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message regarding their thoughts on any attempt to try the king. 20
    News of his father’s impending trial reached the Prince of Wales, who was by then in Holland, the guest of his sister Mary
     and her husband Prince William of Orange. Charles’s younger brother James had already arrived at The Hague, having escaped
     England disguised as a girl. Despite the Christmas celebrations, this was a generally gloomy time for the members of the Stuart
     family. The atmosphere was lifted for Charles by his first real love affair. After a family breakup, the teenage beauty Lucy
     Walter found herself in The Hague where she became the lover of the republican Robert Sidney (younger son of the more famous
     Algernon). When the eighteen-year-old prince caught sight of her he was immediately captivated. Lucy jumped beds and launched
     into an affair with the prince that soon led to pregnancy. Despite the power of his first big fling, Charles devoted time
     to seeking ways to save his father from what increasingly looked like certain doom. Entreaties to the powers in France and
     in Holland to intervene came to nothing, as would desperate pleadings to Parliament and the army in England.
    On the first day of 1649, the much-reduced ranks of the House of Commons decided that the king should be tried by a High Court
     created expressly for that purpose. The following day, the House of Lords rejected the proposal. The Commons now had to decide
     how far it should push its authority. After two days, the House declared that it was the supreme authority in the land and
     could pass laws without consent of either lords or king. On 6 January 1649, the Commons passed an Act setting up a special
     High Court of Justice to try the king.
    At Windsor Castle, King Charles was kept well informed of these preparations. Though schooled since childhood in the art of
     never letting the regal mask slip, human frailty finally burst through. One of his courtiers wrote:
    His Majesty hath received intelligence from Westminster that the General Council of the Army have resolved to bring him to
     a speedy tryall. All of which his Majesty doth very ill receive; for (with a sad dejected countenance, and tears trickling
     down his sacred cheeks) he saith that his conscience begins to dictate sad and dismall apprehensions to his memory and that
     he much feareth the clouds begin to gather to a head for the eclipsing and eradicating the splendour and glory of his days. 21
    On 13 January a parliamentary committee decided the king should be tried at Westminster Hall, the scene of many other historic
     trials, including those of William Wallace and the gunpowder plotters.
    Charles now knew that his fate would shortly rest in the hands of those he could least wish to hold it: a court consisting
     of mere subjects who considered themselves his peers.

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A WICKED DESIGN
    8 January—27 January 1649
    There was only one building in London big enough to stage the king’s trial: Westminster Hall, built at the end of the eleventh
     century on the orders of William II. Its glorious hammer-beam roof, commissioned by Richard II in the fourteenth century,
     required no internal supporting columns and provided the hall with the largest uninterrupted interior in England, measuring
     two hundred and forty feet by nearly seventy. It had been built for great events; Charles’s own coronation banquet had been
     held in it, as had those of many kings before. But then, so had many treason trials.
    The question facing the trial’s organisers was twofold: how to give it legitimacy and how to make that legitimacy apparent
     to the people. The answer to the second part seemed relatively easy – the king should be tried in front of a large panel of
     judges and in the presence of the public, so that justice could be seen to be done. To facilitate this, all public sessions
     of the trial would be held in Westminster Hall.
    The answer to the first part was more difficult. The task of giving the