The King's Revenge: Charles II and the Greatest Manhunt in British History

by Jordan, Don

  The day after interviewing Hutchinson, the committee examined the list of sixty-seven judges, dead and alive, who had attended the last session of the trial and heard the sentence of death pronounced. Those most hated by the royalists were dead of course – Oliver Cromwell, Henry Ireton, John Bradshaw and Thomas Pride. The committee took the first step towards punishing them posthumously. It voted to except them from pardon and ‘attaint’ them as traitors. Attainder was medieval England’s great disincentive to treason. It was seen by many as a punishment equally dire as execution. As well as condemning the individual to a traitor’s death, it condemned his bloodline to ruin by declaring all titles, property and estate held at the time of the treason forfeit to the crown. The near-contemporary historian Roger Coke described the punishment facing the judges as ‘terrible … for tho’ they did not all suffer in their Persons, scarce any of them but forfeited their Estates’. Pauper-making went with widow-making.

  An Act of Parliament conferred the regicides’ estates on the king’s brother James, Duke of York. One of the recurring matters occupying parliamentary time in the months ahead was the nodding through of land and property transfers to the future James II.

  A start was made with Oliver Cromwell’s property. The Council of State ordered the seizure of the late Protector’s team of horses and the ‘grand coach’ which he had commissioned before his death. This was followed later by moves to take back from the Cromwells the great estate in Monmouthshire that Parliament had voted to Oliver for his military achievements. Cromwell’s widow Elizabeth was the first to suffer. She was rumoured to have planned to finance life in exile with a cache of valuables – gold, jewels and paintings – that were allegedly royal property. The hoard was supposedly hidden in a Thameside warehouse owned by a friend of the widow. In a report dated 12 May, the Parliamentary Intelligencer announced that the council was ‘following up information that there were several of His Majesty’s goods at a fruiterers’ warehouse near the Three Cranes in Thames Street London which were there kept as the goods of Mrs Eliz Cromwell, wife of Oliver Cromwell deceased, sometimes called Protector’. The report added: ‘it being not very improbable that the said Mrs Cromwell might convey away some such goods, the council ordered persons to view the same.’ There was a follow-up report in Mercurius Publicus on 16 May: ‘Amongst goods that were pretended to be Mrs Cromwell’s at the fruiterers’ warehouse are discovered some pictures and other things belonging to His Majesty.’ What the pictures and ‘other things’ were was never revealed.

  A few weeks later, a much larger repossession exercise began after a list was produced of properties formerly owned by Henrietta Maria, the Queen Mother. They ranged from the palace of Somerset House, which the Commonwealth had used as a barracks, to a string of stately manor houses sequestered by the state and sold to government supporters. The buyers had included John Lambert, now in the Tower, Edward Whalley, now on his way to America, and Edward Dendy, probably in Rotterdam. All the properties and everything else they owned were liable to be seized from their families. It was the same for every attainted fugitive.

  A line of men-o’-war bearing Charles and his brothers James and Henry hove to at Dover on 23 May. The royal party was carried on what had been the flagship Naseby, but was now The Charles. During their passage across the Channel the king had ordered not only her name but those of four similar vessels to be changed: The Richard became The James, The Dunbar became The Henri, The Lambert became The Henrietta, and The Speaker became The Mary.

  George Monck was first to greet his sovereign. He began to bow, making as if to prostrate himself, only to be swept into an embrace by the king, who kissed him. After that there unfolded scenes of fawning comparable to those envisaged by John Milton. Dignitaries jostled to kiss the hems of Charles’s garments and to deliver the most humble and joyous declarations. A leisurely progress to London followed, interrupted by a three-day stopover at Canterbury where a new royalist council was appointed and Monck was invested with the Order of the Bath, the first of many gifts to him from the grateful king.

