by John Higgs
As Parliament saw it, the fact that Charles was so wrong about everything meant the country had no choice but to end his absolute monarchy and attempt an early prototype of what would later be called constitutional monarchy. This meant that the monarch would be stripped of all their political powers, yet retain their symbolic position of the head of state. Parliament would take over the task of running the country, while the king could swan around in nice palaces and occasionally wave at people. A constitutional monarchy and the divine right of kings were very different things, so there was not much scope for finding an acceptable compromise between them. Dead-locked, with no chance of negotiation, parliament and monarchy fell into a long and bloody civil war.
The English Civil War put Charles on a collision course with a country gentleman turned military leader, the fundamentalist puritan Oliver Cromwell. Like Charles, Cromwell also believed his actions were guided by God. As there was no way that both Cromwell and the king were correct, the war itself became an ideological battlefield that pitted scripture against the divine right of kings. The result of that war, it was then thought, would reveal the true mind of the Creator. And following the defeat of the royalist forces by Cromwell’s New Model Army, it turned out that God was considerably less impressed by monarchy than was previously thought.
With Charles under arrest the country faced an unprecedented period of instability. Parliament dithered, pockets of royalist sympathizers regrouped and the monarchies of Europe generally just freaked out. It gradually became apparent that the best way to secure the status of the revolution was to chop the king’s head off. This would put to bed the thorny problem of monarchy in the Christian era once and for all.
Following a show trial intended to give legal protection to those who arranged the regicide, King Charles I of England, Scotland and Ireland walked to the scaffold at the Palace of Whitehall on a cold January morning in 1649, made a dignified speech and placed his head on the block. One neat swing of the axe later, the nations of the British Isles were no longer a monarchy. For those intent on committing regicide, beheading was the only method worthy of consideration. Regular people were put to death in all sorts of inventive and unpleasant ways, such as hanging, disembowelling or burning at the stake. But a king had to be beheaded, for the act represented the removal of the head of the body politic. Even in death, kings are inherently symbolic.
In the pre-Enlightenment seventeenth century, the non-existence of monarchy was almost unthinkable and the fact that some soldiers and politicians had taken it upon themselves to kill the king was utterly shocking. The beheading triggered a wave of rebellion from those who never really believed that things would go this far. Cromwell had to take his army north in order to remind those who had forgotten, particularly the Catholics of Scotland and Ireland, who had just had their king butchered without their consent, exactly whose side God had been on. Cromwell went on to commit some of the worst atrocities the British Isles had ever seen. The sieges of Drogheda and Wexford, and the Act for the Settlement of Ireland that followed in 1652, can only really be described as wilful religious genocide.
In light of this, it is surprising that Cromwell had a reputation for religious tolerance. As he saw it, what a godly nation needed was a church that worshipped in accordance to scripture. To be more specific, that church needed to interpret the Bible in just the same way that he did. With the main bulk of the nation’s faith in accordance with his liking, he was content to argue that the principle of freedom of conscience should be respected, and that no godly person should be persecuted if they were compelled to follow a different Christian path. Calvinists, Lutherans, Presbyterians and Huguenots would all be free to worship as they felt compelled to, even if they were not allowed to preach or convert. But there was one exception to Cromwell’s belief in freedom of conscience, and that was Catholicism. Catholics were seen as entirely different to other Christian sects. Their faith required allegiance to a foreign power, and that was a far greater problem than the differing beliefs of the Protestant movements. The geographic positioning of divine power, in other words, was more important than the details of the faith.
After either defeating or massacring all the royalist supporters in Britain and Ireland, Cromwell returned to London. On the back of a particularly decisive victory over Scottish royalists at Worcester, Cromwell was formally received by the people of London in the manner of a Roman general, or perhaps even a Roman Emperor. Cromwell viewed himself as God’s humble servant and, on the basis of his military victories, the people could only assume God viewed him in that way too. Lacking a king to project the symbolic representation of nationhood onto, the people found a suitable replacement in the form of the Lieutenant General who was, perhaps more than anyone, responsible for the king’s death.
Could Cromwell become king? As he saw it, spiritual authority lay not with the King or the Pope, but in the pages of the Bible itself. And as it happened, Cromwell did possess such a bible and he never missed an opportunity to advertise the fact. It had previously seemed unthinkable that a humble country farmer could ever generate the necessary symbolic resonance to claim a title such as king, but Cromwell had a bible in his hand and a string of military victories under his belt, and it wasn’t as if there were many other obvious candidates. So after much muttering and debate Parliament approached Cromwell and asked how he felt about giving being king a go.
