James left the hall at the end of the day’s hearing, sick to his belly from lack of food and at what he had heard and seen. He went back to his safe house and, with his head thumping, wrote his report, translated it into the code that they had agreed, and took the letter down to Queenhithe. The master of a ship was waiting for him.
“We sail with the tide,” he warned.
“Go now,” James said. “This is all I have to send. Someone will be waiting for you when you dock. They’ll ask for the paperwork from Monsieur St. Jean.”
“I’m guessing it’s not good news,” the captain said, looking at James’s darkened face.
“Just give him the letter,” James said wearily, and turned away from the river and the bobbing ships and his own longing to go with them.
Alinor’s brother, Ned, was among the crowd that pushed their way into the Westminster Hall on the first day of the trial, but he did not see James. Nor did James, who kept his head down and his hat pulled low over his face, notice the ferryman. The two men, without knowing it, shared a vigil, each of them incredulous that the trial was going ahead, both of them doubtful that there could be a guilty verdict. The roundhead veteran doubted that the judges would hold their nerve for long enough to find their king guilty of treason. And even if they did, Ned was certain they would have no appetite for a death sentence. How could subjects pass a death sentence on their king? All the courts in the land were by royal appointment, bound to keep the king’s laws. Who had the power to judge the lawgiver? For the first time in his life, that cold day in January, Ned saw his king in the semidivine flesh, seated on his velvet cushion, with his tall hat like a crown on his head, and thought, confusingly, that a man so arrogant as to bring himself before a court by his refusal to speak to his fellow men, or to keep his word when it was given, deserved that they should act against him. But at the same time, he could not stop himself thinking that a man so long-fingered, so beautifully dressed, with such mournful beauty, must be, as he claimed: half god, and entirely above justice.
Saturday— It is unlikely that an attempt to rescue him by force could succeed. He is brought by river to a private house before entering Westminster and intensely guarded. I think his only chance of freedom is on the insistence of the princes of Europe, especially if they threaten war on this half-hearted half-attending parliament. Many MPs have been excluded from parliament, less than half the summoned judges are attending, the people are not calling for the king to be sentenced. The decision of the court is by no means certain, the king is refusing to answer to it, and claims that it has no authority. I believe it could be adjourned without a verdict if the king’s fellow-monarchs and kinsmen demand it. If the trial continues there is a real danger of a verdict of “guilty,” and tho’ a verdict is not a sentence, His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales would be well advised to demand an assurance that they will not go from verdict to a sentence of exile or imprisonment.
They will call witnesses to give evidence of His Majesty breaking peace treaties, dishonoring his parole, denying his word, and lying to the parliament; and this can only cause more bad feeling. The mood of the hall is growing darker. The king has been fatally ill-advised to say nothing. Since he makes no explanation nor defense, it appears as if he has no defense. Worse, he looks as if he is relishing the accusations. But it does not stop them. We have only one advantage right now: that they have adjourned till Monday. There is time for you to make demands and stop this trial.
James sent his coded letter of advice into the darkness, into the hands of a ship’s captain crossing the stormy seas of the Channel in winter. He had no reply, but he expected none. There was no reason that the lords in exile should reassure him that they were taking steps to save the king. On Sunday, he attended the church for the empty service of protestant communion, and prayed fervently in his own room. He went down three times to Queenhithe in case a ship had come in with a letter for him. Not even his father had written.
On Monday he wrote again to his masters at The Hague that the court had met, and still the king would not answer to them.
Tomorrow they will meet without the presence of His Majesty to hear witnesses. It is essential that someone contradicts their testimony. Can one of you lords or gentlemen attend to cross-question the witnesses? If they say that the king is a liar it does not matter that the court is unconstitutional—it is something that should never be said. If we do not challenge this, we are teaching the people of England that they can say anything.
As the days went on, and James sent daily reports and received no reply, not even acknowledgment, he felt more and more that he, like the king, had been forgotten, and that he and the king would go on forever in this strange life in which every word uttered was of life or death importance, every word was on oath, and yet the boredom and banality of day after day in the Painted Chamber at Westminster, as the witnesses listed one dishonorable folly after another, was as painful as a man sucking on a decaying tooth.
Ned, listening as hard as he could, pushed into a corner at the very back of the room, found it incomprehensible that the judges could find the courage to sit in judgment on their king, but not to force him to answer. He feared, as the bitterly cold January drew to an end, that the king would escape all justice by the simple technique of denying that anyone had the right to judge him. He denied their right to speak of him, he denied their right to listen, he denied their right to be.
“It’s as if none of us is here,” he complained to his landlady in the cramped little inn that evening. “It’s as if none of it ever happened at all. He’s not even listening to the evidence against him. He’s not even attending now. They’ve let him off his own trial. He’s—well, I don’t know what he’s doing. Playing golf at St. James’s?”
“We’re nothing to the likes of them,” she said.
“I’m not nothing,” Ned said doubtfully. “On my ferry, on the mire. I’m not nothing there.”
On the evening of Saturday, January 27, James wrote his last letter in code and sent it to the unnamed man who had asked him to report, but not told him what he should do in the case of a disaster. Now the disaster had come and James wrote slowly, feeling that the time for urgency was past, and either they had an escape which they had not troubled to explain to him, or they had heard his warnings and done nothing. Either way his purgatory of misery had been completely wasted.
I regret to report that they have found him guilty and, with the verdict, they passed sentence of death. They recorded that they judged him tyrant, traitor, murderer, and public enemy to the good people of the nation, to be put to death by the severing of his head from his body.
If you have influence for mercy or pardon or a plan for escape it should be deployed now. They have not set a date for execution, but he is to see his children, Princess Elizabeth and her little brother Prince Henry, on Monday. His execution must follow unless you have prevented it.