If Charles could have remained firm to either one or the other faction, and have made concessions either to Presbyterianism or on the subject of the militia, he might even now have prevailed. But he had learned nothing by experience, and continued at this juncture his characteristic policy of intrigue and double-dealing, “playing his game,” to use his own words, negotiating with both parties at once, not with the object or wish to arrive at a settlement with either, but to augment their disputes, gain time and profit ultimately by their divisions. The “Heads of the Proposals,” submitted to Charles by the army on the 28th of July 1647, were terms conceived on a basis far broader and more statesmanlike than the Newcastle Propositions, and such as Charles might well have accepted. The proposals on religion anticipated the Toleration Act of 1689. There was no mention of episcopacy, and its existence was thereby indirectly admitted, but complete religious freedom for all Protestant denominations was provided, and the power of the church to inflict civil penalties abolished, while it was also suggested that dangers from Roman Catholics and Jesuits might be avoided by means other than enforcing attendance at church. The parliament was to dissolve itself and be succeeded by biennial assemblies elected on a reformed franchise, not to be dissolved without their own consent before 120 days, and not to sit more than 240 days in the two years. A council of state was to conduct the foreign policy of the state and conclude peace and war subject to the approval of parliament, and to control the militia for ten years, the commanders being appointed by parliament, as also the officers of state for ten years. No peer created since May the 21st, 1642, was to sit in parliament without consent of both Houses, and the judicial decisions of the House of Lords were to be ratified by the Commons. Only five persons were excepted from amnesty, but royalists were not to hold office for five years and not to sit in the Commons till the end of the second biennial parliament. Proposals for a series of reforms were also added. Charles, however, was at the same time negotiating with Lauderdale for an invasion of England by the Scots, and imagined he could win over Cromwell and Fairfax by “proffers of advantage to themselves.” The precious opportunity was therefore allowed to slip by. On the 9th of September he rejected the proposals of the parliament for the establishment of Presbyterianism. His hopes of gaining advantages by playing upon the differences of his opponents proved a complete failure. Fresh terms were drawn up by the army and parliament together on the 10th of November, but before these could be presented, Charles, on the 11th, had escaped to Carisbrooke Castle in the Isle of Wight. Thence on the 16th he sent a message offering Presbyterianism for three years and the militia for his lifetime to the parliament, but insisting on the maintenance of episcopacy. On the 28th of December he refused his assent to the Four Bills, which demanded the militia for parliament for twenty years and practically for ever, annulled the honours recently granted by the king and his declarations against the Houses, and gave to parliament the right to adjourn to any place it wished. On the 3rd of January 1648 the Commons agreed to a resolution to address the king no further, in which they were joined by the Lords on the 15th.
Charles had meanwhile taken a further fatal step which brought about his total destruction. On the 26th of December 1647 he had signed at Carisbrooke with the Scottish commissioners the secret treaty called the “Engagement,” whereby the Scots undertook to invade England on his behalf and restore him to the throne on condition of the establishment of Presbyterianism for three years and the suppression of the sectarians. In consequence the second civil war broke out and the Scots invaded England under Hamilton. The royalist risings in England were soon suppressed, and Cromwell gained an easy and decisive victory over the Scots at Preston. Charles was now left alone to face his enemies, with the whole tale of his intrigues and deceptions unmasked and exposed. The last intrigue with the Scots was the most unpardonable in the eyes of his contemporaries, no less wicked and monstrous than his design to conquer England by the Irish soldiers; “a more prodigious treason,” said Cromwell, “than any that had been perfected before; because the former quarrel was that Englishmen might rule over one another; this to vassalize us to a foreign nation.” Cromwell, who up to this point had shown himself