My Dear Sweet Child,
Let thy name, Freelove, put thee in mind of the freelove of God in giving thee to me and thy dear mother, and know that thou art the child of one whom God counted worthy to suffer for his sake . . . I pray thee never learn any pride, but be humble and meek and courteous and wait upon God’s ordinances . . . be sure to marry a man that is gracious and fears God; be sure to prefer grace before wealth and parts – for a little with the fear of God is better than great riches with an ungodly man . . . never marry without the consent of thy dear mother if she be living. In all thy actions have an eye to eternity and never do anything against the light of thy own conscience. Know that thy dear father is gone to heaven to thy dear brother and be sure so to live that by God’s grace thou mayest follow after . . .
Freelove’s father now had little time. Hugh Peters was more than ‘melancholy sick’ – he was in mortal terror. So Cooke tried to cheer him with a biblical text (Hosea 13: 14: ‘I will ransom them from the power of the grave; I will redeem them from death’). When he woke, after a few hours’ sleep, Cooke put on a show of jollity as he welcomed the jailer, Mr Loman, and the guards, talking of the ‘angels who in a few hours will take over your office and escort me to eternity. Come brother Peters, let us knock at heaven’s gates this morning.’10 But Peters had found a different kind of spiritual consolation – a bottle containing alcoholic spirit, from which he hoped to imbibe the courage he would need for the journey to whatever gate awaited his soul: his body, he knew, would be impaled on Aldersgate.
Mary came to the prison early on Tuesday: the doors of the dungeon were open to the family before the sled arrived. She laid her head upon his bosom and sobbed uncontrollably. ‘My dear lamb,’ John said tenderly, ‘let us not part in a shower. Here, our comforts have been mixed with a chequerwork of troubles, but in heaven all tears shall be wiped from our eyes.’11
Lawyers don’t cry, in any event. His chains and manacles were struck off when the sheriff arrived to take him down the steps to the waiting sled. It had a pole stuck on the back, to which Thomas Harrison’s severed and bloody head was attached. Cooke was strapped down backwards on the straw, so that he faced the grisly visage. Peters was placed on a separate sledge, but he looked distracted and sottish, gnawing his gloves and toying with pieces of straw.12 It was a chill and blustery October day – so cold and wet in the pen of the Old Bailey that the prisoners waiting there petitioned the court that they might return to Newgate until called for trial. The sleds bumped over the cobbled stones – the point of this drag along Fleet Street was so that the backs of lowborn traitors should be bruised and bloodied before they arrived at the railings of Charing Cross, where the gibbet had been erected. There, a large crowd had gathered to see this double entertainment: they jeered and laughed at Hugh Peters, and called for him to go up the scaffold first, but Cooke insisted that his friend needed more time to prepare for the ordeal. With one look at the preacher, the sheriff agreed. So it was the lawyer who was taken first to the scaffold, and shown the axe and the fiery brazier in which the tongs and elongated iron corkscrews were glowing red-hot. Peters was tethered to the railings while Cooke went up a short ladder to the gallows platform. The hangman fitted the halter loosely around his neck: he was allowed a final speech and prayers before it would be tightened and he would be required to step off. With the rope around his neck and the sheriff by his side, the barrister made his final speech.13
He began with a short prayer, seeking God’s blessing on a poor servant in ‘this valley of derision’, and His blessing upon England and all other nations. Then he said, ‘Mr Sheriff and gentlemen, I desire to speak a few words, briefly . . .’ Whenever lawyers promise to speak briefly they are not to be believed, and John Cooke spoke at great length. Conventionally, he pardoned those who had brought him to this pass, in a passage that royalist spin-doctors were later to seize upon to pretend he was penitent:
I have no malice in my heart against any man or woman living upon the face of the earth; neither against the jury that found me guilty nor the court that passed sentence. I desire freely to forgive everyone from the bottom of my heart. Truly, I say, as to the King’s Majesty, I have not any hard thoughts concerning him: my prayers shall be for him, that his throne may be upheld by truth and by mercy.
