Joyce proceeded to deliver the king to Newmarket and thus to Cromwell. He claimed later that he was acting under Cromwell’s
orders, but Cromwell disputed it. Whatever the truth, the king was now in Cromwell’s hands and, unknown to anyone, the first
step to the scaffold had been taken. As for Joyce, he was later promoted to the rank of colonel, but was ever afterwards known
as ‘Cornet Joyce’ in recognition – or in horror – that one of the most junior officers in the army should have had the nerve
to kidnap a king.
On 7 June, after hearing Lilly’s account, William Prynne had a warrant issued for Joyce’s arrest. The colonel is thought to
have been still in England, but he avoided the bloodhounds and joined the list of military men, lawyers and politicians who
evacuated to the Netherlands.
During Lilly’s testimony another well-known name was dropped. This was Hugh Peters, the excitable Puritan preacher who was
close to Cromwell. Peters had visited the king frequently during his imprisonment and was thanked by Charles for his kindness,
but his brilliant and sometimes venomous sermons made him yet another royalist hate figure. Peters became a suspect in the
search for the axemen because Lilly reported that mention of him had been made during that supper. This was enough for William
Prynne to issue a warrant. The idea that the ungainly old Puritan had been one of the
hefty figures on the scaffold was ludicrous. But he had been such a celebrant of republicanism – and of Cromwell’s victories
– that he was a natural target for the royalists. He went into hiding in London and managed to stay undiscovered for weeks,
but his enemies would pursue him to the scaffold. A rhyme was taken up by newspapers: ‘The best man next to Jupiter/Was put
to death by Hugh Peter.’
6
In Ireland, the inquiry was handled by the recorder of Dublin, who was able to yield another suspect whom Prynne also had
arrested. He was a bearded army veteran, William Hulet (or Hewlet). A sergeant testified that in 1649 he and Hulet had been
in a unit drafted into Whitehall for the trial. He reported that, a day or two before the execution, a colonel gathered a
group of nearly forty men together and asked whether any would behead the king for £100. He also promised preferment in the
army. None of the men put their hand up. On the day of the execution, however, the sergeant was posted by the window to the
Banqueting House; from here he saw the heavily disguised executioner kneel and overheard him ask for the king’s forgiveness,
which of course was refused. The sergeant claimed to have recognised the voice as that of William Hulet. A short time after
the execution, Hulet’s promotion came through. He was made up to captain-lieutenant. Several other soldiers were found who
had served with Hulet and were willing to claim that he had admitted being on the scaffold. Hulet was held pending trial.
Throughout June, the Commons laboured over the punishment lists, while those who knew they were possible targets trembled.
If they were to be added to the list of those wholly excepted they would be as good as dead; if added to the secondary list
of the partially excepted, they faced attainder, probably incarceration and the destitution of their families. If they were
very lucky, they might escape with a fine and a permanent ban on holding office.
After agreeing the twelve-strong death list, the Commons took less than two weeks to choose the ‘twenty and no more’ men who,
though not regicides, were to join the bulk of the judges a step away
from the gallows in the partially excepted category. Predictably the twenty included the most troublesome figures of the old
republican establishment, Sir Harry Vane and Sir Arthur Haselrig. Also among them were the former Speaker, William Lenthall,
and the former generals John Desborough, Charles Fleetwood and John Lambert, as well as Daniel Axtell.
Gossip augured badly for them – and for that other former general Edmund Ludlow, who recorded:
My Lady Vane told my wife, that Mrs. Monck had said, she would go upon her knees to the King, and beg, that Sir Henry Vane,
Maj Gen. Lambert, and Lt-Gen. Ludlow, might die without mercy and one of my friends, who frequented the court, assured me,
he heard Monk saying to the King, that there was not a man in the three nations more violent against him, or more dangerous
to his interests than I was.
7
On 18 June two more men – William Hulet and Hugh Peters – were added to the death list. Peters was indicted on the strength
of a statement from William Young, a doctor from Pwllcrochan in Pembrokeshire. According to the
House of Commons Journal
, Dr Young claimed that he had attended Peters in Plymouth when he returned from Ireland dangerously ill and that Peters had
told him that ‘he and Oliver Cromwell, when the said Cromwell went from the Parliament unto the Army in 1648, did in a field
… none being present besides, contrive and design the death of his late Majesty, with the change of the Government.’
