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| ISBN-13: | 9781932528992 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | IHS Press |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2003 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 974 KB |
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Charles I
By Hilaire Belloc
IHS Press
Copyright © 2003 IHS PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-932528-99-2
CHAPTER 1
THE PROBLEM
THERE IS AN INSTITUTION AS OLD AS THE WORLD: MONARCHY – Kingship. In most places and in most times men have agreed to be governed by Kings, having found in such government something consonant to their nature.
In one man there seemed to stand incarnate all the men of the community and to be concentrated in him their common weal. He was the visible symbol of their unity.
Today all Christendom is hungry for monarchy. In the United States, partly by the provision of the Constitution, more by its development in the nineteenth century, the principle of an executive in the hands of one man was preserved. But in Europe it was gradually lost, and replaced by the rule of a few; in practice, of the rich, under the guise of representatives. That experiment is breaking down before our eyes, and monarchy is returning.
Why and how was it lost? The first great western country to lose it was England. In England a rebellion three hundred years ago deposed and killed the King. Thenceforward the wealthier classes who had raised that rebellion gradually ousted the Crown and took over its power. How and why did English kingship so fail in the person of its last possessor, Charles Stuart? That is the problem approached in this book.
From before the beginning of all record, for centuries upon centuries, the people of Britain had known no other rule. When they had been divided into warring tribes, each tribe or city had its King; when they had formed part of the high Roman civilisation they looked to one mighty monarch above them in the person of the Emperor; when they fell back again, during the Dark Ages, into half a hundred clans or groups of various tongue and religion, yet each unit among them had its King. When the greater part of the island slowly reunited under the term "England," a common monarchy re-arose and there was a King of England in whom communal authority and action was vested; he reigned in the south, from Winchester or Westminster, unquestioned for eight hundred years. The dynasty would change, by marriage or by force of arms; the territory over which it ruled would expand or diminish, the office was held by weak hands and by strong – imperilled when it passed to a child or when powerful subjects rebelled against it, yet always surviving and taken for granted as the air which men breathed.
During the Christian centuries after the conversion of the Pagan Roman Empire kingship began in each province of Christendom to take on a mien still more exalted and, as it were, sacramental. It had inherited from Rome the sense of majesty, the awe and worship of that authority by which men lived, and already in the last of the Pagan Imperial Courts the Emperor was something divine. But with the triumph of the Christian system in the Dark and Middle Ages something more intimately religious entered into that central idea; the King was anointed as well as crowned; he was sacred through these symbols, which were endowed with an effective power.
It was in France that this majesty of kingship took on its colours and began to shine, and from the crownings and anointings at Rheims the spirit spread throughout the west. Over England that spirit lay with as profound an effect as over any princedom among Christian men. It must be the first priest in England – the Archbishop of Canterbury – who should anoint and crown the King claimant; only after that stamp of religion had been set was he King indeed. From him proceeded all acts of government and control; in his name was the peace preserved; he was the framer of national policy; he appointed to every national office; by him alone could be created a special title of nobility, and by him were the armies summoned and led.
All Europe and particularly England was in this mood, because England was upon a scale which helped her to be singularly united. The King of France held a double power direct over his own lands but shadowy over his great vassals; the little realms that were growing up beyond the Pyrenees, as the land of Spain was slowly reconquered from the Mohammedan, had each their King but were each for centuries too small to weigh heavily in the balance of Europe. For a time there had been a King vaguely over the Germans, but long since, almost from the end of the Dark Ages, the chieftains of the various German districts had alone really ruled. In Italy the cities and principalities and the territory of the Papal monarchy were similarly divided. But in England kingship was firmly welded, after a model suited to it, having a territory not too large for central rule yet of an extent wide enough to make the realm a principal factor in the business of Europe.
So things had been in the minds of men for centuries; kingship went back long beyond all tradition.
A child born in the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, at the end of the year 1600, was to inherit this hitherto unquestioned office, and apparently to inherit it undiminished in reputation or effect. He was to come to the kingship of his fathers in true descent of the Blood Royal, and, destined as it would seem, to administer as those before him had administered and to hand on this same power and majesty to his posterity. Yet in the lifetime of that child – and it was not a long one – monarchy in England crumbled, or rather was destroyed. He himself acted that tragedy and took the tragic part therein. First he was thwarted by his more powerful subjects through his early years, from the day when as a young man of twenty-five he came to his own after his father's death. Next they took arms against him, when he had not long passed his fortieth year. They gradually destroyed his national forces, they triumphed over him, they belittled him by one humiliation after another, and at last, before he had reached his fiftieth year, they put him to death. With him died the English monarchy – he was the last ruling King of England, the last who governed as Kings had governed for untold years.
