The King's Revenge: Charles II and the Greatest Manhunt in British History Read online

  Also by Don Jordan and Michael Walsh:

  Van Hoogstraten: Blood and Retribution

  White Cargo: The Forgotten History of

  Britain’s White Slaves in America

  COPYRIGHT

  Published by Hachette Digital

  ISBN: 9780748126545

  Copyright © Don Jordan and Michael Walsh 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  Hachette Digital

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DY

  www.hachette.co.uk

  To Dian and to Eithne

  CONTENTS

  Also by Don Jordan and Michael Walsh

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Contents

  Preface

  1 The Watchtower

  2 ‘That Man of Blood’

  January 1647–January 1649

  3 A Wicked Design

  8 January–27 January 1649

  4 Execution

  29 January–7 February 1649

  5 Propaganda and Assassination

  January 1649–October 1651

  6 ‘The Honour of Dying for the People’

  April 1653–August 1658

  7 After Oliver

  September 1658–October 1659

  8 The Invader

  October 1659–February 1660

  9 The Round-up Begins

  February–April 1660

  10 Exodus

  April –May 1660

  11 Death List

  May–September 1660

  12 ‘The Guilt of Blood’

  8–12 October 1660

  13 Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t

  13–19 October 1660

  14 Disinterred

  November 1660–April 1661

  15 Bloodhounds

  May–September 1661

  16 On the Word of a King

  September 1661–July 1663

  17 The Tightening Net

  1663–1665

  18 Plans to Invade and Hopes Dashed

  1665–1692

  19 Epilogue: the Legacy of the Regicides

  Appendix I: The Regicides and their Fate

  Appendix II: People

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  About the Author

  Illustration

  PREFACE

  The fate of the men who dared to sit in judgment upon King Charles I has intrigued us ever since we began work on our previous book, White Cargo. During our research we came across a curious folk tale from New England which made us wonder if we had spotted the tip of a more significant story. This is how we came to write The King’s Revenge.

  The folk tale, dating from the early English settlements in Massachusetts, was of the Angel of Hadley. The story goes that the remote pioneer village of Hadley was attacked by an overwhelming force of Algonquin warriors and faced certain annihilation. When all seemed lost, a mysterious figure appeared with flowing white hair and beard, brandishing a sword. Exhibiting considerable military prowess, the stranger marshalled the townsfolk into an effective fighting force. The enemy was repelled and the town saved. As soon as the battle was over, the stranger disappeared as quickly as he had come. Afterwards, the God-fearing people of Hadley put their rescue down to an avenging angel sent by God.

  Today, there is debate about whether the attack took place or not. But what interested us was that there existed a real-life candidate for the angel – a former Cromwellian general by the name of William Goffe, who had sat as a judge in the court that sentenced King Charles I to death. Following Charles II’s ascension to the throne, the general became a wanted man and fled to Massachusetts. British troops were dispatched to find him and bring him back to face trial for treason. Unknown to the people of Hadley, their Puritan pastor hid the runaway in the attic of his house for many years. If the attack really occurred, then the former Civil War officer would have been the ideal candidate to lead the townsfolk in battle.

  This story led us to wonder about all sixty-nine men who had determined the execution of King Charles I. How many, like the soldier in Massachusetts, had fled? Where did they run to and were they pursued? How many stayed in England to state their case and face the probability of death? How many were executed? How many were imprisoned? These were among the questions thrown up by the tale of the avenging angel. We decided to follow our lead and research the fate of the men who became known simply as the regicides. We discovered that their stories had never been gathered together into one coherent whole.

  Several months after the execution of Charles I in 1649, his eldest son, Charles, the Prince of Wales, wrote from exile in Holland, vowing vengeance on those blamed for his father’s death: ‘… we shall therein by all ways and means possible endeavour to pursue and bring to their due punishment those bloody traitors who were either actors or contrivers of that unparalleled and inhuman murder’.

  Of course, the prince had no means by which to carry out his threat. He lived on the charity of the ruling families of Europe and, as continental states gradually came to terms with republican England, was increasingly isolated. This all changed in the summer of 1660 when Charles was invited to return and take up the throne. Catapulted into power, he could at last do something about those who had brought about his father’s death.

  The story of the ensuing retribution is essentially that of an unrelenting manhunt for everyone who had signed Charles I’s death warrant, plus a few more whom Charles II wanted rid of.

  To tell the story required our starting with the actions that led to the hunt, the trial and execution of the king. It also required the creation of a narrative that encompasses a series of individual biographies. Of necessity, these biographies must play second fiddle to the narrative. Hence they cannot all be given the depth of attention they might each merit on their own. It is the greater story that we are after here and we have had to make judgments with which others might disagree. Those who wish to discover more on any one person will find the general bibliography at the end of the book a useful starting point.

