Rebels and Traitors (78 page)

The circumstances voided past differences, so the ex-dragoon felt sufficient loyalty to go up to his old commander and shake his hand. ‘Gideon Jukes — I served under you, sir, at Naseby’

‘Sergeant Jukes — the tall one!’

Gideon accepted it ruefully. He had learned that courage, honesty and congeniality meant nothing if you were a lank in a memorable bumstarver coat. ‘Captain now, sir. Colonel Rainborough honoured me.’

Okey, who had little sympathy with the Levellers, nonetheless looked solemn, acknowledging the filthiness of Rainborough’s murder. He made no comment on Gideon’s promotion, yet continued to talk with him. He seemed glad to share his thoughts with a man he trusted, but with whom he could omit the reserve he had to show troops under his command. After introducing Robert, Gideon volunteered that if he could assist, he was available. Okey nodded.

‘Is the outcome certain?’ Robert asked in a confidential tone.

‘By no means. There are plenty who want to see his life preserved.’

Robert continued to press for publishable details. ‘I heard that Oliver Cromwell said, “We will cut off the King’s head, with the crown upon it.”’

‘Likely we will,’ agreed Okey, ‘but there shall be due form.’

As they hung about, Okey told them setting up the High Court of Justice had been the work of a Dutch lawyer, one Dorislaus, who had drawn on the ancient Roman Praetorian Guard, who had authority to overturn tyrants. Taking notes, Robert asked about John Cook, the Solicitor-General and prosecutor. Okey was impressed by Cook, who had written a passionate pamphlet called
The Poor Man’s Case,
in which he made direct associations between poverty and criminality, urging an end to imprisonment for debt and the offer of second chances for first-time offenders. Cook had advocated that all doctors and lawyers should give a tenth of their time to the poor,
pro bono.

‘No fees?
That
will never happen!’ Gideon guffawed.

Robert murmured excuses and slipped away. ‘He feels the cold,’ Gideon said, although he knew Robert was going to write up his notes, to be printed later. He would probably try to find a copy of
The Poor Man’s Case
too. Gideon would rather lazily let Robert hunt down the work, then snaffle it to read himself.

Gideon remained chatting to Okey for the rest of the hour it took for the judges formally to reach a decision. Okey gave him an insight into the behind-the-scenes organisation. Soldiers constantly came and went with messages, bearing out his description of endless activity.

‘All must be scrupulous. Nothing is done without drafting and redrafting.’ Okey’s mild complaint was uttered with a certain pride; he showed the heightened excitement men acquired during busy planning. Gideon had seen Edward Sexby fired up like this. He had known the thrill himself. Soldiers in battle wore that look. Colonel Okey, who had shown when he led the dragoon charge at Naseby that he could be inspired by a heady moment, was full of his recent experience: ‘Every document is framed many times. We were running to and fro for a week, wording the formal charge. Solicitor Cook wanted to go right back to the start of the reign, every niggle, rumour and false move for the past twenty years — even the possibility that the King had some duplicitous hand in his father’s death —’

Gideon took a scathing view: ‘King James died naturally. We would have looked like fools.’

Okey slapped his arm. ‘That’s my opinion. Still, every aspect has been chewed over like stale bread and dripping. How to style the King? -mere “Charles Stuart”, or load him with his full paraphernalia of titles? Then we had to assemble witnesses, yet keep them safe from interference. The written evidence was held at the House of Lords — I had to squeeze the King’s cabinet out of them when it was called for in evidence, and you know they won’t co-operate … All the time, we must shift the King constantly and unexpectedly, for safety —’

Gideon’s fair eyebrows shot up. Attempted escape? I heard that he refused to flee, after he left Carisbrooke.’

Okey glanced around nervously. Gideon took note of armed men lying on the leads at roof level, weapons covering the hall and New Palace Yard. ‘Can’t take any chance, Captain. Plenty of delinquents have slipped through and are hanging around London. Cotton House is convenient for the court, but it’s a sieve, a glorified library, not built for defence. We built a barracks in the garden for two hundred men, but it is a nightmare. Whitehall Palace makes a good halfway-house, but he could gnaw his way out like a mouse through cheese if he was minded to. Hampton Court is safer — but it takes time to ferry him back again …’

There was movement near the hall doors. Gideon spotted Robert, gesticulating that the judges were returning. He and Okey began to move. ‘Good to see you, Jukes!’ exclaimed the colonel warmly — which surprised Gideon. ‘Your offer of assistance is civil. Call on me at my house, if you will.’

