CHAPTER FOURTEEN Trial of Charles I

Crown, as noun and verb, appears two-hundred and sixty times across thirty-six of William Shakespeare’s works. The incidence is highest in the history plays, of course: two-thirds are found in King John, Richard II, the two parts of Henry IV, Henry V, all three parts of Henry VI, Richard III, and Henry VIII, with Henry VI Part ι, on its own, accounting for a quarter of the total.

Incertainties now crown themselves assured,

And peace proclaims olives of endless age.

This crowning can be dismissed as the tolling of romantic love—seemingly innocent of connotations that are more portentous and political. But to read on through to the end of Sonnet 107 is to feel the chill of those closing lines:

Now with the drops of this most balmy time

My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes,

Since, spite of him, I’ll live in this poor rime,

While he insults o’er dull and speechless tribes:

And thou in this shalt find thy monument,

When tyrants’ crests and tombs of brass are spent.

Tyrants’ crests and tombs of brass make the connection. Shakespeare’s his­tory plays, true to the mediaeval past of England, are about little else. Wit­ness sleepless Henry IV railing at his insomnia:

Canst thou, O partial sleep, give thy repose

To the wet sea-boy in an hour so rude;

And in the calmest and most stillest night, With all appliances and means to boot, Deny it to a king? Then, happy low, lie down!

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. [Henry IVPart2, III.i]

There was good reason for Henry TV’s unease. His crown had been tak­en from the head of the hapless Richard II, who had been forced to ab­dicate and then been struck down by one of his jail-keepers (if we credit Shakespeare’s version of events) at Pontefract Castle, in the cold of Febru­ary 1400.

The singular, savage eloquence that Shakespeare bestowed on Richard reflects the sinister, savage political conflict between York and Lancaster:

Slave, I have set my life upon a cast,

And I will stand the hazard of the die:

I think there be six Richmonds in the field;

Five have I slain to-day instead of him.

A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse! [RichardIII, Viv∣

Nonetheless, in the sordid and brutal chronicle of English internecine slaughter, the Wars of the Roses were merely an entr’acte. For sixteen de­cades before Bosworth Field, beginning at Berkeley Castle in 1327, violent ends had routinely been visited upon the rulers of England. At Berkeley, Edward II, dethroned by his estranged wife leading a powerful faction of exiled nobles whom he had turned against him by his promotion of low­born favorites, was first starved near to death, then dispatched by an inge­niously gruesome method that left no external marks on the cadaver.

Yet nowhere in all this sanguinary chronicle of usurpation, deposition, and murder can be found anything approaching the enormity voiced by Oliver Cromwell two days before Charles I stood his trial in Westminster Hall on January 20, 1649. Hearing Algernon Sidney’s reasons for refusing to serve as a judge in the matter, Cromwell shot back, “I tell you we will cut off his head with the crown on it.”¹ Cromwell and his aiders and abettors were as good as their word.

It required another one and one-half centuries for those fears to materi­alize, in the Place de la Revolution, on another cold January day (January 21, 1793), when Citoyen Capet, Louis XVI, King of the French, quondam Louis XVI, King of France, was guillotined after a mock trial bearing an uncanny resemblance to that of Charles I in the matters of tribunal, sittings, charges, the king's defense, and the vote to condemn.

A century afterward, Lenin had the cold-bloodedness to go back to the old way of doing things. Czar Nicholas II and the royal family, with their physician and personal servants, were summarily disposed of in a fusillade of small-arms fire in the cellar of the house in Ekaterinburg where they were held captive. For seventy years the Soviet regime survived if not al­ways thrived. But one quality ultimately eluded it: political legitimacy, not merely in Russian eyes, but in the eyes of people all around the world. Now that regime is gone. The bodies of the Romanovs, as they have become identified, have been honorably re-interred in St. Petersburg, among their ancestors and antecedents.

