CROMWELL AND THE KING’S EXECUTION
1648–1649
While Fairfax and Cromwell were fighting the armies raised in the King’s
name, the Parliament was once more negotiating with Charles I. In spite
of the vote for no addresses, passed on January 17, 1648, April was not
over before both Houses were discussing the reopening of negotiations.
Petition after petition came from the City demanding a personal treaty
with the King, and the House of Lords echoed the demand. The Lords were
so zealous for a peace that when Hamilton and the Scots invaded England
they refused to join the Lower House in declaring them enemies. The
Commons, more cautious, insisted that the King should accept certain
preliminaries before any treaty began, and refused to allow him to come
to London to treat. At last the two Houses arrived at a compromise, and
on August 1st it was agreed that there should be a personal treaty with
Charles in the Isle of Wight. The Commissioners of Parliament met the
King at Newport on September 18th, a couple of days before Cromwell
entered Scotland. Charles consented to annul his former declarations
against the Parliament, and to admit that they had undertaken the war
“in their just and lawful defence.” He promised the establishment of the
Presbyterian system for three years, and a limited Episcopacy
afterwards. He even offered the control of the militia for twenty years
and the settlement of Ireland in such fashion as Parliament should think
best. The question whether these concessions were a sufficient basis for
lasting peace is one on which modern historians have differed as much as
contemporary politicians did. It is certain that the King was not
sincere in making them. “To deal freely with you,” wrote Charles to one
of his friends, “the great concession I made this day—the Church,
militia, and Ireland—was made merely in order to my escape.... My only
hope is, that now they believe I dare deny them nothing, and so be less
careful of their guards.” The Presbyterian leaders argued and haggled in
the hope of obtaining the permanent establishment of Presbyterianism,
but the question whether any treaty would bind the King they neglected
to take into account.
Meanwhile a dangerous excitement was spreading in the army. From an
agreement between the Presbyterians and the Royalists, an Independent
army had much to fear. The first result of the treaty would be a general
disbanding. To be dismissed with a few shillings in his pocket, but
without security for his arrears, or indemnity for his acts during the
war, was the most a soldier could expect. If any sectary who had fought
for the Parliament hoped that it would give him freedom to worship as
his conscience dictated, the act against heresy and blasphemy, passed in
May, 1648, had shown the futility of his hopes. Whether Episcopacy or
Presbyterianism gained the upper hand, toleration would be at an end as
soon as he laid down his arms. Add to this, that the soldiers were
firmly convinced that the proposed treaty afforded no security for the
political liberties of the nation. Once restored to his authority,
Charles would, either by force or by intrigue, shake off the
restrictions the treaty imposed, and rear again that fabric of
absolutism, which it had cost six years’ fighting to overthrow. The
renewal of the war had heightened their distrust of Charles, and
embittered their hostility to him. The responsibility for the first
Civil War had been laid upon the King’s evil counsellors; the
responsibility for the second was laid upon the King himself. It was at
his instigation, said the officers, that conquered enemies had taken up
arms again, old comrades apostatised from their principles, and a
foreign army invaded England. In a great prayer-meeting held at Windsor
before they separated for the campaign, they pledged themselves to bring
this responsibility home to the King. “We came,” wrote one of them, “to
a very clear resolution, that it was our duty, if ever the Lord brought
us back again in peace, to call Charles Stuart, that man of blood, to an
account for the blood he had shed, and mischief he had done to the
utmost, against the Lord’s cause and people in these poor nations.” They
were equally determined to punish the King’s instruments. At the close
of the first war, the army had shown itself more merciful than the
Parliament, but the second war made it fierce, implacable, and resolute
to exact blood for blood. Fairfax’s execution of Lucas and Lisle, two
royalist leaders taken at Colchester, “in part of avenge for the
innocent blood they have caused to be spilt,” was a sign of this change
of temper.
Cromwell shared this vindictive feeling towards the authors of the
second war. When he took Pembroke, he excepted certain persons from the
terms of the capitulation and reserved them for future punishment.
