Act of Oblivion, page 31
He grabbed his pistol from beneath his pillow and strode along the passage. Will was lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling. He sat up as Ned entered. Ned put his finger to his lips, warning him not to speak. ‘There’s a man come,’ he whispered, ‘a stranger.’ He beckoned to Will to follow.
They went into the passage and lifted the planks. Ned descended the ladder to the earth floor. Will climbed down a few rungs, reached up and replaced the boards, then came down the rest of the way to join him. It was the first time they had been forced to hide. They had no candle. Pressed close together in the warm darkness behind the chimney, they stood and listened to the murmur of voices, indistinct through the heavy brickwork. Presently they heard the clump of footsteps going up the stairs. The heavy feet passed above their heads and stopped. The planks were lifted. John Russell’s head appeared.
‘You have a visitor.’
Ned said, ‘Who is he?’
‘He gives his name as James Davids and claims to know you both. He’ll say no more till he sees you.’
‘Is he genuine?’
‘I believe so. He says he’s come from Holland.’
‘Holland?’
Will said, ‘How does he know we’re here?’
‘He was told by our friends in Boston, which makes me think he speaks the truth. They must trust him, although the letter he brought from them is naturally circumspect. They sent him with a guide.’
‘What do you say, Ned?’
Ned thought it over. ‘If he knows we’re here, any harm is already done. But I know of no one named James Davids.’
‘Nor I. It sounds a made-up sort of name.’
They climbed up out of the chamber, brushed the dust from their clothes, and followed Russell downstairs – Will first, eager with curiosity, Ned behind with his pistol, more wary.
The stranger stood warming himself at the fire, an old leather sack at his feet. He had the look of a vagrant – a narrow, half-starved face, blotchy with cold, and long, straggling hair and beard, just starting to turn grey. He took off his hat. ‘Colonel Whalley! Colonel Goffe! How glad I am to find you both alive!’
As he moved towards them, hand outstretched, Will said in a tone of astonishment, ‘I believe I recollect your face,’ and after a moment or two, beneath the havoc wrought by the past six years, Ned dimly recognised him too – Roundhead colonel, wealthy gentleman, Member of Parliament, judge at the King’s trial, and fellow signatory of His Majesty’s death warrant – John Dixwell.
That evening, after Dixwell had cleaned himself up and put on some old clothes belonging to Reverend Russell, the four men sat down to supper in the parlour and he told them something of his adventures. When the monarchy had been restored in the summer of 1660, he had at first promised to turn himself in under the terms of the Act of Oblivion. But he had delayed the date of his surrender, pleading ill health, and used the time to sell some property. Then, carrying enough money to live comfortably, he managed to slip out of England to Rotterdam. From there he went to Hanau in Germany, where he stayed for a couple of years within walking distance of Valentine Walton, John Barkstead and John Okey. He had almost been caught in the same trap as Barkstead and Okey, but something about the invitation to Delft had made him suspicious.
‘I told them they were fools to go, but Okey trusted that serpent Downing. When I heard what had happened, it was no surprise to me. I knew then I had to get out of Hanau.’
He moved on to Switzerland, to Lausanne, to see Edmund Ludlow, who had assured him it was safe. Then Ludlow had nearly been kidnapped by some Irish adventurers, and John Lisle, living in the next town, was shot dead in the street, and so he had abandoned Switzerland and headed back to Holland. But then came the capture of New Amsterdam, and everywhere suddenly there was talk of a war between England and the Dutch. Deciding that, as an Englishman, in such an event he would be too conspicuous, he had taken a ship to Boston, arriving in December, and now here he was.
Ned said, ‘It seems that wherever you go, disaster follows.’
Will laughed, shaking his head. ‘Come now, Ned, that’s unfair. John merely showed prudence.’
John . . .
