Rebels and traitors

Chapter Fifty-Eight — London: 1649

The King's embalmed body, with the severed head ghoulishly stitched back on, lay in state in the royal apartments at St James's Palace for several days. It was then turned over to Bishop Juxon and other supporters for a private burial. When Westminster Abbey was refused them, as being too public, they settled on the Royal Chapel in Windsor. A vault was opened, which was found to contain the remains of King Henry VIII and Queen Jane Seymour. There, in a plain lead coffin, King Charles was buried. As the small cortege approached the chapel, the sky darkened and a furious snowstorm had started, turning the black velvet pall to white.

A book purporting to be the late King's prayers and meditations, Eikon Basilike, was printed to such an immense reception it ran into twenty-three editions within a year. Robert Allibone and Gideon Jukes despaired of the reading public.

Richard Brandon died in June. Some claimed it was a judgement.

In the months before he died, Brandon was said to have openly acknowledged, particularly when tipsy, that he was the King's executioner. He admitted he received thirty pounds for his day's work, paid to him in half-crowns within an hour of the deed. In Rosemary Lane, thirty pounds would keep a man in drink until he killed himself that way. The only problem was to find someone willing to give change for the half-crowns. The coins' face value was so large they were never currency among the poor.

Brandon also boasted of an orange stuck full of cloves and a handkerchief, which according to him were taken from the King's pocket after the headless corpse was carried off the scaffold. Brandon claimed he was offered twenty shillings for the orange by a gentleman in Whitehall; he refused and then, lacking acumen, he sold it for only ten shillings in Rosemary Lane.

Later stories claimed he had suffered from a bad conscience. It was said that about six o'clock on the fateful day, he returned to his wife and gave her the money, saying it was the dearest money he ever earned in his life. Another version said Brandon used up the reward in stews and brothels, catching Naples scab which, along with the drink, then destroyed him. It was also maintained that he never again slept easily and was afraid to walk the streets or sleep without a candle. His successor was William Loe, a dust-carrier and cleaner of dungheaps.

Gideon Jukes, who felt permanent ties to Brandon, attended his funeral in Whitechapel. A noisy throng stood to see the corpse carried to the churchyard. Some heckled, 'Hang him, the rogue! Bury him in a dunghill.' Others battered the coffin, saying they would quarter him. Gideon later saw the burial register, which baldly pronounced: 'June 21st, Richard Brandon, a man out of Rosemary Lane. This R. Brandon is supposed to have cut off the head of Charles the First.' Gideon wondered if the entry ought to be removed, but doing so would only draw more attention.

The sheriffs of the City of London sent large quantities of wine for the funeral.

Nobody came forward to validate Brandon's admission. The army remained resolutely silent. Although the axeman's identity seemed glaringly obvious, public speculation ran rife for years. Royalists theorised that the masked executioner had been Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell's chaplain, Hugh Peter, was named. Some claimed inside knowledge that it was Solicitor-General Cook. Years later Colonel Hewson's man, Sergeant Hulet, was formally charged with having been the axeman's assistant on that day, and was even found guilty by a jury, yet he was released unpunished, perhaps because of too many doubts. But Royalists' favourite bogeyman for the task was Colonel John Fox, Tinker Fox of Birmingham.

A year after the execution, Fox was sent on Parliament's business to Edinburgh, where the elders of the Kirk imprisoned him. By the time he was released in October 1650, he was so hugely in debt he was said to be ready to starve; his health collapsed and he died destitute at fifty, with his wife having to petition Parliament for ten pounds to pay for his funeral. Gideon Jukes could not attend that burial; he would by then be himself in Scotland.

Gideon had resumed normal life as a printer.

Immediately after the King's death, the mood in Basinghall Street was jubilant. Government was being reconstituted, with the King's Privy Council now replaced by a Council of State. Machinery was enacted daily to institute a Commonwealth. Robert printed a banner in a large font with the Parliamentary resolution: 'It hath been found by Experience that the Office of a King in this Nation is unnecessary, burdensome and dangerous to the Liberty, Safety and Public Interest of the People of this Nation; and therefore ought to be abolished.' The House of Lords was done away with on even better grounds: that it was 'useless and dangerous.'

