by Jordan, Don
Shortly before two o’clock, the military guard came to take Charles to the scaffold, escorting their prisoner through the maze of corridors linking parts of the old palace, constructed piecemeal over several centuries. At this point, Colonel Tomlinson had no further part in the proceedings but the king asked him to accompany him to the scaffold, to which Tomlinson agreed.4 A staircase led them into the imposing Holbein Gatehouse, built by Henry VIII to straddle Whitehall so that he could reach his cockpits and tilt-yard without having to enter the street. Now Charles and his escorts took the same route to cross Whitehall unseen by the crowds swarming below.
In a throng of soldiers, parliamentarians and hangers-on, Charles emerged into the echoing volume of Inigo Jones’s Banqueting House, with its celebrated ceiling painted by Peter Paul Rubens. The ceiling was a glorious affirmation of the divine right of the House of Stuart to rule. Above the doomed king’s head his father ascended gloriously into heaven, stepping from earth onto the wing of an eagle clutching a thunderbolt in its talons. Charles was up there too, depicted as an infant with the Roman goddess Minerva holding a crown above his head, indicating his divinely ordained succession.
The great chamber had played host to many royal revelries and masques, attended by the court or by foreign ambassadors. After many years of war, the great chamber’s windows were still boarded up, obscuring its extravagance in a funereal gloom. One window was open, its frame ripped out to allow a temporary flight of steps to lead up and out to the scaffold built against the outer wall. Before climbing the stairs, Charles said goodbye to Tomlinson, who had been his jailer since he was taken to Windsor. As a memento, Charles gave Tomlinson a gold toothpick in a case.5
At two o’clock, the king emerged from the Banqueting House. The huge crowd surged forward but was pushed back by lines of cavalry and infantry. Across the square, Oliver Cromwell looked on from a window in the palace. Staring around him, Charles realised that a circle of troops kept the crowd too far back for them to hear his speech. This was a blow: his last words – those he had wished to speak in Westminster Hall following his sentence – would have to be addressed to the group standing on the scaffold. Among them were Colonel Hacker, Bishop Juxon, some soldiers and the heavily disguised executioner and his assistant, wearing masks and false beards, like pantomime villains but for their very lethal axe.
Following established protocol, the condemned man addressed the crowd as best he could. He began by protesting that he had not waged war on Parliament and so was innocent: it was Parliament which had waged war upon him. He declared that his death was God’s judgment and, alluding to the Strafford affair, said that one unjust sentence was being punished by another. He finished by proclaiming that he was going from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown, adding wistfully, ‘Where no disturbance can be, no disturbance in the world.’ For a monarch whose reign had encompassed more disorder than any since the Wars of the Roses it was a reasonable sentiment. For a man with one eye on the block and the other on posterity, it was a well-judged speech – the words of a martyr.
Approaching the execution block, Charles realised it was so low that to place his head upon it he would have to lie flat on his belly. He asked if it could be raised up so he could at least have the dignity of kneeling, but was told it could not. It seems this was not some final, mean-spirited humiliation of the king. The executioner had brought a small block he could easily carry.
The king instructed the executioner not to strike until he saw him signal by thrusting his hands forward. The headsman consented. Charles lay down and placed his head on the block. As the executioner stooped to move a wayward wisp of hair sticking out from under the king’s cap at the nape of his neck, the king nervously asked a second time if he understood to wait for the signal. This was no small matter. Charles wanted to make sure the blade did not fall until he had composed himself. A severed head with staring eyes would be a bad image for a martyr. Certain that the headsman understood his instruction, Charles lay down and placed his head on the block. After a brief prayer, he thrust out his hands. When the executioner’s assistant held up the severed head for the crowd to see, Charles’s eyes were modestly closed and the expression the very look of a royal martyr.
Instead of shouting the traditional words, ‘Behold the head of a traitor!’ the assistant threw the head down with such force that the right cheek was bruised. Among the vast crowd, many groaned, while others cheered. Some rushed forward to dip handkerchiefs in the blood running off the block, either as mementoes or as talismans. Soldiers, it was said, dipped their swords in the royal blood.
