24

Execution

CHARLES WAS BROUGHT from Westminster to Whitehall in a closed sedan chair. He was sealed from his people, ‘as they carry such as have the plague’.¹ Witnesses would remember the silence of the foot soldiers lining King Street and the onlookers gathered at windows and shop stalls, many in tears.

It took only minutes for Charles to arrive at Whitehall, the Tudor palace he had hoped to replace. Even at Carisbrooke Castle he had continued to work on plans for a vast new classical building: England’s Versailles before that palace was even a glint in the eye of Louis XIV. The architect Inigo Jones, having survived the conflagration that had ended the Basing House siege, had travelled, drawings in hand, to the Isle of Wight. This was the world in which Charles was happiest: a world of beauty and order in which he had time to choose his options, calmly and rationally. Yet it was also one of human warmth. In private Charles had always been very different from his chilly and regal public persona. Outside his family he was most relaxed in the company of the creative and knowledgeable commoner. ‘With any artist or good mechanic, traveller or scholar, he would discourse freely,’ others remembered. He was interested to learn from them, but also contributed from his experience, giving ‘light to them in their own art of knowledge’.²

Now even the theatre Charles had built at Whitehall was closed. Parliament had banned all plays in England. The magnificent organ he had bought for the chapel was also sold off, while the bedchamber where he rested had been stripped of his collection of art.³ The full-length portraits he had hung there of his wife, his brother and his sister were all up for sale. For the time being he still had the books in his personal library. These included his volumes on the Order of the Garter, bound in purple velvet or green leather, some with silver mounts and clasps. Many had been gifts from his mother when he was Prince of Wales.⁴ He had little time to enjoy them now.

Two hours after Charles arrived at Whitehall he was moved again.⁵ This spared him the sound of the scaffold being built outside the Banqueting House. He was taken instead to St James’s Palace. Here much of his great art collection still remained, although these pictures too were awaiting sale. The family portraits included one of his sister and her children. A ‘whole table of monkeys with my proper self’, she had written jokingly when she had sent it to him as a gift in 1629.⁶

Charles’s eldest nephew, Charles Louis, was still in London. Charles suspected he would ask for a last interview, as would many of his friends. He didn’t want to see any of them. ‘My time is short and precious,’ he told a servant, ‘I hope they will not take it ill that none have access to me but my children. The best office they can do now is to pray for me.’⁷ Charles then sent Parliament a request to see the thirteen-year-old Princess Elizabeth and the eight-year-old Henry, Duke of Gloucester.

Charles knew he would never see his other children again.

James, Duke of York, now fifteen, had joined his mother in Paris, having arrived from The Hague a few days earlier. His creditors had seized his baggage and the Dutch government had had to intervene to get it released. James found his mother’s situation not much better. The high taxes Anne of Austria had raised to pay for the wars in Europe had prompted months of violence in Paris. It marked the beginning of civil wars in France known as the ‘Fronde’, after the slings carried by the mobs. Anne had fled Paris with the ten-year-old Louis XIV, but Henrietta Maria remained at the Louvre along with the youngest of the Stuart children, the four-year-old Henrietta. It was bitterly cold, they had no fuel, and the merchants of Paris were refusing Henrietta Maria any further credit.

The Prince of Wales, meanwhile, who remained in The Hague as the guest of his sister Mary and her husband, also had ‘nothing to live on’. He had been obliged to dismiss many of his followers, and was living ‘a private life while awaiting a wind more favourable to [his] affairs’.⁸ The prince had written to his father, and the bearer arrived at St James’s Palace that evening. The messenger kissed the king’s hand and, weeping, embraced his knees. Charles consoled him and gave him two letters, one for the prince and another for Henrietta Maria. The prince’s letter asked for his blessing and promised to do all he could to earn it.⁹ ‘I had rather you be Charles le Bon, than Charles le Grand, Good than Great’, he wanted his son to know, but ‘I hope God has designed you to be both.’ ‘Farewell till we meet, if not on earth, yet in heaven.’¹⁰

Charles spent much of the rest of the day praying with the sixty-six-year-old Bishop of London, William Juxon. The old man, who loved his hunting almost as much as he loved his God, had attended on Charles during the trial, and had performed the miracle of attracting little antipathy, even amongst those MPs ‘whose ears’ it was said ‘were ever opened, nay itching after such complaints’.¹¹ Charles broke from his prayers only briefly that night. He had considered what final gifts he had for his children. Surrounded by Parliament’s spies he asked the most ingratiating of them, his bedchamber servant Thomas Herbert, for his assistance. He wanted Herbert to visit one of his couriers, Lady Elizabeth Wheeler. She had kept in her protection a few things that remained precious to him. Charles offered Herbert a testimonial in exchange for his help.^fn1 Parliament would learn of every detail of what their spy was now sent to collect.

