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

by Jordan, Don

  That, Your Majesty having declared Your Gracious Pleasure to proceed only against the immediate Murderers of Your Royal Father, we Your Majesty’s most humble Subjects, the Lords and Commons in Parliament assembled, not finding Sir Henry Vane or Colonel Lambert to be of that Number; Are humble Suitors to Your Majesty, That, if they shall be attainted, yet Execution as to their Lives may be remitted.4

  The Lord Chancellor reported that the king had agreed: ‘That he had presented the petition of both Houses to the King, concerning Sir Henry Vane and Colonel Lambert; and His Majesty grants the desires in the said petition.’5 Apparently the two were safe. But, three days after the executions of John Okey and his friends, Vane and Lambert were ‘delivered up’ into the hands of Sir John Robinson, governor of the Tower of London, preparatory to trial. The Duke of York had dispatched ships to pick up Vane from the Scilly Isles and Lambert from the Channel Islands. The Venetian resident rubbed his hands in anticipation. ‘It is believed that when they arrive parliament will make them pay with their lives for their crimes,’ he told the Doge.6

  As the trial approached, Charles was preoccupied with domestic matters. Two months earlier he had married. His queen was a buck-toothed but pretty Portuguese princess, Catherine of Braganza. After greeting his bride-to-be in Portsmouth, the thirty-two-year-old king had rhapsodised over her. ‘She has as much agreeable in her looks as ever I saw and if I have any skill in physiognomy which I think that I have, she must be as a good a woman as ever was born,’ he wrote to Clarendon. ‘I cannot easily tell you how happy I think myself. I must be the worst man living (which I hope I am not) if I be not a good husband.’

  He was still more captivated by his mistress Barbara Castlemaine, who made the king eat his words. Determined to assert her presence at court, Lady Castlemaine persuaded Charles to have her appointed first lady to the queen’s bedchamber. The tearful and indignant Catherine resisted and Clarendon urged the king to back down. At this Charles exploded. In a letter worthy of a lovesick boy, he warned Clarendon:

  I wish I may be unhappy in this world as well as the world to come if I fail in the least degree of what I have resolved which is of making my lady Castlemaine of my wife’s bedchamber. And whosoever I find using any endeavour to hinder this resolve of mine (except it be only myself) I will be his enemy to the last moment of my life.

  The issue was still unresolved when Charles was forced to give attention to John Lambert and Harry Vane. On 6 June 1662 the two were charged in Westminster Hall, the scene of past triumphs for each of them. Neither was given advance notice of the indictment nor given a copy in court, and both must have been shocked when the charges were read out to them. They referred not to the 1640s but to 1659 and rested on the novel assertion that Charles II had been de jure king of England at the time, even though he was in fact a wandering exile. John Lambert, who had helped reinstate the Rump and led its troops into battle that year, was indicted for stirring up rebellion against the king. Sir Harry Vane, the politician, was accused of ‘compassing and imagining the King’s death’, contriving ‘to subvert the ancient Frame of Government’ and preventing the king from ‘the exercise of his regal authority’.

  Predictably the proceedings that followed were as loaded against the defendants as the show trials of 1660 had been against their friends. Not only were they given no copy of the indictments, but counsel was denied them, the jury was packed with royalists, and they were allowed neither sufficient time to find their own witnesses nor the right to question those who did appear.

  Cool but apologetic, Lambert made no challenge to the charges but stressed his loyalty. Described by a foreign observer of the trial as ‘trying to excuse and justify the crimes of which he was accused’, he was ‘for all the world not upset about them and did not speak to deny his deeds, but tried all the time to make them appear less serious, and appealed to the King’s Mercy, by which he won the judges’ hearts’.7 Lambert was nevertheless found guilty of treason and sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered.