  While the king paused, the destruction of republican symbols went on. In New Palace Yard, Westminster, in Cheapside and at the Old Exchange, copies of the Solemn League and Covenant were ceremoniously burned by the common hangman. ‘The executioner … did his part perfectly well’, reported the Kingdom’s Intelligencer,

  for having kindled the fire he tore that Solemn League into very many pieces, first burned the Preface and then cast each parcel solemnly into the fire, lifting up his hands and eyes, not leaving the least shred but burned it root and branch. What a damnable wicked Covenant was this … that fatal oath born in Scotland and fed in both kingdoms with the blood and livelihood of more thousand Christians than this oath had words.16

  The king and his two brothers rode through cheering multitudes and were hailed outside London by a reported fifty thousand troops drawn up on Blackheath. This was the prelude to a magisterial parade into London that enthralled the crowds and sickened republicans. As David Masson wrote:

  At the skirts of London itself there were the kneeling Lord Mayor, Aldermen, and Common Council, and thence through the City, the trained-bands and City Companies … a troop of three hundred in cloth of silver … next a marching mass in purple velvet … next, a troop in buff, with silver sleeves and green scarfs … smaller troops, in blue and silver, grey and silver, and pure grey, all with trumpeters before them … the Sheriff’s-men, in red cloaks and with pikes in their hands … six hundred picked men of the City-companies, in black velvet suits with chains of gold … then kettledrums, trumpets, and streamers … the Knights of the Bath and their esquires … then more kettledrums and trumpets, preceding his Majesty’s lifeguard of horse … then, in a blaze of various colours, the City-marshal, the City-waits, and all other City-officers … the two Sheriffs, the Aldermen, the Heralds … the Lord Mayor carrying the sword … then Lord General Monck and the Duke of Buckingham; then, O then, His Majesty himself, between the Dukes of York and Gloucester.

  No doubt the excited rush and bustle made it easier for furtive men going the other way. It is believed that Thomas Scot and John Okey managed to leave the country somewhere during the period around Charles’s return. Scot’s was a heart-stopping escape. He claimed not to have feared arrest but murder: ‘Some unreasonable men designed no less than a bloody assassination upon me,’ he said.17 An assassin would have found it easy to track him down. A well-known figure, he lived ostentatiously with his family in a wing of Lambeth Palace across the river from Whitehall. In May or June a passage to the Continent was arranged for him, probably from Portsmouth. His vessel set off, but her route was through waters notorious for the presence of pirates and sure enough Scot’s vessel was boarded. According to Scot’s own account, the pirates ‘plundered’ him and set him ashore somewhere on the Hampshire coast. The hunt for regicides must have been in full swing by now, but somehow Scot avoided capture. He got aboard another vessel, this one shipping Spanish prisoners of war back to the Spanish Netherlands. It is more than possible that Scot’s friendship with the Spanish envoy in London helped him secure a berth on the ship.

  Ludlow continued to hang on. He even watched the king’s entry into the city, the soldier idealist in him quailing at the sight. He wrote:

  I must not pass over the folly and insolence manifested at that time by those who had been so often defeated in the field, and had contributed nothing either of bravery or policy to this change, in ordering the soldiery to ride with swords drawn through the city of London to Whitehall, the Duke of York and Monck leading the way; and intimating, as was supposed, a resolution, to maintain that by force which had been obtained by fraud.

  He then reflected bitterly on the changed role of the army he had been proud to lead. ‘It was a strange sight to me, to see the horse that had formerly belonged to our army, now put upon an employment so different from that which they had at first undertaken … they had not been raised out of the meanest of the people,
and without distinction, as other armies had been; they … had engaged themselves from a spirit of liberty.’

  Edward Hyde, Charles’s Chancellor, was equally struck by the welcome, though from a different perspective. ‘At Whitehall the two Houses of Parliament cast themselves at his feet with all vows of affection to the world’s end. Well might the King exclaim, as he saw the fervency of welcome, It had been his own fault he had been absent so long; for he saw nobody that did not protest he had ever wished for his return.’18

  The pageantry went on for days. Across the country there was a ‘delirium of joy … peals of bell-ringing, bonfires and shouting mobs, public feasts, wine running from the spouts for the general benefit’ and burnings of Oliver Cromwell in effigy, usually accompanied with effigies of the Devil.19

  The exodus of judges would go on too.

