A History of Britain, Volume 2 (24 page)

‘I see I am before a power,' was Charles's accurately laconic response. For the remainder of the proceedings the court merely sat as a committee eventually passing judgement on 27 January and sentencing him to be ‘put to death, by the severing his Head from his Body'. The following day Charles was brought back to hear his fate. When he asked to be heard again, he was about to be denied when one of the commissioners, John Downes, protested that Charles ought to be allowed to speak, drawing from Cromwell an intimidating rebuke – ‘What ails thee?' When he heard himself condemned as a ‘tyrant, traitor and murderer, a public and implacable enemy to the Commonwealth of England', Charles allowed himself a last, droll chuckle. Once again he asked to speak and once again was denied on the not unreasonable grounds that he ‘had not owned us as a court'. He was taken away protesting, ‘I am not suffered to speak. Expect what Justice other people will have.' A bare fifty-nine members of the court signed the death warrant, Cromwell and Ireton prominent among them.

Elizabeth I had wanted Mary Stuart's execution to be carried out in the utmost secrecy, away from the public gaze. Cromwell and Ireton were convinced that as many people as possible should see Charles beheaded, both to dissuade any attempts at rescue and to do God's work without the slightest tremor of shame or hesitation. So a scaffold was erected in Whitehall and a huge throng gathered on the cold morning of 30 January. Charles was walked up the back stairs of Inigo Jones's Banqueting House
through the great hall where he and Henrietta Maria had danced in royal masques celebrating their loving communion with Britannia and with each other. The Palladian windows of the palace had long been boarded up, so that Rubens' great paintings in the ceiling overhead could hardly have been visible to the little king as he stepped through the room and out through an opened window on to the platform, where death awaited. But up there none the less were the great painted jubilations of Stuart power and wisdom: Peace clasping Prosperity; the protection of Mercury and Minerva; the enraptured union of the crowns embodied in embracing putti. This insistent, unreal vision of a happy, united Britain, this compulsion to bring together those ill-matched partners, Scotland and England, was what had sustained the Stuarts and what (not for the last time) had ruined them.

Perfectly composed and dressed in two shirts, lest shivering be mistaken for fear, Charles noticed that the block was extremely low to the wooden platform and asked if it might not be raised a little. Apparently it could not, no reason being given. And at last he was allowed to give his speech, written out on a paper that he opened on the scaffold. ‘I never did begin a War with the two Houses of Parliament, and I call God to witness, to whom I must shortly make an account, That I never did intend for to incroach upon their Privileges, they began upon me.' Then followed an instant history lecture, his much delayed, personal response to the Grand Remonstrance of 1642. But it was not Edward Hyde's thought-out political theory of a constitutional monarchy so much as an expression of personal sorrow and anger. Charles remained indignant that the power of the militia had been taken from him and deeply remorseful for his collusion in the unjust death of Strafford for which God was now properly punishing him. He ended by declaring that ‘For the People . . . truly I desire their Liberty and Freedom as much as any body whomsoever; but I must tell you, That their Liberty and Freedom consist in having of Government, those Laws, by which their Life and their Goods may be most their own. It is not for having share in Government (Sir) that is nothing pertaining to them. A Subject and a Soveraign are clean different things.'

No one had ever accused Charles I of pandering to the public. From beginning to end, through all the tactical twists and turns of his short-sighted but not ignoble career, he had remained utterly constant in his belief in the divinity of his appointment. The celestial hosannas of Rubens' pictures were for the likes of him and him alone. ‘I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible Crown; where no disturbance can be, no disturbance in the world,' he said, in that deep, quiet voice. Stray hairs
tucked back into his white cap, he lay down before the low block, and the executioner, Richard Brandon, cut through his neck with a single blow.

