Virgin Earth

  The Lord President Bradshaw nodded to the prosecutor John Cook to begin but he had turned away, talking to one of the lawyers. The king, with all his old imperiousness, poked Cook sharply in the back with his cane, and the man spun around in shock, his hand going instinctively to where his sword would be. A gasp went round the courtroom.

  ‘Why does he do it?’ Alexander demanded.

  John shook his head. ‘I doubt any man has ever turned his back to him before,’ he said quietly. ‘He cannot learn to be treated as a mere mortal. He was brought up as the son of God’s anointed. He just can’t understand the depth of his fall.’

  John Cook ostentatiously pulled his jacket into shape, and completely ignored the blow. He approached the judges’ table, and asked them to agree that if the king would not plead then his silence would be taken as a confession of guilt.

  The king replied. John noticed that in this crisis of his life he had lost his stammer. His diffidence in speaking directly to people had gone at last. He was clear and powerful as he told the court, in a voice raised loud enough to ensure that he could be heard in the courtroom and by the men scribbling down every word, that he was defending his own rights, but also the rights of the people of England. ‘If a power without law can make laws, then who can be sure of his life or anything that he calls his own?’

  There was a soft mutter from the courtroom, and a few heads nodded in the galleries where the men of property were especially sensitive to the threat that a parliament free of king and tradition might make laws that did not suit the men of land and fortune. There were Levellers enough to frighten the men of property back on to the side of monarchy. Those that called for the king’s execution today might call for park walls to be pulled down tomorrow, for a law which treated commoners and peers equally, and for a parliament which represented the working man.

  The Lord President Bradshaw, his metalled hat still clamped on his head, ordered the king to be silent, but Charles argued with him. Bradshaw ordered the clerk to call the prisoner to answer the charge but the king would not be silent.

  ‘Remove the prisoner!’ Bradshaw shouted.

  ‘I do require –’

  ‘It is not for prisoners to require –’

  ‘Sir. I am not an ordinary prisoner.’

  The guards surrounded him. ‘God no!’ muttered John. ‘Don’t let them jostle him.’

  For a moment he was back in the Whitehall palace courtyard with the king in the coach and the queen with her box of jewels. He had thought then that if one hand had touched the coach the whole mystery of majesty would be destroyed. He thought now that if one soldier took the butt end of his pike and irritably thumped Charles Stuart, then the king would go down, and all his principles fall with him.

  ‘Sir,’ the king raised his voice, ‘I never took arms against the people, but for the laws –’

  ‘Justice!’ the soldiers shouted. Charles rose from his chair, looked as if he wanted to say more.

  ‘Just go,’ John pleaded, his hands clapped over his mouth to prevent the words from being heard. ‘Go before some fool loses patience. Or before Cook pokes you back.’

  The king turned and left the hall. Alexander looked at John.

  ‘A muddled business,’ he said.

  ‘A miserable one,’ John replied.

  Tuesday 23 January 1649

  The hall doors did not open until midday. John and Alexander were chilled and bored by the time they pushed their way in. At once John’s eyes were taken by a great shield, white with the red cross of St George, hung above the commissioners’ table which was draped in a richly coloured Turkey rug.

  ‘What does it mean?’ he asked Alexander. ‘Will they sentence him without another word?’

  ‘If they decide that his silence means guilt then he cannot speak,’ Alexander said. ‘Once sentence is pronounced he’ll just be taken out. That’s how all the courts work. There’s nothing more to say.’

  John nodded in silence, his face dark.

  There was a sympathetic murmur as the guards brought the king into court. John could see traces of strain in his face especially around his dark, solemn eyes. But he looked at the commissioners as if he despised them and he dropped into his chair as if it were his convenience to be seated before them.

  John Bradshaw, the man with the hardest task in England, pulled the brim of his hat down to his eyebrows and looked at the king as if he were not far off begging him to see reason. He spoke quietly, reminding the king that the court was asking him, once more, to answer the charges.

