being deeply guilty of that most detestable and bloody treason, in sitting upon and giving judgement against the life of our royal father . . . the persons beforenamed shall within 14 days next after the publishing of this our royal proclamation personally appear and render themselves to our speaker under pain of being exempt from any pardon or indemnity both for their respective lives and estates.
This proclamation was deliberately devious. It declared that all the named persons were guilty of treason (so much for their prospect of a fair trial), but then plainly indicated that they would be pardoned if they surrendered within the next fortnight. Nineteen of them did so, in reliance upon this interpretation, including General Fleetwood, John Downes and Henry Marten, only to be told they would be tried for treason: they would be sentenced to death, but would not be executed unless Parliament so determined.11 But Cooke was never admitted to this class, because he had not surrendered to the Speaker. The reason he had not surrendered was that he was not at liberty to do so: he was imprisoned in Dublin and then delivered under close escort to the Tower of London: on June 6th, the day of the proclamation, he was under guard at Chester, en route to London.
The Restoration was here to stay, and now it was party time. The celebrations had been more or less continuous since May Day, and they culminated on 29 May with the triumphant return to London of Charles II. John Evelyn stood in the Strand to behold it:
This was [the King’s] birthday and with a triumph of above 20,000 horse and foot, brandishing their swords, and shouting with inexpressible joy; the ways strewed with flowers, the bells ringing, the streets hung with tapestry, fountains running with wine; the mayor, aldermen and all the companies, in their liveries, chains of gold, and banners; lords and nobles, clad in cloth of silver, gold, and velvet; the windows and balconies, all set with ladies; trumpets, music and myriads of people flocking, even so far as from Rochester, so as they were seven hours in passing [through] the city, even from two in the afternoon until nine at night.12
The world really was turning upside down for God-fearing republicans: the big question was: who would be pitched out of it? The republican Admiral Lawson was quick to drink the King’s health and become ‘as officious, poor man, as any spaniel can be’.13 He survived (against Pepys’s predictions), demoted to the command of one ship. Oliver St John jumped aboard the first boat to Holland so he could come back beside the King, which saved his neck but not his job: he was too much of a timeserver for even the royalists to permit him to serve them.14 Thurloe was charged with treason, although he managed – to the happiness of history – to save the state papers from burning by hiding them in the roof of Lincoln’s Inn Chapel, where they were discovered decades later. New titles and appointments cascaded from the royal prerogative: George Monck was soon able to style himself ‘George, Duke of Albermarle, Earl of Torrington, Baron Monck of Potheridge, Beauchamp and Teyes, Captain General and Commander-in-Chief of all His Majesty’s forces in the three kingdoms, Master of His Majesty’s horse; knight of the most noble order of the Garter; Privy Councillor and Lieutenant of the Kingdom of Ireland’. Power-brokers like John Mordaunt, now a viscount, were plied with bribes. Corruption, which Cromwell had always held in reasonable check, flourished as never before. Lady Monck proved so avaricious at charging placemen for their places that she insisted that the former royal coach-maker, whose patent was still valid, should pay her £500 to be appointed to the position he already held.15 Bishop Burnet, a confirmed royalist, was deeply shocked at the brazenness of the man to whom he owed his cassock: ‘Monck was ravenous as well as his wife. They asked and sold all that was within their reach.’16 Royalist propagandists were needed to cover up the corruption and spin-doctor the new dispensation, so Marchmont Needham was sacked as editor of Parliament’s newspaper Mercurius Politicus, and replaced by Henry Muddiman – an ‘arch rogue’ as Pepys described him, who had unashamedly written for the Rump and would henceforth slant the news for Charles II. The most crucial ‘conversions’ to royalty – of Presbyterian grandees like Holles and Annesley and Ashley Cooper – came not from conviction but from self-interest: monarchy was embraced for reasons of insurance rather than affection.
This was a time when public men would make any sacrifice to protect their lives and estates. That a few men were prepared to die for the republic was the real wonder. Some were motivated by religion: the Fifth-monarchist Thomas Harrison, for example, was waiting patiently and prayerfully for the King’s troopers: death would deliver him to glory. Edmund Ludlow was awed but also irked by his religiosity: he thought it was the duty of the godly to flee persecution rather than ‘expose themselves to the merciless cruelty of their bloody enemies’.17 He had been amongst the forty-nine listed in the proclamation, so he turned himself in to the Speaker within fourteen days and arranged bail, but soon realised that his fate had been sealed. He broke bail and went into hiding: in September, the King proclaimed a large reward for his apprehension. John Cooke, from his cell in the Tower, offered to die in Ludlow’s place: he would plead guilty and suffer execution if all proceedings were dropped against the colonel. The council declined to entertain this novel idea of a trial (and execution) by substitute – no doubt it suspected Cooke’s reason was (as he privately admitted) that Ludlow was a better man to continue the fight for their ‘good old cause’. The colonel laid low for a while in London, then slipped across the Channel and made his way to the safe shores of Lake Geneva.
