by Simon Parke
President Bradshawe intervened. ‘How do you plead?’ he asked. ‘We will not ask again.’
But Charles had a question of his own: ‘I plead with a question and the question is this: by what power am I called hither?’
‘They have no power!’ shouted a woman from the gallery. Heads turned sharply and Cromwell muttered something to Ireton.
‘It’s the Fairfax woman,’ he said. ‘Why was she allowed in?’
‘It’s a public trial,’ said Ireton. ‘I forget whose wish that was.’
Lady Fairfax was the wife of the army’s commander-in-chief – but no friend of the army now.
‘She was a friend once, was she not?’ queried Ireton.
‘A family friend who has forgotten her friendship,’ replied Oliver. ‘The last kind word I heard from her mouth was at your wedding, Henry.’
‘It seems a long time ago. These days, she appears as Queen Fairfax and quite the ruler of their marriage.’
Her husband was not in attendance today, despite being called as a commissioner. He was skulking somewhere – or locked by his wife in the privy, for she delighted in his absence. When his name was called out, she had loudly declared: ‘He has more wit than to be here!’
She needed quietening, that was clear, though who was to do it, less so.
And then Bradshawe, the president, replied to Charles, reading his lines from the clerk’s notes. ‘By what power are you called, Charles Stuart?’ (He enjoyed speaking to the king in this way.) ‘By the power of the Commons in parliament assembled and of all the good people of England.’
‘That’s a lie!’ shouted Queen Fairfax.
‘It is no lie,’ declared Bradshawe.
Don’t get into a conversation with the woman, thought Cromwell.
Lady Fairfax, shouting: ‘Not half, not a quarter of the people of England are with you! This charge is made by rebels and traitors! No law could be found in the history of England by which a king can be tried—’
‘Will the lady please quieten herself!?’ Now Bradshawe was shouting.
‘So they must ferret about and find a gentleman from Holland, named Isaac Dorislaus. Yes, it was a Dutchman who framed these charges! A foreigner!’
‘Madam!’ shouted Bradshawe, but Mrs Fairfax didn’t care. She was standing now.
‘Isaac Dorislaus is a lawyer with a fondness for antiquity, who lifts up a stone and finds under it an ancient Roman law which declares that a military body can legally overthrow a tyrant!’
‘How does she know about Dorislaus?’ asked Cromwell.
‘How do you think?’ replied his son-in-law. ‘She shares a pillow with the general.’
‘Antiquity is sometimes true, madam,’ said Bradshawe, drawing gratefully on his legal background.
‘Then why do the army not overthrow themselves? For they are the tyrants here!’
There was laughter in the hall and it was Charles who calmed them down . . . which served only to make things worse.
‘England has never been an elective kingdom,’ he said quietly, wishing to approach the matter by another path. No one responded, Bradshawe still confused as to whether the trial had actually begun. So Charles continued: ‘I am a monarch not by election but by inheritance.’
‘Hear, hear!’ shouted a lone voice.
‘Thus to acknowledge a usurping authority, like the one before me this day, would be a betrayal of sacred trust. So I must ask again: by what authority – and by that I mean, by what lawful authority – am I here?’
He paused, pleased at their discomfort. Bradshawe had given his answer and found it rejected, and as he didn’t have another, he looked across to Cromwell who glowered.
‘For, as we know,’ said Charles, surprisingly free from his stammer, ‘there are many unlawful authorities in the world. Thieves and robbers gather by the highways, authorities in their way . . . yet we elevate them not.’ And now he smiled for a moment, before seriousness struck again. ‘Remember I am your king, your lawful king. Remember that well.’
‘God bless your majesty!’ cried a voice from the hall.
Charles paused with pleasure. The clerk was aware that Charles had not yet made a plea concerning innocence or guilt, and that the court could not therefore legally proceed – though it was proceeding, in a manner, led by the defendant and his supporters.
‘I say it again: remember I am your king, your lawful king.’
‘God bless your majesty!’