  The king looked up from turning a ring on his finger. ‘When I was here yesterday I was interrupted,’ he said sulkily.

  ‘You can make the best defence you can,’ Bradshaw promised him. ‘But only after you have given a positive answer to the charges.’

  It was opening a door for the king; at once he soared into grandeur. ‘For the charges I care not a rush …’ he started.

  ‘Just plead not guilty,’ John whispered to himself. ‘Just deny tyranny and treason.’

  He could have shouted his advice out loud, nothing would have stopped the king. Bradshaw himself tried to interrupt.

  ‘By your favour you ought not to interrupt me. How I came here I know not; there’s no law to make your king your prisoner.’

  ‘But –’ Bradshaw started.

  The king’s outflung hand meant that Bradshaw should be silenced. The Lord President of the court tried again against the king’s torrent of speech. He gave up and nodded to the clerk of the court to read the charge.

  John looked over to where Cromwell was sitting, his chin in his hands, watching the king dominating his own trial, his face grim.

  The clerk read the long, wordy charge again. John heard his voice tremble at the embarrassment of being forced to read over and over again to a man who ignored him.

  ‘You are before a court of justice,’ Bradshaw asserted.

  ‘I see I am before a power,’ the king said provocatively. He rose to his feet and made that little gesture with his hand again which was a cue for a servant to bow and go. John recognised it at once but did not think that any other man in the court would realise that they had been dismissed. The king did not care to stay for any longer.

  ‘Answer the charges,’ John whispered soundlessly as the guards closed around him and the king walked from the court.

  Wednesday 24 January 1649

  John spent Wednesday idling at the little house in the Minories with Frances. The court was not sitting.

  ‘What are they doing then?’ Frances asked. She was kneading dough at the kitchen table, John seated on a stool at a safe distance from the spreading circle of flour. Frances had learned her domestic skills from Hester, so she would always be a competent cook; but her style was more enthusiastic than accurate and Alexander occasionally had to send out for their dinner after a catastrophe in the bread oven or a burned-out pot.

  ‘They’re hearing witnesses,’ John said. ‘It’s to put the gloss of legality on it. Everyone knows he raised the standard at Nottingham. We hardly need witness accounts on oath.’

  ‘They won’t call you?’ she asked.

  He shook his head. ‘They’re seeking the smallest of trifles. They’re calling the man who painted the standard pole. And for the battles they’re using the evidence of men who fought all the way through. I was there only at the very beginning, remember. I was there at Hull which everyone has forgotten now. I never saw proper fighting.’

  ‘Are you sorry now?’ she asked, with her stepmother’s directness. ‘Do you wish you had stayed by him?’

  John shook his head. ‘I hate to see it come to this, but it was a bad road wherever it led,’ he said honestly. ‘We would be in a far worse case today if he had succeeded, Frances. I do know that.’

  ‘Because of the Papists?’ she asked.

  John hesitated. ‘Yes, I do think so. If he is not a Papist himself then the queen certainly is and half the court with her. The children – almost bound to
be. So Prince Charles may be, and then his son after him, and then the door open again to the Pope and the priests and the monasteries and the convents and the whole burden of a faith that is ordered on you by your masters.’

  ‘But you don’t even pray,’ she reminded him.

  John grinned. ‘Yes. And I like to not pray in my own way. I don’t want to not pray in a Papist way.’ He broke off at her chuckle. ‘I have travelled too far and seen too much to believe in anything very readily. You know that. I have lived with people who prayed very faithfully to the Great Hare and I prayed alongside them and sometimes thought my prayers were answered. I can’t see only one way any more. I always see a dozen ways.’ He sighed. ‘It makes me uncomfortable with myself, it makes me a poor husband and father, and God knows it makes me a poor Christian and bad servant.’

