by Jordan, Don
So Charles got his way. On 8 May the still absent prince was officially proclaimed ‘the most Potent, Mighty and Undoubted King of England, Scotland and Ireland’, with no conditions attached.
By common consent among historians, this was a disastrous decision. William Cobbett wrote: ‘To the king’s coming in without conditions may be well imputed all the errors of his reign.’5 In the opinion of Edmund Burke,
The man given to us by Monck, was a man without any sense of his duty as a prince; without any regard to the dignity of his crown; without any love to his people: dissolute, false, venal, and destitute of any positive good quality whatsoever, except a pleasant temper, and the manners of a gentleman. Yet the Restoration of our monarchy even in the person of such a prince, was every thing to us, for without monarchy in England, most certainly we never can enjoy either peace or liberty.6
How little truth there was to Monck’s warning about urgency was evident from Charles’s own reaction. He could hardly have moved at a more leisurely pace. A man who all his life loved symbolic gestures, Charles opted to delay his arrival in England, finally making a triumphal entrance in London three weeks later on his thirtieth birthday.
Over those weeks Parliament lavished spending money and compliments on the Stuarts, and worked on how to deal with the alleged killers of the king. The Commons voted £50,000 in immediate cash for Charles, £20,000 for his brother James and £10,000 for brother Henry, topped up by £10,000 from the City of London and a £3000 personal gift – a bribe – from William Lenthall, the Speaker in the Long Parliament. Samuel Pepys was in the party sent to The Hague to accompany the Stuarts back to England. His diary for 16 May 1660 notes the poverty of the royal entourage – ‘their clothes not being worth forty shillings the best of them’ – and their relief at suddenly being in funds. ‘How overjoyed the King was when Sir J. Grenville brought him some money; so joyful, that he called the Princess Royal and Duke of York to look upon it as it lay in the portmanteau before it was taken out.’
While Charles dawdled in The Hague, the manhunt he had always promised himself got under way in London. The hunt would dominate the first year of the new king’s reign and was still to resonate during that of his brother. The legislation authorising it was a ‘Bill of General Pardon, Indemnity and Oblivion’ introduced into the Commons by the solicitorgeneral, Heneage Finch, on 9 May. This was to be the focus of the regicide battle, specifying all those deemed guilty enough to die, those guilty enough to lose everything but their lives and those to be let off with minor punishments.
During the first debates on the Bill, the king’s ‘inclination to mercy’ was stressed repeatedly, not least by Charles himself. But those who suspected that they would be targets recalled the ferocious threats of revenge attached to his name in earlier years. They were faced with stark choices – fleeing for their lives, keeping their heads down and praying for the best, or standing their ground as martyrs for the cause.
Those who fled were arguably the wisest. Charles exhibited moments of ruthlessness that boded ill for anyone judged an opponent. While preparing the ground for his landing in England, he dispatched a letter to Monck telling him to stop appeasing opponents. He wrote, ‘There are many persons still contriving … against me and you and who must be rather suppressed by your authority and power than won and reconciled by your indulgences. … it may be a little severity towards some would sooner reduce the rest than anything else you can do.’7 Later he told Parliament: ‘The same discretion and consequence which disposed me to the clemency I have expressed … will oblige me to all rigour and severity towards those who shall not now acquiesce but continue to manifest their sedition and dislike of the government, either in words or deeds.’8
Among the first of the King’s judges to flee were William Goffe and his father-in-law Edward Whalley. Had they lingered they would undoubtedly have been leading targets for arrest. A report to Charles’s Chancellor, Edward Hyde, pinpointed them as particular enemies – Whalley ‘as a great stickler against the King and Goffe [as] another’.9 On 4 May the two managed to slip unnoticed out of the country just as the last pieces confirming the Stuart restoration were falling into place. The former major-generals kissed their families goodbye and took horse for Gravesend, where passage awaited them on the Prudent Mary. She was bound for Boston.
The two refugees would no doubt have heard that Monck had just secured another endorsement from their former comrades in the army. On 2 May the Declaration of Breda was read to a mass meeting of army officers who applauded it. The meeting repeated the army’s recent commitment to abide by the will of Parliament and recorded the officers’ satisfaction with Charles’s promises. There was a similar commitment from naval officers at a meeting aboard the Naseby, and of course this was marked by celebratory cannonade from the entire fleet.
That evening the House of Lords ordered the restitution of all statues of the dead king and of the blue and gold royal coat of arms of the Stuarts. A statue of George Monck was also proposed.
Goffe and Whalley had booked their passages under the names of Edward Richardson and William Stephenson, but their real identities became known to some of their fellow passengers quite quickly. Fortunately these other passengers were sympathisers. New England was a bastion of Puritanism and admirers of Cromwell, and most of the passengers on the Prudent Mary would have been no different. The fugitives made friends on board with two prominent colonists who were en route for home, Captain Daniel Gookin of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and William Jones of New Haven Colony. They would prove godsends in the troubled years ahead.10
A third judge, John Dixwell, would later join Goffe and Whalley in America. Most of the other fugitives either attempted to hide in England or made for Europe.