There is no single, simple, uniquely mystical attribute of monarchy that alone affords it legitimacy and thereby denies the regime that succeeds a monarchy the ability to establish a new legitimacy. None, not even mon­archs themselves, made any claim that kings are sinless or inerrant. They are human. The institution’s most eloquent defender and avid advocate, James VI and I of Scotland and England, in his numerous works on kingship struck a single prevailing note, which was the king’s divinely ordained and divinely derived obligation truly to imitate God in justice and righteous­ness in governing his people and conducting the affairs of his state.² James recognized with complete clarity that failure to discharge the obligation placed upon the king by God could constitute tyranny and might well lead not merely to divine retribution in eternity but also to deposition and death in this present world. James reminded his son and heir apparent at the time, Prince Henry, that a tyrannical king’s subjects might become his

burreaux [public executioners]: and although that rebellion be euer vnlawfull on their part, yet is the world so wearied of him, that his fall is little meaned by the rest of his Subjects, and but smiled at by his neighbours.³

The prophetic quality of James’s vision testifies to the pragmatism that monarchs required in a Europe that was simultaneously suffering the first modern continental war, the first modern revolution, and the last and great­est medieval schism.

This understanding of legitimacy was twice voiced at climactic mo­ments when the whole polity of a people and a nation-state stood on the precipice and looked into the black hole of lost legitimacy. Neither speaker had a philosopher’s intellect and the character of each was seriously flawed, deeply enough to impeach his credibility. But what each said in the forum that condemned him long survived him and proved all too true, both as analysis and prophecy. On December 26, 1792, with Louis XVI facing a rev­olutionary Convention that was already committed to his destruction, one of his counsel stunned his judges. Raymond-Romain de Seze noted that King Louis, shorn of the inviolability accorded him by the Constitution of 1791, as “Citoyen Capet” did not have the rights of an ordinary French citizen:

I look among you judges and see only accusers; Louis will therefore be the only Frenchman for whom there exists neither law nor legal form. He will have nei­ther the rights of the citizen nor the prerogatives of the king.⁴

The Convention was troubled. Seze concluded by admitting that if he achieved nothing there, he would rely upon history, warning them to take care in their judgment, for history would judge them over centuries.

This drama in Paris played out almost exactly 144 years after Charles I at Westminster uttered the same prophecy even more explicitly. Judgment was delivered:

For all which treasons and crimes this Court doth adjudge that the said Charles Stuart, as a tyrant, traytor, murtherer and publique enimy to the good people of this nation, shall be put to death by the severing of his heade from his body.

After the sentence reade the Lo. President [John Bradshawe] said: This sen­tence now read and published, it is the act, sentence, judgment and resolution of the whole court.

Whereupon the court stood up and owned it.

The King. Will you hear me a word, Sir?

Bradshawe. Sir, you are not to be heard after the sentence.

The King. No, Sir?

Bradshawe. No, Sir, by your favour, Sir. Guard, withdraw your prisoner.

The King. I may speak after the sentence—By your favour, Sir, I may speak after the sentence over. By your favour—hold—the sentence, Sir—I say, Sir, I do—

Bradshawe. Guard, withdraw your prisoner.

The King. I am not suffered for to speak. Expect what Justice other people will have.⁵

The expectation appeared soon enough. Rule by major generals, parlia­ments summoned by writs and then dispersed by the sword, legislation by executive ordinance, judges sacked for refusing to excuse lawlessness. If less bloody than the Jacobin Terror, the English Revolution of saints- in-arms was hardly less a despotism. At least, it was a regime so despotic and illegitimate that after the death of Cromwell, the only figure capable of controlling the army, it unraveled rapidly. In 1660, King Charles II was restored by a rump of the army marching down from Coldstream on the Scottish border under General Monck and the concurrence of the Rump of the Long Parliament afforced by the members excluded by Colonel Pride on the eve of Charles I's trial.

Only in the last few dramatic moments of the so-called trial of Charles I, in his exchange with Lord President Bradshawe, is to be found a dis­putation that invokes the law and the matter that supplies a classic qual­ity to this otherwise wholly dolorous event. For here alone was drawn a clear issue to support an adversarial forensic engagement that within our common-law tradition constitutes trial. For four days of hearings Charles Stuart had maintained steadfastly that he was “Charles, King of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, etc.” Therefore, the tribunal that he confronted had no authority to try him, for treason could be committed only by acts in defeasance of the king himself, the only crimes acts of malfeasance by others committed against his peace. English law did not recognize a crime called tyranny—had no true bill, writ, or warrant to direct against malefactors termed “tyrant” or “public enemy” On the first day, pressed by Bradshawe to plead guilty or not guilty, the king enunciated precisely and clearly what he had lived to do and what he was prepared to die for:

The King. I do tell you, Sir, England was never yet an elective kingdom, it was an hereditary kingdom for near this thousand years. Therefore let me know by what authority I am called hither. Your authority raised by an usurped power I will never—1 will never betray my trust. I am entrusted with the liberties of my people. I do stand more for the liberties of my people than anyone that is seated here as a judge: therefore show me by what lawful authority I am seated here and I will answer it. Otherwise I will not betray the liberties of my people.⁶

These words echoed those of the king's father pronounced in the House of Commons in 1607 when the House had taken up hue and cry after a Cambridge civilian of much learning and slight sagacity who cast the royal prerogative higher than it could fly, to James I's evident discomfort. James's minister, the Earl of Salisbury, told the House:

His Majesty said further that for his kingdom he was beholden to no elective power,... [and] that, though he did derive his title from the loins of his ances­tors, yet the law did set the crown upon his head, and he is a king by the com­mon law of the land.⁷

Indeed, Charles had made the point that the liberties of his people had been entrusted to him by God, by old and lawful descent, and he would not an­swer to a new unlawful authority.⁸ He argued, correctly, that there was no lawful authority in that body, but merely a usurped power threatening the liberty of every subject as much as it did his life. So he did not answer. And at the last, as the guards dragged him away, he drew the clearest contrast between what had occurred there and what went by the name of justice in his realm. If the fount of justice was contaminated by the effusion of its own blood, then there could be no justice.

Who was this man of such tenacity, even obstinacy? Admittedly, dur­ing the quarter-century of his rule duplicity and obduracy had seemed far more characteristic of him. In power he appeared myopic and his vision opaque; powerless he was far-seeing and clear-sighted. Most accounts of Charles's rule manage somehow to slight the man and, by invidious com­parison, often to overrate the meanest of his associates and his adversaries. Nor has Charles done much better with his biographers. Only now, after generations of meticulous modern historical research on Stuart Britain, are there genuinely scholarly biographies of Charles I, and the best of these demonstrate that much more remains to be done with the subject. His fa­ther James I and his heir Charles II, are more familiar and better limned in lifelike hues and true dimensions. Charles's nemesis, who at his trial was the presence which even when absent was always present— Oliver Crom- well—has drawn as much ink in death as he did blood in life. Certainly, Cromwell offers more than Charles, since he delivered himself freely in let­ters, speeches, and memoranda, carefully preserved and latterly well edited, providing a rich source for his thoughts as well as his acts.⁹

The vast muniment by which Cromwell can be studied was very much a product of his fervent, pious, mystical absorption with God, whereby he was compelled to agonize and soliloquize mightily in recalling His injunc­tions, assurances, and approbations.¹⁰ There was none of this with Charles. He talked to God only through the elegant and orotund rhetoric, full of imagery and tautology, of Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer, containing the rites and ceremonies of the Church by law established. What God said to Charles, Charles kept to himself. The difference with Cromwell was not one of piety but of theology—in the case of Cromwell, quasi-mystical the-

2i2 Trial of Charles I ology. In routine and temporal intercourse, Charles also stood in marked contrast to his father, James I. Where James had been loquacious, Charles was taciturn, keeping his own counsel, saying little publicly, and even with his ministers and councillors confiding little and nothing with much in­timacy. Save with “Steenie” (George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham), and after that companion’s murder in 1628, with his queen, Henrietta Maria, Charles was never comfortable speaking frankly and familiarly. James’s vul­gar and garrulous bonhomie fueled the notion (quite unfounded) that his heart and mind were as open as his mouth. Charles appeared a closed book. His guarded speech seemed to mask a closed mind, perhaps a calculating mind. Listening to Charles was an exercise in fathoming a hidden meaning, a cloaked agenda. Much of his reputation for unreliability and duplicitous­ness stemmed from his unwillingness to telegraph his intentions, so that others would in the logical course of things think they understood what he meant only to be greatly disabused by events. His enemies thought him a machiavel. In fact, he probably lacked the sagacity to be Machiavellian. He was certainly not eloquent enough to have played the role.

