"Von der Parteien Gunst und Hass verwirrt/ schwankt sein Charakterbild in der Geschichte" (Schiller about Charles' contemporary Wallenstein; less elegantly put in a prose translation into English, "distorted by the favour and hatred of factions, the portrait of his character flickers through history". Up until a few years ago, I assumed there was at least consensus about Charles I., while possessing "private" virtues (i.e. good son, father and husband), not having been a very good King, what with the losing his head over it, but no, he does have his defenders in that department as well, present day ones, I mean, not 17th century royalist. I haven't read Leandra de Lisle's Charles biography, but I did read her recent biography of his wife Henrietta Maria, which makes a spirited case for her as well. (My review of the Henrietta Maria biography is
here.) While I'm linking things, Charles I. inevitably features heavily in two podcasts I listened to in the last two years, one named "Early Stuart England" and thus concluded (it ends with the start of the Restoration), and one ongoing, called "Pax Britannica" and about the story of the British Empire, which has only just arrived at the Great Fire of London; both start with Charles' father James (VI and I), and do a great job offering context and bringing all the many players of the era alive, not "just" the respective monarchs. They appear to be both well researched, but come to quite different conclusions as to what Charles thought he was doing in his final trial in their episodes about those last few months in the life of Charles I. Stuart . (Also regarding where Cromwell initially thought the trial was going.) If you don't have the time for an entire podcast but want to hear vivid presentations of the trial itself and the summing up of Charles I., good and bad sides, that go with it,
here is the trial/execution episode of Early Stuart England, and
here the one from Pax Britannica.
Now, on to my own opinions and impressions re: Charles I. Which after reading and listening up in the last years on the Stuarts didn't change as much as my opinions on his father James did, but that's another, separate entry, which I will probably write as well. Years ago I thought Charles had a lot in common with his maternal grandmother Mary Queen of Scots - they both died undeniably with courage and flair, they both saw themselves as martyrs of their respective faiths, they both were great at evoking personal loyalty in people close to them - and neither of them was an actually good ruler, not least because their idea of the kingdom and people they were ruling and the actual people differed considerably. Mostly I still think that, though now I also see considerable differences.
Not least because Mary literally became a Queen as a baby, and once she was smuggled out of the country as a toddler, she grew up very much the adored future Queen of France, in France, and some of her later troubles hailed from the abrupt change from the role she'd been prepared for - Queen Consort of a Catholic kingdom - to the one she had to fulfill - Queen Regnant of a by now majorly Protestant Kingdom. Meanwhile, her grandson Charles might have been male, but wasn't expected to reign at all, because he was the spare, not the heir, through his childhood and early adolescence. Not only that, but he was overshadowed by
both his older siblings, brother Henry and sister Elizabeth, he was sickly small child and for years not expected to live at all, he was handicapped twice over (stuttering and having trouble walking, with the usual ghastly historical methods used to cure him of both). Mary was a golden child (as were Charles' siblings), young Charles was the family embarassment and reminds me of no one as much as of Frederick I. of Prussia (that's the grandfather of Frederick the Great), another "spare" who was suffering from physical impairments and spent a childhood overshadowed by his glamorous older brother, his father's favourite, with whom he nonetheless had a good relationship and grieved for when he was gone. (Think Boromir and Faramir.) That makes for a very different psychological and emotional make-up, and both Charles I. and Frederick I. compensated later in life, when they unexpectedly did become the heir and then the monarch, by very much leaning into the ritual and splendour of Kingship. No "Hail fellow, well met" type of attitude for them (which for all their absolutism the Tudors were so good at); they were monarchs who rather treasured the distance and remoteness, as if in compensation of all that early ridicule and disdain.
If you're curious about the first Frederick, more about him
here. Of coure, he died in bed, having created a new kingdom (and a lot of debts), whereas Charles ended up beheaded, with (most) of his family in exile, his three kingdoms at war and England a Republic (or if you want to be hostile a military dictatorship) for the next twelve years. Some of the reasons for this different results are Charles' fault, but not all. He did live in very different circumstances, not least because he inherited some baggage from the previous reign, fatally a very bad relationship between King and Parliament, and his father's favourite, Buckingham. (In fact, Buckingham managing to be the favourite of two monarchs in a row instead of being kicked out once his original patron was no more was a feat hardly any other royal favourite has accomoplished.) But he also from the get go was good at making his own mistakes, ironically enough at first by being completely in sync with the mood of the times. The peace with Spain was a signature James I. policy and achievement (and a very necessary one at the point he inherited the kingdom from Elizabeth, with both England and Spain financially exhausted by the war) - and deeply unpopular. When young Charles (still Prince of Wales) and Buckingham after their misadvantures in visiting Spain and NOT returning with a Spanish infanta as a bride for Charles went into the opposite direction and became heads of the war party which wanted a replay of the Elizabethan era's greatest hits, Charles was, for the first and last time in his life, incredibly popular. And once James was dead, an attempted replay was exactly what he and Buckingham went for - which turned out to be a disaster. Instead of glorious victories, there were defeats. Buckingham just wasn't very good as either admiral or war leader. And Charles was stubbornly loyal to his fave.
