Killers of the King Read online

  For Charlotte

  ‘The fury of civil wars, when the battle has ceased, is almost invariably reserved for the scaffold.’

  Malcolm Laing, historian of Scotland, 1802

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Picture Section

  Footnotes

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  By the Same Author

  A Note on the Author

  Author’s Note

  Spellings: For ease of reading most of the letters and other documents here transcribed are given with the spelling corrected to correspond with modern usage. Many of the main characters’ names were spelled in a number of ways (‘Ludlowe’, ‘Cooke’, etc.) in the seventeenth century, but I have plumped for their modern version.

  Sources: The original writings of Edmund Ludlow have been edited by many writers for their political ends, with his Puritanism often downplayed and those views that chimed with radical Whig philosophy frequently amplified. However, as A. B. Worden, the pre-eminent historical expert on Ludlow, affirms, ‘The work, which supplies vivid accounts of Ludlow’s military and political career, can still be profitably consulted.’

  Prologue

  The English Civil War began in 1642, the result of escalating political, social and religious tensions between Charles I and Parliament. The English Crown had received insufficient revenue for decades, and was, periodically and reluctantly, forced to seek Parliament’s aid in granting it financial assistance. However, in return, Parliament increasingly expected to be heard by the King, on grievances relating to three of the key aspects of seventeenth-century life: rights, money, and God.

  From 1629 to 1640, Charles elected to reign without Parliament in order to hush the exasperating voices of its more strident members. Instead, he relied on money raised through the exploitation of ancient kingly privileges and customs. These were thought by many to be abuses of power and an erosion of the people’s civil liberties.

  Religion added to the frictions. While many in the House of Commons were Presbyterian or Puritan, Charles was believed to be a Catholic sympathiser – a suspicion that was fuelled by the evident Roman Catholicism of his French wife, Henrietta Maria. The King was an intensely devout man who believed in an ecclesiastical structure in which bishops were not only the commanding pediment, but also the crucial cornerstone. A weak ruler generally, he insisted on the imposition of his strict religious views. Some Puritans, meanwhile, headed overseas to escape Charles’s persecution, many of them gravitating to the new colonies in America.

  In 1639 and 1640 the Scots invaded England in protest at Charles’s attempts to inflict his High Anglican creed upon their Presbyterian churchmen. The King was obliged to summon Parliament in order to fund a defensive army. This left him vulnerable to the built-up resentments of members of the House of Commons arriving in Westminster, who demanded lasting and meaningful concessions. A key one of these was to make Parliament’s summoning a regular occurrence, rather than remaining dependent on the whim of the Crown. Even in the face of foreign invasion, many MPs were unwilling to give the King what he wanted until they had been satisfied. Although Charles tried to regain control, he could not.

  In August 1642, after further frustrations and humiliations, he raised his standard at Nottingham in a call to arms. That autumn the Royalist and Parliamentary armies stumbled into each other while heading towards London. At the ensuing battle of Edgehill, shockingly for both sides, many hundreds of Englishmen were killed by their compatriots.

  The following year the war seemed to be going in the King’s favour, but Parliament’s control of London and the navy, its superior supply chain, and its subsequent alliance with the Scots, gave it an increasingly clear advantage. 1644 saw the Royalists lose control of the north of England, when Scottish and Parliamentary soldiers destroyed the King’s forces at Marston Moor. The following year Parliament debuted its imposing, professional, fighting machine – the New Model Army – which triumphed at the battle of Naseby and captured Bristol, England’s second city. By the spring of 1646 Charles’s military forces were beaten, and the First Civil War was effectively over. The Crown’s diverse enemies had been brought together by fear and suspicion of a monarch who seemed to threaten their civil and religious liberties. The question for them now was: what to do with the defeated King?

  Chapter 1

  Man of Blood

  We have been by Providence put upon strange things, such as the ancientest here doth scarce remember. The Army acting to these ends, Providence hath been with us, and yet we have found little fruit with our endeavours. The kingdom and Army calls for expedition.

  Edward Sexby, Parliamentary soldier, October 1647

  The news that King Charles was being sent from Windsor for trial in Westminster was fresh – exhilarating to those who believed he must be held to account for the recent, rich bloodshed in his three kingdoms; deeply troubling to others who had either fought for his defeated cause, or who retained instinctive deference for God’s anointed representative, in spite of his hand in the years of discord.

  So when Mr Proctor, making the opposite journey from London towards Windsor, had almost reached the crossing of the Thames at Brentford – scene of a Royalist victory six years earlier – he quickly realised that the brisk rhythm of approaching cavalry was the King’s escort, speeding the illustrious prisoner to the capital. It was a force powerful enough to see off a rescue attempt, numerous enough to make escape impossible.