This child so born in 1600, and so destined to see the tragic close of all for which he had stood, was Charles Stuart.
Why did so mighty a change come upon him and upon his office, and in his time? How did a revolution so complete, and, as it would seem, so improbable and unprepared, come to so rapid a conclusion with himself for the victim?
Two elements combine in all such problems: Circumstance; and the Character of the Man. The Circumstance, when we shall have probed it to its depth and comprehended it in full, exhibits a process apparently inevitable. Men are tempted to say when they know what forces have been at work to produce some astonishing historical thing, "I now see that it could not have been avoided, and that no matter who had been there he would have suffered the same fate." But this is a mechanical illusion, for there is also present the factor of personality.
It is not conceivable that another character seated on Charles Stuart's throne would have lived to see the monarchy at his death what it had been at his birth; but it is true that there were those qualities in the man which by their temper, rather than their proportion, of strength and weakness, not only rendered the evil more certain but gave it the shape it took.
It was not only fate, it was also something in Charles Stuart himself – his virtues mainly – which destroyed the Crown of England and the power thereof.
It behoves us then as we approach this great story first to see as clearly as may be what the Circumstance was – how monarchy and its society stood in that year 1600 in England, and why there lay within the structure of the community, as it then was, the forces that would bring down the Throne. Only when we have thus understood the Circumstance can we proceed to the Character and its development in life; only then can we observe how that Character reacted to such Circumstance, how the Circumstance thwarted and constrained the Character, and led it down the paths to sudden death.
CHAPTER 2THE CIRCUMSTANCE
WHEN THAT BOY WAS BORN IN THE YEAR 1600, THE BOY IN whose person the English monarchy was to fail, how stood that monarchy, the matter of the whole affair? The aged Elizabeth sat on the Throne of England. She had still three more years to live. About her there still shone – but falsely – the splendour which had illumined the English Crown in its highest days. But her long reign had been imperilled, tortuous and unhappy, with a declining population and wealth and with a people divided among themselves not only on her own her right to rule (for she was a bastard in the eyes of Europe and in the eyes of many of her subjects) but also on the right or wrong of that new society which a group of political and religious adventurers had established in her name.
Yet when old Elizabeth died, more than forty mortal years after her crowning, the monarchy of England was still in all outward appearance what it had been – wholly master of the State and that from which emanated all government.
The person of the monarch was as sacred as ever, spoken of with the same awe; the office that person held was still higher than all other human estate and was thought to be responsible only to God. There was still an impassable moral gulf between the holder of that office and the greatest subject. Even in the unhappy old Queen's absence, the men who brought in the dishes to her table genuflected to the empty chair wherein she would have sat; she was treated with as much pomp as you could find in any court of Europe, even in the new and glorious court of Spain itself.
But there was between the appearance of all this and the real thing beneath, a threatening contrast. It is often so with institutions already undermined; they are at their most splendid external phase when they are ripe for downfall. For power was passing from the Crown, though power seemed wholly to proceed therefrom, and though the rich men who were themselves the agents of the decline in kingship, did not realise that they were themselves stepping into its place. The old Elizabeth believed in her own power, as the century entered, her great subjects believed in it, though it was already flickering out.
What were the reasons for this? Why was the English monarchy in especial suffering decline, while monarchy elsewhere in Christendom was growing stronger than ever? Why was English kingship standing prepared for replacement by the power of the wealthier classes?
These were the reasons: —
For the last fifty years and more first, a child (a weak and diseased child), then an elderly woman also diseased, isolated and out of touch with her time, then this third, this woman Elizabeth, abnormal in physique, repeatedly sickening, had been in turn called sovereign. Where everything was so personal, such a succession had progressively weakened the power of the Crown, for there had been no King. The forms of awe, of dread, of worship, which were proffered – and were sincerely proffered – could not make up for the lack of real strength. The office required a man, and for over fifty years there had been no man.
In the opening phase when the diseased child was nominally monarch for a little space of six years, power was openly exercised by a few very wealthy men, most of them quite newly enriched, who relying on a group of violent religious revolutionaries, imposed a new, detested worship, and under the cover of it had looted the royal fortune at will. This was the so-called "reign" of little half-brother, Edward, the sixth of that name, who died exhausted before he was seventeen.
Mary, the elderly woman who succeeded, certainly legitimate, in her youth the idol of London and the populace, had been kept away from public eyes for many years; she had lived secluded. She restored the ancient popular religion, but she violently inflamed the small but intense, determined and growing minority who were bent upon achieving the religious revolution. Under her acceptance and in her name, the Council persecuted all dissidents; they burnt heretics for four years and did but exasperate division.