  Vane took the prosecution on and argued every point. Everything he had done was ordered by Parliament, he insisted, and Parliament, not the absent Charles, was sovereign at the time. It was not possible to commit treason against a king not in possession of the crown. The prosecution accused him of insolence, telling him that his own defence ‘was a fresh charge against him, and the highest evidence of his inward guilt’.8

  On the second day of the trial Charles decided to break his word and deny Vane a pardon. He wrote to Clarendon about Vane: ‘He is too dangerous a man to let live, if we can honestly put him out of the way.’ The king was reported to have been particularly incensed by Vane’s insistence that he could not be regarded as de facto monarch when in exile. Sir Harry was duly found guilty and sentenced to the tortured death of a traitor. Charles refused the promised royal pardon and an equally tortured way was found to show that the king’s honour was intact despite his broken word. Lord Chief Justice Foster announced that the gift of mercy did not abide with the king but with God, and God intended mercy only for the penitent. Vane, of course, remained thoroughly unrepentant.

  Charles did, however, keep his promise to John Lambert. He was spared death and returned to Guernsey, initially to be held in close confinement, but later he was allowed to buy a house there and live with his wife Frances. Guards were told to shoot him if he was ever found colluding with enemies of the king.

  In the end, Sir Harry Vane was spared a traitor’s death. Charles, perhaps in recompense for his broken pledge, agreed to his being beheaded. On 14 June, Vane stood on the scaffold before a vast crowd on Tower Hill and began to deliver his last speech. The sheriff standing nearby attempted to snatch his notes but Vane evaded him and began to speak. Immediately a thunder of drums beneath his feet drowned out his words. An array of drummers and trumpeters were stationed under the scaffold. Since Thomas Harrison’s unexpected oratory at Charing Cross, the authorities had learned new tricks about information management. Every time Sir Harry began a sentence the cacophony sounded.

  Vane died unheard by most in the crowd but he died well. ‘In all things,’ wrote Pepys, ‘he appeared the most resolved man that ever died in that manner.’9 To the chagrin of the court, a copy of the speech which Vane had tried to give above the drumming and trumpeting was smuggled out. It was as impressive as the authorities feared.

  While the captive regicides might now be spared death, that did not hold for the dozen or more fugitives abroad. Catching and killing them – or just killing them – remained a priority. In the next two years the hunters would score in France and Switzerland.

  In France, they tracked down Archibald Johnston, Lord Wariston. After the Marquis of Argyll, Johnston was probably the Scot most hated by the supposedly forgiving Charles. He was the leading Covenanter, who had imposed humiliating terms on Charles when he sought support in 1650 and 1651. But that was not all. Wariston, the epitome of the stern Calvinist, is said to have been horrified at the unabashed licentiousness of the young king. In one incident Wariston upbraided Charles for reportedly forcing himself on a noblewoman. It is said that the alleged royal rapist never forgave Wariston for his temerity.10

  Wariston was the one Covenanter leader to escape the dragnet ordered by Charles in July 1660 after Argyll’s arrest. Wariston fled to France and then Germany, where he established himself in Hamburg. One year later, in May 1661, a decree of forfeiture and death was issued against him in Edinburgh. He was accused of high treason in accepting office from Cromwell, sitting in the upper house after having been appointed King’s Advocate by Charles I, and of persecuting royalists.11

  Wariston was finally traced after his name was mentioned during the panic over the so-called Tong Plot in the autumn of 1662. This was yet another alleged assassination plot against the king involving the seizure of Windsor Castle. Once again informants alleged that Edmund Ludlow was involved, Sir Ralph Verney reporting that Ludlow was to have led a rising on Lord Mayor’s Day in London, ‘about
noon, when all were busy, or at night when all were drunk’. Hundreds were hauled in for questioning. The most talkative was an ex-halberdier in Oliver Cromwell’s regiment who poured out names with blood-curdling examples of what fellow ex-soldiers were saying they would do to the king.12 He accused in particular Captain Robert Johnston, another ex-halberdier. What he had to say prompted the authorities to arrest Johnston on suspicion of treason and led Charles himself to attend his interrogation.

  This was not the king’s first trip to the Tower to see alleged traitors face to face and quiz them himself, nor would it be his last. He had led the interrogations of the men entangled in the White Plot at the outset of his reign in 1660 and would continue to personally question men thought to threaten the throne. Among those he was to face in the future was the odious Titus Oates, author of the fictitious Popish Plot in 1678.

