CHAPTER ELEVEN

Providence and Necessity

Since providence and necessity had cast them upon it, he should pray God to bless their counsels.

Cromwell on the trial of the King, 26 December 1648

Cromwell’s stay before Pontefract was to have a surprising, even sinister, extension until the very end of November, when he would then have been absent from London for close on seven months. Yet there is no doubt that in the first instance the reduction of this doughty castle was an important part of the settlement of England following the close of the Second Civil War. Established at nearby Knottingley, Cromwell planned the siege of Pontefract with as much care as if it had been a battle, for in the wake of the Scottish invasion it would have been highly irresponsible to have abandoned such a stronghold untaken. Built on rock, the castle was difficult to mine, and it also had plenty of water; its thick towers, reminiscent of the dark days gone by when Richard II had been done to death there, could neither be scaled nor battered down. It was no wonder that the siege had been a long and fruitless one, with occasional merry cessations when the siegers and besieged toasted each other as ‘Brother Cavalier’ and ‘Brother Roundhead’. Cromwell’s correspondence hummed with demands for supplies, and all the administrative detail allied to the pacification of the North, down even to the humble problems of a Mrs Gray who wanted to visit her sick brother inside Pontefract, or a poor woman outside unable to feed her own family yet compelled to give quarter to soldiers ‘much beyond her ability’.¹

How forward the Royalists could still be with the aid of such a base was demonstrated by a daring raid on their part at the end of October. Four Cavaliers with a forged message from Cromwell actually penetrated the lodgings of Colonel Rainsborough, that veteran of the Putney debates, at Doncaster and abducted him; in an ensuing scuffle in the street as he attempted valiantly to elude his captors, Rainsborough was killed. The Royalist plan had been to exchange Rainsborough for Sir Marmaduke Langdale, believed to be languishing in Nottingham Castle, although ironically enough Langdale had escaped by his own efforts the day before. But the murder created a sensation in Parliament, where it was generally attributed to Rainsborough’s reputation as one of the first to suggest the trial of the King, and Cromwell himself took urgent steps to trace and punish the offenders.

Meanwhile in the South, it was becoming increasingly clear to the Council of the Army that little could be expected from King and Parliament except wily procrastination on the one hand, and pusillanimity towards the authors of the Second Civil War on the other. In this Henry Ireton who had, wrote Burnet, ‘the principles and temper of a Cassius in him’, played a decisive role in Cromwell’s absence. Charles indeed had a vested interest in neither accepting nor denying the Treaty of Newport (although called a treaty, the term in fact covered negotiations) while the prospects of outside assistance in the future loomed brightly. Not only was there Europe as a subject for optimism, but also Ireland where as usual there had been a total reversal of alliances and the energetic Ormonde was on the verge of concluding an agreement with the Catholics on Charles’s behalf, to the rage of the English Parliament. ‘Though you will hear that this treaty is near or at least more likely to be concluded,’ wrote Charles to Ormonde, ‘yet believe it not, but pursue the way you are in with all possible vigour; deliver also that my command to all your friends, but not in public way.’ The admonition was characteristic of the King. It meant for example that his subsequent public concession to Parliament to order Ormonde to cease these negotiations was quite worthless. To him all duplicity was justifiable in the higher cause of salvaging the essential rights of the Crown, such as the ‘negative voice’ to the acts of Parliament. At the same time Charles’s conception of kingship seemed to have been altered not one whit by the exhibition of the temper of the nation which he had witnessed over the last six years, which demonstrated that some greater participation must and would be catered for. On the Isle of Wight he had copied down with approval the verses of the poet Claudian at the Court of the Roman Emperor Honorius declaring that it was an error to give the name of slavery to the service of a distinguished prince, since there was never sweeter liberty than under a worthy King – nunquam libertas gratior extat/ Quam sub Rege pio. It was a doctrine almost ludicrously out of tune with the views of his most vocal subjects. Even Clarendon wrote afterwards of the downfall of the King that so many miraculous circumstances surrounded it ‘that men might well think … that the stars designed it’.²

The mood of the soldiers could be seen by the tenor of their Remonstrance, for whose initiation Ireton was probably largely responsible. Called by Whitelocke ‘the beginning of the design against the King’, it was first discussed by the Army in draft at St Albans on 7 November. It was from the first a vicious and explicit document, aimed not only at the purging of the present Parliament, but also at the trial of the King, together with other major offenders of the recent war. Key phrases accused Charles of having betrayed his trust, and declared him ‘guilty of all the bloodshed in these intestine wars’, together with those who had been his ‘contrivers and abetters’. Despite this, a party of creatures in Parliament were endeavouring to ‘re-inthrone’ him. The only solution was justice, and justice in this case should be impartial, or as an ominous sentence had it, ‘the same fault may have the same punishment, in the person of King or Lord, as in the person of the poorest commoner’. It was not until 16 November that Ireton secured its general adoption since there were those in the Army who were still animated by a spirit of compromise as opposed to the more radical feelings of the soldiers – as at Putney a year earlier – while Fairfax continued worried and hostile to any plan which involved the overthrow of the existing Government. But the northern army showed itself among those who were favourable to its tenets. On 2 November a letter from Cromwell’s secretary Robert Spavin, at Pontefract, had cried optimistically: ‘I verily think God will break that great idol the Parliament, and that old job-trot form of government of King, Lords and Commons.’ On 10 November representatives of the northern regiments met to endorse the petitions of the southern regiments.³

But of Cromwell’s own feelings there was much less certainty. One interesting sidelight on his frame of mind at this stage was provided by the account of John Lilburne who, freed from the Tower since August, decided to allow himself the pleasure of a visit to Cromwell at Pontefract while in the North on his own business. To Lilburne’s disquiet, the man to whom he had just freely offered the last drop of his heart’s blood if only he would return to truth and justice, was not in a particularly radical mood. Cromwell, wrote Lilburne, ‘savoured more of intended self-exalting’ than of enthusiasm for anything he had heard him advocate formerly concerning ‘the Liberties and Freedoms of the Nation’. For all Lilburne’s fears, it seems that it was Cromwell who thought it worthwhile setting in train conferences between Levellers and Independents in London. No doubt his experiences at Putney had taught him that it was better to have the Levellers with him than against him; at all events on 15 November representatives of the Levellers met Ireton, Hugh Peter and Colonel Harrison at the Nag’s Head Tavern and some important last-minute changes were made to the details of the Remonstrance along the lines of the Levellers’ own Agreement.⁴

More personal in its revelations, but still deeply uncertain, was the first of two intimate letters Cromwell wrote on 6 November to his cousin ‘Robin’ Hammond on the Isle of Wight guarding the King.⁵ In some ways the letter is a positive morass of obscurity, since caution dictated the use of a series of code-names or nicknames, not all of which can be reliably identified. Nevertheless several pointers to Cromwell’s thinking emerge. First, he was by no means so hostile to the Levellers as he had been, influenced presumably by the Presbyterian reaction: ‘how easy to take offence at things called Levellers, and run into an extremity on the other hand, meddling with an accursed thing …’

At the same time Cromwell’s complicated second paragraph makes it clear that he still preferred presbytery to moderate episcopacy, because presbytery would restrain the King more effectively: ‘If I have any logic it will be easier [for Charles] to tyrannize having that he likes and serves his turn [i.e. episcopacy] than what you know and all believe he so much dislikes.’ The Scottish alliance is then heartily defended against those who have evidently attacked him for being too soft towards the Presbyterians on the grounds that this was on the contrary the consummation of a religious dream. ‘I profess to thee I desire from my heart, I have prayed for it, I have waited for the day to see union and right understanding between the godly people (Scots, English, Jews, Gentiles, Presbyterians, Independents, Anabaptists and All).’ Was it not fitting then, when the Scots acknowledged their mistakes, to accept their union: ‘And herein is a more glorious work in our eyes than if we had gotten the sacking and plunder of Edinburgh, the strong castles into our hands, and made conquests from Tweed to Orcades.’ The annihilation of the Scots suggested by one friend was ‘not only very unfeasible but I think not Christian’. It is noticeable that there is nothing in the letter specifically against acceptance of the Treaty of Newport, if it could be achieved, for all the veiled language and phrases like ‘Peace is only good when we receive it out of our Father’s hand …’ Nor indeed is there any mention of a trial for the King. Indeed the letter taken as a whole gives no evidence of a mind thoroughly made up on any of the vital issues being decided in the South. In general, Cromwell’s attitude is best summed up by one phrase applied to the Scots: ‘Innocence and integrity loses nothing by a patient waiting upon the Lord.’

By 20 November however, the date on which the Remonstrance was presented to the Commons, taking four hours to read aloud, Cromwell’s letter to Fairfax forwarding some supporting petitions from the Army showed that he had moved, albeit cautiously, towards their own more radical views:⁶ ‘I find a very great sense in the office of the regiments of the sufferings and the ruin of this poor kingdom,’ he wrote, ‘and in them all a very great zeal to have impartial justice done upon Offenders; and I must confess, I do in all, from me heart, concur with them; and I verily think and am persuaded they are things which God puts into our hearts.’

