The Pursuit of Glory, page 26
But Charles had a higher objective than proving the incompetence of his judges. Knowing that such a state trial could only produce one verdict (guilty) and one sentence (death), he set about constructing a programme for posterity. Offering no compromise on monarchical authority, he made it more palatable both by invoking divine support and by contrasting the deep historical roots of his own position with the radical novelty of his opponents: ‘I have a trust committed to me by God, by old and lawful descent; I will not betray it, to answer to a new unlawful authority.’ More importantly, he stressed that it was he who was the true champion of the people of England: ‘do you pretend what you will, I stand more for their liberties. For 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 he calls his own.’ In a particularly memorable utterance combining aristocratic insouciance with populism, he proclaimed: ‘For the charge, I value it not a rush; it is the liberty of the people of England that I stand for.’
This dual appeal to religion and liberty he took with him to the place of execution on 30 January 1649. Had he raised his eyes to the ceiling of the Banqueting Hall of Whitehall Palace, as he made his way to the window leading to the scaffold erected against the wall outside, he would have passed under Rubens’ great fresco depicting the apotheosis of his father, James I. He was about to achieve his own very different apotheosis. Famously wearing two shirts, lest the crowd might think he shivered from fear rather than cold, he conducted himself with the serene dignity and courage of which enduring myths are made. Well might Andrew Marvell write:
He nothing common did or mean
Upon that memorable Scene:
But with his keener Eye
The Axe’s edge did try:
Nor call’d the Gods with vulgar spight
To vindicate his helpless Right,
But bow’d his comely Head,
Down as upon a Bed.
His final words could be heard only by those surrounding him, but they were to have a mighty resonance when published. In a brilliant stroke of self-deprecation, he acknowledged the justice of God’s retribution–not because he was guilty of the crimes invented by his accusers, but because he had allowed his faithful and guiltless servant Strafford to be judicially murdered by Parliament in 1641. He reaffirmed his commitment to monarchical liberty, presenting himself as ‘a martyr of the people’: ‘Truly I desire their liberty and freedom as much as anybody whomsoever; but I must tell you their liberty and freedom consists in having of government, those laws by which their life and their goods may be most their own. It is not for having a share in government, sir, that is nothing pertaining to them. A subject and a sovereign are clear different things.’ So what Cromwell and the army had hoped would be an execution of not just a man but a whole political system turned out to be ‘a massive propaganda victory’ (David L. Smith) for the royalists. As the axe fell, there rose from the crowd not a shout of triumph but ‘such a groan as I never heard before, and I desire I may never hear again’, as one observer recorded.
For those who could not attend the execution, there were to be plenty of representations available within a very short time of the event. Prints provided a visual narrative of the events, including the king’s last walk to the scaffold, the moment of truth, the executioner holding aloft the severed head, spectators rushing to dip their handkerchiefs in the royal blood, and so on. For the literate, verbal accounts–often also illustrated–flowed from the presses, especially from the enterprising publishers of the Dutch Republic. Both genres were combined in the most successful of all memorial volumes–Eikon Basilike [Royal Portrait]: The Portraiture of His Sacred Majesty in His Solitudes and Sufferings. Advance copies became available on the very day that the axe fell and hawkers were selling the first print-run of 2,000 within the week. Purporting to be the King’s own work, although John Gauden, Bishop of Exeter, had played a major part in turning royal ideas into polished prose, it proved to be the publishing sensation of the century. Despite the high price–fifteen shillings initially–it had appeared in thirty-five editions by the end of 1649, not to mention eight on the continent. By 1660 it had been translated into Latin (more than once), Dutch, French, German and Danish in twenty foreign-language editions. It might be noted in passing that, when he commissioned his chaplain to translate it into Latin, Charles stated that he wished ‘that it should be delivered to the world in a language common to the most part of the world’. For the reader in a hurry, there were extracts and digests; for the poetic reader, there was even a version in verse. The first edition and many of the more expensive editions were adorned with a graphic frontispiece, depicting the King as a martyr, clasping a crown of thorns representing his suffering in this world, but steadfastly directing his gaze upwards to the eternal glory that awaited him in the next. The volume’s twenty-eight chapters had three objectives: a justification of the King’s actions in the past, a programme for royalists in the future, and pious edification through prayers and contemplations. Combining all three was Charles’s political testament, in the form of an open letter to the Prince of Wales. It will serve as well as any other contemporary document to illustrate the essentially religious nature of political discourse in mid-seventeenth-century Europe. As Charles puts it: ‘The true glory of princes consists in advancing God’s glory, in the maintenance of true religion and the church’s good.’ It was only after God, the royal soul and the Anglican Church had been attended to that ‘the next main hinge on which your prosperity will depend and move’ was considered. This was ‘civil justice’, those settled laws of the kingdom which made the people subjects not slaves and maintained a mutually beneficial relationship between royal prerogatives and the people’s ‘ingenuous liberties, which consists in the enjoyment of the fruits of their industry and the benefit of those laws to which they themselves have consented’.
