UNLIKE HIS FATHER, Charles was not a wordsmith. He was neither a keen author nor an enthusiastic public speaker. His was a cinematic imagination and his eye encompassed far more than the pictures he hung on his walls. He had used the visual – a theatre of ceremony, ritual and beauty – both at court and in church, to reform and shape a socially deferential, hierarchical society that was appropriate to divine-right monarchy and sacramental kingship.
A deferential society suggests to us a slavish fawning to snobs with an unearned and unjustified sense of superiority. Today we strive to create a ‘meritocracy’ in which people are able to achieve their potential through their own efforts. There is, however, another perspective. A meritocracy also suggests that those who are not successful have less merit than those who excel; and that those who have success owe nothing to luck, or the help of the less successful, but only to their own efforts and brilliance. Ours is a self-congratulatory system that also fosters a sense of entitlement.
The hierarchical society Charles imagined was underpinned by Christ’s example of self-sacrifice. Everyone owed service, both to those above them (commoner to noble, noble to king, king to God) and to those beneath them, to whom they owed a duty of care. This included protecting the weak, and promoting the talented and the brave. That was the theory. Charles wanted to make it a reality. It was not a contemptible ambition. It was, however, an ambition that he failed spectacularly to achieve, and therein lies his tragedy.
Charles was, in his private life, ‘the best master, the best friend, the best husband, the best father’.1 He was both loving and loved. Yet Charles distrusted appeals to the emotions, in part because he had absorbed his father’s lessons concerning the dangers of ‘populism’ (by which he meant demagogy), but also because he had no instinct for it. He was unable to act spontaneously: to let his spirit and passions pour out to the wonder and terror of his subjects. He found people difficult to read and his inability to interpret their actions and feelings often left him angry and frustrated. Form and order mediated relationships in a way he was comfortable with. Equally, any challenge to form and order felt extremely threatening.
Charles accepted that there were great benefits to working with Parliament, but, like his father, he never really appreciated its significance to the English people. Nor was he able to overcome his instincts, trust more to his MPs, and to his own power to control and intimidate them, accepting the compromises and slights to his regal authority that the messy business of politics sometimes required. He was always self-righteous – but rarely ruthless.
The fallen king was remembered as having had a ‘compassion of nature which restrained him from ever doing a hard-hearted thing’.2 His enemies, fearful of the reversals to Calvinism during the Thirty Years War, and believing they were fighting for its very survival, had no such compunction.
The new media of pamphlets and news-sheets, sermons and political speeches, all helped to build a narrative that would justify rebellion and foreign invasion as a necessary defence against ‘popery’, with godly peers and their Puritan allies whipping up ethnic and religious hatred to create a climate of fear. Targeted and organised mob violence was used to intimidate English MPs, and misogynistic attitudes to women helped demonise Henrietta Maria as the papist-in-chief. From slashing the ‘popish’ pictures in her chapel, it would be just a short step to slash the faces of the ‘popish whores’, the laundry women and wives in the Royalist baggage train at Naseby.
Not all Royalists cared, however, for the image of a saintly and merciful ‘white king’. It was all very well to rely ‘wholly on the innocence of a virtuous life’, but, they pointed out, it had exposed Charles ‘fatally to calamitous ruin’.3 His failure to punish London for the lynching of Buckingham’s astrologer Lambe in 1628 had only encouraged further violence, since it demonstrated that ‘the king had rather patience enough to bear such indignities than resolution to revenge them’. Similarly the riot in St Giles’s Kirk in Edinburgh against the Scottish prayer book in 1637 might not have paved the way to the Bishops’ Wars, ‘had the king caused the chief ringleaders of these tumults to be put to death’.4 Archbishop Laud’s description of Charles, written in the aftermath of Strafford’s execution in 1641, was perhaps the most damning of all Royalist criticism: ‘a mild and gracious prince who knew not how to be, or be made great’.5
It is worth remembering, however, that while flinching from cruel acts may be a political liability, it is not a moral weakness. Even as the fighting began Charles sought order amidst the disorder, finding time in the weeks after Edgehill to read and make suggested changes to his collection of quarto texts by Beaumont and Fletcher, controlling characters and story in a way he could not control his subjects in life.fn1 But Charles was becoming courageous, resilient, and increasingly hard-nosed. He showed remarkable skills of leadership during the civil war and inspired great loyalty. Parliament had control of London and the majority of England’s wealth and population. For a time, they also had the backing of the Scots. Despite these advantages it took four years for them to defeat Charles militarily. ‘He was very fearless in his person’ in battle, and had shown equal courage on the grindstone of captivity.6
Imprisoned from 1646, Charles never gave up the struggle to get the best terms possible for his restoration as king. In his last negotiations with Parliament before Pride’s Purge, his final sticking points remained his consistent refusal to betray his God by denying episcopacy, or his brothers in arms by giving up his friends to punishment. Until the last day of his trial he hoped he could yet strike a deal. He had always underestimated the ruthlessness of his enemies.
Parliament had by then become a monster that devoured its own. The old Puritan William Prynne, who had been cropped of his ears in the 1630s and had acted as the prosecution lawyer against William Laud, was one of the MPs purged in 1648 – considered too moderate, too accommodating to Charles for the tastes of the New Model Army and their friends. Prynne even became something of a Cavalier hero in the years ahead, as the British kingdoms became subject to a virtual military dictatorship.
Today Charles’s principal legacy is the Church of England, with its bishops and choral music, and which even in our secular age, and to many non-Anglicans, remains interwoven with the culture of this kingdom. At St George’s Chapel, Windsor, a wreath is laid during evensong every year on the anniversary of Charles’s death. The banners of the Garter knights hang above the stalls as choral music is sung in remembrance of the former sovereign of the Order. A flawed prince, but also principled and brave, Charles had been a better exemplar of a chivalric knight than he ever was a king.