1654

Sifting through memories of confused dreams, I stand at the foot of the stairway. Although the weight of the nation lies on my shoulders, I have set this morning apart for the four-hour walk into the heart of London. It has been four years since the execution and I have rarely visited Whitehall Palace since, but I must go today … and go alone. There are memories to be faced.

It is twenty-six years — half a lifetime — since I took my seat in Parliament. I was naive in those days, marvelling that such opportunities could come to a farmer’s son bearing the simple name of Oliver Cromwell.

Five years have passed since I signed the fateful document. However, even now, my dreams are haunted by the image of a king standing before a canvas.

1632: The First Canvas

King Charles, first of that name, stands before the artist and his easel.

How does one go about sketching a king? It is as though he has taken the distilled essence of majesty. Only his small frame remains to remind him of his lonely childhood, which was spent struggling with rickets and stammering speech. The artist must encapsulate, in the steely curve of the armour, the determination of a child who emerged reluctantly from the shadows of his older brother. When the beloved heir Henry perished as a young man, Charles had carved out a life for himself and made the court his own.

As the profile takes shape, the artist refines the gilt sheen of the king’s sash, the shimmer of the flowing chestnut hair. He smooths over blemishes. On the canvas, the king’s skin is a statuesque ivory. Almost a pallor.

This is the power of a paintbrush. These horsehairs, oils and mixed ochres are to uphold Charles’ very reputation. The paintbrush’s craft will disperse kingly majesty across the nation; only in this way can the people glimpse their king and be warned against treason. That, in these days of quickening turmoil, is crucial.

As the artist works in the stuffy seclusion of his workshop, war is brewing in Parliament: its relationship with the king has festered for years and is turning gangrenous.

When John Pym, a fellow Member of Parliament, asks to speak with me, we meet in my kitchen.

Before us lie two empty plates, smeared with eel sauce and flakes of pastry. In the stifling summer heat, the smell of eel pie grows cloying. But eavesdroppers could prove fatal; we swelter in the kitchen, with doors and windows locked.

In hushed tones, we are trying to pin down the very nature of treason, its definition as slippery as the eels my wife brings back from the Ely markets.

Pym speaks through his teeth. 'Think of Burton, Bastwick, Prynn. Their ears cut off. Blood spilled. All for printing pamphlets pointing out errors in His Majesty’s church … they were obeying their consciences, no more.’

Anger rises in me, burning my chest, at the thought of the artist — smoothing over the king’s blemishes, cobbling together a fairytale reputation. ‘Charles is betraying his own people, John. It’s nothing less than treason.’

Silence. My heartbeat quickens; the very air tingles. Revolutionary words … and I cannot erase them.

Then John takes a swig from his ale, draining the tankard. 'Be careful with your words, Cromwell. You know you’re naught but a farmer’s son in His Majesty’s eyes.’

Meanwhile, in his stuffy workshop, the king’s artist breathes life into his canvas. Refining the armour, he creates a canvas glowing with kingly majesty until, at last, the only details left to complete are the king’s eyes. The final strokes are applied: the king’s gaze is a steely one, its determination not quite masked by the gently sloping eyelids.

No sooner is the portrait hung on the Whitehall Palace wall than the civil war begins. On the battlefield, the standard is raised in torrential rain. As the king’s family flees to their rural retreat, the portrait is left on the wall, a spectre of a bygone age.

Coins, imprinted with kingly majesty, are dispersed throughout the kingdom; they are exchanged by soldiers on the field, trodden down in the mud and stench of the battlefield.

The months fly by in a dizzy choreography of charges, attacks and sometimes retreats. The Parliamentarian generals gather in tents to plan frantically between battles, and I, a mere farmer’s boy, find myself propelled to become Oliver Cromwell, head of the New Model Army.

Marston Moor, Edgehill, Naseby. Battles speed by; then comes 1646. Victory is won, and the king captured: we place the treaty before him, a canvas of peace. His gaze hardens. His loyalty — to his close family, his friends and his own beliefs — comes far before his willingness to compromise over religion or war. He refuses the treaty.

The chance for peace has come and gone. The king negotiates in secret, and his supporters turn to violence; in the wake of Royalist revolts, the Second Civil War breaks out, spreading like a forest fire.

Our committee meets with battle scars on our faces. To us, the Parliament, it has become clear: we have pinned down the definition of treason … and appointed the guilty one.

Now that John Pym has succumbed to cancer, it is General Fairfax who stands to speak. His voice, on this rare occasion when he chooses to use it, is like thunder.

'Our verdict is this: King Charles, first of that name, is a man of blood.’

