by Jordan, Don
The entire series of trials and executions lasted ten days. Thirty-two men were indicted and ten were executed; one was released thanks to his connections at the royal court; another was released because the judges felt the conviction was unsound. This left seventeen waiting to know their fate, and three who had already fled abroad and so were left untried.
The state was not done with those who had escaped its grasp. Spies and secret agents would spread across Europe to fetch them back. At home, a search began to discover the identity of those who had dared to publish the last speeches of the regicides. The reign of Charles II had begun in a vile spectacle of gore, but the desire for vengeance was by no means sated.
14
DISINTERRED
November 1660–April 1661
After the heads of the dead had been impaled for display on the end of poles around the capital, the executions stopped for a time. It would later be claimed that Charles called a halt to the butchery because he was so sickened by what he witnessed. However, another theory was that the condemned men were dying too well. Most of the executed men had exhibited ‘such firmness and piety’, wrote Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury and nephew of Lord Wariston, ‘that the odiousness of the crime grew at last to be so much flatten’d … the King was advised not to proceed farther’.1
Attention was given instead to the twenty regicides who had vanished abroad. Shortly before the October bloodletting, the authorities made their first tentative move to secure foreign help to track them down. A Catholic priest named O’Neill is reported to have been sent to the Netherlands to negotiate the surrender of the regicides there. He found the Dutch authorities unhelpful. They had a proud tradition of offering sanctuary and had no reason to go against it for the Stuarts. ‘Nothing could be done against the liberties of the state,’ Lord Clarendon noted sourly. It could hardly have helped that O’Neill had evidently been given little or no briefing before his mission. When the Dutch Stadtholder Johan de Witt asked for the names of the wanted men, O’Neill did not have them. It would take six months before a more effective agent was deployed.2
The New England authorities would prove at least as difficult as the Dutch when London became aware that Whalley and Goffe were in America and ordered action against them. That was nearly four months after their arrival on the Prudent Mary. Since then they had wandered freely, not bothering to disguise themselves. Such a way of life began to look unwise in November after a warrant for their arrest was produced in Boston and a £100 reward for them dead or alive was posted. But as we shall see, New England was in no mood yet to give them up to the Stuarts. Even after details of the Act of Oblivion arrived, and with them grisly details of the first executions, the two fugitives seemed to have nothing to fear.
In London, vengeance quickly resumed full flow. Before the stink of disembowelment had time to clear around Tyburn’s triple tree, moves were afoot for a new form of retribution there. On 6 November a parliamentary Bill was introduced that would lead to the posthumous dismemberment at Tyburn of the rotting corpses of three dead regicides, first and foremost that of Cromwell himself.
The Lord Protector had been dead for twenty-six months. His monumental tomb lay in Westminster Abbey. It stood in the Henry VII chapel, the glittering gothic masterpiece erected six generations earlier at the end of the Wars of the Roses. The remains of most of the Tudors, the victorious dynasty in that earlier English bloodletting, were housed in the chapel. It was also the resting place of the first Stuart to sit on the English throne, James I, and of his mother Mary Queen of Scots. Cromwell’s tomb, set by the western wall of the chapel, represented him too as royalty, as the monarch that he had reluctantly refused to be in life. The tomb, which is believed to have been of marble and alabaster, was surmounted by an effigy of him reclining, dressed in royal robes, a sceptre in one hand, a globe in the other, and a crown on the head.
One can imagine Charles and his two brothers exploring the abbey after their delirious welcome back to London six months earlier, perhaps looking for their grandfather’s tomb, only to be brought to a juddering halt by the monument to Cromwell, the man most blamed for the ruin of their father. After a pause the young trio might then have drawn each other’s attention to other newish memorials in the abbey. More than a dozen luminaries of the Commonwealth who had died after the king were interred there too. They included men who almost rivalled Cromwell in the pantheon of royalist hate – Henry Ireton, Thomas Pride and John Bradshaw, the stony-faced lawyer who had presided over the king’s trial.