The bloodlust was mounting and this can be attributed at least in part to the king’s personal arrival on the scene. As Charles’s
Chancellor Edward Hyde coyly put it, ‘the actual presence of the King and his court and the exuberant ebullitions of loyalty
which burst so vehemently from assembled myriads had not tended to diminish their detestation of regicides or to impart a
merciful calmness to their deliberations.’
8
How bloodthirsty was Charles himself? Since his much-applauded declaration from Breda, his consistent posture had been that
of the merciful prince, the reconciler. Gone was the furious figure of earlier years, thundering for revenge. However, he
stood back as the numbers on the death list mounted, and was to help ensure that some were added to the list. Republicans
like Edmund Ludlow inevitably put the worst construction on Charles’s actions. Recalling the numbers of his friends lined
up for punishment or death in June and July 1660, Ludlow wrote:
Tho’ the message from Breda had declared the King would be satisfied, if some few persons who had an immediate hand in the
death of his father, might be excepted from the indemnity; yet finding himself now possess’d of the throne, ’twas visible
to all men that he used the utmost of his endeavours to influence the House of Commons to greater severities than were at
first pretended.
The king’s motives, Ludlow decided, were ‘partly revenge and partly rapine’, in other words, the royal seizure of the estates
of those who were excepted.
Bribery and enmity, and, of course, influence and family, played their parts in the selection of who was excepted and who
escaped. The diaries of that arch political fixer of the Commonwealth period, the lawyer Bulstrode Whitelocke, show all those
elements at work. Whitelocke had made some very dangerous enemies from his time as Commissioner of the Great Seal and president
of the Committee of Safety. They included George Monck, William Prynne and Heneage Finch. No more frightening a trio could
be imagined, given the influence each wielded. Prynne, the barrack-room lawyer, hated to be found in error on any fact and
during the Long Parliament Whitelocke, the genuinely learned lawyer, caught him out several times. The little man had borne
him a deep animosity ever since and, according to Whitelocke, searched the Parliament journals to
find something against him. Whitelocke’s wife, who apparently had helped Prynne when he was in poor straits, tried to intercede
for her husband. She waited for hours to see Prynne, only to be treated to an outburst of invective from him. He told her
that her husband should be excepted and he would see to it that he was excepted. She was then dismissed ‘more like a kitchen
wench than a gentlewoman’.
It is not clear why Finch was an enemy, but George Monck’s antagonism stemmed from Whitelocke’s warning to the Common Council
the previous winter that he, Monck, was planning the restoration. This, the General complained, might have ruined the whole
enterprise. He and Whitelocke had been friends but when Whitelocke went to see him to plead for his backing he was snubbed.
In his now desperate battle for survival, Whitelocke found himself paying out a fortune in bribes. The Earl of Berkshire,
whose daughter had been imprisoned by order of the Committee of Safety, which was sometimes chaired by Whitelocke, demanded
£500; if the money was not forthcoming, he would persuade the Lords to have Whitelocke excepted. Thomas Napper, Whitelocke’s
former clerk and now a royalist colonel, arranged for Whitelocke to have an interview with the king and expected £500 for
the favour (he got £250). Near the top of the tree ‘Ned’ Hyde, the Chancellor and a purported friend, was bought off with
‘a present’ of £250, plus ‘fees’ totalling £37 18s 8d. And right at the top, the king was graciously pleased to accept treasures
from the royal library which Whitelocke said he had saved for His Majesty. They included the fifth-century
Codex Alexandrinus
, which Whitelocke claimed he could have sold for £4000 overseas.
9
On 14 June, William Prynne, true to his threat, tabled a motion in the Commons proposing Whitelocke’s inclusion on the ‘twenty
and no more’ list. It may be hard to believe that sentiment played a part in deciding the fate of this wily man, but during
the debate much was made of the plight that Whitelocke’s family would face if he was excepted or partially excepted – he had
sixteen children to support.