Cromwell had given notice that he would ‘cut his head off with the Crown on it'. But the famous ‘groan by the thousands then present' that greeted the king's head as it dropped into the bloody basket and was then held aloft by Brandon could not have been very reassuring. For the person of the monarchy had already proved to be separable from the institution. In his last days, while yielding nothing of the highness of his sovereignty, Charles had managed, despite all the attempts to gag him, to assert a teaching that he would have done better to have learned seven years before: that armed power could not remake the broken legitimacy of the English, much less the Scottish, state. The point was well taken. But if anything had been learned from the tragic experience of the reign of Charles I, it was that henceforth the mere assertion of a divinely appointed right to rule would not suffice for political peace. It would only be when a monarch of both England and Scotland would manage to square the circle, and see that the authority of the Crown might actually be strengthened not compromised by parliamentary partnership, that the violent pendulum swings of the English and Scots polities would find their equipoise. That is what the notoriously anachronistic, Whiggish and self-congratulatory Victorians believed, at any rate. And, as a matter of fact, they were right.

FOR THE FORTHRIGHT
and the adamant, it was time to begin again; to bleach the country of the stains of the past. ‘Whatever our Fore-fathers were,' declared Henry Marten in parliament, ‘or whatever they did or suffered or were enforced to yeeld unto, we are the men of the present age and ought to be absolutely free from all kinds of exorbitancie, molestation or Arbitrary Power.' All over the country in the early months of 1649, acts of obliteration, big and little, got under way. Young Isaac Archer, living near Colchester, had been spending time innocently gluing pieces of decorative silk to prints, when his father, William, ‘with a knife, I know not why, cutt out the picture'. The picture was of Charles I. In the weeks after the king's execution, the remnant of the purged parliament lopped off its own head by abolishing the House of Lords as ‘useless and dangerous'. The monarchy itself followed the peerage into the trash, denounced as ‘unnecessary, burdensome, and dangerous to the liberty, safety and publick interest of the people'. The Great Seal, which gave acts of parliament the force of law and which bore the likeness of the monarch, was defaced and replaced by the stamp of the House of Commons, bearing the optimistic inscription ‘In the First Year of Freedom by God's blessing restored 1648'. Writs, which had formerly required acts to be carried out in the name of the king, were now issued in ‘the name of the Keepers of the Liberty of England'.

So there was a ‘Commonwealth'. But what was that – an absence or a presence? Official bravura papered over popular uncertainty and confusion as to where, exactly, sovereignty now lay. There was no shortage of
suggestions, of course. ‘At that time,' wrote Lucy Hutchinson, the wife of a staunchly Puritan soldier, ‘every man allmost was fancying forms of government.' The problem was who was to judge between them. To look for arbitration was to stare at a void.

As it happens, voids were a topic of compulsive fascination among philosophers, both natural and political. Learned disputes raged over whether vacuums could occur at all in nature; and if they did, whether they indicated utter vacancy, or the presence of a mysteriously ‘subtle matter', albeit invisible and indeterminate. In 1644 the Italian physicist Evangelista Torricelli had performed the famous experiment which set off the debate. Torricelli took a glass tube, sealed at one end, filled it with mercury and then put it upside down into a basin, also filled with mercury. He had made, in effect, a primitive barometer. Atmospheric pressure pushed the mercury up the tube, but not all the way. Between the top of the mercury level and the sealed end of the tube was a space. But what was inside that space: a something or a nothing? This was what divided ‘vacuists' from ‘plenists', those for whom a vacuum was a possibility in nature and those for whom the
horror vacui
was a paramount truth.

The philosopher Thomas Hobbes was a plenist, someone for whom a vacuum was as abhorrent in the government of the state as in the operations of nature. When Charles I was executed in January 1649, Hobbes was living in Paris, debating the mystery of the Torricellian gap with French philosophers like Marin Mersenne, and writing, among other works, his answer to the dilemma posed by the vacuum of sovereignty. Published two years later, in 1651, his
Leviathan
would be profoundly shocking to the royalists who had confidently assumed Hobbes to be one of their own, for it seemed to counsel submission, indeed
unconditional
submission, to the self-appointed powers which had rushed into the space left by the dead king. Worse, in that same year, Hobbes acted on his convictions by returning to England, now governed by parliament and Council of State, both filled with unrepentant regicides. For someone thought to have owed everything he had – station, employment, security – to royalist families like the Cavendishes, this was unforgivable apostasy.

