“The evolution and persistence of the commemoration of Charles King and Martyr”
“And there are aching solitary breasts, Whose widow'd walk with thought of thee is cheer'd, Our own, our royal saint: thy memory rests On many a prayer, the more for thee endear'd.” (John Keble. ‘King Charles the Martyr’. The Christian year: thoughts in verse for the Sundays and Holydays throughout the years. 1869) This regicide, which we commemorate tonight, is commemorated in a surprising number of churches, which witnesses to the continuity and survival of the observance into the twenty-first century. For many Anglicans this continued observance is regarded either with indifference or as an embarrassment. What relevance, they ask; does a not particularly attractive seventeenth-century king have for the twenty-first century? Does not such an observance burden the church with historical baggage, which prevents it from witnessing effectively to the modern world? There is nothing new in such attitudes; by the end of the seventeenth century voices were raised questioning not just the appropriateness of the commemoration, but even the claim that Charles was anything more than a failed tyrant. Such questions lay behind a report commissioned by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1957, published under the title the commemoration of saints and heroes of the faith in the Anglican Communion. This report is, to date, the most complete statement of the theological position of the Church of England in regard to the recognition and honouring of saints and martyrs. The report rejected any need for a bureaucratic procedure within the Church of England similar to that of Rome, and suggested instead a return to an older tradition where saints were `home grown'. In other words, commemoration developed spontaneously from the `grass-roots' and was then given sanction by the church. Using this model, Charles was an ideal type of Anglican saint, spontaneously venerated by the faithful — a !1
veneration that was then acknowledged and regularised by ecclesiastical authority and the provision of a suitable liturgy. As the report observed, King Charles is a clear example of popular canonisation; in which Church, state and popular feeling concurred, and that with a vehemence surprising to the modern generation. The Propers did indeed reflect the deep emotion of their day too vividly for modern use; but their framing and the Calendar entry was as genuine a canonisation — that, too, of a martyr — as the historic Church can show, Convocation, Parliament and popular acclaim acting in passionate unity. (1) What the report did not address was changing perceptions towards individuals accredited as saints. If the criterion for commemoration was a situation where ‘Church, state and popular feeling concurred’, how was the church to regard such a ‘saint’ when popular feeling changed and the perspective of history cast doubt upon the extent of the individual's sanctity? Such ambiguity has accompanied the commemoration since its inception, for the simple reason that Charles' ‘martyrdom' occurred within the context of civil war and was as much a political as a religious phenomenon. In 1772 Shute Barrington, Bishop of Llandaff, my home diocese commented on the ambiguity of Charles' reputation, and when, in the same year, Sir Roger Newdigate defended the memory of Charles at St Margaret’s Westminster to the House Commons as the Church of England's ‘only canonised saint’ he ‘occasioned an universal laughter throughout the House’. (2) An examination of the thirty- six surviving sermons in the British Library by James Sack, in his book From Jacobite to conservative notes that those preached to the Lords and Commons between 1764 and 1811 at St Margaret’s for the Commons and Westminster Abbey for the Lords revealed that seven were critical of Charles ten defended the traditional political theology of the commemoration, whilst the remaining nineteen were fairly neutral dissertations upon the need for submission to lawful authority and the excellence of the British constitution. (3) Newdigate's involvement in 1772 occurred during one of the periodic debates about the abolition of the State Services, this time inspired by a sermon preached that year by Dr Thomas Nowell of St Mary's Hall, Oxford. Unlike Barrington before the Lords, Nowell had offered the !2
Commons a spirited defence of the royal prerogative and a traditional view of the martyr, which inspired James Boswell biographer of Samuel Johnson to say of Nowell that he was — along with himself and Dr Johnson — the ‘very perfection of Toryism’. (4) In the debate over Nowell's sermon, Mr Thomas Townsland proposed that it be burnt by the hangman for containing ‘arbitrary, Tory, high-flown doctrines’, and that the preachers for the Fast Day should in future be confined to those of the rank of Dean or above, those who were chaplains to the House, or at least those who had taken the degree of Doctor of Divinity. James Sack has also studied Parliamentary attendances at the Fast Day sermon on the 30th January in the eighteenth and early nineteenth Centuries and concludes