A clue to the king’s character and mentality is afforded by his aesthetic sensibilities, artistic taste, and passion for objets.¹¹ He was the greatest col­lector of art and a principal patron of the best artists of his age. His taste demonstrated a contemplative nature that was withdrawn and all absorbed in the beauty of the thing at hand. While he was fond of the extravagant theatrical productions presented at Court, by the barristers in their Inns, and under noble patronage—especially when he and his queen had roles — his interest in these masques had more to do with the artistry of the stag­ing and the allegorical qualities of the script than with a passion for drama itself. Indeed, one suspects that the cultivation of artistic sensibilities played a larger part in Charles’s development than the more avowedly and directly intellectual evolution that characterized his father’s upbringing and provid­ed James with analytical capacities that clearly Charles did not have. Rather than an ear for dialectic, Charles had an eye for space and scape, light and shade, and this found its outlet in his steady support of building and even urban renewal. His Court architect, gladly continued from James’s reign, was Inigo Jones. Charles, confiding direction to Jones, prosecuted with renewed vigor the hitherto desultory attempts to control slum building in and around London and metropolitan urban sprawl by law and regula- tion.¹² Charles threw himself into active encouragement of Jones’s labors to complete or elaborate the great monuments of that genius: the Queen’s House at Greenwich, Lincoln’s Inn chapel, Covent Garden, Lincoln’s Inn Fields. And the Banqueting House at Whitehall, which would feel Charles's last footfall as he stepped through its window to the block outside.

The search for Charles begins with pathology. As an infant he suffered from acute rickets: soft bones, and marked deformity caused by an inability to assimilate phosphorous and calcium that resulted from malnutrition and insufficient exposure to ultraviolet rays. In short, he was poorly fed from birth and too long confined in Holyrood Palace, under the Firth of Forth's leaden skies. It was more than a year after James I, Queen Anne, and Prince Henry traded Edinburgh for Westminster that Charles's keepers thought the boy strong enough to make the trip. He was already four years old and had only begun to walk. He remained frail and sickly throughout his youth and, in part because of his disease, had none of his older brother's robust good looks. Charles was given to bouts of melancholy, which is a recog­nized consequence of rickets. He became an arduous sportsman, though he preferred the chase because mounted he was a match for anyone, his physical weakness overborne by a ferocious courage. His favorite likeness of himself was Van Dyck's bold equestrian oil.

Rickets left on Charles another, even more indelible, mark. The scraw­ny, deformed infant was barely suffered by his mother. His father's affection was focused upon his older brother, and so Charles went unloved. Even after Prince Henry died of typhoid in 1612, aet 18, Charles could not fill his void in the parents' affection. The best he could do was to seek for and find affection in the older youths who moved into James's circle as favorites. It was the last of these who provided a barely adult Charles with the con­stant companionship and genuine affection he had not found before. When Buckingham was murdered in 1628, Charles plummeted into an abyss of grief and despair from which he was saved only by the love of his volatile and mercurial French bride of four years, Henrietta Maria, sister of Louis XIII of France. Thereafter, his reliance on her became profound; there was never again any other favorite but the queen. He requited her love with a monogamous constancy virtually unknown in princes of the age. That she proved all that a wife should be, during his life and beyond his death, did not make any less perilous the fact that he relied heavily upon her accep­tance and affection, as to a lesser extent that of others, for self-justification and self-assurance. He was too yielding and too easily influenced by those surrounding him to be a consistent and capable ruler. That his last favorite was the least selfish and most loyal—probably also the most practical—did not guarantee that Henrietta Maria's contributions to policy were more sound and beneficial than those before supplied by “Steenie.”

Much less hard, literary evidence exists (or ever existed) to reflect the king at work in propria persona than exists to document others' contribu­tions to the statecraft and governance of the age. Inevitably, Charles's con­duct of affairs has generally been underestimated and his actions underval­ued. This is true even of the best studies. A beautifully paced and brilliantly executed study of his halcyon days in the last few years of his Personal Rule depicts Charles in full connubial bliss, enjoying the lively company of his four young children, happy among his objets, diverted by masques, and oblivious of the worst that was about to be.¹³ There is nothing positively wrong about the picture. What is lacking is an attempt to detect and dem­onstrate what the king might have been doing as prince rather than as part­ner, parent, patron, and player. The job is a tough one and to a great extent thankless. Tough, because a thoroughly informed and masterful historian must make projections from the known to the unknown (not statistically but, rather, anecdotally), and finally take a Kierkegaardian leap into faith in order to suggest how, by whom, in what ways, and to what extent the king's hand was on the tiller of the ship of state. Thankless, because it is so much simpler and more likely to elicit applause and encomia to write about how the great forces of history—yes, even economic determinism and historical materialism, alive and well still in those citadels of lost causes, universities—shaped events, led inevitably to civil war and revolution, and could only issue in the death of Charles Stuart.

