The King’s ‘commands’ were speedily implemented: two days later Pepys ‘saw the limbs of some of our new traitors set upon Aldersgate, which was a sad sight to see’ – even for a man who that morning ‘going down into my cellar put my foot into a great heap of turds’,23 a common enough occurrence in this insanitary city. The following day – Sunday – Pepys attended a sermon followed by lunch with his boss Montague (now Lord Sandwich) who had been in a ‘melancholy humour’ all week – understandably, since he had spent it sitting on the bench at the Old Bailey while Bridgeman dispatched men he had fought alongside at Naseby and Marston Moor. (Montague never said a word throughout the trials, and the experience sent him into a depression from which he never recovered his religious faith.) Pepys went on to Westminster Abbey where he met some friends from the office and, in these newly liberated times, went with them on an extended pub-crawl. On his way to The Crown in Palace Yard, he stopped to inspect a friend’s new home and was taken to see the view from its turret. It overlooked Westminster Hall and – lo and behold – ‘there is Cooke’s head set up for a traitor, and Harrison’s on the other side. From here I could see them plainly, as also a very fair prospect about London.’24 This is the last recorded sighting of John Cooke: his head mounted above the great gate of the hall where he had once demanded justice on the head of state.
20
Long Live the King
JOHN COOKE HAD been put to death for daring to prosecute the King. Many men in the country had been guilty of treason, as defined by Bridgeman, for taking up arms against Charles I and thereafter adhering to forms of government which forcibly excluded Charles II. The Act of Indemnity and Oblivion bestowed a blanket amnesty: the new regime would protect and even elevate those who had turned their coats in time. This indulgence was necessary to smooth the Restoration and to encourage future obedience. But the Act of Oblivion was an act of expediency, not of reconciliation. The royalists could never forget and could only selectively forgive those who had deprived them of their power and perquisites, of their happiness and hereditaments, for eighteen long years, in which they had at first been cooped up at Oxford and then forced to choose between lonely exile and sullen submission to modestly bred colonels and lawyers and preachers. The regicide trial served as an outlet for this deep-seated desire for vengeance (a motive masked by its legal formalities) and as a means of deterring any future assault on the prerogatives of the monarch.
Soon the King and his advisers became concerned at signs that the exercise was turning counterproductive.1 They decided, after the executions of Axtell and Hacker, to bring no more regicides to the public scaffold for the time being. Axtell had been popular for rounding up Catholics responsible for the massacres in Ireland, and Hacker moved many to tears by his short but dignified speech, made with the rope around his neck, explaining that he joined the parliamentary cause because he believed it to be right and that his conscience was clear – as he went to a higher court: ‘I do not doubt but to have the sentence reversed.’ The two men had stood, in Tyburn fashion, on a horse-drawn cart rather than a scaffold: when the Sheriff gave the signal for it to move off from under them the driver at first refused, saying that he would rather forfeit his cart and horse than have a hand in hanging such men. When Tench, the carpenter who had nailed the tethering posts to the King’s scaffold, was apprehended at the end of November he was secretly tried and immediately beheaded: although patently innocent of treason, he was guilty in royalist eyes of a crime tantamount to sacrilege.2 In January, fifteen survivors of the Fifth monarchy rebellion were hurriedly hanged, and their heads were impaled on the spikes of the gate at London Bridge to keep Hugh Peters company. Their quarters, boiled at Newgate, were impaled upon other gates to the city alongside the carved-up carcasses of the regicides.