It was dark as Herbert left St James’s Palace and security was tight. Guards were posted at ‘the house, garden, park, gates near Whitehall, King Street, and other where’.¹² Herbert, however, was free to go where he wished. He found Lady Wheeler in her house behind the narrow road of King Street, with its notorious taverns. She had kept Charles’s possessions in a little cabinet, which she now handed over.

When Charles opened the cabinet the following morning several jewels tumbled out, including more than one Garter with its George. Several of them appeared to be broken. ‘You see’, Charles said sadly, ‘all the wealth now in my power to give my two children.’¹³

In the royal chapel that morning Hugh Peter gave a ‘funeral’ sermon on Charles. He chose as his text ‘the terrible denunciation to the King of Babylon’: ‘All the kings of the nations, even all of them, lie in glory, every one in his own house. But thou art cast out of thy grave like an abominable branch, and as the raiment of those that are slain, thrust through with a sword, that go down to the stones of the pit, as a carcass trodden under feet.’¹⁴

Frantic efforts were, however, still being made to save Charles’s life. The ambassador from the Venetian Republic reported great hopes of the Scots. They were insisting that the Edinburgh Parliament needed to be consulted on the fate of their king before sentence was carried out. ‘It may be they repent, though tardily, of the abominable example they afforded two years ago by selling their king to the English for a few pounds sterling,’ the Venetian observed.¹⁵ The Dutch ambassadors also had an audience with Fairfax and on 29 January he duly urged his Council of War to postpone the execution – but without success.

Charles spent the rest of the day burning his papers and ciphers before preparing himself with prayer for his children’s arrival at his rooms. Eventually Elizabeth was brought in, sobbing inconsolably. She would write down that night all she remembered: how he had blessed her and told her that ‘he was glad as I was come … and although he had not time to say much, yet somewhat he had to say to me’. He asked her to remind James to obey his elder brother as his sovereign, told her they should love each other and forgive their enemies – but never to trust them. He then paused and said to his weeping daughter, ‘Sweetheart, you’ll forget this.’ She promised, ‘I shall never forget this while I live.’ He tried to comfort her, saying ‘not to grieve and torment myself for him, for that should be a glorious death that he should die, it being for the laws and liberties of this land and for the Protestant religion’. He foresaw God settling the throne upon the Prince of Wales. They would all be happy then, he told her. Knowing Elizabeth’s love of study, Charles suggested some reading from the books he still had. They included Laud’s book against the Catholic martyr John Fisher, ‘to ground me against popery’. He asked her also to send his blessing to her other siblings, and to tell her mother that ‘his thoughts had never strayed from her, and that his love should be the same to the last’. Charles then took the eight-year-old Henry onto his knee.

With Charles’s two eldest sons condemned as traitors by Parliament it was still possible Henry would be made a puppet ruler. The boy had been crying like his sister, but Charles spoke to him as plainly and directly as he could. ‘Sweetheart,’ he said, ‘now they will cut off your father’s head.’ At this Henry looked steadfastly at him. ‘They will cut off my head, and perhaps make thee a king; but mark what I say. You must not be a king so long as your brothers Charles and James do live; for they will cut off your brothers’ heads (when they do catch them) and cut off your head too, at the last, and therefore I charge you, do not be made a king by them.’ Henry replied, ‘I will be torn in pieces first.’ The vehemence of the little boy made the king smile. But he then had to say his last goodbyes. Charles gave Elizabeth and Henry all his jewels save his onyx George with its portrait of their mother. Then he kissed his children, with tears ‘of joy and love’.

