Abstract
‘I do plead for the liberties of the people of England more than you do’, King Charles I told his accusers. But there was no dissuading the makeshift court that had been assembled to engineer his execution. It took only a week for the judges to announce their predetermined verdict: ‘that he, the said Charles Stuart, as a tyrant, traitor, murderer, and public enemy to the good people of this nation, shall be put to death by the severing of his head from his body’. Thus it was that on a cold January day in 1649, King Charles laid his head on the block, gave the signal to his executioner, and was beheaded with one blow of an axe in full public view. The crowd that had gathered for the spectacle did not burst out in cheers. A young man who stood among them reported only ‘such a groan as I never heard before, and desire I may never hear again’.1
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Notes and References
C. V. Wedgwood, A Coffin for King Charles: The Trial and Execution of Charles I (New York, 1964), pp. 128, 152, 181;
S. R. Gardiner (ed.), Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution 1625–1660, 3rd edn revised (Oxford, 1906), p. 380.
S. R. Gardiner, History of England from the Accession of James I to the Outbreak of the Civil War, 1603–1642 (10 vols, London, 1883–4, 1894–6), V, 317–19, 379, 434; VI, 321, 328–9, 360, 376; VII, 352–3; X, 129, 136; History of the Great Civil War (4 vols, London, 1901–4, revised edn), IV, 326–8.
Christopher Hill, The English Revolution 1640, 3rd edn (London, 1985), p. 11. See also pp. 65–7.
See, for example, ‘Recent Interpretations of the Civil War’, in Christopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution: The English Revolution of the 17th Century (New York, 1964), pp. 3–31. See also pp. vii–viii.
Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution 1603–1714, 2nd edn (New York, 1980), pp. 61–2.
Tim Harris and Christopher Husbands, ‘Talking with Christopher Hill: Part IF’, in Geoff Eley and William Hunt (eds), Reviving the English Revolution: Reflections and Elaborations on the Work of Christopher Hill (London, 1988), p. 344.
Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution 1529–1642 (New York, 1972), pp. 48, 56, 71–2, 133, 137, 138. A new chapter entitled ‘Second Thoughts in 1985’ was added to the 1986 editon. See page 171. Stone has also written, ‘Hill and I are thus now in agreement that the English Revolution was not caused by a clear conflict between feudal and bourgeois ideologies and classes’. ‘The Bourgeois Revolution of Seventeenth-Century England Revisited’, in Eley and Hunt, Reviving the English Revolution, p. 287. One of Stone’s students, Robert Brenner, has recently breathed new life into the socio-economic explanation with Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1650 (Princeton, NJ, 1993).
Alan Everitt, ‘The County Community’ in E. W. Ives (ed.), The English Revolution (London, 1968), pp. 48, 62.
See also his The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion 1640–1660 (Leicester, 1966), pp. 56–69.
Thomas Barnes, Somerset 1625–1640: A County’s Government During the Personal Rule’ (Cambridge, MA, 1961), p. 143.
For other examples, see J. T. Cliffe, The Yorkshire Gentry from the Reformation to the Civil War (London, 1969), pp. 282–335
and Anthony Fletcher, A County Community in Peace and War: Sussex 1600–1660 (London, 1975).
Fletcher especially goes out of his way to avoid criticising Charles, preferring instead to blame an amorphous ‘Caroline government’ or ‘the Council’ for the unrealistic and insensitive demands made on local governors. John Morrill, The Revolt of the Provinces: Conservatives and Radicals in the English Civil War 1630–1650 (London, 1976), pp. 24–31.
For a recent survey and analysis of the movement, see Glenn Burgess, ‘On Revisionism: An Analysis of Early Stuart Historiography in the 1970s and 1980s’, Historical Journal, 33, no. 3 (1990), 609–27.
For a spirited denial that there has been any revisionist movement, see Mark Kishlansky, ‘Symposium: Revolution and Revisionism’, Parliamentary History, 7, pt. 2 (1988), 330–2.