Five days later, the second of his two surviving private letters to Hammond showed that some kind of decision was indeed being hammered out on the anvil of his conscience.⁷ In part the letter must have been reluctantly parting company with the arguments of the Army – but it also contains the most explicit avowal so far of Oliver’s belief in the doctrine of signs or providences as clues to the will of God. He began with a plea to Hammond to examine them: ‘As to outward dispensations, if we may so call them, we have not been without our share of beholding some remarkable providences, and appearances of the Lord. His presence hath been amongst us, and by the light of His countenance we have prevailed.’ Then Hammond is adjured to remember how God deliberately sought him out for a new task after he sought to retire to the Isle of Wight, by sending the King in flight there into his charge. Why then should such a ‘chain of providence’ come about? Cromwell’s answer: ‘I dare be positive to say, it is not that the wicked should be exalted …’

Cromwell then turns to the political question. Can it ever be lawful to resist the lawfully constituted authority, which is Parliament? But no authority has the right to perform any actions it pleases whatever the consequences: ‘all agree there are cases in which it is lawful to resist’. Hammond must therefore ask himself these questions: first, whether Salus Populi (or the safety of the people as the supreme law) was not a sound proposition.^* Secondly, whether in the treaty before them this was being taken properly into account, or whether on the contrary ‘the whole fruit of the war’ was not likely to be frustrated, ‘and all most like to turn to what it was, and worse?’ Thirdly, Cromwell suggested that the Army might even be a lawful power in itself, called by God to oppose and fight against the King, in which case the actions of the Army would be justified in foro humano – in the interests of humanity.

This thinking-aloud is followed by a return to the whole subject of the signs and the import of the Second Civil War victories: ‘My dear friend, let us look into providences; surely they mean somewhat. They hang so together; have been so constant, so clear and unclouded. Malice, swoln malice, against God’s people, now called Saints, to root out their name; and yet they, by providence, having arms, and therein blessed with defence and more.’ Even the growth of disaffection among the soldiers cannot be ignored as another sign: ‘What think you of Providence disposing the hearts of so many of God’s people this way, especially in this poor Army, wherein the great God has vouchsafed to appear … ?’ In a significant phrase, Cromwell described how ‘we in this Northern Army were in a waiting posture, desiring to see what the Lord would lead us to’. They had now been guided, and for all Cromwell’s own feeling that the Treaty should perhaps have preceded the Remonstrance, ‘yet seeing it is come out, we trust to rejoice in the will of the Lord, waiting His further pleasure’. He ends on a grim note concerning the King, and those that would ‘judge not’. Have not some of their friends by ‘their passive principle’ overlooked what is just and honest, in their erroneous belief that good could be done in one way as well as another? ‘Good by this Man!’ – Charles I – expostulated Cromwell, against whom the Lord had witnessed, and whose character Hammond knew so well.

Thus Cromwell in the North maintained his waiting attitude, although evidently from this letter travelling in his opinion steadily forward as the Army démarche drew nearer, as though drawn intellectually onwards by the success of their positive demands. But in the South, there was to be no waiting, and long before Hammond could ever have received this letter, the revolutionary turn of events there had provided Cromwell with many more dispensations to consider and interpret.

The final form of the Remonstrance had presented the House of Commons with a radical challenge which could not long be ignored. It was true that the demand for the trial of Charles, whom the Army believed guilty of starting the war, did not necessarily postulate the extinction of the monarchy as such. Although it was suggested that its expensive pomp should be set aside for a few years at least to pay for the cost of the wars, the door was left open for some later monarchical form, possibly a regency for the little Duke of York. To the apprehensive Commons, ever casting glances over their shoulders at the soldiery, it was more to the point that the stern demand for the dissolution of this Parliament was paralleled by demands for a much more democratic system of election; here the influence of the Levellers being felt. Under the circumstances, the Commons, with more optimism than wisdom, decided to put off a proper consideration of the Remonstrance for a week in the hope that the King would in the meantime have strengthened their hands with a favourable response to the Treaty. But Charles’s latest answer when it came still would not contemplate the permanent abolition of the episcopacy, and the House had to content itself with weakly extending the period of negotiation allowed to him.

The Army, like time and tide, was now inexorably on the move. Its patience was exhausted. On 26 November the General Council sitting at Windsor considered ‘the great business now in hand’ after their prayers. On the question of whether Parliament should be dissolved altogether or merely purged (which would leave behind a radical minority who had originally been constitutionally elected) it seems that this minority overrode the opposition of Ireton. It was to be purgation. On 27 November the Commons once more adjourned the discussion of the Remonstrance, and the next day the General Council at Windsor decided that the Army should move on London. It was on 1 December that the fatal march was carried out, to the accompaniment of the same wave of fear on the part of the capital’s inhabitants which had marked the previous summer’s military incursion. It was on 1 December, too, that the Army had the King moved from the Isle of Wight to Hurst Castle on the mainland, having recently replaced the worried Hammond by a more determined jailer in the shape of Colonel Ewer.

Now, as Charles occupied himself with walks along the freezing winter shores of the Solent, the House of Commons rushed to its final doom with the speed of the Gadarene herd, showing however a sort of crazy courage in that it finally rejected the Remonstranceby a vote of 125 to 58. It was not enough to bow to Fairfax’s demand, originally made to the Lord Mayor, for £40,000 owed to the Army, needed for quartering; their temper was more surely shown by the debates on the King’s answers which followed, in which a substantial body of opinion suggested that Charles had made sufficient concessions to provide a basis of peace. The Army were now quite ready to strike, and on Monday, 4 December, a day of torrential rain, were camping in Hyde Park.

And where was Cromwell while such vital councils of Army and Parliament were enacted? His artless maintenance of his ‘waiting posture’ in the North must by this time have been deliberate. The Remonstrance had been published on 22 November, and would have been received at Knottingley around 23 and 24 November; Cromwell replied to Fairfax on the subject in an undated letter which has recently been convincingly re-assigned to somewhere between the 23rd and 25th:^* ‘We have read your declaration here, and see in it nothing but what is honest and becoming Christians and honest men to say and offer. It’s good to look up to God, who alone is able to sway hearts to agree to the good and just things contained therein …’⁹ And he expressed his hope of waiting ‘speedily’ upon Fairfax, departing the following Tuesday – 28 November. But by the 28th Cromwell had not gone, and it was on that day that Fairfax sent an express message, which could not have taken longer than forty-eight hours to reach him, up to Knottingley asking him to join them at Windsor ‘with all convenient and speed possible’. He apparently finally left on Friday, 1 December, leaving the siege to be completed by another hand. Yet despite this urgent command from his superior officer, despite the fact that various contemporary reports indicate that Cromwell was actually expected at Windsor on the 2nd, he still did not arrive in London till the evening of Wednesday, 6 December. The inference of this leisurely five-day journey at such a tumultuous period is obvious, and it was one that Cromwell’s contemporaries did not hesitate to draw: he simply did not wish to arrive in London before the momentous deed of purgation had been initiated.

The most likely explanation of this mysterious delay is that Cromwell still hoped desperately that the Commons might reform themselves. He had after all, in contrast to some of the Army officers, a dual role as member of Parliament and Army leader, and throughout his life was certainly not without consideration for the Parliamentary principle, even if exasperation led him to violate it from time to time. The use of force on a representative body was a delicate subject indeed, and although Ireton’s correspondence with Cromwell on the topic beforehand has vanished – no doubt for good reasons of security – it must surely have existed. Cromwell for all his geographical absence must have been sufficiently aware of what was being proposed to have had some genuine troubles of the spirit. In January in argument with Ireton over the setting of a term for Parliament, it was he who thought it would be ‘honourable and convenient’ for the Commons to decide it themselves. That the theme of desirable self-purgation was one on which he felt strongly can be judged from a reference to it after the end of the Rump, how he had wished ‘these men might quit their places with honour’ and had himself as a member exerted endless pressures on them to do so ‘once and again, and again, and ten nay twenty times over’.¹⁰ To this hope he could of course always add his characteristic convenient acceptance of anything which had actually taken place as signifying the will of the Lord in that direction.

Cromwell’s words to Ludlow, when he finally rode into London on the evening of Wednesday, 6 December, to find that the dreaded purge had taken place in dramatic form that very day, did indeed point to this providentialist attitude: he declared that he had not ‘been acquainted with this design; yet, since it was done, he was glad of it, and would endeavour to maintain it’.¹¹ And so last-minute had been some of the arrangements for the purge that it was quite possible that Cromwell’s words were literally accurate; dissolution had only been finally rejected by the committee of officers the day before. This was too late for the news to reach Cromwell who was on his way; therefore, if he did derive most of his information from his son-in-law and chief colleague Ireton, he might well have expected a dissolution.

There was certainly much of improvisation about the arrangements for the purge as they were carried out. At seven o’clock in the morning the soldiers were stationed round the House, and as the members started to arrive, there was Colonel Pride (a stalwart of the Army radical cause, said to have begun life as a drayman or a brewer, who had fought at Naseby and Preston with Cromwell) with a list in his hand to debar those proscribed by the Army. In this task he was ably assisted by Lord Grey of Groby, a peer ever active in the Roundhead cause, described as having ‘credulous good nature’, qualities which no doubt enabled him to take part in this extraordinary ritual. The obstreperous William Prynne was told that Pride’s commission was the power of the sword as he pointed out the members whose faces were unknown to Pride, a strange echo of Joyce’s words to the King a year back. Prynne however did not think it a ‘fair commission’. Some members were simply turned away, but those who resisted were locked up together in a chamber, and thirty-nine of these spent the night in a nearby tavern known as ‘Hell’, even the seven older men present, who were offered parole, refusing it for the sake of their outraged honour.