As they were taken to the bedchamber door Elizabeth cried so hard it ‘moved others to pity that were formerly hard-hearted’. Charles, standing by a window, couldn’t bear it and dashed to his children for a last embrace, kissed them and blessed them.¹⁶ When they had gone, he collapsed and had to retire to bed.¹⁷

Bishop Juxon stayed with Charles until late that night and promised to return early for the day of his execution. Charles managed to rest for around four hours, getting up a couple of hours before dawn. His room was lit as usual by a cake of wax in a silver basin. He opened the curtains and announced to Herbert, who slept on a pallet by his bed, that he had ‘great work to do this day’. It was freezing outside and he asked Herbert for an extra shirt. ‘The season is so cold,’ he said, and it will ‘make me shake which some observers will imagine proceeds from fear. I would have no such impression. I fear not death!’¹⁸

Juxon arrived soon after Charles had dressed. Fairfax had gone to Whitehall in an attempt to get the execution postponed. His efforts failed. The king got together his last possessions. He wanted to give the Prince of Wales – soon to be Charles II – his Bible, which had his own annotations in the margins. For his second son, the future James II, he had something practical – a circular silver slide rule. Charles had been good at mathematics as a child. There were more religious books for Elizabeth and a catechism for Henry. There were also two gifts for friends: a romance for the Earl of Lindsey, who had commanded the scarlet-clad Life Guards of Foot at Edgehill, and a gold pocket watch which had belonged to King James and which Charles asked to be given to the Duchess of Richmond, a daughter of his murdered friend and mentor, the Duke of Buckingham. He remembered her playing with it when she was a small child.

Charles then took Communion and prepared to leave. He had been allowed to choose the hour of his death.¹⁹ When the call came he smiled at Juxon. ‘Come let us go,’ he said, and took his hand.

With the bishop on his right, Charles walked through the frosted garden and into St James’s Park, where two regiments of foot were drawn up on either side, their colours flying. A guard of halberdiers went before him and others behind. They were bare-headed, a mark of contempt. The drums were beating so loudly no one could hear anyone speak, although Charles tried to say some words to the colonel walking on his left. As they reached Whitehall Charles walked up the stairs and along the Privy Gallery. From the windows he would have been able to see the scaffold that awaited him outside the Banqueting House. It was draped in black. Charles was taken to one of the smaller rooms on the south side of the gallery. From here there was a different view: of the abbey where he had been crowned, and Westminster, the seat of his parliaments and the place of his trial. He had a last meal of bread and wine. It would help prevent him feeling faint.

It was just after two o’clock when Charles was brought back through the Privy Gallery and into the Banqueting House. He walked below the Rubens ceiling celebrating a peace long gone and the Stuart dynasty that was soon also to pass. Parliament had declared it illegal to proclaim a new king on Charles’s death. A line of soldiers stretched the length of the room, holding back a crush of people. As Charles walked between the guard the crowd behind them prayed loudly. Charles smiled at his people, but it was noticed that, at the age of only forty-eight, his beard was ‘long and grey, his hair white and he seemed greatly aged’.²⁰ At the north end of the room the transom and mullions of one of the windows had been removed to create a door. From here he stepped down onto the black floor of the scaffold. At his left knee, a garter band flashed with 412 diamonds. Juxon remained at his side. To one witness, watching from a nearby rooftop, it seemed Charles showed ‘the same concernedness and motion as he usually did’ when he had arrived at the Banqueting House ‘on a masque night’.²¹

Whatever anxiety Charles felt he was keeping it hidden behind his performance. The scaffold was his stage in this theatre of death: every gesture he made, every detail of what followed, would be remembered and would impact on his heir’s chances of being crowned. Standing in the bright light of that cold day he sought out his audience.

Few of those responsible for his being there would see his end. Fairfax was at a prayer meeting. Hugh Peter was ill in bed. Where Cromwell was is unrecorded. Charles could see rows of infantry and, behind them, cavalry. The crowd had been pushed far back so they would not hear anything Charles said. The confined space had also ensured their numbers had been kept low. Elsewhere the shops were open – Londoners had been encouraged to go about their normal business. On the scaffold itself there were more soldiers, but it was the executioner and his assistant who stood out. They were dressed in wigs and sailors’ costumes, their faces masked with fishnet. The executioner had even added a false beard. He was taking no chances in ever being recognised.