  11

  DEATH LIST

  May—September 1660

  While the country celebrated, a hue and cry was unloosed for the men who had judged the king. A decision was taken to attach the terrible label ‘regicide’ to those who had been present in the High Court as Charles I’s death sentence was pronounced and from their number to select the death list of seven. Thirty-seven of these men were still alive, and the order went out to sheriffs and other law officers across the country to seize them and seize their property.

  The seven were deemed to be unpardonable and were wholly ‘excepted’ from the Bill of Indemnity. They could expect the full savagery of a traitor’s death – hanging, castration and disembowelment before the victim was beheaded and the trunk quartered so parts could be displayed across the land.

  The remaining judges were to be on a list of men who could expect severe future punishment short of death; the phrase used was ‘pains, penalties, and forfeitures’. What that punishment was to consist of would be decided by Parliament at a later stage. For a lucky few this would turn out to mean a fine and perhaps a bar from future public office; for most it would mean incarceration for life and the seizure of their estate and property by the king.

  A rhetorical blast from the Speaker, Sir Harbottle Grimston, let Parliament know how the regicides were to be viewed. In judging them, Sir Harbottle told the Commons, they ‘were looking over a long, black, prodigious, dismal roll and catalogue of malefactors … monsters, guilty of blood, precious blood, precious royal blood, never to be remembered without tears’. There was, he thundered, an absolute necessity to except such men from pardon ‘that they may be made Sacrifices to appease God’s Wrath, and satisfy Divine Vengeance’.1

  The first of the judges to be selected for execution was the flamboyant Fifth Monarchist Thomas Harrison. On 4 June Parliament announced that he was to be ‘excepted out of the Act of general pardon for life and estate’. The choice of General Harrison was no surprise. Apart from his several roles at the trial of the king, his status at the head of the Fifth Monarchists made him look the most dangerous of surviving republican leaders and a man for royalists to be rid of.

  A day after Harrison was named, six more judges, major figures from the republican past, were listed with him as wholly beyond pardon. They were the military men John Jones and John Barkstead, the lawyer John Lisle and the parliamentary politicians Thomas Scot, Cornelius Holland and William Say. Edmund Ludlow narrowly escaped inclusion after George Monck received a letter alleging a plot by Ludlow to mount an insurrection. Ludlow managed to put down that nonsensical claim and Barkstead, the once feared military governor of the Tower, was voted in by a narrow margin as the seventh man on the death list.2

  The list was supposed to stop at seven, the number of men that Parliament had agreed should bear the guilt of King Charles’s death by being totally excepted from pardon. However, that restriction was immediately disregarded. On 8 June, three days after announcing the identities of the seven, the Commons put five more on the list: the prosecutor, John Cook, one of the clerks of court, Andrew Broughton, the sergeant-at-arms, Edward Dendy, and the two so far unidentified executioners.

  The same day, Parliament decided to add men other than judges to the list of partial exceptions – individuals who, though not stained by the guilt of the king’s death, had shown such ‘mischievous activity’ in the recent troubles they deserved to suffer. The Commons voted that there should be ‘twenty and no more’ on this list.

  At the beginning of June only three of the twelve men on the death list were in government hands – Harrison, John Cook and John Jones. The last two had been seized by Sir Charles Coote in Ireland back in February. Coote had held Cook until a few weeks earlier when George Monck ordered his return to England. John Jones had been released about the same time only to be picked up after a few weeks, this time in England. Jones evidently expected the worst, for he spent the time after his release putting his affairs in order. He was found by constables ‘taking the air’ in a London park.

  Of the other nine on the list, the two executioners were still unidentified, while the remaining seven men had slipped away to Europe. A stop on the ports had been ordered in mid-May and thorough searches were undertaken. However William Say, John Lisle, Cornelius Holland and Andrew Broughton escaped through the net and were either in, or on the way to, Switzerland, while Thomas Scot was in Brussels, Edward Dendy was probably in the Netherlands and John Barkstead in Germany.