One by one, the trappings of monarchy and the nobility were reviewed. The crown and sceptre had been secured and locked up. Other emblems and oaths were redesigned — among them the Great Seal, the Mace, the oaths of office for judges, the titles of public institutions, badges and coinage.

Gideon was living at his parents' house, now owned by Lambert and Anne. In part this was to save money until he decided whether he needed to set himself up in business separate from Robert. There was not enough work to keep both partners plus a journeyman, though Amyas would be leaving them. He was about to get married and was to be set up in his own workshop with his father-in-law's help. He had had his apprentice bond returned. In that he was more fortunate than Gideon, whose bond had been a debt repayment. Still, his father had bequeathed him a useful legacy out of affection and his mother had added to that when she died. He joked that even his army arrears might one day turn up.

Robert had taken on a new, fourteen-year-old apprentice called Miles, who spent a lot of time lusting after girls who would not look at him and the rest staring into space.

'This is a gormless, dawdling noodle of a lad, Robert!'

'Oh, just like my previous apprentices,' smiled Robert. Miles grinned vacantly before accidentally knocking over a pile of stitched pamphlets.

'You could pick those up, young man, and re-stack them tidily,' Gideon hinted. Miles gawped at him as if he could not believe the newly returned partner was so stiff and unreasonable. Gideon mimed taking a sight on him with a musket, holding the pose in concentrated silence as if covering some pernicious Royalist he intended to blast to smithereens. Very slowly, Miles stooped and retrieved the pamphlets. Robert hid a smile.

Another reason Gideon felt obliged to live with his brother was that relations between Lambert and Anne had become so strained he tried to be a peacemaker.

Lambert's health had never fully recovered after Colchester. He was now in his middle forties, with a limp in his foot from Naseby; he had the poor digestion and rheumatics of a much older man, and grumbled like one too. He seemed unlikely to achieve his parents' longevity. War had diminished his gusto; he was running to seed. Lumpish, touchy, dictatorial, and much given to seeking out old comrades for long nights of reminiscence, he ate and drank too much, with too little time spent at home. Gideon dared not imagine what happened in bed with his wife.

Anne still took the lead in running the grocery business. Lambert saw himself as the titular head, but let Anne get on with things as she had done while he was away. They did not tussle for supremacy; Lambert gave way as if he was too tired to care. Trade had suffered badly during the war. Lambert was given to pretending he thought this was Anne's bad management; she ceased taking criticism as a joke. They sniped at each other over business, but there was worse amiss.

Gideon realised that in some ways he had been lucky to be away soldiering. Life was simpler: you only struggled for food, sleep and survival. He had made the army his own refuge from domestic problems, and now he wondered how far Lambert did the same. Gideon had been away from home for over six years, Lambert for five. Returning was bound to take readjustment.

Slowly, they both settled. Perhaps because he was younger and a single man, Gideon found it easier. He slipped back without too much anxiety into the print shop, conveniently filling the place Amyas left. Robert welcomed him, welcomed his skill and reliability, and particularly his conversation. A year older than Lambert, Robert would have been penned up with only the dream-struck new apprentice had Gideon not come home.

Gideon picked up that other people thought in Lambert's absence something had been going on between Anne Jukes and Robert Allibone. He hated the idea. Robert was now forty-five, not too old for lust though surely too far gone for love (thought Gideon, at a mere twenty-eight), certainly Robert seemed fixed for ever as a widower. To Gideon, the man had aged noticeably; he was shocked at how the sandy hair had thinned and grown lank around Robert's nearly bald crown. Never one with much concern for good eating, Robert's diet at taverns had made him sallow and leather-skinned, with some of his freckles coarsening into liver spots. However, he remained lean and active, his mind sharp and his temperament kindly. As time went by, Gideon ignored other people sniggering; he convinced himself that if Robert did hanker after Anne, Anne safely ignored the infatuation.