that before the outbreak of the French Revolution the pattern of official observance was one of continuing indifference. In 1788 only one peer attended the Abbey, whilst the following year the Bishop of Lincoln, George Pretyman friend and tutor to William Pitt, preached the most hostile Fast Day sermon of the eighteenth century, in which he condemned Charles as a tyrant and praised the Parliamentarians as the true defenders of English law and liberty. (5) However in January 1793, a few days after the execution of Louis XVI St Margaret's and the Abbey were `thronged' with MPs and peers, including Pitt and the entire Cabinet, making the point that the French had copied the crime of the English regicides; and there was a noticeable change in the establishment attitude to Charles after the execution of Louis and the outbreak of war with Revolutionary France. Instead of the bland injunctions to obey the powers that be, or even attacks upon Charles for allegedly claiming an unacceptable prerogative, he became a martyr for the rule of law and just rights, a victim of the horrors of revolution. The puritans and regicides of the 1640s were transformed into the revolutionaries and Jacobins of the 1790s. (6) Such a change of emphasis did not, however, encourage more MPs or peers to attend the Fast Day sermons, and after 1795 the Parliamentary observance of the Fast ceased altogether until 1807 when it was resumed at the request of George III — although on that occasion only three MPs attended St Margaret's. In January 1810, Spencer Perceval Prime- Minister wrote to the king, acknowledging !3
his desire that the Fast be observed, but pointing out that, the attendance of the two Houses of Parliament on these occasions [January 1808 and 1809] as well as upon the same occasion in the preceding year 1807, was very discreditably thin. Perceval proposed that, instead of the Services, Parliament should simply adjourn for that day, rather ‘than that they should express collectively a determination to observe it, and should individually so entirely neglect it’. The king's reply expressed regret at the low attendance and felt that the Fast Day should be continued because an Act of Parliament established it. But George agreed to leave the final decision to Perceval and the Archbishop of Canterbury. (7) In 1811 only two MPs attended St Margaret's and, with the establishment of the Regency, Perceval again attempted to have the observance quietly dropped, writing to Colonel McMahon, the Prince Regent's secretary, in January 1812, explaining the reluctance of the king to give up the observance, but pointing out the fact that the two Houses attended so very scantily that the pretence of their attending defeated the object of paying attention to the day. (8) The Prince Regent agreed that the low turnouts invalidated the Parliamentary observance of the Fast and the practice was discontinued after one hundred and fifty years. What is noticeable from Perceval's correspondence is that he was not objecting to the observance on ideological grounds; rather it was a practical recognition that the situation was illogical and needed amending. Neither was Perceval proposing that the Office be removed from the Book of Common Prayer. Individuals were still free to observe the day if they wished, and there is evidence that the Office was read at public schools and universities, in cathedrals and parish churches throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Parson Woodforde in his Diary recorded reading the State Services for 30 January and 29 May in 1785, and in 1789. Samuel Johnson wrote a Fast Day sermon in which he meditated upon the condition of man and the necessary evils that ensued when the barriers of law, civilisation and society are swept aside by zealots and fanatics. (9) Owen Chadwick notes in this book ‘The Spirit of the Oxford Movement’ that, A ‘high churchman’ in (for example) 1800 would probably reverence King Charles I and keep the day of his death as a day of martyrdom. He would think that Charles died for the maintenance of the Church of England and its !4
episcopal or apostolic ministry; that the responsibility for his death lay with the Roundheads who were the ancestors of the Whigs, and with the Presbyterians and independents who were the ancestors of the modern dissenter. (10) The rise of the Oxford Movement was to give new life to the commemoration in the sense that Charles I was honoured as a defender of the establishment and an ‘orthodox’ view of Anglicanism which saw it as both Catholic and reformed. It is in such a role that Charles appeared in Keble's The Christian year, first published in 1827. As Brian Martin observed in his book, T John Keble: priest, professor and poet. The Christian year was one of the best-sellers of the nineteenth century; between 1827 and 1873, when the copyright expired, it went through 140 editions, with 305,500 copies being printed; and for Victorian Anglicans it occupied an honoured place after the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. (11) In the poem Keble offered for 30 January, the emphasis was on Charles the patient