“The persons excepted,” he wrote to Parliament, “are such as have
formerly served you in a very good cause; but being now apostatised,
I did rather make election of them than of those who had always been
for the King; judging their iniquity double, because they have
sinned against so much light, and against so many evidences of
Divine Providence going along with and prospering a just cause, in
the management of which they themselves had a share.”
He was equally exasperated against those who had promoted the Scottish
invasion.
“This,” he said, “is a more prodigious treason than any that hath
been perfected before; because the former quarrel was that
Englishmen might rule over one another, this to vassalise us to a
foreign nation. And their fault that appeared in this summer’s
business is certainly double to theirs who were in the first,
because it is the repetition of the same offence against all the
witnesses that God hath borne.”
The moral he drew from his victory at Preston was that Parliament should
use it to protect peaceable Christians of all opinions, and punish
disturbers of the peace of every rank.
“Take courage,” he told them, “to do the work of the Lord in
fulfilling the end of your magistracy, in seeking the peace and
welfare of this land—that all that will live peaceably may have
countenance from you, and they that are incapable, and will not
leave troubling the land, may speedily be destroyed out of the land.
If you take courage in this God will bless you, and good men will
stand by you, and God will have glory, and the land will have
happiness by you in despite of all your enemies.”
When Cromwell returned from Scotland, he found the Parliament preparing
to replace the King on his throne, and to content itself with banishing
some dozen of the royalist leaders. Regiment after regiment of Fairfax’s
army was presenting its general with petitions against the treaty and
demands for the punishment of the authors of the war. Cromwell’s troops
imitated their example, and in forwarding their petitions to Fairfax,
their leader expressed his complete agreement with his soldiers.
“I find,” he wrote, “a very great sense in the officers ... for the
sufferings and ruin of this poor kingdom, and in them all a very
great zeal to have impartial justice done upon all offenders; and I
do in all from my heart concur with them, and I verily think they
are things which God puts into our hearts.”
On November 20, 1648, the army in the south sent Parliament a
“Remonstrance,” demanding the rupture of the negotiations, and the
punishment of the King as “the grand author of all our troubles.”
Cromwell approved of this declaration, and told Fairfax he saw “nothing
in it but what is honest, and becoming honest men to say and offer.” It
would have been better, he thought, to wait till the treaty was
concluded, before making their protest, but now that it had been made he
was prepared to support it. The Newport treaty seemed to him to be a
complete surrender to Charles. “They would have put into his hands,” he
said later, “all that we had engaged for, and all our security would
have been a little bit of paper.” No one knew better than Cromwell that
a mere protest would not stop the Parliament, and he was ready to use
force if necessary. The arguments by which he justified its employment
are fully stated in his letter to his friend, Robert Hammond, whose
scruples he sought to overcome.
Was it not true that the safety of the people was the supreme law? Was
it not certain that this treaty would undo all that had been gained by
the war, and make things worse than before the war began? If resistance
to authority was lawful at all, was it not as lawful to oppose the
Parliament as it was to oppose the King?
“Consider,” he urged, “whether this army be not a lawful power
called by God to oppose and fight against the King upon some stated
grounds; and being in power to such ends, may not oppose one name of
authority for those ends as well as another name,—since it was not
the outward authority summoning them that by its power made the
quarrel lawful, but the quarrel that was lawful in itself.”
These, however, were but “fleshly reasonings,” and there were higher
arguments. “Let us look into providences; surely they mean somewhat.
They hang so together; have been so constant, so clear, unclouded.”
The victories God had given could not be meant to end in such a
sacrifice of His cause and His people as “this ruining hypocritical
agreement.” “Thinkest thou in thy heart that the glorious dispensations
of God point to this?” The determination of the army to prevent the
treaty was also God’s doing. “What think you of Providence disposing the
hearts of so many of God’s people this way? We trust the same Lord who
hath framed our minds in our actings is with us in this also.” There
were difficulties to be encountered and enemies not few—“appearance of
united names, titles, and authorities”; yet they were not terrified,
“desiring only to fear our great God that we do nothing against His
will.”