  Today we know a great deal about the frivolous side of Charles II but we know less about his more ruthless side, which saw him callously send his political enemies to the scaffold. Fresh insights into his character may still be found. Contemporary parliamentary records reveal a new role for Charles: that of the interrogator. In late 1660, just a few months after ascending to the throne, the king went to the Tower and interrogated prisoners accused of treason. According to reports, the notoriously lazy monarch was a dab hand at drawing out confessions. Fortunately for the modern researcher and writer, the seventeenth century saw the explosion of the written and printed word: official records of all types, contemporary memoirs, newspapers, propaganda sheets, personal diaries and letters, plays and poems. All these and more flowed from pens and presses. We are grateful to have been able to access these precious documents, chiefly at the British Library and the Public Record Office.

  Thanks to this desire to record events, we have a greater idea of the struggle some men faced: a struggle with their consciences and their impulse for self-preservation. For example, at the last Parliament to be held before the return of Charles II, Thomas Scot effectively signed his own death warrant by declaring he was proud they had kille
d Charles I. By contrast, Thomas Fairfax, who commanded the New Model Army in its defeat of the royalist forces, provided a white horse for Charles II to ride at his coronation. Fairfax was not alone in changing sides. For most this was a simple matter of survival. Many of our most important characters did not, however, change their allegiance. They are interesting precisely because they stood up for their beliefs.

  Perhaps most exhilaratingly of all, seventeenth-century records bring to life a world of espionage. From papers held at the Public Record Office at Kew, spymaster Sir George Downing – ‘that perfidious rogue’, as Samuel Pepys described him – is revealed to us in all his brilliant treachery. We see him plan with ruthless efficiency to go to the Continent and kidnap his former friends and bring them back to be executed for treason. We see a honeytrap set by Aphra Behn, the Mata Hari of her day, successfully turn a republican exile into a spy for the House of Stuart.

  Some characters are interesting simply because they were there – and wrote down what they saw and thought. Hence the larger-than-life legal grandee Bulstrode Whitelocke who wrote in his memoirs that he evaded trial for his participation in the republic’s affairs by bribing, among others, Edward Hyde, a former fellow parliamentarian and friend. Hyde was by then Charles II’s Lord Chancellor and much given to moralising and lecturing the king about his mistresses, but not above extracting a small fortune from a former ally in need. Hyde’s more punctilious side allowed him to write a brilliant history of those turbulent years.

  The surviving documentation of the time also reveals the unsavoury side of statecraft and the law. One account of the court that was set up to judge the alleged regicides reveals that it was fixed, sending men to their deaths on specious charges and insufficient evidence. In a fit of hubris, the king’s counsel John Kelying wrote a legal memoir in which he recalled how judges and the prosecutors got together beforehand to rig the rules in order to meet their own ends.

  In dealing with our large cast, we have had to be wary of the sometimes misleading nature of the accounts. For example, Lucy Hutchinson’s famous memoir of her husband, Colonel John Hutchinson, one of the men who signed Charles I’s death warrant, needs to be approached with caution. It gives a sanitised version of how her husband evaded the death penalty after the restoration. Edmund Ludlow’s published memoirs were thought to be entirely by his own hand until his original manuscript, titled A Voyce from the Watchtower, was discovered at Warwick Castle in 1970. Thanks to the detective work of Dr Blair Worden, we now know this was a large part of Ludlow’s original manuscript and that the memoirs as previously published were a radically rewritten version by a different hand in order to present Ludlow as more of a late-seventeenth-century Whig and less of the religious radical he was in real life.

  Sometimes historical characters are fascinating because of their opacity. By far the most impenetrable character was George Monck, a professional soldier who first plied his trade for the House of Stuart. He later became one of Cromwell’s most trusted commanders. After Cromwell’s death, his career took a further twist: he helped to crush all parliamentary and army opposition in order to pave the way for the return of Charles II. It is hardly surprising that opinions differ on Monck’s motives. The reader will see we have reached our own conclusions.

  Today, the House of Stuart is remembered chiefly for its sexual scandal, a wonderful art collection and the formation of the Royal Society. Its Puritan adversaries are remembered almost solely as king killers and for Irish atrocities. They have been described as dangerous fanatics or, at best, foolhardy men who carried out a heinous deed. This is a shame, for among them were remarkable men. They played a critical role in British history, formulating forward-looking social, political and legal ideas that still hold good today, yet they have few monuments and, in the case of those who were executed, no graves. The remarkable struggle between Charles II and his recalcitrant subjects led to the longest-running manhunt in British history – a story worthy of a new and wider audience.

  1

  THE WATCH TOWER

  The middle-aged man who climbed the hill to the church above the little town on the shores of Lake Geneva had a heft and strut that marked him out as an old soldier. He carried a sword and wore a breastplate under his cloak. A casual observer might have marvelled at the vanity of a man trying to recapture the martial glories of his youth, but the truth was that the old soldier feared for his life.