The truth was that if Anne Jukes had ever had a soft spot for another man, it was not Robert but Gideon. Fortunately neither Gideon nor Lambert saw this.

Robert had guessed. Robert, trapped in unrequited and impossible heartache, was too great a spirit to speak of it. He had always been his own man, self-contained, emotionally reserved. He sought refuge in solitary evening journeys on his horse, Rumour; he dined several times a week at an inn in King Street, over in Westminster. Rumour had acquired a taste for buckets of ale, while Robert pecked for facts in the political undergrowth like a foraging blackbird tossing leaves. To those who knew him, Robert's nosing around Parliament seemed perfectly natural. Writing the Public Corranto was the work he loved best. Disappearing on his own to hunt down news let him hide his secret sorrow.

Gideon understood that he was unwelcome on these jaunts. He did not know why. It seemed to him only that Robert had established a routine he did not wish to break and that he had sources to protect. When Robert found news to report, he would be bright-eyed and enthusiastic as he set the text in the print shop the next day.

Arrangements for becoming a Commonwealth did not always run smoothly. When a proclamation went to sheriffs and mayors to promulgate the Act for Abolishing the Kingly Office, even the Lord Mayor of the City of London, Abraham Reynoldson, refused, because it went against his conscience; he was summoned to the bar of the House, stripped of his office and thrown in the Tower for a month. The City was ordered to elect a new lord mayor — and one with a compliant conscience was immediately produced.

The House of Commons was working hard. Some days Robert Allibone could hardly scribble down all the matters of note. On the same day, the 2nd of April, when Alderman Reynoldson's conscience was discussed, plenty of fascinating items vied for prominence.

'They gave an order for a committee looking into the affairs of Colonel Rainborough's widow,' Robert reported. 'She is to be given a grant of land from the confiscations from deans and chapters — three thousand pounds was mentioned to me by an informant. Then who turns up in the House of Commons but your friend Sexby!'

'Sexby?' Gideon experienced a pang.

'Quite the crawler, nowadays.' Robert distrusted Sexby, despite his Leveller links. 'There have been Scots commissioners lurking around since the attempt to make a Presbyterian peace. These dour souls are outraged by us lopping off a head that could have mouthed the Covenant. They scampered off, heading for The Hague, to make a devil's pact with the Prince of Wales, begging him to make us all slaves of the Kirk.'

'You must say, "Charles Stuart, eldest son of the late King"!' Gideon reproved Robert.

'Strip me naked, so I must.'

'So what of Sexby?'

'Honest Edward tells Parliament he has chased gallantly after the Scotch commissioners and has personally arrested them at Gravesend — with not a moment to spare (as he told it). He has tucked them up safe under guard in a fort — for which he has been awarded twenty pounds, not a penny less.'

'Handsome!'

Robert heard the edge in Gideon's tone. 'Did you obtain any benefit for that secret work of yours in January?'

'I was allowed to buy dinner for Colonel John Fox.'

'A colonel! Should he not have treated you?'

'He lacks his arrears,' replied Gideon dryly.

Robert was still niggled. 'I do not know how Sexby showed his face, preening himself, when that very day a petition was brought for the four Levellers who are languishing in the Tower.' John Wildman, John Lilburne, William Walwyn and Thomas Prince had been arrested on suspicion of promulgating republican pamphlets called England's New Chains Discovered and The Second Part of England's New Chains Discovered. 'There was no time for them,' snarled Robert. 'The petition got short shrift — the Commons had to rush to the day's most pressing business.'

'And what fine work was that?'

' "Ordered, That the Committee of the Revenue do take care, and give Order, That the Seats in the House be repaired".'

'Seats, Robert?' For a moment Gideon was flummoxed, then he sadly grinned. 'All you can expect from a Rump, I suppose.'