The vote went Whitelocke’s way by 174 votes to 137.
10
His escape cost him ‘a great deal of money in gratifications and buying out of enemies from their designs of destroying him’,
Whitelocke wrote.
Midway through the compilation of the death list, on 16 June, the king issued a proclamation authorising the arrest of John
Milton and the minister John Goodwin. The poet was still in hiding and couldn’t yet be found. But his books could. Charles
ordered a public burning of Milton’s
Eikonoklastes
and
Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio
(in defence of the people of England). The king proclaimed that both books ‘contained sundry treasonable passages against
us and our Government, and most impious endeavors to justify the horrid and unmatchable murder of our late dear father, of
glorious memory’. The burnings, which were carried out with great solemnity by the common hangman, began on 27 August and
enough copies were found to enable him to repeat the performance every day throughout the next two weeks.
Milton remained at large for nearly two months. He was finally taken into custody at about the time of the book burnings and
remained in jail until 15 December. Then he was released without any charge. Monarchy’s most vibrant critic was neither excepted
nor subject to any sanction. That ‘amazed’ people, wrote Milton’s biographer David Masson. Their incredulity was understandable.
As another biographer put it, Milton’s offence was worse than that of the regicides, for ‘they had only put the King to death,
he attacked the very office and memorialized posterity against the very idea of Kingship’.
11
It seems that the poet was saved by the lobbying of his very powerful political friends, Sir William Morrice and Sir Thomas
Clarges, and by the support of royalist poets Andrew Marvell and Sir William Davenant, the Poet Laureate. Milton is said to
have intervened to save Davenant’s life in 1650 when he was in the Tower facing a possible treason trial, and Davenant was
determined to return the favour. Another of Milton’s biographers wrote: ‘A life was owing to Milton, and ’twas paid nobly.’
12
Throughout the list-making William Prynne was at his busiest, serving on more committees and speaking more often than anyone
else, a man driven by ‘a pathological desire for revenge on regicides and Cromwellians’, according to one historian.
13
During the first discussions he came triumphantly into the Commons brandishing data on eleven judges who had not been involved
in the sentencing of Charles but who, he said, had been active enough during the trial to qualify as regicides. The Commons
immediately put them on the partially excepted list. Then Prynne turned to those who had not participated as judges. On one
day alone, 18 June, he moved to except from pardon all the MPs who had drawn up the key Cromwellian statute,
The Instrument of Government
, and then successively moved to exclude Charles Fleetwood; Richard Cromwell; Major Selway, an ardeut republican; Bulstrode
Whitelocke; William Godwin and John Thurloe.
14
He failed this time, but Selway and Fleetwood were to be included on the list of twenty in the end.
In July, Prynne backed proposals to fine and disable whole classes of republicans and Commonwealthsmen from public or private
office – all those who had sat in High Courts of Justice since 1648, all of Cromwell’s major-generals, anyone who had petitioned
against the king, and whole sections of MPs and officials from the Protectorate. One proposal would have had them all refunding
their salaries. It was likened to a ‘hand-grenado thrown into a barrel of gunpowder’.
15
Charles’s wiser advisors managed to defeat the more extreme proposals, but according to Edward Hyde they were hard put to
do it.
Three of the four most prominent Scottish Covenanters were among the men swept into prison in July and regarded as regicides.
First came the leader of the Campbell clan, once the most powerful man in Scotland, the pious, squint-eyed, brilliant and
much feared Marquis of Argyll. Eight years earlier at Scone he had crowned Charles king of Scotland in return for the young
prince’s uncomfortable adoption of the Covenant. At the time, Charles promised ‘on the word of a King’ to make Argyll a duke
when he assumed the
English throne. Subsequently, their ways had parted, Charles fleeing Britain after the Battle of Worcester and Argyll reaching
agreement with Cromwell. Nine years later, Argyll could no longer expect that dukedom, but nor did he expect the reception
he was given when he arrived in Whitehall at the beginning of July. He asked for permission to see the king in order to kiss
his hand.
16
On hearing this, Charles petulantly stamped his foot and sent the Garter King of Arms to arrest the marquis for treason.