Roughly eighty members were left in this purged body of the Commons. Their first action on the morrow was curiously inappropriate. It was of course Cromwell’s first appearance in the House for many months, and in the interval he had won the signal victory of Preston. Henry Marten, ever quick-witted, took the opportunity to observe in connexion with the imprisoned members that since Tophet was prepared for Kings, it was fitting that their friends should go to Hell. He then suggested, possibly as a jest, that Cromwell should be thanked for his deserts. But Sir Henry Vane took up the suggestion and the House solemnly congratulated Cromwell. This Parliamentary remnant did now try to show some sort of independence, by protesting against the continued imprisonment of some of the members. Although they had to abandon the ploy, they did succeed in holding over the further discussion of the Remonstrance till 10 December. Numbers of attendance were sinking all the time thereafter, and if Royalist sources were to be trusted, the once proud House sometimes had difficulty in even securing a quorum of forty members.

Side by side with this decline of Parliamentary influence came the rise of hostility to the King, egged on, given a voice indeed, by the preachers who now resumed their previous role as inciters of violence. Their language was vitriolic as before: the expedient of the weekly fast and sermon had been taken up again, and allowed George Cockayne, minister of St Pancras Cheapside, to preach on the old anti-monarchical texts. There were the familiar references to Saul and Ahab, leaders who had wrongly failed to execute Kings; ‘Woe to them, whose King is a Child, whose Princes eat in the morning’ was another convenient text. Above all the message came through clearly that there should be no delay in judgement since there was now no point in compromise: ‘Honourable and worthy,’ cried Cockayne, ‘if God do not lead you to do Justice upon those that have been the great Actors in shedding Blood, never think to gain their love by sparing them.’¹²

Yet it would be a mistake to assume that Cromwell at this point, in knuckling in to the dictates of the radical fringe of the Army – or of divine Providence as he preferred to interpret them – had also abandoned himself totally to the concept of the King’s execution. It was trial rather than sentence that currently preoccupied him, and on the subject of trial, he was also much concerned over the fates of those other abettors and contrivers, English Presbyterians and Scottish leaders, who were also responsible with the King for the Second War. The next three weeks – from 7 December onwards – encompassed it is true the final change in his attitude. But they were weeks of manoeuvre and negotiation, in the course of which Cromwell set in train sufficient attempts at parley with the King to convince at least one great authority that he still hoped to save his life.

Parliament now dutifully reinstated the Vote of No Addresses to Charles (by revoking its repeal) and annulled the votes in favour of regarding Charles’s answers to the Newport proposals as a basis for negotiation. But it was then considered enough to let off Hamilton, Goring and other military leaders with fines and banishment. This was scarcely to the taste of the Army. Shortly afterwards a body of former Army officers who were also Presbyterians, including Sir William Waller and Sir John Clot-worthy, were arrested on the charge of inviting the Scots to invade England. For this type of trial, evidence was imperative, and it seems that Cromwell made it his business to try and secure some substantiation of the charge from the Duke of Hamilton, now a prisoner at Windsor. Hamilton however held firm, for all the libellous rumour spread by Mercurius Pragmaticussupported by Mercurius Elenticus on 14 December that the ‘cunning coward’ had told tales to ‘Duke Oliver’. Four days later the newsletters had to eat their words: Hamilton had continued to aver that he had not been invited to England either by the King or any member of the English Parliament. Possibly Cromwell offered Hamilton bribes to provide the vital assurances, for Hamilton was said to have warned his brother against falling into the same trap in a secret letter written in lemon juice. Hamilton certainly understood only too well the issues at stake. He wrote pathetically back to Scotland on 23 December: ‘It is for obeying their commands [i.e. those of the Scottish Parliament] that I now suffer; and so I trust in God to be looked on, and not as an enemy to either kingdom …’¹³

Taken up perhaps with his visits to Hamilton, Cromwell at this point occupied a much less prominent position in the counsels of the Army. A new Agreement of the People was now under discussion there, but Cromwell only attended two of the consequent debates in December, that of the 15th and the 29th. It was on the 15th however that the crucial decision was taken to bring the King to Windsor Castle ‘and there to be secured in order to the bringing of him safely to justice’. A committee of seven was formed to meet from day to day in order to discuss the best ways of doing this, as also to contemplate the fate of the leaders including Hamilton, Goring and Lord Capel. It was Colonel Harrison (confirming in his rich dress the theory that in the Puritan house there were many mansions) who conducted Charles from Hurst Castle to Windsor, where he arrived on 23 December. The previous day the Governor, Colonel Whichcote, had been blessed with a long and detailed series of instructions signed jointly by Cromwell and Ireton on the subject of the precautions he was to take with his royal prisoner. Nothing was to be left to chance, lest Charles elude justice by what was likely to be the last method left to him – escape at the hands of some of his still loyal subjects. Amid details of horse guards in the Upper Castle, a company of foot perpetually on guard there, bridges drawn up at night, and Charles’s isolation from all other prisoners, one sentence read: ‘It is thought convenient that (during the King’s stay with you) you turn out of the Castle all malignant or Cavalierish inhabitants’ – except, the writers add hastily, the prisoners themselves. The letter ended: ‘The Lord be with you and bless you in this great charge.’¹⁴

The next day it was the turn of the Council of Officers to draw up stringent rules for dealing with Charles, of which the fifth article read: ‘You are not to admit any private discourse betwixt him and any other person, save what one of yourselves or one of the aforesaid Gentlemen [officers of the guard] shall hear.’ It was significant that one member of the Council present, and one only, objected to this article – Oliver Cromwell. His objection cannot be without relevance to the secret but none the less positive negotiations in which he was now involved on the subject of Charles. What was their object? It is difficult to be certain at such a stretch of time, particularly as the evidence is in the main second hand. One view held at the time was that Cromwell himself was very much cooling on the aims of the ‘petty ones of the levelling conspiracy’ who were so eager for the death of the King. As a Royalist agent wrote on 21 December: ‘Strange to tell – I have been assured that Cromwell is retreating from them, his designs and theirs being incompatible as fire and water, they driving at a pure democracy and himself at an oligarchy.’ The agent believed that Cromwell was only adhering to ‘the present design of taking away the King’s life’ in order to draw the Levellers’ fire and expose them for the wild men they were.¹⁵

Such straws of evidence, which point at least to some little wind of compromise on the part of Cromwell and Ireton, also fit into the attempts at mediation of Whitelocke and his fellow-commissioner Sir Thomas Widdrington around the end of the third week of December. Having met Cromwell at the house of Speaker Lenthall on 19 December, Whitelocke together with Widdrington had a further meeting with him the next day – he found Cromwell lying at ease in one of the King’s rich beds in Whitehall, like many leaders of a new regime capable of enjoying some of the luxuries of the old. At the ‘earnest desire’ of Cromwell and Lenthall, the two commissioners now drew up a paper, ready on 22 December, which was intended ‘to endeavour to bring the army into some better temper’. It is true that by the Monday it seems that Whitelocke and Widdrington had realized that nothing would induce the soldiers to spare the King’s life, and had withdrawn disheartened from their attempts at mediation.¹⁶ But Cromwell was still separated from the fanatical temper of the main body of the Army.

On 22 December for example, Hugh Peter gave a fire-raising sermon in public, which began with him standing in the pulpit apparently fast asleep, surrounded by soldiers. He was woken with a start by the voice from heaven, which revealed to him that the monarchy was about to be rooted up by the Army, not only in England but in France and other kingdoms. Peter passed on his message with gusto: the powers of the earth were to be dashed to pieces by this Army, ‘the cornerstone cut out of the mountain’. A few days later he termed Charles ‘this great Barabbas at Windsor’ – a robber who would be released, leaving the soldiers like Christ to be crucified in his place, unless some violent action were taken. This was not the language of Cromwell. Although it has been suggested that his main objective in his tortuous manoeuvres was merely to bring about the trials of the lesser offenders first, in order to confront Charles with their evidence – in short ‘to bring him to justice with some plausible appearance of legality and consent’¹⁷– there seems no real reason to doubt what many of Cromwell’s contemporaries believed: that he was making genuine attempts to settle the kingdom without cutting off the head of the King.

Monday, 25 December – a Puritan, working Christmas Day – saw yet another of these obscure approaches in the shape of a visit from Lord Denbigh to Windsor. Denbigh was a prominent Roundhead who had already been employed on various missions to the King. He had a ready-made excuse to go down to Windsor in that Hamilton’s late wife had been his sister; but it was said that his real purpose was to put some secret proposals to the King from Cromwell. However, for some reason which is obscure, Charles never saw Denbigh and so the mysterious mission was never accomplished. The King may have rejected him or may have simply been unaware of the true purpose of his visit.¹⁸ Whatever the truth of this odd little episode, Cromwell’s speech to the Army Council on the same day as Denbigh made his abortive visit to Windsor shows how little his mind was yet made up on execution. According to the acid-penned Mercurius Melancholicus, on Christmas Day, when the Army should have been at church thanking God for His memorable and unspeakable mercy in sending His son to save mankind, they preferred to discuss in Council the grimmer subject of the King’s trial. It was Ireton who wanted the King, ‘the capital enemy’, brought to ‘speedy justice’, for that they had ‘conquered the kingdom twice’. Cromwell on the other hand ‘had more wit in his anger, and told them there was no policy in taking away his life’. His reasons were purely practical, and the most cogent one argued that if at any point they lost the day, they could always produce the King as ‘their stake’, and ‘by his means work their peace’.¹⁹

Yet the next day, Tuesday, 26 December, as the House of Commons debated the King’s trial, Cromwell was reported in Parliament as singing a very different tune. On this date he made his crucial speech of rejection of the King. According to one version: ‘When it was first moved in the House of Commons to proceed capitally against the King, Cromwell stood up and told them, that if any man moved this upon design, he should think him the greatest Traitor in the world, but since providence and necessity had cast them upon it, he should pray God to bless their councils’ although, he added, ‘he were not provided on the sudden to give them council’. Another version of the speech makes the reasons for Cromwell’s change of heart even clearer: ‘Since the Providence of God hath cast this upon us, I cannot but submit to Providence, though I am not yet provided to give you my advice.’^* Cromwell had thrown in his hand and from now on would make no more efforts to save the King.