From the start, Ned did not care for Dixwell. There was something about him – a smugness in the way he talked, a certain condescension, although Will did not seem to notice it, hanging on his every word. Ned guessed he was about ten years younger than himself, ten years older than Will. He had been MP for Dover at the outbreak of the Civil War, and had been given the rank of colonel, although he had never fought in a proper battle, at least not that Ned could recall. What he did remember was that Dixwell had voted in the Commons to put the King on trial, and had sat as judge, but then like many others had tried to avoid signing the death warrant. He was one of those MPs Cromwell had hauled out of the chamber on the day before the execution, marching him to the room where the warrant lay on the table and thrusting the pen into his hand.
Still, Ned tried to adopt a more friendly tone. ‘So how long will you stay with us, Colonel Dixwell?’
‘That depends upon the goodwill of Mr Russell.’
‘You are welcome as long as you wish to remain,’ said Russell.
Dixwell said, ‘I am confident of a great change in our fortunes in ’sixty-six, when the Lord is come in glory and our cause will be restored.’
Ned said, ‘You will stay as long as that?’
‘If I am permitted.’ Dixwell glanced at Russell, who nodded. ‘It will be a glorious day to share together.’
‘Amen,’ said Will. ‘God came to me in a dream last night and showed me a vision of a world on fire, with a great light coming down from Heaven, and a man walking through the flames unscathed, clad from head to toe in white. Our Lord and Saviour, come to save us.’
There was a silence as they considered this.
‘Can it really be so certain?’ Ned blurted out. ‘I am no authority on the Scriptures, but the prophecy seems to me conjectural. If 666 truly marks the end of days, should not the Second Coming have occurred in Saxon times? It seems a long time for you to wait for something that mayn’t happen.’
‘Forgive my father-in-law,’ said Will. ‘Sometimes I think he has the makings of a Presbyterian.’
Offended – a Presbyterian, him? – Ned excused himself abruptly and went upstairs to bed. He knew his behaviour was sulky, childish even; that he was turning into one of those querulously stubborn old men he had despised in his youth. He would apologise. He lay awake for an hour or two, presuming that Will, when he came up, would shift along the passage to share his room, and surrender his own to Dixwell. Instead, when at last he heard them mount the stairs, the two men retired together. He fell asleep to the sound of their murmured conversation.
The next morning, he said, with a forced smile, ‘You are very thick with Colonel Dixwell.’
‘We thought it best that John should share with me, for as long as he decides to stay.’
‘As you wish.’
‘You are offended?’ Will put a concerned hand on Ned’s arm. ‘I thought the arrangement would suit you. You keep to your room more than I do mine. It means you may write your book in peace.’
‘I have it in mind to abandon my book.’
‘Why?’
‘It is not pleasant always to dwell so much in the past.’
‘But how else will you pass the time? At least I am still able to work.’
It was not meant unkindly. Still, Ned flinched. There it was – the unspoken spoken at last. He was in his sixty-seventh year, his old wounds aching, his muscles shrunken on his thin arms: a burden, too old to do much now except sit in his room with his memories. ‘Well, I suppose that’s true enough.’
He stood at the window and watched the two younger men walk across the yard to the barn.
My dear and only daughter, I must speak now of the execution of the King, the act which brought us to our present unhappy state.
Following His Majesty’s recapture and close imprisonment on the Isle of Wight, the Civil War – which we had thought won – flared up anew, and for a time, our position looked quite hopeless. A huge Scottish army was mustering in the north, to come to His Majesty’s rescue. Our counsels were divided, between those in Parliament who still believed a settlement with the King was possible, and the bulk of the army which believed Charles Stuart was Satan. Royalist uprisings spread across the country. In May 1648, General Cromwell and I parted, he to the west, to suppress the King’s forces there, and I to the east, to help perform a similar task in Kent and Essex.
The fighting of that summer and autumn was much crueller and more desperate than anything that had gone before. His mind recoiled at the memory. Such things as he had never expected to see in England. Crops and barns and windmills set on fire to starve the enemy countryside. Colonel Shambrooke shot through the body with a poisonous bullet that had been boiled in vitriol. At Chelmsford, the bodies of twenty Royalists laid out in a row, all gentlemen, with their fine clothes and white skin, all shot in the back of the head. At Colchester, his troopers had thrown a grenade into the enemy’s gunpowder store and blown more than a hundred men to pieces. The Royalist commanders, Sir Charles Lucas and . . . what was the other one called? Sir George Lisle, that was it . . . both shot in the castle yard after a drumhead trial despite having surrendered. So many good men lost.