Cooke must have realised his days were numbered. He had been unlawfully held prisoner in Dublin Castle for several months while the Irish Parliament, called by Coote and Broghill, raged on: it ended on 1 May by declaring ‘those most inhumane, unparalled and barbarous proceedings’ against Charles I to be ‘the foulest murder and highest assassination’.18 This declaration was designed to provide some retrospective justification for the arrest of Cooke, whom Coote was holding as hostage until his own fortune was secure.19 He delayed implementing the council’s order until confirmation that he had returned to royal favour: on 18 May, Cooke and the other prisoners finally left for London. Before his departure Cooke was brought before the recorder of Dublin, John Bisse, and examined over his part in the King’s death.20 By this time, other captured regicides were confessing and avoiding, seeking to minimise their role in the hope of saving their lives. But John Cooke was the barrister who had established the right of silence and he declined to answer any of the questions put to incriminate him, or even to sign the record of his examination.21 His blank deposition was dispatched for Parliament to consider, before his arrival in London, as to whether he should be put on trial for treason.
John Cooke travelled under guard but with his new wife for company, arriving to face jeering crowds in Chester. He had been told that Parliament would pay his passage to London, but his guards now insisted that he pay them for horses and accommodation, else they would make him and Mary travel on foot. But he did not even have £20: he had been in prison for three months and had not been able to sell cattle to raise money for their passage and it was now too late: on 24 May the Convention Parliament in Ireland ordered sequestriation of his estate. He had to borrow to enable them to continue the journey on horseback.22 He gave no thought to escape: at first, he wrote to a friend, it was a relief to be out of Ireland, where ‘those that will not swear or get drunk, but have family prayers, are accounted fanatics’, but he was unprepared for the royalist hysteria that was sweeping England and ‘the thousand curses we had between Chester and London’. Cooke finally arrived at the capital on 18 June, with Colonel Hercules Hunks, Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Phayre and William Hulet, a soldier suspected of being the King’s executioner. They were paraded through the streets in an open cart, and then placed in a barge for the doleful entry to the Tower through ‘Traitor’s Gate’.
Cooke was a close prisoner over the summer, kept in leg irons and chains and allowed no visitors other than three commissioners who interrogated him to discover whether he knew anything about the identity of
the King’s executioner. Mary stayed in London with the family of Colonel Ludlow. She went to the Tower each day, asking in vain for admittance, until her husband spied her from his cell window and cried, ‘Go home to our friends, dear lamb. I am well, blessed be God; they cannot keep the comforter from me.’ When the jailer, fed up with being pestered by Mary, threatened to have him removed to Newgate – the disease-ridden jail for common prisoners next to the Old Bailey – Cooke shrugged: ‘If the way to the new Jerusalem be through Newgate, blessed be God for Newgate.’23 He managed to snatch an occasional word with Thomas Harrison, who occupied a nearby cell and radiated his own spiritual comfort. Cooke had never believed in the Fifth monarchy but it cheered him to think that ‘all who are called forth to testify for Christ prove courageous . . . we live by faith and not by fight’. He managed in time to smuggle out messages to Mary, telling her jocularly to save money by not spending any on dressing in black for his funeral, since by that time his soul would be enveloped in saintly white. ‘I am full of spiritual joy and trust God to make what bargain for me he pleases, for he knows the appointed time of my composition and dissolution.’24
The appointed time drew on apace. In June the Houses began to argue in earnest over the identities of those who would be denied ‘Immunity and Oblivion’. These debates went on until the end of August and the final decisions had little to do with evidence – they were based on personal loyalties, money and family connections. Lenthall avoided ‘exception’ thanks to his son’s exuberant royalism, and regicides like Tomlinson (commended by Charles I) and Ingoldsby (who had ‘gone over’ to the royalists and put down Lambert’s revolt) and Cromwellian stalwarts like George Downing were protected by their royalist or Presbyterian friends. Even Lieutenant-Colonel Phayre, executor of the warrant for the King’s death and Cooke’s fellow traveller from Dublin, was saved from certain death by a lucky marriage with the daughter of Sir Thomas Herbert, who interceded on his behalf. But John Cooke, who had neither judged nor executed the King, could claim no such connections: he had played no part in Parliament as an MP; had insufficient money and estate for bribes, and could not rely on class or gentry connections. His fellow lawyers were not prepared to help him: as Ludlow explained, ‘The malice towards this gentleman was very great from those of his own robe . . . for that he constantly pressed for a reformation of what was amiss in the laws’.25 Cooke would be given no credit for his years of judicial service, either: the King was a regular guest at the Blackfriars mansion of the Earl of Cork, who could not forgive the chief justice who had ruled in favour of his tenants.26 In Ireland, the vultures were gathering over the farm of a man marked for death: as early as 29 May, the day of the King’s return to London, the Dean of Cloyne asked Sir John Percivale to help him obtain Cooke’s land in Barnehay. Dripping with hypocrisy, the dean pretended that ‘he is not much inclinable to be trading in such affairs’ but the land ‘lies conveniently for his near residence upon this parish’.27