Indeed, so marked is his change of heart from the Army Council speech of the day before as to lead one to infer one of Cromwell’s dramatic turnabouts along the lines of his revulsion against Charles about the time of the Saddle Letter in the autumn of 1647. It may well have been the failure of the Denbigh Mission which decided him, perhaps one of those chance misunderstandings in history which have momentous consequences. But clearly whatever the ultimate cause that secured his passive adherence to the active principle of proceeding against the King capitally, it was Providence which had once more pointed the way. The signs were now leading in a new direction – towards the death of the King. The next day, 27 December, it was agreed in the House of Commons that Charles’s royal state was to be drastically reduced; no longer should he be served on bended knee, and he was to have fewer and cheaper servants. In practice it was a petty humiliation which Charles had the innate dignity to rise above; but in theory it was a dangerous indication of how the position of the monarch was now regarded. ‘Stamp! Stamp! on Royal Majesty’ cried the pejorative Mercurius Pragmaticus indignantly to Cromwell in its last issue of the year: ‘and as you stamp him down, stamp your own image in his dust’.²¹

Now things began to move fast. On 28 December the House of Commons read for the first time the ordinance setting up a special court for the trial of the King, which was finally passed on 1 January 1649. But the enormous contradictions inherent in setting up a court – any court – for trying a sovereign lord of a country were fully demonstrated by the reactions of the House of Lords. By now a tiny body, estimates varying between eleven and sixteen, it nevertheless with some courage rejected the court out of hand. The Earl of Northumberland put the problem in a nutshell: the Commons were clinging heavily to the thesis that the King had wrongly levied war against Parliament and the kingdom of England. But not only, said Northumberland, could they not be sure that it was the King who had levied war first, but even if he had, they had no law extant which could be produced to make it treason in him to do so. That was the nub of the matter: by what law, by what remotest gloss of legality, could a sovereign be tried for high treason, when the definition of treason was of an offence against the sovereign? The trial of Charles’s grandmother, Mary Queen of Scots, had been marked by something of the same difficulty, precedents being sought back into the days of Conradin Hohenstaufen to justify the trial of one who as a sovereign of another country could hardly be said to be within the English law, even if that law contained a measure as wide-ranging as the Act of Association. But Charles was actually the King within his own country. He could not possibly be tried under the Common Law as a subject, to say nothing of the obvious impossibility of producing a jury of his peers or equals. The truth was that no adequate machinery existed for the trial of a King. The machinery that was now hastily thrown together by a narrow majority of a House of Commons forcibly depleted by brute force could hardly fail to incur the censure of those thinking people who inspected it.

Evidence of this general feeling could be seen in the fact that the original ordinance of the Commons had provided for Chief Justices Rolle and St John, with Chief Baron Wilde, to act as judges; there were to be one hundred and fifty Commissioners as a jury, with fifty to make a quorum. But in a new ordinance brought in on 3 January that idea was abandoned, probably because the judiciary were unwilling to take part in such a charade; the new High Court of Justice was to contain only one hundred and thirty-five Commissioners who were to act as both judge and jury. Three memorable resolutions were added the next day: ‘That the people are, under God, the original of all just power’, that the Commons of England ‘in Parliament assembled’ had the supreme power in the nation; and that anything enacted by this Commons had the force of law, to be obeyed by the people – ‘although the consent and concurrence of King or House of Peers be not had thereunto’.²² It was a sweeping declaration of all that men had hitherto been confusedly and vaguely fighting over; with the Commons abrogating to themselves the supreme of power, with King and Lords robbed once and for all of their negative voice.

After the passing of the Act of 6 January, a new era could be said to be begun when the sole actions of the Commons had a dubious legality of their own – that is if their ability to pass the Act in the first place without consent of Lords or King was admitted. The temper of the new era was set by the long preamble to the Act. It was an endless brief of accusation against Charles Stuart, who having conceived the wicked design of introducing arbitrary and tyrannical government, had to that end levied and maintained a cruel war in the land against Parliament and the kingdom as a whole, whereby the country had been miserably wasted. Despite such evil doings, Parliament might have been content merely to imprison this monster, ‘but found by sad experience that such their remissness only served to encourage him and his companions in the continuance of their evil practices’.²³

Yet for all the Commons’ bold words, and reckless determination, there were others close to the centre of things who were still inspired by a strange mixture of doubt and faith. The uncertainty still prevalent even in the Army Council was demonstrated by theweird incident of the woman who appeared out of the blue at the end of December to communicate to them the substance of her visions concerning ‘the presence of God with the Army’. Elizabeth Poole, as she turned out to be called, had had the Army appear to her in the shape of a man and the country as a whole as a woman ‘full of imperfection, crooked, weak, sickly …’ The man it seemed was destined to heal the woman. This revelation was treated with great seriousness. Elizabeth Poole was asked if she had any direction to give the Council, and her vision, termed by Colonel Rich ‘that testimony which God hath manifested here by an unexpected Providence’, was much discussed. On 5 January God directed the good lady to return to the Council; first she handed in a paper arguing against the execution of the King; then, after the paper had been formally debated in her absence, she was called in for further talks. She repeated her view that although the King should be judged and ‘you may bind his hands and hold him fast under’, he should not be put to death. Once more, she was treated with great respect and subjected to a long cross-examination. Ireton, for example, questioned her at great length about her revelations. If this King was not to die, did it mean that no King was ever to die, no matter what filthy crimes he had committed? The precise nature of what she had seen was discussed. Did she see an angel or a vision? The answer was a vision.²⁴

Later a Royalist pamphlet accused Cromwell with Ireton of having stage-managed the whole incident, coaching the woman beforehand in her answers in order to sway the Army Council. But the record of the debates shows that the suggestion was manifestly absurd; the real significance of the incident lay in the real respect accorded this unlooked-for visitor. When Elizabeth Poole employed the Scriptures to plead against execution – ‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, I will repay’ she quoted at one point – or described the King as the husband or head of the people who could be restrained but not cut down by his ‘wife’, citing the Biblical precedent of Nabal among the Israelites, she was speaking language the ‘Saints’ could understand. Even Lady Fairfax was supposed to have seen a vision – a man coming into her room with her husband’s head in his hand – and this it was, according to Mercurius Pragmaticus, which led her to beseech Sir Thomas to have nothing to do with the trial of the King.²⁵ As in Julius Caesar’s Rome, the Ides of March were come but not gone: many clung to the supernatural in such a tenebral period, as being at least outside the common round which was being so woefully disturbed and therefore not subject to the same rules. Like Caesar himself, in this deranged time many were ‘superstitious grown of late’.

The main preoccupation of the Army was still with the terms of its new Agreement of the People, initiated in December. Cromwell continued to attend the Councils only sporadically, his absence probably explained by his problems in the Commons (although the Council had now moved more conveniently to Whitehall). But at least once he gave in debate a glimpse of the way his mind was tending when he argued with Ireton over the article which set a terminal date for the existing Parliament. Ireton believed that it was important that such a date – not later than the end of April – should be written in, and it was at this point that Cromwell made his remark referred to earlier, that ‘it will be more honourable and convenient to put a period to themselves’. Ireton then pointed out the advantages of linking this Agreement with the ending of an unpopular Parliament – ‘The people may think if they oppose this Agreement, they oppose the ending of this Parliament.’ To this Cromwell put in: ‘Then you are afraid they will do so?’ So the clause stood.²⁶ The Agreement was completed on 15 January, and presented to the Commons on the 20th, at which point it was put aside until the great matter of the King was concluded. But in the meantime Lilburne had withdrawn moodily from the whole affair, having desired that the Agreement should be circulated more democratically among the ordinary people.

It was clear that the actions of the Commons were not only inimicable to the large majority of the population of England – not one in twenty supported it said Lord Northumberland – but the slender nature of their support was well known to the men concerned. But matters continued to move forward with the headlong momentum of a runaway coach on a short sharp hill. Cromwell showed much industry in his preparations, and as much resolution as if he were planning a cavalry charge. Ultimately he might rely on divine approval as indicated by outward dispensations, rather than popular agreement, but he was nevertheless fully cognizant of the need to canvas the cause. There is evidence that he brought pressure to bear on the Presbyterian ministers of the City of London, largely hostile to proceedings, in contrast to men like Hugh Peter and Stephen Marshall; the City itself was subjected to propaganda. At the first meeting of the High Court of Justice on 8 January, and in the ensuing week when procedural details for the impending trial were discussed, it was Cromwell who made a speech in favour of allowing the public to listen to the discussions, but he was overruled.²⁷

Cromwell also displayed some sense of the paramount need for unity, placing it above revolutionary doctrine, by supporting the cause of the House of Lords. The Commons’ resolution of 4 January, while abrogating all power to themselves and emphatically denying any right of the Lords to disagree, had nevertheless not specifically abolished the Lords. The Lords, under the Speakership of Denbigh, countered with a milder ordinance of their own, which simply said that any future King levying war against Parliament would be guilty of treason and tried. At the same time they passed certain small ordinances, in order to assert their continued right to do so, and passed them on to the Commons according to standard procedure. In the general atmosphere of flux, the Commons were by no means certain what attitude to take to these unbidden ordinances from another place. Marten and his group suggested they should not be received, but in the end their party was defeated.

