Graphic fragments of evidence kept surfacing to stir the punitive venom of the Lords. The sight of the fatal death warrant
was one. The allegation that soldiers had spat at the king was another. And there was the report of how the carpenter who
constructed the scaffold, a man named Trench, had dipped his handkerchief into Charles’s blood after the deed was done. On
the day the Lords had their first glimpse of the death warrant, they produced a list of all the judges present when sentence
was pronounced and a second list of all who signed the warrant, and immediately voted to have all the men on both lists wholly
excepted.
It was all taking too long for the king. He wanted the Bill of Indemnity out of the way so his council could get on with the
potentially explosive task of disbanding the army. For all George Monck’s regimental purges, there was a real danger of a
backlash from republican officers if retribution were to be visited on too many people, which was what the peers’ bloodlust
threatened to achieve. On 27 July Charles came down to the House to urge it to complete its deliberations quickly. In a speech
that challenged the Lords to defy him, he said, ‘I do earnestly desire and conjure you, to depart from all particular animosities
and revenge … and that you will pass this Act, without other exceptions than of those who were immediately guilty of that
Murder of My Father.’
On the day that the king was delivering his injunction to the Lords, the
Prudent Mary
was disembarking Edward Whalley and William Goffe in Boston. New England was as yet unaware of the reversal of fortunes in
England. No one in America, including the two newcomers, yet knew of the hue and cry unleashed all over England in pursuit
of the king’s judges. The two men were war heroes and stars of a revolution of which Massachusetts heartily approved, and
the colony’s Puritan establishment opened its arms to them.
22
No one of their status had ever visited the colony before, and they were wined and dined by the great and good almost from
the moment they landed. The governor of Massachusetts, John Endecott, set the pace, receiving and feasting them in their first
week in Boston. Other prominent colonists, including the president of Harvard, followed suit. So did the governor of New Haven,
William Leete, who put them up in his home. Captain John Crowne, an angry royalist, later reported that the regicides ‘were
treated like men dropped down from heaven’.
23
It was a honeymoon which should have been short-lived, for news of the restoration came hard on the regicides’ heels. Less
than two weeks after the arrival of Whalley and Goffe, their host Daniel Gookin showed them a paper brought by the latest
ship to dock. It reported the House of Lords’ order to arrest sixty-six members of the High Court of Justice and seize their
estates. Goffe wrote in his diary, ‘Went to Boston lecture, heard Norton, Scotch ship brought threatened recognition.’ The
two were subsequently challenged in the street, apparently by someone from the same ship, while another royalist, Thomas Breedon,
demanded their arrest. Yet such was the climate of opinion in the colony that nothing was done. Governor Endecott told Breedon
that he would not ‘meddle with them’ without an executive order.
Breedon later returned to England and unloaded his outrage on the Council of Foreign Plantations, the embryonic Colonial Office
presided over by the Duke of York. Captain Breedon told the council that when he demanded action against Whalley and Goffe,
the
marshal-general in Massachusetts had grinned in his face and taunted him: ‘Speak against Whalley and Goffe if you dare, if
you dare.’ Even after another Scottish ship berthed in Boston, bringing Breedon copies of the final Act of Pardon and Oblivion
and the king’s proclamation, he was vilified for showing them around. The copies were dismissed as ‘being more malignant pamphlets
that he had picked up’. Whalley and Goffe remained utterly unmolested. The remarkable honeymoon of the two supposedly hunted
men would last beyond Christmas.
Back in England, the Lords voted to except three more men who had nothing to do with Charles I’s death: Sir Harry Vane, Sir
Arthur Haselrig and the once-feared general John Lambert. The additions were made in the presence of James, the king’s brother.
He and the youngest Stuart brother, the Duke of Gloucester, regularly attended these sessions, no doubt reporting back to
the king and ensuring that his real wishes were transmitted to the floor.
Aristocratic bloodlust was anything but sated by the lengthening death list which the peers were building, apparently with
royal approval. The Lords took up the Penruddock campaign and found more victims there: ‘In the House of Lords, much striving
there is of several parties to increase the number excepted,’ Edmund Ludlow recorded. ‘Mrs Penruddock and Dr Hewitt’s widow
and several others solicit for particular satisfaction for the death of their relations … And much ado they make.’ Still greater
ado was created when an altogether more celebrated widow, the Countess of Derby, joined in. She was bent on vengeance for
the execution of her husband, the Earl of Derby, who was beheaded with other Cavaliers after a court-martial at Chester in
1652.