  In the assessment of historian Alan Marshall, Charles was ‘rather good at it’, judging from his interrogation of Titus Oates more than a decade later. ‘The King had the blend of wit and nastiness in his character that would have been valuable in such an area.’13 It certainly appears to have worked on Johnston, who poured out the names of dissidents, among them that of Wariston. Johnston told Charles that the Covenanter leader was in Hamburg but had recently travelled to Holland. It is unclear what happened next, but papers in the National Archives show that within the month Johnston was acting as a government informer, though a deeply reluctant one.14

  Johnston’s reports reveal him homing in on Wariston’s wife, who was in London. He appears either to have become, or already to have been, very close to her. Given that he shared a surname with the Waristons, the suspicion arises that he was a family member. He told his handler: ‘Wrote her letters and knew all her secrets.’ Through Lady Wariston he got to hear of her close circle of friends, which included the wives of other fugitive republicans, among them Frances Goffe and Mary Whalley. In one undated note he wrote: ‘Mrs Cawley whose husband was one of the King’s judges not yet discovered [found] lodges at her brother’s in Red Cross Street [and] is intimate with the wives of Ludlow, Goffe and Whalley and might know where they live.’ Another wife in the circle – now a widow – was Lady Vane.15

  Late in 1662, Johnston discovered that Lady Wariston planned to meet her husband in Rouen. This risky trip was apparently undertaken following the king’s rejection of a plea for clemency sent on Wariston’s behalf. The couple hadn’t seen each other for over two years and Wariston was an ill man. Evidently he was willing to take the risk of leaving the safety of Hamburg to see his wife. One Alexander Murray, commonly called Crooked Murray, was assigned to follow her. Unwittingly she led Murray straight to her husband in Rouen. Wariston had allowed ‘a great bushy beard’ to grow and wore a periwig as a disguise, but he was easily identified. Murray’s men seized him while he was at prayer.

  Unlike the Dutch republicans, the French under Louis XIV provided no impediment to the extradition of fugitives from the Stuarts. The king’s council debated the case and thought of refusing extradition, but on Louis’s orders allowed Murray to depart with his prisoner. Wariston was lodged in the Tower in January 1663 and held for six months, before being shipped to Edinburgh to hear in the Scottish Parliament the sentence passed on him in his absence.

  Two and a half years on the run had left Wariston a wreck of a man who was now showing all the signs of dementia. But family pleas to stop his appearance because of his health were ignored and on 8 July he went before Parliament. He was ‘so disordered both in body and mind, that it was a reproach to a government to proceed against him’, wrote his nephew, Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury. ‘His memory was so gone that he did not know his own children … It was apparent that age, hardship, and danger, had done their work effectually on his iron nerves, and the intrepid advocate of the covenant exhibited the mental imbecility of an idiot.’16

  Wariston’s family lobbied to save him and offered the usual bribes to those close to the king. It was futile. Bishop Burnet wrote, ‘We solicited all the hungry courtiers. Many that had a great mind to our money tried what could be done but they all found it was a thing too big for them to meddle with.’17

  Like Argyll two years before, Wariston was executed at Edinburgh’s Mercat Cross. He had to be helped to haul himself up the ladder onto the scaffold but once there recovered his wits sufficiently to read out a speech denying all responsibility for Charles I’s death. Royalists claimed he had faked senility in an attempt to save his life. Presbyterians referred to the notorious rape by the young king and claimed Wariston was a victim of Charles’s vindictiveness. ‘The real cause of his death’, wrote James Aikman, was ‘our king’s personal hatred’ following the dressing-down given to him by Wariston after the incident. ‘This the king could never forgive’.18

  17

  THE TIGHTENING NET

  1663–1665

  The abduction and execution of Barkstead, Corbet and Okey filled the fugitive regicides with dread. Royalist spies were active across the Continent, making kidnapping or death a possibility at any time. Worse still, most of the regicides suspected – some were even certain – that royalist agents knew where they lived. The murders of Ascham and Dorislaus – though they had happened more than a decade before – were recalled with a shudder. The exiled regicides felt like hunted animals. It was no way to live, yet it was the only way to live.