Not surprisingly, the dead regicides’ tenure in the abbey did not last. The Bill introduced to Parliament in November ordered them removed: ‘That the carcasses of Oliver Cromwell, Henry Ireton, John Bradshaw, and Thomas Pride, whether buried in Westminster Abbey, or elsewhere, be, with all expedition, taken up, and drawn upon a hurdle to Tyburn, and there hanged up in their coffins for some time; and after that buried under the said Gallows’.3
This grisly idea came direct from the court, if not from the king himself. The proposer of the measure, Silius Titus, was one of Charles’s most trusted aides, who had claimed authorship of Killing No Murder and had been the agent sent to help Miles Sindercombe in the attempts to assassinate Cromwell. He was also a key intermediary during preparations for the restoration. Here in the Convention Parliament, he vied with William Prynne in eagerness to punish. Titus acted as teller for the attempt to except Sir Arthur Haselrig from pardon, and he was partly responsible for Adrian Scroop’s execution, calling on his former commanding officer, Richard Browne, to repeat to the House the words which brought Scroop to the block. Titus introduced the disinterment proposal as an addition to a larger Bill codifying the attainder for treason of all regicides, alive or dead, so their property could be seized. He said that his addition aimed to provide that ‘execution did not leave traitors at their graves, but followed them beyond it.’ A few days after tabling the amendment, Titus was awarded £2000 for ‘signal services for the Royal family’, a sum subsequently raised to £3000, though he had difficulty obtaining all of it. Later Charles granted him a pension of £500. All of which leads to the assumption that if the posthumous punishment was not Charles II’s own idea, he certainly approved of it.4
The date set by Titus’s Bill for the disinterments was 30 January, the anniversary of Charles I’s execution. Parliament decreed that the date was to be a holy day in perpetuity, a day of ‘fasting and humiliation’. It was one more step towards the sanctification of the little monarch.
News of the posthumous punishments to come left a bad taste in some mouths. Samuel Pepys, in his youth an admirer of the Lord Protector but now a convinced royalist, recoiled at the news. ‘It … doth trouble me that a man of so great courage as he should have that dishonour though otherwise he might deserve it,’ he noted in his diary on hearing of the decision to take revenge on Cromwell’s corpse.5
Titus’s next step was to join Prynne in the attempt to hurry more to the execution block. On 7 December Prynne reminded the House that it was twelve years to the day since the trial of the king had been agreed and he moved an amendment to the new Bill of Attainder to secure further executions. Titus seconded him. Two of the judges who had surrendered themselves within the fourteen-day deadline were targeted for immediate execution, Sir Hardress Waller and Augustine Garland. Titus characterised Waller as a royal pensioner who had voted for his benefactor’s death. ‘The Turks would not eat the bread of any man they meant to betray, and a Roman soldier who betrayed his master, though for the public good, was executed.’6 The executions didn’t go through. Waller’s life was saved by the lobbying of his cousin, the royalist general Sir William Waller, but he never regained his liberty. Similarly with Garland, who was incarcerated first in the Tower and then, it is thought, in Tangiers.
The weeks before the disinterments were full of argument, rumour and twitching nerves in government. Ministers shrieked in alarm at an earnest pamphlet questioning the constitutional status of the existing
Parliament. Sir Heneage Finch told Parliament that he ‘could not think of anything more dangerous than writing this book at such a time … It blew up this Parliament totally and damned the Act of Oblivion.’ The author, he said, was ‘the greatest incendiary that could be’.7 In fact the writer, William Drake, claimed to be a royalist. That didn’t help him. He was dragged before Parliament and impeached. His pamphlet, The Long Parliament Revived, was ritually burnt.
Drake’s impeachment came during a brief moment of calm after the excitements in the Strand. On 5 November the Venetian resident reported:
nothing of consequence has happened this week. The regicides are executed, the disbanding of the army proceeds apace and most of the men are already paid off. When Parliament meets the most interesting question will be the affair of the duke of York and the chancellor’s daughter. It becomes increasingly clear that though the father is trying to hush the matter up, parliament means to deal with it, especially as the duke persists in denying the marriage.*
The personal problems of the royal family did indeed command centre stage for a while. Apart from the scandal of the pregnant Anne Hyde and her hasty marriage to the heir to the throne, the king’s youngest brother, the Duke of Gloucester, had died of smallpox in September, followed by his sister who succumbed to the same disease two months later. The Queen Mother, Henrietta Maria, decided not to stay in England and made plans to depart for the Continent. Anti-monarchists, of course, saw the deaths as God’s retribution for the martyrs of Charing Cross.