It was said the common hangman of London had refused the task of beheading his king, swearing ‘he would be shot … rather than do it’.²² Known as ‘Young Gregory’, after his father and namesake who had held the post before him, he had already beheaded Strafford and Laud and was extremely skilled at a difficult job. The type of axe used for English executions was designed to chop and shape logs, as the French doctor who had attended the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, had noted with dismay. It had a slant in the blade, to shave wood. If you didn’t know what you were doing with such an axe the blow would not strike where it was intended, but fall askew, landing on the skull or the back. The king’s life could easily end in crude butchery.

Charles walked to the middle of the scaffold and looked ‘very earnestly’ at the block. There were ropes and chains in case he struggled. The block itself was scarcely more than a hewn log on the ground, eighteen inches long by six in height.²³ He would have to lie flat. Charles balked at that and asked ‘if there was no higher’.²⁴ It was explained that this was what an efficient block looked like. Mollified, he took out the notes for his speech. ‘I shall be very little heard of anybody here, I shall therefore speak a word unto you,’ he said to those on the scaffold. He still wished to make the final defence he had been denied in court. He was innocent, he said, of starting the war and before God he had never wished to take Parliament’s privileges. On the contrary, Parliament had taken his privileges, beginning with the militia. God was punishing him, not for the war, but for his role in another unjust sentence, ‘that I suffered to take effect’. He did not mention Strafford’s name. He did not need to.

For his own death he forgave those who were ‘the chief causers … Who they are God knows. I do not desire to know.’ He hoped, however, that they would repent, ‘for indeed they have committed a great sin’: not only rebellion against a divinely ordained ruler, but regicide.

As Charles talked on, a soldier restlessly shifted his position and brushed against the axe. Charles paused and turned, rebuking him, ‘Hurt not the axe that may hurt me.’ A blunt blade, even in the hand of an expert, would end with the executioner hacking and hewing. Such had been the fate of Mary, Queen of Scots, whose ladies-in-waiting had witnessed the axe being used to saw at the last sinews that secured her head to her shoulders.

As Charles continued, his speech recalled the words on the standard he had raised at Nottingham in 1642 at the outbreak of civil war: give Caesar his due. ‘God will never prosper you, until you give him his due, the king his due (that is my successors) and the people their due … I desire their liberty and freedom as much as anybody whomsoever’, but, ‘I must tell you’ that true liberty and freedom lay in the rule of law, ‘by which their life and good may be their own. It is not for having a share of government, sirs, that is nothing pertaining to them. A subject and a sovereign are clean different things.’ Yet it was for his subjects that he would die: ‘I am a martyr of the people.’

Charles stopped, but Juxon now reminded him that he had yet to say something on the Church of England. ‘I had almost forgotten it!’ Charles exclaimed, with the relief of a schoolboy whose recital was almost over. ‘I declare before you all that I die a Christian according to the profession of the Church of England as I found it left me by my father.’ Turning to the officer in charge of the execution Charles asked, ‘Take care that they do not put me to pain.’

He then turned to a second soldier, who again was clumsily pushing against the axe, and this time a febrile concern was more evident. ‘Take heed of the axe, pray, take heed of the axe,’ he repeated. Then he instructed the executioner. ‘I shall say but a very short prayer and then thrust out my hands.’ Having called Juxon for his nightcap he put it on. ‘Does my hair trouble you?’ he asked the executioner. It did, and the man helped tuck his hair away. Charles did not seem to mind his killer’s touch. ‘There is but one stage more,’ Juxon reassured his king. ‘I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown where no disturbance can be,’ Charles observed. ‘It is a good exchange,’ Juxon confirmed. Charles was prepared. His last words would be for Juxon alone.

Charles took off his cloak and handed his onyx George to the bishop. Every new knight was admonished, at his installation, ‘in all just Battles and War … strongly to fight, valiantly to stand, and honourably to have the victory’. Seeking that victory was now to be the burden of his heir. ‘Remember,’ he said to Juxon. The king’s George depicting the slaying of the dragon of rebellion was for the new sovereign of the Order.