In the course of debate many theories were put forward concerning the future of the Lords, ranging from their abolition to a joint sitting with the Commons (Whitelocke rejected this as too dangerous: the Lords might dominate the Commons). It was typical of Oliver’s eternally pragmatic attitude to this institution that, in answer to a motion for suppression, he sprang to the defence of the Lords, seeming to his hearers ‘very violent’. Gone were those equally violent outbursts repeated by Manchester at the time of their quarrel in 1645. At Putney he had shown himself more interested in the general safety of the kingdom than in theoretical considerations of the Lords’ powers. Now he asked his fellows if they were all mad to ‘take such courses to incense the Peers against them, at such a time when they had more need to study a near union with them’. The whole question of the Lords was left in abeyance till after the King’s trial should be completed.²⁸

Further proof of communal reluctance for this enterprise was seen in the fact that out of 135 Commissioners nominated as judges-cum-jurymen, only fifty-two turned up in the first instance. Fairfax was there – his first and last appearance. At the meeting on the 10th the Chief Justice of Cheshire, named John Bradshaw, was chosen as President of the court. Later Milton was to write grandly how Bradshaw surpassed in glory ‘all former Tyrannicides in the precise degree in which it is more manly, just and majestic to judge a Tyrant, than to kill him Misjudged’.²⁹ At the time it was not so much Bradshaw’s distinction as a lawyer that rendered him suitable for the post – he had by no means reached the heights of his profession – as his sheer willingness to serve and thus add some dubious measure of legal authenticity to the trial. Bradshaw certainly brought some practical wisdom to his approach to the task, for although endowed with the old deanery at Westminster, well guarded, as an official residence, and granted a magnificent scarlet robe of office, he wore armour beneath it to ward off possible assassination, and his high-crowned beaver hat was prudently lined with steel.^*

The next necessity was to draft the charge against the King: for this two committees were set up, one under Ireton to advise counsel on the subject, and the other under Ludlow to prepare for the trial itself. Two days later it was decided that matters were now sufficiently advanced to bring their intended victim to the capital. The house of Sir Robert Cotton, that great antiquary of Charles’s father’s reign, was felt to be an appropriate lodging: with its spacious gardens down to the river, it lay in the heart of the maze of buildings of the complex Palace of Westminster, adjacent to St Stephen’s Chapel. Between the House of Commons and the House of Lords and flanked by other parliamentary chambers it presented little possibility of escape.^* Having been taken first to St James’s Palace, Charles was then carried secretly to Whitehall in a sedan chair for fear of a popular demonstration in his favour: his final journey to Westminster took place by water.

As Charles was conducted through the Cotton Gardens, it seems that this melancholy procession was actually witnessed by Cromwell. One of those who later testified against Henry Marten at his trial told the story of Cromwell hastening to the window when he heard the King’s presence; watching him as he came up through the gardens, he was seen to go ‘white as the wall’. Turning away, he drew together Bradshaw, Sir Henry Mildmay and Sir William Brereton and said: ‘My Masters, he is come, he is come, and now we are doing that great work that the whole nation will be full of.’ There was much of Cromwell’s inspiration in the days to come in that evocative phrase, even if his next words pinpointed the doubts of others: ‘Therefore I desire ye to let us resolve here what answer we shall give the King when he comes before us, for the first question that he will ask us will be by what authority and commission do we try him.’ Silence fell. It was the quick-witted Marten who broke it: ‘In the name of the Commons and Parliament assembled and all the good people of England.’³⁰

The scene was now set for the formal trial of the King of England, which opened on 20 January. The High Court adjourned from the Painted Chamber to Westminster Hall, that great oblong edifice lying like a coffin athwart the Palace of Westminster, at an angle north and south to the Abbey. Originally built in the time of William Rufus just after the Conquest, it was an exceptionally large chamber by any standards, nearly three hundred feet long, and its famous roof, hammer-beamed in oak under Richard II, rising to a hundred feet. The tragedies of English Kings were not new to it: here Edward II had abdicated and Richard II had been deposed. Here heroes, patriots galore, and villains too had been tried from Sir William Wallace in the early fourteenth century to Sir Thomas More, Guy Fawkes and, only seven years before, the ill-fated Strafford.^* But apart from these showpieces of its history, Westminster Hall had a recognized place in the judicial system of the time: law courts including the Court of Common Pleas, the King’s Bench, Chancery and Court of Exchequer were actually held in or near the Hall itself, the wooden structures which contained them being light and moveable, and capable of being covered over by galleries erected by scaffolding for a great occasion such as this. With the law courts had come other social accretions – shops to sell stationery necessary to lawyers, taverns and coffee-houses for the essential peripheral discussions. In contrast to its icy austerity today, Westminster Hall was then a hub of many committed lives.

In contrast to the length of its history, Westminster Hall now witnessed a procedure which was short and not particularly edifying. ^†31 In a way it was tragic that it was to this sort of expedient that the once high ideals of ‘godly rule’ had come – an unlawful trial, with the most significant decorations of Westminster Hall, those symbols of military might, on permanent display, the Royalist colours captured in battle, the flags of Marston, Naseby and Preston. Charles himself displayed inestimable courage and dignity throughout his trial; as Burnet wrote afterwards and as many other commentators were to note, the Stuarts were better in misfortune than in prosperity. Perhaps there was some justice in this; in that their personal qualities so often brought misfortune upon them, it was only fitting that they should be well equipped to endure the slights of adversity. Certainly it was Charles’s bearing, the staunchness of his answers, which alone touched the proceedings of the trial with a kind of glory, and showed up the proceedings for what they were – a series of squalid and hasty botched-up expedients.

He entered the hall, showing his usual elegance in matters of personal taste in his dress, all in black relieved only by the Star of the Garter and the bejewelled George and blue ribbon round his neck. Charles immediately gave the court ‘a stern looking’, and from the first showed his opinion of their legality by failing to remove his hat. He himself was given a chair upholstered in red velvet at the south end of the Hall. There were guards behind him and further troops in the court. Facing him were his judges in three rows, with Bradshaw as President in the centre, confronted by a table covered in a handsome turkey carpet. Cromwell’s exact position is uncertain, for although an artist’s impression shows him sitting in the middle of the row, other evidence – and the balance of probabilities – points to a more prominent place. He was certainly not one of those to hang back. Two days earlier he had made his feelings clear to Algernon Sidney, who on being chosen as a judge, had objected to the court for two good reasons: ‘First, the King can be tried by no court; secondly no man can be tried by this court.’ Cromwell replied without hesitation: ‘I tell you we will cut off his head with the Crown upon it.’ Sidney fired a Parthian shot as he left in disgust: ‘You may take your own course, I cannot stop you, but I will keep myself clean from having any hand in this business.’³²

But Cromwell no longer suffered from any such ambivalences, although many of his old allies were falling away. Sir Henry Vane had not been seen in the Commons since the aftermath of Pride’s Purge, and was not a member of the court (although the fact that he returned to his work at the Admiralty on 30 January, the day of the King’s death, was enough to condemn him as part of the regicide crew after the Restoration). When Fairfax’s name was called from the roll of judges, there was no answer. A masked woman, among the ‘great press’ of spectators in the galleries, cried out that he had more wit than to be there. ³³ It subsequently transpired that she was Lady Fairfax, a keen Presbyterian to whose influence many attributed Fairfax’s waning enthusiasm for the proceedings of his associates, but already this piece of defiance had caused much disorder in the court; indeed throughout the trial the spectators were uncomfortably unruly rather than docile, as the judges must have hoped. Fairfax and Vane had each in their way worked closely with Cromwell in the recent years; he respected both; neither was prepared to follow him in what was now afoot. It was two greater forces, Providence and necessity, that urged him on.

The charge against the King was then read by John Cook, a man of no particular reputation, who had been appointed Solicitor for the Commonwealth after William Steele the Attorney-General pleaded illness (but it was typical of the suspicions of the times that Steele’s excuse was not accepted until the committee concerned had caused a personal investigation of his condition). Cook was flanked by another nonentity, John Aske, and a man of somewhat greater interest, Dr Dorislaus, lately Parliament’s envoy to the Netherlands, a scholar and personal friend of Cromwell who had lately recommended him for a position at Cambridge.³⁴ The text of Cook’s charge produced a reaction from the King. He tried to interrupt, touching Cook’s arm with his silver-headed cane. As he did so, the knob fell off; Charles waited – perhaps for someone to pick it up – and after a pause bent down and picked it up himself. A man who since childhood had been served and waited upon, he was after all now quite alone.