  Frances paused in her work and looked at him with love. ‘I don’t think you’re a bad father,’ she said. ‘It’s as you say – you have seen too much to have one simple view and one simple belief. Nobody could have lived as you did, so far from your own people, and not come home feeling a little uneasy.’

  ‘My father travelled further and saw stranger sights but he loved his masters till the day of his death,’ John said. ‘I never saw him have a single doubt.’

  She shook her head. ‘Those were different times,’ she said. ‘He went far as a traveller. But you lived with the people in Virginia. You ate their bread. Of course you see two ways to live. You have lived two ways. And in this country everything changed the moment that the king took up arms against his people. Before then there were no choices to be made. Now you, and many others, see a dozen ways because there are a dozen ways. Your father had only one way: and that was to follow his master. Now you could follow the king, or follow Cromwell, or follow Parliament, or follow the army, or become a Leveller and call for a new earth for us all, or a Clubman and fight only to defend your own village, or turn your back on them all and emigrate, or shut the door of your garden and have nothing more to do with any of them.’

  ‘And what would you do?’ John asked, secretly rather impressed by his daughter’s political acumen.

  ‘I don’t have to choose,’ she said smugly with a sly little sideways smile. ‘That’s why I married Alexander.’

  ‘And which side does he serve?’

  She laughed outright. ‘He serves the master who pays the bills,’ she said. ‘As do most people. You know that.’

  Thursday 25 January 1649

  The High Court was sitting in the Painted Chamber in the Palace of Westminster. John knew the room from his days in royal service and guided Alexander through the maze of lobbies and waiting rooms and retiring rooms until they could slip in by a side door. The day was given over to reading out the signed depositions of witnesses who had spoken before the commissioners the previous day. There was little of interest – the halting accounts of the king on horseback riding through the wounded without caring for their condition. Accusations that royalist officers had permitted the looting of dead men’s weapons, and rifling the pockets of wounded men.

  ‘That’s very bad,’ Alexander said softly to John. ‘That’s one thing Cromwell’s very strict on. He won’t have looting. That’ll count against the king.’

  ‘Hardly matters,’ John said dourly. ‘Not when you think that he’s accused of tyranny and treason.’

  One witness, Henry Gooch, gave evidence to show that the king was trying to raise a foreign army to invade England even while he was negotiating with Parliament for an agreed return to the throne.

  ‘Could be a lie,’ John said.

  Alexander shrugged. ‘We know he was raising an army in Ireland and begging the Scots to invade. We know that the queen was trying to move a French army to turn out for him before the people of Paris rose up against their own king and drove him out of the city. This is just evidence on top of evidence.’

  ‘What happens next?’ John asked one of the soldiers of the guard as the clerk went on reading the evidence.

  ‘They have to find guilt and pronounce sentence,’ the man said solemnly.

  ‘But he hasn’t pleaded!’ John exclaimed.

  The man looked away. ‘If he chooses not to plead then it counts as guilty,’ he said. ‘There’ll be nothing for you to see or hear until they are ready to pass sentence.’

  ‘Does he know this?’ John asked Alexander. ‘D’you think he knows that if he goes on and on refusing to plead they’ll just execute him anyway? As if he had admitted his guilt?’

  ‘It’s his law,’ Alexander replied impatiently. ‘Men have been executed under his name. He must know what he is doing.’

  John felt himself shiver like a man with cold water down his spine.

  ‘I’ll wait,’ he said to Alexander. ‘May I stay with you a few days longer?’

  Friday 26 January 1649

  John and Frances walked together down to the Tower and then along the path beside the river.

  ‘I might go and stay with Mother for a few days,’ she said, looking out over the bright water.

  ‘Why?’ asked John. ‘Am I crowding you out?’

  ‘I don’t want to be here when they do it,’ she said.

  For a moment he did not understand her. ‘Do what?’

  ‘Behead him. They’ll do it here, won’t they? In the Tower? And put his head on Tower Bridge? I don’t want to see it. I know he’s been in the wrong, but I remember the day he came to the Ark and he was so handsome, and she was so pretty and dressed so richly. I don’t want to hear the drums roll and then stop for him.’