  The cavalrymen of the New Model Army – buff-coated, each armed with a pair of pistols and a sword, girded by chest armour and topped off with a lobster-tail helmet – began to pass him in disciplined formation. At the core of the column Proctor saw two men who he would clearly remember, under oath, a decade later: riding alone amongst the ranks of troopers was a tall, thin figure, who Proctor recognised as the charismatic firebrand preacher, Hugh Peters. Dynamic and lively, Peters triumphantly led his captive prize towards his interpretation of justice. Immediately behind Peters, sitting quite alone in the six-horse royal carriage, was the slight King – a reluctant passenger, on a winter road, the anguish in his heart triggered by the peril of his destination.

  Proctor instinctively removed his hat, his eyes briefly locking with those of the King, who returned the courtesy shown him by his subject. Furious at this fawning, the soldiers nearest Proctor set their mounts at him, casting this eyewitness to history and his horse from the roadside, down into a ditch, ‘where,’ he recalled, ‘I stayed till they passed by, and was glad I escaped so.’1

  Charles’s former progresses between London and Windsor had denoted a shuttling from one bastion of monarchical power to another. What Proctor had chanced upon was quite different: the taking of a King of England from a sprawling prison to a focused place of judgment. There, his life would be in play, in a forum where, for the first time in his quarter-century reign, he would be shorn of all power, and at the mercy of a body that absolutely denied the fundamental belief that was at the centre of his kingly philosophy: that he was answerable only to God.

  Charles had made bids for freedom during the three years since the First Civil War had ended in his military defeat. In April 1646 he had slipped away from his beleaguered wartime headquarters of Oxford, in a party of three led
by Dr Michael Hudson. The King valued Hudson as ‘my plain-speaking chaplain’, but he had useful secular functions too, having been the scoutmaster-general (intelligence chief) in the Royalist army of the North. This escape from Oxford was planned despite the disapproval of many of Charles’s trusted followers, some of whom had called for him to accept a noble end in battle over the ignominy of being caught in disguise, while deserting his followers. The Parliamentarians, they said, would kill him either way.

  But Charles was one for whom the last word of advice tended to weigh heaviest, and when his courtier and confidant John Ashburnham told him that a secret breakout from Oxford could succeed, Charles let his nephew, Prince Rupert, and his cousin, the Duke of Richmond, know his intention of immediate flight. By candlelight Ashburnham clipped at the King’s hair and remodelled his beard, while providing him with a priest’s cassock as a further disguise. The governor of Oxford, Sir Thomas Glemham, was now let in on the plan. Glemham retrieved the keys to the city, and just after the clock struck three in the morning, he led the King, the courtier and the priest over Magdalen Bridge, towards the East Gate, wishing them well as they slipped away. Glemham then rode back alone, locking the gates of Oxford to all for five days, as agreed with the King. It was hoped this would result in enough of a head start to give this desperate plan its best chance of success.

  Charles’s design was to leave England for another of his kingdoms, Scotland. The principal Scottish army was in league with his Parliamentary enemies, joined to them through a religious and military covenant. But Charles hoped to play on residual loyalty to his Stuart family roots: Charles’s grandmother was Mary, Queen of Scots, while his father had been James VI of Scotland before succeeding Queen Elizabeth, in 1603, as ruler of England. Relying on the Scots was a risky strategy, but (after contemplating a bold appearance in London) Charles felt he had nowhere better to turn.

  Hudson led his royal master through various dangers: outside one town they passed by Parliamentary dragoons without being challenged; at a checkpoint in a village they were stopped. On being asked, ‘To whom do you belong?’ Hudson replied, ‘To the House of Commons.’2 They were waved on.

  The party of three eventually reached Norfolk, from where the prominent Parliamentarians Miles Corbet and Valentine Walton reported on the fugitive’s progress to the Speaker of the Commons. The King, they said, had swapped his black coat for a grey one, dispensed with his long cassock, and acquired a new hat: ‘Wherever they came, they were very private, and always writing,’ Corbet and Walton noted. ‘Hudson did enquire for a ship to go to the north, or Newcastle, but could get none.’3

  The fugitives eventually succeeded in reaching Newark, where they knew the Scots were besieging one of the last remaining Royalist garrisons. The King and his two companions presented themselves to an astonished Scottish army, forcing its generals to face a startling conundrum: here was their ruler – their chief enemy – who had come to them for help, and in the process had made himself their prisoner. Hudson quickly realised the gamble had failed. He learnt that the Scots were considering two options, both of them disastrous for his master: selling Charles to Parliament; or using him at the head of one English army to attack and weaken the New Model Army, the force which had recently dealt the Royalists repeated heavy defeats and whose successes now made the Scots uneasy when they looked south.

  Indignant that anyone might for a moment think they would let self-interest overcome their unswerving desire to do the right thing, the Scots wrote to Parliament in London: ‘Trusting to our integrity we do persuade ourselves, that none will so far misconstrue us at that we intended to make use of this seeming advantage for promoting any other ends than are expressed in the covenant, and have been hitherto pursued by us with no less conscience than care.’4 They then promptly sold the King to Parliament for a £100,000 down payment.

