The Comic History of England

by Gilbert Abbott À Beckett

Both Houses of Parliament met, and an Act of Indemnity was passed for the benefit of the king's enemies; but, like the old story of Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark, most of the persons interested in the Act were excepted from its provisions. Nineteen of the regicides surrendered; and ten more being in custody, formed a batch of twenty-nine to be brought to trial. A commission was issued for the purpose, and on the 9th of October, 1660, the proceedings began before a tribunal of thirty-four, many of whom had been Long Parliament men, masked Presbyterians, or miscellaneous scamps, of quite as revolutionary a turn as some of the prisoners submitted to their judgment. Sir Hardress Waller, who was number one on the list, had prepared a very fine speech in his defence; but looking over the document he made up his mind that it was rather strong, and could certainly do no good, upon which he pleaded guilty. Harrison and Carew, who came next, made each a very eloquent and enthusiastic harangue, glorying in their respective acts, by which they laid down their lives as an investment for a reversionary interest in the good books of posterity.

Henry Marten, "the wit of the House of Commons," made a most dismal attempt to laugh the matter off, and to joke the prosecution out of court; but his humour, notwithstanding its extreme heaviness, had no weight with his judges. He began by demanding the benefit of the Act of Oblivion, and in a lame bon mot claimed to be allowed to forget himself. He was sharply told he must plead guilty or not guilty, but he insisted on the benefit of the Act of Indemnity, saying his name did not appear among the exceptions, and that in fact he had never been an exceptionable character. Irritated by these dismal jokes—so insulting to the understanding of the court—the Solicitor-General ordered the Act to be produced, with the name Henry Marten inserted legibly enough, when "the droll," with a miserable quibble not even amounting to a pun, exclaimed, "My name is not so—it is Harry Marten." This unmeaning objection being very properly overruled, the "mad wag" endeavoured to stand upon his reputation for mad waggery, and urged that being known as a wit, he had done nothing with a serious intention. He was, however, told that regicide in sport was high treason in earnest, when, after some few further attempts at facetiousness, the "witty Harry Marten" was found guilty, and retired cutting wretched jokes upon the disgusted turnkey.

The court, which, in order to get beforehand with its work, had prepared most of its verdicts before the trials commenced, had already determined on fixing the act of cutting off the king's head on the shoulders of William Hewlett. Everything went to prove that the common hangman had performed the sanguinary job for £30, but the commissioners had made up their minds, and were unwilling to open the very small parcels for the purpose of looking at the charge by the light of the evidence. Hewlett was condemned, but people beginning to talk of the glaring injustice of the verdict, he was eventually saved from capital punishment. Poor Garland was another of the intended victims, and it may well be said that Garland by his heroism has made himself a wreath of immortality. He would have pleaded guilty to the accusation of having signed the death warrant of Charles, but indignantly repudiated the charge of having insulted the fallen sovereign. "I was a regicide, it is true," exclaimed Garland, "but as for the assertion of my having been base enough to spit in the face of the king, I throw it back in the face of my enemies."

Upon this the Solicitor-General called as a witness a low, needy fellow, named Clench, who swore not only to the spitting by Garland, but to the king having wiped his face immediately afterwards, and from the supplementary lie told by Clench to support the first falsehood, the term Clencher obviously took its origin. Poor Garland was found guilty, of course, but his life was not eventually forfeited. The executions of the regicides were very numerous, and conducted in a spirit of barbarous brutality, that excited a great deal of disgust at the time among all but those who were animated by the desire to retaliate the atrocities that the other side had committed. It is in fact, a very common fault among philanthropists, and others who rush about with a strong sense of great social wrongs, to commit some other wrongs equally great, or even greater, upon the persons by whom their virtuous indignation may have been excited.

We feel naturally interested in the fate of poor Harry Marten, the "funny man" of the Long Parliament. While in prison under sentence of death, he was visited by some aristocratic friends, who recommended the wit to petition in a jocose strain, but his humour had become exceedingly dreary in his dingy dungeon. He contrived, nevertheless, to serve up one small pun in a lengthy document begging for mercy; and though the Commons did not see the fun of the thing, the Lords good-naturedly took it for granted that, coming from a professed wag, there must be "something in it," and with a patronising "Ha, hal—very clever—amazingly droll!"—the Peers remitted his sentence.