Elizabeth herself had come to the Throne, though of a birth the legitimacy of which was doubtfully admitted, she had been put upon the Throne not as of right, but by the support of two men – William Cecil and her brother-in-law, the King of Spain. She was the candidate of the Spaniards, against the French who favoured the candidature of the legitimate heiress, Mary, the young Queen of Scotland. By this inception all her reign was coloured. The genius of William Cecil moulded it. He was the chief and the presiding genius among a clique of men all bent on enriching themselves; Elizabeth for their figurehead and their symbol – and it was William Cecil who governed England, not the Queen. It was he who chose agents of high ability (such as the master of his spy-system, Walsingham), he who, with the rest, carried out a fixed policy, foreign and domestic.
That policy was directed to avoiding disturbance in England over the religious quarrel which had everywhere bred war and was in process of ruining the strength of France, close at hand. He set up a newly established Church, meeting the intense religious revolution half-way and confirming its principal demands – the abolition of the Mass, the marriage of clergy, the liturgy in English, and the repudiation of the unity of Christendom through the repudiation of the authority of the Papacy. William Cecil more than any other one man by his individual genius began to make the worship of the nation replace the old idea of Catholic Europe. It was through him and his that the quarrel with Spain, his original supporter and ally was fomented and most successfully brought to its fruit by long and subtle intrigue, until at the very end of the effort he could defy the Spanish power. It was through him and his that Elizabeth's cousin, the unfortunate Queen of Scotland and rightful Queen of England, taking refuge in England from a rebellion at home, was more and more strictly imprisoned and finally put to death – with the responsibility for that killing thrown upon the exceedingly reluctant Elizabeth. She had never intended it, it was done in spite of her, although she would have been glad to see her rival put out of the way so only that she had not the blame of overtly ordering the death.
This work of the great Cecil was continued by his second son, Robert, the big-headed humpback dwarf, of a genius almost equal to his father's.
There had thus been more than half a century by the time this boy, Charles Stuart was born in 1600 – he who was to inherit the Throne of England as grandson of the murdered Queen of Scotland – a passing of real rule from the hands of the monarch to the hands of others.
This progressive decline might have been arrested by the coming to the Throne of some strong and masculine personality, had the long weakness of monarchs been the only form of decay in the royal power; but there was present another form of decay, more continuous, even less apparent but more profound and of increasing effect. The Crown was decaying financially.
Power may not be created by wealth: it may come first and seize wealth; but it is not compatible with lack of wealth; and the wealth of the English Crown, the secure income of it, and the sufficiency of that income to purchase the things and services whereby the Crown must maintain its government, was getting less and less. This process of financial decline had also been growing for much more than half a century – that is, for all the active lifetime of a man: during the whole of that period a public frame of mind was established and habits of thought and procedure in public affairs became rooted: an unconscious taking-for-granted the impoverishment of the government and the habit – or right – of subjects to resist new claims for supply. This financial decay of the Crown of England, continuous and unchecked, might be compared to the process of anaemia in a human body. It was a loss of blood going on all the time.
Producing this impoverishment there were three causes at work; but to understand how those causes had their effect we must first grasp what it is difficult for the modern mind to grasp – something quite contrary to our daily experience as it has been formed by centuries of political habit: the income of the government was based by immemorial tradition upon endowment and not upon taxes.
Men had thought for centuries past of the Crown as something with an income of its own like the income of a private man (though very much larger), and derived, like the income of a private man, from the administration of its own sources of revenue. There was no distinction between the money which a King spent upon his private trinkets and what he spent upon his ships and the salaries of his officials, his embassies, the whole conduct of his control over society. Today we can only think of the income of the government in terms of money supplied to it out of the private incomes of the governed – what we call "taxes." This idea of regular taxes did not, in 1600, exist. It had never hitherto existed. The King paid for what he regularly needed, however public the service, out of what he privately owned – his control of the forest and waste lands, his ownership of manors, his feudal dues paid to him personally as an owner of feudal rights over his direct tenants, through wardships, and the proceeds of his courts of justice. And the very word "tax" meant in those days almost the opposite of what it means today. It did not mean a regular recurrent levy; it meant a special payment made to meet a particular crisis, and not to be repeated.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Charles I by Hilaire Belloc. Copyright © 2003 IHS Press. Excerpted by permission of IHS Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Dedication,Title Page,
Copyright Page,
FOREWORD,
INTRODUCTION,
THE PROBLEM,
THE CIRCUMSTANCE,
STUART,
THE FORMATIVE YEARS,
BUCKINGHAM,
MATURITY,
SCOTLAND,
THE EFFORT FOR UNITY,
THE MENACE,
THE CRISIS,
THE GREAT REBELLION,
THE TRIUMPH OF THE GREAT REBELLION,
THE HOSTAGE,
THE KILLING OF THE KING,