  The fugitives were keenly aware of the activity of royalist agents, with both sides’ antennae twitching for reports of the other’s movements. Despite the appeal of Holland and Germany, most of the fugitives chose Switzerland. The country had an attraction as a centre of the Protestant Reformation, with several cantons and cities – notably Zurich, Geneva, Bern and Basel – having been early adopters of the new theology. When the reformist priest John Calvin left France, he had moved first to Basel and then Geneva. Prior to the Civil Wars, several of the regicides had travelled to Geneva and had been enthusiastic about its democratic government, its Calvinist history and the present-day teachings of reformist theologians such as John Deodati, who had entranced John Milton and John Cook.

  By the beginning of 1663, Switzerland was home to William Cawley, Cornelius Holland, John Lisle, Nicholas Love, William Say, Edward Dendy and the two unfortunate clerks to the Court of Justice, Andrew Broughton and John Phelps. The linchpin of the group became Edmund Ludlow, the man around whom so much hope was pinned for a counter-strike against Charles II. Ludlow was a relatively recent arrival in Switzerland, having spent the best part of two years travelling across Europe.

  Basic survival was a major preoccupation for most of the runaways. Few of them spoke any foreign languages. Some had more access to money than others, but even the wealthy found it difficult to extract funds from estates under threat of sequestration. Some would be forced to throw themselves on the charity of their foreign hosts. Others turned to trade. For magnates like William Cawley, finance was not a problem. During the first Civil War, he had been very active in his local county committee, charged with seizing and selling royalist property. In subsequent years he became a property speculator, opportunistically buying and selling former royalist estates, and grew immensely rich.

  From his writings, we know something of how Ludlow managed. He had, he says, a supply of cash with him from England, and he had arranged for money to be available to him through European bankers. Not only did Ludlow have friends and contacts across northern Europe, he had a great ally at home in England. This was his wife, Elizabeth, an able and persuasive individual in her own right.1 Elizabeth was undoubtedly Ludlow’s main lifeline as he progressed through the Continent and into his new life, no doubt helping to maintain channels for funds as he went. Ludlow was so well organised that when he arrived in Geneva he received by post a bill of exchange allowing him to draw on more funds, even though he had no immediate need for them, having so much left over from his initial reserve.2

  He travelled to Switzerland accompanied by another person, whom he doesn
’t name but may have been John Phelps. On the way through Europe, he occasionally received news sheets from home, keeping him up to date with events in England. Several times he learned he had been captured; Mercurius Politicus once claimed, ‘we hear it from very good hands he is already in custody.’3

  When Ludlow received the sobering news of the trial and execution of Harrison, Carew, Scot and the other regicides, it was a terrible blow. The deaths of friends such as John Cook hit hard, and so too did the betrayal of the Good Old Cause by men such as Denzil Holles, the Earl of Manchester and George Monck, now sitting in judgment and sentencing their old allies to die. When the trial ended, one of the judges, Sir Harbottle Grimston, had made a speech in which he railed against the regicides who had escaped. According to Grimston, there wasn’t a plot afoot in England without Ludlow being at the head of it – in fact, Ludlow had recently been about to seize the Tower with a force of 2500 men.4 (The previous year, the royalist spy Joseph Bampfield had claimed that Ludlow and Desborough were ready to lead a rebellion to coincide with the king’s coronation.) It was another demonstration of how propaganda can foreshadow violent action. Royalist secret agents were already tracking the regicides in Europe.

  Following the show trial and executions in London, the exiles in Geneva began to feel uneasy. The city lay in a most precarious geographical position, surrounded by French territory except for the wedge of Lake Geneva that sliced in from the north-east. The refugees’ greatest fear was that Charles II might use his influence in Paris to persuade France to bring pressure on the small city state to give up its guests, just as Downing had successfully brought pressure to bear on the Netherlands.