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By Root 1267 0

and before them’. Such ‘rudeness’ and ‘barbarity’ represented a kind of ‘monstrous duty’ and soldiers were apparently only asked to do it once. Charles’s refusal to plead in the formal proceedings, and his refusal to show the proper deference in his gestures and demeanour, was echoed by his prosecutors. In particular Bradshaw was castigated by posterity for his arrogance and insolence – he ‘insolently reprehended the King for not having stirred his hat’ and his manner was marked by ‘great sauciness and impudence of talk’. But this was political theatre of course. The court could not show deference to this man, Charles Stuart, who stood before it, denying its jurisdiction over him: Bradshaw’s point, even on a hostile reading, was that the King had not shown ‘more respect to that high tribunal’.65

Publicity was part of the trial, and it was political theatre for all parties, but it was not all choreographed. Here again there was a relatively even battle. For example, when proceedings opened and the roll of the names of the commissioners was called silence greeted Fairfax’s name. When it was called a second time his wife called out from the gallery that ‘he has more wit than to be here’. Her voice rang out again when the impeachment was read in the name of ‘the good people of England’: ‘It is a lie, not half, nor a quarter of the people of England. Oliver Cromwell is a traitor’. Exasperated, Daniel Axtell, who was commanding the guard in the court, ordered shot to be fired into the box, but wiser counsels prevailed.66 Although this rather intemperate order was not obeyed, Axtell remained sufficiently prominent in proceedings that he could incite the soldiers to chant ‘justice, justice’ as Charles was led away at the end of proceedings.67 Clarendon claimed that Axtell’s brutality was matched by others present: although in the course of the trial ‘there was in many persons present… a real duty and compassion for the King, so there was in others so barbarous and brutal a behaviour towards him, that they called him Tyrant and Murderer, and one spit in his face; which his majesty, without expressing any trouble, wiped off with a handkerchief’. Another reasonably well-attested story is that Charles tried to interrupt Cook as he read the charge by touching him on the sleeve with his cane. As he reached over the silver tip of the cane came off and there was a momentary pause as Charles waited for someone to retrieve it, before doing so himself.68

These stories of cruelties and indignities suffered silently and patiently in the name of larger ideas formed the bedrock of Charles’s martyrdom: by the time Clarendon wrote he felt that ‘the saint-like behaviour of that blessed martyr, and his Christian courage and patience at his death, are … so well known’ that there was no need to enlarge upon them.69 This martyrdom he willingly embraced on the scaffold, and in the subsequent propaganda battle both sides had reason to play down the ambiguities and tensions of the trial. Charles, in Clarendon’s and subsequent accounts, was the patiently suffering martyr in the trial who died a good death on the scaffold. His judges were later portrayed by their partisans as implacably pursuing justice on that man – both sides found a simpler version of the trial as a foregone conclusion, or an unavoidable act of justice, useful to their self-image.

All this is not to deny that Charles did indeed conduct himself bravely both during the trial – where he apparently shed a life-long stutter in delivering a commanding performance – and on the scaffold. In preparation for his execution, Charles burned his papers and was visited by his two youngest children, Henry and Mary, on 29 January. Sentence was carried out on 30 January in Whitehall, probably because it was more easily policed than Tyburn or the Tower. Again there is significance to this choice of site, and irony too. Charles was led to the scaffold through the Banqueting House, Inigo Jones’s masterpiece which he had once dreamed of turning into part of the frontage of a massive new palace on the Thames.