Full content for this article includes photograph and illustration.

Source: History Today, Jan 1996 v46 n1 p29(6).

Title: Charles I: Regicide and Republicanism. (Execution of a King of England)

Author: Sarah Barber

Abstract:

        The Jan 1649 execution of King Charles I was approved in an open court and resulted from charges that he had dishonored the office of the king, which made him culpable as a person, not a king. Charles I refused to accept defeat for the second civil war, in which many Englishmen died.

Subjects: Kings and rulers - Crimes against Regicides - Analysis

People: Charles I, King of England - Crimes against

Magazine Collection: 82D0584

Electronic Collection: A17953152

RN: A17953152

Full Text COPYRIGHT 1996 History Today Ltd.

        The most public and profound examination of the personal morality of an English monarch was undertaken at Westminster Hall in January 1649. The House of Commons, which had on the fourth of the month declared itself to be the supreme and sufficient power in the land, had established a High Court of Justice to pass judgment on Charles Stewart. 135 men sat as `commissioners', both judge and jury, surrounding and presided over by the lord president, John Bradshaw, who resorted to wearing a specially reinforced hat to protect himself from outraged, sniping royalists. The wife of the general of the New Model Army shouted abuse at the judges from the balcony.

        Behind the constitutional debates about whether kings were accountable to anyone other than God or whether there was a reciprocal bond between king and people, the court was deciding whether Charles' private morality had besmirched the pristine display of public morality demanded of a magistrate. The discourse between the notions of public and private morality, illustrated so graphically in 1649, has now entered common speech at the debased level of metaphor and literary trope. The tabloid newspapers, even the heavyweight broadsheets -- one of the interesting cultural products of our current debate about monarchy is that the 'quality press' has had to use the same story-lines and techniques as their more despised cousins -- regularly gauge the mood of their readers towards the institutions of monarchy. In general, respect for and love of the person of the queen is largely undiminished. The private behavior of the queen remains discreet and beyond scrutiny and thus her public image remains untarnished. With the younger members of the family and those less immediately in line to the throne, royalty has become a matter of personalities and league tables. Personal morality is the key to their public reception.

        We may consider constitutional monarchy on the British model far removed from the kingship of the past. The debate over public and private morality, however, remains largely unchanged. The wider public has always had concern for the private face of its royal family, as the scandals over the behavior of Edward 11, George IV or Edward VII testify. Only during and after the Second World War did the monarchy of Britain achieve widespread approbation. A combination of the failure to meet such high public expectations and the unremitting and unforgiving glare of mass publicity makes us now more critical than ever.

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        The academic tools to examine this phenomenon were codified as long ago as 1957 when the American historian, Ernst Kantorowicz, first published his study of the phenomenon of `the king's two bodies'. Kantorowicz's task, in this instance, was to examine what he called `medieval political theology' or the way in which commentators throughout the Middle Ages engaged in a debate on the personal and spiritual capacities of kingship. It was possible to speak of the personal body of the king, which may be infirm, elderly, young or imbecilic, which could be distinguished, but not necessarily separated from the office of kingship, which was supreme, carried no such personal defects and was immutable through time. The body of the king may become frail and die, but his powers are never in demise, for as soon as the old king expires, someone is on hand to proclaim, `the king is dead; long live the king'. It was a commonplace to say that `the king never dies'.

        Although his primary purpose was to discuss the medieval antecedents of this theory, Kantorowicz drew attention to their frequent use by Elizabethan jurists and the ways in which such an understanding of the functions of monarchy had entered the language. Edmund Plowden's Reports made full use of its maxims, but so too did Shakespeare in his study of the kingship of Richard 11. The Tragedy of Richard II is a study of the way in which the personal actions of a monarch precipitate the separation of the mystical and spiritual aspects of monarchy from the person whose embodiment of these aspects we are meant to owe allegiance and respect. The monarch which can never die, which is represented. in the eternal symbols of state, is replaced by a fallible human being: `for within the hollow crown/That rounds the mortal temples of a king/Keeps Death his court, and there the antic sits/Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp'.