1649: The Second Canvas

The trial begins; the death warrant is unrolled.

A squadron of small print stands sentry on the page — revolution and resentment smoothed into formulaic prose. The paper is a canvas of death, bearing a pen portrait of the king, a reputation to be scattered like ashes across the nation. Behold your king! Tyrant, traitor, public enemy; slaughterer of your sons and husbands.

Before our assembly — before the artists of his execution — the man of blood stands. With a fuller, greyer beard, he has aged beyond his forty-eight years, and yet ... even now ... his air of humbled majesty pervades the room. Charles, first of that name: the kingliness clings to him more strongly in death than in life.

A feather quill lies by the warrant, like a paintbrush for the canvas of death. The feather of some feeble bird is about to authorise a man’s death.

Fifty-nine judges line up to sign the paper. Some hands tremble like those of a man just released from the torture chamber. Others write their signatures with a firm hand, their writing as deft as an artist’s brushstrokes.

I am the third to sign. The scratch of quill of paper cuts through the silence, like a grating swan song, and there lies my name: Oliver Cromwell, a farmer’s son, has sealed the king’s fate.

On 28th January, 1649, Charles is led through Whitehall Palace, through the gilt grandeur of the empty banqueting hall, and onto a scaffold — where the block and axe are waiting.

Charles, first of that name: the first to be tried by judge and jury; the first to be killed not by illness, assassins or a rogue arrow in battle, but by the executioner’s axe.

The crowd groans as the head is held up by its chestnut hair.

1654

Five years have passed since the execution, and here I am, sifting the memories of a turbulent life.

I spend the early hours trudging the long pilgrimage into London until I arrive at Whitehall Palace, my boots spattered with mud. Wood-panelled walls flash by. As my footsteps resound in the empty corridors, I consider the strange change my own name has undergone. My portraits have always held the image of a stocky farmer rather than of majesty. 'Warts and all,’ I tell my artists. How the tables have turned that I, a farmer’s son, have signed the king’s death warrant. Oliver Cromwell: those five syllables now bear the weight of regicide.

I grip my cane tighter, remembering the day I visited Charles’ coffin, the slow creak as I lifted the lid. What a sight. The grey pallor, the careful stitching attaching head to body, the closed eyes. Much blood had been lost; devoted subjects had mopped it up with their handkerchiefs. The King of England, reduced to a grey corpse, dead before his time. ‘Cruel necessity,’ I muttered.

Now, as then, grimness overclouds my thoughts. His death was cruel, yes, but necessary … surely necessary …

Enough reflection. A white doorway looms, like a spectre, at the end of the dim corridor: I’ve arrived.

I pause; the ungracious squeak of my leather boots ceases. Silence, save for the whisper of my feathered hat brushing against the doorway. I stoop, as I once ducked into my battlefield tents to plan the cavalry charges, and then emerge into the room.

Winter sunlight leaks through narrow windows, casting sharp strips of light on the floor — but the corner is dim, and my eyes take a moment to adjust. Oddly clumsy, I wrench off my battle-scarred gloves. I scan the shadows — it must be here. And then I see it.

Propped unceremoniously against the palace wall, the first canvas lies. He is forgotten in the shadows, as he was in childhood; alone in death, as he was in life.

As my eyes adjust to the dimness, there is the king before me.

I used to tell doubters that the execution was the darkness before dawn, leaving the sunshine of liberty in its wake. But there is Charles before me, and, yes, the kingly glow is still there as I remember it. There he is, the young father with a lifetime ahead of him — the block still in the unforeseeable future. I remember witnessing his goodbye to his children: my dreams have been haunted by the gentleness in his eyes as, on the morning of his execution, he placed his toddler son on his knee and said, 'Soon they will cut off thy father’s head’. There was a sad duty in the boy’s face, and sheer terror in his daughter Elizabeth’s. My own daughter, another Elizabeth, is thriving, a wife and mother of three; Charles’ Elizabeth died of the shock — a maiden of fourteen.

A glimmer of sunlight catches the painting, picking out the gilt of Charles’ sash, his chestnut hair and the gentle gaze below his sloping eyelids.

The paintbrush has kept him alive; the stroke of my pen helped to kill him.

During his life, I never spoke with the king privately. We were surrounded by chaos in Parliament; separated by a vast gulf of enmity during the war; reunited only at the trial, when I signed his death warrant. Only now, when it is too late for him to reply, do I have the chance to speak to him — but now, as at the coffin, no words come. Only ‘cruel necessity’.

So I stand in silence, in the bitter cold of an empty palace, alone with the king I killed.

Thank you for reading!