martyr and defender of the church, rather than as the symbol of a particular political system. Keble retained the pathos of the martyrdom whilst quietly discarding the political conclusions derived from the regicide. Keble's view of Charles was consistent with his regard for the historic episcopal integrity of the Church of England, the importance of establishment and the retention of Anglicanism at the heart of English life. In the Anglican divines of the seventeenth century the Oxford reformers discovered what they considered the classic exposition of Anglicanism as both Catholic and reformed, grounded in scripture, reason and tradition. Although Charles was not included in the great Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology produced by the Oxford reformers in the 1840s, he was included in the one-volume presentation of classic seventeenth-century Anglicanism edited by More and Cross, published in 1935. (12) But for the Oxford Movement Charles was accorded the status of ‘honorary member’ as he had given his life defending the Church of England and was thus a true martyr. Politically, Charles was enlisted by those who sought to defend paternalist values against the onslaught of Whig utilitarianism and was thus part of a nostalgic view of England, which included gothic architecture and chivalry. !5
It was as such a conservative figure that Charles appeared in a number of paintings in the early nineteenth century. Sir Roy Strong one time director of the National Portrait Gallery in London and a server at the High Altar at Hereford Cathedral has written some interesting analysis on the depiction of Charles. The Victorian taste for historical narrative was matched on the continent by such paintings as Charles mocked by the soldiery by Paul Delaroche, which is the most explicit visual representation of the Christ— Charles parallel ever produced. The scenes depicted tended to concentrate upon the tragedy of Charles' martyrdom, and sought to engage the viewer emotionally in the sufferings Charles endured either by contrasting the halcyon days of the 1630s with the horrors of civil war, or by a direct presentation of Charles' sufferings and humiliations. In so doing there is an implicit political sub-plot, for, in presenting an image of a stoic Charles taking leave of his weeping children on the eve of his execution tends to arouse sympathy for the king rather than his persecutors. (13) Peter Nockles in his book The Oxford Movement in context has pointed out the extent to which the political and religious elements of Anglican identity began to part company in the 1830s, so that he writes: ‘the gradual divorce of the two in subsequent decades made it increasingly difficult for later generations of high churchmen to appreciate the mental framework within which the pre-Tractarian high church operated’. (14) The figure of the martyr inevitably partook of this process; it became increasingly difficult to maintain the traditional political theology of the Restoration because that was rooted firmly in the unity of church and state, a unity that became increasingly untenable in the face of Catholic Emancipation and Whig reforms in the 1830s. Ironically the renewal of high church Anglicanism associated with the Oxford Movement witnessed the almost inevitable demise of the political aspects of the old tradition of Royalist Anglicanism. The extent of this divorce is revealed in the debates surrounding the proposal to remove the State Prayers from the Book of Common Prayer in 1858. On 28 June 1858, Earl Stanhope moved in the Lords that an address be presented to the queen requesting her to revoke the proclamation !6
issued at the beginning of her reign enjoining the observance of the State Prayers, with the exception of the Accession Service, which would be retained. Stanhope referred specifically to the political aspects of the Services (the Gun Powder Plot, Charles I and Charles II) as a principal reason why they should be removed. He asked whether the Services were designed to make the church political rather than help the church make political society religious. Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, who, in supporting the motion, argued that the Services were `far too political, far too polemical, far too epigrammatical’, demonstrated that the clergy could argue from the same position. Apart from Wilberforce, the motion was supported by Sumner, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Ebury, who earlier had tried unsuccessfully to table a motion for the comprehensive revision of the Anglican liturgy. (15) The Prayers were defended by the Duke of Marlborough who argued that, whilst some of the language might need changing, the State Prayers commemorated three of the seminal events in the history of the nation and, what was more, stood as a constant reminder that the nation stood under the providence of God. But the majority of the peers rejected the appeal to providence and voted to present the address to the queen. When the issue was again debated, on 19 July, Marlborough attempted to salvage something of the Prayers by suggesting that some