Lord William Russell on the scaffold

Some men are killed for what they did. A smaller number are killed for what their executioners are afraid they will yet do. The scaffold, in that second case, is not the closing of a case at law but the opening of a long argument, and the man on the block knows it before the headsman does. He stands inside a quarrel the Crown cannot win by killing him, and the form of his dying is the form in which the quarrel will be carried on after him.

THE HOUSE OF BEDFORD AND THE CATHOLIC QUESTION

William Russell is the eldest surviving son of the 5th Earl of Bedford, a great Whig house seated at Woburn, with the Russell vault under the chapel at Chenies in Buckinghamshire. He has sat for the county of Bedfordshire in the Commons since 1660. He is forty-three. Through the Exclusion Crisis of 1679 to 1681 he has been the parliamentary figure of the opposition, the man who carried the Exclusion Bill into the Lords and who refused, when Charles dissolved the Oxford Parliament, to let the question be buried. The question is whether James, Duke of York, openly Catholic, may succeed his brother on the throne of a Protestant kingdom. In the spring of 1683 a knot of hotter Whigs, Rumbold, Ferguson, Rumsey, talk in private houses of taking the King and the Duke on the road from Newmarket at the Rye House in Hertfordshire. Russell is not at those meetings. He is at the wider meetings, with Monmouth and Essex and Sidney, where the parliamentary question is the only question. The Crown's lawyers do not draw the distinction. On the thirteenth of July, at the King's Bench, on the evidence of Lord Howard of Escrick (who has perjured himself in three previous depositions), he is convicted of high treason. The sentence is the standard sentence, mitigated by Charles, on account of the Earl of Bedford's name, to beheading.

THE MORNING OF THE TWENTY-FIRST OF JULY

The weather over London is heavy summer sun. The scaffold has been raised in the open ground at the centre of Lincoln's Inn Fields, not at Tower Hill, by the King's particular order, so that the City and the Inns of Court shall see it done. By twenty past eleven the crowd is thick along the rails, four of the benchers of Lincoln's Inn at the front, gentlemen of the Bar behind them, apprentices on the roofs of the houses on the south side. He has come from the Tower by coach with Bishop Burnet of Salisbury at his right hand and the Dissenting minister John Tillotson, admitted by Lady Rachel's request, at his left. He carries in his coat a folded paper, the scaffold-speech he and Burnet have drawn up in the past three days, in the standard Whig form: a denial of the particular charge, a defence of the principle, a statement of faith. Rachel is not here. Rachel is at Southampton House in Bloomsbury, by his instruction, with the children. Through the four days of the trial she sat in the gallery behind him and took the notes on which Hawles and Pollexfen built the defence; she will, this morning, be writing the date in the family Bible.

A QUARTER OF AN HOUR ON THE BOARDS

He mounts the steps and the boards give a little under his weight, which steadies him. He looks once at the Fields, at the brick of Newcastle House on the west side, at the elms, at the white faces along the rail, and he does not look again. The form of the thing is to be observed. He gives the paper to the sheriff, who passes it to Burnet (it will be in print by Hawles within the week and run to seven editions before Christmas). He kneels with Tillotson at one side and Burnet at the other and prays, in the Dissenting form Rachel was raised in, not in the Anglican form. The crowd is quiet enough that the bell of St Clement Danes can be heard, faintly, eastwards. Lord Howard, he thinks, has the King's pardon by now, signed last Tuesday; the perjury has paid. The conviction stands on one man's word, and that man known. The principle for which he is being killed, that organised parliamentary opposition to a Catholic succession is itself treason against the King's person, is not, in any plain reading of the constitution of this kingdom, the law of England. Charles wants the example because Charles is tired. James wants the example more, and James will, in his own time, sit where Charles sits, and the example will be remembered by the people on whom it was set. Rachel will raise the two girls and the boy without rancour, by his instruction yesterday in the Tower; the principle will outlive the family in its present generation, and the family will, in two generations, stand on the ground the Crown is this morning denying them. He gives Burnet his watch. He gives the executioner ten guineas in a folded cloth, by the custom, and asks him plainly to make one stroke of it. He lays his head on the block.

THREE STROKES

Jack Ketch is drunk, or frightened, or both. The first stroke is short and goes into the shoulder. There is a sound from the crowd, a single noise, and then no sound. The second stroke is across the neck and does not part it. The third finishes the work. By the tradition of the Stuart scaffold it is the worst execution of the reign; the London Gazette of the twenty-third will record that Ketch was publicly censured by the Lord Chamberlain. The body is wrapped in the black cloth that Rachel sent down with the coach.

SOUTHAMPTON HOUSE, THE SAME HOUR

At Southampton House in Bloomsbury, Rachel Russell sits in the small closet off the great parlour with the Bible open on the table and her pen in her hand. She has written the date. She has not yet written the entry. She is the second daughter of the 4th Earl of Southampton, raised in the Dissenting interest, forty-six years old, and she has been, through the four months of his imprisonment, the practical instrument of the defence: she carried his letters out of the Tower, she retained Hawles and Pollexfen, she took the notes in the gallery, she petitioned the King in person at Whitehall on her knees. She will, in the forty years of her widowhood that are now beginning, refuse every offer of a second marriage, raise the three children alone, correspond with Tillotson and Burnet on the points of faith, and become, by the time of Queen Anne, the most consulted Whig matron in England. The seven hundred and twelve surviving letters in her hand, printed by her great-grandson in 1773, will be one of the founding documents of the Whig conscience. She hears, faintly, the bell at St Giles in the Fields. She writes the entry.

THE COMMONS, FEBRUARY 1689

The Convention Parliament, six years on, with William of Orange in the chair of state and James fled to Saint-Germain, takes up the attainder. The committee, sitting in the Painted Chamber, hears Sir John Hawles, who defended him, and reads Rachel's notes from the trial. The Act of Reversal passes both Houses in a forenoon. The Bedford lands are restored. The text of the Act records that the said attainder be utterly null and void to all intents and purposes whatsoever, that the trial was contrary to law, and that the conviction rested on the evidence of one man known to be perjured. In 1694 the Earl of Bedford is raised to the dukedom, the patent reciting, by King William's particular direction, that the honour is given in memory of the son. The Russell line in the Lords, the 4th Duke as Secretary of State, the 6th Duke as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Lord John Russell as Prime Minister from 1846 to 1852, carries the Whig succession through the next two centuries. The principle for which he was killed in Lincoln's Inn Fields becomes, by slow constitutional accretion, the settled law of the country.

THE YARD OF GROUND

There are deaths whose meaning is held inside the body and dies with it, and deaths whose meaning travels outward from the body through the country for a hundred years. The man who is killed for an argument the kingdom is about to concede is killed twice: once on the boards, and once, more thoroughly, by the verdict of the generation that follows. Charles meant the scaffold to close the Whig question. The scaffold opened it. The square in Lincoln's Inn Fields is now a public garden, railed, with plane trees. The tradition of the four Inns of Court holds that the patch of grass at its centre, where the boards stood that July morning, is, by the reckoning of the Bar, the most consequential single yard of ground in the political history of the English law.