The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain (32 page)

One hundred and thirty-five commissioners were appointed to draw up the charges against Charles, though only fifty-two of them attended on the first day. Essentially he was to be accused of shedding his people’s blood in England and Ireland, but not Scotland, where representatives of the English parliament could not plausibly claim any jurisdiction. The gist of the case was that Charles was the sole ‘occasioner, author and continuer of the said unnatural, cruel and bloody wars; and therein guilty of all the treasons, murders, rapines, burnings, spoils, desolations, damages, and mischiefs to this nation, acted and committed in the said wars, or occasioned thereby’.
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This was very obviously something impossible to prove, so weak that it might even have been an attempt to get the King to plead, and thus acknowledge the court’s right to try him and the view of the constitution that the trial signified – a view that ran clean contrary to that which he had asserted all his reign. Had he done so, then a number of different outcomes were possible, even now: his restoration as a monarch whose powers were henceforth limited by his admission of the sovereignty of the people of England; deposition and his replacement by his youngest son, the nine-year-old Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, who conveniently happened to be a prisoner of the Parliament; more importantly, sentence of death would become unnecessary, because Charles would have yielded the argument, and the sovereignty of the people would have been established.

On the first day of the trial in the Great Hall of the Palace of Westminster, 20 January 1649, the King refused to plead. He would not enter the trap set for him. To do so would have been to deny everything he had stood for. He would not recognise the court’s right to try him. He continued to refuse each day the court met. He was fortified in this attitude by the realisation that others were very evidently of his opinion. Fairfax had been appointed one of the commissioners who, having drawn up the charge, were now acting as both judge and jury, but when his name was called, his wife in the gallery cried out, ‘Not here and never will be. He has too much sense.’
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It was also clear from the manner of some of the commissioners who did attend that even they were uncertain of the authority thrust upon them.

The King’s case was simple. He was not before a legally constituted court. ‘I say, sir, by your favour,’ he told its president, John Bradshaw, a lawyer from Cheshire, ‘that the Commons of England was never a Court of Judicature. I would know how they come to be so.’ Bradshaw could not give the truthful answer: that the court represented naked power. Instead he sidestepped the question, declaring, ‘The Court hath considered of their jurisdiction, and they have ready affirmed their jurisdiction,’ which was to say, ‘We are a lawful court because we say we are a lawful court.’

This was chicanery, though essential in view of the assertion that the court was acting in the name of the people of England. That claim too had provoked an interruption from the bold Lady Fairfax: ‘It is a lie! Not a half or a quarter of them.’

By now Charles must have realised that he really was in danger of his life. There had come earlier a moment when his position was revealed to him. S. R. Gardiner, nineteenth-century author of a ten-volume history of the civil war, recounted it in this manner: while the prosecutor was speaking, ‘Charles had attempted to interrupt him by touching the sleeve of his gown with a silver-headed cane. The head of the cane fell off, and Charles, accustomed even at Carisbrooke and Hurst Castle, to be waited on by those who were ready to anticipate his slightest wish, looked round in vain for someone to pick it up. For a moment his loneliness was brought home to him as never before.’
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Yet he held his ground, his dignity unimpaired. He demanded trial before a properly constituted parliament of England, and he turned accuser himself. The court claimed to represent the people of England, but: ‘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 he calls his own.’

It was the argument of all traditional authority against all revolutionaries, but now, denied the show trial they had intended, his judges proceeded to pass sentence. Dressed in black and wearing the ribbon of the Order of the Garter, the King heard the clerk of the court declare: ‘For all which reasons and crimes this Court doth adjudge, that the said Charles Stuart, as a tyrant, traitor and murderer, and a public enemy, shall be put to death by the severing his head from his body.’

It was Saturday, 27 January.

There was still a delay in getting the death warrant signed, and there is a degree of confusion about the signatories, for some of those among the commissioners who affixed their names were not present in court on the Saturday, and some who were present were not among the fifty-nine who signed the document. The delay and discrepancy give some plausibility to a story that the King was approached, sometime that day, or on the 28th, before the warrant was signed on the Monday, by emissaries from the army grandees, with a ‘paper book’ containing proposals that would, if he had assented to them, have left him with his ‘life and some shadow of regality’. If this indeed happened – and the story was reported soon after the King’s death – Charles remained true to himself and his principles. He would be a martyr rather than an apostate.

Sometime on the 28th or 29th the King was told when he was to be killed and where the execution would take place. He occupied himself with writing letters, including a long one full of advice to the Prince of Wales, with making his last bequests, and attending to his dogs. Prince Henry and Princess Elizabeth, the two children held captive by Parliament, were brought to him to say goodbye. He told them what was to happen – ‘Sweetheart,’ he said, taking the eight-year-old boy in his arms, ‘now they will cut off thy father’s head’ – and instructed them to forgive their enemies as he forgave his. He impressed on Henry especially that he must remain true to the Church of England and loyal to his eldest brother, resisting any attempt to make him king in his place. ‘I’ll be torn in pieces first,’ the boy said.
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Charles kissed them and sent them away. Bishop Juxon came to pray with him, and then it was night.

The morning of 30 January was brisk and cold. Charles wore two shirts, lest the cold make him shiver and people think him afraid. He walked from St James’s to Whitehall, and was led to the scaffold through the banqueting hall, passing under the great painting,
The Apotheosis of King James
, with which Rubens had decorated the ceiling. The remnant of the Parliament had hurriedly passed an ordinance forbidding him to name a successor; but there was no need for him to do so. There had been fears that he would offer resistance, and arrangements had been made for him to be tied down, but the fear was ridiculous. The King understood that this was theatre, and, like his grandmother Mary at Fotheringay, he gave a magnificent performance. He had lost the war, been defeated by his enemies; by the manner of his death he would conquer them. ‘I shall say but short prayers,’ he told the masked executioners. ‘Remember,’ he said to Bishop Juxon. Then he knelt and laid his head on the block.

