1649: Charles I
January 30th, 2008 Headsman
On this date in 1649, the struggle between parliament and crown cost the Stuart monarch Charles I his head.
Charles‘ political clumsiness and unreconstructed authoritarianism had seen the realm whose unitary sovereignty he insisted upon blunder from disaster to disaster: into bankruptcy, military defeat, religious conflict and the English Civil War.
The assignation of cause and consequence in that war’s genesis has much exercised historians.
What is beyond dispute is that the confrontation between monarch and subject, pitting against each other political and economic epochs, theories of state and power, rates as one of history’s most captivating courtroom dramas.
Charles refused to answer the court’s charge of treason, occasioned most particularly by the king’s fomenting the Second Civil War while already a defeated prisoner of parliament following the first Civil War. He rested firmly on royal prerogatives against what some interlocutors take to be an almost desperate plea by his judges for some hint of acknowledgment that could open the door to compromise:
[A] King cannot be tried by any superior jurisdiction on earth. But it is not my case alone — it is the freedom and the liberty of the people of England. And do you pretend what you will, I stand more for their liberties — for if the power without law may make laws, may alter the fundamental laws of the kingdom, I do not know what subject he is in England that can be sure of his life or anything that he calls his own. Therefore, when that I came here I did expect particular reasons to know by what law, what authority, you did proceed against me here.
It must be borne in mind that the trial of a king was a completely unprecedented event. Charles might be forgiven his attitude, even if it smacked of the impolitic high-handedness that had forced this deadly test of powers.
Parliament’s position — here in the words of its President — is distinctly in the stream of political discourse (if not always actual practice) ascendant in the West to this day.
Sir, as the law is your superior, so truly, sir, there is something that is superior to the law and that is indeed the parent or author of the law — and that is the people of England.
…
And therefore, sir, for this breach of trust when you are called to account, you are called to account by your superiors — “when a king is summoned to judgment by the people, the lesser is summoned by the greater.”
The modern and the medieval, facing each other at the bar.
A fragment from a World War II bomb-damaged and only-recently-rediscovered Hippolyte Delaroche painting situating Charles in the Christlike pose of enduring the mockery of his captors.
Charles played his lordly disdain to the end, refusing to admit parliament’s jurisdiction by making any sort of plea.
The line between heroic defiance and pig-headed obstinacy being very much in the eye of the beholder, the confrontation is typically played straight-up for its arresting clash of principles — as in the 1970 biopic Cromwell, with Alec Guinness as the monarch:
Probably more troubling for the parliamentary party than the regicide taboo was consideration that the execution would transfer royalist loyalties from a man safely imprisoned to an heir beyond their power, who could be expected to (as in fact he did) resume the civil war.
Competing philosophies expounded for the competing interests; the dispute involved the era’s intellectual titans, in conflict over the most fundamental concepts of the state. Thomas Hobbes wrote his magnum opus The Leviathan as a royalist exile in Paris, and its abhorrence for rebellion and divided sovereignty unmistakably reflects the English Civil War experience. John Milton earned his bread as a republican polemicist; his poetic celebration of Satan’s failed rebellion in Paradise Lost, written after the Stuart restoration, can be read as a political critique.
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It’s conventionally thought that the beheading was conducted by a radical minority, though that supposition is debatable, colored as it is by the ultimate restoration of the crown. But although England would have a king again, the weight of political authority would steadily, permanently, gravitate towards parliament, organ of the merchant classes who would steer England henceforward.
Did it have the right? Two implacable powers each claimed an indivisible object; “between equal rights, force decides.” So on this cold winter’s afternoon — Charles wore thick undergarments, so he would not shiver with the appearance of fright — the deposed king was marched to a scaffold erected at Whitehall. He gave a short final address, with the famous words for his principle of martyrdom — “a sovereign and a subject are clean different things” — then laid his head on a low block, where a masked executioner (never definitively identified) cleanly chopped it off.
After the monarchy’s restoration, Charles was canonized as a saint by the Church of England: he’s still the last person so venerated, an odd salute to a mortal career of unalloyed arrogance and incompetence. Observance of the cult was toned down in the 19th century, although a Society of King Charles the Martyr dedicated to its preservation still exists; monarchists of a more secular inclination also continue to mark his martyrdom on this anniversary.