Immediately after the execution there arose much speculation (which has continued to the present day) as to the identity of the executioners. It is likely that the main executioner was the ‘common hangman’, Richard Brandon. The king’s head was expertly severed by a heavy blow that sliced cleanly through the neck’s fourth vertebra.
Brandon did not survive long after the king’s execution. Five months later, on 20 June 1649, following Brandon’s death, an anonymous tract appeared claiming to be his confession.6 The tract claimed that it came to be written after Brandon confessed all to ‘a young man of his acquaintance’. According to the published confession, Brandon was paid £30 for the job – and told his wife it was ‘the deerest money that ever he earn’d in his life, for it would cost him his life’. Brandon soon lapsed into a fever and ‘lay raging and swearing, and still pointing at one thing or another, which he conceived to appear visible before him’. The tract also quoted ‘a neighbour’ who said that Brandon had told him that at the very moment he was about to strike the blow to execute the king, a great pain struck him in his neck that had continued ever since; and that he had been so troubled by the fact that the king would not give him forgiveness for what he was about to do that he had never slept quietly since. Of course, it may be that the tract was entirely made up in order to cash in on the death of the notorious hangman, or designed to muddy the waters and divert suspicion from other candidates for the role.
Within two days of the execution, royalist pamphlets were circulating, describing the unjust killing of the king. Word of Charles’s death began to filter through to the Continent. At first, no one knew whether to believe the stories or not. Queen Henrietta was in Paris with two of their children waiting fearfully for word. Two hundred miles to the north in The Hague, the Prince of Wales and his brother and sister also waited. Rumours were circulating in both cities, but neither queen nor prince would have firm news about events in London for several days.
The news finally reached The Hague and the Royal Palace on 4 February. William of Orange broke the sad news to his wife of her father’s death by execution. Mary was too shaken to undertake the task of breaking the news to her brothers. The burden therefore fell to a senior member of the small Stuart retinue, Dr Stephen Goffe, an ardent royalist who as a chaplain to Charles I had carried secret messages for the king after he had been taken into captivity. When the situation became too dangerous for the clerical agent he had taken a boat for the Continent and was now chaplain to the Prince of Wales. Goffe’s family had split over the question of king or Parliament. Stephen’s brother William was a colonel in the parliamentary army and would later become revered in America as an upholder of liberty.
Goffe steeled himself for the task. As the oldest member of the household and a chaplain to two generations of the royal family, it was his duty. Entering the prince’s chamber, he got to the heart of the matter at once by addressing the eighteen-year-old prince as ‘Your Majesty’. Grasping the significance, Charles burst into tears and fled from the room. The prince’s reaction, according to his advisor Edward Hyde, was of understandable shock: ‘The barbarous stroke so surprised him that he was in all the confusion imaginable and all about him were almost bereft of their understanding.’7
Charles was now a penniless king without a kingdom. Nine weeks later, his first son was born to his mistress Lucy Walter, the first of many children born out of we
dlock as the prince sought to obliterate the world in sex and personal pleasure. On the surface, Charles still seemed as frivolous and charming as ever, but to those who knew him something seemed to harden inside him after his father’s death.
By the time news reached Holland of the execution, the king had not yet been buried. Thomas Herbert recorded that immediately after Charles’s death, he met Fairfax in the Long Gallery of Westminster Palace. Herbert was surprised when Fairfax asked him how things went with the king. Next, Herbert met Oliver Cromwell, also coming along the Long Gallery. Cromwell was much more to the point and told Herbert that he would have ‘orders for the King’s burial speedily’.8 The interesting point here is that when the axe fell, both men were supposedly in a prayer meeting together, yet one appeared aware of exactly what had happened on the scaffold and the other did not. Since all of London knew that Charles had been executed, it is most unlikely that the supreme army commander did not. One may suppose that Fairfax was in some form of denial, or else he had shut himself away so that he might genuinely not know the precise time of the execution, thereby distancing himself from the business. An alternative explanation is that Fairfax may have believed that an appeal he had made earlier in the day for a postponement of the sentence had been successful. His future actions, however, would reveal much more about the commander-in-chief’s changes of mind.