The charge, following the same lines as the Act of 6 January, used such words of the King as ‘tyrant, traitor, murderer, and a public and implacable enemy of the Commonwealth of England’; he was said to have abused his trust as governor by erecting a tyrannical power, had then levied war against Parliament and finally become ‘the author of the second war’. But when Bradshaw called on Charles to answer this charge ‘in the behalf of the Commons assembled in Parliament and the good people of England’ the irrepressible Lady Fairfax called out: ‘It’s a lie, not half, nor a quarter of the people. Oliver Cromwell is a traitor.’ Colonel Axtell, in charge of the troops in the hall, lost control and was for firing into the gallery, but others of greater wisdom merely hustled the demonstrative lady from the court.

In answer to Bradshaw, Charles’s first question was also his strongest point. By what authority had he been brought to the bar? He saw no Lords there who would make it a Parliament, and since he was not convinced that they constituted a lawful authority, he would not answer them, since that would betray his trust. In vain Bradshaw answered yet again that it was by the authority of the people of England, by whom he had been elected King. This made it easy for Charles to answer that he had inherited his crown, not received it by election. Charles conceded nothing and answered nothing. On 22 January he battled away again, most effectively, on the same point, accusing his judges of ‘power without law’. What might follow such a heinous combination? ‘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.’

The next day he had another exchange on the subject with Bradshaw who refused to allow Charles to address the court in order to explain his reasons for not answering the charge. Once again Charles held his own. ‘I do require that I may give in my reasons why I do not answer, and give me time for that,’ he said. Bradshaw: ‘It is not for prisoners to require.’ Charles: ‘Prisoners! Sir, I am not an ordinary prisoner.’ It was too true. For all Charles’s imprudences, for all the fatal combination of arbitrary government with a newly independent-minded age, for all that the doctrine of divine right could not be allowed to flourish on English soil, he was still not a subject within the Common Law of England. No machinery did exist to try him. In the end in the face of Charles’s fixed refusal to plead, Bradshaw was compelled to tell the clerk to ‘record his default’.

The court did not sit publicly on the 24th, and the conclusion can probably be drawn that Charles’s steadfast denial of their legality had caused much confusion among the judges. There was much behind-the-scenes activity. Some of this centred on the absent Fairfax who some hoped might provide a focal point for opposition. The three votes of the Scottish Parliament denouncing the trial, the last of these on 22 January, were also not without their effect on the men who were still theoretically their allies in London. Burnet had from Lieutenant-Colonel Drummond, who was present, the story of Cromwell’s own arguments with the Scots about this time, in which he repeated the doctrines of Mariana and Buchanan (by gist if not by name – it is doubtful if he had actually read their works) both of whom in the previous century had argued that it was lawful to kill a tyrant under given circumstances.³⁵ In suggesting further that the King should be punished that much more than an ordinary subject for a breach of his trust, rather than less, Cromwell was indeed on much more logical if not legal ground, than the absurd accusations of high treason. On the question of legality even, it was possible to argue, as Cromwell was apparently arguing to the Scots, that the King’s whole position was founded on a contract with his subjects; in that case, if he broke the contract, he could be penalized judicially by whatever sentence was considered requisite. A judicial execution – as opposed to trial for treason – was something which leaders had certainly undergone on occasion throughout history. There were certainly strong arguments to be put forward that King Charles had failed in his trust.

Then Cromwell met the objection that they had all signed the National Covenant, which bound its adherents formally to preserve the King, with the argument that Charles had obstructed the true settlement of the religion, and they were thus released from their oath. But Burnet also casts light in another direction on Cromwell’s state of mind at this period. Burnet gave further revelations, derived from conversations he had with one who knew Cromwell ‘and all that set of men’ well. Burnet asked how they could have possibly justified their behaviour to themselves. His informant replied: ‘They believed there were great occasions in which some men were called to great services, in the doing of which they were excused from the common rules of morality: such were the practices of Ehud and Jael, Samson and David: and by this they fancied they had a privilege from observing the standing rules.’ As Burnet was quick to comment: ‘It is very obvious how far this principle may be carried, and how all justice and mercy may be laid aside on this pretence by every bold enthusiast.’

Obviously this argument approached the death of the King from exactly the opposite angle to the previous one. Now Cromwell and his party were being led to put the King to death by the dictates of God as revealed step by step in his signs. A year later he wrote pleadingly to his friend Lord Wharton: ‘It’s easy to object to the glorious actings of God, if we look too much upon instruments … Be not offended at the manner; perhaps no other way was left.’³⁶ It was a kind of inexorable process (provided it succeeded) to which there could be only one conclusion. Since Cromwell himself in his own words and speeches made frequent allusions to the second argument, compared to this one brief mention of the theory of a contract broken, we must suppose that it was this providentialist inspiration which swayed him personally. Even if he thought it worth paying lip-service to the doctrines of Buchanan and Mariana beloved of some of his contemporaries, it was this other conviction which ultimately manifested itself in his own behaviour, while the hired clique of soldiers shouted ‘Justice, justice’ and the crowd continued to murmur ‘God Save the King’.

On the 25th there was some public attempt at the usual processes of judicature when witnesses were called to say that they had seen Charles setting up his standard. Others declared that they had observed him on the field of battle with his sword drawn and present at several fights. All of this was intended to prove, if rather bizarrely, that Charles had indeed levied war against his people. Yet it was hardly relevant to the foregone conclusion: on the same day the forty-six men present resolved officially that the court should now proceed to sentence Charles Stuart, and that this condemnation – for being ‘public enemy to the Commonwealth of England’ – should extend to his death. But while a further committee was now appointed to draw up an official sentence, with its actual description left ominously blank in the terms of their commission, forty-six votes seem to have been considered altogether too weak a quorum. Therefore the next day a new condemnation was issued by the court, by now a total of sixty-two judges having been scraped together. In this sentence, although it was noticeable that the charge of high treason was dropped, it was pronounced for the first time that Charles should be ‘put to death by the severing of his head from his body’.

By this date, Friday, 26 January, it seems that some of the most determined men among the judges, such as Cromwell himself, had already signed the warrant. His name can be seen third on the still surviving document, below that of the President Bradshaw and Lord Grey of Groby. Many of the names on the historic roll remind one vividly of the bygone days of the war – here was Edward Whalley, John Okey, Hardress Waller, Ireton, Thomas Pride, Richard Deane, Harrison, and Isaac Ewer. But there was less unity in the signing than such a reflection implies. Out of the sixty-two men who had given sentences, only fifty-nine ultimately signed the warrant itself, under circumstances which have given rise to some controversy, and it seems that not more than twenty-eight of these had placed their names on it by the following Saturday. The truth is much obscured since the evidence given at the trials of the regicides ten years later was understandably a compound of incrimination and self-exculpation. Two points do emerge with some verisimilitude: first, since the original date for the execution inscribed on the warrant was altered to the 30th, and the warrant itself was dated ‘upon Saturday last’ (i.e. the 27th), there must have been some unexpected delays. Perhaps it was even hoped to perform the execution forthwith on the Saturday, the 27th, but not sufficient signatures had been obtained. In any case the clumsy use of erasure, rather than issuing a new warrant under a new date, does substantiate the theory that by the 29th some of those who had signed were already regretting it, and might have refused to sign twice.³⁷

Secondly, relevant to Cromwell himself, stories of force, whether moral or physical, used to get signatures are sufficiently widespread to point to his maniacal determination to get this measure through, allowing nothing to stop him. For all the caution necessary in weighing the excuses of the regicides – who naturally had a vested interest in accusing the dead Cromwell of bullying them into submission – there seems to have been a horrifying exhilaration about his behaviour which reminds one either of Burnet’s theory of righteousness – or perhaps his laughter riding into battle. There is the story told by Colonel Ewer that he and Henry Marten inked each other’s faces with pens after signing, as the warrant lay in the Painted Chamber, like grotesque schoolboys. There is the testimony of Clarendon as to how Sir Richard Ingoldsby came to sign; Cromwell ran at him across the room, and taking him by the hand, dragged him to the table, crying out that ‘though he had escaped him all the while, he should now sign that paper as well as they’. When Ingoldsby refused, Cromwell and others held him down and Cromwell laughing loudly put the pen between his fingers and forced him to trace RICHARD INGOLDSBY with his own hand.^* The story of Thomas Waite, another apparently reluctant signatory, lends further support to the ruthless manner in which some signatures were obtained: tricked into going down to the court by a forged note, purporting to come from Lord Grey of Groby, but actually from Cromwell and Ireton, he witnessed some of that Saturday’s scenes. He only attended on the Monday (29th) because he had been assured there would be no execution, but Cromwell overrode his objections to signing with the words: ‘These that are gone in shall set their hands, I will have their hands now.’³⁸

It is true that Lucy Hutchinson afterwards in her Memoirs showed scorn for such cowardly stories of compulsion: ‘Some of them, after, to excuse, belied themselves and said they were under the awe of the Army, and overpersuaded by Cromwell, and the like, but it is certain that all men herein were left to their free liberty of acting, neither persuaded nor compelled; and as there were some nominated in the commission who never sat, and others who sat at first, but durst not hold on, so all the rest might have declin’d if they would …’³⁹ As Mrs Hutchinson was able to save her own husband from trial through her own Royalist family connexions, she was arguably in a better position to speak the truth than those who were concerned at a trial to save their own skins. Nevertheless the kernel of her remarks lies surely in her last reflection on the eternal variety of human reactions to any given situation. Certainly there were some men Cromwell could never have compelled, and indeed there is no evidence that these men who honourably retired were ever harassed. But as always there were also weaker brethren. On these we must believe that Cromwell, in the full flood of belief in himself as God’s instrument, was not above bringing whatever pressure seemed suited to the occasion.

