Virgin Earth

Tuesday, 30 January 1649

It was such a bitter, cold morning that John thought the ice on roof and gutter had crept into his own veins and was freezing his belly and bones as he waited in the street. The king was to be executed before noon but though the streets were lined three-deep with soldiers, and the two executioners waited in the lee of the black-draped scaffold, the note-takers and sketch artists gathered at the foot, there was no sign of the king.

The street, crammed with people packed in behind the cordon of soldiers, had a strange echo to it, as the sound of talk, prayers, and the shouts of ballad-sellers bawling out the titles of their new songs bounced off the walls of the windowless buildings and boomed in the cold air.

John, looking behind him at the tight-packed crowd and then forward to the stage, thought it seemed like an exercise in perspective, like Inigo Jones’s deceiving painted scenery for a masque, the penultimate scene of a masque which would be followed by the ascension, with Jehovah coming down from a great cloud and the handmaidens of Peace and Justice dancing together.

The two executioners climbed the steps to the platform and there was a gasp at their appearance. They were in costume, in false wigs and false beards and dark brown doublets and breeches.

“What are they wearing? Masquing clothes?” Alexander asked of the man on his left.

“Disguised to hide their identity,” the man said shortly. “It’ll be Brandon the hangman hidden under that beard, unless it’s Cromwell himself doing the job.”

John briefly closed his eyes and opened them again. The scene had not changed; it was still unbearable. The chief executioner positioned the block, laid down his ax and stepped back, his arms folded, waiting.

It was a long wait, the crowd grew restless.

“A reprieve?” Alexander suggested. “The plan he had for peace finally heard and accepted?”

“No,” someone said in the crowd nearby. “He has been stabbed to death by Cromwell himself.”

“I heard there was an escape,” someone else said. “He must have escaped. If he was dead they would show the body.”

The rumor and the speculation continued all the morning in a swirl of muttering all around John who stood cold and silent in the middle of it all.

“I must find something to eat,” Alexander said. “I am famished.”

“I don’t want anything,” John said.

“You must be starving, man; and cold,” Alexander exclaimed. “Let me bring you a loaf of bread when I buy some dinner for myself.”

John shook his head. “I feel nothing,” he said simply. “Nothing at all.”

Alexander shook his head and wriggled through the crowd to where an enterprising baker was selling hot bread rolls from a tray. It took him more than an hour to regain his place at John’s side but still nothing had happened.

“I brought you some bread,” he said cheerfully. “And I filled my flask with rum.”

John took the bread in his hand but he did not eat it. His eyes were fixed on the scaffold.

“They are saying that the Scots have visited Colonel Fairfax, who was against this from the start, and that they are all going to Cromwell to beg for a reprieve. The king can be free to live abroad, even Scotland.”

John shook his head.

“I know,” Alexander said. “If they gave him so much as a farthing’s chance he would raise an army and come back again. If he can conspire from prison when he is bound by his word of honor, what would he do loose amid the courts of Europe? He would always come back again. They can’t trust him with his life.”

“They’ve called Parliament,” a man said beside them. “That’s the reason for the delay. They are passing a law in a hurry which says that no one else can be proclaimed king. No value in beheading a king if another springs up to take his place, is there? And we have one of his sons in England and another two of them in France, and his nephew hanging round like a dog at the door of an abattoir. We’ve princes enough for pass-the-crown to go on forever. We have to break them of the habit now. So they’re making a law to say that no king can be proclaimed in England ever again.”

That sentence shocked John out of his absorption. “No king can be proclaimed in England ever again,” he repeated.

“Yes,” the man said. “It has a ring to it, doesn’t it? It makes you feel that it’s all been worth the struggle. We are free of them forever. There will never be another man to set himself high above all others. There will never be another family who think themselves better than the rest of us by virtue of the bed they were born in. Any masters we have in the future will have to earn their place. They will have to be men that we choose to serve because they are wiser or better or even richer than us. But not because they are born to it. This is Charles the Last. After him there will be freedom.”

“Charles the Last,” John repeated. “Charles the Last.”

The clocks had struck twelve and then one and then two before there was a stirring among the soldiers, which was quickly caught by the crowd, and then a shout: “He’s coming.”

John did not move. He was still and silent as he had been all day. The crowd around him jostled fiercely but John gripped his hands on the railing before him and held tight. Alexander saw that his knuckles were white; but so were his hands, his face, his whole body was bleached by cold and distress.

A window in the Banqueting Hall was open and the king stepped out onto the platform. He was simply dressed in black again: a black cape, a tall black hat, black breeches and a white shirt. The Order of the Garter was a blaze of color in dramatic contrast. He looked out at the crowd, John felt that somber, dark gaze pass over him and wanted to raise a hand, to catch at recognition for a moment. He kept his hands and his head down.