Hobbes, the son of a Wiltshire parson and the nephew of a prosperous glover who had given him the means to be educated at Oxford, had subsequently been tutor to the future second Earl of Devonshire, William Cavendish. No sooner had he come into his own than he proceeded to squander it, to the detriment of his old tutor who, according to his friend John Aubrey (the nonpareil of seventeenth-century gossips), wore out his shoes and caught colds from wet feet going ‘up and downe to borrow money'. But after the second earl died in 1628, Hobbes continued to
collect monies for the Devonshires, extracting the forced loan of 1628 and billeting soldiers in the homes of loan refusers. In 1640 he had stood, unsuccessfully, for parliament from Derby, as a loyal champion of royal prerogative and the personal rule. Perhaps, though, his defeat in the polls made Hobbes (who prided himself on the clarity of his prescience) see the writing on the wall. For he took himself off to exile in Paris well before the war began. His patrons the Cavendishes duly lost battles and fortunes and then trooped to Paris themselves to join the court in exile. Still in favour, Hobbes became mathematics tutor to the Prince of Wales and to his prematurely dissipated companion, the second Duke of Buckingham. Geometry, which for Hobbes was one of the few uncontestable realities in the universe, bored both his charges. According to Aubrey, Buckingham relieved the tedium of his instruction by languidly masturbating, while Charles thought his tutor ‘the oddest fellow he ever met with'.

The publication of
Leviathan
would certainly not have made the prince any less bemused. Apart from supplying arguments for accepting the outcome of the civil war, it also seemed to attack institutional Christianity with such withering scepticism that in court circles Hobbes was deemed little better than an atheist. ‘It was below the education of Mr. Hobbes,' complained Edward Hyde, who had enjoyed his company in the circle of Viscount Falkland at Great Tew, ‘& a very ungenerous and vile thing to publish his
Leviathan
with so much malice and acrimony against the Church of England when it was scarce struggling in its own ruins.'

Hobbes was a materialist, a rationalist, and not really a Christian in the sense of subscribing to gospels full of miracles and sacred apparitions. But he certainly believed in some sort of deity to whom alone otherwise absolute sovereigns had to render account. If for nothing else, Hobbes's God was needed to keep Leviathan honest. And he was certainly unequivocal in his condemnation of the rebellion against the king. His later history of the civil war,
Behemoth
(1679), begins with an imaginary view from the Devil's mountain, of ‘all kind of Injustice, and of all kinds of Folly that the world could afford'. But in 1650 he believed that moral anathema was no help at all in answering the paramount questions for everyone caught in the sovereignty vacuum. It was all very well to follow the lament ‘the king is dead' with the shout ‘long live the king' if you happened to be in Paris, since that was indeed where the new king could be found. But suppose you were stuck in Wiltshire? Then the questions that preyed on you were not about propriety but self-preservation. To pretend otherwise was self-deluding humbug. Simple but inescapable anxieties forced themselves on any rational person. What will become of
me and mine? Who should be obeyed? On whom can we depend for our elementary needs of safety? Who will stop differences of opinion and differences of religion – for, argued Hobbes, there will always be such differences, incapable of adjudication – from becoming causes for endless, murderous war? Who will stop soldiers from burning dwellings, stealing animals and assaulting the defenceless? Who will enforce contracts – the very touchstone of justice? Who would allow us to sleep quietly in our beds? And how may such a protector be known: by faith or by reason?

They are the terrors of orphaned children who had seen their father-ruler killed in front of them; who, in counties ravaged by war, had seen familiar adjudicators – bishops and priests – effaced from the landscape of authority. Those anxieties would not be put to rest with the return of the bishops and the judges when Charles II was restored to his throne in 1660 and received his old maths tutor once more at court. For the Restoration closed, but it did not heal, the puncture wounds with which the civil war had pierced the body politic. Beneath the skin there was still traumatized tissue, which could be made raw and bloody again by collisions with misfortune. Plague, fire, defeat and paranoia would shake the confidence of the English in the protective authority of the throne and would make allegiance once more arguable, contingent. Forty years after the Great Seal of the beheaded king was defaced, his son James would drop it into the Thames in an act of perverse self-destruction. The political barometer would feel the pressure of altered atmosphere. The mercury of liberty would rise. A vacancy at the top would be declared.