Note 375 — Chapter X · (continued 2)

Clarendon says that there were many consultations among the officers about the best mode of disposing of the king; some were for deposing him, others for poison or assassination, which, he fancies, would have been put in practice, if they could have prevailed on Hammond. But this is not warranted by our better authorities.

It is hard to say at what time the first bold man dared to talk of bringing the king to justice. But in a letter of Baillie to Alexander Henderson, May 19, 1646, he says, "If God have hardened him, so far as I can perceive, this people will strive to have him in their power, and make an example of him; I abhor to think what they speak of execution!"—ii. 20. Published also in Dalrymple's Memorials of Charles I., p. 166. Proofs may also be brought from pamphlets by Lilburne and others in 1647, especially towards the end of that year; and the remonstrance of the Scots parliament, dated Aug. 13, alludes to such language. Rushw. Abr. vi. 245. Berkley indeed positively assures us, that the resolution was taken at Windsor in a council of officers, soon after the king's confinement at Carisbrook; and this with so much particularity of circumstance that, if we reject his account, we must set aside the whole of his memoirs at the same time. Maseres's Tracts, i. 383. But it is fully confirmed by an independent testimony, William Allen, himself one of the council of officers and adjutant-general of the army, who, in a letter addressed to Fleetwood, and published in 1659, declares that after much consultation and prayer at Windsor Castle, in the beginning of 1648, they had "come to a very clear and joint resolution that it was their duty to call Charles Stuart, that man of blood, to an account for the blood he had shed, and mischief he had done to his utmost, against the Lord's cause and people in these poor nations." This is to be found in Somers Tracts, vi. 499. The only discrepancy, if it is one, between him and Berkley, is as to the precise time, which the other seems to place in the end of 1647. But this might be lapse of memory in either party; nor is it clear, on looking attentively at Berkley's narration, that he determines the time. Ashburnham says, "For some days before the king's remove from Hampton Court, there was scarcely a day in which several alarms were not brought him by and from several considerable persons, both well affected to him and likely to know much of what was then in agitation, of the resolution which a violent party in the army had to take away his life. And that such a design there was, there were strong insinuations to persuade." See also his Narrative, published in 1830.