He who had given the King and England his best now gave all left to him. On one of those awakening days of spring, when even in the Tower there were trees bursting into leaf, glimpses of cloud-flecked blue, bars of sunshine across the cold walls and sounds from the wide river of music and merry-making, Lord Strafford wrote to the King, asking, for the sake of the peace of England, to be left to his fate.
In these words he concluded his noble letter: “My consent will more acquit you to God than all the world can do besides. To you I can resign the life of this world with all imaginable cheerfulness.” The King gave way, but with no abatement of his anguish, since he justly felt that such a request was but another reason for him to keep his word.
He could not, when he had consented, sign the warrant himself, so this was done by four lords, and he sent a message entreating mercy of the peers, or at least a delay; but there was no pity in England for Lord Strafford, nor for the King.
The worst half of the tragedy was his; he never forgot nor shook his conscience free of what he had done. When he came to his own agony and bent his sad head to the block he looked at Juxon, that same bishop who had been advocate for Strafford, and said, “Remember,” and it was believed that the terrible whisper referred to the forsaken friend who had died the same death eight years before.
At the moment he fell into a kind of apathy in the midst of the rejoicing faction who had their way at last.
Lord Strafford prepared for death; he was in the full vigour of life, of a worldly temper, proud and ambitious; the warm days were full of the keen joy of life. He tasted to the utmost the sharpness of the struggle between flesh and spirit. When he heard from the written paper the actual words of the King formally condemning him he was for a moment broken with emotion and overcome at thought of the friendship that had failed so miserably; he, beloved of the King, was to die an attainted man, a death humiliating and shameful, branded as a traitor.
He struggled to control his haughty spirit, to subdue the flesh that clung to lovely life, but always before his eyes were the ripening green, the sweet early weather, the sounds from the river, and it was not easy.
The execution was hurried on; on the 12th of May he went to his death in black satins like the great gentleman he was; as he left the gate Archbishop Laud, his one-time coadjutor, now his fellow-prisoner, met him, and he went on his knee to receive the blessing of one who was to so quickly follow him to the scaffold, then on between his guards silent and scornful like the leader of them all, while on his face were the low-breathed air and the early sunshine, and in his ears the calls of the birds and the swish of the river rippling hurriedly under the fortress walls.