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* Carte’s Ormond, vol. ii. p. 254. This account seems better
supported than that in Ablancourt’s Memoirs, that the
chancellor chiefly pushed the Portuguese alliance. The
secret transactions of the court of England could not be
supposed to be much known to a French resident at Lisbon:
and whatever opposition the chancellor might make, he would
certainly endeavor to conceal it from the queen and all her
family; and even in the parliament and council would support
the resolution already taken. Clarendon himself says, in his
Memoirs, that he never either opposed or promoted the
Portuguese match.

When the matter was laid before the council, all voices concurred in approving the resolution; and the parliament expressed the same complaisance. And thus was concluded, seemingly with universal consent, the inauspicious marriage with Catharine, a princess of virtue, but who was never able, either by the graces of her person or humor, to make herself agreeable to the king. The report, however, of her natural incapacity to have children, seems to have been groundless, since she was twice declared to be pregnant.[*]

* Lord Lansdowne’s Defence of General Monk. Temple vol. ii
p. 154

The festivity of these espousals was clouded by the trial and execution of criminals. Berkstead, Cobbet, and Okey, three regicides, had escaped beyond sea; and after wandering some time concealed in Germany, came privately to Delft, having appointed their families to meet them in that place. They were discovered by Downing, the king’s resident in Holland, who had formerly served the protector and commonwealth in the same station, and who once had even been chaplain to Okey’s regiment. He applied for a warrant to arrest them. It had been usual for the states to grant these warrants; though at the same time, they had ever been careful secretly to advertise the persons, that they might be enabled to make their escape. This precaution was eluded by the vigilance and despatch of Downing. He quickly seized the criminals, hurried them on board a frigate which lay off the coast, and sent them to England. These three men behaved with more moderation and submission than any of the other regicides who had suffered. Okey in particular, at the place of execution, prayed for the king, and expressed his intention, had he lived, of submitting peaceably to the established government. He had risen, during the wars, from being a chandler in London, to a high rank in the army; and in all his conduct appeared to be a man of humanity and honor. In consideration of his good character and of his dutiful behavior, his body was given to his friends to be buried.

The attention of the public was much engaged by the trial of two distinguished criminals, Lambert and Vane. These men, though none of the late king’s judges, had been excepted from the general indemnity, and committed to prison. The convention parliament, however, was so favorable to them, as to petition the king, if they should be found guilty, to suspend their execution: but this new parliament, more zealous for monarchy, applied for their trial and condemnation. Not to revive disputes which were better buried in oblivion, the indictment of Vane did not comprehend any of his actions during the war between the king and parliament: it extended only to his behavior after the late king’s death, as member of the council of state, and secretary of the navy, where fidelity to the trust reposed in him required his opposition to monarchy.

Vane wanted neither courage nor capacity to avail himself of this advantage. He urged that, if a compliance with the government at that time established in England, and the acknowledging of its authority, were to be regarded as criminal, the whole nation had incurred equal guilt, and none would remain whose innocence could entitle them to try or condemn him for his pretended treasons: that, according to these maxims, wherever an illegal authority was established by force, a total and universal destruction must ensue; while the usurpers proscribed one part of the nation for disobedience, the lawful prince punished the other for compliance: that the legislature of England, foreseeing this violent situation, had provided for public security by the famous statute of Henry VII.; in which it was enacted that no man, in case of any revolution, should ever be questioned for his obedience to the king in being: that whether the established government were a monarchy or a commonwealth, the reason of the thing was still the same; nor ought the expelled prince to think himself entitled to allegiance, so long as he could not afford protection: that it belonged not to private persons, possessed of no power, to discuss the title of their governors; and every usurpation, even the most flagrant, would equally require obedience with the most legal establishment: that the controversy between the late king and his parliament was of the most delicate nature; and men of the greatest probity had been divided in their choice of the party which they should embrace; that the parliament, being rendered indissoluble but by its own consent, was become a kind of cordinate power with the king; and as the case was thus entirely new and unknown to the constitution, it ought not to be tried rigidly by the letter of the ancient laws: that for his part, all the violences which had been put upon the parliament, and upon the person of the sovereign, he had ever condemned; nor had he once in the house for some time before and after the execution of the king: that, finding the whole government thrown into disorder, he was still resolved, in every revolution, to adhere to the commons, the root, the foundation, of all lawful authority: that in prosecution of this principle, he had cheerfully under gone all the violence of Cromwell’s tyranny; and would now with equal alacrity, expose himself to the rigors of perverted law and justice: that though it was in his power, on the king’s restoration, to have escaped from his enemies, he was determined, in imitation of the most illustrious names of antiquity, to perish in defence of liberty, and to give testimony with his blood for that honorable cause in which he had been enlisted; and that, besides the ties by which God and nature had bound him to his native country, he was voluntarily engaged by the most sacred covenant, whose obligation no earthly power should ever be able to make him relinquish.

All the defence which Vane could make was fruitless. The court, considering more the general opinion of his active guilt in the beginning and prosecution of the civil wars, than the articles of treason charged against him, took advantage of the letter of the law, and brought him in guilty. His courage deserted him not upon his condemnation. Though timid by nature, the persuasion of a just cause supported him against the terrors of death, while his enthusiasm, excited by the prospect of glory, embellished the conclusion of a life, which through the whole course of it, had been so much disfigured by the prevalence of that principle. Lest pity for a courageous sufferer should make impression on the populace, drummers were placed under the scaffold, whose noise, as he began to launch out in reflections on the government, drowned his voice, and admonished him to temper the ardor of his zeal. He was not astonished at this unexpected incident. In all his behavior there appeared a firm and animated intrepidity; and he considered death but as a passage to that eternal felicity which he believed to be prepared for him.

This man, so celebrated for his parliamentary talents, and for his capacity in business, has left some writings behind him: they treat, all of them, of religious subjects, and are absolutely unintelligible: no traces of eloquence, or even of common sense, appear in them. A strange paradox! did we not know, that men of the greatest genius, where they relinquish by principle the use of their reason, are only enabled, by their vigor of mind, to work themselves the deeper into error and absurdity. It was remarkable, that as Vane, by being the chief instrument of Strafford’s death, had first opened the way for that destruction which overwhelmed the nation, so by his death he closed the scene of blood. He was the last that suffered on account of the civil wars. Lambert, though condemned, was reprieved at the bar; and the judges declared, that if Vane’s behavior had been equally dutiful and submissive, he would have experienced like lenity in the king. Lambert survived his condemnation near thirty years. He was confined to the Isle of Guernsey, where he lived contented, forgetting all his past schemes of greatness, and entirely forgotten by the nation. He died a Roman Catholic.