  Others of the king’s judges who, fearing the worst, scattered abroad included John Hewson, the apprentices’ hate figure in London who ended up in Germany; Sir Hardress Waller, who had also been held in Ireland by Sir Charles Coote but was now in France; and Edward Whalley and William Goffe, who must have been more than halfway across the Atlantic. All told, nineteen of forty-four men whose arrest had been ordered were abroad, seemingly out of Charles’s reach. The rest remained in England to brave it out.

  Around them the country boiled with righteous animosity against all those described as regicides. As recently as April, royalists had issued public declarations disdaining ‘any thoughts of rancour or revenge’ once the king was restored. The pledge was forgotten immediately Charles was back in England. His return saw a deluge of bloodthirsty royalist broadsheets inciting action against the ‘phanatics’ who had ‘murdered’ the king. A Hue and Cry after the High Court of Injustice set out the names of the ‘traitors’ and the estates they owned. Lucifer’s Lifeguard listed ‘the anti-Christian imps who have been murderers and destroyers of the best religion, the best government and the best King that ever Great Britain enjoyed’. The Royal Martyrs listed ‘Lords and Gentlemen that were slain in … defence of their King’ and Royal and other Innocent Blood called to heaven ‘for dire vengeance’.

  At this stage the number of captured regicides could be counted on one hand. After Harrison, Cook and Jones the next to be seized was sixty-four-year-old Gregory Clement, whose signature on the death warrant was number fifty-four. He was caught at the end of May hiding in London, in what was described as a mean house near Gray’s Inn. Clement had never been a discreet individual and this characteristic was his downfall. In 1653 he had been discharged from the House of Commons for ‘offensive and scandalous’ behaviour after being discovered in bed with a maidservant. Now he made the mistake of not acting the poor man in a poor man’s neighbourhood. He ordered in provisions only the well-to-do could normally afford, and a suspicious neighbour reported him. The militia was called out and Clement was brought from the house to be questioned by officers in front of a gaping crowd. One of the interrogators knew him but was evidently a friend, for he failed to divulge Clement’s identity. Clement survived the questioning and the militia were eventually prevailed upon to let him go. But Clement had a very distinctive voice and the story is that before he could get away, a blind man in the crowd recognised it and challenged him. At this, Clement evidently broke down and admitted his identity. He was sent to the Tower.3

  Colonel Daniel Axtell was betrayed by a friend who had agreed to hide him. Axtell had been on the run since John Lambert’s fiasco at Daventry six weeks earlie
r, having stuck loyally with Lambert till the moment the latter allowed himself to be arrested by the eager Richard Ingoldsby. Only then did Axtell make his own escape. Even without the Lambert connection, Axtell would have been a prime royalist target. It was he who had allegedly roused the halberdiers under his command to shout ‘Justice, justice’ as the king passed by during his trial; it was claimed, too, that he had ordered his men to shoot the masked woman in the gallery – identified by many as Lady Fairfax – who had barracked the judges. The friend who betrayed Axtell agreed to hide him, but thought better of it: as soon as the search for regicides was launched he contacted the nearest constable and turned his guest in.

  Officers caught Sir Henry Mildmay as he tried to escape through Rye on the Sussex coast. Keeper of the King’s Jewels under James I and Charles I, Mildmay had retained his post to become a disposer of royal treasure under the Commonwealth having taken Parliament’s side in the Civil War. Enemies accused him of growing rich by dipping into the treasures he was supposed to be guarding. In fact he sold them all on Parliament’s orders, but in the way of such office holders probably secured a goodly cut. Although not a signatory to the death warrant, he attended several sessions of the trial, which was enough to damn him in royalist eyes. On the report of his arrest, the Council of State, sniffing royal gold, ordered his captors to take particular care to guard whatever ‘monies and goods’ he and his servants had about them.

  Two wanted men from the New Model Army completed the government catch in May. The brilliant general John Desborough, the hard man of the Wallingford House group, was caught on the Essex coast, and the bluff, unbribable cavalry officer Francis Hacker, another who commanded the guards at the king’s trial, was arrested in London.