THE MYTH OF CHARLES I
By HUGH TREVOR-ROPER
ON January 3oth, 1649, King Charles I was executed, and cries of horror arose from an outraged world. There had been revolutions before, and kings had been murdered, but never with such dreadful formality ; nor could it occur to the prosperous Bourbons or the barbarous Romanovs who denounced it that such a deed could be repeated. The murderers were ready to defend themselves. They uttered magniloquent phrases about Divine Providence and the will of the people which doctrinaire republicans of the nineteenth century (when it was quite safe to be republican) were ready to swallow ; but they deceived no one at the time. All recognised that the act had been perpetrated by a hated and despotic Army, mindless and afraid, and a small parliamentary rump, its creature.
No judge would sit in the new High Court of Justice. Soldiers dominated its sessions in Westminster Hall, and its President wore a bullet-proof hat throughout the proceedings. When he called upon the King to answer the charge made " in behalf of the good people of England," Lady Fairfax called from the gallery, "No, not half of them! It is a lie! " Her words were cut short. " Down with the whores, shoot them! " ordered the colonel of the guard. When the King demanded to be heard, the rhythmical cry of " Justice, Justice, Execution, Execution! " drowned his words, as arranged by a Puritan clergyman. Intimidation and forgery were needed to secure signatures to the death-warrant.
On the day of execution staples were fixed to the platform in Whitehall to tie the King down in case he struggled. Soldiers around the scaffold prevented him speaking to the crowd, who expressed their indignation with sullen groans and had to be dis- persed by cavalry. Even the Army shrank from the act they carried out ; a promise of £too and promotion could not find a soldier to be executioner, and the common hangman who finally carried out the sentence—a skilled practitioner who had prepared himself in childhood to inherit his father's office by decapitating cats and dogs— died of remorse within a few months. Arbitrary power was not concealed ; it was merely consecrated by the solemn barbarities of religion and the bloodcurdling texts of a buffoon-preacher.
Martyrologists will no doubt take this occasion to dwell upon the details of martyrdom. Historically it is more interesting to enquire how such a revolutionary situation came about. Charles I's failure was a double failure—a failure of government, which destroyed his personal rule, and a failure of personality which brought him to his death. The first failure was not merely his ; it was the failure of a whole system. He had neither devised the system nor carried it out ; he had merely approved of it and been carried along by it as a decorative parasite ; and since he felt no intimate connection with it, he did not defend it when it wavered, but saw its architects removed to the Tower and the block. It was the system of Thorough, the system of Laud and Strafford, which had collapsed through internal weakness and could never be restored. But Charles I's second failure was purely personal. Irresponsible, unpolitical, convinced, as he said in his last speech, that " a sovereign and a subject are clean different things," he had persuaded himself that no compact with his subjects could limit his ultimate freedom. Worse still, he took no pains to conceal this view. At any stage in his progressive defeats in politics and war he could have recog- nised the facts of power and made a practical bargain with serious, practical men who wanted nothing better than " a good corre-
spondency " with him. But Charles was not a practical man. His tongue could compromise, as a tactical manoeuvre, but not his heart, and he showed it. The practical men could find no basis of settlement, or of their own future safety, and if they could not Become revolutionary they were thrust aside by others who could.
Thus the voice of reason stammered and was drowned by a cry for the death of " Charles Stuart,that Man of Blood." It seemed the only way to settle the business.
Thus not tyranny but weakness brought Charles I, as it was to bring Louis XVI and Nicholas II, to his pompous death. Never- theless, his fate in our insular revolution has a dramatic quality which even the greater significance and more universal character of the French and Russian Revolutions cannot give to theirs. It is an artistic difference. While they were dull and ordinary men, Charles I had a touch of quality which they lacked. He was an aesthete. His court was the last Renaissance court in Europe, and himself perhaps the greatest royal patron that art has ever found. Even the fragments and recollection of his great picture-galleries bewilder us. His taste seemed universal ; while bidding for old masters he could detect a living genius, and while he commissioned Rubens he could invest in Rembrandt. Neglecting politics, he seized every artistic opportunity. On his romantic visit to Spain he missed the Infanta but secured a set of Titians. When Rubens visited England as an ambassador he was made to decorate the Banqueting Hall of Whitehall.
