ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
XXIV.—CHARLES I.
THE character of Charles Stuart is still the subject of warm controversy, and there is little probability of public opinion becoming unanimous on the question, for his life is not merely the story of the career of an individual sovereign, but the record of a great national struggle, and of the most important era in the civil history of England ; and although comparatively few persons are now to be found who will commit themselves to an unreserved panegyric of Charles, there is still so large an amount of sym- pathy in certain classes of society with the political and religious tendencies which he is supposed to represent, and of dislike to those by whom he was opposed, as to create a disposition to regard all his actions from a favourable point of view, and to extenuate, if not defend, his most questionable proceedings. And, independ- ently of these prepossessions, there is just that in the character of Charles I., and in the real facts of the case, to mislead a super- ficial observer, and at first to lend a certain plausibility to the attractive picture of him which. the softening influences of time and the imaginations of his sympathizers have substituted for the real man. Every one is acquainted with the conception of him which is still perhaps the prevalent one in the majority of English drawing-rooms, as a stately English gentleman of the most refined tastes and habits, of highly cultivated mind, deep religious feelings, and the purest morals, who unfortunately entertained—or rather was educated into—notions of absolute authority, which were in- consistent with the predominant spirit of the age, though justified by royal precedents, and who, after making every concession consistent with right to the exorbitant demands of his rebellious subjects, resisted them by arms in strict self-defence, and more than expiated any errors he had committed in his lifetime by his heroic and saintly bearing on the scaffold. Yet such a repre- sentation, in 9ur opinion, can be supported only by the widest deductions from the most imperfect premissea, by a total dis- regard of all but a few isolated facts, and a violation of all the sequences and natural relations of events. Very different will be the result if, abandoning all vague generalities, we study the man in. the realities of his actual life, and allow these to speak for them- selves, as we should do in estimating the character and motives of other men. At the same time, the truer portrait may explain the origin of the highly-coloured party tradition.
The best plea in extenuation of any faults in the character of Charles is that he was the son of such a man as we have seen. James Stuart to have been, and that he was brought up under such influences as would spring from the character of his father, and the morale of such a Court and such an administration of affairs. Charles could not have altogether escaped from the con- tagious effects of such an atmosphere, unless he had himself possessed a temperament which might act as a natural anti- dote to the poison, or unless his moral organization was of so high an order as to enable him to apprehend and deliberately eschew the evil influences to which he was exposed. From this point. of view, then, while proper allowance must be made for the evil in the character or conduct of Charles which can be identified as. hereditary, or the result of earlytraining and unfavourable earlyasso- ciations, we must also discriminate, in arriving at a conclusion as to. . his moral calibre, between that absence of evil in him which was the result of an immunity from temptation and due to his natural temperament, and that which sprang from his conscious preference of good to evil, where that natural temperament gave a dangerous
incentive to pursue the wrong path. Nor, while we lay proper stress on the impressions as to his rights and duties. which he may have derived from early tuition, we must forget to note" those events which may show that he had become sensible, and recognized by his own acts, that these early lessons were erroneous, at an epoch of his life sufficiently early to have saved him from evil consequences if he had only been self-con- sistent in his subsequent career. Looked at in this manner, what do we find to be the leading facts bearing on the character and moral responsibility of Charles ?
He was the son of a man of gross temperament, who, if not from that cause actually very profligate, was flagrantly indecorous in his habits, and the diffusive centre of licentiousness in court and country. But the natural temperament of Charles was of a fiuer grain, and although he had no such active antipathy to debauchery as to prevent him from adopting an unscrupulous debauches as his only bosom friend, and had become habituated to and toleranP of an amount of grossness and immorality in his daily associations that would surprise some of his modern admirers, and shocked
the nice susceptibilities of some of the more pure-minded among his contemporary partizans ; he was himself generally cleanly and decorous in his personal habits, and compared with his father and his father's courtiers, and many of his own, moral in conduct, refined in tastes. That he was personally not entirely untainted on this point by the associations of his early life is demonstrable, but while this is not to be dwelt upon as an index of his real character, only a modified praise can be bestowed on his superiority to James in decorum of life. His morality in this respect was too passive to be estimated as a great virtue, and affords no evidence of higher perceptions of moral purity. A natural coldness of temperament and reserve harmonized best with a formal decorousness of demeanour, and threw around the person of Charles a halo of respectability which would not have attached to Lim bad his nature been,more emo- tional. An overruling sense of duty seems scarcely more strongly marked in such a morality, than it is in the general acceptance of the moral rules of any church or creed. In this restricted sense Charles may have striven to live morally, and as far as this implies merit, he is entitled to it. There was, however, another feature in his demeanour, which the popular mind has instinctively perceived, and on which the idea of his superiority is mainly based. This is the sesthetic one. By nature Charles was an artist, as well as in fact a connoisseur and patron of art. His ill-health as a boy, the weakness of his limbs at that period, and his imperfection of speech had suggested the cultivation of a naturally fine eye, as an important resource, and a certain external refinement of manner had been the result, which would have been sufficient in itself to make a marked distinction between him and his father James. The dignity of bearing in Charles, which owed so much to this msthetic cause, and which was sustained by a profound sense of self-importance and superiority, was lost only in moments of great irritation and when this self- conceit was strongly outraged, and it might be easily mistaken for that true courtesy which arises from a constant sense of what is due to the position and feelings of others as well as to a man's own. But of this essential characteristic of a really high-bred gentleman, Charles was destitute, and although we must attri- bute his deficiency, in a great measure to the unfortunate influence and example of his father, and cannot therefore in justice allow it to weigh much in the scale in our general moral estimate of him, it is a fact, nevertheless, which must materially affect our sympathy with his character as a whole.
