This was the end after so many years of strife, evasion, pacts made and broken, bloodshed and lives ruined. Charles was a prisoner on trial for his life, and in one of his splendid beds at Whitehall (now the headquarters of the army) Oliver Cromwell slept or lay awake and struggled with tumultuous thoughts.
Many who had been with him all along were against him now. Vane and Sidney protested hotly. Many members refused to sit among the judges who were to try Charles.
"The King," said Sidney, "can be tried by no court, and by such a court as this no man can be tried."
"I tell you," said Cromwell sombrely, "we will cut off his head with the crown upon it."
So passionate and vigorous and unalterable was his resolution now it was taken.
The fiercer spirits of the army were with him. "'Blood defileth the land,'" quoted Ludlow, "'and the land cannot be cleansed of the blood shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it.'"
Cromwell, too, now believed that by God's express law the King was doomed.
It mattered not a whit to him that the tribunal which was to try Charles had neither legal nor moral right, since there was no law by which the King could be brought to trial, and the judges represented neither the Commons nor the people, but a section of the army; indeed, while others endeavoured to find excuses with which to cover up the obvious illegality of the proceeding, Cromwell disdained any such shifts. As he had been the man who had striven longest and most arduously to make some compromise with the King, he was now the man who was advancing most boldly and directly to the climax of the King's last phase.
He had decided there could be no peace while Charles lived, and he spared no effort to secure his death.