Through his own ambassadors, through cosmopolitan financiers and travelling virtuosi, Charles continually enriched his collection, and his purse was refreshed by questionable taxation only to be exhausted on works of art. In Rome Bernini carved his head from a triptych by Vandyck : Vandyck who, more than any other, has captured the elegance and refinement of that doomed Cavalier generation. Nor was it only painting that Charles patronised. Inigo Jones was his surveyor of buildings, Henry Lawes his musician ; and if the great poets—Milton and Marvell and the metaphysicians—were too serious for his taste, he took care of the lesser, granting them here a benefice or a bishopric, there a pension or a perquisite—Herrick and King, Suckling and Lovelace, and those fashionable academic poets, Strode and Randolph, Cleveland and Cartwright, whose reputation has long evaporated. From the King's court the fashion of culture spread outwards to the lesser courts of the nobility. The Earl of Arundel would return from Vienna with marbles and pictures ; the Earl of Pembroke gathered more Vandycks than anyone else in the world ; Milton's Comus and Lawes's music were played in the Earl of Bridgetvater's castle ; Palladian houses and Italian gardens enclosed a privileged life which seemed exempt from revolution ; and in the romantic Cavalier Montrose that exquisite generation contrived to produce a poet even in Scotland—the last poet ever to arise in that prosaic peninsula.
An aesthete need not be an intellectual. Charles I had perfect taste, but he was not interested in thought, and in literature as in life he sought not meaning but sensuous beauty and jheatrical effect. In religion he sought not a rule of conduct but a graceful liturgy. Above all literature he preferred the drama and the masque. Oxford was his spiritual home ; at Cambridge they thought too much, but in Oxford Laud had corrected that. Oxford was " the only city of England that he could say was entirely to his devotion." Thither he went in his prosperity to see plays and yet more plays, on new stages where the genius of Inigo Jones had contrived mechanical billows and shifting scenes ; thither he went in adversity, as to a refuge, to be received " with that joy and affection as Apollo should be by the Muses." There he sadly forecast his fate from a prophecy in Virgil and " dropped a tear " at the news of the poet Cartwright's death.
To the end he retained his love of masques and pictures, poetry and plays. A prisoner at Hampton Court, he commissioned a portrait from the newly-found-Dutch painter Lely ; and immured " in his doleful restraint in Carisbrooke Castle " he consoled himself with Tasso and Ariosto, George Herbert and Edmimd Spenser, and a book of plays. Driven from comedy to more melancholy thoughts, he turned to religion. In the days of Laud he had been somewhat inattentive, for the archbishop had made Anglicanism, like himself, practical and boring. Even his plays at Oxford had been made tedious by politics and morality. Now, with bishops abolished and church-lands for sale, it was too late to be practical. The busy, complacent, persecuting Church of Laud had gone, and religion had become consolatory and devotional, the gentle minis- trations of Juxon and the consecrated phrases of the Book of Prayer. Charles's taste for religion, his taste for drama, and his refusal to compromise all combined at the end. He managed his last act with flawless taste ; Inigo Jones could not have designed more perfectly that ,final mise-en-scene.
When mythology is sustained by art, history strives in vain. The regicides, when they cut off King Charles's head, sealed their own historical doom. If the King's faults were personal, his death logically ended them ; they could not invalidate the claims of the monarchy. By destroying him the rebels had destroyed his liabilities, which were their own assets and sole justification, and had to fight against the myth which they had enabled him to create. They sought to liquidate the monarchy and the Church. They sold their lands and property, but they could not dispose of their intangible assets. They, sold King Charles's pictures, and kings and cardinals and bankers sent their agents to so memorable a sale. They nearly sold all the English cathedrals for scrap. And they protested, ever more shrilly, the virtues of republics, the justice of the deed, and the clarity of their consciences. But it was no good ; they convinced no one. "They were an oligarchy, detested by all men," was the reply of a real republican. And meanwhile Dr. John Gauden, a prudent clergyman who contrived to write an Anglican best-seller while drawing the salary of a presbyterian minister, was plying his indefatigable pen. Within a day of the execution his Eikon Basilike, the Portraicture of His Sacred Majestie in His Solitudes and Sufferings appeared as the genuine work of the royal martyr. Conquered and frustrated people hunger for a myth, and provided they have a symbolical figure and a dramatic immola- tion they are seldom fastidious about the literal truth or authenticity of the gospel. Eikon Basiliki supplied the need ; it ran through forty-seven editions. The function of a myth is to compensate for the loss of reality ; and when the royal Government and Church returned, shorn of their old powers, and the happy author was blackmailing his way from bishopric to bishopric, doubtless there were many who found in his skilful mythology balm for their final defeat. Perhaps there are still some. If so, they ought to celebrate not on January 3oth, the day the reality was destroyed, but on January 3rst, the day the myth was born.
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