King and commonwealth

EXECUTION OF THE KING.

On taking leave of his two youngest children, who were still in England, Charles bade the Lady Elizabeth, a girl of twelve years old, tell her brother James it was his father’s last desire that he should no longer look on Charles as his eldest brother only, but be obedient to him as his sovereign. Then taking the little Duke of Gloucester on his knee, he said to him, ‘Sweet heart, now they’ll cut off thy father’s head; mark, child, what I say, they’ll cut off my head, and perhaps make thee a king; but mark what I say, you must not be king so long as your brothers Charles and James live; for they’ll cut off your brothers’ heads when they can catch them, and cut off thy head too at last; and, therefore, I charge you not to be made a king by them.’ ‘I will be torn in pieces first,’ said the child weeping.[150] Charles kissed them both, and bade Bishop Juxon have them taken away, while he turned to the window to hide his own emotion. The next morning the king walked from St. James’s to Whitehall amidst a guard of soldiers, with Juxon on one side and Col. Tomlinson on the other, talking to them on the way calmly and cheerfully. About noon he was conducted through a passage, made in the wall of the Banqueting House at Whitehall, on to the scaffold, which had been erected in the open street. Men and women who had forced their way into the hall uttered prayers in his behalf as he passed by. The soldiers throughout the whole occasion kept a deep silence, awed by the solemnity of their own act. On the scaffold, which was hung with black, stood two executioners disguised in masks. Soldiers filled the space immediately below, so that the crowded spectators beyond could hear no word the king uttered. Charles died in the firm belief in which he had lived, that in the quarrel between himself and his subjects he had been always in the right, they always in the wrong. He addressed a short, cold speech to the few assembled on the scaffold, in which he asserted this belief, and then prepared calmly to die. “Hurt not the axe,” he said to a gentlemen who touched its edge while he was speaking; “that may hurt me.” In the words of Marvell:

“I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown,” he said to the bishop, “where no disturbance can be, no disturbance in the world.” Then putting his head upon the block, he said to the executioner, “When I put out my hands this way, then—; stay for the sign.” Within a few moments the sign was given, and the executioner, holding the head up in his hand, cried to the people, “Behold the head of a traitor.”

INSTANCES OF DEPOSITION.

By Charles’ trial two issues were decided, the king’s deposition and his execution. The two issues are distinct. That a king holds office for the good of his people, and, if he perverts his power to their injury, may justly be deprived of it by their representatives, is a constitutional principle, which has been acted on in the later as well as in the earlier years of history. Forty years after the trial and execution of Charles I., Parliament resolved that his son, King James II., having endeavoured to subvert the constitution of the kingdom by breaking the original contract between king and people, and having violated the fundamental laws, and having withdrawn himself out of the kingdom, had abdicated the government, that the throne had thereby become vacant. The crown which the House of Stuart thus for a second time forfeited, they proceeded to bestow upon William and Mary of Orange. For a hundred years, in fact till the death of Charles Edward in 1788, that the kings ruled by a Parliamentary title was not merely a theoretical principle, but the actual basis of the settlement of the crown. It was also one of the original principles of the nation. The Saxon kings were, in fact, elected, and the principle was partly recognized that what the nation gave, it could take away; Sigeberht, Æthelred, Harthacnut were all deposed by the Witenagemot, or great council of the nation.[see Appendix] Hereditary succession was not established as the rule in practice till the accession of Edward I. The sanction of the nation was added in doubtful cases. Nor did the Great Council, when transformed into the two Houses of Parliament, forget the use of its ultimate power of deposition. In 1327 the moral sense of the nation revolted at the conduct of its king. A bill, charging him with immorality, incapacity, cruelty, and oppression was read and admitted as a sufficient ground of deposition. By this, Parliament declared that Edward II. had ceased to reign, and bestowed the crown on his son. In 1399 thirty-three charges were read in Parliament against Richard II. The king was declared guilty on every charge, and his deposition pronounced. The scene was one which the great dramatist had made familiar to the nation. When, therefore, the court told Charles that he was responsible to the Commons of England, and was tried in the name of the people of England, they were introducing no new principle into the constitution. In such cases, the fictions of lawyers, which in ordinary times may often be useful as preventives against revolutions, are cast aside like gossamer threads, and the king, “who can do no wrong,” stands arraigned as a common criminal.

