John Bradshaw surveyed the sixty-eight commissioners, saw half a dozen irresolute faces, a dozen men wishing they were elsewhere, a score of men who would have to be persuaded all over again, and announced that the court would withdraw to consider.
The king went out first, his step light, his head high, a slight triumphant smile on his face. The commissioners filed out after him, muttering to each other, clearly thrown off their course by this late offer. A draught of clean, cold air swept into the courtroom as the double doors were thrown open at the back and some of the crowd left.
John and Alexander kept their places. ‘I’m not leaving,’ John said. ‘I swear he will escape the hangman. They’ll return with an agreement. He’s done it again.’
‘I wouldn’t take a bet against it,’ Alexander said. ‘He could easily do it. The commissioners are all of them uncertain, Cromwell looking ready to murder. The king has them on the run.’
‘What d’you think they are doing now?’ John asked.
‘Cromwell wouldn’t purge them, would he?’ Alexander speculated. ‘Rid himself of Downes and any that agree with him? He’s done it with Parliament, why not with the court?’
John was about to reply when the doors at the back of the hall were slammed shut, the usual signal that the court was about to reconvene, and then the king re-entered, smiling slightly, like a man who is playing a role which is too absurdly easy for him to take seriously, and seated himself in his red armchair. Then the commissioners came in again. Downes was not with them.
‘He’s not there,’ Alexander said quickly. ‘That’s bad.’
John Bradshaw’s face was as grim as Cromwell’s. He announced that the court would not accept any more delays. There would be no calling of the Commons and the Lords. The court would proceed to sentence.
‘But a little delay of a day or two further may bring peace to the kingdom,’ Charles interrupted.
‘No,’ Bradshaw said. ‘We will not delay.’
‘If you will hear me,’ the king said sweetly. ‘I shall give some satisfaction to you all here, and to my people after that.’
‘No,’ Bradshaw said. ‘We will proceed to sentence.’
The king looked stunned, he had not thought they would resist the temptation of an agreement. He sat back in his chair for a moment and John could tell, from his absorbed expression and the gentle beating of his fingers on the arm of his chair, that he was thinking of another plan, another approach.
It was John Bradshaw’s great moment. He had a speech in his hand and he started to recite. He read slowly enough for all the writers from the journals to copy down what he was saying. He cited the traditional duty of Parliament and the duty of the king, and the claim that kings could be held accountable for their crimes. The crowd grew restless during the long legal citations but Bradshaw came to the point – that the king, by taking arms against his people, had destroyed the agreement between a king and his people. He was there to protect his people, never to attack.
‘I would desire only one word before you give sentence,’ the king interrupted.
‘But sir, you have not owned us as a court, we need not have heard even one word from you.’
The king subsided into his chair as Bradshaw gestured to the clerk of the court.
‘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.’
In silence the sixty-seven commissioners rose to their feet.
‘Will you hear me a word, sir?’ the king asked politely, as if nothing had taken place.
‘You are not to be heard after sentence,’ Bradshaw said and motioned to the guards to take him away.
The king leaned forwards more urgently. He had not realised that they would not hear him after sentence had been passed. He knew so little of the laws of his own land that he had not realised a man sentenced is not allowed to speak. ‘I may speak after the sentence –’ Charles argued, his voice a little higher in anxiety. ‘By your favour, sir, I may speak after the sentence.’
The guards came closer. John found he was shrinking back, a hand to his mouth like a frightened child.
Charles persisted. ‘By your favour, hold! The sentence, sir, I do –’
The guards closed in, forcing him to his feet. Charles shouted over their heads to the stunned crowd: ‘I am not suffered for to speak: expect what justice other people will have!’
They hustled him from the hall, there were confused shouts, some for, some against him. The commissioners filed out, John saw them go as if they were floating away, Bradshaw’s red gown and absurd hat a dreamlike imagining. ‘I never thought they would do it,’ John said. ‘I never thought they would.’
Sunday 28 January 1649
John would not attend church with Frances and her husband. He sat at the kitchen table, a glass of small ale before him, while the church bells rang and then fell silent, and then rang again.
Frances, entering in a rush to prepare the Sunday dinner, checked at the sight of her father, so uncharacteristically idle.
‘Are you sick?’
He shook his head.
Alexander followed his wife into the kitchen. ‘They say he is praying with Bishop Juxon. He is allowed to see his children.’
‘No clemency?’ John asked.
‘They are building the scaffold at Whitehall,’ Alexander said shortly.
‘Not here?’ Frances asked quickly.
Alexander took her hand and kissed it. ‘No, my dear. Nowhere near us. They are closing off the street before the Banqueting House. They are fortifying it against a rescue attempt.’
‘Who would rescue him?’ John asked forlornly. ‘He has betrayed every one of his friends at one time or another.’
Tuesday 30 January 1649
It was such a bitter, cold morning that John thought the ice on roof and gutter had crept into his own veins and was freezing his belly and bones as he waited in the street. The king was to be executed before noon but though the streets were lined three-deep with soldiers, and the two executioners waited in the lee of the black-draped scaffold, the note-takers and sketch artists gathered at the foot, there was no sign of the king.