Briefly stated, Cromwell’s argument was that the victories of the army,
and the convictions of the godly, were external and internal evidence of
God’s will, to be obeyed as a duty. It was dangerous reasoning, and not
less dangerous that secular and political motives coincided with the
dictates of religious enthusiasm. Similar arguments might be held to
justify not merely the temporary intervention of the army, but its
permanent assumption of the government of England. Practical good sense
and conservative instincts prevented Cromwell from adopting the extreme
consequences of his theory; with most of his comrades the logic of
fanaticism was qualified by no such considerations.
As Parliament continued the treaty without attending to their
Remonstrance, the army determined to employ force. On December 1st,
officers sent by Fairfax seized Charles at Newport and removed him to
Hurst Castle in Hampshire. The next day, Fairfax and his troops occupied
London. Undeterred, the House of Commons resolved by 129 votes to
eighty-three that the King’s answers were a ground to proceed upon for
the settlement of the kingdom. The same evening, the commanders of the
army and the leaders of the parliamentary minority held a conference to
decide what was to be done. On their march, the officers had declared
their intention of dissolving the Long Parliament, and constituting the
faithful minority a provisional government until a new Parliament could
meet. But now, in deference to the wishes of their friends in
Parliament, they resolved, instead, to expel the Presbyterian majority
from the House, and to leave the Independent minority in possession of
the name and authority of a Parliament. On December 6th, accordingly,
Colonel Pride and a body of musketeers beset the doors of the House of
Commons, seized some members as they sought to enter, and turned others
back by force. The same process continued on the 7th, till forty-five
members were under arrest, and some ninety-six others excluded.
Cromwell arrived at London on the night after “Pride’s Purge” began, and
took his seat next day amongst the fifty or sixty members who continued
to sit in the House. Like the rest of the officers, he had contemplated
a forcible dissolution and the calling of a new Parliament. But seeing
that a different plan had been adopted by his friends on the spot, he
did not hesitate to accept it. He said, “that he had not been acquainted
with this design, but since it was done he was glad of it, and would
endeavour to maintain it.”
On the question of the King, a difference of opinion between Cromwell
and the bulk of the officers soon showed itself. He approved of their
seizure of Charles, and had no doubt of the justice of bringing him to
trial. But he doubted the policy of the King’s trial and condemnation,
if any other satisfactory expedient could be devised to secure the
rights of the nation. It might be that the King’s deposition would be
sufficient, or that he would at last make the concessions which he had
hitherto refused. Of the discussions which went on in the council of
officers during the next three weeks very little is known. There are
vague rumours of a great division of opinion amongst them, of one party
sternly insisting on the King’s punishment, of another willing to be
content with his deposition or imprisonment. We get glimpses of Cromwell
negotiating with lawyers and judges about the settlement of the nation,
inspiring a final attempt to come to terms with Charles, and arguing
that it would be safe to spare the King’s life, if he would accept the
conditions now offered him. All these attempted compromises failed. The
King preferred to part with his life rather than with his regal power,
and unless he yielded no constitutional settlement was possible. So the
military revolution, for a moment arrested in its progress, moved
inevitably forward, and Cromwell went with it.
On December 23rd, Charles was brought to Windsor. “The Lord be with you
and bless you in this great charge,” wrote Cromwell to the governor,
sending him therewith minute instructions for the safe-keeping of his
captive. On the same day, the House of Commons appointed a committee “to
consider how to proceed in the way of justice against the King.” “If any
man,” Cromwell is reported to have said, “had deliberately designed such
a thing, he would be the greatest traitor in the world, but ‘the
Providence of God’ had cast it upon them.”
