This Day in British History (Charles I Execution: From Monarch to Martyr?)

Jan. 30, 1649—Irreconcilable differences on the prerogatives of the British crown and Parliament, worsened by century-old sectarian divisions, reached a bloody climax as King Charles I was beheaded, in a public ceremony that backfired on the Puritan Parliament contingent that pressed for his execution.

Over the last three decades in Great Britain, with the mystery that long protected the Windsor dynasty dissipating, sentiment has risen for an end to the monarchy. But with the execution of Charles and the subsequent inability to replace it with a truly democratic, republican alternative, that opportunity may well have been squandered for good.

One of Charles’ most significant military opponents, Oliver Cromwell, the third member of Parliament to sign the king’s arrest warrant, emerged from the post-execution turbulence as the leader of the government. Poor health limited the “Lord Protector” to a reign of only nine years.

With Cromwell’s son Richard unable to wield power effectively as his successor, adherents of the monarchy helped bring back the Stuarts. The subsequent “Restoration” with Charles’ son, Charles II, at its center, inaugurated an era far removed from the Puritan piety preached and enforced by Cromwell--until, that is, James II--with little of his brother's political nimbleness, and openly professing Catholicism--ran afoul of Parliament, just as his father had, and likewise lost his throne 40 years later.

The strategy pursued by Cromwell and his followers—end Charles I’s life publicly, for all to see—differed from how Charles’ grandmother, Mary Queen of Scots, had been dispatched by her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I of England, for plotting her assassination.

That beheading occurred in Fotheringhay Castle, in Northamptonshire, with a limited number of eyewitnesses—and a good thing, too, because Mary’s death was regarded as unusually brutal even by the standards of her time.

Cromwell and his Puritan "New Model Army" convincingly defeated Charles on the battlefield, but the king's trial and execution were far less adroitly handled. 

Consider the following, all of which undermined the legitimacy of the case for many onlookers:

*The government had to be dissolved by force;

*The House of Lords would not sanction the trial, so that had to be dissolved;

*The House of Commons had been purged of opponents of the New Model Army, leaving only a "Rump Parliament":

*The House of Commons had never before served as a judicial body.

*New procedures had to be devised.

All of this provided Charles with grounds to argue that the proceedings were illegitimate. He even had unexpected support from a member of the packed gallery: Lady Fairfax, the wife of the commander-in-chief of the New Model Army, loudly explained the absence of her husband from the proceedings: "He has more wit than to be here!"

Following this unprecedented royal trial for treason, Charles—the second in the Stuart dynasty uniting the thrones of England and Scotland, deposed as ruler shortly before his death— stunned opponents used to his stammer with unexpected dignity and eloquence on the scaffold.

He had successfully prevailed upon his captors to allow him to wear a second shirt, lest onlookers misinterpret his shivering in front of the Banqueting House in Whitehall as cowardice rather than the human body’s natural reaction to a bitterly cold afternoon.

With time running out for him, he made his case once again, this time in more concise form, for the divine right of kings. This was the notion that royalty derived their authority from God, not an earthly power--or, as he expressed more emphatically, “A subject and a sovereign are clean different things.”

Above all, he claimed that he could not fulfill his duties as a sovereign by yielding to those who had defeated him in the English Civil War.

Were he “to have all laws changed according to the Power of the Sword, I needed not to have come here, and therefore I tell you ... that I am the martyr of the people,” he declared.

A single swing of the axe removed Charles’ head. But it could not so easily detach his hold on many onlookers, some of whom dipped their handkerchiefs in his blood spilled on the scaffold, a portent of the cult of martyrdom that began to build around him. Nor did it neatly eliminate class and religious differences that had roiled the kingdom, even after the so-called Glorious Revolution 40 years later—commonly hailed as the indispensable step toward a constitutional monarchy.

I titled this post “This Day in British History,” not “This Day in English History,” in recognition of the fact that Charles’ fate also affected Scotland and Ireland, two sources of unrest in the British Isles during the war and afterward.

Vacillating, equivocating, quibbling over nuances, telling successive audiences what they wanted to hear: Charles was all of this, and more (traits listed by the Victorian public intellectual Thomas Babington Macaulay, in my quote three years ago from his History of England from 1485 to 1685).

All the same, was he, as the charges against him stated, “a tyrant, traitor, murderer, and a public and implacable enemy to the Commonwealth of England”?

That phrase might have applied, with far greater justice, to Henry VIII. To be sure, Charles irritated virtually every faction in the kingdom that could have allowed him to preserve his authority and his life. But Henry had done far more: increasingly as the years went on, he made his subjects, from the humblest to the mightiest, fear for their lives because of his capriciousness.