Nonetheless, almost imperceptibly, this has begun to change. If fifty years ago one felt lonely and vulnerable suggesting that the Personal Rule of Charles I really was Charles's, that many of its most important policies bore the mark of his exigency, it is less lonely now.¹⁴ That Charles, even more than his ministers (and possibly with a better sense of generalship though poorer statecraft), vigorously prosecuted war against his rebellious Scots subjects, 1638-1640, is no longer doubted:

Ultimately, it was Charles I who insisted not once but twice that he should prosecute an ill-advised and badly financed war against Covenanter Scotland. Insufficient counsel and lack of funds were direct results of the king's political decisions.¹⁵

Moreover, if Charles nowadays suffers blame at the hands of an historian, it is not because of his detachment and frivolousness, but rather because he did so much to deserve it. There is something both right and reassuring about this judgment:

In explaining the triumph of the Covenanters in Scotland itself, it is necessary to place a very heavy responsibility on the king. He was not, in fact, nearly as duplicitous as he is sometimes taken to be, but he did feel a very profound incomprehension and distaste for the religious convictions of large numbers of his subjects.¹⁶

Another scholar has suggested that the English Revolution might better be called The English Wars of Religion, to distinguish it from the later modern revolutions and tie it more closely to the Reformation. That distinction presents the danger of failing to understand that the English Revolution faced both ways, and as the Reformation’s consequences flowed into it so its consequences flowed into the Age of Democratic Revolutions. To reject this suggestion is not to take religion out of the volatile mix of plaints and grievances, not to deny its dominance as a genuine ideological force that made the English Revolution. But religion worked at only one level of au­thority, and that was not the level under which Charles was put to death. The author’s conclusions go too far: Charles’s failure to respond to the fear of his subjects that the Protestant religion would be subverted weakened his hold on the affections of his people and raised in them a perception and belief which made civil war necessary and which was ultimately to bring the king to the scaffold.¹⁷ But even to over-emphasize religion as an element in the destruction of the king is not to deny that Charles was a central actor and efficient cause of the war that ended his rule.

Charles’s destruction is the strongest evidence of his central importance to the age and its events. Merely to remove his crown did not require tak­ing his head first. The ax was not a tool to chop down a symbol or deface an icon: it was to bisect “Charles Stuart tyrant” for his own misdeeds, not merely those of his ministers, aides, and abettors. The elaborate show trial that the army and its leader determined upon was intended to manifest openly and clearly to the world, the English people, the king’s subjects in Scotland and in Ireland, foreign princes and powers, and not least to pos­terity the “crimes” of Charles I. The trial was also intended to reinforce the judges’ belief in the rightness of their actions; this was not the first time that usurpers had whistled shrilly in the graveyard. Thwarted by the king’s refusal to play courtroom-courtroom, the tribunal turned to hearing witnesses for the record absent the king, and without possibility of cross­examination. To doubt the sincerity of Charles’s accusers and judges, to question whether they really did believe the king a criminal with his hands steeped in the blood of the righteous, to suspect that this was all a charade staged by cynics for a purely Machiavellian purpose is to assign all emotions to the category of neurosis and all beliefs to the category of psychosis.

Were they right, was he a tyrant? The question has never failed to ex­cite debate. Some externals can be peeled off to narrow the issue. First, whatever the Puritans might have suffered, theological heterodoxy was not a charge against Charles. The king's governance of the Church by law es­tablished, which was more solidly and legally vested in his sole authority than any secular power he exercised, was not central to the accusations, but his ecclesiastical discipline was trumpeted to aggravate the accusations and allow Bradshawe to strike the posture of answering to a higher authority. Second, beyond the vicious charge against Charles at the trial, that he had connived at the poisoning of his father, James I, few suggested and fewer still believed that this man was a monster of ordinary criminal dimensions. The operable word was “tyrant,” his crime tyranny.