  From the moment he was taken north from Newark and handed over in Newcastle, the King was treated with dutiful respect by a Parliament eager to explore options for peace. The Presbyterian majority in the Commons had grave reservations about the rampant power of the army. It wanted to find an accommodation with Charles that maintained the monarchy, while securing the regular summoning of Parliament, and blocking the King’s ability to milk ancient, controversial powers and so circumvent it. If these goals were achieved, Parliament would be able to dismiss the troubling regiments that had given it victory over the Royalists, and live in peace with the much diminished Crown.

  To the powerful Puritan element in the army, this conciliatory attitude was profoundly alarming. It signified a denial of the King’s many and serious wrongdoings – something they believed God had made clear through administering Charles repeated defeats: in a superstitious age, battle was seen as an ordeal in which the righteous could expect to triumph. The level of success enjoyed by Parliament’s New Model Army had been astonishing. Gone were many of the patrician senior officers who had fought their King with reservation and trepidation: their first lord general, the Earl of Essex, had embarked on his initial campaign with sufficient pessimism to take his coffin in tow; and another commander, the Earl of Manchester, had openly despaired, ‘However many victories we win, there will still remain the King.’5 This aristocratic high command had been replaced by a band of flinty colonels: hard-bitten fighting men who had risen to regimental command, often from humble beginnings: they included a cobbler, a silversmith and a butcher’s son. Many of them believed they were on a divine mission to establish God’s will through force of arms. They had witnessed at first hand the slaughter of their men at battles and sieges, as well as the resulting suffering inflicted on the civilian population. They had honed their units into Christian powerhouses, where prayers were said morning and night, swearing was punished with the lash, blasphemy would see a man’s tongue pierced through, and the striking of a civilian or the threatening of an officer would result in a sentence of death.

  Meanwhile, an increasing number of soldiers wanted Charles to answer for what they saw as his personal crimes: no longer were they prepared to subscribe to the convention that the King was above wrongdoing, with any royal misdemeanour blamed rather on his advisers. This had reached absurd levels in the Civil War when Charles’s enemies claimed to be fighting him in the name of ‘the King and Parliament’.

  The soldiers of the New Model Army had seen the Civil War up close, and believed the responsibility for its horrors lay firmly at Charles’s feet. They feared that Parliament’s determination to turn a blind eye to such a glaring and calamitous offence sent a dangerous message to the large swathes of the population that still held a superstitious reverence for kingship. ‘These things I say made the people ready to conclude,’ wrote Edmund Ludlow, an MP and senior army officer, with a republican’s hatred for the flummery of royalty,

  that though his designs had been wonderfully defeated, his armies beaten out of the field, and himself delivered into the hands of the Parliament, against whom he had made a long and bloody war; yet certainly he must be in the right: and that though he was guilty of the blood of many thousands, yet was still unaccountable, in a condition to give pardon, and not in need of receiving any: which made them flock from all parts to see him as he was brought from Newcastle to Holmby [Holdenby], falling down before him, and counting him as only able to restore to them their peace and settlement.6

  Holdenby, where the King was now detained, was the enormous Northamptonshire mansion bought forty years earlier by his father, James I. Here, Charles was treated with such deference – his Parliamentary guardians decking out the Midland palace in freshly bought finery, and staffing it with royal minions – that tensions between Parliament and the army’s rank and file escalated. Soldiers who had risked their lives in the Parliamentary cause, defending what they saw as the liberties of the people and God’s true religion against a dangerous King who they believed harboured Catholic sympathies, were dismayed to see their defeated enemy easing back into a position of regal authority – one that
he had not only exercised so calamitously in the recent past, but which threatened their wellbeing now. If the King were restored to anything approaching his former powers, he would inevitably seek vengeance against the men who had defeated his forces and slain his friends and followers. The sacrifices on the field would have brought no advantage; they would merely have demanded retribution.

  Confident that they were in the ascendant, and that the soldiers that had won the war for their cause would soon be cashiered and put out to pasture, many in Parliament spoke openly of pricking the power of the army. Senior officers sitting in the Commons listened to increasingly strident attacks on the military with growing anger. ‘These men,’ the army’s second-in-command, Oliver Cromwell, hissed to Ludlow, ‘will never leave till the army pull them out by the ears.’7 Some soldiers fought back in the hostile forum, bringing successive petitions to Parliament with three clear demands: they wanted the kingdom’s affairs settled to their satisfaction; they insisted that they be given their outstanding wages; and they required that a pledge be made by MPs not to disband the army. Shocked by their impudence, Parliament instead threatened to treat any who repeated such petitions as traitors.

  Certain that its enemies in Parliament were determined to settle with the King to its detriment, the army sent a force to Holdenby to remove Charles into its custody. During the succeeding year he was shuttled round various military centres of operations – Royston, Hatfield, Reading and Woburn. On his travels he was wooed by four parties keen to harness the prestige of the Crown for their own purposes: the army, Parliament, the Scots, and those championing the City of London’s business interests. Sensing that Charles was feeling buoyed by the attentions of these powerful bodies, Henry Ireton, one of the leading figures in the New Model Army, warned: ‘Sir, you have an intention to be arbitrator between the Parliament and us – and we mean to be so between you and the Parliament.’8