Glenn Burgess claimed that revisionism ‘began as a reaction against Marxist, structural and sociological attempts to write the social history of politics’. This is a common but, I think, mistaken impression. The Marxist-sociological approach to early Stuart politics had failed so abysmally before the 1970s that it hardly needed to be revised. The only sociological approach that revisionists explicitly attacked was Perez Zagorin’s version of the court versus the country. It is true that revisionists shifted the emphasis from long-term to short-term causes of the English Civil War, but here I think their concern was not to counter Marxist or sociological interpretations as much as to counter the Whig tradition that interpreted the whole early Stuart period as an escalating series of constitutional conflicts, marked by milestones along the way like the Petition of Right, and culminating in the Civil War. If one looks at what revisionists actually said, it was this Whig interpretation, not Marxist or other socio-economic interpretations, that they were chiefly concerned to refute. Revisionists could have dispelled much of this confusion if they had been more precise about which of their predecessors were allegedly at fault or which prior accounts they wished to revise. Often they referred simply to the ‘Whig tradition’ or ‘what every schoolboy knows’. In any case, it is this kind of revisionism (what Burgess calls ‘revisionism as a form of anti-whig history’) that had most bearing on the reputation of King Charles and is therefore of most concern to us. Burgess, ‘On Revisionism’, pp. 612, 614.
Three of Elton’s seminal essays were ‘Studying the History of Parliament’, ‘The Stuart Century’, and ‘A High Road to Civil War?’ These have been printed together in volume II of Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government: Papers and Reviews 1946–1972 (2 vols, Cambridge, 1974). My quotations come from ‘The Stuart Century’, pp. 160–1.
‘Studying the History of Parliament’ provoked an exchange with J. H. Hexter in British Studies Monitor, 3, no. 1 (Fall 1972), 4–22.
Conrad Russell, ‘Parliamentary History in Perspective, 1604–1629’, History, 61 (1976), 25, 14, 6, 17, 26. Russell said Parliament was ‘heading for extinction’ (p. 6).
Compare Thomas Cogswell, ‘A Low Road to Extinction? Supply and Redress of Grievances in the Parliaments of the 1620s’, Historical Journal, 33, no. 2 (1990), 283–303.
Conrad Russell, Parliaments and English Politics 1621–1629 (Oxford, 1979), p. 423.
In an earlier work Russell had emphasised the difficult circumstances faced by Charles, especially the inadequate financial resources of the Crown, but he took a dimmer view of Charles. Conrad Russell (ed.), The Origins of the English Civil War (London, 1973). See Russell’s introduction, pp. 1–34, and the chapter he contributed to this volume entitled ‘Parliament and the King’s Finances’, pp. 91–118.
J. N. Ball, ‘Sir John Eliot and Parliament, 1624–1629’, in Kevin Sharpe (ed.), Faction and Parliament: Essays on Early Stuart History (Oxford, 1978), p. 204.
Anthony Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War (New York, 1981), pp. xxx, 408.
For Pym in the 1620s see Conrad Russell, ‘The Parliamentary Career of John Pym, 1621–9’, in Peter Clark, Alan G. R. Smith, and Nicholas Tyacke (eds), The English Commonwealth 1547–1640: Essays in Politics and Society Presented to Joel Hurstfield (Leicester, 1979), pp. 147–165.
While Fletcher and Russell emphasised Pym’s obsession with religious issues, Perez Zagorin has argued that he was no less concerned with political and constitutional issues. Zagorin, ‘The Political Beliefs of John Pym to 1629’, English Historical Review, 109, no. 433 (Sept. 1994), 867–90.
See also John Morrill, ‘The Unweariableness of Mr Pym: Influence and Eloquence in the Long Parliament’, in Susan Amussen and Mark Kishlansky (eds), Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England: Essays Presented to David Underdown (Manchester, 1995), pp. 19–54.
The most elaborate exposition of this position was in the opening chapter of Russell’s Parliaments. Derek Hirst summarised the literature on this issue and attempted to rebut it in ‘The Place of Principle’, Past and Present, 92 (August 1981), 79–99.