Cornelius Holland and John Barkstead, both of them also judges, fled for the Dutch coast. The Netherlands was an obvious place in which to lose themselves. The great trading city of Amsterdam was the base of numerous English merchants, most of them Puritan and sympathetic to the Good Old Cause. There were numerous other potential havens in the country too. The great university city of Leiden was one of a dozen or more places with substantial English and Scots populations. These émigré enclaves had first grown up during the Spanish war, when garrisons from both countries were stationed throughout the Low Countries. A by-product of this military presence was the provision by treaty of churches for British subjects in Dutch towns. These were non-episcopal and nonconformist and enjoyed the same privileges as the Dutch Reformed Church. In Leiden, the pastor received at least part of his salary from the municipality, while the town magistrates provided a meeting house for use by the English-speaking congregation.
Barkstead appears to have reached a Dutch port without trouble. Cornelius Holland, on the other hand, was nearly caught. He later told how he had planned to stop in his native town of Colchester on his way to the coast and on arriving took rooms at an inn. He explained that he had come to collect money owed him by a friend, a local merchant. One assumes he needed every penny he could get to fund his life in exile. Holland left his horse at the inn while seeking out the merchant. Mysteriously, he then vanished from sight until the early hours of the following morning. Someone at the inn appears to have become suspicious of the absent guest, and Colchester’s major of militia was brought out of bed by news that a suspected person might have booked in at the inn. There was excited talk of it being John Lambert, though of course Lambert was being held in the Tower. At around 4 a.m., Holland’s rooms were raided in his absence. Holland heard of the raid and did not return for his horse. His friend smuggled him out of town. Eventually he escaped across the Channel and joined other exiles at Lausanne in Switzerland.
John Milton chose to hide, realising correctly that although he had no direct role in the king’s death, Cavaliers would be after his blood. He left his home in Petty France on 7 May, borrowed the tidy sum of £400 for emergencies and went to ground in a house near Smithfield. Friends are said to have dissuaded cons
tables from making a thorough search for him by putting out a story that he was dead. They even held a pretended funeral. The poet avoided arrest for nearly four months.
Edmund Ludlow stuck around precariously, spending much of his time on the run. He had ‘timely warning’ of the order to arrest all who had signed the death warrant, and the night before it was issued he quit his house in London to stay with the first of a long line of relatives and friends who would shelter him till he finally left the country. A day later a warrant for his arrest was circulated throughout the land. He breathed in relief that he hadn’t followed his usual route. If his way had taken him near the Guildhall, he would have seen the statue of Charles being re-erected and, outside the Courts of Justice, the installation of the royal arms.
The manhunt began to focus on its quarry on 12 May, nearly two weeks before the king stepped back on English soil. That day, extracts from the official report on his father’s trial, dated December 1650, were read aloud in the Commons. The ten-year-old report congratulated ‘the persons entrusted in this great service, of the trial of the late King’ for having ‘discharged their trust in them reposed with great courage and fidelity’. Four or five of the men in the new Convention Parliament had been among the king’s judges. They sat uncomfortably as the praise accorded them was quoted ten years later. The record states that several of these former judges rose to their feet to ‘express how far they were concerned in the said proceedings’.11 What they said is not recorded, but as David Masson puts it: ‘Happy were those who could say that, though named among the commissioners for the trial, they had never sat in the court, or had discontinued their sittings before the fatal close.’12
Passions began to run so high that, according to Edmund Ludlow, men dared not show moderation lest it be called disaffection to the king. Yet in private, he says, various members of both houses declared in favour of a general indemnity covering everyone without exception. Ludlow’s memoirs quote the gout-ridden Lord Fairfax as asserting that if any man must be excepted, ‘he knew no man that deserved it more than himself, who being general of the army at that time, and having power sufficient to prevent the proceedings against the king, had not thought fit to make use of it’.
On the opening day of debate on the Bill, Sir John Lenthall, son of the former Speaker, roused fury when he tried to spread blame beyond the judges. ‘He that first drew his sword against the King committed as high offence as he that cut off the King’s head,’ Sir John declared. Strictly that was true, but his words prompted an outraged rebuke from his father’s successor as Speaker, Sir Harbottle Grimston. There was ‘much poison’ in young Lenthall’s words, Grimston claimed. They were spoken out of a design to ‘set the house on fire’. Lenthall was forced to withdraw the words and was briefly imprisoned.
The first principle dealt with was numbers – how many were to die, how many to be imprisoned for life. Monck, careful not to stir up opposition needlessly, had discussed the matter with Charles’s envoys, urging the king to forgo vengeance and pardon everyone. Not so merciful as claimed, the prince was not to be persuaded. Monck then accepted that there should be up to five ‘exceptions’ from pardon – meaning executions – among the judges. In an increasingly bloodthirsty atmosphere, five deaths was considered inadequate and almost immediately it was agreed to raise the total of judges excluded from pardon to seven. This unlucky handful, together with whoever among the wider community Parliament chose to make examples of, would constitute an initial death list. There was also to be a much longer list of men subject to heavy punishment short of death. However, none of this would be set in stone before the Bill was enacted. Until that happened there would be a desperate struggle to have enemies included on the two lists and friends removed. Behind the almost non-stop celebrations of the returning royals and their supporters, dozens of life and death struggles would be waged.