foremost in supporting the negotiations with the king, now spoke of the treaty of Newport, which he found the parliament in the act of negotiating on his return from Scotland, as “this ruining hypocritical agreement.” Charles had engaged in these negotiations only to gain time and find opportunity to escape. “The great concession I made this day,” he wrote on the 7th of October, “was made merely in order to my escape.” At the beginning he had stipulated that no concession from him should be valid unless an agreement were reached upon every point. He had now consented to most of the demands of the parliament, including the repudiation of the Irish Cessation, the surrender of the delinquents and the cession of the militia for twenty years, and of the offices of state to parliament, but remained firm in his refusal to abolish episcopacy, consenting only to Presbyterianism for three years. Charles’s devotion to the church is undoubted. In April 1646, before his flight from Oxford, inspired perhaps by superstitious fears as to the origin of his misfortunes, he had delivered to Sheldon, afterwards archbishop of Canterbury, a written vow (now in the library of St Paul’s cathedral) to restore all church lands held by the crown on his restoration to the throne; and almost his last injunction to the prince of Wales was that of fidelity to the national church. His present firmness, however, in its support was caused probably less by his devotion to it than by his desire to secure the failure of the whole treaty, and his attempts to escape naturally weakened the chances of success. Cromwell now supported the petitions of the army against the treaty. On the 16th of November the council of officers demanded the trial of the king, “the capital and grand author of our troubles,” and on the 27th of November the parliamentary commissioners returned from Newport without having secured Charles’s consent. Charles was removed to Hurst Castle on the 1st of December, where he remained till the 19th, thence being taken to Windsor, where he arrived on the 23rd. On the 6th “Pride’s Purge” had removed from the Commons all those who might show any favour to the king. On the 25th a last attempt by the council of officers to come to terms with him was repulsed. On the 1st of January the remnant of the Commons resolved that Charles was guilty of treason by “levying war against the parliament and kingdom of England”; on the 4th they declared their own power to make laws without the lords or the sovereign, and on the 6th established a “high court of justice” to try the king. On the 19th Charles was brought to St James’s Palace, and on the next day his trial began in Westminster Hall, without the assistance of any of the judges, who all refused to take part in the proceedings. He laughed aloud at hearing himself called a traitor, and immediately demanded by what authority he was tried. He had been in treaty with the parliament in the Isle of Wight and taken thence by force; he saw no lords present. He was told by Bradshaw, the president of the court, that he was tried by the authority of the people of England, who had elected him king; Charles making the obvious reply that he was king by inheritance and not by election, that England had been for more than 1000 years an hereditary kingdom, and Bradshaw cutting short the discussion by adjourning the court. On the 22nd Charles repeated his reasoning, adding, “It is not my case alone; it is the freedom and liberty of the people of England, and do you pretend what you will, I stand more for their liberties, for if power without law may make laws ... I do not know what subject he is in England that can be sure of his life or anything that he calls his own.” On the 23rd he again refused to plead. The court was adjourned, and there were several signs that the army in their prosecution of the king had not the nation at their back. While the soldiers had shouted “Justice! justice!” as the king passed through their ranks, the civilian spectators from the end of the hall had cried “God save the king!” There was considerable opposition and reluctance to proceed among the members of the court. On the 26th, however, the court decided unanimously upon his execution, and on the 27th Charles was brought into court for the last time to hear his sentence. His request to be heard before the Lords and Commons was rejected, and his attempts to answer the charges of the president were silenced. Sentence was pronounced, and the king was removed by the soldiers, uttering his last broken protest: “I am not suffered to speak. Expect what justice other people will have.”