The king took some notes from his pocket and spoke quietly to the men on the platform. John, straining his ears, could hear only tantalizing snatches of speech; only the last few words rang clear: “I am a martyr to the people.”

John heard a hiss of breath at the unending, irresistible grandeur and folly of the man, and realized it was cold air through his own teeth. The king swore that he died in the faith of his father, as a Christian, and then spoke quietly to the executioner.

“Oh God, don’t let him botch it,” John whispered, thinking not of the executioner who had done this a hundred times, but of the king who must do this beautifully, just once.

The king turned to Bishop Juxon and the bishop helped him to tuck his long hair under his cap to keep his neck free for the blade. Charles handed his George and the ribbon of the Garter to the bishop, and pulled the ring from his finger.

“No, not that, no, no,” John muttered. The details were unbearable. John had nerved himself for an execution; not for a man undressing as if in domestic confidence, tucking his hair out of the way of his pale, fragile neck. “Oh please God, no.”

Charles took off his doublet but wrapped his cloak around his shoulders again, as if it mattered that he should not catch cold. He seemed to be complaining about the executioner’s block. The executioner, a terrifying figure in his masquing disguise, seemed to be apologizing. John, remembering the king’s ability to delay and prevaricate, found that he was shaking the fence post before him in painful impatience.

The king stepped back and looked up at the sky, his hands raised. John heard the scribble of a pencil behind him as a sketch-maker captured the image of the king, the martyr of the people, his eyes on heaven, his arms outspread like a statue of Christ. Then the king dropped his cloak, knelt down before the block and stretched out his neck.

The executioner had to wait for the signal; the king had to spread out his arms to consent. For a while he knelt there, unmoving. The executioner leaned forward and moved a wisp of hair. He waited.

“Please, do it,” John whispered to his old master. “Please, please, just do it.”

There was a wait of what seemed like hours, then with the gesture of a man diving into a deep river the king flung his arms out wide and the ax swept a lovely unstoppable arc downward, thudded into his neck bone, and his head dropped neatly off.

A deep groan came from the crowd – the sound a man makes at his death, the sound a man makes at the height of his pleasure. The sound of something ending, which can never happen again.

At once there were slow, determined hoofbeats behind them and people screaming and pushing in panic to get away.

“Come on!” Alexander cried, tugging at John’s sleeve. “The cavalry is coming through, out of the way, man, we’ll be ridden down.”

John could not hear him. He was still staring at the stage, still waiting for the final act when the king, gorgeously dressed in white, would step down from the stage and dance with the queen.

“Come on!” Alexander said. He grabbed John’s arm and dragged him to one side. The crowd eddied, rushing to the sides of the street, many running forward to the scaffold to snatch a piece of the pall, to scrabble for a bit of earth from under the stage, even to dip their handkerchiefs in the gush of scarlet hot blood. John, pulled by Alexander, and pushed by the people behind him trying to get away from the remorseless cavalry advance down the street, lost his feet and fell. He was kicked in the head at once, someone trod on his hand. Alexander hauled him upward.

“Come on, man!” he said. “This is no place to linger.”

John’s head cleared, he struggled to his feet, ran with Alexander to the side of the road, pressed against the wall as the cavalry forced their way down to the scaffold, and then slipped away as they went past. At the top of the road he checked, and looked back. It was over. Already it was over. Bishop Juxon had disappeared, the king’s body had been lifted through the window of the Banqueting House, the street was half-cleared of people, the soldiers had made a cordon around the stage. It was a derelict theater at the end of the show, it had that stale leftover silence when the speeches have been finished and the performance is all over. It was done.

It was done but it was not over. John, returning home, found his house besieged with neighbors who wanted to hear every word, every detail, of what he had seen and what had been said. Only Johnnie was missing.

“Where is he?” John asked Hester.

“In the garden, in his boat on the lake,” she said shortly. “We heard the church bells toll in Lambeth and he knew what it was for.”

John nodded, excused himself from the village gossips and went down the cold garden. His son was nowhere to be seen. John walked down the avenue and turned right at the bottom for the lake where the children had often gone to feed ducks when they were little. The irises and reeds planted in the wet ground at the margin were in their stark frosted beauty. In the middle of the lake the boat was drifting, Johnnie, wrapped in his cape, sitting in the stern, the oars resting on the seat either side of him.

“Hey there,” John said gently from the landing stage.

Johnnie glanced up and saw his father. “Did you see it done?” he asked flatly.

“Aye.”

“Was it done quickly?”

“It was done properly,” John said. “He made a speech, he put his head on the block, he gave the sign and it was done in a single blow.”

“So it’s over,” Johnnie said. “I’ll never serve him.”

“It’s over,” John said. “Come ashore, Johnnie, there will be other masters and other gardens. In a few weeks people will have something else to talk about. You won’t have to hear about it. Come in, Johnnie.”