        Although the crown, the sceptre and the robes of state are worn by a person, they are symbols of the office which transcends the individual holder of it. Despite peccadillos, mistakes and sins, monarchs are owed respect because of the awe and majesty which surrounds their office. If it is accepted that the king's person cannot be separated from the office, then as Shakespeare's bishop of Carlisle announced, `what subject can give sentence on his king'. However, if there are circumstances in which the person and the office can become disengaged, the king can fall from grace to the level of a citizen before the law and become open to the judgement of his peers. This was the tragedy of Charles I. In 1649, the new rulers of England, holding their positions by virtue of conquest over the anointed symbol of divine power on earth, chose to make the most public and graphic display of the way in which the person of the monarch could be separated from the sovereignty he was meant to express. Charles was beheaded outside the Banqueting Hall at Whitehall --the room in which he had commissioned Rubens to paint a tribute to the mystical, semidivine powers of his father, James.

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        The action which the High Court of Justice, composed of army officers, MPs of the Rump Parliament and London worthies, took at the end of January 1649, was that of regicide -- king-killing. Charles Stuart was not the first king to be killed in this country: indeed, Richard II was murdered in a far more brutal manner at Pontefract Castle. However, Charles was still, nominally, holding the office of king and provided the unique spectacle of being tried in open court. To many, this was the most heinous and catastrophic action which the English people had ever taken. Elizabeth Poole, the Abingdon prophet, declared that as Charles was king, so he was the Lord's anointed. Whatever his personal actions, he was England's rightful king and the unchallengeable possessor of patriarchal rights. Even Charles' prosecutor, John Cook, a hack lawyer from Leicestershire, was later to reveal the full, psychological impact of the action for which he had agitated. Three years after the trial scenes in Westminster Hall he was on a ship travelling to Cork to take up his new post as Chief Justice of Munster. When the ship was involved in a storm, Cook's feverish dream had him screaming into the dark `I am not a parricide: I did not kill my father'.

        The most straightforward definition of a regicide is one of the forty-one individuals who signed Charles' death warrant and thereby directly sanctioned this singular act in English history. In the early 1980s, A.W. McIntosh extended this definition to include people like Cook, who did not subscribe the warrant, but whose involvement in the proceedings made him as responsible as those whose names were recorded in the annals of infamy. However, by applying the theory of the king's two bodies to the events of the trial and execution of Charles, there emerges another definition of regicide; one which is wider, more subtle and looks deeper into the protagonists' motivations.

        Trying to attach the label `regicide' to all those who signed the death warrant implies that the same action by differing people was guided by similar reasoning. Did the pious and reluctant Cromwell act in the same way as the colourful libertine, Henry Marten, and was he driven on by the same arguments as the New Model stalwarts, Ireton, Harrison and Jones, or by the same principles as the dashing young aristocrat, Thomas, Lord Grey of Groby? Not all these signatories were looking for the same solution to the conflicts of the 1640s. To some, Charles' execution was a means to an end. Millenarians regarded the final death of worldly kings, and thereby of all fleshly authority, as the necessary catalyst for the Second Coming of Christ: `old things shall be done away, and behold all things shall become new'. Others believed Charles had been guilty of sacrilege when he ignored God's providential message of victory by the parliamentary forces in 1646. He was guilty of murder in declaring war against the people of England. As such, he must be tried. This placed all the culpability for the war on the head of one man. His trial and execution would enable England to place the crown on the head of a godly magistrate.

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        There were also those who may or may not have believed that Charles was guilty of the charges brought against him, but that the bloodshed of the past seven years had been the consequence of investing a single person with potentially semi-divine powers. Any individual, no matter how godly, was likely to abuse such powers. As it was encapsulated two hundred years later, `power corrupts, but absolute power corrupts absolutely'. This was the gist of the debate which Bulstrode Whitelocke reported on December 23rd, 1648:

        Some of them were wholly against any king at all; others were against having the present king, or his eldest son to be king; others were for the third son, the duke of Gloucester, (who was among them, and might be educated as they should appoint) to be made king. Lower down the social scale, the ballad of `The Anarchie', early in 1648, repeated the same debate with the interesting addition of gender analysis: Then lets ha' King Charles sayes George, Nay lets have his son sayes Hugh, Nay then lets ha' none sayes Jabbering Jone, Nay lets be all Kings says Prue.

        The grandee leaders of the army had been in negotiations with Charles, on the basis of their settlement document the Heads of the Proposals since August 1647. It was the outbreak of a second civil war which proved a watershed: many of the soldiers declared that they had been dazzled by monarchy. They had shown too much reverence for the sanctity of the office to believe a king of England could have so much blood on his hands. With his refusal to lie down and admit defeat during the winter of 1647-8 and his negotiation of an alliance of Engagement with the Scots, Charles had revealed himself, in the eyes of many New Model soldiers, as an individual who went beyond mere culpability. He had put his own wilful rejection of the peace above the manifest will of God. He was `Charles Stuart: that man of blood'.