To understand what followed, Frances, you had to know what it was like.
After General Cromwell had beaten the Welsh at Pembroke, and then the Scotch at Preston, the forces of the New Model Army converged on London determined to settle the matter of the King once and for all. I arrived along with the main force on Saturday 2nd December. We occupied the palaces of Whitehall and St James, sleeping in the royal apartments, the state rooms, the servants’ quarters – wherever a man might lie. On the following Tuesday, despite the presence of many thousands of soldiers, the Commons passed a motion to continue negotiations with the King. Seeing there was no possibility of such an assembly ever agreeing to bring His Majesty to trial, the Army Council decided to exclude all those Members of Parliament who had voted in favour of a settlement.
It was Will’s regiment, commanded by Colonel Pride, the most radical in the army, that had been given the honour of surrounding the Commons chamber. Will had been in the thick of it, dragging off forty MPs who dared to protest to a holding prison in a nearby tavern, and turning back more than twice that number at musket point when they came to take their seats. Ned had helped in the task, carrying away that prating windbag William Prynne, with his earless skull and twisted face.
You may wonder – many did; I did myself – at the action of an army that had gone to war in the name of Parliament now treating it more roughly than the King had ever dared. But we knew that God was with us. How else could we have won so many victories? We were sure it was his work we were doing.
Even so, he had argued privately with Cromwell about their methods. Surely there must be simpler ways to dispose of the King than the full panoply of a trial. His Majesty had tried often enough to escape. Give him the opportunity to try again, then shoot him as he fled: would that not be just? But Cromwell retorted that the Lord’s work was not to be done in the dark. The people should see Charles Stuart charged with his crimes and justly punished according to the law. He was confident the King would be utterly humiliated. Ned was not so sure.
Six weeks later, the King was brought to London under heavy guard and imprisoned in a house on the Thames, within the precincts of Westminster, which was an armed camp. Ned was among the panel of one hundred and thirty-five commissioners – officers, MPs, lawyers – appointed to be judges. The trial was fixed to start at Westminster Hall, the largest space in England, on the afternoon of Saturday 20 January.
From the outset, looking out across the vast building, ringed with soldiers, crowded with hundreds of spectators, he was uneasy. Only half the judges’ seats were occupied; the rest were too frightened to attend. When the roll call was taken, General Fairfax was found to be among those missing. People whispered: where was he? A woman called out from the public gallery, ‘He has more wit than to be here!’ Few recognised her, but Ned did: Lady Fairfax.
After that, it played out exactly as he had feared. He knew Charles Stuart better than any of them. The moment he came up the steps into the hall, that slight figure, flanked by soldiers commanded by Colonel Hacker, Ned could see he was entirely unbowed. The King was not provided with a lawyer. He had not been told the charges against him. He took his seat and glanced around him with his usual mixture of detached curiosity and contempt. He scanned the judges’ benches – apart from Cromwell and Ireton, men almost entirely unknown to him – and for a moment his eyes rested briefly on Ned before dismissing him with a flicker of disdain and moving on. When John Cooke, the prosecuting attorney, began to read the indictment, accusing the King of breaking his coronation oath and making war on his own people, Charles reached over and tapped him on the shoulder with his cane to interrupt him, and when Cooke took no notice, he struck him hard enough for the silver head of the cane to fall off and roll across the flagstones. He waited for someone to retrieve it, and when no one did, he picked it up himself.
Bradshaw, the president of the court, asked him how he wished to plead.
‘First, I would know by what power I am called hither – what lawful authority.’ His voice was clear and firm. ‘There are many unlawful authorities in the world, thieves and robbers by the highway. Remember, I am your King, your lawful King . . .’
He refused to enter a plea until he was told the legal precedent for the court, and as there was none, he put them all on the defensive – so much so that when he was taken away at the end of the afternoon, there were even shouts of ‘God save the King!’