In these last hours Charles, who was probably weary of life, showed a remarkable dignity and self-possession, and a firm resignation supported by religious faith and by the absolute conviction of his own innocence, which, says Burnet, “amazed all people and that so much the more because it was not natural to him. It was imputed to a very extraordinary measure of supernatural assistance....; it was owing to something within himself that he went through so many indignities with so much true greatness without disorder or any sort of affectation.” Nothing in his life became Charles like the leaving it. “He nothing common did or mean Upon that memorable scene.” On the morning of the 29th of January he said his last sad farewell to his younger children, Elizabeth and Henry, duke of Gloucester. On the 30th at ten o’clock he walked across from St James’s to Whitehall, calling on his guard “in a pleasant manner” to walk apace, and at two he stepped upon the scaffold from a window, probably the middle one, of the Banqueting House (see [Architecture], Plate VI., fig. 75). He was separated from the people by large ranks of soldiers, and his last speech only reached Juxon and those with him on the scaffold. He declared that he had desired the liberty and freedom of the people as much as any; “but I must tell you that their liberty and freedom consists in having government. ... It is not their having a share in the government; that is nothing appertaining unto them. A subject and a sovereign are clean different things.” These, together with his declaration that he died a member of the Church of England, and the mysterious “Remember,” spoken to Juxon, were Charles’s last words. “It much discontents the citizens,” wrote a spectator; “ye manner of his deportment was very resolutely with some smiling countenances, intimating his willingness to be out of his troubles.”[3] “The blow I saw given,” wrote another, Philip Henry, “and can truly say with a sad heart, at the instant whereof, I remember well, there was such a grone by the Thousands then present as I never heard before and desire I may never hear again. There was according to order one Troop immediately marching fromwards Charing-Cross to Westminster and another fromwards Westminster to Charing-Cross, purposely to masker” (i.e. to overpower) “the people and to disperse and scatter them, so that I had much adoe amongst the rest to escape home without hurt.”[4]
Amidst such scenes of violence was at last effected the destruction of Charles. “It is lawful,” wrote Milton, “and hath been held so through all ages for any one who have the power to call to account a Tyrant or wicked King and after due conviction to depose and put him to death.”[5] But here (it might well be contended) there had been no “due conviction.” The execution had been the act of the king’s personal enemies, of “only some fifty or sixty governing Englishmen with Oliver Cromwell in the midst of them” an act technically illegal, morally unjustifiable because the supposed crimes of Charles had been condoned by the later negotiations with him, and indefensible on the ground of public expediency, for the king’s death proved a far greater obstacle to the re-establishment of settled government than his life could have been. The result was an extraordinary revulsion of feeling in favour of Charles and the monarchy, in which the incidents of his misgovernment were completely forgotten. He soon became in the popular veneration a martyr and a saint. His fate was compared with the Crucifixion, and his trials and sufferings to those of the Saviour. Handkerchiefs dipped in his blood wrought “miracles,” and the Eikon Basilike, published on the day of his funeral, presented to the public a touching if not a genuine portrait of the unfortunate sovereign. At the Restoration the anniversary of his death was ordered to be kept as a day of fasting and humiliation, and the service appointed for use on the occasion was only removed from the prayer-book in 1859. The same conception of Charles as a martyr for religion appeals still to many, and has been stimulated by modern writers. “Had Charles been willing to abandon the church and give up episcopacy,” says Bishop Creighton, “he might have saved his throne and his life. But on this point Charles stood firm, for this he died and by dying saved it for the future.”[6] Gladstone, Keble, Newman write in the same strain. “It was for the Church,” says Gladstone, “that Charles shed his blood upon the scaffold.”[7] “I rest,” says Newman, “on the scenes of past years, from the Upper Room in Acts to the Court of Carisbrooke and Uxbridge.” The injustice and violence of the king’s death, however, the pathetic dignity of his last days, and the many noble traits in his character, cannot blind us to the real causes of his downfall and destruction, and a sober judgment cannot allow that Charles was really a martyr either for the church or for the popular liberties.