Talk of plots was now in the air. The ‘White Plot’ seemed the most serious. News of it surfaced in mid-December after a Major Thomas White was arrested trying to bribe a porter in Whitehall. A search of his chambers led to the discovery of lists of radicals, the arrests of forty or fifty men and the discovery of an alleged plan to assassinate George Monck. On 17 December the usual precautions were taken, with a proclamation banning all former soldiers from within twenty miles of London. Ripples of apprehension spread across the country. There were reports of conspiracies in Lincoln, York, Hull, Wiltshire, Essex and Leicester.8
The Convention Parliament was finally dissolved on 29 December, providing an occasion for the king to enjoy even more gushing adulation than usual. One historian dubbed the loyal address by the Speaker, Sir Harbottle Grimston, as ‘eastern’ in its adulation. The king who had been rescued from a hopeless exile by Parliament was told that it was the country that owed him endless thanks. ‘Royal Sir,’ Grimston began, ‘you have denied us nothing we have asked this Parliament, indeed you have outdone your Parliament by doing much more for us than we could agree amongst ourselves to ask and therefore must needs be a happy Parliament. This is a healing Parliament, a reconciling, peacemaking Parliament, a blessed Parliament.’
Lord Clarendon, the Lord Chancellor, then treated Parliament to a hair-raising account both of the White Plot and of an earlier one which was said to involve seizing the Tower and Windsor Castle, freeing the regicides and killing the king. The Chancellor blamed the plotting on reaction to the execution of the regicides and he made much of rumours about the involvement of Ludlow and Lambert. Ludlow, he asserted, was expected ‘to lead the fanatics’.9 Ludlow had already fled to Europe and was at that moment a distant spectator of events in England, but as we will see his name would be attached to a host of alleged plots over subsequent years. He would become the Stuarts’ bogey man.10
Before he was finished, Clarendon joined in the gushing praise of the king. Charles, he revealed, had attended the questioning of suspects and proved the master interrogator. ‘His Majesty hath spent many hours himself in the examination of this business; and some of the principal officers, who, before they came to His Majesty’s presence, could not be brought to acknowledge any thing, after the king himself had spoken to them, confessed, that their spirits were insensibly prevailed upon and subdued, and that it was not in their power to conceal their guilt from him.’ This was not to be the last time Charles II made the river trip to the Tower to interrogate men accused of wanting to kill him.
A week after the dissolution of Parliament, Sir Arthur Haselrig died in the Tower, aged about fifty-nine. It is not known whether a rapprochement was effected between him and his former ally, Sir Harry Vane, who was also in the Tower.
But Sir Arthur’s death was overshadowed by a violent eruption by the Fifth Monarchists in response to the regicide executions. It occurred when the king and his brother were two days away from London, in Portsmouth, seeing their mother off to France. Thomas Venner, a wine cooper, had assumed the leadership of the movement after the execution of Thomas Harrison. On 6 January 1661 Venner led a group of up to fifty armed followers who broke into St Paul’s Cathedral shouting ‘King Jesus and the heads upon the gates’ and demanded of passers-by whom they supported. One man was shot dead when he answered, ‘God and King Charles.’ It was said that one of their aims was to rescue the head of Thomas Harrison, which had been rotting on a spike on London Bridge for three months. The group never managed that, but over the next four days they were to conduct an astonishingly effective guerrilla war in the city. Well armed and well trained, they appeared and disappeared ‘like wildfire’, rampaging fearlessly through the city, beating back all comers. Samuel Pepys’ reaction was almost admiring: ‘these fanatiques that have … routed all the trainbands that they met with, put the king’s life guards to the run, killed about twenty men, broke through the City gates twice; and all this in the day-time, when all the City was in arms’. He thought there had to be five hundred of them and was astonished to hear there were nearer thirty. ‘A thing that never was heard of, that so few men should dare and do so much mischief.’11
Charles dispatched his brother James back to London to join Monck in suppressing the outbreak. It took four days to subdue Venner and his men. All or most of them were too badly wounded to fight on. Charles himself returned from the coast to see Venner and two others hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn and nine more hanged. It is not known if he interrogated them too.