The fatal blow was greeted with a groan from the crowd. ‘Such a groan,’ one young man remembered, ‘as I never heard before and desire I may never hear again.’
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A troop of cavalry was sent in to disperse the crowd. Someone reputedly picked up a handkerchief stained with the King’s blood; it was later said effectively to cure scrofula – the condition known as the king’s evil.

In the royalist imagination Charles was transformed into a suffering Christ, the scaffold at Whitehall his Golgotha. The remote, chilly, correct figure of the years before the civil war disappeared, replaced by the holy martyr king. For Henry Guthrie, ‘So ended the best of princes, being cut off in his age, by the barbarous hands of unnatural subjects.’
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Not everyone felt like that of course. Cromwell himself was reported to have murmured, ‘Cruel necessity’ as he stood by his victim’s coffin. A fifteen-year-old St Paul’s schoolboy, by name Samuel Pepys, remembered his elation when he heard the news of the execution. If he had had to preach a sermon that day, he thought, he would take as his text ‘And the memory of the wicked shall rot’.

Beyond London, the news was received with horror. In Paris, the King’s heir, the eighteen-year-old Prince of Wales, burst into tears when addressed as ‘Your Majesty’, and, according to Edward Hyde, fell ‘into all the confusion imaginable…sinking under the burden of his grief’. Henrietta Maria, who for all her faults and the bad advice she had so often given him, had loved her husband passionately, could neither weep nor speak nor move from her chair for many hours when they told her he had been killed. Montrose, exiled in the Hague, fainted. For two days he did not move from his chamber, and when his chaplain and biographer Wishart entered it, he found these verses on the table:

Great, good and just, could I but rate

My grief, and thy too rigid fate,

I’d weep the world in such a strain

As it should deluge once again.

But since thy loud-tongued blood demands supplies

More from Briareus’ hands than Argus’ eyes,

I’ll sing thy obsequies with trumpet sounds,

And write thine epitaph in blood and wounds.

He had himself painted wearing black armour, and ‘from this moment’, John Buchan wrote, ‘there is an uncanniness about him, as of one who lives half his time in another world’.
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This too is testimony to the manner in which Charles, by accepting death as a martyr, had obliterated the memory of the follies and blunders of the years of personal rule – follies and blunders that had driven this same Montrose to sign the National Covenant and take up arms against the King.

In death Charles conquered even his adversaries. A couple of years after the execution, Andrew Marvell, Presbyterian poet and Cromwellian, wrote a heroic ode celebrating Cromwell’s achievements in Ireland, where he had slaughtered his prisoners after the Battle of Drogheda and told the native Irish they might go to ‘Hell or Connacht’. Yet in celebrating ‘our chief of men’, Marvell inserted into his poem these lines describing the King’s execution:

He nothing common did or mean

Upon that memorable scene,

But with his keener eye

The axe’s edge did try;

Nor called the gods with vulgar spite

To vindicate his helpless right,

But bowed his comely head

Down, as upon a bed.
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The image of the Man of Blood, promoted by his enemies, was expunged. After the Restoration, the revised 1662 Prayer Book of the Church of England provided an order of service for the Commemoration of the Martyr King on the anniversary of his execution.

Chapter 12

The Interregnum and the Scattered Family (1649–60)

The news of the King’s execution shocked the courts of Europe. Few probably would have been surprised, or even distressed, if he had been quietly strangled or poisoned in his prison. Assassination had often been the means of ridding a nation of its unpopular or unsuccessful monarch. But for his subjects to put an anointed king on trial and then strike off his head as if he had been a common criminal, that was another matter altogether, one that struck at the roots of all legitimacy. Nevertheless, it was not long before the dictator Cromwell was treated as an equal by foreign courts, receiving the marks of respect commonly accorded to power. England had been weak, of little account in European politics. Now she was strong. However unsuccessful Cromwell proved at home, where his constitutional experiments all failed and he had no more success in dealing with the various parliaments he devised than Charles had had in his relations with the House of Commons, the Lord Protector, as he styled himself, made England feared and admired abroad. ‘I desire,’ he said, ‘the English Republic to be as much respected as was the Roman Republic in ancient times’;
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and his desire was satisfied. He humbled the Dutch at sea, made successful war on Spain, and formed an alliance with France. Despite the close family ties between the Bourbon monarchy and the Stuarts, the French court went into formal mourning when the great dictator died in 1658.

Meanwhile, throughout the years of his rule, the Stuarts lived in exile and poverty, as did so many of their adherents. Some of the royalist exiles in time despaired and made peace with the republicans, enabling them to return home and in some cases repair their fortunes and regain their estates. No such accommodation was possible for members of the royal family. They were condemned to wait till the wheel of fortune might turn – something that seemed unlikely in the high years of Cromwell’s rule.

Those who remained in exile were loyal to the new king, Charles II, as of course were many royalists in England, Scotland and Ireland. He might be a king without a state, but he was still a king, head of a government-in-exile, with ministers who had nothing but the affairs of his peripatetic court to administer. Foreign monarchs too recognised him as king, except when they sought friendly relations with the English republic and found Charles to be an embarrassment.