Five days later an ordinance was introduced erecting a tribunal to try
the King, to consist of three judges and a jury of 150 commissioners. On
January 2, 1649, the ordinance was transmitted to the Lords, with a
resolution declaring that “by the fundamental laws of this kingdom it is
treason in the King of England for the time being to levy war against
the Parliament and the kingdom of England.” The unanimous rejection of
this ordinance, and the discovery that the judges would refuse the part
assigned to them, did not make the Commons draw back. A new ordinance
was brought in, creating a court of 135 commissioners, who were to act
both as judge and jury, and omitting the three judges. Fresh resolutions
declared the people the original of all just power, the House of Commons
the supreme power in the nation, and the laws passed by the Commons
binding without consent of King or Lords. This ordinance, or, as it was
now termed, act, was passed on January 6, 1649. It set forth that
Charles Stuart had wickedly designed totally to subvert the ancient and
fundamental laws of this nation, and in their place to introduce an
arbitrary and tyrannical government; that he had levied and maintained a
cruel war against Parliament and kingdom; and that new commotions had
arisen from the remissness of Parliament to prosecute him. Wherefore
that for the future “no chief officer or magistrate whatsoever may
presume to imagine or contrive the enslaving or destroying of the
English nation, and to expect impunity for trying or doing the same,”
the persons whose names followed were appointed to try the said Charles
Stuart. On the 19th of January, the King was brought from Windsor to St.
James’s, guarded by troops of horse.
Ever since the eighth, the commissioners for the King’s trial had been
meeting in the Painted Chamber to settle their procedure. But nearly
half of those named refused to accept the duty laid upon them. Some had
fears for their own safety; some, political objections; others objected
to the constitution or authority of the court. Algernon Sidney told his
colleagues that there were two reasons why he could not take part in
their proceedings. First, the King could not be tried by that court;
secondly, that no man could be tried by that court. “I tell you,”
answered Cromwell, with characteristic scorn of constitutional formulas,
“we will cut off his head with the crown upon it.”
Nevertheless, the question of their authority was a question to which
the court was bound to agree upon an answer. If a story told at the
trial of the Regicides may be trusted, the commissioners were still at a
loss for a formula on the morning of the 20th of January, when the trial
began. As they sat in the Painted Chamber, news was brought that the
King was landing at the steps which led up from the river.
“At which Cromwell ran to the window, looking on the King as he came
up the garden; he turned as white as the wall ... then turning to
the board said thus: ‘My masters, he is come, he is come, and now we
are doing that great work that the whole nation will be full of.
Therefore I desire you to let us resolve here what answer we shall
give the King when he comes before us, for the first question he
will ask us will be by what authority and commission we do try him?’
For a time no one answered. Then after a little space, Henry Marten
rose up and said, ‘In the name of the Commons in Parliament
assembled and all the good people of England.’”
About one o’clock the court adjourned to Westminster Hall. At the upper
or southern end of the Hall, a wooden platform had been constructed,
covering all the space usually occupied by the Courts of Chancery and
King’s Bench. A wooden partition rising about three feet above the floor
of this platform divided the court itself from the body of the Hall. On
the lower side of this partition, running across the Hall from side to
side, was a broad gangway fenced in by a wooden railing, and a similar
gangway ran right down the Hall to the great door. Along the sides of
the gangways, with their backs to the railings, stood a line of
musketeers and pikemen, whose officers walked up and down the vacant
space in the middle of the passages. The mass of the audience stood
within the railed spaces between the sides of the Hall and the gangways,
but on each side of the court itself, and directly overlooking it, were
two small galleries, one above the other, reserved for specially
favoured spectators. At the back of the court, immediately under the
great window, sat the King’s judges, about seventy in number, ranged on
four or five tiers of benches which were covered with scarlet cloth.