Though Royalty had risen wonderfully in public respect, there was nothing in the conduct of the royal family to render it respectable. The queen-mother, Henrietta Maria, returned to England with an extensive French suite, and ran into debt even over her head and ears, which being very long, may enable us to measure the depths of her extravagance. The utmost dissoluteness prevailed at Court, and the king's brother, the Duke of York, had married—several months later than he should have done—Miss Anne Hyde, the daughter of the Lord Chancellor Clarendon. This consummate old humbug affected to be much pained at the degradation of his prince, through his marriage with Clarendon's own daughter, and the chancellor, affecting to doubt the fact, declared, if it were true, "The woman should go to the Tower and have her head chopped off!" in accordance with an Act of Parliament he would himself draw up for that purpose. All this unnatural abuse of his own child, instead of earning him the smallest respect, simply rendered him infamous in the minds of all but those who believed he was acting a part, and who regarded him, therefore, as simply contemptible. He is believed to have been secretly engaged in promoting the marriage against which he publicly protested; and the recognition of his daughter as Duchess of York, which soon afterwards took place, was purchased, it is said, by Clarendon's paying the debts of the queen-mother, by, of course, robbing the people.

It is impossible to say much for the magnanimity of the royalist party, whose triumph was signalised by continued acts of mingled ferocity and littleness. A law was passed attainting Oliver Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw, who were dragged from their graves in Westminster Abbey, and hanged at Tyburn, on the 30th of January, the day of the death of Charles the First—in celebration of his martyrdom. This was certainly one way of crying quits with the regicides in the game of butchery, and both sides were thus brought to the same degraded level. The royalist resurrectionists having commenced the desecration of the dead did not relinquish their loathsome pursuit until they had ex-humed, as we learn nom Hume, the remains of Cromwell's highly-respectable mother and inoffensive daughter, as well as numerous others who had done nothing in life to render them in death the objects of enmity.

All parties now began to claim the merit of the Restoration in the hope of obtaining a reward, and bills for old arrears of alleged loyalty were sent in to the Government. The Scotch were of course not backward in looking after the profits due, or supposed to be due, on account of any assistance rendered to Charles in his misfortunes; but the king and his friends having been sold two or three times over by the crafty Caledonians, his majesty thought they had really made their full money out of him. When, therefore, the Marquis of Argyle asked permission to pay his respects, a friendly reply was despatched to bring him up to town; but on his arrival at Whitehall, he had scarcely knocked at the door when he found he was regularly let in, for a guard, tapping him on the shoulder, walked him off as a traitor. He was sent to be tried by his own countrymen; for as some of them would profit by his death, it was considered that making them his judges would be a sure method of getting rid of him. The result realised the estimate formed of the character of the Scotch, who condemned him and hanged him as a matter of beesness, because there was a small profit to be got out of the transaction. Poor Argyle had been the very party who had put the crown on the king's head a few years before at Scone; but, "Life," said he, on the scaffold, "is a toss up, and it's heads I lose on this melancholy occasion."

On the 8th of May, 1661, a new Parliament met, which lasted even longer than the long one par excellence, and, indeed, the lengths to which it went might alone have entitled it to the epithet bestowed on its Republican predecessor. The Cavaliers had a very large majority in this assembly, and the off-hand manner in which it dealt with the country rendered the words cavalier treatment and bad treatment synonymous. The royal prerogative was the object of nearly all the acts of this assembly; and the rights of monarchy were being continually declared, in the same spirit as the artist who wrote "This is a lion," under his picture, because there would have been room for doubt in the absence of the epigraph. Thus the frequent assertions of the Parliament that the king was paramount, and indeed absolute, were tolerably good evidence of the fact that the position is not altogether incontrovertible.

After a brief session, in which the Cavaliers helped themselves to £60,000, by way of compensation-money, and voted a supply to the king, the Parliament adjourned from the 30th of July till the 28th of November, by which time Charles and his minister, Clarendon, had got up a little mare's nest of a pretended conspiracy, to give a new impetus to the prevailing spirit of inconsiderate loyalty. The servile Commons called at once for a few supplementary executions, and with this view it was resolved to look through the back numbers, or stock remaining on hand, of the regicides. Lord Monson, Sir Henry Mild-may, and Sir Robert Wallop, were "unearthed" from the obscurity into which they had crept, and were dragged on sledges, with ropes round their necks, to Tyburn and back again. Poor Wallop's name was cruelly made suggestive of ruffianly attacks, which, by turning the first person present—Wallop—into the participle in ing, the reader will at once mentally realise.