A bulging House of Commons committee of fifty-two members handled the Bill after the preliminaries. William Prynne and the solicitor-general, Heneage Finch, headed the hard-liners pushing for harsh, widespread punishment, while Arthur Annesley, a late convert to royalism, was the leading moderate.
All the known paperwork from 1648–9 was transferred to Prynne and John Bowyer, the man who had arrested General Harrison. Prynne ferreted endlessly through it to produce evidence on who exactly had done what in the prelude to the trial and beyond. Whole libraries seem to have been sent to him to burrow through. Later he was appointed Keeper of Records at the Tower of London, a post he called ‘most suitable to my genius’. In a letter to the Speaker, Sir Harbottle Grimston, he wrote: ‘whilst you are sucking in the fresh country air, I have been almost choked with the dust of neglected records (interred in their own rubbish for sundry years) in the White Tower; their rust eating out the tops of my gloves with their touch, and their dust rendering me, twice a day, as black as a chimney sweeper.’13
Meanwhile, the king’s legal officers were dispatched to load the dice against the regicides by weakening the rules of evidence that were to apply when they were brought to trial. A series of secret meetings with senior judicial figures took place in the Inns of Court. They were attended by the king’s attorney, Sir Geoffrey Palmer, and his solicitor, Sir Heneage Finch, together with the Duke of York’s attorney, Sir Edward Turner, the Chief Baron of the Exchequer, Sir Orlando Bridgeman, and three senior judges. These lawyers agreed to charge the alleged regicides under the ancient law of treason, which made ‘imagining’ the death of the king or his heir punishable by death. ‘Imagining’ could cover a range of acts from direct involvement in a royal death to advocating it. They then agreed to drop the requirement under common law for two witnesses to prove an action. In the forthcoming trials one witness was to be deemed sufficient.
Three of the accused regicides swiftly wriggled off the hook. Richard Ingoldsby was the first of them, quick to capitalise on his capture of John Lambert. Before Charles was even proclaimed Ingoldsby’s friend, the Earl of Northampton was lobbying the king on his behalf. In a letter to Charles dated 29 April, the earl portrayed Ingoldsby as a deeply honourable man misled by others but now a real convert to the crown. The letter asserted that no one else in the army could have crushed Lambert with so small a force. He wanted no reward, only ‘His Majesty’s pardon and forgiveness of his former errors’.
The repentant Ingoldsby was summoned before Parliament on 14 May. In tears he presented himself as horrified at what he had been part of. He claimed that, although he had been named as one of Charles I’s judges, he attended none of the sessions, ‘always abhorring the action in his heart’. The day after the pronouncement of what he called ‘the horrid sentence’, he had come across Cromwell and other judges in the Painted Chamber where they assembled to sign the warrant. His story was that Cromwell saw him and ran to him, forcing him over to the table and saying that although he had escaped the trial he would be made to sign the warrant along with the rest. Ingoldsby claimed to have refused, saying that he was forcibly held while ‘Cromwell, with a loud laugh, taking his hand in his, and putting the pen between his fingers, with his own hand wrote Richard Ingoldsby.’14 His performance was called a ‘whining recantation’. It served its purpose, however. Ingoldsby would be made a baronet. It is worth noting that his signature on the warrant is bold and florid.
Another judge to be freed early in the hunt was Colonel Matthew Tomlinson, the man whose courtesy and attentiveness in guarding the king to and from the court each day had so impressed Charles that he presented the officer with a gold toothpick. Luckily for Tomlinson, Charles had let others know of his considerate behaviour.
The third of the judges to get off relatively lightly was Colonel John Hutchinson, the former governor of Nottingham Castle who had just been returned as a member of the Convention Parliament. Hutchinson, the well-connected son of a baronet, had been as zealous as anyone in killing the king, attending every day of the trial as well as signing the death warrant.15 He escaped retribution eleven years later after,
like Ingoldsby, providing support for George Monck in the critical months of January and February. But there were – and still are – unanswered questions about the man and his escape from the scaffold. After his death four years later, his wife Lucy wrote an adulatory memoir about him, casting him as an unflinching embodiment of honour. He was hardly regarded as such by former comrades at the time, for he sent to the Speaker an abject letter that grovelled in apology for his part in the king’s death. ‘I acknowledge myself involved in so horrid a crime as merits no indulgence,’ it said. The letter went on to claim a ‘real, and constant repentance’ arising from ‘a thorough conviction’ of his ‘former misled judgment and conscience’, not from a regard for his own safety. He also seems to have produced a wealth of supportive testimony from kinfolk and aristocratic friends that he had aided the royalist cause at a much earlier date. He had, he asserted, ‘endeavoured to bring the King back’.
