[1649 A.D.]

with it, and the servants of the king were pleased to see, in the sudden whiteness that covered their unfortunate master's coffin, a symbol of his innocence. The procession arrived at the spot selected for sepulture, and Bishop Juxon was preparing to officiate according to the rites of the Anglican church, when Whichcott, the governor of the castle, objected "that it was improbable the parliament would permit the use of what they had so totally abolished, and therein destroy their own act," and he would not permit the service to be so performed. They submitted; no religious ceremony took place, the coffin was lowered into the vault, all left the chapel, and the governor closed the doors. The house of commons had an account of the expenses of the funeral laid before them, and allowed five hundred pounds to pay them. On the very day of the king's death, before any messenger had left London, they published an ordinance declaring any one to be a traitor who should proclaim in his place, and as his successor, "Charles Stuart, his son, commonly called prince of Wales, or any other person whatever." On the 6th of February, after a long debate, and in spite of the opposition of twenty-nine voices against forty-four members, the house of lords was formally abolished."

VARIOUS ESTIMATES OF THE EVENT

Clarendon: Milton: Guizot: Knight

It is scarcely necessary that we should offer any opinion upon this tremendous event. The world had never before seen an act so daring conducted with such a calm determination; and the few moderate men of that time balanced the illegality, and also the impolicy of the execution of Charles, by the fact that "it was not done in a corner," and that those who directed or sanctioned the act offered no apology, but maintained its absolute necessity and justice. "That horrible sentence upon the most innocent person in the world; the execution of that sentence by the most execrable murder that was ever committed since that of our blessed Saviour"; forms the text which Clarendon gave for the rhapsodies of party during two centuries. On the k other hand, the eloquent address of Miltons to the people of England has been in the hearts and mouths of many who have known that the establishment of the liberties of their country, duly subordinated by the laws of a free monarchy, may be dated from this event: "God has endued you with greatness of mind to be the first of mankind, who, after having conquered their own king, and having had him delivered into their hands, have not scrupled to condemn him judicially, and, pursuant to that sentence of condemnation, to put him to death."

In these times we can afford to refuse our assent to the blasphemous comparison of Clarendon (blasphemy more offensively repeated in the church service for the 30th of January), and at the same time affirm that the judicial condemnation which Milton so admires was illegal, unconstitutional, and in its immediate results dangerous to liberty. But feeling that far greater dangers would have been incurred if "the caged tiger had been let loose," and knowing that out of the errors and anomalies of those times a wiser revolution grew, for which the first more terrible revolution was a preparation, we may cease to examine this great historical question in any bitterness of spirit, and even acknowledge that the death of Charles, a bad king, though in some respects a good man, was necessary for the life of England, and for her "teaching other nations how to live."

We must accept as just and true Milton's admonition to his countrymen

[1649 A.D.] in reference to this event, which he terms "so glorious an action," with many reasonable qualifications as to its glory; and yet apply even to ourselves his majestic words: -"After the performing so glorious an action as this, you ought to do nothing that is mean and little, not so much as to think of, much less to do anything but what is great and sublime. Which to attain to, this is your only way: as you have subdued your enemies in the field, so to make appear, that unarmed, and in the highest outward peace and tranquillity, you of all mankind are best able to subdue ambition, avarice, the love of riches, and can best avoid the corruptions that prosperity is apt to introduce (which generally subdue and triumph over other nations), to show as great justice, temperance, and moderation in the maintaining of your liberty, as you have shown courage in freeing yourselves from slavery."

There was, at the time of the king's execution, a book being printed which was to surround his life with the attributes of a saint, and to invest him in death with the glory of a martyr. The "Eikon Basilike, or Portraiture of his Sacred Majesty in his Solitudes and Sufferings," purported to be written by Charles the First himself. Milton, who was directed by the parliament to answer this Eikon, or Image, treats it in his Eikonoklastes, or Image-breaker, as if the king had "left behind him this book as the best advocate and interpreter of his own actions"; but at the same time Milton is careful to add, "as to the author of these soliloquies, whether it were the late king, as is vulgarly believed, or any secret coadjutor (and some stick not to name him), it can add nothing, nor shall take from the weight, if any be, of reason which he brings." The question of the authorship of this book has now passed out of the region of party violence; the controversy on that matter has almost merged, as a literary problem, into the belief that it was written by Gauden, afterwards bishop of Exeter. This divine probably submitted it to Charles during his long sojourn in the Isle of Wight; he published it as the work of the king; but he claimed the authorship after the restoration.

