VII’s Chapel in Westminster, and of Queen Henrietta Maria’s chapel in Somerset House; her altarpiece, designed by Rubens, was cast into the Thames. Cawley was laid to rest in the handsome, unfussy Protestant church of St Martin, set back from Lake Geneva on a gentle hill.

  Nicholas Love had felt sure before the great trial of January 1649 that Charles I would be acquitted and, when proved wrong, had become rich through the acquisition of confiscated royal and Church property. While friends decided to trust the clemency seemingly promised by the Declaration of Breda, Love wisely fled, ‘being resolved not to trust the mercy of enraged beasts of prey’.2 He died aged seventy-four, at the end of 1682, and was buried near to William Cawley.

  Andrew Broughton, one of the clerks at Charles’s trial, had arrived in Switzerland in 1662 after initially hiding in Hamburg with Nicholas Love. He, Love and Ludlow had travelled to an audience with the Lords of Berne to present the regicides’ thanks to the senators for their protection from Royalist revenge. Broughton died in 1687, aged eighty-five, after quarter of a century in Vevey. He was also committed for burial in St Martin’s.

  These deaths left Ludlow as the solitary Swiss exile to hear of the death of Charles II, and the even more thrilling news of James II’s overthrow. He had remained fascinated by events in Britain, and still maintained an alluring charisma to those who regarded him as the ultimate invincible opponent of the British Crown. In the mid-1660s, the Dutch had sounded out Ludlow to see if he would aid them in their conflict against Charles II. But Ludlow never forgave the Dutch for their betrayal of Barkstead, Corbet and Okey, which he believed left them tarnished with bloodguilt. He refused to help them, despite their common cause.

  In 1684, the year before Charles II’s death, Ludlow was the man that plotters turned to, asking him to raise the standard against the Stuarts in the west of England. He declined, claiming that he was in ‘no ways disposed to the thing, saying he had done his work, he thought, in this world, and was resolved to leave it to others’.3

  Such a rebellion took place in the southwest of England the following year. It was led by the Duke of Monmouth, Charles II’s favourite illegitimate son. Monmouth had been a popular figure in England, as well as commander of its army, before overreaching himself and being banished abroad. On the death of his father he returned to England, hoping that people would flock to his Protestant cause in a stand against his Catholic uncle, James II. But the invasion was premature and poorly planned: the new King had yet to provoke huge unpopularity, and only a ragtag force of 4,000 – many armed with pitchforks – followed the duke. Monmouth resorted to a desperate nocturnal attack on the superior Royalist forces on Sedgemoor, but the element of surprise was lost when a pistol was discharged into the night. James II’s favourite, John Churchill, led the King’s forces in a complete rout of the rebels, while his commanding officer, Lord Feversham, was delayed from appearing on the battlefield because – it was said – he insisted on eating his breakfast first. (Feversham was further waylaid through problems straightening his wig and cravat.)

  Monmouth, despite tearful pleadings, was sentenced to death. He was beheaded in a flurry of inept axe blows on Tower Hill, the first strike a glancing wound that made the duke look up in disbelieving pain. At this Jack Ketch, the executioner, lost his nerve, his repeated hacks failing to do the job. He eventually threw down his blade in defeat, before being forced by the irate crowd to complete his task with the retrieved axe, and then with a knife.

  James II was determined to make an example of all the rebels and sent Judge George Jeffreys, Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, into the southwest to dispense vengeance in his name. One of those arrested was Dame Alice Lisle, the elderly widow of the regicide John Lisle, who had been fel
led by a blunderbuss in that Swiss churchyard twenty-one years earlier. She was accused of harbouring fugitive rebels on her property: Richard Nelthorp was discovered hiding behind the chimney in her family home, Moyles Court. John Hicks, a Nonconformist preacher, was also found on her land.

