HISTORY: JOHN S DOYLEreviews The King's Revenge: Charles II and the Greatest Manhunt in British History By Don Jordan and Michael Walsh Little, Brown, 383pp. £20
‘WHAT YOU READ, I would have it history so that you might compare the dead with the living; for the same humours is now as was then, there is no alteration but in names.”
This sound piece of advice was given to Charles Stuart, prince of Wales, by “the unutterably grand” earl of Newcastle, the first of a series of aristocrats who acted as his governor from the time he was eight, in 1638 or so.
The King’s Revenge, which is about Charles’s hunt for those who had been involved in killing his father, King Charles I, does not suggest that the young man, even as he grew older, spent much time reading. He preferred swiving, that contemporary term for amorous pursuits (the earl of Rochester wrote of him that “His sceptre and his prick are of a length / And she may sway the one who plays with th’other”), but he did gain a firm understanding of history. He oversaw the restoration of the monarchy and waged a pitiless campaign against those who had opposed it.
The cover of the book shows a crown resting on a bloody halberd. And there is indeed a great deal of blood in the story. Don Jordan and Michael Walsh have a background in film and television, and a good eye for drama. Fifty-nine men signed the death warrant of Charles I; another 10 were present when judgment was passed but did not sign.
With the “manhunt” of the book’s subtitle one can imagine a 17th-century Jack Bauer character: 69 Regicides, the hours winding down, the names ticked off the list.
In 1649, after the civil war in England between Charles I and the parliamentarians, the king was brought to trial, accused of high treason and high misdemeanours. He rejected the right of the court – 53 judges appointed by parliament – to try him. His refusal to plead was interpreted as a confession of guilt, and the proceedings wound up quickly with a sentence of death by beheading.
It was 11 years before the monarchy was restored. Much of that time was spent by the future king’s supporters in hunting down those who had killed his father. On his ascent to the throne, Charles II renewed the pursuit with vigour. Some were brought to trial – usually as cursory an affair as that given his father – and others were simply assassinated.
In all, 20 regicides were executed. Others died of natural causes, in prison. Oliver Cromwell succumbed to malaria. Many fled abroad, to France, the Netherlands, Switzerland and America. Some gave themselves up, to avail of the king’s amnesty, only to find that he had changed his mind. And death was not the end of it, because of the notion of attainder, which meant that all titles, property and estate held at the time of the treason were forfeit to the crown.
Those brought to trial were usually hanged, drawn and quartered – a sentence that included “being alive [you] shall be cut down, and your privy members shall be cut off, your entrails to be taken out of your body, and you, living, the same to be burnt before your eyes, and your head to be cut off”.
What is remarkable about this story is the amount, and quality, of written testimony available to the authors. There is a terrific account of the humiliation of Charles I at his trial, in which you can see the divine right of kings suddenly extinguished. And there are his words to his daughter Elizabeth the day before his execution: “Sweetheart, you’ll forget this.”
The diarists Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn have much to contribute in this line, but so too do many of the protagonists themselves.
The shifting allegiances are striking. Charles Monck, one of the chief villains of the book, was a turncoat of heroic proportions. He had been commander in chief of the English army in Scotland and an ardent admirer of Cromwell. But after being promised the extraordinary sum of £100,000 a year for life, as well as land and honours, if he helped Charles gain the throne, he changed sides and pledged his life to the king.
The King’s Revenge is most interesting in the way it shows how the rule of law and the supremacy of parliament were established, gradually, in slow shifts – built out of unpromising materials and on unstable ground – and how the trial of Charles I was the key moment in this. Modern Britain, and the modern United States, have much to thank the regicides for, the authors suggest.
The American strain of the story is worth a book of its own: the hunt across New England for the king’s jailer, Edward Whalley, and the Puritan William Goffe, who, thanks to sympathetic colonists, stayed hidden in caves and cellars for years. In fact, a legend associated with Whalley, in which a white-haired stranger, the Angel of Hadley, appeared and rallied the settlers against the indigenous Algonquins, made its way into novels by Hawthorne, Walter Scott and Fenimore Cooper.
Jordan and Walsh’s engaging book is a work of popular history that attempts the double job of telling a long and racy story of revenge while explaining the vastly complicated historical background. It is no surprise that the revenge narrative emerges more clearly than the history, but the reader’s appetite for more of both is sharpened.
Charles lived on to a natural death at the age of 54. He left no children by his queen, Catherine of Braganza, though many by one of his mistresses, “the very beautiful and willing” Barbara Villiers (an ancestor of our old friend Princess Di), and the throne passed to his brother, James II, a Catholic.
The rest, as the earl of Newcastle might say, is history.
John S Doyle is a journalist and broadcaster