Less reverent by far was Monty Python’s homage:
“The most interesting thing about King Charles the First is that he was five foot six inches tall at the start of his reign, but only four foot eight inches tall at the end of it.”
Part of the Themed Set: The English Reformation.
Also on this date
- 1913: John Williams, the Case of the Hooded Man
- 2011: Ahmed Ali Hussein, enemy cleric
- 1474: Not the Archer of Meudon
- 1996: William Flamer, Alito'd
- 1661: Oliver Cromwell, posthumously
Entry Filed under: 17th Century,Beheaded,Capital Punishment,Death Penalty,England,Execution,Famous,Famous Last Words,Heads of State,History,Martyrs,Milestones,Notable Jurisprudence,Notable Participants,Notably Survived By,Power,Public Executions,Religious Figures,Treason
Tags: 1640s, 1649, alec guinness, capitalism, charles i, charles ii, cinema, English Civil War, hippolyte delaroche, january 30, john milton, leviathan, london, monarchism, monty python, paradise lost, philosophy, Protestant Reformation, regicide, saint, satan, thomas hobbes, whitehall
January 30th, 2008 at 7:05 am
I’m not sure how I feel about this. I’m a history graduate and specialised in this period in UK and European history at this time (and the French Revolution). Have you heard of Sellars and Yeatman, Headsman? They wrote a famous “Brief Study” of UK history as people remembered it, so it was all jumbled up and quite crazy! They christened the Cavaliers “Wrong but Wromantic” and the Puritans “Right but Repulsive”, and I feel much the same. However, legalistically, Charles was a fool to think he could emulate Elizabeth and to proclaim “The divine Right of Kings” – if there was one, his brother Henry should have been king, not him. He drove a coach and horses through UK rights and privileges by ruling without Parliament and imposition of various illegal taxes (much like the American Revolution, really) . So the Wromantic side of me loves the Van Dyke “Happy Families” paintings of the Royal family at that time, and the hardheaded bit says he asked for what he got!
January 30th, 2008 at 7:17 am
P.S Thanks for the fim clip. I went to see it was a equally history fanatic friend, and we wept throughout most of the film ! Alex Guiness was marvellous, but Cromwell wasn’t a quarter as handsome as Richard Harris!
July 17th, 2008 at 1:58 am
[...] monarch is the one who drove the bus over the cliff. But much is forgiven a martyr. Indeed, like Charles I of England, the last Romanov monarch has been posthumously saddled with divine sanction; he and all the family [...]
October 13th, 2008 at 1:51 am
[...] Headsman On this date in 1660, the restored House of Stuart began a week of bloody justice against Charles I’s regicides by hanging, drawing and quartering Thomas Harrison at Charing [...]
October 22nd, 2008 at 11:16 am
[...] Charles I [...]
November 28th, 2008 at 12:45 pm
[...] The personal contest between these men for the throne of England was the echo of the decades-old struggles straining the English polity — the Reformation and the reach of royal authority. [...]
January 30th, 2009 at 1:35 am
[...] 30th, 2009 Headsman On this anniversary date of King Charles I’s beheading, the two-years-dead corpse of the late Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell was hung in chains at Tyburn [...]
January 30th, 2009 at 2:16 pm
[...] historians even today. Ann Hughes gives a good introduction on the BBC site about the execution. Executed Today also has a good range of material on this. For a range of different views, try the following texts [...]
February 1st, 2009 at 11:50 am
[...] January 30, 1649, King Charles I was beheaded on a scaffold at Whitehall. Historical reenactment. Some background. [...]
March 7th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
die charles
April 26th, 2009 at 1:31 am
[...] Pembroke had earned his Round head by taking Carew Castle from King Charles‘ forces in the First English Civil [...]
July 28th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
[...] If Cromwell’s dying sentiment concealed any lasting bitterness for the crown, maybe his spirit would take some satisfaction a century later when another of his name and family rose high enough to behead a king. [...]
December 21st, 2009 at 4:42 am
[...] vituperator had, too, become complicated by the progress of the proposed Spanish Match to wed Prince Charles to Europe’s leading Catholic monarchy — an ultimately abortive project, but nearing the [...]
January 2nd, 2010 at 4:01 am
[...] of its sizable arsenal. And though the elder Hotham personally barred the gates of Hull against King Charles — Hotham had been appointed governor by Parliament in a test of authority against the [...]