The desire for vengeance was still unsatiated. The decomposed bodies of Bradshawe, Cromwell and Ireton were dug up from their graves on 30 January 1661 (the anniversary of the King’s execution) and hanged at Tyburn. This pantomime was carried out in front of an enormous crowd – Pepys noted that the ladies of the court were all in attendance.3 The bodies were first taken to the Old Bailey, where one of the King’s judges solemnly condemned the corpses, still in their shrouds, propped up against the bar. They were then strapped to sledges and dragged through the streets to the gallows. ‘The curses of the people went along with them’, reported Wharton, the astrologer who had defamed Cooke in 1649 but who was now Sir George, the respected correspondent for Mercurius Publicus, the King’s newspaper. ‘When the three carcasses were at Tyburn they were pulled out of their coffins and hanged at the several angles of that triple tree, till the sun was set, after which they were taken down and their heads cut off, their loathsome trunks thrown into a deep hole under the gallows.’4
This ceremonial desecration took place after a morning spent in ‘solemn fasting sermons and prayers at every parish church’, singing newly composed psalms to the glory of kings and bishops:
Angels look down, and joy to see
Like that above, a monarchy.5
It was followed by macabre exhumations of Parliament’s chief heroes: the skeletons of John Pym; of Admiral Blake who had died in the course of his great naval victory over the Dutch; of Colonel Dean, killed while helping Blake famously to defeat Tromp back in 1652; of Thomas May, the Parliamentary historian; of William Strode, one of the ‘gang of Five’ MPs who had defied Charles I; of Cooke’s co-counsel Isaac Dorislaus; and of all the commonwealth colonels and admirals and MPs and preachers whose bones could be uprooted by frenzied cavaliers. Even, and most viciously, those of Cromwell’s mother and daughter. The carcasses were briefly exhibited to ghoulish crowds and then thrown into a common pit in the yard of St Margaret’s church at Westminster.6 In this fashion did the sovereign, in the first year of his Restoration, seek to bury in a mass grave all memory of the sovereignty of Parliament. The King ordered the hangman to set the several heads of Cromwell, Bradshawe and Ireton upon poles, to be erected on top of Westminster Hall alongside the heads of Cooke and Harrison.
Having wreaked this vengeance on the dead, the King’s men turned to hunt down the living – those regicides who had escaped to friendlier countries. Some disappeared, and had to be hanged in effigy (Pepys noticed a portrait of Colonel Hewson hanging on a gallows at Cheapside). Colonel Okey reached safety in the Low Countries, and obtained a personal assurance from the English ambassador to Holland that he and Colonel Barkstead would be untroubled if they made a visit to The Hague. Since this ambassador, George Downing, had once been a fervently republican chaplain to Okey’s regiment and owed his advancement as MP and diplomat largely to the colonel, they felt safe in accepting his word. But Downing, with a treachery unparalleled even in these times, burst through their door with an armed force and captured them as they were dining with fellow regicide Miles Corbet. In 1662 the English government prevailed upon the Dutch to ignore international law and repatriate all three political refugees. Their trial was a formality, for all surviving regicides had been ‘outlawed’ by Act of Parliament: once positively identified, they were taken directly to the gallows. To the government’s dismay they were accompanied by an army of friends and supporters, some of whom had to be dragged off the fatal cart before it could be drawn away to leave the three dangling. Corbet had made a memorable speech, explaining that in the Commons he had opposed putting the King on trial but had been so convinced by the evidence that he voted in favour of the sentence. He added, pointedly, that the ‘immoralities, lewdness and corruption’ encouraged by the Restoration ‘were no inconsiderable justification of the proceedings against Charles I’.7 Later, when it was learnt that pieces of Okey’s mangled body had been released to his family for burial, an estimated 20,000 well-wishers turned up for the funeral – so many that the sheriff seized the coffin and had it buried by night in the safety of the Tower.
