“Liberty being given me to speak, I related what follows:  viz., That the next Sunday but one after Charles I. was beheaded, Robert Spavin Secretary to Lieutenant-General Cromwell at that time, invited himself to dine with me, and brought Anthony Pearson and several others along with him to dinner.  That their principal discourse all dinner time was only who it was that beheaded the king.  One said it was the common hangman; another, Hugh Peters; others were also nominated, but none concluded.  Robert Spavin, so soon as dinner was done, took me by the hand, and carried me to the south window.  Saith he, ’These are all mistaken; they have not named the man that did the fact:  it was Lieutenant-Colonel Joice.  I was in the room when he fitted himself for the work; stood behind him when he did it; when done, went in with him again:  there is no man knows this but my master, viz.  Cromwell, Commissary Ireton, and myself.’—­’Doth Mr. Rushworth know it?’ saith I.  ‘No, he doth not know it,’ saith Spavin.  The same thing Spavin since has often related to me, when we were alone.”

R.W.E. 
Cheltenham.

Paper Hangings (Vol. ii., p. 134.).—­“It was on the walls of this drawing-room (the king’s at Kensington Palace) that the then new art of paper-hangings, in imitation of the old velvet flock, was displayed with an effect that soon led to the adoption of so cheap and elegant a manufacture, in preference to the original rich material from which it was copied.”—­W.H.  Pyne’s Royal Residences, vol. ii. p. 75.

M.W.

Black-guard.—­There are frequent entries among those of deaths of persons attached to the Palace of Whitehall, in the registers of St. Margaret’s, Westminster, of “——­, one of the blake garde.” about the year 1566, and later.  In the Churchwarden’s Accompts we find—­

    “1532.  Pd. for licence of 4 torchis for Black Garde, vj. d.”

The royal Halberdiers carried black bills. (Grose, Milit.  Antiq., vol. i. p. 124.) In 1584 they behaved {269} with great cruelty in Ireland.  (Cornp.  Peck’s Des.  Curios., vol. i. p. 155.) So Stainhurst, in his Description, says of bad men:  “They are taken for no better than rakehells, or the devil’s blacke guarde.”—­Chap. 8.  Perhaps, in distinction to the gaily dressed military guard, the menial attendants in a royal progress were called black-guards from their dull appearance.

I remember a story current in Dublin, of a wicked wag telling a highly respectable old lady, who was asking, where were the quarters of the guards, in which corps her son was a private, to inquire at the lodge of Trinity College if he was not within those learned walls, as the “black guards were lying there.”

M.W.