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        In response, several New Model regiments issued blood-curdling statement 9-of hatred against Charles, demanding he be put on trial. They denied this would be a private, human act of revenge, because they spoke on behalf of the godly people and expressed divine will. The New Model Army would be the instrument of God's vengeance. The regiments in the north likened Charles to the idolatrous Ahab -- who married the more notorious Jezebe -- claiming there were `thousands ... that have not bowed their knee to Baal and are yet ..firme and untainted with the poysonous principles of Oppression and Tyranny'. The soldiers of the forces of Scrope, Saunders and Wauton were troubled by `the serious thoughts of the hideous cry of innocent blood crying for vengeance to Heaven'. Others believed that the `grand Delinquent' should be `hewen in pieces by the sword of Justice'.

        This was the tenor of the messages which came to Fairfax and Cromwell from their troops in the regions. There was considerable pressure on the grandees to abandon the conciliatory position which they had taken in the autumn of 1647 and accept the wrathful judgement of God. It was in December 1648 that Cromwell finally accepted that there was no option but to put Charles on trial. The voice of his soldiers was insistent. Grandees, directed by the venomous demands of the regiments in the field, were convinced that in the absence of all other scapegoats -- all `evil counsellors' having been dispatched -- there was only one author of England's misery, the king himself. By his own, ungodly, wilful and arbitrary actions, Charles had lost the respect and reverence due to him as king and encouraged a vocal section of the English people to regard his tenure of the office as a separate issue from the office itself. These statements constituted a vicious, unrelenting and chilling attack on the person of the king.

        On the other hand, Clement Walker described the position taken by Henry Marten whom he believed had always had an intention to institute government without any kings: Such were their proceedings against the King, or against the kingly Government, which was cut off by the same Axe that murthered the King, and was (indeed) first in their intention, though last in execution; as appearetly by Harry Martin's Speech in the House upon the debate, Whetber a King, or no King? That if they must have a King, be bad rather have bad the last than any gentleman in England. He found no fault in his Person, but in his Office.

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        It was not mere affectation or the desire to save their necks which induced several individuals in 1660 to deny that they had acted from malice towards the king when they signed the death warrant. Such a view rescued many of the most active in 1649 from certain death in 1660 for the events of the rule of `King Oliver' had demonstrated the truth of the maxim that single person rule was apt to overbalance into tyranny, irrespective of the family to which the single person belonged.

        The desire to attack the person of the king as a man who had proven himself sinful by declaring war against his people, by breaking the reciprocal bond between government and governed and by ignoring the providential victories against him, can be described as regicide. It was a desire to cut a cancerous individual away from a fundamentally sound body politic. If Charles was removed and replaced by one who could reunite the gravitas of the office with respect for the incumbent, England would return to peace and stability. Within an explosive political situation, this was an essentially conservative approach. More radical were those who claimed that Charles was a fallible human being, and that the power of his position was an open invitation to abuse the trust between the rulers and the ruled. Much better to devolve power onto the heads of many individuals who could demonstrate direct representativeness of and accountability to the people. This was a utopian and unrealistic way to describe the individuals who sat in the Rump Parliament, but such was the `republican' position achieved in January 1649. As the government's supporters who had a bible to hand pointed out, `in a multitude of counsellors there is safety' (Prov.24.6).

        As Whitelocke had outlined, between the two extremes of the scale – regicidal replacement of the individual monarch on the one hand and a republican reworking of the notion of representativeness on the other -- there seemed to be several options facing the protagonists of the 1649 settlement. In the end there was no choice. The regiments demanded `condign punishment' on Charles and once that had been carried out republican government seemed the only possible substitute. `Regicide' and `republicanism', therefore, represent the two ends of the spectrum but also the only viable political actions.

