And now ye Senators, is this the thing
So oft declard Is this your glorious King?
Religion vails her self; and Mourns that she
Is forc’d to own such Horrid Villanie.
When he had done, the King put his long hair under his cap, helped by Juxon and the grey-bearded man in the mask, and spoke a few words with Juxon. He took off his cloak and doublet, gave his George[[7]] to the bishop, and bade the executioner set the block fast. Then, as he stood, he said two or three words to himself, with hands and eyes lifted up, and lying down, placed his neck on the block. For a moment he lay there praying; his eye shining, said one of those who watched, as brisk and lively as ever he had seen it. Suddenly, he stretched forth his hands, and with one blow the grey-bearded man severed his head from his body. It was now, noted another spectator, precisely four minutes past two.
The other masked man took the King’s head, and without a word held it up to the people. A groan broke from the thousands round the scaffold,—“such a groan,” writes Philip Henry, “as I never heard before, and desire I may never hear again.” Thereupon he saw two troops of horse, one marching towards Westminster, the other towards Charing Cross, roughly dispersing the crowd, and was glad to escape home without hurt.
The King’s body was placed in a plain wooden coffin, covered with a black-velvet pall, then, after embalming, enclosed in an outer coffin of lead, and conveyed to St. James’s. His servants wished to bury him at Westminster, in Henry the Seventh’s Chapel, amongst his ancestors, but this was denied, because “it would attract infinite numbers of people of all sorts thither, which was unsafe and inconvenient.” Windsor seemed safer, and the Parliament authorised Herbert to bury his master there, allowing
five hundred pounds for the expenses of the funeral. Leave was given to the Duke of Richmond, the Earl of Southampton, and two other noblemen to attend it. They selected a vault in St. George’s Chapel, where Henry VIII. and Jane Seymour were interred, and laid the King’s body there on Friday, the 9th of February. No service was read over him, for the governor would not allow Juxon to use the service in the Prayer-book, saying that the form in the Directory was the only one authorised by Parliament. To the mourners, however, it seemed that heaven gave a token of their dead sovereign’s innocence.
“This is memorable,” writes Herbert, “that at such time as the King’s body was brought out of St. George’s Hall the sky was serene and clear; but presently it began to snow, and fell so fast, as by that time they came to the west end of the royal chapel, the black velvet pall was all white, the colour of innocency, being thick covered with snow.”
England mourned, but the army and its partisans rejoiced. At last the blood shed in the Civil War was expiated by the death of its author. “Blood defileth the land,” quoted Ludlow, “and the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it.” The publicity and formality of the proceedings against the King, which seemed to most men an insulting mockery of justice, was to the Regicides themselves a source of exultation. “We did not assassinate, nor do it in a corner,” said Scot. “We did it in the face of God, and of all men.” A tradition, supported by some contemporary stories, tells that Cromwell himself came by night to see the body of the dead King in the chamber at Whitehall, to which it had been borne from the scaffold. He lifted up the coffin lid, gazed for some time upon the face, and muttered “Cruel necessity.” A royalist poet represents him as haunted on his death-bed by “the pale image” of the martyred monarch. Poetical justice required such retribution, but history knows nothing of Cromwell’s repentance. He had been one of the last men of his party to believe the King’s death a necessity, but having persuaded himself that it was a just and necessary act he saw no reason for remorse. It seemed to him that England had freed itself from a tyrant “in a way which Christians in after times will mention with honour, and all tyrants in the world look at with fear.”