  Dame Alice was a lady of some standing in the community. A mother of eleven children, she was in her late sixties when Monmouth invaded. As judge, Jeffreys was of course supposed to remain detached. However, on 27 August 1685, as the case against Dame Alice was heard in Winchester Castle, he revealed himself to be an eloquent addition to the prosecution. He reminded the jury of what the dame’s late husband had been guilty of – ‘I will not say what hand her husband had in the death of that blessed martyr, she has enough to answer for . . . and I must confess it ought not one way or other to make any ingredient into this case what she was in former times’4 – but it was clear that Jeffreys was eager to underline her connection by marriage to the shocking execution of King James’s father.

  The jurors, troubled by the sight of the old lady repeatedly falling asleep while on trial for her life, tried to persuade the judge that they had enough doubt about her guilt to make conviction impossible. But Jeffreys would have none of it, insisting, ‘There is as full proof as proof can be; but you are judges of the proof, for my part I thought there was no difficulty in it.’5 The jury remained in an agitated huddle for fifteen minutes before finally and unhappily declaring Dame Alice’s guilt.

  She was sentenced to be burnt at the stake, a punishment that, on appeal, was commuted to beheading. Some say she gave a dignified speech from the scaffold, hastily erected in Winchester market square, while others reported her as being ‘old and dozy’, and reported that she ‘died without much concern’.6 The killing of this venerable pillar of the community appalled many, and while Judge Jeffreys went on to dispatch a further 300 people connected with Monmouth’s rebellion, the stain of Dame Alice’s blood has clung to his reputation with particular stubbornness. The regicide’s widow has the unwanted distinction of being the last woman ever to have been beheaded by order of a court in English history.

  Three years later the invasion by William of Orange resulted in the bloodless Glorious Revolution. In 1689 the new regime was looking to suppress support in Ireland for the exiled James II. Ludlow’s name was again discussed as a possible leader of the English force: his effectiveness there, thirty years earlier, was recalled with admiration.

  Ludlow said goodbye to friends in Switzerland, feeling it was at last time for him to return to England and help the latest manifestation of God’s cause. He was greeted with joyful nostalgia by other survivors from the glory days of the New Model Army and the Republic of the Commonwealth. His lodgings in London bustled with family and old colleagues. But there were still powerful enemies for the lieutenant general to contend with.

  Ludlow’s confiscated estate had been granted to Sir Edward Seymour, an arrogant and unpopular Speaker of the House of Commons. Concerned that Ludlow would look to reclaim his property, Seymour’s brother-in-law, Sir Joseph Tredenham, launched a pre-emptive attack in Parliament. Tredenham was quick to remind MPs that Ludlow’s arrest warrant was still live: he must, therefore, be punished for high treason. ‘To what can these persons pretend,’ Tredenham said, in reference to returning exiles like Ludlow, ‘but to bring us into the same anarchy as formerly?’7 While sympathisers tried to delay a vote on his fate, Ludlow slipped away to the Netherlands. Soon afterwards King William announced that Ludlow must indeed be held to account for his part in Charles I’s death, and offered a reward of £200 for his arrest.

  Ludlow returned to Vevey. He died there in late 1692 at the age of seventy-two. His widow had a Latin inscription borrowed from the works of Ovid placed over the door of their home: ‘Omne solum forti patria quia patris’. It applies equally to the many other pious regicides – those courageous men who dared to kill a king in the hope of bringing peace to their traumatised land; who were forced to live overseas, or face agonising and degrading death at home. Translated, it reads: ‘To the brave man every land is a fatherland, because God his father made it’.

  King Charles I of England out Hunting, Sir Anthony van Dyck, c.1635

  Charles’s refusal to engage with Parliament, as well as his High Church sympathies, resulted in tensions that erupted into the English Civil War in 1642.

  Battle of Marston Moor, John Barker, 1644

  The New Model Army, in alliance with the Scots, destroyed the King’s army at the battle of Marston Moor, Yorkshire in 1644. Charles lost control of northern England in a day.

  Through secret dealings with his allies, Charles I brought about the Second Civil War in 1648. It was put down with ruthless efficiency by the Parliamentarians; during the Siege of Colchester the Royalist Army were forced to retreat behind the city wall.