commemoration of the events be included in a revised Accession Service, although he only mentions the Gunpowder Plot, the Restoration and the `Glorious Revolution'; Charles was simply ignored. He was poorly supported and Marlborough declined to put his proposed amendment to the vote. To the majority in Parliament the State Prayers were an irrelevance and their removal from the Book of Common Prayer in 1859, after nearly two centuries, occurred almost without comment. (16) With the removal of the State Prayers from the Book of Common Prayer it seemed more than likely that, with the exception of 5 November, the commemorations would fall into oblivion. But the strength of the Tractarian and ritualist revival within the Church of England ensured that the legacy of older, high church allegiances would persist. The figure of the martyr, shorn of a specific political !7
agenda, remained as an inspiration to those who cherished a vision of the Church of England, which was Episcopal, Catholic and reformed woven into the fabric of English society. With the deletion of the State Prayers, Charles' name also disappeared from the Calendar, and in 1894 the Society of King Charles the Martyr was formed to honour his memory and to urge the return of his name to the Calendar. Australia remarkably blazed a trail some eighty years later with the inclusion of Charles in the 1978 An Australian Prayer Book Calendar. In the Church of England this was finally achieved in 1980, when Charles was restored to the Calendar of the Alternative Service Book, albeit under `minor commemorations'. This overview since the reign of George III has unavoidably concentrated on its decline, yet it is appropriate at this point to ask why the commemoration should have persisted for so long. Indeed, it is one of the questions of my paper, in contrast to much historical work, which is concerned with why things change. As I stand here in the pulpit of Christ Church Brunswick, I contend that perhaps we have become so conditioned to an environment of permanent change that we instinctively look for change in history rather than for those things that persist, whilst assuming that any idea or institution which does persist over time must be moribund, reactionary or unworthy of serious study. Undoubtedly apathy and inertia play a part in the persistence of any idea or institution; nevertheless the commemoration does reveal the extent to which an idea and an institution can survive because it is valued by succeeding generations and helps to define and articulate the values of those generations. I hope our annual commemoration does its small part to assist this. Hence the longevity must be accounted for, from the presentation of Charles as an icon of legitimacy and suffering kingship in 1648, to the report of the Church of England acknowledging his sanctity as a legitimate expression of Anglican spirituality in 1957. Why was a king who for most of his reign was neither successful nor popular, and who was decisively defeated in a bloody civil war, the only English king since the Reformation to be canonised? Perhaps the answer to this question lies in the very fact that he was defeated so decisively and in the subsequent trauma and fear of social !8
breakdown this defeat aroused in significant sections of the community. In retrospect the tensions and anxieties of the Personal Rule of the king seemed trivial compared to the radicalism, exactions and depredations of Parliament and the Army. A questionable King or no drinking, no dancing, no singing no theatre no Christmas, its not surprising there was a restoration and a re-casting of Charles in the glow of the restoration. The ensuing reaction of the late 1640s ensured that the figure of Charles, now a helpless prisoner, would be reassessed. What this reaction also reveals is the extent to which the idea of sacred kingship was part of the fabric of contemporary life. The king was not just an executive officer, but sacred both in his person and his office. He partook of both secular and religious functions, uniting church and state in his person. Therefore the relative merits of the king were irrelevant and the sight of the king as a prisoner, bearing his captivity with dignity and firm in his determination to resist his enemies, not only set an example of resistance to the all- conquering Parliament and Army, but also became a symbol of the sufferings of the nation. From 1680 the nature of the commemoration began to change; from the ideal of uniformity implicit in the newly restored church, the commemoration became the property of a party. Yet ironically in so doing, the commemoration was assured of survival, for as long as the ideology of order based upon patriarchalism and divine right retained any vitality, the figure of the royal martyr would also remain. The work of Sack, Nockles and others has demonstrated that patriarchalism and theories of divine right did not disappear in 1688, 1714, or even 1789, but persisted well into the nineteenth century. Reverence for the martyr was part of this tradition, hence the survival of the commemoration as an integral part of high church and Tory ideology. Because the political theology of the commemoration was tempered in the fire of civil war and defeat, it reflected the immediacy of those events. Faced with an apparently ruthless and successful enemy who had destroyed the foundations of monarchy and religion, the Royalists were not inclined to tread softly in asserting the innocence and heroic virtue of `their' martyr. Not only that, but the commemoration in the 1650s was important in maintaining morale !9