Of the civilian Levellers, William Walwyn was in some respects the most influential, yet the most discreet. Anne Jukes and Robert had a high opinion of him: a quiet, home-loving man who always said his favourite occupations were a good book and the conversation of friends. There was no evidence that Walwyn had contributed to the England's Chains pamphlets. His guiding principles were toleration and love. It was thought astonishing that he had been arrested, unlike Lilburne, who had spent so much time in the Tower of London that at least one of his children was born there and given the name Tower. 'The pathetic soul died,' said Anne Jukes. 'As you might expect!'

The critical pamphlets had been condemned in Parliament as scandalous and highly seditious, destructive to the present government, tending to division and mutiny in the army and to the raising of a new war. 'Somebody must have read them carefully,' scoffed Gideon.

The four Levellers were arrested by troops of horsemen, dragged from their beds in dawn raids. They were taken to Whitehall and charged with treason. During John Lilburne's examination by the Council of State, at one point he was sent into an adjoining room; he could hear Oliver Cromwell losing his temper and shouting at Lord Fairfax: 'I tell you, sir,' — thumping the table — 'you have no other way to deal with these men but to break them, or they will break you!'

The fear of army mutiny was justified: unhappiness homed in on impending service in Ireland. With England now settled, Cromwell was to make an expedition to end the long unrest there. Three hundred infantrymen in Colonel Hewson's regiment swore they would not leave for Ireland until the Levellers' programme had been introduced; they were cashiered without pay arrears. The next serious event, which caused Gideon a desperate crisis of conscience, happened in London. This involved Robert Lockyer, a young Particular Baptist from Bishopsgate; Anne Jukes, whose family also came from Bishopsgate, had grown up with some of his relatives. Lockyer served in Whalley's regiment, which had incorporated some of Cromwell's original Ironsides; although Whalley himself was more or less a Presbyterian, there were radicals among his men. This regiment was guarding the King at Hampton Court when Charles escaped to Carisbrooke. They subsequently fought at Colchester. Whalley himself supported Pride's Purge, was a member of the High Court of Justice and signed the King's death warrant. He believed his regiment was governed by 'Reason, not Passion' — but he was wrong.

With the King dead, soldier Levellers as well as civilians had realised the execution merely gave the army grandees uncontrolled power. They had installed a republic, yet would ignore the Levellers' constitutional programme. Paying arrears, providing for the wounded and their dependants, and protecting soldiers from enforced service abroad also still remained a low priority.

Eight troopers had petitioned Fairfax to restore the original Council of the Army, with its regimental Agitators. The response was to court-martial five and subject them to the painful punishment called 'riding the wooden horse'. The civilian Richard Overton, who for once was not in prison, greeted this with a celebrated pamphlet likening the soldiers to foxes cruelly hunted down by beagles. Alone among the Leveller leaders, Overton approved the trial and execution of the King; he called it the finest piece of justice that was ever had in England.

A month later, part of Lockyer's troop was stationed in Bishopsgate. Radicals among them were already fired up, as the planned expedition to Ireland gave them a focus. The Levellers believed that the native Irish Catholics had the same right to their own land and to self-determination as the English — an opinion in which they were virtually isolated. Their ideals forbade travelling across international boundaries. Soldiers saw themselves as volunteers who could only be sent abroad with their own consent. Cromwell's intended expedition was gunpoint imperialism. The Levellers believed that any man might refuse to obey commands that were incompatible with his ideas of reason and justice.

When they were ordered to leave their quarters, thirty of Whalley's men seized their colours and barricaded themselves into the Bull Inn in Bishopsgate Street. When their captain tried to carry off the flag, Lockyer and others hung onto it. Colonel Whalley arrived on the scene to be told that the mutineers only wanted their arrears, to pay for their quarter before they left London. Money was promised, therefore, though not enough. A large crowd of civilians gathered and threatened a riot, but were dispersed by loyal soldiers. Next morning Fairfax and Cromwell turned up. Lockyer and fourteen others were arrested. In their subsequent trial, six were condemned to death, of whom Fairfax pardoned five. Lockyer was picked out as the ringleader.