  John Bradshaw was known by his colleagues for scrupulous honesty. He was made Lord President of the High Court of Justice, formed to try the King.

  Charles I before his judges. He is seated in the centre, with his back towards us, facing the dozens of men trying him for his life. The King consistently refused to recognise the right of this assembly to sit in judgement of him.

  An Eyewitness Representation of the Execution of King Charles I in 1649, John Weesop, c.1653

  Charles faced his execution with poise and courage, leaving his followers with the myth that he had suffered with Christ-like dignity.

  Charles II, John Michael Wright, c.1661–66

  Charles II, soon after his Coronation. His life as an impoverished exile ended when the British people returned to kingship as their chosen form of rule. Th e hunt for his father’s killers continued throughout his 25-year reign.

  The bodies of three prominent regicides – Oliver Cromwell, his son-in-law Henry Ireton, and John Bradshaw – were exhumed so their bodies could suffer the punishment that they had escaped through death.

  The first harvest of the regicides, in 1660, resulted in the hanging, drawing and quartering of ten men. The ghastliness of this form of execution was a spur to the others to run for their lives. Not all of them got away.

  Lieutenant General Edmund Ludlow was greatly feared by Charles II, being a gifted soldier and effective politician. Ludlow fled to Switzerland, and was the target of Royalist kidnappers and assassins.

  Major General Thomas Harrison was Charles I’s guard from prison at Hurst Castle to his trial in London. A much-hated religious zealot, Harrison was the first to be sentenced at the trial of the regicides.

  Hugh Peters, pastor of Salem, Massachusetts, returned to England to breathe fire into the Parliamentary cause. His passionate sermons convinced many that a king could be put to death if guilty of tyranny.

  Colonel John Hutchinson timed his appeal for clemency perfectly, but the Royalists discovered incriminating documents that made them hell-bent on vengeance.

  Colonel John Okey had commanded the New Model Army’s only regiment of dragoons. After the Restoration, Okey’s former chaplain Downing set about hunting Okey and his colleagues. Okey was captured in the Netherlands.

  Colonel Adrian Scroope was fined just one year’s income for his part in the King’s death until a conversation was recalled in which Scroope showed no remorse for his actions. This sealed his fate.

  William Goffe fled to America with his father-in-law, Edward Whalley, once the Restoration was inevitable. At first the major-generals were greeted in Massachusetts with respect, but were soon hunted for their lives.

  Colonel Daniel Axtell roused Parliamentary troops to shout for ‘Justice!’ in the trial against the king. His later presence on the scaffold was, he said, just a case of a soldier obeying orders.

  William Goffe has entered mythology as ‘the Angel of Hadley’ – the deliverer of the colonial outpost Hadley from an attack by Native Americans in 1675. He is depicted directing the defence that saved the women and children from massacre.

  Judges Cave, West Rock, New Haven, George Henry Durrie
, 1856

  Judges Cave in New Haven, Connecticut, is one of the supposed hiding places of Goffe and Whalley. The two fugitives believed this to be a safe refuge until it was discovered by a Native American hunting party, forcing them to flee.

  Footnotes

  * Born in the Tower of London, whilst her father Sir Allen Apsley was keeper there, Lucy Hutchinson was a formidable character, known for her intellect and her republicanism. A Latin scholar (then rare among women), she was the first person to translate the complete text of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura (‘On the Nature of Things’), and later wrote poetry and many religious treaties. She was the mother of nine children, and her husband, John Hutchinson’s, biographer after his death.

  * Richard II (1367–1400) had lost his throne after resigning it before the House of Lords, rather than through a public trial.

  * Whitford’s identity as the killer of Dr Dorislaus would remain secret until the following May, when he was on the way to his execution with other defeated Royalists, and declared who he was, and what he had done. The Scots then declined to execute him.Whitford was from that point on hunted by the Commonwealth, but always remained a step ahead of them.

  * After whom Davenport College, at Yale University, is named.