A second and third voice now joined in.
‘Why doesn’t Bradshawe intervene?’ asked Ireton of Cromwell; but Charles would not be stilled.
‘What sins you bring on your heads this day, my friends, and what judgement upon this land – the judgement of God.’
‘Preston was God’s judgement!’ shouted a gaunt-eyed soldier who Charles smiled at . . . and then ignored.
‘So think well upon what you do in this place,’ said Charles. ‘Ponder the weight of this time, before you go from one sin to a greater sin. For one moment leads to another, and what is lost can never be reclaimed.’
‘You’re a man of blood!’ called out the rough voice of another soldier, who had lost two brothers at Marston Moor. ‘A traitor!’
‘It is Cromwell who is the traitor!’ replied Lady Fairfax in a loud voice. ‘Him!’
She pointed down towards Cromwell, who didn’t move. Had former friendship come to this? And as her taunting continued, encouraging grunts of support from the crowd, action was finally taken. Cromwell caught the eye of Colonel Bawdsley, formerly a drayman, who threatened to order his soldiers to shoot into the public gallery unless the lady chose silence.
‘They will fire upon you and you shall be much bloodied!’ he declared, hoping this would please his lieutenant-general. But Cromwell only sighed. The musket was accurate enough in war, where general slaughter was appropriate, but aimed at the gallery, a few commissioners would be sent sprawling as well – and they did not have any to spare. After some discussion with Lady Fairfax – giddy with the attention and with ten muskets now pointing towards her – she was persuaded to leave the courtroom, though not silently.
‘Does truth make the air unclean here?’ she enquired. ‘Is that the reason I am hustled in this petulant manner? Long live the king! And I speak for us all. I speak for England. Long live the king!’
*
Robert Hammond watched Lady Fairfax leave; in his heart, he applauded.
He too sat in the gallery, a row back from the fiery soul, and while it was unseemly for a woman to speak in such a forward manner, who could disagree with the sentiments? He surveyed the scene below him and found it unutterably bleak: soldiers minding the aisles in a courtroom where only one outcome was possible. He had feared this, had always feared this, ever since Charles had arrived in his care on the island. Hammond had fought for parliament, and gladly so, but not for rule by soldiers. The line between deceit and honour was ever more obscure.
‘We fought against misgovernment – we didn’t fight against the king,’ he’d said to Ireton during an unpleasant exchange at Windsor. They came face to face there after he was abducted by Ewer on the road.
‘And what if the king is the misgovernment?’ said Ireton.
‘He was perhaps let down by his advisors,’ said Hammond. ‘Not well served—’
‘Not well served?’ interrupted Ireton. ‘Who appointed his advisors? They did not appear pristine from the soil, Robert! If his advisors were fools, perhaps a fool appointed them!’
Hammond looked down on Ireton now and eased himself back a little, hiding his form, for he was a royalist today and would prefer no army eyes upon him. Ireton’s gaze did rove a little, glancing up and around; Cromwell’s stayed singly on the king. Though as Lady Fairfax was finally evicted from the court, Oliver glanced up and their eyes met. Hammond was the first to turn away.
Charles was buoyant as Lady Fairfax was removed, for he’d found Jane.
After some discreet scouring, he’d discovered her seated in the gallery near the despicable Hammond. Now, there was a disappointing man! But Jane was true: she’d said she would be here for the trial, that she’d never leave him. He nodded graciously towards her, with fond memories of the guardroom and elsewhere, though particularly the guardroom. She replied with a nervous smile, which covered a mind considering a thousand different sorrows and fresh plans for freedom.
But the king’s buoyancy was mainly in consideration of the commissioners. He was aware that one hundred and thirty-five of them had been appointed for this trial, chosen from a supposed cross-section of English notability – landowners, MPs and army officers . . . those reckoned to have enough of Cromwell in their veins to behave. But here was the interest for Charles: as he looked around now, he could count no more than seventy before him. This left sixty-five absentees, which was intriguing; it suggested that even his enemies concurred with the illegality of this gathering. So perhaps there were more twists ahead, with Fairfax – thanks to his wife – now famously absent. He had beaten the king in battle, but refused to be his judge in peace.