This is a trait sympathetic in a private human being and disastrous in a monarch, because the "evil advisor" ploy is ever so useful if you need to blame someone for an unpopular policy and/or monumental fuckup, and James, for all that he adored his boyfriends, had used it if he had to. Charles I.' sons, Charles II. and James II., drew very different lessons from their childhood and adolescence in an English Civil War, not least in this regard . Charles II. was ruthless enough to sacrifice unpopular royal advisors if needs must, James II. was not and was more the doubling down type, and guess which one died a king and which one died in exile. Buckingham had already been hated under James, but under Charles this really went into overdrive, and there was a rather blatant attempt at getting him killed via show trial when parlamentarians (aware that Charles who refused to let Buckingham go insisted that Buckingham had only fulfilled his orders) thought they had a winning idea by insinuating Buckingham had murdered James (which Charles hardly could cover for), only to find Charles indignantly shot that down as well. Buckingham ended up assassinated anyway, by a disgruntled veteran but to the great public cheer of Parliament, and you can't really call Charles paranoid for developing the opinion that most MP were fanatics not above lying in order to kill his friends with flimsy legal jiustifications.
(Fast forward to Wentworth/Strafford getting killed in just such a fashion years and years later.)
Buckingham's successor as person closest to the King and accordingly hated for it was Charles' wife, Henrietta Maria, and here we have shades of Louis XVI., because in both cases the fact these two Kings didn't have mistresses and were loyal to their wives worked against them and contributed to the wives fulfilling the role of the royal favourite in getting blamed for everything going wrong, and there was an increasing amount of things going wrong. Leandra de Lisle points out that actually, far from dominating Charles and making him do her bidding, Henrietta Maria had to live with the fact that Catholics under Charles had it worse, not better, than they had lived under James I., because no, Charles wasn't a crypto Catholic. Going all in with the High Church idea and the bishops etc. together with Archbishop Laud wasn't in preparation for an eventual return to Rome. Which didn't make it better in terms of the result. It was one of those head, desk, moments demonstrating what I said earlier, that Charles kept misjudging what the people in the countries he was ruling wanted and were like (he really seems to have thought it was all a couple of troublemakers in Westminster that objected, but really, out there in the countryside, etc.).
Now, for all that he spent his first three years as a toddler in Scotland, he had otherwise zero experiences of the place, and none of Ireland, so he has some excuses there, and like I said, I can understand the emotional background to the increasingly terrible relationship with the English Parliament. But it still means he failed at his job, to put it as simplified as possible. There were monarchs before and after who were also absolutely and sincerely convinced they were God's anointed (and knew better than anyone elected). Elizabeth certainly thought she was. And most of her favourites were deeply unpopular. (It's telling that the sole one who wasn't, Essex, was the one ending up rebelling and getting executed.) But she was aware she had to woo Parliament now and then to get what she wanted in terms of budget. And she was really good at a mixture of prevaricating, not allowing herself to be pinned down in one particular corner. Charles I.'s near unerring instinct for finding "solutions" to his problems that made things worse, not better, and then refusing to offer scapegoats or listen to advice that required a complete reevaluation of his own beliefs was a fatal combination of traits which, again, would have well fitted a private citizen - but not a monarch in early modern England.
So did Charles leave the country something other than a Civil War in which some 6% of the population died? (Hence the "man of blood" label, though of course it's a bit rich coming from the likes of Cromwell - just ask the Irish.) An A plus art collection, and I'm not just being flippant. He had superb taste in paintings, not just in terms of dead and already declared great painters but of his own contemporaries. (Charles I. as a nobleman and patron without royal responsibilities - say, as the King's younger brother he was originally supposed to be - , would probably get an admiring footnote in any cultural history.) The idea that monarchs/heads of government can be put on trial and held reponsible not by other fellow monarchs but by their people. (Well, in principle. In practice, the trial in question was extremely questionable from a legalistic pov, not least because it wasn't even conducted by the actual elected Parliament but by the leftover "rump" that remained after having been purged by the military of anyone who might disagree. Hence Charles, who like grandmother Mary was at his best when backed into his last corner, pointing just this out as if he was a trained lawyer. Stupid, he was not. Whether that makes his previous fuckups as a ruler worse is for you to decide.) Anyway, I would say that the National Assembly putting Louis XVI on trial had a better claim of being actually representative of the country AT THAT POINT than the Rump was of Civil War England. And both trials presented an intriguing paradox, to wit: a) the monarchs they judged were guilty of at least some of the accusations - Louis XVI HAD conspired with foreign powers against his people in his last two years, Charles
had, among other things, restarted the Civil War after it had already been believed to have ended, but b) any just trial should allow for the possibility that the defendant could be found innocent, and there was no way in either trial that would have happened, the only acceptable outcome was a guilty verdict and a death sentence, because the accusers and the judges were one and the same. (One of the podcasters disagrees and belongs to the school of historians who think hat if Charles
had submitted to the authority of the trial and had entered a plea, he wouldn't have ended up executed, btw.)
(BTW, Robespierre originally was, unless I'm misrenembering, against a trial against Louis XVI for that reason - not because he didn't want him dead, but because, and here his inner lawyer spoke, a trial should allow for the possibility of innocence, and if Louis was innocent, the entire Revolution was wrong, which could no be, hence there should not have been a trial.)
Charles to his last hour did not consider himself guilty in the sense he was accused of being. He did think his death was divine punishment, not for failing his people - he thought, as mentioned, he had done his best throughout his life, and it wasn't his fault that it hadn't worked out - , but for letting Parliament bully him into signing the death warrant for Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Stafford, a man he
knew to be innocent and to have been condemned just as a lesson to him. This, he said in his final speech, was why his fate was deserved. I think this perspective both shows why I wouldn't have wanted to be ruled by him, but why I also think he was, as a human being, a far cry from our current lot of autocrats who wouldn't know how to spell guilt and responsibility, be it personal or political.
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