After this, it became state policy to employ assassins to hunt down the fugitives. In 1664 at Lausanne they murder
ed John Lisle. He was a master of the Middle Temple who had assisted Bradshawe at the King’s trial and had himself presided over the High Court of Justice which on his casting vote had acquitted the royalist recruiter John (now Baron) Mordaunt. The Swiss cantonal governments, unlike the perfidious Dutch, genuinely welcomed Protestant asylum-seekers: they stepped up protection of Ludlow, Broughton (the clerk who had read out Cooke’s charge), Phelps, Love and Cawley, who in due course died in their beds at Vevey, beside the serene shore of Lake Geneva. There St Martin’s church continues to afford their bodies the dignity and commemoration denied by their own country.8
Regicides who had taken ship for the American colonies could receive no official protection, although many family members sought refuge there and were well looked after. (Thomas Harrison’s genes, for example, were transmitted to the eighth, ninth and twenty-third Presidents of the United States.) Colonels Goffe and Whaley were sympathetically received by the people of Boston, where they worshipped openly and attended civic functions. When a local loyalist accused them as killers of the King, the magistrates showed whose side they were on: they arrested the accuser. But such tolerance in the King’s dominions could not be suffered for long: warrants were issued for their arrest and in 1664 commissioners arrived from London to take them into custody. So they headed for the hills, hiding in a cave and then living for many years in concealment outside the town of Hadley, a hundred miles from Boston. In 1675 Hadley became the target for a massed Indian attack: surrounded and outnumbered, its citizens were confused and in despair, until
suddenly a grave elderly person appeared in their midst, in his mien and dress differing from the rest of the people. He not only encouraged them to defend themselves, but put himself at their head, rallied, instructed and led them on to encounter the enemy, who by this means were repulsed. As suddenly, the deliverer of Hadley disappeared – the people utterly unable to account for this strange phenomenon.9
Colonel Goffe, so legend has it, had taught them the tactics of the New Model Army – as effective against arrows and tomahawks as they had proven against Prince Rupert’s cavalry.
Some of the better-connected regicide supporters were permitted to purchase their pardons. John Milton had done as much to justify the King’s trial as Cooke and Peters; imprisoned in October 1660, he was saved by the intercession of his barrister brother, a close friend of the Duke of York, and by royalist masque-master William Davenant, reputedly William Shakespeare’s illegitimate son, against the advice of Heneage Finch, who said that the poet ‘deserved hanging’.10 Clarendon was unconcerned about coffee-house intellectuals and he spared James Harrington, author of Oceana, the blueprint for a British republic, and the members of his Rota Club. The real danger, he brooded, would come from men of practical genius, especially Lambert and Vane – both under secure imprisonment. His problem in taking their lives was that the Parliament had petitioned the King in a merciful moment in mid-1660 to spare them and he had personally reported to the House of Lords that the King had assented to this request. It would be an astounding breach of faith to renege on that promise, but the courage Clarendon had displayed over his long exile was replaced by perfidy when in power. Besides, his own daughter had married the King’s brother, James, the heir to the throne, and he was determined to protect his royal grand-paternity. In April 1662, Vane and Lambert were brought to trial. Lambert, a general who always knew when he was beaten, threw himself on the mercy of the court. He was locked away, in solitary confinement in island prisons where, over the twenty-one years until his death, the draftsman of England’s first and only constitution slowly lost his mind. Sir Harry Vane, however, was of a different metal.
Vane had not been a regicide – on the contrary, he had firmly opposed both Pride’s Purge and the King’s execution, and had publicly broken with Cromwell over his dissolution of the Rump. (Vane was on his feet at the moment when Cromwell brought the House down and had suffered his unfair but immortal rebuke: ‘O Sir Henry Vane! Sir Henry Vane! The Lord deliver me from Sir Henry Vane!’) Understandably, he had held no office during the protectorate, preferring to write about God and republicanism, and to campaign for what he was the first to term ‘the Good Old Cause’. He had enjoyed an illustrious career, beginning with his governorship of Massachusetts and then his election to the Long Parliament, in which he had produced the evidence that secured Strafford’s conviction and later played whip to the Independent group of MPs, outwitting the Presbyterian faction under Holles, whose impeachment he had been the first to move. He returned to parliamentary duties just a few hours after the King’s execution and served the commonwealth as its most formidable administrator – his control of naval business was the key to Blake’s triumphs over the Dutch. His return to power in 1659 – he was first a leader of the Rump and then recruited by Fleetwood to the short-lived Committee of Safety – showed that he was the best man left alive to command the allegiance of all the anti-Stuart factions. So Clarendon decided that he had to die, irrespective of the King’s promise to Parliament.