J. H. Hexter saw the elimination of principle and constitutional issues as the ‘Namierization’ of seventeenth-century politics. He charged that ‘the current reflex among English historians is to shrink from anything that looks like a big idea’. Times Literary Supplement, 21 January 1983, pp. 51–4.
For a defiantly heroic treatment of one MP under Charles, see Robert Zaller, ‘Edward Alford and the Making of Country Radicalism’, Journal of British Studies, 22 (Spring 1983), 59–79.
Kevin Sharpe, ‘Faction at the Early Stuart Court’, History Today, 33 (Oct. 1983), 43;
Kevin Sharpe, ‘Crown, Parliament and Locality: Government and Communication in Early Stuart England’, English Historical Review, 101 (April 1986), 321–50;
Linda Peck, ‘“For a King not to be bountiful were a fault”: Perspectives on Court Patronage in Early Stuart England’, Journal of British Studies, 25 (Jan. 1986), 51–8.
These themes were repeatedly emphasised by Russell. On the alleged localism of the country gentry, see Sharpe, ‘Crown, Parliament and Locality’; Clive Holmes, ‘The County Community in Stuart Historiography’, Journal of British Studies, 19 (1980), 54–73;
and Anthony Fletcher, ‘National and Local Awareness in the County Communities’, in Howard Tomlinson (ed.), Before the English Civil War: Essays on Early Stuart Politics and Government (London, 1983), 151–74.
Russell, Parliaments, p. 414.
Sharpe, Faction and Parliament, p. 42.
J. P. Kenyon, Stuart England (Harmondsworth, 1978), pp. 44–6, 84–5, 97, 107. Referring to the earlier ‘Addled Parliament’ of James I’s reign, Kenyon called it ‘childish, hysterical, and downright vicious’. In his later, revised edition of documentary sources for the Stuart period, Kenyon continued these themes. Parliament behaved with ‘customary foolishness and narrow-mindedness at times’, and the king’s imprisonment of Eliot ‘was not so outrageous as all that’.
J. P. Kenyon, The Stuart Constitution 1603–1688: Documents and Commentary, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 22, 24.
Times Literary Supplement, 16 September 1983, p. 990.
Russell pioneered this theme in his article on ‘Parliamentary History in Perspective’. The most formidable contributions on this point came from Mark Kishlansky, first in his article ‘The Emergence of Adversary Politics in the Long Parliament’, Journal of Modern History, 49 (Dec. 1977), 617–40,
and later in his book Parliamentary Selection: Social and Political Choice in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1986).
Russell, ‘Parliamentary History in Perspective’, pp. 3–4, 18–22; Parliaments and English Politics, pp. 4–26.
The most ambitious statement of this theory is Perez Zagorin, The Court and the Country: The Beginnings of the English Revolution (New York, 1971).
For a review of the controversy, see Dwight D. Brautigam, ‘ The Court and the Country Revisited’, in Court, Country and Culture: Essays on Early Modern British History in Honor of Perez Zagorin, ed. Bonnelyn Young Kunze and Dwight D. Brautigam (Rochester, NY, 1992), pp. 55–64.
See also Morrill, Revolt of the Provinces, pp. 14–22; Kevin Sharpe, Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 11–22;
P. W. Thomas, ‘Two Cultures? Court and Country Under Charles I’, in Russell, Origins, pp. 168–93;
Derek Hirst, ‘Court, Country, and Politics before 1629’, in Faction and Parliament: Essays on Early Stuart History ed. Kevin Sharpe (Oxford, 1978), pp. 105–38.
Russell, ‘Parliamentary History in Perspective’, p. 4; Russell, Parliaments and English Politics, pp. 6, 427. But see also Perez Zagorin, ‘Did Strafford Change Sides?’ English Historical Review, 101 (January 1986), 149–63.
Russell, Parliaments and English Politics, pp. 22–3.
Roger Lockyer, Buckingham: The Life and Political Career of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham 1592–1628 (London, 1981), pp. 269, 474.