Odd though this seemed at the time – and still does today – the king left no specific instructions for his burial. Despite this, those close to him had begun planning his funeral some time before his execution. When his head and body were carried indoors from the scaffold, everything was ready to embalm the corpse and place it in a wooden coffin. A thin lead casing was formed around the coffin to seal it and it was wrapped in a dark velvet covering.9
The king’s close allies, including Bishop Juxon, decided he should be buried in Westminster Abbey, a traditional burial place of England’s kings and queens. They wished him to be placed in the chapel of Henry VII, from whom he was descended, and where his father and brother were buried, along with Edward VI, Mary Queen of Scots and Queen Elizabeth. Thomas Herbert applied to the new governing council for permission for burial in the abbey. Unsurprisingly, it was denied, the reason given that it would be ‘inconvenient’. Having a newly martyred king buried right in the centre of the nation’s spiritual power was the last thing the republicans wanted.
Herbert and Juxon decided the best way forward was to apply for permission to bury the king at Windsor Castle. Charles had been fond of the castle and also held the Chapel of St George in high regard. The crypt of the chapel housed the remains of several kings: Henry VI, Henry VIII and Edward IV, who had rebuilt the chapel in English Perpendicular splendour. This time, their application was successful. On 6 February, Parliament authorised Herbert to bury the king at Windsor.
The following day, six horses covered in black pulled a black hearse from the courtyard of St James’s Palace and headed for Windsor. Four carriages followed, carrying Herbert and the bishop, along with various retainers who had served the king since he was taken into army captivity. Upon arrival, the coffin was first taken to the Dean’s House and then laid in Charles’s old bedroom while Herbert and the rest of them went to look at the chapel. They decided the best resting place was the vault in which Edward IV was interred on the north side of the choir.
As with almost everything relating to the king’s final days, even the choice of a resting place for his corpse would not be straightforward. While Herbert and his companions were inspecting the vault, a group of royalist nobles came in, among them the Duke of Richmond, the Earl of Southampton and the Earl of Lindsey. This group insisted upon viewing all the options for themselves. While this was going on, one of them beat with his staff on the paving stones, which rang with a hollow sound. According to Herbert, the paving was removed and earth dug up to reveal a vault that ran under the choir. The nobles descended and discovered that the vault contained two coffins, one of which was ‘very large of antique form, the other little’.10 These coffins, they surmised, surely contained the bodies of Henry VIII and his third wife, Jane Seymour, who was known to be buried beside her husband (this was confirmed by research 160 years later).11 The nobles agreed that the vault was the place to bury the king.
Charles’s coffin was carried from his bedroom down to St George’s Hall, where it was placed for a time under a black velvet pall. A small entourage gathered to carry the king to the chapel under a clear blue sky. No sooner had they left the hall than snow began to fall, turning the pall white. As the bishop opened his copy of the Book of Common Prayer to read from it the order for the burial of the dead, there was another crisis. The governor of the castle, Colonel Whitchcott, intervened, saying the Book of Common Prayer was no longer allowed. And so Charles Stuart went to his grave without even the words he would have wished for to be read over his body. Thomas Herbert recorded that the total cost of the funeral was £229 5s, of which £130 was paid to pall bearers and others he described as ‘seventeen gentlemen and other inferior servants for mourning’.12
And so England entered a new era without a king – except, of course, that there was one, of sorts. Across the water in Holland, the followers of Charles, Prince of Wales, declared him king. All he had to do was find a kingdom. The problem facing him was that while he had little material support, those who had brought his father to the scaffold had one of the finest armies ever seen. So how was he to find his way back, if at all?