And Charles was buoyed also by the support of the people, crammed in around him. He was their king, was still their king, his seat here a throne. He’d been too long away, he could see this now, and they needed him, for he held their lives together – unlike the cold soldiers: ‘like blocks of ice in the thawing winter lake’, he would write. But around him was the warm and swirling support of the people, allowed in without restriction, and many more left disappointed outside.
How they loved him.
*
The trial, though going badly, had not been hastily conceived.
‘It must be public,’ Cromwell had said in his Drury Lane parlour some weeks before. Ireton’s face wasn’t sure, but his father-in-law was convinced. ‘There will be no secrecy here; everything is to be done in the light of day, as befits God’s people. It will be a public trial!’
And surprisingly, Ludlow agreed. Edmund Ludlow – the cushion-beater – was republican and Baptist, fierce at both and a man with Leveller sympathies. He’d helped Ireton purge parliament and it was Henry who’d brought him to Drury Lane today. Ireton needed an antidote to Cromwell’s meandering and Edmund was that man. With an insatiable aggression towards the king and his ways, he would make Oliver listen; and no one would harm cushions in Elizabeth’s house.
‘He sinned openly,’ said Edmund, ‘so he should be tried openly.’ Oliver nodded, glad of his agreement. ‘He must be sentenced and executed in the face of the world,’ continued Ludlow, ‘and not secretly made away with, by poisonings – or other more private deaths.’
‘We must have the trial, that is all I say,’ said Ireton, wearily. ‘Whether in sunlight, candlelight or darkness, I care not greatly.’
‘I know what must be done,’ replied Oliver. He spoke firmly but quietly, lest Elizabeth hear. He wished she was sewing with the poor women of Southwark, but this was not such a day. She was somewhere around.
‘Though I will say this about a public trial,’ said Ireton, ‘and it’s a warning: you will not make friends by opening the courtroom doors.’
Edmund looked at him. ‘Do we need friends?’ he asked. ‘After all, Henry, you’ve managed without them thus far.’
Edmund was Edmund and would be ignored.
‘What do you mean, Henry?’ asked Oliver.
‘You will simply make friends for Charles; that is what a public trial will do. They will take his side. The military way looks good in battle – but never in court.’
‘They will see him as a man who ignores providence, as a man of blood,’ protested Cromwell.
‘No, they won’t, Oliver. If you weren’t at the battle, you neither see the blood nor feel the providential message. They will gaze only on long-suffering Charles, small Charles, gentle Charles, martyr Charles, father Charles, kind holder of the nation’s soul.’
Henry’s mind moved quicker than Oliver’s, the future a clearer place; less attached to cloying notions of unity and purpose, which so slowed Cromwell’s way. They did not ride a popular tide, this was the fact that Ireton could see, and consequently, the less public involvement the better.
‘Maybe he will still negotiate. There is time.’
Ireton raised his eyebrows in dismay. Oliver was slipping again, and Edmund duly intervened.
‘Oliver, the king will die in negotiation with both heaven and hell, and a third party if he can find it – the representatives of purgatory perhaps. But he will never say yes . . . and he will never say no.’
‘Quite,’ said Cromwell, a little chastened. ‘But definitely a public hearing.’
Ireton would settle for that.
*
And so on the first day of the trial, the public flocked in freely. But Charles did not recognize the illegal court; it was quite absurd, and therefore he could not plead . . . though he still had much to say, much that he would like to speak about.
First of all, he wanted to explain that a king could not be held accountable by earthly judges – it simply could not be – and also, that nothing lawful could be derived from a body politic that had cut itself in half and removed one part of its indivisible law-making sovereignty.
‘The fine figure of parliament has recently become a mere rump,’ as one flier put it. ‘An arse that passes much wind!’