The street, crammed with people packed in behind the cordon of soldiers, had-a strange echo to it, as the sound of talk, prayers, and the shouts of ballad sellers bawling out the titles of their new songs bounced off the walls of the windowless buildings and boomed in the cold air.
John, looking behind him at the tight-packed crowd and then forwards to the stage, thought it seemed like an exercise in perspective, like Inigo Jones’s deceiving painted scenery for a masque, the penultimate scene of a masque which would be followed by the ascension, with Jehovah coming down from a great cloud and the handmaidens of Peace and Justice dancing together.
The two executioners climbed the steps to the platform and there was a gasp at their appearance. They were in costume, in false wigs and false beards and dark brown doublets and breeches.
‘What are they wearing? Masquing clothes?’ Alexander asked of the man on his left.
‘Disguised to hide their identity,’ the man said shortly. ‘It’ll be Brandon the hangman hidden under that beard, unless it’s Cromwell himself doing the job.’
John briefly closed his eyes and opened them again. The scene had not changed; it was still unbearable. The chief executioner positioned the block, laid down his axe and stepped back, his arms folded, waiting.
It was a long wait, the crowd grew restless.
‘A reprieve?’ Alexander suggested. ‘The plan he had for peace finally heard and accepted?’
‘No,’ someone said in the crowd nearby. ‘He has been stabbed to death by Cromwell himself.’
‘I heard there was an escape,’ someone else said. ‘He must have escaped. If he was dead they would show the body.’
The rumour and the speculation continued all the morning in a swirl of muttering all around John who stood cold and silent in the middle of it a
ll.
‘I must find something to eat,’ Alexander said. ‘I am famished.’
‘I don’t want anything,’ John said.
‘You must be starving, man; and cold,’ Alexander exclaimed. ‘Let me bring you a loaf of bread when I buy some dinner for myself.’
John shook his head. ‘I feel nothing,’ he said simply. ‘Nothing at all.’
Alexander shook his head and wriggled through the crowd to where an enterprising baker was selling hot bread rolls from a tray. It took him more than an hour to regain his place at John’s side but still nothing had happened.
‘I brought you some bread,’ he said cheerfully. ‘And I filled my flask with rum.’
John took the bread in his hand but he did not eat it. His eyes were fixed on the scaffold.
‘They are saying that the Scots have visited Colonel Fairfax, who was against this from the start, and that they are all going to Cromwell to beg for a reprieve. The king can be free to live abroad, even Scotland.’
John shook his head.
‘I know,’ Alexander said. ‘If they gave him so much as a farthing’s chance he would raise an army and come back again. If he can conspire from prison when he is bound by his word of honour, what would he do loose amid the courts of Europe? He would always come back again. They can’t trust him with his life.’
‘They’ve called Parliament,’ a man said beside them. ‘That’s the reason for the delay. They are passing a law in a hurry which says that no-one else can be proclaimed king. No value in beheading a king if another springs up to take his place, is there? And we have one of his sons in England and another two of them in France, and his nephew hanging round like a dog at the door of an abattoir. We’ve princes enough for pass-the-crown to go on forever. We have to break them of the habit now. So they’re making a law to say that no king can be proclaimed in England ever again.’
That sentence shocked John out of his absorption. ‘No king can be proclaimed in England ever again,’ he repeated.
‘Yes,’ the man said. ‘It has a ring to it, doesn’t it? It makes you feel that it’s all been worth the struggle. We are free of them forever. There will never be another man to set himself high above all others. There will never be another family who think themselves better than the rest of us by virtue of the bed they were born in. Any masters we have in the future will have to earn their place. They will have to be men that we choose to serve because they are wiser or better or even richer than us. But not because they are born to it. This is Charles the Last. After him there will be freedom.’
‘Charles the Last,’ John repeated. ‘Charles the Last.’
The clocks had struck twelve and then one and then two before there was a stirring among the soldiers which was quickly caught by the crowd, and then a shout: ‘He’s coming.’
John did not move. He was still and silent as he had been all day. The crowd around him jostled fiercely but John gripped his hands on the railing before him and held tight. Alexander saw that his knuckles were white; but so were his hands, his face, his whole body was bleached by cold and distress.
A window in the Banqueting Hall was open and the king stepped out on to the platform. He was simply dressed in black again: a black cape, a tall black hat, black breeches and a white shirt. The Order of the Garter was a blaze of colour in dramatic contrast. He looked out at the crowd, John felt that sombre, dark gaze pass over him and wanted to raise a hand, to catch at recognition for a moment. He kept his hands and his head down.
The king took some notes from his pocket and spoke quietly to the men on the platform. John, straining his ears, could hear only tantalising snatches of speech; only the last few words rang clear: ‘I am a martyr to the people.’
John heard a hiss of breath at the unending, irresistible grandeur and folly of the man, and realised it was cold air through his own teeth. The king swore that he died in the faith of his father, as a Christian, and then spoke quietly to the executioner.
‘Oh God, don’t let him botch it,’ John whispered, thinking not of the executioner who had done this a hundred times, but of the king who must do this beautifully, just once.