The constitutional struggle between the crown and parliament had not been initiated by Charles I. It was in full existence in the reign of James I., and distinct traces appear towards the latter part of that of Elizabeth. Charles, therefore, in some degree inherited a situation for which he was not responsible, nor can he be justly blamed, according to the ideas of kingship which then prevailed, for defending the prerogatives of the crown as precious and sacred personal possessions which it was his duty to hand down intact to his successors. Neither will his persistence in refusing to yield up the control of the executive to the parliament or the army, or his zeal in defending the national church, be altogether censured. In the event the parliament proved quite incapable of governing, an army uncontrolled by the sovereign was shown to constitute a more grievous tyranny than Charles’s most arbitrary rule, and the downfall of the church seen to make room only for a sectarian despotism as intolerable as the Laudian. The natural inference might be that both conceptions of government had much to support them, that they were bound sooner or later to come into collision, and that the actual individuals in the drama, including the king himself, were rather the victims of the greatness of events than real actors in the scene, still less the controllers of their own and the national destiny. A closer insight, however, shows that biographical more than abstract historical elements determined the actual course and issue of the Rebellion. The great constitutional and religious points of dispute between the king and parliament, though doubtless involving principles vital to the national interests, would not alone have sufficed to destroy Charles. Monarchy was too much venerated, was too deeply rooted in the national life, to be hastily and easily extirpated; the perils of removing the foundation of all government, law and order were too obvious not to be shunned at almost all costs. Still less can the crowning tragedy of the king’s death find its real explanation or justification in these disputes and antagonisms. The real cause was the complete discredit into which Charles had brought himself and the monarchy. The ordinary routine of daily life and of business cannot continue without some degree of mutual confidence between the individuals brought into contact, far less could relations be maintained by subjects with a king endowed with the enormous powers then attached to the kingship, and with whom agreements, promises, negotiations were merely subterfuges and prevarications. We have seen the series of unhappy falsehoods and deceptions which constituted Charles’s statecraft, beginning with the fraud concerning the concessions to the Roman Catholics at his marriage, the evasions with which he met the Petition of Right, the abandonment of Strafford, the simultaneous negotiation with, and betrayal of, all parties. Strafford’s reported words on hearing of his desertion by Charles, “Put not your trust in princes,” re-echo through the whole of Charles’s reign. It was the degradation and dishonour of the kingship, and the personal loss of credit which Charles suffered through these transactions—which never appear to have caused him a moment’s regret or uneasiness, but the fatal consequences of which were seen only too clearly by men like Hyde and Falkland—that were the real causes of the rebellion and of the king’s execution. The constitutional and religious grievances were the outward and visible sign of the corroding suspicions which slowly consumed the national loyalty. In themselves there was nothing incapable of settlement either through the spirit of union which existed between Elizabeth and her subjects, or by the principle of compromise which formed the basis of the constitutional settlement in 1688. The bond of union between his people and himself Charles had, however, early broken, and compromise is only possible between parties both of whom can acknowledge to some extent the force of the other’s position, which can trust one another, and which are sincere in their endeavour to reach agreement. Thus on Charles himself chiefly falls the responsibility for the catastrophe.
His character and motives fill a large place in English history, but they have never been fully understood and possibly were largely due to physical causes. His weakness as a child was so extreme that his life was despaired of. He outgrew physical defects, and as a young man excelled in horsemanship and in the sports of the times, but always retained an impediment of speech. At the time of his accession his reserve and reticence were especially noticed. Buckingham was the only person who ever enjoyed his friendship, and after his death Charles placed entire confidence in no man. This isolation was the cause of an ignorance of men and of the world, and of an incapacity to appreciate the ideas, principles and motives of others, while it prepared at the same time a fertile soil for receiving those exalted conceptions of kingship, of divine right and prerogative, which came into vogue at this period, together with those exaggerated