They wore their ordinary dress as officers or gentlemen. In the back
row, on each side of the scutcheon bearing the arms of the Commonwealth
of England, sat Cromwell and Harry Marten. In the centre of the front
row of the judges, at a raised desk, sat Serjeant John Bradshaw, the
president of the court, and on each side of him his assistants, Lisle
and Say, dressed in black lawyer’s gowns. About the middle of the floor
of the court was a table where the two clerks were seated, and on the
table lay the mace and the sword of State. In the front of the court, at
the very edge of the platform, were three compartments, somewhat like
pews, the backs of which were formed by the low partition separating the
court from the Hall. In the central one were a crimson-velvet arm-chair,
and a small table covered with Turkey carpet, on which were an inkstand
and paper. Here sat the King, and in the partition on his right were the
three lawyers who were counsel for the Commonwealth. The King had his
face turned towards the president and his back to the crowd in the body
of the Hall. As the floor of the court was higher than the floor of the
Hall, the spectators stood, as it were, in the pit of a theatre, but the
partition somewhat intercepted their view of the interior of the court.
Yet they could see the King’s head and shoulders above it.
Charles kept his hat on his head, and showed no sign of respect to the
court.
“The prisoner,” says the official account, “while the charge was
reading, sat down in his chair, looking sometimes on the High Court,
and sometimes on the galleries, and rose again, and turned about to
behold the guards and spectators, and after sat down, looking very
sternly, and with a countenance not at all moved, till these words
‘_Charles Stuart to be a tyrant_,’ traitor, etc., were read; at
which he laughed, as he sat, in the face of the court.”
Throughout the trial, as the King’s judges had anticipated, he declined
to admit the jurisdiction of the court. On each of the three days when
he appeared before it, on the 20th, the 22d, and the 23rd of January, he
maintained his refusal to plead. “Princes,” he had said in a declaration
published in 1629, “are not bound to give an account of their actions
but to God alone,” and he now consistently repeated that “a king cannot
be tried by any superior jurisdiction on earth.” What excited more
sympathy, however, was his association of the rights of his subjects
with his own, and his claim to be defending both against the arbitrary
power of the army.
“It is not my case alone,” he said; “it is the freedom and liberty
of the people of England; and do you pretend what you will, I stand
more for their liberties. For if power without law may make laws,
may alter the fundamental laws of the kingdom, I do not know what
subject he is in England that can be sure of his life, or anything
that he calls his own.”
On Tuesday, the 23rd, after Charles had for a third time refused to
plead, the court adjourned to the Painted Chamber, and the more
determined members resolved to treat the King as contumacious, and
proceed to pronounce judgment against him. Others opposed this course,
and the next two days were spent in hearing evidence at private meetings
of the court in the Painted Chamber—partly in order to gain time whilst
the recalcitrant members of the court were being converted. One after
another, a number of witnesses deposed that they had seen the King in
arms against the Parliament. One had seen the royal standard set up at
Nottingham. Another had seen the King at Newbury, in complete armour
with his sword drawn, and had heard him exhort a regiment of horse to
stand by him that day, for that his crown lay upon the point of the
sword. A third swore that he heard Charles encourage his soldiers to
strip and beat their prisoners when Leicester was stormed. Documents
were also brought to prove the King’s invitations to foreign forces to
enter England. At length, on the evening of Thursday, the 25th, a vote
that the court would proceed to sentence Charles Stuart to death was
procured, and on the morning of the 26th, sixty-two commissioners agreed
to the terms of the sentence which their committee had drawn up. It was
resolved, however, that the King should be brought before the court to
hear his sentence, instead of being condemned in his absence, and this
was doubtless done in order to give him a chance to plead, in case he
should repent of his contumacy.