That politicians were in the market for a new king only a few years after carelessly breaking their old one needs some explanation. The idea of parliamentary representation went back centuries at that point, but political science was still very basic and the system really didn’t work well. After the death of Charles, the country had been governed by a council referred to by the fantastically British name of the Rump Parliament. This had been expected to shut itself down, in order to trigger a fresh round of elections. It failed to do this, which compelled Cromwell to interrupt their deliberations, call them “whoremasters” and “drunkards,” and have them turfed out of the building by a troop of soldiers. Once he had emptied the building and locked the doors, he assembled a council of his own to decide the constitutional direction of the nation. This council was an assembly of the extremely devout, and was known as the Barebones Parliament after one of its more extreme members, the delightfully named Praise-God Barebone. This council quickly gave up and shut itself down, recognizing that the task assigned to it was way beyond its skillset.
This was followed by another Parliament, but Cromwell shut that one down when it became apparent that it had ideas that differed from his. The British political class had been so used to existing alongside a figure with absolute power that it found the responsibility of having to decide on and implement policy all by itself to be almost impossible. Really, they just wanted to have a king again, provided that this king was a little bit more anti-Catholic than the last.
This put Cromwell in something of an awkward position. As far as he was concerned, he was a simple man of God who had never asked for the burden of the responsibilities that increasingly fell to him. Power was something that he had to endure in order to serve his higher lord. Yet no matter how much he explained this simple fact, he knew deep down that signing the death warrant for a king and then taking the throne himself sent out a different message. He wasn’t against royalty per se, if that was what God wanted, but there was no avoiding the fact that becoming King Oliver would look bad.
For these reasons, Cromwell turned down the title of king and instead took the title of Lord Protector. A Lord Protector was a very different thing to a king. True, he started answering to the title of “Your Highness” and his daughters took the title of Princess. He moved into the royal palaces of Hampton Court and Whitehall, and he began raising knights. He had the power to open and close parliaments, and to declare his eldest surviving son as his successor. He held an investiture to confirm his position of Lord Protector, and sat in the traditional coronation chair in Westminster Hall wearing a purple velvet
robe lined with ermine and holding the royal sceptre. But – and this was the important point – he was definitely not a king.
The fact that he wasn’t a king was evident when his son Richard succeeded him to the title of Lord Protector, following Oliver’s death in 1658. Richard lasted less than a year. His failure wasn’t just because he wasn’t particularly good at running a country. Many kings, presidents and prime ministers have been terrible at the job, but have still been able to maintain a successful career. The problem was he didn’t have that magical symbolic quality that binds the nation together. Richard didn’t have the respect of the army or the charisma necessary to rebuild the finances of a war-stricken nation. Had he been the son of a legitimate king, he would at least have possessed a certain credibility that would have cancelled out many of the question marks about his long-term survival in the role. Had his father allowed the crown to be placed on his head, Richard may have been more successful. As it was he was mocked in a manner that highlighted that he wasn’t a king: his nickname was Queen Richard.
The efforts to end the monarchy in seventeenth-century Britain, then, were not a success. Shortly after Richard became the second Lord Protector, he was deposed and Charles II, the son of the late Charles I, was crowned in his place. Charles II took the view that the best way to recover from the stern, joyless period of the puritan Commonwealth was to drink heavily and have lots of parties. In this he astutely understood both his role as a symbolic representative of the nation, and the true character of the British people. Charles II was soon given the nickname of the Merry Monarch. As we have repeatedly seen, the popular nicknames for heads of state say much about how successful they were in fulfilling the symbolic aspect of the role.
Charles II was crowned on the understanding that he recognized he was a constitutional monarch. There would be no more talk of the divine right of kings, and parliaments would shoulder the difficult task of running the country. This arrangement did not always go entirely smoothly, and arguments between crown and parliament would erupt whenever Charles suggested that maybe Catholics were not really that terrible. But from this point on, the British monarchy were severed from the concept of absolute power and instead embraced their irrational role of symbolic personifications of the people.
It was a remarkable result, and one which could have come from the Hollywood school of storytelling. It had looked like it was all over for the monarchy. They were beaten in war and imprisoned in politics. When the severed head of Charles I was held aloft by the black-hooded executioner, all hope was lost. But, somehow, the story was not yet over, and the monarchy would return in a wiser and purer role. The magic of iconography had triumphed over the base mud of politics. In terms of the structure of myth, it had echoes of the legend of the phoenix. It was like a climactic bout in a Rocky movie, or the return of Gandalf the White after his battle with the Balrog. When you view the monarchy as a symbolic representation of the British people, this was not a bad story for a country to tell itself. It is a story, perhaps, that helps explain the Churchillian stoicism of 1941, the country’s “darkest hour,” when it stood alone against Nazi Germany with no reasonable hope of victory.
This early defeat and humbling of the monarchy goes some way to explaining why the British royal family has survived into the twenty-first century. When the axe came for the neck of the French monarch, over a hundred years later, the story that followed was very different. The problem of unjustifiable absolute monarchy in the Christian era still circled the great houses of Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and those problems got harder to ignore with every passing year.
8. A Tale of Two Beheadings: Part 2 – France
Before the revolution, France was run under a system which has been posthumously named the ancien régime, or the old order. In the ancien régime, France was understood to consist of three estates. The first estate, and the most important, was the church. The second estate was the nobles. The third estate, which was the least important, was everyone else. This included the vast majority of the French population.
