Charles had arrived at Whitehall about ten o'clock, and was not led to the scaffold till past one. It was said that the scaffold was not completed; it might have been more truly said that the conspirators were not ready. There was a mystery in this delay. The fate of Charles the First to the very last moment was in suspense. Fairfax, though at the time in the palace, inquired of Herbert how the King was, when the King was no more! and expressed his astonishment on hearing that the execution had just taken place. This extraordinary simplicity and abstraction from the present scene of affairs has been imputed to the General as an act of refined dissimulation, yet this seems uncertain. The Prince's _carte blanche_ had been that morning confided to his hands, and he surely must have laid it before the "Grandees of the Army," as this new order of the rulers of England was called. Fairfax, whose personal feelings respecting the King were congenial with those his lady had so memorably evinced, labored to defer for a few days the terrible catastrophe; not without the hope of being able, by his own regiment and others in the army, to prevent the deed altogether. It is probable--inexplicable as it may seem to us--that the execution of Charles the First really took place unknown to the General. Fairfax was not unaccustomed to discover that his colleagues first acted, and afterwards trusted to his own discernment. [Illustration: _CHARLES I. GOING TO EXECUTION._ Photogravure from a painting by E. Crofts.] Secret history has not revealed all that passed in those three awful hours. We know, however, that the warrant for the execution was not signed till within a few minutes before the King was led to the scaffold. In an apartment in the Palace, Ireton and Harrison were in bed together, and Cromwell, with four colonels, assembled in it. Colonel Huncks refused to sign the warrant. Cromwell would have no further delay, reproaching the Colonel as "a peevish, cowardly fellow," and Colonel Axtell declared that he was ashamed for his friend Huncks, remonstrating with him, that "the ship is coming into the harbor, and now would he strike sail before we come to anchor?" Cromwell stepped to a table, and wrote what he had proposed to Huncks; Colonel Hacker, supplying his place, signed it, and with the ink hardly dry, carried the warrant in his hand and called for the King.