A group of women with radical sympathies had petitioned for the release of the four civilian Levellers. 'We were instructed', said Anne Jukes, by now a veteran of such demonstrations, 'to go home and wash dishes.' Gideon heard the anger in her voice and saw Lambert cringing. 'We answered back that because of the war, we have no dishes!'

Robert Lockyer was brought to St Paul's Churchyard to face a regimental firing squad. Gideon went there in sympathy, though he could hardly bear to watch. If he had stayed in the army, this could so easily have been him.

Lockyer was twenty-three. His brave departure was deeply moving. He declared he was not afraid to look death in the face and regretted that he was to die for so small a thing as a dispute over pay, after fighting eight long years for the freedom and liberties of his country. As the firing party lined up, heckled by Lockyer's supporters, the grandees were terrified that this mutiny might lead to a popular uprising in the City.

Disdaining a blindfold, Lockyer stared out the six musketeers. He reminded them they had all fought together for a common aim. He willed them to spare him, as his brothers in arms, saying that their obedience to superior orders would not acquit them of murder. They shuffled with unease. Gideon saw with miserable sympathy that the troubled men could well refuse their duties. He remembered how he had thought at Colchester that, if chosen, he would cheerfully have joined the firing squad that shot Lucas and Lisle. Here, he was in agony for the musketeers. He knew this was wrong. But he saw, too, that the grandees had no other course. There was no solution to the impasse. The Leveller movement was unravelling.

Then Colonel Okey, who was said to have already lost his temper at the court martial, angrily distributed Lockyer's coat, boots and belt amongst the squad. Being soldiers, booty won them over. In his shirt, Lockyer prayed his last prayers and gave the appointed signal by raising both arms. Immediately he crumpled beneath the bullets.

At Lockyer's funeral, which Gideon attended, three thousand people followed the hearse, walking in total silence from Smithfield, through the City, to the New Church at Moorfields. On the coffin lay a naked sword and bunches of bloodstained rosemary. Sea-green ribbons were worn by mourners. Six trumpets sounded a knell. Lockyer's horse, draped in mourning, was led behind the coffin — a privilege normally reserved to a commander-in-chief. As the Leveller news-sheet, the Moderate, pointed out, this was a remarkable tribute for a private trooper.

A month later more trouble flared. Twelve hundred men, who had been assembled for Ireland, mutinied. As they camped at Burford in Oxfordshire, Fairfax and Cromwell mounted a surprise night attack. Resistance was brief. Several mutineers were killed. Most either surrendered or fled without much bloodshed, the rest being imprisoned in Burford Church for four days. Three ringleaders were shot against the church wall. For his part at Burford, Colonel Okey received a curious reward: he was made a Master of Arts of Oxford University.

Parliamentary forces crushed a further uprising which William Thompson, a friend and protege of Lilburne, had inspired. Again the rebels were routed, with Cornet Thompson dying in a desperate action near Wellingborough. Military unrest then faded. By August Cromwell finally embarked for Ireland with the soldiers he needed. The civilian Levellers were still in jail, their enormous outpouring of pamphlets about to dribble to a close. Their supporters declined in disappointment.

Some took up more radical beliefs. As Lambert struggled to come to terms with life after the civil war, Anne sought refuge in a completely different community. She joined a group who were calling themselves True Levellers.

One day Gideon came home from the print shop and found his brother in a state of outraged hysteria. 'My wife has run off with some other man!'

'Calm yourself,' urged Gideon, relieved that he knew Robert Allibone had been working quietly at the shop all day. From conversations with Anne, Gideon realised where she had really gone and why. 'Your wife has a group of friends who say the world is a common treasury. They say that if the people band together in self-sufficient communities, the ruling class must either join in or starve because there will be no labourers for hire. Meanwhile the common people can support themselves and enjoy true liberty'

'She has run away to anarchy!'

'No, she has run away to St George's Hill in Surrey' snapped Gideon. 'She has gone to plant beans, carrots and parsnips.'

Lambert threw himself across the kitchen table, with his head in his hands. 'Then I would rather she was an adulteress!' he decided bitterly.