Leaving aside the difficulty of tyranny, the argument that Charles's rule constituted tyranny naturally divides into two distinct chronological parts, at 1642. Grievances from the period before 1642, royal trespasses that could be seen as contravening the ancient constitution, the practices of kingship and governance hallowed by more than a century of implementation, had been redressed by the first session of the Long Parliament in 1640-1641. Remedy had been provided by the legislation passed by the king in Parlia­ment and by the punishment of his “evil counsellors,” including the legis­lated murder of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford. In effect, for crimes prior to 1642, even a tyrant could reasonably plead a general pardon (as was issued at the end of every parliament). For the period after 1642, the charge of tyranny was essentially that Charles had levied war against his subjects. Less turned on who fired the first shot and whether the king was seen in armor taking the field against his subjects than by what authority Parlia­ment had taken control of the militia, the polity's only military force, and by what authority the king could alone control the militia and whether in defense of that authority he could use military force. Whatever the provo­cations and exigencies, the king's prerogative, accepted and not before so deeply questioned, gave him sole control over the militia, and the king had clear authority to use force to defend his prerogative and his crown. With regard to the period after 1642, to make the charge of tyranny stick required substantial evidence that the king had gone beyond all lawful exercise of the police power. No evidence adduced at the trial, nothing less transparent than the farrago of accusations drummed by the prosecutor and nothing submitted by Bradshawe in his long meander through theorists of tyran­nicide, could establish that.

The answer to the question depends ultimately on what was then per­ceived at the time as constitutionally correct and legally right. It was accept­ed at the time that there was only one constitution and one system of law

governing England. Any theory about the constitution and the law could be tested against the single standard applicable to both. There was no great gulf between the king and his parliamentary adversaries as to the nature of the constitution and the effects of the laws. The most coherent statements included James I's major political writings¹⁸ and countless speeches by mem­bers of Parliament on both sides of every issue of grievances that had arisen between 1621 and 1642, creating a rich tradition of parliamentary consensus as to what the ancient constitution was. The summation of the consensus was the work of the actor and analyst who first attempted to make histori­cal sense of the revolution in which he had been caught up: Edward Hyde, later Earl of Clarendon. At the critical juncture, when war was becoming inevitable, Hyde refurbished the late-medieval notion of mixed monarchy and made it Charles's platform from which he responded to Parliament's demands and resisted Parliament's encroachments on his regality. Charles embraced the doctrine on June 18, 1642, in an answer drafted by Hyde to the Nineteen Propositions advanced by Parliament. In this answer, the king firmly declined to accept the Parliament's radical demands for wide execu­tive powers, including appointment of ministers, in defeasance of his regal­ity. Mixed monarchy required consensus based on a symbiotic relationship between the king and the three estates (clergy, nobility, commonalty) in Parliament. The relationship could and should have tensions, but the ties that bound all to common duty for the commonweal were to be main­tained untorn and resilient in order to contain the tensions. Thus the mix encompassed monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy in a functional balance that would discourage the preponderance of any one element of the three. Modern constitutional theory-including that made practic at Philadelphia in 1787—owes much to that doctrine. More to the point, mixed monarchy already enjoyed substantial agreement as being the essence of the ancient constitution. But by the summer of 1642, Parliament, which had already embarked on a campaign to gain unitary political hegemony, in the House of Commons and in the field, was already beyond this appeal.

The king acted upon this view of the constitution. He was right to do so, and in any event he would have been derelict not to have done so. He said as much as he denied the tribunal's authority to try him. The actions of Parliament after 1642 and the absence of those MPs who failed to heed the king's summons to his subjects to rally to his colors at Nottingham were in defeasance of his crown and dignity. This constituted treason. The forces of Parliament made war upon the king within his realm. He had no alternative but to resist and to use all effectual but acceptable methods to suppress the treason. This did not constitute tyranny; it was strong and strait governance. How clear was the king's case was admitted implicitly by the Rump of the Long Parliament after it was purged by Colonel Pride on behalf of the army. Recognizing that the House of Lords would not partici­pate in the destruction of the king and that he himself would not consent to go quietly from the scene, on January 4, 1649, the Commons arrogated to themselves alone the “Supreme Authority of this Nation,” with full power to enact and declare law “although the consent and concurrence of the king and House of Peers might not be had thereunto.”¹⁹ This was more than treason: it was usurpation. It violated every precept and traduced every in­stitution of the ancient constitution. It was not merely a shift to enable the Commons to destroy the king; it was tyranny, full and revealed, unblushing and shameless.