There was acid in his forgiveness, however, as he continued:
But I must needs say, that poor we have been bought and sold by our brethren, as Joseph was. Brother has betrayed brother unto death – that scripture is in a great measure fulfilled. I desire for my own part to kiss the rod and I do desire (if it may please the King’s Majesty) that no more blood may be shed after mine: it may be the Lord will put it into his own breast.
(He then indicated Peters on the scaffold below.)
Here is a poor brother coming. I am afraid that he is not fit to die at this time. I could wish that his Majesty might show some mercy.
It was a poignant moment: Cooke’s compassion touched even the hack propagandist Henry Muddiman.14 Peters, tethered to the scaffold rail, was wild-eyed and stupid, gulping at his alcohol bottle. The moment passed as the sheriff brusquely interrupted Cooke’s solicitude: ‘Leave that out. The King has clemency enough for everyone but his father’s murderers.’ Cooke took the hint. ‘Then I shall proceed to say something about my profession and faith, founded upon the rock of Jesus Christ . . .’ This was too much for the sheriff: there could be no divine justification for treason. ‘You must not use such expressions.’ Cooke replied with as much dignity as a man with a rope around his neck could muster: ‘It has not been the manner of Englishmen to insult a dying man, nor even in other countries, amongst the Turks and heathens . . .’
But to avoid argument, he turned to members of his old congregation in Gray’s Inn, some of whom he had spied in the crowd. Ever one for citing precedents, he referred them to two obscure verses in the Book of Philippians – the sheriff did not realise that Cooke was urging them in Bible code to keep faith in the Good Old Cause (If I be offered upon the sacrifice and service of your faith, I joy, and rejoice with you all. For the same cause also do ye joy, and rejoice with me).15
Cooke had to speak carefully. He expressed the acceptable wish that ‘the Lord keep England from popery and from superstition and from profanity, and may there not be an inundation of the anti-Christ in the land’. He forgave his debtors ‘those few pence that are owing to me’ but then spoke of his clear conscience – at which the sheriff shook his head and told him to leave it out. Cooke turned to him angrily:
‘Sir, I pray take notice. I think I am the first man to be hanged for demanding justice, therefore I hope you will not interrupt again. If you will believe the words of a dying man, let me say, as I must give account, that I have nothing lying upon my conscience.’
He then turned to his friends in the crowd: ‘I have a poor wife and child – commend me to them.’ He made a heartfelt plea to the King and Parliament not to forfeit his estate or the estates of the other regicides and to deal justly with the claims of his wife. He asked again that all the other condemned defendants be reprieved, and that he let his death be a ‘living sacrifice’ for them. He made a short motion to the court of final appeal, namely ‘Jesus Christ, before whom I hope to appear’. He then turned to the sheriff: ‘I have nothing else to plead. I shall speak a few words to the Lord in prayer and shall not trouble you further.’
Lawyers do not speak ‘a few words’, even to the Lord. But as he stood with the rope around his neck, the crowd must have felt for the loneliness of the longwinded barrister. The sheriff was used to lengthy prayers and respected a man’s final address to God – he would not interrupt again. His prisoner began conventionally, asking for strength to bear the burden of suffering and hoping to be numbered amongst the elect on the great day of judgment. He was a ship about to enter harbour after a long voyage – ‘I would not go back again for all the world.’
It was a coded way of saying that he had no regrets. Then, came the last
words the barrister was ever to speak:
Lord, let it be well with England, hear me for my poor friends and relations, for my poor wife and child, and for Ireland . . . I believe that an army of martyrs would willingly come from heaven to suffer in such a cause as this that I come here to suffer for . . . O that the Lord would grant that no more might suffer. So, dear and blessed Father, I come into the bosom of thy love, and desire to enter into that glory which is endless and boundless, through Jesus Christ.
John Cooke looked up at clouds heavy with rain, and stepped into thin air. The rope pulled tight about his neck and he briefly blacked out, but the hangman quickly cut the rope and his body crumpled on to the ground. The assistants took the tongs and pincers and one held a flaming torch. John Cooke was quickly stripped and bent over backwards, as his genitals were cut off with a sharp knife. He was held up, conscious, while they were dangled in front of his goggling eyes before the hangman threw them into a bucket. The captain of the guard, egged on by the crowd, ordered that the cowering Peters be untied and brought forward, forced to watch the disembowelling. ‘Come, Mr Peters: how do you like this work?’ laughed the hangman. His assistants pulled on the halter that brought the judge forward: the hangman inserted the molten knife and expertly twisted out the lining of the inner bowel: Cooke was then bent backwards again to watch as his entrails were put to the torch.