Hovering over these three estates, separate and untouchable, was the monarchy. The most famous of these was Louis XIV, whose nickname was the Sun King. Louis reigned for a record seventy-two years and lived in unimaginable luxury at the Palace of Versailles. He oversaw many wars and a period of great artistic and intellectual achievement. Even Napoleon had to begrudgingly admit that Louis XIV was “a great king.”
The monarchy required vast amounts of money for wars and general high living. It was the job of the nobles to provide this money, which they did by taking it from the peasants. The tax-collecting powers of the second estate was a situation ripe for corruption, and generally speaking the nobles became very rich while the over-taxed peasantry became extremely poor. Occasionally the monarch would question whether this system could perhaps be improved, but the nobles were usually able to prevent any moves to limit their powers. Even being an absolute monarch had its limits, and the people who provided that absolute monarch with money tended to get their own way more often than not.
Then the revolution happened.
Over a few short months every area of French society went into involuntary spasms. It started with the aristocracy and rippled down the social scale to the middle classes, the urban population and the peasantry of the countryside. In May 1789 the King called a general meeting of the three estates in order to tackle the state’s financial problems. This collapsed over issues relating to the relative size of the representation of the second and third estates. In June, members of the third estate met in a tennis court near Versailles, having been locked out of their normal meeting place, and vowed to gain fair representation under a constitutional, not an absolute, monarchy. The repercussions of this hit the streets and in July, the citizens of Paris stormed the Bastille, the king’s arsenal, and released the seven prisoners held there. In August the peasants in the countryside began attacking abbeys, castles and anything that seemed like a symbol of the feudal system, in a period known as the Great Fear. By the time the women of Paris marched on Versailles in October, it was all over for the ancien régime.
Like the collapse of the imperial system around the First World War and the fall of the USSR in 1991, the French Revolution seemed to come out of nowhere and leave historians befuddled as to what actually caused it. The great inequality of the country was clearly a significant factor, as was the inability of the system to modernize. Food shortages, high inflation and institutionalized corruption all played a part. An important aspect was the rise in Enlightenment philosophy, from writers such as Voltaire and Rousseau, which served as intellectual support for the emerging republic. Enlightenment thought placed mankind front and centre and promoted rational thinking, which was bad news for the concept of monarchy. Much of the intellectual work behind this movement was the work of the French second estate, so their role in providing the system of thought that enabled the revolution was ironic, considering what fate had in store for them.
The new system had to absorb the spiritual and symbolic aspects of the old regime. It claimed the Church’s property in November 1789, and forced the clergy to swear an oath of loyalty the following summer. Then, in 1793, the policy of “dechristianization” was unveiled, which was intended to purge France of Catholicism and, perhaps more importantly, the influence of Rome. Even republicans need to bring the spiritual focus of the nation under their wing. There was some argument for making France an atheist country, but Maximilien de Robespierre, perhaps the most influential of the post-revolution politicians, decided to create a new faith instead. He understood that citizens unconsciously expected a symbolic side to the republic, and that the lack of one would severely weaken it. One of the original aims of the revolution had been freedom of religion, but that was quickly dropped by the new administration.
Robespierre’s new faith was called the Cult of the Supreme Being. The Supreme Being was a slightly vaguer version of the Christian god who really hated
tyranny and monarchs and just loved republics. Robespierre’s new faith was not a success, for creating a new religion is not as easy as it looks. But there was at least one grand Festival of the Supreme Being, which was held in June 1794. The centrepiece of this festival was the guillotine from the Bastille. This may initially appear to be in bad taste, but as large wooden instruments of death go it was far more humane than the crucifix.
The Cult of the Supreme Being did not catch on, but the new republic found more modern methods of gaining the symbolic credibility it needed. A key factor here was the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, a document that was the first step towards the new French constitution. Inspired by the American Revolution and Enlightenment thought, the Declaration took its authority not from divine sources, but from the concept of natural, universal human rights. These, as its American equivalent noted, were “self-evident.” Its third article stated that, “The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation.” Royalty, it was clear, was being moved down the pecking order. Louis’ role as an absolute monarch was over. But would he still possess the symbolic role that justified a constitutional monarchy?
As the revolution progressed, this became increasingly unlikely. The republic wanted that symbolic role for itself, and thanks to the black magic that advertising people now call “branding,” it was able to get it. Le Tricolore became the official flag of the republic at the start of the revolution, and in July 1792 it became compulsory for men to wear a tricolore cockade on their hat. La Marseillaise was composed around the same time and adopted as the French national anthem three years later. Flags and anthems have a strange irrational power to bind together disparate people as equal citizens in a shared nation. With that irrational power harnessed to the rational power of the Declaration, the suspicion started to arise that maybe the new republic didn’t actually need a monarch at all, not even a neutered constitutional one.