If Charles then had been merely deposed by Parliament, he would never have gained the reputation he has had as a martyr. The justice and legality of the course taken to compass his death is, however, a distinct question. His trial and execution was the work, not of a full Parliament, but of a small minority which could make no pretence of representing the people of England. To carry out their end, this minority proceeded to violent measures which only circumstances of extreme necessity could justify. They excluded members by violence from the House of Commons;[151] they virtually abolished the House of Lords; they passed a retrospective ordinance; and, instead of exercising their function in Parliament according to precedent, they erected a new and arbitrary court of justice.

It must, indeed, be said that a great advance had been made in the treatment of deposed kings since the fourteenth century. An arbitrary court and an ex post facto law are better than the secret murder which was the lot of Edward and Richard. The light of day and the presence of the chief men of the nation gave the semblance of a fair trial. Even this semblance is less debasing to the morality of the community than the sanction of murder by government. Compared with this, informalities were but a slight evil; indeed it could scarcely be expected that a constitution could provide special legal forms for the trial of the chief of the State, who could never be tried except after a revolution.

On the one hand it has been said that the people had been rent asunder into two great bodies, one engaged for the king, the other for the Parliament, and that, therefore, if Charles was to be put on trial for his life at all, he ought to have been tried, not by the rules of common or statute law, but by those of international law, which obtain between foreign nations. These forbid that the victors should take the lives of the vanquished. It was, in fact, on these principles that the struggle had been maintained. Prisoners on either side had rarely been put to death as traitors, the fellow-feeling of the combatants, as well as the fear of retaliation, having prevented such cruelty. The rules of international law applied as much to the leaders as to their followers. On the other hand, it was undoubtedly true that Charles was guilty in a sense in which no other leader was guilty, and no mere general could have been. For it was his deceptions, followed as they were by the refusal of the necessary Militia Bill, that caused the war. Had he read aright the history of the past, he would have seen that the great Edward’s “pactum serva” contained the whole law for a constitutional king. Charles was not punished as a combatant, but as the cause of the combat, in other words, for his previous actions as a king. As for the rights of war, the Independent leaders could scarcely have doubted that, had the cases been reversed, he would have meted the same measure to them.

The voice of the nation, however, was for clemency in the hour of their king’s fall; they did not think he had committed such sanguinary crimes as justified the violation of law to accomplish his death. Thousands had fought on his side; thousands who had fought against him wished to spare his life. His enemies might plead that they were acting in self-defence; but if they counted on the king’s death stopping the reaction, they greatly miscalculated. When Charles was dead, they had his son to deal with, who had not, as his father, lost the confidence of the nation.

THE FEELINGS OF THE ACTORS.

These objections were so strongly felt at the time, that several officers, and several Republicans, stood aloof from the whole proceeding. Fairfax, Skippon, Vane, Algernon Sidney, exerted all their influence to prevent a trial for life, wishing to see the king merely deposed. On the other hand, the mass of sectarians, Republicans, and Levellers pressed for Charles’ execution as a grand and signal display of justice; one that had not its record in history, and might serve as a warning to all crowned heads for the future. Charles, according to them, had broken his coronation oath, in which he swore to govern by the laws of the land, and had thereby been the author of the civil war, and the bloodshed attendant upon it. Any accommodation was alike unsafe and wicked; unsafe, because his duplicity had been proved over and over again; wicked, because of the express words to be found in God’s law, that “blood defileth the land, and the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it.”[152] “As for Mr. Hutchinson,” says his wife, “although he was very much confirmed in his judgment concerning the cause, yet being here called to an extraordinary action, whereof many were of several minds, he addressed himself to God by prayer, desiring the Lord, that, if through any human frailty he were led into any error, He would open his eyes and not suffer him to proceed—and finding no check, he proceeded to sign the sentence against the king. Although he did not then believe but it might one day come to be again disputed among men, yet both he and others thought they could not refuse it without giving up the people of God (whom they had led forth and engaged themselves unto by oath) into the hands of God and their enemies.”