The Parliamentary debate over John Cooke’s life was a mere formality. On 6 June, Mr Annesley informed the House that he had received the record of the interrogation of ‘Jo. Cooke Esq, a prisoner in the castle of Dublin’. The next day, the record of the interrogation of the judge who claimed his own right to silence was read to the House and it resolved – without any recorded debate or dissension – ‘that John Cooke Esq be excepted out of the Act of General Pardon and Oblivion, for life and estate’. (This meant that Cooke was liable to execution and forfeiture of all his lands and goods, and the Dean of Cloyne could rub his hands in greedy expectation).28 The Commons could hardly wait to pass the next resolution, accepting the King’s gracious pardon for all its present members.29
The debates over other regicides continued for three months, much to the King’s irritation: three times he had to address Parliament and ask them to hurry up, whilst thanking them ‘for your justice towards those, the immediate murderers of my father’. Prynne, now back with a vengeance in Parliament, took the lead in calling for the death of as many republicans as possible, including all who had acted as prosecuting counsel in any high court of justice;30 Matthew Hale led the MPs who wanted to limit the scapegoats and save the lives of those who had voluntarily surrendered. The lords were less forgiving, and there were casualties in the battles between the two Houses – Adrian Scroope, for example, was twice voted a pardon by the Commons, but rejected each time by the Lords. Clarendon explained that the royal proclamation of 6 June (requiring surrender ‘under pain of being exempt from any pardon’) did not mean that those who surrendered would be pardoned. The republicans remained dangerous, and must be eliminated – besides, he said, no one would stay loyal to a king so weak that he forgave all offences. Clarendon guided several joint sessions to a compromise – the Act would bestow a general pardon, subject to exceptions for the most dangerous republicans, who would lose all civil rights. Those who were also regicides would be liable to trial and execution for treason.31 Following these intemperate debates with special interest was the newly appointed Solicitor-General, Heneage Finch, the MP for Canterbury. He was the son of Charles I’s cowardly Speaker and nephew of Chief Justice John Finch of ship-money infamy who had just returned from exile. It would fall to him to prosecute those whom Parliament decided to condemn.
Parliament also determined which of the great ‘commonwealthsmen’ should keep their lives but none the less lose their lands, be barred from public office and remain liable, at the King’s pleasure, to indefinite imprisonment. Here the great lawyers, who had disappeared in droves during the King’s trial but had taken what benefit they could from its aftermath, came up for judgment. Lenthall now lost out (by 215 votes to 126), as did Oliver St John; Whitelocke, who had been frantically pulling royalist strings since the beginning of the year, narrowly (by 176 to 134) kept his property and his civil rights. Clarendon delivered the King’s promise that despite some cavalier MPs urging that ‘they must die for the Kingdom, rather than for the King’, John Lambert and Sir Henry Vane would be spared because they had not been involved in the King’s trial.
The Act of Free and General Pardon, Indemnity and Oblivion was finally passed on 29 August. It excluded the forty-nine regicides named in the King’s proclamation, together with the two unnamed persons ‘who being disguised by frocks and vizors, did appear upon the scaffold’. The Act presumed guilt in uncompromising terms:
All which persons for their execrable treason in sentencing to death, or signing the instrument for the horrid murder, or being instrumental in taking away the life of our late sovereign lord, Charles I, of glorious memory are left to be proceeded against as traitors to his late Majesty according to the laws of England and are out of this present Act wholly excepted and foreprized.
Noting that the nineteen who had surrendered within a fortnight of the proclamation ‘did pretend thereby to some favour, upon some considered doubtful words in the said proclamation’ the Act of Oblivion directed that this ‘favour’ should be to have their sentence of death confirmed by Parliament – and the mood of the members of this Parliament, cavaliers and Presbyterians alike, was merciless. It was signified by Article XXXVII: ‘Except also out of this present Act Oliver Cromwell deceased, Henry Ireton deceased, John Bradshawe deceased and Thomas Pride deceased’. This inexcusable clause was inserted so as to permit an act of revenge both macabre and puerile: to desecrate their graves, dig up their bodies and hang high their skeletons. Notwithstanding the King’s promises, from Breda onwards, of reconciliation and forgiveness, his party had a pathological determination to exact retribution for the trial of Charles I. Historians praise the Act of Oblivion for its ‘moderation’ in focusing on the regicides rather than other supporters of Cromwell’s regime, but this is to overlook the disproportionality of that focus. Parliament not only permitted desecration of the dead bodies of England’s former leaders; it selected certain of its own servants and members as victims to propitiate the King.
The new Speaker of the House (the turncoat lawyer H
arbottle Grimstone) offered this legislation to the King much as a priest would offer libation to a pagan god: its list was ‘a long black prodigious dismal roll and catalogue of malefactors . . . we deal not with men, but monsters, guilty of blood, precious blood, royal blood, never to be remembered without tears’. This hardly presaged a fair trial, but a fair trial for the regicides was never in prospect. Restoration propaganda showed Charles I as an iconic, Christ-like figure, whose blessed qualities had been inherited by his son (a veil was drawn – on pain of prosecution – over any true account of Charles II in his debauched exile years). What the state needed now was a show trial, in which the new King’s puissance would be on show: those who had once dared to dim the divinely ordained light would be torn to pieces, for public edification and entertainment.
The Tyrannicide Brief Page 36