When she surrendered a stronghold on the Isle of Man upon receiving the news of her husband’s death, Lady Derby had earned
the distinction of being the last royalist commander in the British Isles to submit to Cromwell’s Commonwealth. Man was effectively
a fiefdom of the earldom and, come the restoration, Lady Derby took revenge on the local Roundhead leader on the island who
had
besieged her, exercising her power as de facto queen of Man by executing him. Then she targeted the four members of her husband’s
court-martial, which included Colonel Harry Bradshaw, a brother of John Bradshaw. A petition from the countess prompted the
House of Lords to summon Bradshaw and accuse him of breach of privilege. Grasping at the furthest reaches of their prerogative,
the Lords held that for commoners to condemn a peer to death was unlawful. Luckily for Harry Bradshaw, he managed to convince
their Lordships that he had tried to save the earl from the block.
The Lords turned to other aristocratic ‘martyrs’ executed on Parliament’s orders in 1649 – the Duke of Hamilton, the Earl
of Holland and Lord Capel. Justices, prosecutors and others involved in their trials, and in Derby’s trial too, were arrested
and hauled before the House to face the most vindictive proposal so far – that a kinsman of each dead peer pick one of their
judges or prosecutors to be executed. Clarendon called it an ‘odious’ and ‘disgusting’ course of action.
The battle of the death lists came to a head in mid-August, when the Commons addressed the Lords’ final version of the Indemnity
Act. The solicitor-general, Sir Heneage Finch, was dispatched to seek a compromise. It was hard going. Their Lordships now
wanted a total of forty-three of the judges to be completely excluded from pardon, also Vane, Haselrig, Lambert, Hacker and
Axtell. The Lords insisted furthermore on exacting vengeance for the four executed aristocrats by executing a man for each
of them. At first the peers wouldn’t budge on anything. Indeed, on the last matter it was claimed that the peers were showing
their moderation by taking ‘no more than one a-piece’.
24
‘Blood requires blood,’ asserted Heneage’s namesake Lord Finch, the Lords’ spokesman, referring to the forty-three regicides.
‘The shedding of royal blood had brought infamy upon the nation’ and their Lordships ‘did not think it fit nor safe for this
kingdom, that they should live.’ They could not live in England and would be a
danger to the Kingdom if allowed to live abroad. The negotiators conferred and reported back again and again throughout a
highly charged week.
A compromise heavily favouring the Lords was eventually forged. The Lords dropped their demand for eye-for-an-eye vengeance
and in return the Commons retreated on much more. They acquiesced to the total exception of thirty judges and agreed to the
exception of Lambert, Vane, Axtell and Hacker too. However, what appeared to be a life-saving deal was made for Vane and Lambert.
In return for putting them on the death list, the Commons secured the Lords’ agreement to a joint petition to the king to
remit execution in the event of the two men being attainted and facing death. The king agreed. The
House of Lords Journal
for 8 September records the Lord Chancellor reporting that ‘His Majesty grants the desires in the said petition.’ Charles
was not to keep his word.
Sir Arthur Haselrig avoided the death list thanks to a letter from George Monck, explaining his pledge made six months earlier
to save Haselrig’s life. This time the great dissembler kept his word and Sir Arthur survived. After a rancorous debate, the
Commons voted by 141 to 116 not to except him. It made little difference. Haselrig died a prisoner in the Tower before the
year was out.
Edmund Ludlow’s time was up. His memoirs do not mention the date on which he decided to escape, but it must have been late
August. Ludlow asked his wife Elizabeth to seek the advice of friends. This led to a rancorous exchange with one of them,
no less than the Speaker, Sir Harbottle Grimston, who urged Elizabeth to make Ludlow give himself up. Ludlow’s memoirs describe
the argument after she pointed out that there was no guarantee of Ludlow’s life if he physically surrendered to the authorities.
Ludlow wrote:
The Speaker seemed much offended with this discourse, and going down the stairs with her, told her he would wash his hands
of my blood, by assuring her, that if I would surrender myself, my life would be as safe as his own; but if I refused to
hearken to his advice, and should happen to be seized, I was like to be the first man they would execute, and she to be left
the poorest widow in England.