and cohesion amongst a defeated and scattered party and confirmed the belief that, whilst earthly success might elude them, truth was on their side. But as time went on it became harder to remember these events and the strong emotions they aroused. By 1710, a 20-year-old witness of the regicide would have been over 80, which meant that later generations were obliged to make a leap of imagination in an attempt to understand the significance of the events and people they were being asked to commemorate. This may go some way to explaining the gradual fading of Charles from the Fast Day sermons at the end of the seventeenth century. The detailed invocation of Charles' life, virtues, trial and execution present in some of the early sermons was replaced gradually with either a purely political debate, or the broad assertion that the regicide confirms, as a general principle, the role of providence in human affairs. Much of the passion of the 30 January Office stems from the conviction of God's providence and the fact that God is intimately concerned with the form of government in England. Modern scholarship on the eighteenth century makes us wary of pronouncing the death of providentialism. For in 1859 it was to providence that the defenders of the State Prayers appealed, the Duke of Marlborough reminding the Lords that politics was not merely a secular or utilitarian activity and that nations as well as individuals lived under the providence of God, an appeal the peers chose to ignore. In one important respect the central point of the political theology of the commemoration had been conceded as early as 1688: namely the distinction between public utility and private conscience. Even a cursory reading of the Eikon Basilike reveals the extent to which Charles appeals to conscience to justify his actions. Kevin Sharpe in his paper ‘Private conscience and public duty in the writings of Charles I’ has demonstrated that in so doing Charles was entirely consistent with one tradition of Renaissance thought, which posited the prince as the head of the body of society, the source of reason, the soul and conscience of the state. (17) At his trial and on the scaffold Charles faced the temptation to expediency squarely, declaring that `If I would have given way to an arbitrary way I need not to have come here.’ (18) For Charles the conflict between private conscience !10
and public policy was resolved through the organic union of the two; public policy was the king's private conscience writ large. Yet the conflict between conscience and expediency remained, until Locke declared that conscience was the property of the individual and divorced from the individual operating in the public domain. This privatisation of conscience was the beginning of the systematic deconstruction of the Renaissance view of the prince as the animating principle within the state. It was left to the non-jurors, Jacobites and high churchmen to fight a rearguard action on behalf of the organic nature of the state and to assert that private and public consciences were but two aspects of the one moral imperative. The figure of Charles King and Martyr and respect for the martyr has remained and I believe will continue to remain to remind future generations of this principle, and as confirmation that constancy in church and state joined or separate did and does matter and did and does make a difference. Whatever might be claimed at the trial about the authority of Parliament, the people or providence, Charles' composure was rooted in his assurance that he represented a legitimate and lawful authority against what he called `a power' and that constancy to this belief in the embodiment of lawful authority in his person resulted in the harmony of private conscience and public duty. Perhaps Charles' most enduring influence, is to serve as a reminder that legitimacy is a fundamental feature of good government, which a community abandons at its peril, and that legitimacy represents the vital link between private conscience and public duty. As Charles so aptly observed at his trial, `if power without law may make laws, may alter the fundamental laws of the kingdom, I do not know what subject he is in England that can be sure of his life, or anything that he calls his own', a statement as true today as it was in January 1649. (19) Notes: 1. Milner-Wright, E. et al The Commemoration of Saints and Heroes of the Faith in the Anglican Communion. The Report of A Commission appointed by the Archbishop of Canterbury SPCK 1957, p. 35. 2. Lacey, A. The Cult of King Charles the Martyr Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 2003. p. 242.