To his honor, perhaps to his glory, Charles was prepared to defend his crown and dignity, and therefore the liberties of his subjects and the rule of law, unto death. It is too much to say that he died for mixed monarchy. Ab­stract doctrine seldom moves a sacred head sore-wounded to martyrdom. Closer to the truth would be the judgment that he died, by his own con­fession, for the Church of England, although his religious concerns were clearly secondary to his principal concern for the civil polity and the law. But Charles did not die because he was a fanatic.²⁰ Rather, he saw with complete clarity that while he had lost the crown he had not lost the sole legitimate right to wear it. At the end, the courageous intensity that was the deepest part of his character persuaded him that he had done all he could.²¹ Edward Hyde, retrospectively in deep admiration for the battle Charles had waged, concluded that

he was the worthiest gentleman, the best master, the best friend, the best hus­band, the best father, and the best Christian, that the age in which he lived had produced. And if he were not the best king, if he were without some parts and qualities which have made some kings great and happy, no other prince was ever unhappy who was possessed of half his virtues and endowments, and so much without any kind of vice.²²

Hyde was not blind to the fact that Charles had too often tried to placate when he ought to have stood firm, remained intransigent when he could have stooped to conquer, and reneged when he should have kept faith. Hyde's balanced encomium was neither faint nor damning, but he accepted the truth that Charles I contributed to his own misfortunes.

Perhaps, at the last, we are left with Charles's myopia. Almost alone among Englishmen, he seemed not to have apprehended the gathering storm. An old Somerset justice of the peace, Sir Thomas Wyndham, on his deathbed in 1635, exhorted his sons, one of whom served Charles in his privy chamber, with these words:

My sons! We have hitherto seen serene and quiet times; but now prepare your­selves for cloudy and troublesome. I command you to honour and obey your sovereign, and in all times to adhere to the Crown; and though the Crown should hang upon a bush, I charge you to forsake it not.²³

The younger Wyndhams did not forsake the crown. All four were Roy­alists; three of them died to preserve that crown. The long night of civil war, usurpation, regicide, and authoritarianism was clearly perceived in a portentous Commons debate on July 9, 1642, while Charles still believed that Parliament would blink first. Old Sir Benjamin Rudyard warned the House, “If Blood begins once to touch Blood, we shall presently fall into a certain Misery, and must attend an uncertain Success, God knows when and God knows what....”²⁴ Bulstrode Whitelocke, a lawyer, was more direct and more perspicacious:

We must surrender up our Laws, Liberties, Properties, and Lives, into the Hands of insolent Mercenaries, whose Rage and Violence will command us and all we have, and Reason, Honour and Justice will leave our Land, the Ignoble will rule the Noble, and Baseness will be preferred before Virtue, Prophaneness before Piety.... What the Issue of it will be, no Man alive can tell: probably few of us now here may live to see the End of it. It hath been said, That he that draws his sword against his Prince, must throw away the Scabbard.²⁵

Every word proved true.

Why did the king not see the chasm opening between him and his peo­ple? The day before he died, Charles's two younger children were permitted to see him; his two older, Charles and James, were on the Continent trying valiantly to raise means to rescue him. He exhorted ten-year-old Henry of Gloucester never to let Parliament make him king, because it would be over the dead bodies of Charles and James, and at the last they would cut off his head, too. Princess Elizabeth, aet 13, was told by her father “not to grieve or torment myself for him, for it would be a glorious death that he should die, for the laws and liberties of this land, and for maintaining the true Protestant religion.” (Alas, she could only grieve and torment herself, dying of a broken heart two years later.) Charles commended to Elizabeth the ser­mons of Bishop Lancelot Andrewes (full of light and evangelistic comfort), Richard Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (the rock upon which Angli­canism was founded, distinct from Rome and Geneva), and the martyred Archbishop William Laud's book against the English Jesuit John Fisher (a vigorous defense of the validity and orthodoxy of the Church of Eng­land).²⁶ Good, sound words, admirable advice. But one book was missing: Basilikon Doron, written by Elizabeth’s grandfather, James VI and I, with its clear warning that a tyrant’s miserable and infamous life might make his subjects his executioners. Possibly Prince Charles never read Basilikon Doron. Perhaps he did and, firm in his own belief that he was not a tyrant, dismissed it as inapplicable to himself. Was he mistaken?