Hallamm remarks upon the internal evidence of its authenticity that "it has all the air of a fictitious composition. Cold, stiff, elaborate, without a single allusion that bespeaks the superior knowledge of facts which the king must have possessed, it contains little but those rhetorical commonplaces which would suggest themselves to any forger." But these "rhetorical commonplaces" are the best evidence, not of the genuineness of the book, but of the skill of the author. They were precisely what was required to make "attachment to the memory of the king become passion, and respect, worship"; so Guizot describes the effect of the Eikon. It was an universal appeal to the feelings, in a style moving along with a monotonous dignity, befitting royalty, though occasionally mingled with cold metaphors. It set forth the old blind claims to implicit obedience - or, as Milton has it, maintained "the common grounds of tyranny and popery, sugared a little over,' amidst the manifestations of a sincere piety and a resigned sadness. In one year there were fifty editions of this book sold. "Had it appeared a week sooner it might have preserved the king," thinks one writer. That may be doubted. But it produced the effect which those so-called histories produce which endeavour to fix the imagination solely upon the personal attributes and sorrows of kings and queens, instead of presenting a sober view of their relations to their subjects. Sentiment with the majority is always more powerful than reason; and thus Milton's "Eikonoklastes," being a partisan's view of Charles' public actions a cold though severe view, in the formal style of a state-paper-produced little or no effect upon the national opinions, and is now read only for the great name of the author."

[1649 A.D.]

John Lingard.

Such was the end of the unfortunate Charles Stuart; an awful lesson to the possessors of royalty, to watch the growth of public opinion, and to moderate their pretensions in conformity with the reasonable desires of their subjects. Had he lived at a more early period, when the sense of wrong was quickly subdued by the habit of submission, his reign would probably have been marked with fewer violations of the national liberties. It was resistance that made him a tyrant. The spirit of the people refused to yield to the encroachments of authority; and one act of oppression placed him under the necessity of committing another, till he had revived and enforced all those odious prerogatives, which, though usually claimed, were but sparingly exercised, by his predecessors. For some years his efforts seemed successful; but the Scottish insurrection revealed the delusion; he had parted with the real authority of a king, when he forfeited the confidence and affection of his subjects.

But while we blame the illegal measures of Charles, we ought not to screen from censure the subsequent conduct of his principal opponents. From the moment that war seemed inevitable, they acted as if they thought themselves absolved from all obligations of honour and honesty. They never ceased to inflame the passions of the people by misrepresentation and calumny; they exercised a power far more arbitrary and formidable than had ever been claimed by the king; they punished summarily, on mere suspicion, and without attention to the forms of law; and by their committees they established in every county a knot of petty tyrants, who disposed at will of the liberty and property of the inhabitants. Such anomalies may, perhaps, be inseparable from the jealousies, the resentments, and the heart-burnings, which are engendered in civil commotions; but certain it is that right and justice had seldom been more wantonly outraged, than they were by those who professed to have drawn the sword in the defence of right and justice.

Neither should the death of Charles be attributed to the vengeance of the people. They, for the most part, declared themselves satisfied with their victory; they sought not the blood of the captive monarch; they were even willing to replace him on the throne, under those limitations which they deemed necessary for the preservation of their rights. The men who hurried him to the scaffold were a small faction of bold and ambitious spirits, who had the address to guide the passions and fanaticism of their followers, and were enabled through them to control the real sentiments of the nation. Even of the commissioners appointed to sit in judgment on the king, scarcely one-half could be induced to attend at his trial; and many of those who concurred in his condemnation subscribed the sentence with feelings of shame and remorse. But so it always happens in revolutions: the most violent put themselves forward; their vigilance and activity seem to multiply their number; and the daring of the few wins the ascendancy over the indolence or the pusillanimity of the many."

S. R. Gardiner

Only after long years does a nation make clear its definite resolve, and for this reason wise statesmen-whether monarchical or republican watch the currents of opinion, and submit to compromises which will enable the national sentiment to make its way without a succession of violent shocks.

B. W.- VOL. XX. G

[1649 A.D.] Charles' fault lay not so much in his claim to retain the negative voice as in his absolute disregard of the condition of the time, and of the feelings and opinions of every class of his subjects with which he happened to disagree. Even if those who opposed Charles in the later stages of his career failed to rally the majority of the people to their side, they were undoubtedly acting in accordance with a permanent national demand for that government of compromise which slowly but irresistibly developed itself in the course of the century. Nor can it be doubted that, if Charles had, under any conditions, been permitted to reseat himself on the throne, he would quickly have provoked a new resistance. As long as he remained a factor in English politics, government by compromise was impossible. Even on the scaffold he reminded his subjects that a share in government was nothing appertaining to the people. All can perceive that with Charles' death the main obstacle to the establishment of a constitutional system was removed. The scaffold at Whitehall accomplished that which neither the eloquence of Eliot and Pym nor the statutes and ordinances of the Long Parliament had been capable of effecting.u