There was another refining influence to which the character of Charles was subjected in early years, which might have been also an elevating one of no common kind. The same physical weakness which had led him to his art-studies had made him—in this case, no doubt, with the strong encouragement of his father—a diligent and earnest reader of books. His • deeper studies of dogmatic and scholastic theology were relieved by the literature of the poets and dramatists ; and had the wise lessons to be derived from the pages of Shakespeare made as much impression on the mind of Charles as did, unfortunately, the divinity schooltnen and the casuists of the recently risen school of right-divine in Church and King, we might have counted the early ill-health of Charles as a piece of real good- fortune to the country which he was to govern. Unfortunately, when his increasing bodily strength enabled him to aspire to the physical accomplishments suitable to his age and position, he had acquired the taste for, and was submitting his mind to, the guid- ance of far less healthy teachers than the great master-spirit of English literature. Charles had not been born to the position of heir to the Crown ; in his childhood he had been to some extent slighted, and he did not become a person of real import- ance in the State until the death of his elder brother, Henry, when he himself was twelve years of age. But he had already learnt some of those lessons of self-importance and superi- ority to the considerations that rule the conduct of men in ordinary positions, which the literary productions of his own father, as well as the teaching of the Churchmen to whose tuition James had con- fided him, were constant in inculcating ; and these lessons perhaps gained an additional relish from the memories of his own early insignificance. His mind had been prepared for the application of these lessons by that early necessity of living very much in himself, which had fostered the internal reserve of his disposition, and made him still more self-centred. Thus disposed, he would learn from his tutors and the books to which they directed him to look upon government as an absolute function of the Sovereign, quite as independent of the will of the governed as the mass performed by the priest at the altar is of the personal participa-
tion of the worshippers in whose presence and for whose benefit it is performed. And however plainly the facts of the case were forced on his attention when he descended into the arena of practical politics, and however often in his personal acts and under peculiar circumstances Charles may have seemed to recog- nize facts as such, his mind never really recognized them, but recurred to those studies of early life in which theory stood for fact, in which facts were ignored, and in which truth and false- hood had a distinctive significance not with reference to the duties and obligations of real life, but to a standard of conscience to which those duties were entirely subordinated, and by which they were taken into account only so far as they did not contravene the con- clusions and objects of one narrow school of thought. This casuistical way of looking at things was peculiarly dangerous in the case of aman so reserved by nature as Charles. Originally perhaps this reserve was little more than the strong reluctance to express his views, felt by one who had a difficulty in speaking, and was conscious of being in a secondary position in the estimation of his auditors. But as he grew up, there can be no doubt that the reserve was caused much less by self-diffidence than by self-conceit ; much less by the fear of falling short of the intellectual standard of those with whom he associated, than by a profound belief that his own wisdom was so complete already that it could gain nothing from being brought into contact with the opinions of other men. From con- cealing his own real thoughts, the step was an easy one to deceiv- ing others by giving utterance to sentiments which were abso- lutely untrue as expressions of his real opinions. The overt act of a lie seemed frequently the best method of incommunicativeness, and the lying of Charles differed in this essential point from that of Elizabeth, that it did not represent any occasional or partial sentiment of his mind, but was entirely external to his whole nature, and was justified probably to his conscience by the casuisti- cal argument that its perpetration formed an essential ingredient of a policy which, as a whole, represented his real views, and, indeed, in his eyes the cause of truth.
