Three days after his sentence the king bade farewell to his sobbing little son and daughter at St. James’s Palace, and walked across the park between a line of soldiers to the stairs, which then were on the site of the present Horse Guards. From thence he crossed the street by a gallery, which led him past the scaffold draped in black, and into his own bedchamber in the Banquet Hall. From there, a little later, he passed through a window, or possibly an opening in the wall, upon the scaffold, with his attendant and Bishop Juxon. Two unknown men in masks and false hair had undertaken the grim and dangerous task of executioner. For among the throngs that filled the streets from Charing Cross down to Westminster there were many who would readily have torn them in pieces. The “martyr-king,” as Jacobins still call him, now that the end of his arbitrary reign had come, behaved with dignity. His last words were: “To your power I must submit, but your authority I deny.” From the roof of a neighbouring mansion, Archbishop Usher stood until he sickened at the sight and swooned, and was carried to his bed. Andrew Marvell’s well-known lines upon this scene will be recalled:

“While round the armed bands,
Did clasp their bloody hands,
He nothing common did or mean,
Upon that memorable scene,
Nor called the gods with vulgar spite,
To vindicate his hopeless right;
But with his keener eye,
The axe’s edge did try;
Then bowed his kingly head,
Down, as upon a bed.”

Strangely enough, it was on this very spot where his death forecast the dawning of that new principle of government of the people, by the people, for the people, which his whole nature loathed, that London had seen the beginnings of the civil strife. Here a company of the citizens, “returning from Westminster, where they had been petitioning quietly for justice, were set upon by some of the court as they passed Whitehall, in the which tumult divers were hurt, and one or more slain just by the Banqueting House.”

The regicides, who felt their bloody deed to be a sad necessity for England’s safety, had no desire to wreak a mean revenge upon the body of the king. Unlike those of many far nobler men who had died as “traitors,” his body was not dishonoured, but was treated with due respect. It was embalmed, and lay for days under a velvet pall at St. James’s Palace, where crowds came to see it. The authorities objected to his burial in Westminster Abbey, as the place was too public, and crowds might gather there. But they accorded him a burial in St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, whither his body was taken in a hearse drawn by six horses and followed by four mourning coaches. His coffin was placed beside that of Henry VIII. within the choir. The next month after the death of Charles, the Parliament voted the use of a large part of Whitehall to Cromwell. Every Monday he dined with all his officers above the captain’s rank. Milton, as his Latin secretary, and Andrew Marvell must have been often at his board, and Waller, his kinsman, and perhaps the youthful Dryden. He was a great lover of music and entertained those who were skilful in any form of art. It is through Cromwell that England owns to-day the Raphael cartoons at Kensington. He purchased many other of the paintings which had belonged to the magnificent collection of Charles I. and had been sold. Here his old mother died, and here in 1658, on a wild August day, amid the tumult of a storm that raged and howled over a large part of England, the great heart of the Protector ceased to beat. On the day that he lay dying, a lad of fifteen years, named Isaac Newton, turned the violence of the storm to his account by jumping first with the wind and then against it, and computing its force by the difference of the distances.

As the dying Oliver approached his end, he was much in prayer; an attendant has recorded some of these last utterances in which he commended God’s people to the keeping of the Almighty: “Give them,” he prayed, “consistency of judgment, one heart, and mutual love; and go on to deliver them and with the work of reformation; and make the name of Christ glorious in the world. Teach those who look too much on thy instruments, to depend more upon thyself. Pardon such as desire to trample upon the dust of a poor worm, for they are thy people too.” Probably never by any master of Whitehall was such a sincerely devout and magnanimous petition raised to heaven. Of the decapitation of his dead body and its subsequent history, when Charles II. was able to wreak his vengeance, we need not speak. Neither need we rehearse the well-known record of the dissolute monarch who on the Restoration set up his profligate court at Whitehall. Of the last hours of Charles II. Evelyn paints a loathsome picture: “I can never forget the inexpressible luxury and profaneness, gaming, and all dissoluteness, and as it were total forgetfulness of God (it being Sunday evening) which I was witness of: the king sitting and toying with his concubines, a French boy singing love songs in that glorious gallery, whilst about twenty of the great courtiers and other dissolute persons were at basset around a large table, a bank of at least two thousand pounds in gold before them.... Six days after all was in the dust.” In the reign of William III. two fires, in 1691 and 1697, consumed all of the palace except the Banquet Hall of Inigo Jones.

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WESTMINSTER ABBEY AS MILTON KNEW IT

From an old engraving.

The Westminster Abbey that Milton knew, unlike the old St. Paul’s of his day, was indeed a house of God, and was not defiled with the intrusion of hucksters and dandies and the bustle of the Exchange. Its lofty walls, ungrimed by smoke, rose fair and stately; the present towers of the west front were then unbuilt, and its mass presented a long, unbroken, horizontal sky-line. Under its high, embowered roof, Milton may have seen less warmth of colour than we, for the stained glass is modern, but he was spared the majority of the pretentious and tasteless monuments which crowd the transepts and the side aisles to-day, and for the most part are in bulk in inverse proportion to their artistic merit, and to the importance of those whom they honour. Perhaps there was no man in England to whose sensitive soul the solemn minster spoke more eloquently. With a mind richly stored in history, and with the artist’s eye and prophet’s soul, every stone of this most venerable and beautiful of English churches must have been dear to him. It is not within the scope of this little volume even to touch upon the romantic history of this centre of English life or to examine its noble architecture, but only to indicate what may most have touched the mind and heart of the great scholar and patriot-reformer who often passed its portals on his walk from Petty France to Whitehall.