The executioner would normally at this point end the excruciating suffering by cutting out the heart but this executioner wanted Peters to observe Cooke in conscious agony for as long as possible. The stench became sickening as the yards of bowel were slowly burned – ladies clasped scented handkerchiefs to their noses as the wind carried the smell to the residential apartments overlooking the gallows. Eventually, Cooke expired: his heart was cut out and exhibited, still pumping, to the approving crowd, the executioner holding it high around the scaffold on his knife before casting it into the bucket. Then the body was beheaded in dumb show, the dead head falling at the stroke of the axe and being held aloft by an assistant shouting: ‘Behold, the head of a traitor!’ It was thrown in a separate bucket (the King had plans for this head) and then the body, laid out on a trestle, was expertly chopped with a cleaver into four pieces – lengthways and then horizontally – to provide four ‘quarters’ – two arms and two legs each with a torso base, for impalement on the spikes of the city gatehouse.
Charles II was in no mood to show the mercy that Cooke had beseeched in his dying speech. He was there, says John Evelyn, and Cooke may even have caught sight of him as he pleaded for the lives of Peters and his fellow prisoners.16 The crowd was already baying for Hugh Peters. But now, according to some reports, a minor miracle occurred: the preacher summoned up the mental capacity to face the ordeal, inspired by his friend’s courage and by the bestiality of the executioners. He turned to the sheriff – ‘You have here slain one of the servants of God before my eyes, to terrify me, but God has given me strength’ – and he went up the ladder unaided. He said a few inaudible words in prayer, and was seen to smile as he stepped off the scaffold.17
Meanwhile, back at the Old Bailey, it was mop-up time. A change had come over the proceedings, now that ten regicides had been convicted and were in the process of execution: those remaining were mainly MPs who had surrendered in reliance upon the King’s proclamation, and the court now invited them to plead guilty on the promise that executions would be suspended until a further order by Parliament. Colonel Harvey, who had opposed the King’s execution, was permitted to call a witness – a Presbyterian minister – who confirmed his opposition and the court promised to pass on to the King his petition for mercy ‘on behalf of myself, my wife and thirteen children’. John Downes made a similar claim, although the prosecutor sarcastically remarked that he had none the less signed the death warrant and asked the court to cut short his self-pitying plea in mitigation. It was more congenial for judges to hear defendants confess and apologise, with a short statement that they had been ‘over awed’ by Cromwell. Even more acceptable was the demoralised blubbering of George Fleetwood, one of Cromwell’s briefly despotic Major Generals, who was the only defendant to cry.
One prisoner who refused the plea-bargain was the irrepressible Harry Marten.18 His defence was that he had acted unmaliciously, to which Finch replied that he would prove Marten acted merrily. ‘That does not imply malice,’ the defendant rejoined, and listened with equanimity to the story of his face-painting jest with Cromwell as they signed the warrant. Marten adopted a light touch: accused of being an incorrigible regicide, he said that on the contrary, he would wish every drop of Charles I’s blood were back in his body if only a similar miracle could restore the bodies of all the Englishmen slain during the civil wars. As for the purged House of Commons, the court might not think it a lawful body but everyone else did, at home and abroad. He adopted Cooke’s argument that its de facto authority was legitimated by the statute of Henry VII. And anyway – a novel and interesting point, this: he had not been involved in killing the King, because Charles was not King at the time – he had been a non-monarch, indeed a prisoner, ever since his surrender to the Scots. Now all Henry Marten wished for was a peaceful life, and he was very happy to be reigned over by Charles II, who had ‘the best title under heaven’ because he had been invited to take it up by Parliament, the true representative of the people of England.