The barrier of truth once overleapt, there was not suffi- cient depth in the moral consciousness of Charles to enable him ever to recover the distinction between right and wrong on this point. For although his mind was much more firmly knit (if we may use the expression) than that of his father, and though his purposes and his processes of reasoning were much more deliberate and sustained, and his whole nature, so to say, more uniform than was that of James, his intel- lect was neither comprehensive nor deep. He adopted a course of conduct more advisedly and pursued it more steadily, but he was quite as incapable as James of perceiving its necessary issues, or of estimating its bearings on other issues and on the general relations of affairs. He was as little master of the situation, and quite as much at the mercy of his own ill-conceived ideas as James, though so different in his mode of action. If James was carried about by every passing caprice or disturbing circumstance, and realized no- thing sufficiently to care to persevere in any course long together, Charles became almost as inconstant and tortuous in his actions, from the mere fact of being unable to perceive the funda- mental and fatal discrepancy between his general purpose and the strokes of policy into which the dictates of a self-satisfied but shallow nature were constantly seducing him. Thus, when blinded by mortified pride, and carried away by the artfully insinu- ated influence of Villiers, he was seeking to revenge himself on the Spanish Court, after his inglorious return from his marriage expedition, he did not see the dangerous antagonism between the policy of popularity-hunting, which he pursued in the middle of the year 1624, and the spirit in which he had written in the November of 1621 to his favourite adviser respecting the popular leaders in Parliament,—" I could wish that the King would send down a commission here that (if need were) such sedi- tious fellows might be made an example to others," and had laid claim to this piece of advice distinctively "as of my adding." Nor, again, was he able to perceive the equally dangerous discon- tinuity between this popular course which he had so vehemently and recklessly pursued at the close of his father's reign, and down to the very day of his own accession, and the autocratic reserve and one-sided conception of the obligations between himself and his people which he assumed immediately after this latter event. And, as we have seen, there was no true standard of right or wrong in his mind to rectify this grave error.
The same inability to preserve in his mind the idea of the essentials of his real and ultimate object, joined to an infatuated belief in his own power of complicated diplomacy,
led to the contradictory proposals and projects which he enter- tained simultaneously during the progress of the great civil struggle in which he involved himself. The action of Charles alternated between simple and direct opposition to the national sentiment, and a multiplicity of cunningly-devised expedients to .obtain the same ends through hidden and tortuous channels. Most of these expedients were plausible and feasible in themselves, but to play with them all at the same time, and to manipulate them so as to secure his own ends out of their contrariety, required the genius of a Richelieu, which Charles in the blindness of his self- 'esteem believed himself really to possess. Of the moral obliquity of -such a course in reference to his duties to individuals and to the nation Charles was absolutely insensible, and he never imagined that those he trifled with or betrayed would see it in that light. Nor had he the saving quality which had prevented his father, to whom he was superior in mental power, from incurring all the ill-effects of his ill-advised actions. James had a natural shrewd- ness, which was with him an instinct rather than real wisdom, but which often served the purpose of the latter. But shrewdness Charles had none. James firmly believed in the absolute wisdom of his plans, but when the crisis came he gave them up on the appearance of danger (though not in time to save his dignity), as if no such faith in them had ever existed. Charles' faith in him- self was more enduring, and perhaps never really failed him till that terrible moment when President Bradshaw rose to pronounce the sentence of the High Court of Justice, and when in broken and -agitated sentences he first recognized the hopelessness of his policy and the reality of his danger.
Notwithstanding his early physical debility, Charles enjoyed many advantages of circumstance over his father. James was always to a considerable extent a foreigner in England, with habits and modes of thought formed in a very different state of -society from that with which he was brought into contact on his accession to the throne of England. Charles, though not actually born in England, came to this country at so early an age that he was educated in English associations, and might be expected to imbibe a considerable amount of English sympathies, if not of English prejudices. There was also something in common between the serious tone of his mind and the growing sentiment of the age. Beyond the circle of courtiers and favourites in which James lived, the spirit of the nation was becoming every year more earnest and more practical in its apprehension of great -principles and religious convictions. That age of idealism was passing away, when Sydney and Raleigh and Deve- reux and Bacon lived at the same time in two worlds, —one of romantic perfection, in imagining which they in- dulged their highest aspirations, and satisfied the cravings -of their deepest moral nature ; the other, external and common- place, in which they were content to live the life and share the morals of the men around them. The seventeenth century sought .to amalgamate these worlds of thought and action, and to bring forth the morality of the closet into the walks of daily life. The nature of Charles was grave and thoughtful, he had fixed ideas on -religion and politics, and he was bent, however imperfect and ill- assorted were the methods he pursued, on realizing those ideas, and in bringing the national temperament into conformity with them. But to become the director and leader of a great national senti- ment requires more than the possession of a handsome face, a grave and decorous bearing, and fair abilities. It demands