The king turned to Bishop Juxon and the bishop helped him to tuck his long hair under his cap to keep his neck free for the blade. Charles handed his George and the ribbon of the Garter to the bishop, and pulled the ring from his finger.
‘No, not that, no, no,’ John muttered. The details were unbearable. John had nerved himself for an execution; not for a man undressing as if in domestic confidence, tucking his hair out of the way of his pale, fragile neck. ‘Oh please God, no.’
Charles took off his doublet but wrapped his cloak around his shoulders again, as if it mattered that he should not catch cold. He seemed to be complaining about the executioner’s block. The executioner, a terrifying figure in his masquing disguise, seemed to be apologising. John, remembering the king’s ability to delay and prevaricate, found that he was shaking the fence post before him in painful impatience.
The king stepped back and looked up at the sky, his hands raised. John heard the scribble of a pencil behind him as a sketch-maker captured the image of the king, the martyr of the people, his eyes on heaven, his arms outspread like a statue of Christ. Then the king dropped his cloak, knelt down before the block and stretched out his neck.
The executioner had to wait for the signal; the king had to spread out his arms to consent. For a while he knelt there, unmoving. The executioner leaned forwards and moved a wisp of hair. He waited.
‘Please, do it,’ John whispered to his old master. ‘Please, please, just do it.’
There was a wait of what seemed like hours, then with the gesture of a man diving into a deep river the king flung his arms out wide and the axe swept a lovely unstoppable arc downwards, thudded into his neck bone, and his head dropped neatly off.
A deep groan came from the crowd – the sound a man makes at his death, the sound a man makes at the height of his pleasure. The sound of something ending, which can never happen again.
At once there were slow, determined hoofbeats behind them and people screaming and pushing in panic to get away.
‘Come on!’ Alexander cried, tugging at John’s sleeve. ‘The cavalry is coming through, out of the way, man, we’ll be ridden down.’
John could not hear him. He was still staring at the stage, still waiting for the final act when the king, gorgeously dressed in white, would step down from the stage and dance with the queen.
‘Come on!’ Alexander said. He grabbed John’s arm and dragged him to one side. The crowd eddied, rushing to the sides of the street, many running forwards to the scaffold to snatch a piece of the pall, to scrabble for a bit of earth from under the stage, even to dip their handkerchiefs in the gush of scarlet hot blood. John, pulled by Alexander, and pushed by the people behind him trying to get away from the remorseless cavalry advance down the street, lost his feet and fell. He was kicked in the head at once, someone trod on his hand. Alexander hauled him upwards.
‘Come on, man!’ he said. ‘This is no place to linger.’
John’s head cleared, he struggled to his feet, ran with Alexander to the side of the road, pressed against the wall as the cavalry forced their way down to the scaffold, and then slipped away as they went past. At the top of the road he checked, and looked back. It was over. Already it was over. Bishop Juxon had disappeared, the king’s body had been lifted through the window of the Banqueting House, the street was half-cleared of people, the soldiers had made a cordon around the stage. It was a derelict theatre at the end of the show, it had that stale leftover silence when the speeches have been finished and the performance is all over. It was done.
It was done but it was not over. John, returning home, found his house besieged with neighbours who wanted to hear every word, every detail, of what he had seen and what had been said. Only Johnnie was missing.
‘Where is he?’ John asked Hester.
‘In the garden, in his boat on the la
ke,’ she said shortly. ‘We heard the church bells toll in Lambeth and he knew what it was for.’
John nodded, excused himself from the village gossips and went down the cold garden. His son was nowhere to be seen. John walked down the avenue and turned right at the bottom for the lake where the children had often gone to feed ducks when they were little. The irises and reeds planted in the wet ground at the margin were in their stark frosted beauty. In the middle of the lake the boat was drifting, Johnnie, wrapped in his cape, sitting in the stern, the oars resting on the seat either side of him.
‘Hey there,’ John said gently from the landing stage.
Johnnie glanced up and saw his father. ‘Did you see it done?’ he asked flatly.
‘Aye.’
‘Was it done quickly?’
‘It was done properly,’ John said. ‘He made a speech, he put his head on the block, he gave the sign and it was done in a single blow.’
‘So it’s over,’ Johnnie said. ‘I’ll never serve him.’
‘It’s over,’ John said. ‘Come ashore, Johnnie, there will be other masters and other gardens. In a few weeks people will have something else to talk about. You won’t have to hear about it. Come in, Johnnie.’
Spring 1649
John was wrong. The king’s execution was not a nine-day wonder, it swiftly became the theme of every conversation, of every ballad, of every prayer. Within days they were bringing to John the rushed printed accounts of the trial and eyewitness descriptions of the execution, and asking him if they were the truth. Only the most hard-hearted of roundheads escaped the mood of haunting melancholy, as if the death of a royal was a personal loss – whatever the character of the man, whatever the reason for his death. The country was gripped with a sickness of grief, a deep sadness which quite obscured the justice of the case and the reasons for his death. No-one really cared why the king had to die. In the end, they were stunned that he had died at all.