He behaved in the same fashion when they assembled on Monday afternoon, and again on Tuesday. It was no longer the King who was on trial, but the army and its legitimacy. A change of tactics was required. On Wednesday morning, the judges voted in private to exclude the accused from the court and to hear the prosecution witnesses in his absence. On Saturday morning, they found him guilty behind closed doors. In the afternoon, he was brought back to Westminster Hall to receive the verdict. Bradshaw asked him if he had anything to say before sentence was pronounced. Still refusing to recognise the army’s court, he asked to address a joint meeting of the Lords and Commons. Bradshaw refused, at which point an extraordinary scene occurred. An MP, a nobody named John Downes, who was sitting two places along from Ned, called out, ‘Have we hearts of stone? Are we men?’
Shaking off the restraining hands on either side, he struggled to his feet. Cromwell, on the bench immediately in front of him, turned round, frowning. ‘What’s wrong with you, man? Are you mad? Sit still and be quiet!’
‘No, sir. I cannot be quiet. Even if I die for it, I must object.’
Bradshaw nervously adjourned the court and the judges retreated to their chamber, where Cromwell railed against Downes for his cowardice. But two or three other judges spoke up in his support. ‘Could we not at least hear what His Majesty has to say? He must have in mind some offer which might settle the peace of the nation?’
‘God’s teeth, can you not see? It is merely another trick of his! We have not come so far to turn back now! You are milksops . . .’
For half an hour, Cromwell thundered at them, until their resistance weakened and cracked, like some fortress under siege, whereupon they all trooped back into Westminster Hall – apart from Downes, whom they left behind in tears – for sentence to be pronounced.
‘. . . that the said Charles Stuart, as a Tyrant, Traitor, Murderer and a public enemy, shall be put to death, by the severing of his head from his body.’
The King said calmly, ‘Will you hear me a word, sir?’
‘You are not to be heard after the sentence,’ said Bradshaw. ‘Take him away.’
The King looked astonished. ‘I may speak after the sentence . . .’ And for the first time, as the guards moved in to lead him away, his composure broke. ‘By your favour, hold! The sentence, sir – I say, sir, I do—’
The remainder of his words were lost in a welter of shouts from the soldiers – ‘Execution! Justice! Execution!’ – as he was marched down the steps out of sight to await his fate.
Ned sat back in his chair, exhausted. He had a sharp, stabbing pain behind his eyes and a tingling in his arms. He had not thought about the events of the trial for many years – never, in fact, in any detail. He waited for the symptoms to pass, as they always did. What else could he remember? That the following day, Sunday, was a day of prayer and meditation. That on Monday, the death warrant was laid out on a table in the Painted Chamber, and he had walked over with Cromwell from Whitehall Palace to sign it (Oliver had requisitioned one of the finest bedrooms in the royal apartments). A dozen or two of the judges were already waiting, warming themselves at the vast fire. It was a perishingly cold day. There was a Turkish carpet spread across the table. Bradshaw signed first, then Lord Grey, the only nobleman among them, then Cromwell, who was in high spirits – he flicked ink onto the face of Henry Marten, who flicked him back. Then Oliver handed Ned the pen and he signed it next, in fourth place, and added his seal with the family crest of three spouting whales. He did so without a qualm. The punishment was just. It was God’s will. Only the trial had been a mistake. He gave the pen to John Okey. He remembered also that Will was there, fresh from visiting the King, standing at the fire describing how he had tried, as an act of compassion, to convince Charles Stuart to pray with a couple of Puritan ministers he had taken along with him: he had been dismissed without a word.
By the middle of the morning, they had about three dozen signatures. ‘Not enough,’ said Cromwell. Ned went with him down to the door of the Commons chamber to haul out the MPs who were trying to evade their duty. ‘Those that are gone in shall set their hands. I will have their hands now.’ Cromwell went in to fetch them. Dixwell was one. The wretched John Downes was another: Cromwell walked him to the Painted Chamber with his arm around his shoulders, telling him this was his chance to redeem himself in the eyes of God and his comrades.
