! and expressed his astonishment on hearing that the
execution had just taken place. This extraordinary simplicity and
abstraction from the present scene of affairs has been imputed to the
General as an act of refined dissimulation, yet this seems uncertain.
The Prince's _carte blanche_ had been that morning confided to his
hands, and he surely must have laid it before the "Grandees of the
Army," as this new order of the rulers of England was called. Fairfax,
whose personal feelings respecting the King were congenial with those
his lady had so memorably evinced, labored to defer for a few days the
terrible catastrophe; not without the hope of being able, by his own
regiment and others in the army, to prevent the deed altogether. It is
probable--inexplicable as it may seem to us--that the execution of
Charles the First really took place unknown to the General. Fairfax
was not unaccustomed to discover that his colleagues first acted, and
afterwards trusted to his own discernment.

[Illustration: _CHARLES I. GOING TO EXECUTION._
Photogravure from a painting by E. Crofts.]

Secret history has not revealed all that passed in those three awful
hours. We know, however, that the warrant for the execution was not
signed till within a few minutes before the King was led to the
scaffold. In an apartment in the Palace, Ireton and Harrison were in
bed together, and Cromwell, with four colonels, assembled in it.
Colonel Huncks refused to sign the warrant. Cromwell would have no
further delay, reproaching the Colonel as "a peevish, cowardly
fellow," and Colonel Axtell declared that he was ashamed for his
friend Huncks, remonstrating with him, that "the ship is coming into
the harbor, and now would he strike sail before we come to anchor?"
Cromwell stepped to a table, and wrote what he had proposed to Huncks;
Colonel Hacker, supplying his place, signed it, and with the ink
hardly dry, carried the warrant in his hand and called for the King.

At the fatal summons Charles rose with alacrity. The King passed
through the long gallery by a line of soldiers. Awe and sorrow seem
now to have mingled in their countenances. Their barbarous commanders
were intent on their own triumph, and no farther required the forced
cry of "Justice and Execution." Charles stepped out of an enlarged
window of the Banqueting House, where a new opening leveled it with
the scaffold. Charles came forward with the same indifference as "he
would have enter