The Least Likely Bride

Epilogue

“Charles Stuart, for levying war against the present Parliament and people therein represented, shall be put to death by beheading, as a tyrant, traitor, murderer, and public enemy of the good people of this land.”

From the steps of the scaffold erected before the banqueting-house at the palace of Whitehall, the herald’s voice rang out across the heads of the crowd. Thousands upon thousands gathered before Whitehall Gate to witness this judicial punishment of a sovereign.

The king mounted the scaffold. A dreadful expectant silence fell over the huge mass of people. Some stood on tiptoe to see over the serried ranks of soldiers surrounding the scaffold.

The king was bareheaded, his hair tied at his nape. He handed his coat to an attendant and himself removed his cravat and loosened his shirt collar. He turned to address the crowd but his voice could not carry across the deep ranks of soldiers.

In the front of the crowd, Anthony stood with his arm around Ellen Leyland. When the king knelt before the block, she turned her head into his shoulder, her body shaken with sobs.

Olivia put a hand on Ellen’s arm, offering her own silent comfort, but she could not take her eyes away from the scaffold. She watched, numbed, as the executioner raised his axe. The hush was profound. Thousands of people stood immobile, barely breathing.

The axe fell.

At the same moment, a great groan went up from the crowd, a collective moan of horror and grief.

Olivia saw her father and Rufus, standing motionless and bareheaded at the foot of the scaffold. Their names had not been among the fifty-nine signatures on the king’s death warrant. But they stood there now, stony-faced, Parliamentary witnesses to the death of Charles Stuart.

“Is it over?” Ellen whispered, unable to raise her eyes.

“Aye, ‘tis over,” Anthony said softly. He followed Olivia’s gaze to where Lords Granville and Rothbury stood grim and immobile. He put his free arm around Olivia.

She leaned into him for a moment. So at last it was over. What had begun on a summer’s day eight years earlier had come full circle. Eight years of war. Eight years of bloodshed. What had begun with an execution had ended with one. She could still hear in her head the persistent raucous screams of the mob on that May afternoon in 1641 as the earl of Strafford lost his head on Tower Hill. There were no such triumphant cries today, only this somber grief-filled silence.

And what of the future?

She looked up at Anthony. Whatever happened in England now, her future and his were bound together with the indissoluble chains of love. Portia and Rufus, Cato and Phoebe, herself and Anthony. Love bound them all, and only love would direct the future.