In the midst of all these chicaneries, both behind and in front of the scenes, it was on Saturday, the 27th, that Charles was brought back into the court to hear the sentence against him read out. That gesture in itself was probably the result of some sort of compromise or sense of delay, since he had now been taken away from Cotton House within the precincts of Westminster to the more distant St James’s Palace, and may not therefore have been intended to reappear. The soldiers set up their familiar cry of ‘Justice’ now amplified to that of ‘Justice and Execution!’ But when Bradshaw once more spoke of the court as constituted in the name of the people of England, there was still a lady present in the gallery to call out: ‘Not half the people!’⁴⁰ Charles himself demanded most movingly that he should be allowed to make a speech, his own apologia, in front of the ranks of both Lords and Commons. To some present, this request seemed by now eminently reasonable, and one John Downes, MP for Arundel, later testified in his own defence at his trial that he had jumped up at this point, intending to make a stirring speech supporting this right of the King. But he was restrained by Cromwell, who turned round, and in a furious whisper, asked him if he was himself? Although Downes was denied a public hearing, the court did then withdraw into the adjacent Inner Court of Wards to hear his arguments; Downes lectured them on the illegality of the court, but all Cromwell did was to answer him ‘with a great deal of storm … sure he [Downes] doth not know that he had to do with the hardest-hearted man that lives upon the earth’. The court should not be hindered from their duty by the words of one ‘peevish man’. Waite, another witness to the scene, spoke of Cromwell laughing and smiling and jeering in the Court of Wards.⁴¹So the proceedings went forward. Bradshaw called on the clerk to read the formal sentence, and himself made a long harangue in which those previous deposed or decapitated sovereigns, Edward II, Richard II and Mary Queen of Scots, were once more recalled to notice. But Charles, having protested at the sentence being read without himself being heard, continued manfully to try to interrupt the court. From what could be distinguished of what he said, he gasped: ‘I am not suffered to speak – expect what justice other people will have.’ And as he was taken forcibly from the court, to the renewed cries of the soldiers, he was still visibly if not audibly protesting.

Back in St James’s Palace, King Charles restored to himself that spiritual peace he prized: he listened reverently to the devotions of the Anglican Church, the body for whose integrity he had sacrificed much, and adjured his little children Henry and Elizabeth to keep trust and to forgive, in words which still retain their capacity to move. Meanwhile abroad frantic efforts were being made to preserve the life which Charles himself evidently held less dear than his own conception of the royal honour. Louis xiv wrote personal letters of pleading to both Cromwell and Fairfax; the States-General of the Netherlands also solicited both, although their Ambassador reported that the generals had not dared open the letters of credence without the presence of three hundred officers, such were the suspicions of the times. In England, it is easy to credit Fairfax’s own story that he was urging the Council of Officers to mercy; but like the weak good man he was, he shrank from the possibility of further bloodshed which more determined opposition would have aroused.⁴² It was another case of the importance of personal qualities in a moment of crisis: a more ruthless man than Fairfax who would have been prepared to rally the soldiers to him at whatever cost could well have saved the King.

Among the frenzied solutions to Charles’s safety which many tried to discover, there was one story of a mission ‘within a few days of the murder’ by one of Cromwell’s own relations, a Colonel John Cromwell who commanded an English regiment in the service of the Netherlands. John Cromwell was said to have come over from Holland armed with two blank sheets, one already signed by the King’s signet, and one by that of the Prince of Wales; both signified that the Prince was ready to grant anything to save his father’s life. The Colonel found Oliver withdrawn and unresponsive in his own house, unwilling to listen to reminders of his former promises, to which he merely replied that ‘times were altered, and Providence seemed to dispose things otherwise; that he had prayed and fasted for the King but no return that way was yet made to him’. John Cromwell tried threats which ranged from the welfare of his own family and posterity to the need to change the Cromwell name back to Williams again if he brought such shame on their heads; but the most he could get out of Cromwell was a promise to consider the subject, if he would leave the two papers, and retire to his own lodging, but not go to bed. About 1.00 a.m. John Cromwell received his final answer: there was to be no message to carry to the Prince of Wales, for ‘the Council of Officers had been seeking God, as he [Oliver] had also done the same, and it was resolved by them all that the King must die’. The story rests on the imperfect authority of Heath, but the language at least has a Cromwellian ring, and even if over-dramatized by its author, it is not impossible that something of the sort happened, particularly as Cromwell was on amicable terms with many of his Royalist relations. The year before he had pleaded for poor old Sir Oliver, saving his land from sequestration, and this year would help his cousin Henry secure remission of his fines. This same John Cromwell remained on terms with Oliver throughout the Protectorate and was even employed by him on some sort of Danish mission.⁴³

So, in the absence of any kind of opposition whose agency could match the compulsion of those who were pushing it forward, preparations for the execution went on apace. The scaffolding continued to rise in Whitehall in front of the King’s lovely decorated Banqueting House. Such was the nervous apprehension of those in charge of these arrangements that staples were actually hammered into the ground for ropes, which it was somehow imagined would be needed to hold down the King while he met his end. The humble fry responsible for these practical details were later arraigned like the loftier regicides. One Robert Lockier confessed in 1660 that he had been ordered by a master carpenter named Hammond to erect a scaffold, and employed by Colonel Dean to fetch four iron staples from an ironmonger in nearby King Street. So little was understood of the character of the man they were dealing with that Lockier was requested to remain ready with his hammer and other tools on the scaffold itself till after the execution in case the King struggled; for this he got wages of 2s. 6d. per day.⁴⁴

So on the morning of Tuesday, 30 January, Charles Stuart walked with calm dignity and religious resignation from St James’s Palace to the designated place of his death at Whitehall. Once arrived, he rested within Whitehall itself, and strengthened himself with a little red wine and a little bread. There was a slight delay, probably because the Commons was even then passing an urgent Act which forbade the proclamation of his successor after his death. They had suddenly taken into account Pride’s words on the problems of cutting off the head of an hereditary King, when they had not yet officially abolished monarchy: they would simply find themselves with another sovereign on their hands. It was two o’clock in the afternoon when Charles stepped forth from the Banqueting House windows in front of the enormous silent crowd. The weather was icy – Charles was secretly wearing two shirts so that he should not shiver and be accused of fear. With him came only his chaplain, Bishop Juxon, for his faithful servant Sir Thomas Herbert who had accompanied him on the mournful march from St James’s Palace begged to be excused from the painful task of being a witness. There were two Colonels Hacker and Tomlinson on the scaffold to supervise the execution, and serried troops below, lest even now the King should appeal to his people – or the people perhaps to their King.

To the spectators indeed their King seemed greatly aged, his beard grey and his hair silver. Now they could see that, but his words could only be heard by those very close to him, Bishop Juxon, the two Colonels, and the two masked executioners, for the ban on any form of public appeal remained absolute. To this tiny audience, though every word would be lovingly treasured by his chaplain to reach the audience of the world, he regretted nothing: ‘For the people truly I desire their liberty and freedom as much as anybody whatsoever; but I must tell you that their liberty and freedom consists in having government, those laws by which their lives and goods maybe most their own. It is not their having a share in the government; that is nothing appertaining to them; a subject and sovereign are clean different things …’ So the sovereign went to his death at the hands of his subjects, proud and unrepentant on that interpretation of government whose inflexibility had brought about his downfall: those words alone did much to show why Charles died. Yet another of his sayings showed also why another section of his people would always regard him as King Charles the Martyr: ‘I go from a corruptible crown to an incorruptible crown,’ he told Juxon, ‘where no disturbance can be, no disturbance in the world.’⁴⁵ And it was Andrew Marvell, very likely present among the crowd, in an ode intended to celebrate Charles’s mortal adversary Cromwell, who penned the words which later immortalized the King’s courage in his last moments, as he bent his neck in silent submission on to the black-draped block:

Nor call’d the Gods with vulgar spite

To vindicate his helpless Right

But bow’d his comely Head

Down as upon a Bed.

A minute later the executioner (believed to be the common hangman named Brandon, but with his assistant he had insisted on the utmost precautions being taken to preserve his identity including a false beard and wig) was holding up the severed head with the traditional cry: ‘Behold the head of a traitor!’ In less than a quarter of an hour, said the French Ambassador, this whole sad ceremony was over. But from the people watching went up not the raucous cries of the crowd at justice done, not the human response to blood lust of so many public executions; something so deeply shocking had been perpetrated that up from the people went a great deep groan, a groan, said an eye-witness, ‘as I never heard before and desire I may never hear again’;⁴⁶ it was a lament that would be heard as long and as far as the problems of justice and injustice were cared for. For whatsoever could be said of the execution of King Charles i, that it was inevitable, even that it was necessary, it could never be said that it was right.