January 10th, 2010 at 4:31 am
[...] run as Archbishop of Canterbury also happened to coincide with Charles I’s 11-year personal rule, sans parliament. The overweening divine’s influence on secular [...]
January 18th, 2010 at 4:13 am
[...] Stuart line was (for now) restored to the throne, and the regicides of its late king horribly if not voluminously [...]
January 19th, 2010 at 2:06 am
[...] Venner himself was born in New England, and there’s a zippy bio of him in The New England Historical and Genealogical Register. The North American colonies and Parliamentarian Britain helped to incubate political/religious heterodoxy for one another, and Venner was not the only budding religious zealot in the distant marches to emigrate to London after Charles I lost his head. [...]
February 12th, 2010 at 4:13 am
[...] forever a separate kingdom and nation. Without a King James of England, there would not have been a Charles I of England, and thus perhaps no religious civil wars in the mid 17th century. Carried still [...]
February 27th, 2010 at 4:51 am
[...] against the perpetrators continued to complicate Dutch-English relations into the reign of Charles I and beyond. Even Oliver Cromwell required, as the price of peace for the First Anglo-Dutch War in [...]
May 12th, 2010 at 4:36 am
[...] 12th, 2010 Headsman On this date in 1641, the doomed English monarch Charles I regretfully sacrificed one of his ablest ministers to the headsman. Thomas Wentworth and loyal [...]
July 10th, 2010 at 3:27 pm
[...] but to put him to death, although they were very clear of the consequences of such actions (The story is recounted lucidly here). Charles strayed not a whit from his absolutist principles, refusing to acknowledge the court had [...]
July 14th, 2010 at 11:19 pm
[...] Duchasse d’Orleans, nee Princess Henrietta Anne Stuart the daughter of deposed and executed King Charles I of England, died suddenly. Some years before, the Duchasse, a great friend, and possibly lover, of her [...]
August 20th, 2010 at 7:25 am
[...] named stadtholder. Reason being: William III was the grandson of the Stuart king Cromwell beheaded, Charles I, and thus a potential claimant to the English throne. Both Protestant Republics had a distinct [...]
November 20th, 2010 at 8:34 pm
[...] Finally the new guy managed to get Drummond on a boat back to the mother country with an unflattering report of his conduct. The crotchety septuagenarian, who had been a spry mid-30’s courtier when first appointed Virginia governor by Charles I, was coldly received by Charles II. “The old fool,” remarked the sovereign, “has taken more lives in that naked country than I have taken for the murder of my father.” [...]
April 27th, 2011 at 4:58 am
[...] weeks following the epochal execution of the late king Charles I were also the climax of a pivotal intra-party conflict among the triumphant Parliamentarians [...]
May 23rd, 2011 at 10:31 pm
[...] when they happened to show up at her door; despite her late husband’s part in the regicide of Charles I, Alice Lisle doesn’t seem to have been the political [...]
December 15th, 2011 at 9:26 am
[...] Manning, the son of a royalist colonel who died fighting for Charles’s late beheaded father, had impeccable credentials for the Stuarts. The alleged English king was now parked on the [...]
January 28th, 2012 at 2:06 pm
[...] politics. Even kings themselves are in mortal peril around [...]
April 7th, 2012 at 11:31 pm
[...] II could not best Oliver Cromwell in life, but finally made Cromwell’s bones suffer for regicide. As an object lesson, what difference whether the bones came to the halter breathing or [...]
April 19th, 2012 at 4:27 am
[...] John Barkstead, Miles Corbet and John Okey were all among the 59 judges who signed the death-warrant of King Charles I. [...]
May 3rd, 2012 at 12:31 pm
[...] Servants and Parents over Children, may seem to have most power and authority (I say nothing now of Princes over Subjects, that being a curious Argument and which may need very Cautious handling) Yet even these may not be [...]
November 15th, 2012 at 3:14 pm
[...] Embarrassing to Louisa, that is. The royals got to keep their jobs — though Adolf Frederick had feared he might go the way of Charles Stuart. [...]
November 17th, 2012 at 8:04 am
[...] The Prince in question was the future King Charles I, which might cause one to doubt the prayer’s efficacy. [...]
January 5th, 2013 at 11:28 am
[...] It had been declared in rebellion by Cromwell‘s parliament for taking too-vigorous umbrage at King Charles‘s execution. Its official C of E ministers were being challenged by breakaway independents of [...]