The problem was how to convict a man who had not in any way coerced Charles I. For treason to be committed against a king, that monarch had to be in actual possession of the crown and not merely entitled to it. But the unprincipled Restoration judges ruled that Charles II became King the moment his father’s neck was severed and all who had supported the republic thereafter were traitors. The ingenious Judge Wyndham (the smart junior prosecutor of Cooke, now elevated to the bench) decided that every Parliament dissolved automatically on the death of the monarch and therefore nothing done or spoken by members of any Parliament since 30 January 1649 could be protected by privilege or provide a defence to those who had obeyed its orders for ‘keeping out’ the new King.
Vane was popular and to obtain his conviction required another major exercise in jury manipulation. The prosecution was horrified to find on the list of names for the first jury panel a number of political moderates, so they directed the sheriff to summon a new panel composed of ‘vetted’ royalists. Vane was refused time to summon his witnesses: he was told that the jury ‘were to be kept without meat, drink, fire or candle’ until their verdict, so no delay could be countenanced. Even so, the jury took a record half-hour before all its members would agree to a ‘guilty’ verdict, and that was only after the Solicitor-General told them that ‘the prisoner must be sacrificed for the nation’. Charles, on the principle that the safety of the King was the supreme law, ignored his parliamentary promise: ‘certainly Vane is too dangerous a man to let live if we can honestly put him out of the way’, he wrote to Clarendon.11 Vane was dishonestly put out of the way, by an execution which served as a doubly symbolic whirligig of royalist revenge: it took place on Tower Hill (the place of Strafford’s death) and on the anniversary of the battle of Naseby. Vane wore a fine black suit and a scarlet waistcoat for his last public appearance, and manifested contempt for the King and his judges throughout the ordeal.
In other cases in 1662, these pliant judges declared that it was treason merely to attend a meeting which discussed how to revert to republican government,12 and the crime of misprision (covering-up) of treason not to report any rumour of republican action to the Council of State or the nearest Justice of the Peace.13 To underline the illegality of republicanism the statutes for the trial of Charles I and for the commonwealth were solemnly burned by the common hangman in Westminster Hall, while the courts were in session. There were regular humiliation rituals for public enjoyment, as remaining regicides were brought from the Tower for mock executions at Tyburn, then paraded to Parliament to plead for their lives. The cavaliers court-martialled at Colchester, Lucas and Lisle, were given lavish state funerals, while Cooke’s Scots equivalent, the lawyer Archibald Johnston who had drafted the Solemn League and Covenant, was ‘hung high’ on a twenty-two-foot gibbet.14
Clarendon wanted to keep republican diehards in prison indefinitely, but Magna Carta endowed everyone in England with the right to challenge the legality
of his detention by habeas corpus. So Clarendon hit on a devious plan: he would keep the ‘enemy combatants’ in custody for ever, but not in England – instead, on offshore islands like Jersey and the Isle of Man. Clarendon’s device was regarded as despicable at the time – it was one of the reasons for his dismissal, and it led Parliament in 1679 to pass the Habeas Corpus Act, which gave ‘the great writ’ extra-territorial affect. Centuries later, the Bush administration followed Clarendon’s thinking and established Guantanamo Bay. In 2004 the US Supreme Court drew on shared precedents from the seventeenth century and applied the 1679 Act to insist upon due process for detainees.15
All this while, John Cooke’s head remained on Westminster Hall. The starlings had plucked through the embalmed flesh of his cheeks, their deposits on his skull giving him, viewed from a distance, the white cap always worn by solicitors in court. The skeletal stretch of his mouth had not, however, stopped talking. Four editions of an underground publication, Speeches and Prayers of the Regicides, in which his letters and scaffold address featured prominently, surreptitiously circulated among the faithful at prayer meetings and in taverns. The royalist regime had instituted a strict censorship: its official newspaper, Mercurius Publicus, had not reported the defiant speeches and prayers from the scaffold. Now Roger L’Estrange, ‘surveyor of the press’ (a witch-finder General with powers to seize unlicensed presses and arrest dissident journalists and printers) went after John Cooke’s posthumous publishers.
The Tyrannicide Brief Page 44