This artful publication combined firmness with magnanimity, resolution with clemency. No wonder that it was showered with encomiums by the royalist pamphleteers who flocked to publicize this ‘everlasting stupendous monument of a book, raised higher than the Pyramids of Egypt’, whose ‘very reading of it aggravateth our loss of so gracious and excellent a prince’. It helped to ensure that royalism remained both a populist and a popular force in English politics. It was the republicanism of Lord Protector Cromwell and his Commonwealth that from this moment was increasingly on the defensive. It also helped to sustain the English monarchy through the trials and tribulations that awaited it at the inept hands of Charles’s two sons. Charles II and James II would have done well to mark, learn and inwardly digest their father’s advice: ‘Keep you to true principles of piety, virtue and honour, and you shall never want a kingdom.’
By 1793, however, piety, virtue and honour were no longer enough. Louis XVI had demonstrated all three in abundance, yet still lost his kingdom and his head. It is of course impossible to determine exactly when his end became inevitable–perhaps on 21 June 1791 when he tried to run away from the Revolution and was caught at Varennes; perhaps on 1 October 1791 when a brand-new National Assembly was convened; perhaps on 20 April 1792 when war was declared; perhaps on 20 November 1792 when compromising documents were discovered in the strong-box that had come to light in the Tuileries. Certain it was that by the time it was decided to put him on trial on 3 December 1792, there could be only one verdict. Louis himself knew this. As he said to his chief defender, Malesherbes, in the course of their first interview: ‘I am sure they will make me perish; they have the power and the will to do so. That does not matter. Let us concern ourselves with my trial as if I could win; and I will win, in effect, since the memory that I will leave will be without stain.’
He approached his final ordeal with stolid calm. Not even his gruelling and humiliating appearance at the bar of the National Convention on 11 December to answer to the charges could affect his fabled appetite: on his return to the Temple he consumed six cutlets, a whole chicken and ‘some eggs’. Yet he had just made his first mistake. By agreeing to a trial and asking for counsel, he had recognized the competence of the National Convention to try him. So when his defence counsel, de Sèze, pointed out that the constitution of 1791 stated unequivocally that ‘the person of the King is inviolable and sacred’, the pass had already been sold. Nor was the ingenious appeal to Rousseau’s dictum that natural law could not be applied to an individual anything more than a debating point. The deputies of the Convention were indeed acting as both accusers and judges, so that Louis was unique in having ‘neither the rights of a citizen nor the prerogatives of a king’, but that was just what one had to expect from a system founded on the sovereignty of the people, exercised through a single-chamber legislature–and to which he had given his consent. By the standards of Charles I, Louis XVI had been a model of compromise, not to say compliance. Perhaps it was just because he lacked that haughty Stuart disdain that he cut such a less impressive figure during his own endgame. In a way, it was a tale of two hats: Charles had contemptuously kept his hat on throughout his trial; Louis had feebly donned the Phrygian cap of liberty to placate the crowd that invaded the Tuileries Palace on 17 June 1792.