On the afternoon of Saturday, January 27th, sixty-seven commissioners
took their seats in Westminster Hall, headed by Bradshaw, who had now
donned a scarlet gown in which to deliver sentence. Once more Charles
refused to plead, requesting that before sentence was given he might be
heard before the Lords and Commons assembled in the Painted Chamber. He
had something to say, he declared, which was “most material for the
welfare of the kingdom and the liberty of the subject.... I am sure on
it, it is very well worth the hearing.” It was afterwards rumoured that
he meant to propose his own abdication, and the admission of his son to
the throne upon such terms as should have been agreed upon. The court
after a brief deliberation refused the request, and Bradshaw, after
setting forth the prisoner’s crimes and exhorting him to repentance,
ordered the clerk to read the sentence. The King strove to speak. “Your
time is now past,” replied Bradshaw, and bade the clerk read on. After
the sentence was read, all the commissioners stood up to testify their
assent. Once more Charles endeavoured to obtain a hearing. “Sir, you are
not to be heard after sentence,” was the answer. He still struggled to
be heard. “Guard, withdraw your prisoner,” ordered the president. “I am
not suffered to speak,” cried the King. “Expect what justice other
people will have.”
As the King was led from the Court, the soldiers gave a great shout,
crying fiercely, “Execution, execution!” Others, it was said, reviled
him as he passed by them, and blew their tobacco smoke in his face. But
outside, in the street, as he went from Westminster to Whitehall,
“shop-stalls and windows were full of people, many of whom shed tears,
and some of them with audible voices prayed for the King.” It was clear
that the feeling of the people was on the King’s side, and that
consideration, if no other, might well have induced the army leaders
even at the last to draw back. But even had they wished it, the army
would not have permitted them to do so. Moreover, Cromwell all through
the trial never wavered or hesitated, and his influence kept the
Regicides together. When the King’s judges came to be tried for their
own lives, some strove to represent themselves as acting under coercion.
One said that Cromwell and Ireton laid hold of him and compelled him to
take his place in the court; others described Cromwell as forcing
recalcitrant judges to sign the death-warrant, and bearing down the
little minority who wished the King to be heard after sentence had been
pronounced. Colonel Ingoldsby boldly declared that Cromwell seized his
hand and guided his pen, though the truth is that Ingoldsby’s signature
shows no signs of constraint. Many such legends circulate in
contemporary literature, fictitious in themselves, yet all testifying to
a well-founded popular impression. Cromwell had made up his mind that
the King must die, and when his mind was made up he was inflexible.
Against that will, all efforts to save the King were futile. Fairfax was
applied to by Prince Charles, but while steadfastly refusing to take any
part in the trial, he remained in all other respects a passive tool in
the hands of his council of officers. The Dutch ambassadors appealed to
Parliament, but what remained of Parliament was helpless or obdurate.
The commissioners of the Scottish Parliament presented public protests
and made private appeals to the leaders of the army. They argued with
Cromwell, telling him that the Covenant obliged both nations to preserve
the King’s person, and that to proceed to extremities against him was to
break the league between England and Scotland. Cromwell answered them by
a discourse on the nature of the regal power, asserting that a breach of
trust in a king ought to be punished more than any other crime. As to
the Covenant, its end was the defence of the true religion; if the King
was the greatest obstacle to the establishment of the true religion,
they were not bound to preserve him. “It pledged them,” he added, “to
bring to condign punishment all incendiaries and enemies to the cause,
and were small offenders to be punished and the greatest of all to go
free?”
Meanwhile, during Sunday and Monday, Charles prepared himself for death.
He spent much time in prayer with Bishop Juxon, burnt his papers,
distributed the small remains of his personal property, and took leave
of his children. As he feared that the army would make the Duke of
Gloucester king, he charged him in simple language not to take his
“brother’s throne.”
“Sweetheart,” said Charles, taking the child upon his knee, “now
they will cut off thy father’s head [upon which words the child
looked very steadfastly upon him]; mark, child, what I say: They
will cut off my head, and perhaps make thee a king; but mark what I
say: You must not be a king so long as your brothers Charles and
James do live; for they will cut off your brothers’ heads when they
can catch them, and cut off thy head, too, at the last; and
therefore I charge you do not be made a king by them.”
At which the child, sighing, said, “I will be torn in pieces first.”