Charles lay down flat and put his head on the low block. A doctor, who had a good view, said he caught the king’s eye, which was ‘quick and lively’.²⁵ After a short moment Charles thrust out his hands. The fishnet only minimally obscured the executioner’s view. The axe fell clean. His assistant picked up the rolling head and held it high, ‘the usual words uttered: behold the head of a traitor’.²⁶

A Royalist, writing much later, said the crowd then gave up a ‘groan as I have never heard before and I desire I may never hear again’. In truth not everyone was saddened. The soldiers showed delight, taking their plunder, and ‘round the armed bands / Did clap their bloody hands’.²⁷ An officer cut the diamond garter from Charles’s left leg. ‘His hair was cut off. Soldiers dipped their swords in his blood’ and swore at his body.²⁸ After Charles’s corpse was taken to a room at the back of Whitehall to be embalmed, the soldiers continued to hack at the wood on the scaffold, hoping to sell the bloodstained chips, along with the locks of Charles’s hair, either as items of curiosity or as holy relics – they did not much care which.²⁹

Their brothers in arms broke up the crowd and the executioner was whisked off to be smuggled away on a barge. The waterman remembered the man seemed terrified and that ‘he shook every joint of him’. His name remains a mystery, but the professional efficiency with which Charles was dispatched suggests it was, after all, Young Gregory himself.

Princess Elizabeth and little Henry were at the Earl of North-umberland’s Syon House when their father was beheaded. It must have been a comfort for the grieving children when the Dutch envoys of their elder sister Mary, Princess of Orange, visited them. The envoys found no signs of a household in mourning. Only the children were in black. The countess greeted the envoys dressed as for any other day.³⁰ The information the spy Thomas Herbert had passed to his political masters ensured that anything of value that Charles had given Elizabeth and Henry had been confiscated and would be up for sale, along with the onyx George that Charles had bequeathed to the new Charles II.^fn2 Larger goods destined for auction, such as Charles’s paintings, furniture and tapestries, were stacked up at Denmark House where, for the first time, soldiers, clergymen, lawyers and other ordinary folk could now see great European art.

It was possible also to see the corpse of the king who had collected this art. Parliament and the army had to ensure there was no doubt that Charles was dead. There had been uncertainty in the past over the fate of overthrown monarchs. Had Richard II survived imprisonment at Pontefract Castle in 1400? Had the Princes in the Tower escaped in 1483? Such questions had fuelled revolt against the rule of their successors. A surgeon had therefore been employed to embalm the king’s corpse and sew his head back in place. He described the task as like stitching the head back on a goose. People paid a ha’penny to view his work and Charles’s body at Whitehall.³¹ In the days that followed others then queued to see it at St James’s Palace.³²

A contemporary image has a sheet pulled up to Charles’s chin, as if he were lying in bed. A fanciful story emerged in the eighteenth century that even Cromwell came to see the body one night, and was heard muttering ‘Cruel necessity.’ A contemporary witness later span another legend, claiming the dead king was smiling as ‘perfectly as if he were alive’.³³ In fact, far from smiling his face was bruised. The executioner’s assistant, who had held up the decapitated head for the crowd, had dropped it heavily.³⁴ But the bodies of martyrs are said to defy the brutality of their end, and it was as a martyr this witness was remembering his king.

On the streets Charles’s last testimony, the Eikon Basilike, was running off the presses. The first copies were already on sale, promoting him as a ‘martyr of the people’, who had died for liberties and the Protestant religion. It sold in huge numbers. There would be forty impressions and issues in 1649 in England alone, and twenty more in Latin, Dutch, French, German and Danish.

Henrietta Maria was dining in the Louvre when she learned that her ‘Dear Heart’ was dead. The blow left her utterly stunned. She sat ‘without words, without action, without motion, like a statue’, her women weeping around her until night began to fall. It was at the Louvre that they had met over quarter of a century before. Now, as Charles’s widow, she was ‘able to see all she had lost and what she owed to the memory of a king who had loved her much’.³⁵ As the candles flickered in the gloom, her sister-in-law, the Duchesse de Vendôme, at last raised her up and led her from the room.³⁶

The future James II, who was in Paris with his mother, would never speak or write of what had occurred, even in his memoirs of the civil war. It was too personal and too painful. In The Hague Mary was reported to be extremely bitter. Her eldest brother, the new Charles II, had learned of his father’s death only when he was addressed by his new title. He broke down and wept.