ideas of his own personal supremacy and importance to which minds not quite normal are always especially inclined. His character was marked by a weakness which shirked and postponed the settlement of difficulties, by a meanness and ingratitude even when dealing with his most devoted followers, by an obstinacy which only feigned compliance and by an untruthfulness which differed widely from his son’s unblushing deceit, which found always some reservation or excuse, but which while more scrupulous was also more dangerous and insidious because employed continually as a principle of conduct. Yet Charles, in spite of his failings, had many fine qualities. Clarendon, who was fully conscious of them, who does not venture to call him a good king, and allows that “his kingly virtues had some mixture and alloy that hindered them from shining in full lustre,” declares that “he was if ever any, the most worthy of the title of an Honest Man, so great a lover of justice that no temptation could dispose him to a wrongful action except that it was disguised to him that he believed it just,” “the worthiest of gentlemen, the best master, the best friend, the best husband, the best father and the best Christian that the age in which he lived produced.” With all its deplorable mistakes and failings Charles I.’s reign belongs to a sphere infinitely superior to that of his unscrupulous, corrupt, selfish but more successful son. His private life was without a blemish. Immediately on his accession he had suppressed the disorder which had existed in the household of James I., and let it be known that whoever had business with him “must never approach him by backstairs or private doors.”[8] He maintained a strict sobriety in food and dress. He had a fine artistic sense, and Milton reprehends him for having made Shakespeare “the closest companion of his solitudes.” “Monsieur le Prince de Galles,” wrote Rubens in 1625, “est le prince le plus amateur de la peinture qui soit au monde.” He succeeded in bringing together during twenty years an unrivalled collection, of which a great part was dispersed at his death. He showed a noble insensibility to flattery. He was deeply and sincerely religious. He wished to do right, and was conscious of the purity of his motives. Those who came into contact with him, even the most bitter of his opponents, were impressed with his goodness. The great tragedy of his life, to be read in his well-known, dignified, but weak and unhappy features, and to be followed in his inexplicable and mysterious choice of baneful instruments, such as Rupert, Laud, Hamilton, Glamorgan, Henrietta Maria—all in their several ways working out his destruction—seems to have been inspired by a fateful insanity or infirmity of mind or will, recalling the great Greek dramas in which the poets depicted frenzied mortals rushing into their own destruction, impelled by the unseen and superior powers.
The king’s body, after being embalmed, was buried by the few followers who remained with him to the last, hastily and without any funeral service, which was forbidden by the authorities, in the tomb of Henry VIII., in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, where his coffin was identified and opened in 1813. An “account of what appeared” was published by Sir Henry Halford, and a bone abstracted on the occasion was replaced in the vault by the prince of Wales (afterwards Edward VII.) in 1888. Charles I. left, besides three children who died in infancy, Charles (afterwards Charles II.); James (afterwards James II.); Henry, duke of Gloucester (1639-1660); Mary (1631-1660), who married William of Orange; Elizabeth (1635-1650); and Henrietta, duchess of Orleans (1644-1670).
Bibliography.—The leading authority for the life and reign of Charles I. is the History of England (1883) and History of the Great Civil War (1893), by S.R. Gardiner, with the references there given. Among recent works may be mentioned Memoirs of the Martyr King, by A. Fea (1905); Life of Charles I, 1600-1625, by E.B. Chancellor (1886); The Visits of Charles I. to Newcastle, by C.S. Terry (1898); Charles I., by Sir J. Skelton, valuable for its illustrations (1898); The Manner of the Coronation of King Charles I., ed. by C. Wordsworth (Henry Bradshaw Soc., 1892); The Picture Gallery of Charles I., by C. Phillips (1896). See also Calendars of State Papers, Irish and Domestic Series; Hist. MSS. Comm. Series, esp. MSS. of J. Eliot Hodgkin, F.J. Savile Foljambe, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, Duke of Rutland at Belvoir Castle, Marquis of Ormonde, Earl Cowper (Coke MSS.), Earl of Lonsdale (note-books of parliaments of 1626 and 1628), Duke of Buccleuch at Montagu House, Duke of Portland, 11th Rep. app. pt. vi., Duke of Hamilton, pt. i., Salvetti Correspondence, 10th Rep. pt. vi., Lord Braye; Add. MSS. Brit. Mus., 33,596 fols. 21-32 (keys to ciphers), 34,171, 35,297; Notes and Queries, ser. vi., vii., viii., ix. indexes; Eng. Hist. Rev. ii. 687 (“Charles and Glamorgan” by S.R. Gardiner), vii. 176; Cornhill Mag. vol. 75, January 1897, “Execution of Charles,” by C.H. Firth.
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