Marten was an extraordinary man. The first republican and the only agnostic among God-obsessed public men, now, it seemed, he had become a loyal constitutional monarchist. Finch smelled a rat: ‘He has accepted the King, but thinks his title comes from acknowledgement by the people – and anyone could obtain that sort of title!’ Marten refused to repent, and despite conviction for his key role in the King’s trial he escaped the hangman. As a true humanitarian he had opposed severe punishments for cavaliers when he was in power, and so they spared his life, allowing him to spend the rest of it in Chepstow Prison.
Four more of the convicted regicides were ‘turned off’ (the official euphemism) at a public bloodbath at Charing Cross on the following day. On this occasion, however, the crowd was unsettled and seemed sympathetic. The sheriff, who had been admonished for allowing Cooke and Harrison too much freedom of final speech, was booed when he intervened to stop Tom Scot’s explanation that he joined the parliamentary cause ‘because I saw liberties and religion in danger, I saw the approaches of popery . . .’ Scot upbraided the sheriff: ‘I shall say no more but this, that it is a very mean and bad cause that will not hear the words of a dying man.’ He then launched into an extremely long prayer in which he managed to incorporate all the points he had intended to make in his speech – namely that he had managed to escape to Europe, but God had called him back to suffer for His sake in a cause for which he was entirely unrepentant. The sheriff interrupted again, and the crowd became angry – it was verging on blasphemy to stop a dying man’s final prayer. It was noticed, too, that the hangman was in some distress: he could only get through his grisly task by swigging from a bottle of alcohol passed up to him on the ladder. Colonel Jones made a modest speech, and his last prayer was short and dignified, for which he was sincerely thanked by the unhappy sheriff. Colonel Scroop, the last to be disembowelled, gave a powerful oration, urging the crowd to leave judgment to God – with whom he seemed so much at ease that his dying agonies were received with more tears than jeers.
The next day, to everyone’s surprise, there were no executions. Samuel Pepys, his appetite whetted by watching the execution of Thomas Harrison, went early to Newgate to observe the expected exit of two more of Cromwell’s brave colonels, Axtell and Hacker, but was told they had been reprieved for a day.19 In fact, the government was having second thoughts: the courage of the ‘black regicides’ in bearing the cruellest death the state could devise was the talk of the town. Comparisons were being made with the Anglican saints who defied bloody Queen Mary. Harrison had set a noble example and Scot and Cooke in particular had made memorable ends, if in the latter�
��s case a most malodorous one. That gave rise to another, very practical, reason for postponement.
In the words of a contemporary report, after the execution of Cooke and Peters on Tuesday, ‘The stench of their burnt bowels had so putrefied the air, as the inhabitants thereabouts petitioned his majesty that there might be no more executed in that place’.20 Charing Cross, chosen as the place of execution so that the regicides would gaze their last down Whitehall to the Banqueting House, the scene of their crime, was overlooked by residential buildings. The residents who complained were well connected, and the executions of Axtell and Hacker were delayed until arrangements could be made to hang them at Tyburn (near modern-day Marble Arch). It was ironic that John Cooke, whose proposals for more humane administration of justice were so rarely implemented during his own life, should achieve by the barbaric manner of his death this early example of environmental law reform.
On Thursday, the King met his advisers to decide what to do with the dead regicides – eight of them, including Cooke, were now in five pieces (four ‘quarters’ and a head) placed in storage to await the royal command. The bodyparts had been thrown into buckets and paraded through the city on the sled, to delight royalists like John Evelyn: ‘I saw not their execution, but met their quarters, mangled, and cut, and reeking, as they were brought from the gallows in baskets on the hurdle. Oh, the miraculous providence of God!’21 Their hearts and privates, having been displayed triumphantly to the mob, had no further use: they were tossed into a bucket and later fed to stray dogs at Aldersgate. But the King spent some little time considering how to display their remains to his best advantage: he chose the head of John Cooke, as the man responsible for the trial, and Thomas Harrison, who had conveyed the King to it, as those most appropriate for public opprobrium. He personally ordered that both heads should be fastened onto poles which were fixed above the entrance at the north end of Westminster Hall. The head of Hugh Peters was in similar fashion exhibited on London Bridge.22 Their quarters were impaled on spikes at the four gates into the city along with those of the other regicides.
The Tyrannicide Brief Page 43
