In the mean while Charles enjoyed the consolation of learning that his son had not forgotten him in his distress.  By the indulgence of Colonel Tomlinson, Seymour was admitted, delivered the letter, and received the royal instructions for the prince.  He was hardly gone, when Hacker arrived with the fatal summons.  About two o’clock the king proceeded through the long gallery, lined on each side with soldiers, who, far from insulting the fallen monarch, appeared by their sorrowful looks to sympathize with his fate.  At the end an aperture had been made in the wall, through which he stepped at once upon the scaffold.  It was hung with black; at the farther end were seen the two executioners, the block, and the axe; below

[Footnote 1:  For the arrival of the ambassadors see the Journals of the House of Commons on the 26th.  A fac-simile of the carte-blanche, with the signature of the prince, graces the title-page of the third volume of the Original Letters, published by Mr. Ellis.]

[Footnote 2:  “Mean time they went into the long gallery, where, chancing to meet the general, he ask’d Mr. Herbert how the king did?  Which he thought strange....  His question being answered, the general seem’d much surprised.”—­Herbert, 194.  It is difficult to believe that Herbert could have mistaken or fabricated such a question, or that Fairfax would have asked it, had he known what had taken place.  To his assertion that Fairfax was with the officers in Harrison’s room, employed in “prayer or discourse,” it has been objected that his name does not occur among the names of those who were proved to have been there at the trial of the regicides.  But that is no contradiction.  The witnesses speak of what happened before, Herbert of what happened during, the execution.  See also Ellis, 2nd series, iii. 345.]

appeared in arms several regiments of horse and foot; and beyond, as far as the eye was permitted to reach, waved a dense and countless crowd of spectators.  The king stood collected and undismayed amidst the apparatus of death.  There was in his countenance that cheerful intrepidity, in his demeanour that dignified calmness, which had characterized, in the hall of Fotheringay, his royal grandmother, Mary Stuart.  It was his wish to address the people; but they were kept beyond the reach of his voice by the swords of the military; and therefore confining his discourse to the few persons standing with him on the scaffold, he took, he said, that opportunity of denying in the presence of his God the crimes of which he had been accused.  It was not to him, but to the houses of parliament, that the war and all its evils should be charged.  The parliament had first invaded the rights of the crown by claiming the command of the army; and had provoked hostilities by issuing commissions for the levy of forces, before he had raised a single man.  But he had forgiven all, even those, whoever they were (for he did not desire to know their names),