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        The middle way, that of emasculating the powers of monarchy, did not fit either the personal interpretation of Charles' behaviour or the reactions which the people of England had towards monarchy. Charles had been offered many different peace proposals since the first overtures were made at Oxford, and on each occasion the parliamentarian demands had been watered down. He had not accepted any, regarding them not as a reduction of his personal power but as a subversion of the indissolubility of the king's two bodies. He had proved underhand and perfidious. A drastic curtailment of the power of the individual monarch would leave the office intact, and several commentators drew attention to the inability of the British people to recognise power without pomp and circumstance. An individual who derived no power from his constitutional position but who nevertheless exercised influence through people's willingness to defer to the outer show, was indeed a false idol. Even Francis Osborne, a royalist prepared to owe allegiance to the Commonwealth, believed it was impossible to `manacle' the power of kings because of the `childish Love the Common people beare the gaudy image'. John Milton, who was far from optimistic about the people's capacity to embrace responsible, representative government, complained they were `an inconstant, irrational, and Image-doting rabble' who worshipped `the mere useless bulke of his person'. In perhaps the finest statement of the republican principle, Henry Robinson believed: We shall find that kings are but meer chargeable Ceremonies, or Ciphers, of little use but to contract humors, and promote personal designs destructive to the being, and well-being of Commonwealths; for they neither are executioners of Justice themselves, nay, scarce (many times) Counsellors, nor do any special or publique work; and yet for meer custom and formalities sake we must have one man adored, having a supreme power invested in him, and be maintained in the greatest State and Glory, meerly to sit still and have the best, the wisest, the most faithful, and gallant instruments bow down, and rejoyce, but to kiss his hand.

        It was possible for the same individual to write as a regicide when in the business of personal attacks on Charles, and as a republican when supporting the wider governmental principle. Hence Milton's Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, written soon after the execution to Justify the regicide, argued the right of every common man to defend himself even against the `King in Person' and even more so the right of the state to defend itself against the person of the king in arms. In Eikonoklastes he had a wider brief to defend the republican government and chronicled the pride and idolatry of all kings. John Cook committed to the presses the prosecution speech which the king did not give him the opportunity to present. in King Charls his Case he attacked Charles' personal failings in the office, citing the first book of Samuel, which did `not insinuate what a good king ought to do, but what a wicked king would presume to do'. In the republican apology, Monarchy no Creature of God's making (1652) he was using the same passages, but with wider import. It was lawful to resist the king, he asserted, because the oath which men had taken to him was not to the person but `was only binding to the politique capacity'.

        The debate about the person and the office continued to dog the republican government. The Commonwealth had to decide whether they were a group of individuals who had collectively taken over the personal sovereignty of the king, or a wholly different form of government which had restyled the office. They had freed individuals from their oath of allegiance to the king, for as an anonymous pamphleteer put it, `to say that the Kings person cannot dye is a matter of Mirth ... for it amounts to this, that I sweare to preserve the lungs person which needs no preservation, because it cannot dye'. In the act which abolished kingship, in March 1649, two of the five sections justified the regicide -- Charles was `justly condemned, adjudged to die, and put to death, for many treasons' -- and two concerned themselves with the wider issue of the abolition of kingship itself, which had proved `unnecessary, burdensome and dangerous'. final section reiterated that loyalty was owed to this government as it had been to any previous one.

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        Ironically, by this time it was already too late for the republic. Politicians and publicists had to be responsive to the new iconography of Charles, set up by the hagiographic Eikon Basilike in which Charles the Martyr made his most striking appearance. Charles had rescued his personal reputation at the eleventh hour, losing his debilitating stutter under the strain of the court room appearance and making some of the most telling speeches about the illegitimate nature of the actions of those who wanted him dead. He claimed for himself the mantle of a representative of the people, for if he, a king, could be tried by an unprecedented court and convicted without witnesses or jury, what chance had the plain man of receiving justice at the hands of the Rump Parliament? In the minds of many, Charles had reunited his private image with the public morality of duty, protection and responsibility implicit in the office of kingship.

FOR FURTHER READING:

Ernst Kantorowicz, The King's two Bodies (Princeton University Press, 1957);William R. Everdell, The End of Kings: A History of Republics and Republicans (Macmillan, 1983); Patricia Crawford, `Charles Stuart, that man of blood', Journal of British Studies xvi.2 1977; A. W. McIntosh, `The number of the English regicides', History, 67, 1982; Austin Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen (Clarendon Press, 1982); Mark Kishlansky, The Rise of the New Model Army (Cambridge University Press, 1979); lan Gentles, The New Model Army in England, Ireland and Scotland (Blackwell, 1992).

Sarah Barber is Lecturer in History at Lancaster University and editor of conquest and Union: Fashioning a British State, 1485-1725 (Longman, 1995).

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