Others advised flight. ‘Another of my friends who was well acquainted with the designs of the court, and had all along advised
me not to trust their favour, now repeated his persuasions to withdraw out of England, assuring that if I stayed I was lost;
and that the same fate attended Sir Henry Vane and others.’
When Ludlow finally departed, his preparations were typically thorough. He had grown a beard as a disguise; a guide and horses
were laid on at a rendezvous south of the river; a merchant in the port of Lewes was to lay on a ship to take him to Dieppe.
There was a choice of safe houses in Dieppe and arrangements with banks provided access to plentiful funds in Europe. But,
as we know, it nearly went wrong. In Lewes, which he reached in the early hours of the morning, searchers boarded the vessel
hired to take him. Thanks to the weather, Ludlow wasn’t aboard. A violent thunderstorm had prompted him to seek better cover
in another boat and this vessel drifted on to a sandbank with the lieutenant-general in it. None of the search party bothered
with the beached boat and Ludlow could relax. Two days later his vessel set sail, braving the still stormy Channel successfully
to land him in Dieppe.
25
He learned that the same craft had taken Richard Cromwell into exile some weeks earlier. He stayed there for several days
until letters arrived from England. One included a printed proclamation offering a £300 reward for his arrest. Ludlow decided
to make for somewhere far distant from England – Geneva. Switzerland would become his base and within two years was the Mecca
for republican opponents of the Stuarts.
On 29 August Charles signed the Bill and it became law. The legislation divided the ‘regicides’ into living and dead. First
were the dead: Bradshaw, Cromwell, Ireton, Pride and twenty others who had died since 1649, all of whose ‘lands, tenements,
goods, chattels, rights, trusts, and other hereditaments’ were to be subject to such
‘pains, penalties, and forfeitures’ as should be specified by another Act of Parliament.
Then came the living. The Act set out a readjusted death list of thirty-two men. Twenty-three were among the king’s judges:
John Barkstead, Daniel Blagrave, John Carew, William Cawley, Thomas Challoner, Gregory Clement, Cornelius Holland, Miles Corbet,
John Dixwell, William Goffe, Thomas Harrison, John Hewson, John Jones, John Lisle, Sir Michael Livesey, Nicholas Love, Edmund
Ludlow, John Okey, William Say, Thomas Scot, Adrian Scroop, Valentine Walton and Edward Whalley. The remaining nine comprised
officials, officers and those said to be culpable in other ways: Daniel Axtell, Francis Hacker, John Cook, Andrew Broughton,
Edward Dendy, William Hulet, Hugh Peters, and those two persons ‘who, being disguised by frocks and visors, did appear upon
the scaffold erected before Whitehall’. All thirty-two were to be absolutely excepted from pardon ‘for life and estate’.
A further nineteen living regicides – those who surrendered by the deadline believing they would be treated mercifully – were
excepted with a saving clause. The Act stated that if any of them be ‘legally attainted for the horrid treason and murder’,
they would be executed only after a special Act of Parliament.
It was now September 1660 and the first trials were to be in October. But first another of the fugitives was captured – the
hapless preacher Hugh Peters.
At the beginning of September, Peters was reported to be in Southwark and two royal heavies, ‘messengers of His Majesty’s
chamber’, were dispatched to apprehend him.
26
Peters was being sheltered in the house of a Quaker family called Mun. A lurid account in
Mercurius Publicus
describes how the officers arrived and searched the house, and how Peters escaped detection by hiding in the bed of his host’s
daughter. She had given birth two days before, and the royal messengers were described as too delicate to enter her room,
thus allowing Peters to go undetected. Rashly, he decided to stay on in the house, and when the searchers returned several
days later
they forced their way in to discover him in a room upstairs. A struggle followed and, according to
Mercurius Publicus
, it took the combined efforts of the two officers, the local constable and a number of neighbours to restrain Peters. He
hotly denied that he was Peters and pleaded with his captors not to allude to him publicly by the name. ‘For, said he, if
it be known that I am Hugh Peter, the people in the street will stone me.’ He eventually only agreed to go along with the
officers after being allowed to down two quarts of ale, the paper sneered.
27