Lord Macaulay

The king could not be trusted. The vices of Charles had grown upon him. They were, indeed, vices which difficulties and perplexities generally bring out in the strongest light. Cunning is the natural defence of the weak. A prince, therefore, who is habitually a deceiver when at the height of power, is not likely to learn frankness in the midst of embarrassments and distresses. Charles was not only a most unscrupulous but a most unlucky dissembler. There never was a politician to whom so many frauds and falsehoods were brought home by undeniable evidence. He publicly recognised the houses at Westminster as a legal parliament, and, at the same time, made a private minute in council, declaring the recognition null. He publicly disclaimed all thought of calling in foreign aid against his people: he privately solicited aid from France, from Denmark, and from Lorraine. He publicly denied that he employed papists: at the same time he privately sent to his generals directions to employ every papist that would serve. He publicly took the sacrament at Oxford, as a pledge that he never would even connive at Roman Catholicism: he privately assured his wife, that he intended to tolerate Roman Catholicism in England; and he authorised Lord Glamorgan to promise that Roman Catholicism should be established in Ireland. Then he attempted to clear himself at his agent's expense. Glamorgan received, in the royal handwriting, reprimands intended to be read by others, and eulogies which were to be seen only by himself.

To such an extent, indeed, had insincerity now tainted the king's whole nature, that his most devoted friends could not refrain from complaining to each other, with bitter grief and shame, of his crooked politics. His defeats, they said, gave them less pain than his intrigues. Since he had been a prisoner, there was no section of the victorious party which had not been the object both of his flatteries and of his machinations: but never was he more unfortunate than when he attempted at once to cajole and to undermine Cromwell. Cromwell had to determine whether he would put to hazard the attachment of his party, the attachment of his army, his own greatness, nay his own life, in an attempt, which would probably have been vain, to save a prince whom no engagement could bind. With many struggles and misgivings, and probably not without many prayers, the decision was made.

[1649 A.D.]

Charles was left to his fate. The military saints resolved that, in defiance of the old laws of the realm, and of the almost universal sentiment of the nation, the king should expiate his crimes with his blood. He for a time expected a death like that of his unhappy predecessors, Edward II and Richard II. But he was in no danger of such treason. Those who had him in their gripe were not midnight stabbers. What they did they did in order that it might be a spectacle to heaven and earth, and that it might be held in everlasting remembrance.

They enjoyed keenly the very scandal which they gave. That the ancient constitution and the public opinion of England were directly opposed to regicide made regicide seem strangely fascinating to a party bent on effecting a complete political and social revolution. In order to accomplish their purpose, it was necessary that they should first break in pieces every part of the machinery of the government; and this necessity was rather agreeable than painful to them. The commons passed a vote tending to accommodation with the king. The soldiers excluded the majority by force. The lords unanimously rejected the proposition that the king should be brought to trial. Their house was instantly closed. No court, known to the law, would take on itself the office of judging the fountain of justice. A revolutionary tribunal was created. That tribunal pronounced Charles a tyrant, a traitor, a murderer, and a public enemy; and his head was severed from his shoulders before thousands of spectators, in front of the banqueting hall of his own palace.

In no long time it became manifest that those political and religious zealots, to whom this deed is to be ascribed, had committed, not only a crime, but an error. They had given to a prince, hitherto known to his people chiefly by his faults, an opportunity of displaying, on a great theatre, before the eyes of all nations and all ages, some qualities which irresistibly call forth the admiration and love of mankind, the high spirit of a gallant gentleman, the patience and meekness of a penitent Christian. Nay, they had so contrived their revenge that the very man whose whole life had been a series of attacks on the liberties of England now seemed to die a martyr in the cause of those liberties. No demagogue ever produced such an impression on the public mind as the captive king, who, retaining in that extremity all his regal dignity, and confronting death with dauntless courage, gave utterance to the feelings of his oppressed people, manfully refused to plead before a court unknown to the law, appealed from military violence to the principles of the constitution, asked by what right the house of commons had been purged of its most respectable members and the house of lords deprived of its legislative functions, and told his weeping hearers that he was defending not only his own cause, but theirs. His long misgovernment, his innumerable perfidies, were forgotten. His memory was, in the minds of the great majority of his subjects, associated with those free institutions which he had, during many years, laboured to destroy: for those free institutions had perished with him, and, amidst the mournful silence of a community kept down by arms, had been defended by his voice alone. From that day began a reaction in favour of monarchy and of the exiled house, a reaction which never ceased till the throne had again been set up in all its old dignity.t