Reading David Hume’s History of England, as he awaited the summons to the scaffold, could not have told Louis how to save his life but it did show him how to die. Like Charles, he studiously avoided any sign of fear. On his last evening he enjoyed his usual large meal–on this occasion pan-fried chicken, pastries, boiled beef and turnip purée, washed down by red wine plus a glass of Malaga with dessert–and then slept soundly. On the morning of 21 January 1793 he rose at five, heard Mass at six, conducted by the non-juring Irish priest Henry Essex Edgeworth de Firmont (non-juring in the sense that he refused to take the oath to the Civil constitution of the Clergy), took communion, and awaited the arrival of the Convention’s emissary. As reported by Edgeworth, he remained unshakeably convinced of both his innocence and his redemption, saying: ‘My God, how happy I am to have my principles! Where would I be without them? With them even death appears sweet to me! Yes, there exists an incorruptible judge in heaven who will know how to give me the justice that men refuse me here.’ Before he could claim his reward, however, Louis faced a prolonged ordeal, as the carriage sent to bring him from the Temple to the place de la Révolution (previously place Louis XV, subsequently place de la Concorde) took an hour-and-a-half to travel through the crowded streets lined by soldiers four ranks deep. Louis kept his eyes on his breviary, probably not even aware of the quixotic attempt to rescue him launched by Baron de Batz and four others. Reaching the raised scaffold at 10 a.m., his hair was cut by the executioner Sanson, as Edgeworth murmured words of spiritual comfort. Louis then attempted to make a speech, first silencing the constant roll of drums by a shout. He had managed only to say ‘I die innocent. I pardon my enemies and I hope that my blood will be useful to the French, that it will appease God’s anger…’ when the drummers were hurriedly told to resume. Quickly strapped to the plank, he became the most prominent advertisement of the efficience of Dr Joseph-Ignace Guillotin’s invention, as Father Edgeworth shouted above the sounds of the drums ‘Son of Saint Louis, ascend to Heaven!’
The revolutionaries proved to be much more thorough in their completion of the grisly process than the Parliamentarian predecessors. Whereas the latter had Charles I’s head sewn back on his body and buried in St George’s Chapel at Windsor, Louis’ physical reamins were taken straight to the Madeleine cemetery, placed in an open wooden coffin, covered in a double layer of quicklime and interred in a deep grave which was immediately filled. The French revolutionaries were not getting rid of an evil king, rather the institution of monarchy itself. In their eyes, Louis XVI was guilty not so much because he had committed acts of treason as for having reigned at all. In Sait-Just’s pithy formulation: ‘No man can reign innocently’. For this point of view, the killing of the king was an act of ritual cleansing. They thought they were replacing the myth of magical monarchical authority with the myth of a phoenix-like republic rising from the blood of the dead king (Clifford Geertz). As one revolutionary newspaper put it: ‘The blood of Loius Capet, shed by the blade of the law on 21 January 1793, cleanses us of a stigma of 1300 years.’ But it turned out that Louis’ twin ideals–Roman Catholicism and monarchism–could not be dissolved by quicklime. However complex the motivation behind their rising may have been, the counter-revolutionaries of the Vendée chose to call themselves the ‘Catholic and Royal Army’. If a republican phoenix did soar from the blood that dripped from Louis’ severed head, so did its monarchical antithesis.