What Charles said to his daughter, the Lady Elizabeth herself related:
“He wished me not to grieve and torment myself for him, for it would
be a glorious death that he should die, it being for the laws and
liberties of this land, and for maintaining the true Protestant
religion. He told me he had forgiven all his enemies, and hoped God
would forgive them also, and commanded us and all the rest of my
brothers and sisters to forgive them. He bid me tell my mother that
his thoughts had never strayed from her, and that his love should be
the same to the last.”
Then, striving to console her, he bade her again “not to grieve for him,
for that he should die a martyr, and that he doubted not but the Lord
would settle his throne upon his son, and that we should all be happier
than we could have expected to have been if he had lived.”
Monday night the King slept at St. James’s. Two hours before the dawn of
the 30th of January, he rose up, and, calling to his servant Herbert,
bade him dress him with care. “Let me have a shirt more than ordinary,”
said he, “by reason the season is so sharp as probably may make me
shake, which some will imagine proceeds from fear. I would have no such
imputation; I fear not death. Death is not terrible to me. I bless my
God I am prepared.”
About ten o’clock, Colonel Hacker came to fetch the King to Whitehall.
Attended by Herbert and Juxon, he walked through St. James’s Park. A
guard of halberdiers surrounded him, and companies of foot were drawn up
on each side of his way. “The drums beat, and the noise was so great as
one could hardly hear what another spoke.” It was a cold, frosty
morning, and the King walked, as his custom was, very fast, and calling
to his guard “in a pleasant manner,” told them to march apace. When he
reached Whitehall, he was kept waiting in his bedchamber for two or
three hours, perhaps in order to give Parliament time to pass an act
forbidding the proclamation of any new king. During part of this time,
he prayed with Juxon, and at the bishop’s urging ate a mouthful of bread
and drank a glass of claret. About half-past one, Hacker came again to
summon the King to the scaffold. In the galleries and the Banqueting
House, through which Charles followed him, men and women had stationed
themselves to see the King go by. As he passed “he heard them pray for
him, the soldiers not rebuking any of them, seeming by their silence and
dejected faces afflicted rather than insulting.”
From the middle window of the Banqueting House, Charles stepped out upon
the scaffold. He was dressed in black from head to foot, but not in
mourning, and wore the George and the ribbon of the Garter. The scaffold
was covered with black cloth, and from the railings round it, which were
as high as a man’s waist, black hangings drooped. In the middle of the
scaffold lay the block, “a little piece of wood, flat at bottom, about a
foot and a half long,” and about six inches high. By it lay “the bright
execution axe for executing malefactors,” which had been procured from
the Tower—probably the very axe which had beheaded Strafford. Near the
block stood two masked men; both were dressed in close-fitting
frocks,—like sailors, said one spectator; like butchers, said another.
One of them wore a grizzled periwig and seemed by his grey beard an old
man. Immediately round the foot of the scaffold stood ranks of soldiers,
horse and foot, and behind them a thronging mass of men and women. Other
watchers filled the windows and the roofs of the houses round.
Seeing that his voice could not reach the people, Charles addressed
himself to the persons on the scaffold, some fourteen or fifteen in
number. He must clear himself, he said, as a man, a king, and a
Christian. To encroach on the liberties of the people had never been his
intent. The Parliament began this unhappy war, not himself. “But for all
this,” he continued, thinking of Strafford, “God’s judgments are just.
An unjust sentence that I suffered to take effect is now punished by an
unjust sentence upon me.”
Then the King forgave the causers of his death, and stated in a few
words his conception of the cause for which he died.
“For the people, I desire their liberty and freedom as much as
anybody whomsoever; but I must tell you that their liberty and
freedom consists in having government, in those laws by which their
life and goods may be most their own. It is not their having a share
in government; that is nothing pertaining to them.... If I would
have given way to have all changed according to the power of the
sword, I needed not to have come here; and therefore I tell you (and
I pray God it be not laid to your charge) that I am the martyr of
the people.”
[Illustration:
CHARLES I.