  A plot to assassinate him had been thwarted only by the vigilance of his landlord, who on his way to church early one Sunday had spotted two ‘ruffian like fellows, desperados with long cloaks and carbines under them’.1 He returned home and told his tenant he thought the men were up to no good. Taking a chance, the old soldier crept out to catch a surreptitious glimpse of the rogues. What he saw confirmed his landlord’s fears. After that, he went to church well armed.

  Though he generally shunned company, to anyone who asked he introduced himself as Edmund Phillips, an Englishman who had chosen to travel and live abroad for a while. In reality he was a fugitive with a price on his head, unable to return home on pain of death, branded a traitor and compelled to live in exile under an assumed name.

  His real name was Edmund Ludlow. Born into minor gentry in Wiltshire, he was a veteran of the British Civil Wars. Before his enforced exile he had been a high-flyer: scholar of Trinity College, Oxford, attorney at the Inner Temple, Member of Parliament, Lieutenant-General of Cavalry, Commander-in-Chief of the Commonwealth Army in Ireland, High Sheriff of Wiltshire and member of the Commonwealth’s Council of State (the Cabinet).

  A portrait of him in later life shows a square sort of fellow with a large face and a determined yet small mouth above a large chin. He wears a full wig, a lace ruff and full armour befitting his status as a lieutenant-general.2 But the old soldier’s real claim to fame – or infamy – was that he had royal blood on his hands. He was a regicide, a king-killer, one of sixty-nine judges who tried Charles I for treason and sentenced him to death by beheading.

  The sixty-nine men who found Charles guilty of treason were a varied lot. What they shared was the belief that Charles had a view of monarchy at odds with the spirit of the age, pursuing autocratic decision-making and promoting religious policies that stifled freedom of conscience. Most of the sixty-nine were members of the House of Commons – or, rather, remnants of Parliament after royalist sympathisers had been ejected in a military coup d’état in late 1648. The aim of this had been to create a Parliament composed purely of radically minded men who would agree to put the king on trial for treason for having waged war against his people. Senior officers of the New Model Army (the Parliament’s victorious military force) including its creator, Oliver Cromwell, also sat as judges. The rest of the bench was made up of radical lawyers and wealthy merchants serving as aldermen, elected councillors, of London. To begin with, Parliament appointed 153 commissioners to try the king. The trial was so contentious that half refused to sit. Those who did voted unanimously to have the king executed for high treason.*

  By killing a king and establishing a republic, the king’s judges not only changed the course of English history but altered their own futures beyond their imagining. Following eleven years of experiments in government unparalleled in British history, the son of the executed king returned to England to rule as Charles II. He had left England fourteen years before when, at the age of sixteen, he fled into exile at the tail end of the Civil War.

  Charles II grew up in warfare and came of age in a foreign country, without a father. He joined his mother’s court in exile at St Germain near Paris, provided for by her French royal relatives. In the seventeenth century the age of sixteen was regarded as adulthood, though thanks to growing up in war-torn England, Charles could at times be socially awkward. To the eyes of the refined French royal court, he was even gauche, though not completely a lost cause. One of his mother’s grand relatives described him as ‘Swarthy, with fine black eyes and a wide, ugly mouth … his head was noble, his hair black
, his complexion brown, his person passably agreeable.’3

  Charles reached maturity as an impecunious prince without a state, flitting between the courts of Europe, selling his silver plate and keeping his demons at bay with a growing passion for sex that would propel him to take on a succession of mistresses in ensuing years. When the throne was suddenly and unexpectedly awarded to him, he seized the opportunity to make up for lost time with an instinctual thirst for luxury and excess – and an understandable desire for revenge upon those who had put him through hell by killing his father.

  The end of fourteen years of exile for Charles marked the beginning of a life of exile for many of his father’s enemies, including Edmund Ludlow. Prime movers behind the revolution – ‘the good old cause’ as they called it – including Oliver Cromwell and his son-in-law Henry Ireton, only evaded retribution by dying before the accession of the new king. Ludlow watched as parliamentarians, lawyers, members of the oldest families in England, were imprisoned and charged with treason.

  Ludlow realised he had become a wanted man. Sooner or later, officers of the Tower would come to arrest him. He moved to the home of friends he could trust. When he learned the two Houses of Parliament were debating who should be placed on lists for trial and execution, he quietly left the city, travelling up-river at night towards Richmond. To match his new renegade status he changed his habits and his appearance. The former government minister grew a beard and flitted in and out of London on foot, joining the robbers, prostitutes, homeless and other unfortunates who kept their watch on the city by night. Ludlow knew it was risky to frequent the city but he was anxious to keep in touch with events and in contact with his family and those who could help him.

  To decide upon his future, Ludlow risked convening a meeting of close friends and relatives at a house in Westminster. ‘A friend and kinsman’ advised him that he should ‘withdraw out of England … assuring if I stayed I was a dead man’. Ludlow was told he would only have to go abroad for a short while and that ‘he supposed within three or four months the hate and rage would be over’.4