5
PROPAGANDA AND
ASSASSINATION
January 1649—October 1651
On the day Charles Stuart was executed, pamphlets appeared on the streets of London proclaiming the Prince of Wales as Charles II. A few copies of a small book also passed furtively from hand to hand. Four days later, street hawkers were selling it on the streets.1 The book carried no publisher’s marks or printer’s name but was purported to have been written by Charles I himself. Its message was that the king had died the death of a holy martyr. The book played a major role in bolstering royalist resistance, turning shock and dismay to outrage and the desire for revenge against Cromwell and all the other representatives of the new republic.2
As soon as the new government appreciated the incendiary nature of the publication, they moved to ban it. But it was too late – it quickly appeared on the Continent, spreading the cult of the martyr king. It became the biggest selling book of the century.3
The book was titled in Greek, Eikon Basilike (‘The King’s Image’). It contained a series of short essays in which Charles justified his actions during the last decade of his reign. Each essay was followed by a prayer. The king’s enemies were never blamed for his misfortunes – they were not even mentioned by name. Instead, the king asked God for forgiveness and instructed his eldest son to be forgiving also. Naturally, the Prince of Wales and his supporters were in no mood for forgiveness.
Eikon Basilike was a propaganda coup. So many editions were rushed out that the zinc plate carrying the frontispiece of Charles the Martyr had to be re-engraved eight times.4 There was no doubt that public opinion, already swaying in the aftermath of his execution, was beguiled by the notion of a martyred king. For the men who put Charles on trial and set up the republic, Eikon Basilike smacked of the Counter-Reformation. It was a Puritan’s nightmare.
Arguments persist about the exact authorship of Eikon Basilike. It appears that Charles began the book some time in 1647 or 1648, as a justification of his actions leading up to and throughout the Civil Wars. When it became clear he would be tried and possibly executed, the work was completed either by Charles or another hand. Likely candidates as ghost writers include the Bishop of Worcester, John Gauden, former royal chaplain Jeremy Taylor, and Dr William Juxon, the Bishop of London.5 Whoever had a hand in its creation, its power has been well put by Andrew Lacey: ‘This little book, perhaps more than anything else, not only fixed the image of the martyr in the public mind, but also demonstrated the power of conservati
ve, royalist and Anglican patterns of thought and allegiance which survived the republic and emerged triumphant in 1660.’6
Charles the victim became more attractive than Charles the monarch had ever been. What regal power and robes could not give him, humility and suffering could. In a modest house in High Holborn near Lincoln’s Inn Fields, a forty-one-year-old writer read the book with growing alarm. This was John Milton, the greatest poet of the age, and a participant in radical political circles. Milton saw right away that an upsurge of sentiment in favour of hereditary monarchy could stop social and religious reforms in their tracks. A counter-blast was urgently needed – and Milton would write it. Though he was outwardly meek – he had been taunted at Oxford for appearing somewhat feminine – inside was a will of iron.
He rushed to finish his work, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. Right from the beginning, he took on the cult of the divine right of kings in the bluntest of words: ‘No man who knows ought can be so stupid to deny that all men were naturally born free.’7
As a student at Cambridge, Milton had intended to become an Anglican priest, but turned away from it, feeling the Church was taking a rigid and doctrinaire path. He also came to the conclusion that monarchy as practised by the Stuarts was authoritarian and allied himself with the anti-monarchist cause. He began work on a treatise justifying the theoretical trial and sentencing of a tyrant or unjust ruler. This became The Tenure of Kings. Milton maintained that a king’s right to rule did not come from God but from the people. Therefore, the people had the right to remove a king.8
What Milton set out was a theoretical basis for getting rid of hereditary monarchy. From earliest times, he said, people had needed to work together or suffer the ‘destruction of them all’. To prevent organisational chaos, they had chosen one person above the rest ‘for the eminence of his wisdom and integrity’. This person was called a king. The king was not the people’s lord and master but their representative, and so could not be selected by inheritance.