And where were they then, the authors of this doom, the Army leaders, the regicides, the signatories of that melancholy warrant? Heath suggested that Cromwell was actually attending a prayer-meeting of the Council of Officers at the fatal moment at which many ‘tedious expedients’ were still being discussed in order to save the King. Oliver, agreeing that much calumny would fall upon them all if he was killed, suggested that they should ‘seek God to know his mind in it’. In the midst of the meeting, and a particularly lengthy prayer from Cromwell himself, a messenger arrived to announce the death of the King. At which Cromwell, holding up his hands, declared that it had obviously not been ‘the pleasure of God that he should live’ and they had done ill to tempt him against his will to this moment of weakness. This last-minute wavering on Cromwell’s part has little corroboration: a more convincing testimony of Cromwell’s unalloyed resolution was given at the trial of Colonel Hacker, the supervisor of the execution, by a Colonel Huncks. An hour before the King died, Huncks was in Ireton’s chamber, when the warrant for the execution was produced, and Hacker read it. Cromwell then ordered Huncks to draw up the further order for the executioner, Huncks refused and there were ‘some cross passages’. But – ‘Cromwell would have no delay’. Sitting down at a little table by the door, he wrote the order out himself, and handing the pen to Hacker, ordered him to sign. According to Huncks, Cromwell termed him a ‘forward, peevish fellow’ for his squeamishness. Another picture of Cromwell the inexorable organizer was given by a witness at the trial of Hugh Peter; the fellow happened to arrive with a warrant concerning the Army as the execution was pending; Cromwell suggested pleasantly that he might like to go down to Whitehall and see the beheading of the King.⁴⁷

The story of the prayer-meeting itself is more probable, if only because it is corroborated by the tale of Sir Thomas Herbert, the dead King’s servant, who met Fairfax by accident after the execution, coming back from a prayer-meeting in Harrison’s rooms. Fairfax did not even seem to know that the King was dead, but shortly afterwards Cromwell appeared and told them ‘they should have orders for the King’s burial speedily’. Richard Baxter also heard that Cromwell kept Fairfax praying. It would certainly be characteristic not only of Cromwell but of all those round him who believed themselves to be the instruments of God’s will, to pray during the actual death of the King.

The arrangements for the King’s interment were put in hand with great efficiency. First the body in its coffin lay under a velvet pall in that room in Whitehall where Charles had spent his last days. It was then embalmed according to the custom of the time, and removed to St James’s Palace. Since permission was now refused his servants to bury Charles in the Henry VII Chapel within Westminster Abbey, his body was taken down to Windsor. Here, on 9 February, under a further pall of falling snow, ‘the colour of innocency’, the King’s body was buried, attended by a small retinue of his loyal friends and servants led by Juxon, who was not however allowed to use the service from the Book of Common Prayer which Charles would have wanted.⁴⁸ Burials make strange bed-fellows: Charles was placed in a vault with King Henry VIII and Queen Jane Seymour, the ruthless monarch and the immaculate consort.

Tradition loves to have it that Oliver Cromwell, on the night that the King’s body lay in its coffin in Whitehall, came also to pay his last respects. About two o’clock in the morning, as the Earl of Southampton maintained watch in the Banqueting House with a friend, sitting by the corpse ‘very melancholy’, they heard the tread of someone coming slowly up the stairs. Presently the door opened and a man entered, much muffled in his cloak, his face completely hidden. Approaching the body, he gazed at it attentively for some time, and then shook his head. The listeners heard these words sighed out: ‘Cruel necessity!’ Then the unknown departed in the same secret manner. Although nothing could be discerned of his features, Lord Southampton used to say afterwards that ‘by his voice and gait he took him to be Oliver Cromwell’.^* In a way, the story, however improbable, does receive a kind of backing from Heath who tells another anecdote of Cromwell openly inspecting Charles in his coffin and observing that ‘if he had not been King he might have lived longer’, for although the details are different, the impression left of Cromwell is somewhat the same. Certainly by the eighteenth century there was a substantial tradition of some visitation by Cromwell to Charles’s coffin: the Reverend Mark Noble regarded it as ‘certain, that he went to feast his eyes upon the murdered King’, and gave yet another version of Cromwell in front of the guard putting his finger to the neck to see if it was quite severed. This soldier, Bowtell, whose sword Cromwell was supposed to have used to lift the lid of the coffin, asked the General boldly: ‘What government they should have now?’ To which Cromwell replied briefly: ‘The same that now was.’⁴⁹Those words too have quite a Cromwellian ring; perhaps the exchange was authentic if the details were not.

Whether purely apocryphal the lot of them, or whether as seems more likely together adding up in synoptic fashion to the probability of some form of last inspection, these stories do at least represent the commentary of the times on Cromwell’s attitude to Charles. It has been pointed out that it is on this basis that many demonstrably false anecdotes of history survive down the centuries: even if not true, they are felt to sum up a particular situation in dramatic form – in this case ‘the impossible dilemma of Oliver Cromwell’.^* It can be argued that their very survival is a proof of their poetic truth, if not of their historic truth. So the famous words ‘Cruel Necessity’ take on a weightier ring than the mere gossip of the past. It was indeed necessity to Cromwell that the King should die. Seeing no way out, he believed therefore that Providence had guided him there, and that it was no longer God’s will that Charles should live. Nor, so far as we know, did he ever regret the decision. Never a particularly backward-looking man, he was supposed to have worried over the thought of the vengeance of King Charles II during the Protectorate, directed perhaps at his family; but of regret for the circumstances which had brought about this desire for vengeance, there was never a trace.

Indeed, Cromwell went further. The next year, while at Edinburgh, he referred to the death of the King as ‘the great fruit of the war’ because it was ‘the execution of exemplary justice upon the prime leader of all this quarrel’. Later he described all the regicides as having acted ‘in a way which Christians in after times will mention with honour and Tyrants look at with fear’.⁵⁰ Nor was it a view confined to Cromwell alone – the pleas of duress put forward by some at the Restoration trials should not blind one to the very real and continuing sense of purpose manifested by others. The counsel for the prosecution, John Cook, for example, wrote shortly before he in his turn was executed: ‘We are not traitors, nor murderers, nor fanatics, but true Christians and good Commonwealth men … we sought the public good and would have enfranchised the people, and secured the welfare of the whole groaning creation, if the nation had not more delighted in servitude than in freedom …’ It was a point of view Cromwell shared, as he would have sympathized with Mrs Hutchinson’s portrait of her husband, that pattern of a Puritan gentleman, in an agony of reflection but in the end coming down firmly and for ever on the side of necessary execution. Like many others, Colonel Hutchinson had formed the impression from the King’s demeanour that if he were released he would merely seek to incur more bloodshed, for which those who freed him would then be responsible: ‘God would require at their hands all the blood and desolation which should ensue by their suffering him to escape, when God had brought him into their hands.’ Hutchinson then addressed himself to God, to be guided from on high, lest he be acting through human frailty; ‘finding no check but a confirmation in his conscience that it was his duty to act as he did, he, upon serious debate, both privately and in his addresses to God, and in conferences with conscientious, upright and unbiased persons, proceeded to sign the sentence against the King’. Like Cromwell, Hutchinson never regretted what he had done.⁵¹

Still more explicit was the answer given by the fellow regicide Colonel Harrison at his trial. They had, he said, acted throughout ‘in the fear of the Lord’. To that followed the indignant question from the court: ‘Will you make God the author of your treasons and your murders?’ The proper answer to that question, at any rate so far as Cromwell was concerned, was – yes, he did make God the author of all that had been done. Cromwell might have been led through the maze of doubts to his last unequivocal position by the actions of Army radicals: nevertheless in the last analysis it was not fear of the Army but conviction of the right which led him to agree to the killing of the King. One only has to recall the bloodthirsty and self-righteous sentiments of those preachers on which he had been nurtured, not only the words of Stephen Marshall, but a tradition of violence preached since the end of the last century, those oft-quoted examples of Ahab and Saul, to see that it was all too possible to hold the position of a necessary – and positively justified, holy – judicial execution. On the eve of Charles’s death, Hugh Peter’s sermon at St James’s Palace had taken as its text Isaiah’s denunciation of the King of Babylon – ‘… thou art cast out of thy grave like an abominable branch … Thou shalt not be joined with them in burial, because thou hast destroyed thy land, and slain thy people.’ On the day following, the familiar sanguinary texts about the Kings of Israel were paraded by John Cardell and John Owen in sermons to the Commons. Owen, a Welshman who had been chaplain to Fairfax throughout the siege of Colchester, called the regicides the ‘Lord’s workmen’, and to describe their deeds he took the words of the Psalmist: ‘It is the Lord’s doing and is marvellous in our eyes.’ Stephen Marshall to the Lords was no doubt equally virulent, equally confident. Cromwell was merely the man of action brought up in this tradition, and echoing the words of the preacher, ‘an eminent witness of the Lord for blood-guiltiness’.⁵²

Yet the necessity was also cruel. Still the traditional story mirrored another aspect of the truth. If not in the sense that Cromwell ever regretted it, it was a disastrous mistake for the cause in which Cromwell believed. From the moment of his trial, with his unquenchable stand on the illegality of it all, backed up by the marked nobility of his bearing in the eyes of the world, King Charles had begun to tread the long causeway towards martyrdom. The very day he was buried at Windsor appeared that detailed account of ‘His Majesty in his Solitude and sufferings’ widely believed at the time to spring from his own hand – Eikon Basilike. In fact it was the work of a Royalist sympathizer, but that made no difference to the rapt appreciation of the public and before the end of the yearEikon Basilike had been reprinted thirty times. The accusations of arbitrary tyranny, once levelled with some substance at the King, could now be placed firmly at the door of the men who had done him to death. The advantage of honour, the attraction of men who battle for the people’s freedom against governmental forces more powerful than their own, had passed from Cromwell’s cause for ever as a result of an action which, ironically enough, he genuinely believed to have been brought about by ‘Providence and necessity’. There was no greater proof of the deep and dangerous ways into which the doctrine of providences could lead a man, sliding so easily and so conveniently into mere self-justification for any harsh and challenging deed which might seem necessary at the time.