That surprised him even more.

The King was declared guilty and sentence pronounced on Saturday. Sunday was the customary day of rest in theory, though not for some. Many were still negotiating to save the King’s life, including Lord General Fairfax who attempted to persuade the Council of Officers to delay the execution; he was even rumoured to have been urged by friends to mount a rescue by force. Foreign ambassadors, the French and Dutch, beset Fairfax and Cromwell, pleading for the King’s life. Some even approached Lady Fairfax, known as a firm Presbyterian. The Prince of Wales sent a direct appeal for mercy. All the time, Cromwell and the hardliners were working to steel the constancy of weak spirits who might wish to avoid regicide.

For Colonel Okey and the other organisers, Monday brought a race to finalise the death warrant. A draft with a blank space for details already existed, signed by some of the commissioners, but a full version with all its amendments filled in now had to be created or, in the language of legislation, engrossed. Two of the three officers originally named to supervise the execution refused to do it. The time and place needed to be fixed. As the clerks reworded these details, the parchment had to be carefully ‘scraped’ in places for amendments. This would inevitably look like tampering afterwards. Fears were that the commissioners who had already signed might back out if a clean new draft was drawn up.

Wild stories circulated of chaotic attempts to persuade more commissioners to sign. In the scramble to add signatures, Cromwell was said to have been almost hysterical, flicking ink at one, Henry Marten, like a manic schoolboy, and allegedly grasping another man’s hand and forcing him to write. In fact more signatories came forward than had been allowed for, so later names had to be cramped inelegantly close together. Eventually the warrant was complete, the parchment engrossed, fifty-nine names courageously signed and sealed. The judges had given sentence. The army was to take over. The order for the execution was issued to Colonel Francis Hacker, Colonel Hunks and Colonel Phayre:

It was on the Monday evening that Gideon took himself to Colonel Okey’s house.

Okey had a ship’s-chandler’s business near the Tower of London and his local church was St Giles in the Fields. He lived in Mare Street, Hackney, out on the eastern edges of London, at the opposite end from the enormous mansions of grander men who clustered near Westminster and Whitehall. Okey’s chosen location, not far from London Fields, was a large, leased three-storeyed gabled house, called Barber’s Barn. It stood among pasture and pleasant lanes, close enough to London to do business in the city, yet countrified. Gideon borrowed Robert’s horse and rode out there, full of curiosity and as keen as always to be associated with any historic event.

‘Yet another!’ exclaimed Susanna Okey, the colonel’s wife. She was soberly dressed in the Baptist style. She cannot have seen much of her husband during the latter years of their marriage. When Gideon introduced himself, she herself led him to Okey, as if to get him out from under her feet.

There were uniformed soldiers already in the house. In civilian dress, Gideon was taken past them, receiving odd glances. Okey was in tense conversation with a second man; they looked up sharply on Gideon’s entrance to the room. A tray of bread and butter and beer, the staples of Parliamentarian housewives when they were suddenly called upon to feed committees, stood half-demolished on the table near to them. A jumble of papers covered the rest of the board.

‘Come in, lad — this is Captain Jukes, who served under me. Colonel John Fox, commander of Bradshaw’s guard in court.’

The man was a stranger to Gideon, unlike others congregated in London for the trial, familiar faces from the old campaigns. ‘I held a garrison near Birmingham, in Warwickshire,’ he said, perhaps rather stiffly.

‘Edgbaston.’ Gideon astonished the colonel, and was pleased by it. He gave no sign he knew Fox had been nicknamed the Jovial Tinker. ‘I worked for Sir Samuel Luke, Essex’s scoutmaster. We had your despatches often through our hands.’

‘I tried to give good intelligence.’

‘Your work was always valued, sir.’