(_From an old engraving._)
]
O horrable Murder
But lo a Charg is drawne, a day is set
The Silent Lamb is brought, the Wolves are met;
And where’s the Slaughterhouse? Whitehall must be,
Lately his Palace, now his Calvarie
And now ye Senators, is this the thing
So oft declard Is this your glorious King?
Religion vails her self; and Mourns that she
Is forc’d to own such Horrid Villanie.
When he had done, the King put his long hair under his cap, helped by
Juxon and the grey-bearded man in the mask, and spoke a few words with
Juxon. He took off his cloak and doublet, gave his George[7] to the
bishop, and bade the executioner set the block fast. Then, as he stood,
he said two or three words to himself, with hands and eyes lifted up,
and lying down, placed his neck on the block. For a moment he lay there
praying; his eye shining, said one of those who watched, as brisk and
lively as ever he had seen it. Suddenly, he stretched forth his hands,
and with one blow the grey-bearded man severed his head from his body.
It was now, noted another spectator, precisely four minutes past two.
Footnote 7:
A pendant representing St. George and the Dragon, worn by Knights of
the Garter.
The other masked man took the King’s head, and without a word held it up
to the people. A groan broke from the thousands round the
scaffold,—“such a groan,” writes Philip Henry, “as I never heard before,
and desire I may never hear again.” Thereupon he saw two troops of
horse, one marching towards Westminster, the other towards Charing
Cross, roughly dispersing the crowd, and was glad to escape home without
hurt.
The King’s body was placed in a plain wooden coffin, covered with a
black-velvet pall, then, after embalming, enclosed in an outer coffin of
lead, and conveyed to St. James’s. His servants wished to bury him at
Westminster, in Henry the Seventh’s Chapel, amongst his ancestors, but
this was denied, because “it would attract infinite numbers of people of
all sorts thither, which was unsafe and inconvenient.” Windsor seemed
safer, and the Parliament authorised Herbert to bury his master there,
allowing
five hundred pounds for the expenses of the funeral. Leave was given to
the Duke of Richmond, the Earl of Southampton, and two other noblemen to
attend it. They selected a vault in St. George’s Chapel, where Henry
VIII. and Jane Seymour were interred, and laid the King’s body there on
Friday, the 9th of February. No service was read over him, for the
governor would not allow Juxon to use the service in the Prayer-book,
saying that the form in the Directory was the only one authorised by
Parliament. To the mourners, however, it seemed that heaven gave a token
of their dead sovereign’s innocence.
“This is memorable,” writes Herbert, “that at such time as the
King’s body was brought out of St. George’s Hall the sky was serene
and clear; but presently it began to snow, and fell so fast, as by
that time they came to the west end of the royal chapel, the black
velvet pall was all white, the colour of innocency, being thick
covered with snow.”
England mourned, but the army and its partisans rejoiced. At last the
blood shed in the Civil War was expiated by the death of its author.
“Blood defileth the land,” quoted Ludlow, “and the land cannot be
cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of him that
shed it.” The publicity and formality of the proceedings against the
King, which seemed to most men an insulting mockery of justice, was to
the Regicides themselves a source of exultation. “We did not
assassinate, nor do it in a corner,” said Scot. “We did it in the face
of God, and of all men.” A tradition, supported by some contemporary
stories, tells that Cromwell himself came by night to see the body of
the dead King in the chamber at Whitehall, to which it had been borne
from the scaffold. He lifted up the coffin lid, gazed for some time upon
the face, and muttered “Cruel necessity.” A royalist poet represents him
as haunted on his death-bed by “the pale image” of the martyred monarch.
Poetical justice required such retribution, but history knows nothing of
Cromwell’s repentance. He had been one of the last men of his party to
believe the King’s death a necessity, but having persuaded himself that
it was a just and necessary act he saw no reason for remorse. It seemed
to him that England had freed itself from a tyrant “in a way which
Christians in after times will mention with honour, and all tyrants in
the world look at with fear.”
[Illustration]
[Illustration]