For an alternative view, see Michael B. Young, ‘Buckingham, War, and Parliament: Revisionism Gone Too Far’, Parliamentary History Yearbook, 4 (1985), 45–69.
Roy Strong, Van Dyck: Charles I on Horseback (New York, 1972);
Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power (Berkeley, CA, 1975);
R. Malcolm Smuts, Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England (Philadephia, 1987).
Martin J. Havran, ‘The Character and Principles of an English King: The Case of Charles I’, The Catholic Historical Review, 69 (April 1983), 169–208.
Kevin Sharpe, ‘The Personal Rule of Charles I’, in Tomlinson, Before the English Civil War, pp. 53–78 and ‘The Image of Virtue: the Court and Household of Charles I, 1625–1642’, in David Starkey (ed.), The English Court from the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War, pp. 226–60. Both these essays are now available in a collection of Sharpe’s works entitled Politics and Ideas in Early Stuart England (London, 1989). I discuss Sharpe’s book below.
William Hunt, The Puritan Moment: The Coming of Revolution in an English County (Cambridge, MA, 1983)
and Ann Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War: Warwickshire 1620–1660 (Cambridge, 1987).
Richard Cust, The Forced Loan and English Politics (Oxford, 1987).
L. J. Reeve, Charles I and the Road to Personal Rule (Cambridge, 1989).
Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (eds), Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics 1603–1642 (London, 1989).
Ibid., p. 187.
Caroline Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot (Chapel Hill, NC, 1983);
Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c. 1590–1640 (Oxford, 1987);
Julian Davies, The Caroline Captivity of the Church (Oxford, 1992).
Allan I. Macinnes, Charles I and the Making of the Covenanting Movement 1625–1641 (Edinburgh, 1991), pp. 1, 129.
Peter Donald, An Uncounselled King: Charles I and the Scottish Troubles, 1637–41 (Cambridge, 1990), p. 322.
See also David Stevenson, The Scottish Revolution 1637–1644: The Triumph of the Covenanters (New York, 1973)
and Maurice Lee, Jr, The Road to Revolution: Scotland Under Charles I, 1625–37 (Urbana, IL, 1985).
J. P. Sommerville, Politics and Ideology in England 1603–1640 (London, 1986), pp. 140 and especially 231–8.
John Morrill, ‘What Was the English Revolution?’ History Today, 34 (March 1984), 12.
See also Morrill’s collected essays in The Nature of the English Revolution (London, 1993).
Conrad Russell, ‘Why Did Charles I Call the Long Parliament?’ History, 69, no. 227 (Oct. 1984), 375–83;
‘Why Did Charles I Fight the Civil War?’ History Today, 34 (June 1984), 31–4;
‘The British Problem and the English Civil War’ History, 72 (1987), 395–415;
‘The First Army Plot of 1641’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, fifth series, 38 (1988), 85–106.
Russell took a more favourable view of Charles in ‘Charles I’s Financial Estimates for 1642’, Bulletin of the Institute for Historical Research, 58, no. 137 (May 1985), 109–20
and ‘The British Background to the Irish Rebellion of 1641’, Historical Research, 61, no. 145 (June 1988), 166–82. Most of these articles have been reprinted in Unrevolutionary England, 1603–1642 (London, 1990).
Conrad Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford, 1990)
and The Fall of the British Monarchies (Oxford, 1991). We shall, of course, examine Russell’s portrait of Charles in these works in detail later. The reader can find Russell’s views on Charles summarised in chapter 8 of Causes.
Russell, Causes, pp. 11–25, 211.
Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, CT, 1992), p. 954.
There are two solid and readable modern biographies of Charles: Pauline Gregg, King Charles I (Berkeley, CA, 1981)
and Charles Carlton, Charles I: The Personal Monarch (London, 1983). The second edition of Carlton’s biography, published in 1995, has a new preface briefly summarising recent scholarship.
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© 1997 Michael B. Young
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Young, M.B. (1997). Introduction. In: Charles I. British History in Perspective. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25309-8_1
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