Venner posed no real threat, and his death and those of his followers appear to have inspired none of the sympathy shown to the executed regicides. Instead they were condemned. But Venner’s uprising, as it would be called, provided the excuse for a clampdown. The government filled the Gatehouse, Newgate and Counters prisons with suspected Fifth Monarchists, Quakers and Baptists, and all meetings of these sects were banned. Some four hundred Baptists were arrested in London alone. It was the beginning of the end of that other promise in the Declaration of Breda – ‘freedom for tender consciences’. Within four months the old Anglican straitjacket was being reimposed. The Corporation Act required all persons holding office in the towns where the Puritans were most numerous to renounce the Presbyterian Solemn League and Covenant,* to declare that opposition to the king was treason, and to take the sacrament according to the rites of the Anglican Church. The following year the Uniformity Act required every clergyman to use the Book of Common Prayer, under penalty of losing his position. Two years after that the Conventicle Act forbade all meeting for purposes of worship not prescribed by the Church of England.
Two days after the Venner executions, work began on digging up the corpses chosen for posthumous punishment. Three were buried in the abbey: Cromwell, Henry Ireton and John Bradshaw. The last resting place of Thomas Pride, the fourth on the list, was at Nonsuch, the site of a demolished royal palace in Surrey. In the event he was left there to rest in peace. Work on disinterring his three comrades began on 26 January, four days before the anniversary of the king’s death. The bodies of Cromwell and Ireton were dug out first. There would have been particular trepidation about handling the Lord Protector’s corpse. According to contemporaries, his burial had been a messy, hurried affair with nauseating consequences. Bishop Burnet described the washing, examination and embalming of the corpse, and then how things had gone wrong. Cromwell’s body was wrapped in six double layers of sere cloth and a sheet of lead, then enclosed in ‘an elegant
coffin of the choicest wood’. But then the body ‘swelled and bursted, from whence came such filth, that raised such a deadly and noisome stink, that it was found prudent to bury him immediately’.12
Cromwell’s vault abutted that of Henry VII, sited centrally under the middle aisle. At the disinterment the vault was broken into and the elaborate coffin located by the sergeant-at-arms, James Norton. The body inside, wrapped in lead and sere cloth as described by Bishop Burnet, was identified by a silver gilt medallion hanging round his neck; on one side were engraved the arms of England entwined with those of Cromwell’s, and on the reverse the words Oliverius Protector Republicae Angliae, Scotiae & Hiberniae Natus 25 April 1599. Inauguratus 15 Dec ris 1653. Mortuus 3 Sep ris 1658. Hic situs est.*13 People paid sixpence a head to glimpse the body, with abbey officials and others jostling for a view. ‘The people crowded very much to see him.’14
Next a shrouded corpse identified as that of Henry Ireton was unearthed, followed by that of John Bradshaw. The latter had been buried only fourteen months earlier and the men who broke open his coffin were nearly overpowered by the smell. His body ‘was green … and stank’.15 From the abbey the corpses were taken by cart to the Red Lion in Holborn, from where they would process west to the ‘tripple tree’ at Tyburn.
The corpses were conveyed to Tyburn early in the morning on 30 January. The odour of John Bradshaw’s corpse accompanied them. ‘All the way the universal outcry and curses of the people went along with them’, reported Mercurius Publicus dutifully. ‘When these three carcasses arrived at Tyburn, they were pulled out of their coffins, and hanged at the several angles of that triple tree, where they hung till the sun was set; after which they were taken down, their heads cut off; and their loathsome trunks thrown into a deep hole under the gallows.’ As usual with high-profile executions at Tyburn, a crowd of boys fought to get under the gallows to cut off the corpses’ toes and sell them as keepsakes.