As we shall see, much can be learnt about the nature of politics in this period from the apparently similar fates of Charles I and Louis XVI, but first it needs to be recorded that monarchs were as much at risk from the assassin’s knife as from the executioner’s axe. At Versailles on 5 January 1757 Louis XV was fortunate that Robert-François Damiens’s knife-thrust missed all vital organs when it penetrated three inches between his fourth and fifth ribs. Unwilling to believe that Damiens had acted alone, his interrogators soon resorted to red-hot pincers and other forms of torture to extract the names of his accomplices. He would not–could not–comply, although if he was the nobody he claimed to be, he was ‘a nobody not unknown by some pretty important somebodies’ (Dale van Kley). The only motivation he would reveal to his torturers was anger at the misery of the people and royal support for bishops and clergy ‘who ought not to refuse the sacraments to people who live well’. That last criticism place him among the supporters of Jansenism, the movement for reform in the Church associated with Bishop Jansen of Ypres (1585–1638), whose stress on the gratuitous nature of divine grace and opposition to the dominant Jesuits had proved especially popular in France. As the Parlement of Paris had always been a hotbed of Jansenism, its members moved quickly to dissociate themselves with Damiens, suggesting indeed that he had been put up to his crimes by the Jesuits. When they tried him, the Parlementaires showed they had nothing to do with him, by decreeing that the form of his execution should replicate the grisly punishment meted out to Ravaillac, the successful assailant of Henry IV in 1610. The details of the sentence provide an excellent if distasteful insight into the judicial attitudes of mid-eighteenth-century France:
The said Robert-François Damiens has been convicted of having committed a very mean, very terrible, and very dreadful parricidal crime against the King. The said Damiens is sentenced to pay for his crime in front of the main gate of the Church of Paris. He will be taken there in a tipcart naked and will hold a burning wax torch weighing two pounds. There, on his knees, he will say and declare that he had committed a very mean, very terrible and very dreadful parricide, and that he had hurt the King…He will repent and ask God, the King and Justice to forgive him. When this will be done, he will be taken in the same tipcart to the Place de Grève and will be put on a scaffold. Then his breasts, arms, thighs, and legs will be tortured. While holding the knife with which he committed the said Parricide, his right hand will be burnt. On his tortured body parts, melted lead, boiling oil, burning pitch, and melted wax and sulphur will be thrown. Then four horses will pull him apart until he is dismembered. His limbs will be thrown on the stake, and his ashes will be spread. All his belongings, furniture, housings, wherever they are, will be confiscated and given to the King. Before the execution, the said Damiens will be asked to tell the names of his accomplices.
In the event, the actual execution was even more ghastly than this scenario suggests. The four horses proved unable to tear Damiens apart, not even after two reinforcements had been hitched up, so the executioner was obliged to employ an axe to sever what parts of the limbs were still attached. The victim remained conscious throughout, repeatedly shrieking ‘My God, have pity on me! Jesus, help me!’, and–according to one observer–was still alive when his torso was thrown on to the pyre. It must be hoped that Damiens found comfort in the Christian charity of the priest in attendance ‘who despite his great age did not spare himself in offering consolation to the patient’. As if that were not enough, the authorities then required Damiens’s children and aged parents to ‘leave the realm with the injunction never to return on pain of hanging and strangulation without formality or trial’.
Across the Channel, the regicidal tradition also flickered on occasions. George III survived two attempts on his life, the first in 1786 when Margaret Nicholson, who believed she was the rightful sovereign, tried to stab him with a dessert knife as he alighted from his horse at St James’s Palace. It was the King who intervened to save her from being lynched by the crowd, calling ‘The poor creature is mad! Do not hurt her! She has not hurt me!’ His assailant was committed to a lunatic asylum, where she spent the next forty-two years. A more serious assault was launched at the Drury Lane Theatre in 1800 by James Hadfield, an army veteran who had sustained eight sabre wounds to the head at the battle of Roubaix in 1794. His pistol-shot narrowly missed its target, lodging in a pillar of the royal box. His dementia took the form of religious delusion, specifically the belief that his death at the hands of the state would effect the Second Coming of Christ. We shall never know whether he was right, for the state declined to oblige, incarcerating him instead (for forty-one years in his case). The only effect of these two episodes was to give the English public well-publicized opportunities to express their devotion to their King. At Drury Lane Theatre no less a person than Sheridan quickly improvised an additional verse to ‘God Save the King’, which was sung to a rapturous audience by Michael Kelly (who had created the role of Don Basilio in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro at Vienna in 1786):