In an article first published in the Winter 1997 issue of Modern Age and republished 17 years later in The Imaginative Conservative, Jeffrey Hart regarded traditional conservative hero Edmund Burke with some asperity for his once-over-lightly treatment of the execution of Charles in Reflections on the Revolution in France.

Unlike the myth that Burke constructed that Britain had proceeded carefully from precedent to precedent, Hart noted, the nation was embroiled in revolutionary turmoil not unlike what occurred across the English Channel late in the eighteenth century. Indeed, until the advent of Robert Walpole, “England had the politics of a banana republic.”

Quote of the Day (Thomas Babington Macaulay, on King Charles I)

“Charles [I] bore no resemblance to his father [King James I of England]. He was not a driveller, or a pedant, or a buffoon, or a coward. It would be absurd to deny that he was a scholar and a gentleman, a man of exquisite taste in the fine arts, a man of strict morals in private life.

“His talents for business were respectable; his demeanour was kingly. But he was false, imperious, obstinate, narrow-minded, ignorant of the temper of his people, unobservant of the signs of his times. The whole principle of his government was resistance to public opinion; nor did he make any real concession to that opinion till it mattered not whether he resisted or conceded, till the nation which had long ceased to love him or to trust him, had at last ceased to fear him.”—English historian and essayist Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859), The History of England from 1485 to 1685 (1987)

Over the years, I have had my issues with the smugness of Thomas Babington Macaulay, but when it comes to King Charles I –born on this day in 1600 in Dunfermline Palace, Fife, Scotland—his conclusions seem indisputable.

Charles did not commit any offenses not done by either his father or, for that matter, any of the Tudors. But he was fatally insensitive to how his kingdom was changing and how much he was alienating a significant proportion of his subjects. That blindness led to the English Civil War, defeat at the hands of Oliver Cromwell, and execution for treason in 1649.

In a post for the “Yesterday Channel” for UK TV, a blogger posed the question, “Did King Charles I Deserve to Die?” After offering the case for the prosecution, the blogger, I would say, makes a more compelling case for the defense, noting that Cromwell and the military arrested any MPs in favor of negotiating with Charles at the end of the civil war. In other words, they engineered a military coup, echoing Macaulay’s charge.

(The image accompanying this post is by the Dutch painter Gerrit van Honthorst in 1628.)

Flashback, September 1649: Cromwell Enters Irish Infamy at Drogheda

Oliver Cromwell only spent nine months in Ireland, but during that brief time he became a byword for British cruelty and oppression. Much of this owed to the end of the siege of Drogheda, when his army killed wholesale. 

Much about the mass killing on September 12, 1649, remains, surprisingly, in dispute. The massacre, justified by the future self-proclaimed “Lord Protector” as in accordance with the justice of God, certainly exacerbated sectarian unrest in Ireland and spawned a national grievance against the British government as undying as the mid-19^th century Potato Famine.

Proximity to England made Ireland a natural launching pad for rebels against the established order. In years past, this would have been the crown. But after 1642, when a faction against King Charles I seized control (thus becoming the “Parliamentarians”), the Catholic Confederation of Kilkenny had aided the Royalists. Seven years later, with Charles seized and executed at Cromwell’s behest but with many still loyal to his son, the head of the “New Model Army” had turned his attention to Ireland as part of the campaign to subdue the last pockets of resistance to the new regime.

For an idea of the fate that Cromwell hoped desperately to avoid, I suggest you rent the Helen Mirren 2005 mini-series, Elizabeth I. In one scene, her counselors, asked about putting down a rebellion in Ireland, look like they’ve been asked to swallow castor oil, and the queen can’t help displaying her scorn. Anybody hoping to tame the island would be facing an emerald briar patch, as the queen’s bratty favorite, the Earl of Essex, was about to find out.

Having arrived in Ireland relatively late in the year, Cromwell felt the necessity to move rapidly and effectively—and unlike precursors such as Essex, he actually did so. His “New Model Army” was more open to men of ability than the Royalists and its members were more motivated by zeal (the religious kind--many of the men shared Cromwell's Puritanism, and  ministers of that faith were assigned to each unit). 

Because Cromwell insisted on being well-provisioned and financed even before leaving England, he would not be as likely to bog down in logistics. When it came time for the attack on Drogheda, the commander also possessed heavy artillery that would make short work of the town’s medieval walls.

Even with all these advantages—not to mention his more than three-to-one manpower edge, as well as divisions among the loose coalition of Protestant Royalists and Irish Catholics—the defenders at Drogheda fought vigorously. Annoyed that they refused his demand to surrender, Cromwell was downright enraged when the fighting went into its second day with members of his army even dying.

The result: at the end of the battle, following Cromwell’s orders of “no quarter,” not only had the beleaguered Drogheda garrison been butchered wholesale, but the killing had even extended to civilians.