Would that the paymasters gave me some credit!’

Like Okey, Fox looked to be in his forties, though he could be younger. He was self-confident, bouncy and a little too open for Londoners to take him well, with an untuneful Midlands accent. Gideon found it whining. Someone had once told him that was how Shakespeare would have sounded — and if those were the terrible vowels of England’s greatest playwright, he was glad to have abandoned any connection with the theatre.

The two colonels resumed their conversation. Gideon rapidly grasped its urgency. Richard Brandon, the public executioner, had refused to kill the King. He had cut off the heads of Strafford and Laud, but baulked at this.

‘Does it have to be Brandon? Or does anybody else have the expertise?’ Gideon asked, catching up with the implications. Once a mere captain would have stayed silent, but the war had changed that. He spoke the unthinkable. ‘Must the King be beheaded?’

‘Shortening it is!’ Fox’s grin confirmed that Midlanders had an odd sense of humour.

Okey shrugged restively. ‘We cannot hang, draw and quarter a monarch, Captain Jukes. For the nobility, an axe is traditional. Besides,’ he added glumly, with the bent logic of any man recently mired in bureaucracy, ‘the death warrant is written now.’

Always realistical, Gideon accepted they could not swing King Charles on a gibbet like a horse-thief.

‘We need surgical despatch. You ask about expertise,’ Colonel Fox dropped his laconic derision and spoke as if he had looked into this rather practically. ‘The prisoner’s neck must be severed correctly, with a heavy, single blow through the fourth vertebra. When the Queen of Scots was beheaded at Fotheringhay Castle, it was terribly mangled -we cannot have such butchery tomorrow. The King of England will not run around the scaffold bleeding like a half-dead capon.’

‘Any hitch will suggest that the deed is not well done,’ Gideon agreed. ‘This must not be botched.’

We have a bright axe specially brought from the Tower,’ Okey said anxiously, trying to reassure himself.

‘Colonel Hewson has sworn his officers to secrecy and offered a hundred pounds to the man who will do the job.’ Fox was calming Okey. Hewson was one of the officers charged with fulfilling the death warrant. ‘He has identified two possibles, Hulet and Jackson. He says Sergeant Hulet is well-metalled.’

‘If Hulet is up for the business,’ Gideon suggested, ‘he should be our fallback — call him an understudy — take the part of the axeman’s assistant —’

’An assistant?’ queried Fox.

‘It is normal,’ said Okey.

‘It would be a lonely profession otherwise,’ Gideon commented. ‘This works to our advantage. A man we trust can be standing by, in case at the last moment Brandon fails. But the main man must be Brandon. He has practised a few times —’ They all laughed, a little hoarsely.

There was a short silence.

‘If he is afraid, he should be offered anonymity’ Gideon continued quietly. ‘He could be masked, like an actor in the theatre. He can be assured that his name will never be revealed. Indeed, I think it right it should not be.’

‘And he will be well paid,’ added Fox, who had blunt standards. Gideon remembered Tinker Fox’s reputation for extracting money by illegal methods.

‘Well,’ Okey decided, ‘Colonel Ax tell will take a troop to Brandon’s house first thing in the morning and bring him.’

Gideon and Colonel Fox exchanged glances. They seemed to have formed an unlikely alliance. ‘It must not look as if the executioner is our prisoner,’ warned Fox. ‘Besides, duress will make him unreliable.’

‘Someone should first try patiently to win Brandon over.’ After seeing how Axtell had run affairs at the King’s trial, Gideon thought the man too brutal for this. Axtell was the coarse colonel with the straight-line moustache who had had muskets aimed at women in the gallery, then encouraged his men to blow smoke at the King and insult him.

Fox agreed. ‘Not Daniel Axtell. He would lower the tone of a curate’s breakfast… I suppose I shall volunteer!’ he said, with the lugubrious world-weariness of his home district. ‘Where does this Brandon live?’

‘By the Tower of London.’ Okey sounded unhappy. ‘St Katharine’s by the Tower … Rosemary Lane.’ Gideon pulled a face.

‘You know this street?’ Fox turned and asked him.