  ‘I have to,’ John said. ‘I feel I have to see the end of this.’

  Frances nodded. ‘I think I’ll go and stay with Mother for a while when they start to build the scaffold.’

  Saturday 27 January 1649

  Westminster Hall was more crowded than ever, John and Alexander were pressed against the railings and continually pushed against the broad back of a sentinel soldier. A little after midday the commissioners came into the hall; sixty-eight of them were present, Cromwell among them. When John Bradshaw came in wearing his hat John saw that he was robed in red, red as a cardinal, red as blood.

  There was complete silence when King Charles came in, dressed in his rich black. He walked with purpose, and his face was bright. He no longer looked like an exhausted man pushed to his limit, he looked determined and filled with confidence. John, reading his master’s stance and face, whispered to Alexander: ‘He has a plan or something. He’s found a way out.’

  Charles did not drop nonchalantly into his chair as he had done before. He seated himself and leaned forwards earnestly and spoke at once, before Bradshaw could begin. ‘I shall desire a word to be heard a little,’ he started.

  Bradshaw at once refused. The proceedings were fixed, the king could not simply speak as he wished. Instead Bradshaw himself started to repeat the charge when there was a stir from the galleries where two masked women were sitting.

  ‘Oliver Cromwell is a traitor!’ one of the women shouted clearly.

  ‘Take aim!’ shouted the commander of the guard and at once the soldiers in the courtroom turned their muskets on the gallery. There was a scream and a rush away from the armed men, Alexander stumbled and grabbed at the railing. The women were hustled away and the guards went back to their positions. Alexander straightened his coat and brushed down his breeches. ‘This is unbearable,’ he said to John. ‘I thought we were going to die in a riot.’

  John nodded. ‘Look at Cromwell,’ he said.

  Cromwell was on his feet, his eyes raking the crowd, taking in the leaded windows through which an attack on the courtroom might be led. There was nothing. It had been nothing more than one woman crying out for her king.

  Slowly, Cromwell resumed his seat, he glanced over to the king. Charles raised his eyebrows, slightly smiled. Cromwell’s face was grim.

  Bradshaw, struggling to regain the attention of the court, ruled that the king’s refusal to speak was considered to b
e a confession of guilt, it would count as a guilty plea. But since the charge was so serious they would hear him speak in his defence as long as he did not challenge the authority of the court.

  ‘They’re bending over backwards to give him a fair chance,’ Alexander whispered to John. ‘There’s no precedent for letting him speak in his defence when he won’t say whether or not he is guilty.’

  The king leaned forwards in his chair, his confidence increasing all the time. ‘For the peace of the kingdom and for the freedom of the people I shall say nothing about the jurisdiction of the court,’ he said clearly. Again, there was no trace of his stammer. ‘If I cared more for my life than for the peace of the kingdom and the liberty of the subject I should have made a particular debate and I might have delayed an ugly sentence. I have something to say which I desire may be heard before sentence is given. I desire to be heard in the Painted Chamber before the Lords and the Commons before any sentence is passed.’

  ‘What?’ John demanded.

  ‘What can he be thinking of?’ Alexander whispered. ‘A proposal of peace at last? Some kind of treaty?’

  John nodded, his eyes on the king. ‘Look at him, he thinks he has the answer.’

  Bradshaw was refusing, insisting on the court’s determination not to be delayed again when one commissioner – John Downes – started up. ‘Have we hearts of stone? Are we men?’ he demanded.

  Two judges either side of him tried to pull him down. ‘If I die for it I must speak against this!’ he shouted.

  Cromwell, seated before him, turned, his face black with fury. ‘Are you mad? Can you not sit still?’

  ‘Sir, no! I cannot be quiet!’ He raised his voice to reach everyone in the hall. ‘I am not satisfied!’