And three weeks previously, this ‘rump’ had declared its heretical hand by asserting that ‘the people are, under God, the source of all just power’. Laughable hypocrisy! For while claiming to represent the people this same parliament had banned, detained and excluded many of its own representatives! Power was not given to ‘the people’ as they claimed, but to some people.
So here in the Great Hall, it seemed to Charles that it was he – and not army or parliament – who both protected and guarded the people’s rights, a noble cause indeed. Charles felt hugely noble today and with much to speak about.
But while he thought these things, he was not allowed to say them . . . and was angry. He was silenced by a nervy Bradshawe and was finally taken from the court at the end of a day of accusation.
The soldiers shouted, ‘Justice! Justice!’ as he was led away. Others shouted, ‘God save the king!’
‘Why do they say that?’ asked Ireton, genuinely bemused.
*
The day had been a disaster.
‘The day went badly for us,’ admitted Cromwell.
‘It matters not,’ said Ireton – though it did, for he did not wish to appear the fool. ‘It is mere talk without substance.’
‘But we do not appear well from the talking, Henry.’
‘As I say, it’s mere talk. There is only one result, and we need not concern ourselves greatly with how we get there.’
‘We need a firmer hand tomorrow,’ said Cromwell. ‘And a better day.’
But the following day was worse.
The hall was packed again and John Bradshawe returned with his metal hat, presiding yet not presiding – for it was Charles who was doing that. And once again, he refused to plead when asked. So had the trial begun?
‘We ought to put rocks on his chest like we would with any other man who refused to plead,’ ventured Harrison, who favoured practical solutions.
And Ireton had suggested to Bradshawe, before the day began, that he drop the insistence that the king must plead one way or the other; that the whole process gave unnecessary attention to the accused.
‘You cannot but give attention to the accused,’ said Bradshawe, drawing again on his legal experience. ‘That is the purpose of a court.’
‘It is not the purpose of this court,’ said Ireton. ‘Or not that manner of attention.’
‘Then p
erhaps you should not allow the nation through the door to listen!’ said Bradshawe. Ireton agreed, but what could he say? ‘Lady Fairfax was right in her way. No one wants this to be so.’
Ireton looked at him unbelievingly . . . while Bradshawe pondered his feet.
‘You are now for the king, Bradshawe?’
‘I am not for the king and never will be!’ declared Bradshawe. ‘I will die proud of these times!’
‘You sound like one with a fancy for the king.’
‘I merely know this nation of ours.’
And he also knew his wife Molly, who begged him each morning to spare his majesty.
‘How could you, John Bradshawe, declare the Lord’s anointed one to be guilty?’ This is what she said in a hundred different ways. To which John replied every time that he would do only what the Lord commanded; so Molly knew what was coming.
‘Then we must hope for his stammer to return,’ said Ireton. ‘He will impress less then.’
‘If God so wills.’
But God didn’t will, and instead of recognizing the court with a plea, Charles once again took the moment for his own cause; and, he sensed, the cause of those seated behind him.
‘It is not my case alone,’ he said firmly. ‘It is the freedom and liberty of all the good people of England.’
‘Does anyone really believe him?’ asked Cromwell.
‘Dung attracts many flies,’ said Ireton.
‘And you may pretend what you will, Mr Bradshawe – and you pretend much,’ declared Charles, ‘but I stand more for their liberties than you.’
And then he stood and turned slightly towards the crowd . . . and felt their gasp of appreciation.
‘The accused will face the court!’ declared Bradshawe. But Charles continued without a change of stance. If anything, he now faced his people more squarely.
‘For if power without law may make law – and alter the fundamental laws of the kingdom – then I do not know any subject of the realm who may be assured of his life; or anything he can call his own!’
There were murmurs of approval which soon turned to outrage, and it happened like this. Colonel Hewson, one of the commanders of the guards, now stepped up on to the stage and walked across to Charles. What was happening? He was taller than the king, towering over him. He spoke with disdain.