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3. Sack, J.J. From Jacobite to conservative: reaction and orthodoxy in Britain, c.1760— 1832. Cambridge 1993, p. 130. 4. Whitehall Evening Post. 13—16 March 1784, quoted in ibid., p. 81. 5. Sack J.J. From Jacobite to conservative, pp. 129—30. Whilst MPs and peers might have been indifferent to the Fast, it is worth noting that the Abbey was often well attended by the general public, particularly if the preacher were well known. 6. Louis XVI had always been fascinated by the life and death of Charles I and must have been aware of the parallels when, during his trial, he called for a biography of Charles `so that he could learn to die like a king'. See Hardman, J. Louis XVI. 1993. Dunn, S. The deaths of Louis XVI: regicide and the French political imagination. 1994. Walzer, M. (ed.) Regicide and revolution: speeches at the trial of Louis XVI. 1974. 7. Aspinall, A. Ed. The later correspondence of George III. Cambridge University Press 1962-1972. Vol. 5, pp. 489—90. 8. Aspinall, A. Ed. The correspondence of George, Prince of Wales 1770—1812. Cambridge University Press, 1971. Vol. 8, p. 350. 9. Woodeforde, J. The diary of a country parson. Ed. John Beresford. Vol. 2. 1968, p. 173. Johnson, S. Sermons. Ed. Jean Haystrum and James Grey. 1978. 10. Chadwick, O. The spirit of the Oxford Movement: Tractarian essays. Cambridge University Press 1990, p. 5. 11. Martin, B. W. John Keble: priest, professor and poet. 1976, pp. 110—12. After the removal of the State Services from the Book of Common Prayer in 1859 later copies of The Christian Year sometimes omitted the poems associated with these services. 12. More, P. E. and Cross, F. L. (eds) Anglicanism: the thought and practice of the Church off England, illustrated from the religious literature of the seventeenth century, London SPCK 1935. 13. Strong, R. And when did you last see your father? The Victorian painter and British history. 1978. 14. Nockles, P. B. The Oxford Movement in context: Anglican high churchmanship, 1760— 1857. Cambridge 1994. 15. Lacey, A. The Cult of King Charles the Martyr Woodbridge, p.246 Boydell Press, 2003. 16. ibid p.246 17. Sharpe, K. `Private conscience and public duty in the writings of Charles I'. Historical Journal. 1997, vol. 40(3), pp. 643—65. !12
18. Wedgwood, C. V. The trial of Charles I. 1964, p. 191. 19. ibid., pp. 144, 138.
Bibliography: Almack, E. Ed Eikon Basilike: the portraiture of his sacred majesty in his solitudes and suffering. London: De La More Press 1903. Aspinall, A. Ed. The correspondence of George, Prince of Wales 1770—1812. 8 vols. Cambridge University Press, 1971. Aspinall, A. Ed George III. The later correspondence of George III. 5 vols. Cambridge University Press, 1972. Astell, M. `An impartial enquiry into the causes of rebellion'. In: P. Springborg, ed. Astell, political writings. Cambridge University Press 1996. Bryant, A. Ed The letters, speeches, and declarations of King Charles II. London Cassell 1968. Chadwick, O. The spirit of the Oxford Movement: Tractarian essays. Cambridge University Press 1990. Cowley, A. The Civil War. Ed. A. Pritchard. Toronto 1973. Dunn, S. The deaths of Louis XVI: regicide and the French political imagination. Princeton 1994. Hardman, J. Louis XVI. Yale University Press 1993. Lacey, A. The Cult of King Charles the Martyr Woodbridge, Boydell Press 2003. Locke, J. Two treatise of government. London: Dent, 1991. Martin, B. W. John Keble: priest, professor and poet. London Croom Helm 1976. Milner-Wright, E. et al The Commemoration of Saints and Heroes of the Faith in the Anglican Communion. The Report of A Commission appointed by the Archbishop of Canterbury SPCK 1957, p. 35. More, P. E. and Cross, F. L. (eds) Anglicanism: the thought and practice of the Church off England, illustrated from the religious literature of the seventeenth century, London SPCK 1935. !13
Nockles, P. B. The Oxford Movement in context: Anglican high churchmanship, 1760—1857. Cambridge 1994. Sack, J.J. From Jacobite to conservative: reaction and orthodoxy in Britain, c.1760—1832. Cambridge 1993. Sharpe, K. `Private conscience and public duty in the writings of Charles I'. Historical Journal. 1997. Strong, R. And when did you last see your father? The Victorian painter and British history. London Thames and Hudson 1978. Walzer, M. (ed.) Regicide and revolution: speeches at the trial of Louis XVI. London Cambridge University Press 1974. Wedgwood, C. V. The trial of Charles I. Penguin 1964. Woodeforde, J. The diary of a country parson. Ed. John Beresford. Vol. 2. 1968, Johnson, S. Sermons. Ed. Jean Haystrum and James Grey. 1978. Wright, B. S. Painting and history during the French restoration: abandoned by the past. Cambridge University Press 1997.
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