At this point, apologists for Cromwell swing into action. Under formal rules of warfare at the time, they say, once a demand for surrender had been refused, combatants could not expect mercy if they lost. Moreover, because there was not much in the way of protest at the time, they insist that many, if not all, of the subsequent charges against Cromwell represent propaganda.

This last point is rather rich. A number of apologists are quick to point out that atrocities had been perpetrated against Protestants when Catholics had rebelled in Ireland eight years before. Surely there were a number of the latter. But the victors in Cromwell’s war had as much motive—and far more opportunity—to whip up propaganda than Catholics had. As Jane Ohlmeyer pointed out in an essay for A Military History of Ireland,  as few as 4,000 Protestants may have been murdered in the initial months of the 1641 rebellion—a far cry from the 154,000 claimed by the lords justice 10 years later.

In terms of the “propaganda”: The position of Irish Catholics in the two centuries after Cromwell can be likened to “the view from the bottom rail,” the phrase used by James West Davidson and Mark Lytle in After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection to describe former slaves still in the lower classes of society in post-Reconstruction America. These aged slaves were mistrustful of white interviewers dispatched by the Federal Writers Project in the 1930s to ask them about life under the “peculiar institution.”

Irish Catholics had equal reason to fear Cromwell and the new colonial regime he helped institute in their land. They had seen neighbors slaughtered. They knew the same thing could happen to them if they agitated openly against the new regime. In addition, many were illiterate, so they could not have provided a written record, even had they wanted to do so. Whatever they remembered, then, survived in the form of folklore, songs, even coded language--the kind of forms generally regarded less trustworthy by historians.

The horrified countrymen who lived on after the depredations of the New Model Army could not, then, be transparent participants in one of the key questions following the end of the siege: How many died at Drogheda? Cromwell put the number at 2,000; later, Catholics claimed 4,000. Historians have tended to split the difference.

There are far worse ways of illustrating the chasm of miscomprehension on both sides of the Irish Sea than with an analysis of how the siege of Drogheda ended. If you are on the Irish side, words such as “butcher,” “massacre” and “genocide” spring to mind. If you’re on the other side of that body of water (or an Irish revisionist), you might say that we don’t know “exactly” what went on.

But in explaining away everything they possibly can, even to the point of offending common sense, the revisionists fail to take into account the words of Cromwell himself. In a letter written a week after Drogheda, he denies any order to kill civilians, but gives the game away when he expresses his true intentions: “This is a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches, who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood.... it will tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future, which are satisfactory grounds to such actions, which otherwise work remorse and regret.”

In other words: 1) The people of Drugheda had it coming because God was on our side; and 2) the massacre would cause so much fear that nobody would dare to rebel afterward, lest they meet the same fate.

A year and a half ago, while touring London, I spotted Hamo Thornycroft’s statue of Cromwell outside Westminster Hall. At first, I shook my head over the absurdity of Parliament honoring this theocrat who had dismissed it as easily as he had Charles I done away with. But the more I thought about it, the more I saw it in keeping with the imperialism the nation was practicing when the statue was first unveiled in 1895.

I didn’t think anything else could make my blood boil as much about Cromwell until I read the assessment of the strongman-turned-dictator by Thomas Babington Macaulay.  For all his almost novelistic vigor as a prose stylist, it is difficult, if not impossible, to take this Victorian politician-historian seriously nowadays because of his blatant biases and his smug self-satisfaction. 

Even given all of that, it came as a shock for me to read Macaulay’s belief that Cromwell’s policy of slaughter, expropriation of land, and forced resettlement in Ireland—what we would term “ethnic cleansing”—didn’t go far enough:  “For it is in truth more merciful to extirpate a hundred thousand human beings at once, and to fill the void with a well-governed population, than to misgovern millions through a long succession of generations.” 

In fact, Macaulay, an unabashed admirer of Cromwell (possessor of a “high, stout, honest, English heart”) was less concerned by the mass murder that occurred at Drogheda than by the “great depravation of the national taste [that] was the effect of the prevalence of Puritanism under the Commonwealth.”

If there is anything more shocking than mass murder, it may be a public intellectual justifying it. And then, Macaulay tops even this, as he considers likens the resettlement of English settlers to Ireland--a colonization project pushed by Cromwell--to a phenomenon occurring across the Atlantic Ocean in his time: "This tide of population ran almost as strongly as that which now runs from Massachusetts and Connecticut to the states behind the Ohio. The native race was driven back before the advancing van of the Anglo-Saxon population, as the American Indians or the tribes of Southern Africa are now driven back before the white settlers."

It's much easier to become "the first responsible European to espouse 'civilizing slaughter'" (as biographer Robert E. Sullivan of Notre Dame has called Macaulay) when you regard a subject people as innately inferior to a master race, as Cromwell did.