qualifications in which Charles was utterly wanting,—honesty of nature, as well as honesty of action, magnanimous self-command, unselfishness in at least an intellectual point of view, and elevation of spirit. But Charles's mind was essentially warped from truthfulness ; he .could rouse no faith and command no confidence in others, because he had no true principle of truth in himself. He had no scruple in deceiving others, because he recognized no reciprocal obliga- tion between himself and other men. However he might disguise it from himself, duty was with him one-sided only. Nor had he any magnanimity. He could never forgive a supposed injury, or often even suppress his continued sense of it, when it was most important to his interests so to do. His dissimulation failed him exactly when it would have served the place of a real virtue. Ile was thoroughly selfish in feeling and in act, and his selfishness never assumed the shape of more than a personal policy. He clung to Villiers alone with faithfulness, because Villiers repre- sented exclusively his supposed personal interests, and thoroughly identified himself with the personal prejudices of his master. But he distrusted and disliked men like Wentworth, who had a real national policy, in which the King was indeed to be made the actuating and absolute mover, but in which the King had to conform himself and his personal caprices to a national policy. fie adhered to Anglicanism as a branch of his own personal judgment, and from a profound sense of the necessary connection between its existence and his own personal power. But when the opportunity seemed to offer itself of raising a new Civil War in his own interests he had no scruple in abandoning (no doubt only temporarily in his own mind) the Church of England to the demands of the Scotch Presbyterians,—and by so doing destroyed all the moral weight which might have attached to his previous dogged refusals to grant any concession on this point, when concession would have placed him again on the throne of his ancestors. Where his own selfish interest seemed to him to conflict with the position or safety of anyone, he sacrificed that person, if unwillingly, at any rate with a baseness of spirit which, in a man who was physically courageous, betrays an inherent lowness of nature. Fortunately for England, he could never be long served successfully by really able men, for if they succeeded so far as to gain an independent reputation, the King, in his short-sighted and poor-spirited jealousy, was never easy till he had mortified them in the eyes of the world and paralyzed their action, though at the expense of his own most important ends. Men of principle abandoned from time to time the cause of his opponents, and from various motives tendered him their services ; but in proportion as they were men of principle, their influence over his practical counsels was weak and uncertain, for they had avowed allegiance to a principle, and not to a King. A few good and true-hearted men clung to him to the last, and believed in him, in the enthusiasm of their loyal devotion to the person of a King, and towards these men Charles was as true and as generous in spirit as it was compatible with his nature to be to any one, for from their unreserved devotion to him personally, they were in his eyes part of himself. But he scrupled not to sacrifice and dishonour such a true servant as the Marquis of Ormond in his disgraceful intrigue with the Irish Catholics through the Earl of Glamorgan—for his steady adherence to the principles professed but in practice abandoned by the King himself were a standing reproach to Charles—and at the same time that he was disavowing Glamorgan to Ormond as a weak man, unworthy of serious confidence, who had greatly ex- ceeded his instructions, he was holding out to Glamorgan the promise of revenge on Ormond for the measures which the latter had taken against him. In such a case, however, individuals went for nothing in the eyes of Charles. He himself, in his imme- diate policy, was everything.
Charles was a faithful and uxorious husband to a self-willed and unfeeling wife, who had the religion and morals of a French- woman of rank of the Fronde period. But he asserted his independence occasionally by refusing to follow her advice exactly where and when it would have been beneficial to his interests to have complied. He never commanded her respect, and very seldom her sympathies, and she soon found consolation for the little grief or remorse she may have felt for his death in a private marriage with a recognized lover. As a father, the conduct of Charles was irre- proachable, and here it is that the sympathies of Englishmen gather most warmly and most justifiably around him. Here the ice of his character gave way, and his strongest opponents were moved and staggered in their belief in his falseness by the natural emotion he displayed in his interviews with his unfortunate younger children. Nor can the charge of deliberate cruelty some- times preferred against him be sustained, except in a few cases of per- sonal vengeance. If he erred on this point, it was in indifference to sufferings caused indirectly through his conduct. Yet by his conduct he inflicted miseries on England which bade fair to de- moralize an entire generation. He was trained in a bad school, but he cannot escape on the most charitable psychological interpreta- tion of his conduct from a large amount of personal moral respon- sibility for conscious and deliberate evil-doing under the influence of an unscrupulous and selfish ambition. Yet, after all, it is the absence of generous feelings and noble motives which lowers the stamp of the character of Charles I. below that of many Sovereigns who have actually done far worse things, and which makes the historical student, in proportion as his studies are deep and long- continued, turn away from the contemplation of him with senti- ments of increasing aversion, and with an increasing conviction that whatever judgment we may pass on the men who condemned him to die the death of a Traitor to the People of England, they were justified in this act, at any rate, by the fact that Charles had really been a traitor to some of the most solemn trusts for which man is responsible, and had forfeited all claim to be called a good man, while he must unhesitatingly be adjudged a weak and bad King.
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