Cromwell and Ireton placed themselves at the head of the movement they were powerless to prevent. There is no doubt that they sympathized in it. Only once does Cromwell allude to the execution, at least in the letters and speeches that still remain. “They,” he says, “that acted this great business have given a reason of their faith in the action, and some here are ready, further, to do it against all gainsayers.”[153] Such a decision as the Independent leaders had to make in regard to the execution of Charles I., shows what is really terrible in revolutions. It is not that men carry their lives in their hands, the soldier thinks nothing of that. It is that crises come then, when men cannot choose the good, cannot stand aside, but must choose between two evils, and see the evil of what they choose. At such a time many a man would gladly oppose both and fall; but a leader is bound to the helm, though he may see no course but to run his ship on the rocks, and drown some to save many. This is what is most terrible in revolutions; after the fact it is terrible to all; it is terrible at the time only to the weaker or more delicate spirits. These birds of calm are caught by the storm and drowned while doubting. Not so the real leaders of revolutions. They ride upon the storm. They see but as the lightning flashes. To them the lesser evil seems a transcendent good. Charles had hoped by his intrigues to crush Cromwell; he failed; and Cromwell thenceforth looked upon him as hopelessly false; as one who was destitute of that sense of truth between man and man, which was a necessity of political life. Such a man, if a ruler, he held, must be dealt with by banishment or by death, as an incurable evil of the commonwealth. His was a stern mind, and a mind into which an idea of privilege did not enter. There was with him no respect of persons. If he had no mercy on Lilburne’s misguided Leveller, who endangered the fidelity of a regiment, he was as severe to the prince, who endangered the liberty of the country. Such a mind, intensely confident of its own sense of justice, never recoiled from its conclusion. If it could not draw back, still less could it conceal its purpose. As it abhorred secret murder, so it abhorred that lingering murder, which, while it shrinks from taking away life, shrinks not from taking away the means of life. If Charles was to die, it could not be by the lingering death Charles himself had assigned to Eliot. There was no secrecy in Cromwell’s dealing with prince or private; the one was given over to martial law before the eyes of his comrades; the other was given as openly to no less stern inquisitors of blood.

CAUSES OF SYMPATHY.

The world, however, has not judged as Cromwell did. And, though on grounds of abstract justice, it is hard to say why a king deserves a mercy which he has denied to his subjects, yet many faults will be forgiven to those who have had the difficult task of governing others. Among the causes which have won an excess of sympathy for Charles, we observe the natural pity for the greatness of the fall, a disinclination to judge hardly of the fallen, but, above all, the deep-rooted sentiment of loyalty, which the restriction of prerogative has itself attached to the king, by making his throne the ideal element of the constitution, and thus so raising him above parties, that when his ministers do well, he receives the honour, when ill, he can restore, or even increase, his own popularity by ridding himself of his advisers. Besides these general considerations, it will be remembered that the interpreter of his times for all the generations before our own, has been one who wrote in the full tide of the reaction, and who, as is now known, has not shrunk on occasion from suppressing truth, in his endeavour to palliate the faults of one side or blacken those of the other. The historian has been seconded so ably by the painter and novelist, that a Cavalier has been held the type of all that is noble, and a patriot of all that is mean. It will be noticed that the two classes by whom Charles has been most admired, have been the clergy, who may have been unconsciously biassed by a not unnatural antipathy to the religious theories of his opponents; and those whose lives have brought them least in contact with public interests: these have judged him as one of their own society, and have been carried away by the many virtues of his private life, his courage in the field, his tender nature and his piety, as well as by the noble attitude in which these qualities sustained him at his death. Those, on the other hand, who have interested themselves deeply in the cause of the people, must perforce judge public men by what they have done for the nation. In their roll of martyrs will come not Charles, who died from reluctance to abandon boldly a prerogative which had been proved to be untenable and pernicious, but Eliot, who died in defence of the necessary rights of the Commons’ house, and the ransacking of whose most secret papers has only proved more clearly what was clear before, that the only ends he aimed at were his country’s, his God’s, and truth’s. Those who look to national interests will hold that the first intellectual virtue of a ruler is an insight into the spirit of his time and the first moral virtue, a sympathy with his people’s hopes and fears. As men may be too good fathers, if they use patronage as a vehicle of nepotism, so kings are too good husbands, when they give or withhold their consent to the nation’s wishes according to the tempers or caprices of their wives, and too good churchmen, when they put one half of their subjects without the pale of toleration. This is not the sense in which, with kings, as with others, “England expects every man to do his duty.”