- 1 This genre was celebrated by Gilbert Burnet at the Restoration in the preface to The Memoires of th (...)
1In the aftermath of the English Civil Wars, men and women took up their pens to bear witness to their traumatic experiences and to provide accounts of the events they had gone through. Many of these writings belong to the memoir genre, which dates back to Caesar’s Commentaries and re-emerged in Renaissance Europe.1 As Susan Wiseman has argued, these first-hand testimonies were crucial in shaping “the Restoration political world’s understanding of the English Civil War” (316). In his own memoirs, written after the Restoration, the republican Edmund Ludlow explained that the genre had the advantage of combining general history and personal experience: “I shall not strictly confine myself to a relation of such things only in which I was personally concerned, but also give the best Account I can of such other memorable Occurrences of those Times as I have learn’d from Persons well inform’d, and of unsuspected Fidelity” (Ludlow 1698, 1). Even when in exile in Switzerland, Ludlow received papers and documents from correspondents in England; he was also in contact with booksellers in Geneva and saw in their hands “a manuscript written by Sir John Barkley himself” (Ludlow 1698, 195; Worden 57), probably Sir John Berkeley’s Memoirs. Drawing on his own experiences and on reliable sources of information, Ludlow, like other Restoration memoirists, was able to disclose segments of history that had hitherto remained concealed, namely what happened behind the scenes of official history (Keeble 2022, 705-706).
2In Les Silences de l’histoire, Frédéric Charbonneau argues that filling in the gaps of history was precisely a defining feature of the early modern memoir genre (10). This view is confirmed by the English historian, Gilbert Burnet, for whom only memoir-writers had the ability to reveal “the secret Causes and Counsels of the greatest transactions” – something which “most Writers of History” could not achieve (1677, np). However, although memoirs may fill in the silences of history, they cannot be considered a historiographical panacea. One limitation of these experience-based writings is that they may be patchy and partial, and often deliberately so. This is particularly evident when recounting the execution of the King. Depending on the authors, this most traumatic event may result in either copious accounts or, conversely, in marked reticence. A terse style, and sometimes silence, were often considered more appropriate than an abundance of words, as suggested by the royalist antiquarian William Dugdale, who wished to combine “great lamentation” with brevity to address the King’s execution: “the last Act of this afflicted King’s life […] cannot well be represented without great lamentation and the deepest expressions of sadness, wherein I shall be as brief as well may be” (361).
- 2 Charles II, “1660: An Act of Free and Generall Pardon Indemnity and Oblivion,” Statutes of the Real (...)
- 3 For an overview, see Baker. On reporting the regicide, see Peacey.
- 4 French Memoirs do not accord much importance to the execution of Charles I (Haffemayer 49). Madame (...)
3The difficulty of representing the execution of the King is conspicuous in the Restoration context, when the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion (1660) made it unlawful and unthinkable “to revive the memory of the late Differences or the occasions thereof.”2 This may explain why, except for Margaret Cavendish’s very royalist Life of William Cavendish (1667), most memoirs that covered the Civil Wars, including royalist ones, were only published after censorship was relaxed either between 1679 and 1685, or after 1695 (Astbury). Much scholarly attention has been paid to the execution of Charles I in recent years.3 However, its depiction in Restoration memoirs has been less studied than other media.4 Yet, the retrospective appropriation of this event by those who witnessed it first-hand may help us to nuance too neat a historiographical contrast between sympathetic and hostile views of Charles I’s execution (Sharpe). With this purpose in mind, and to better understand the paradoxical attitudes towards the beheading of the monarch – oscillating between disclosure and silence –, I will examine three strategies adopted by Restoration memoirists when approaching this unheard-of event: arousing compassion and fuelling the cult of the royal martyr; appealing to reason and conscience to convince the reader of the necessity of tyrannicide; using reticence as a means to say as little as possible about an unprecedented event that remains difficult to represent.
4The publication of the Eikon Basilike immediately followed Charles I’s execution, with thirty-five editions appearing in 1649 alone (Skerpan-Wheeler 122; Wilcher 290). This book, which recounts the King’s sufferings during his trial and execution, became central to royalist propaganda (Keeble 2002, 36-38; Lacey). In the History of His Own Time, Gilbert Burnet claims that stirring such emotions as compassion played a major role in bringing about the Restoration, uniting the nation in sympathy with the monarch. The Eikon Basilike, which contained the King’s meditations and prayers, was essential in this process (Staines 105-109; Potter 243):
[the King’s] serious and christian deportment […] made all his former errours be entirely forgot, and raised a compassionate regard to him, that drew a lasting hatred on the actors, year 1660. This was much heightened by the publishing of his book called [Eikon Basilike], which was universally believed to be his own: And that coming out soon after his death had the greatest run in many impressions that any book has had in our age. (Burnet 1724, 50)
5Memoirs, both in print and manuscript, helped to perpetuate the cult of the royal martyr initiated by the Eikon Basilike, by offering highly emotional and prolix accounts of the King’s final days. Allan Fea has gathered a sample of these in the extensive Memoirs of the Martyr King Being a detailed record of the last two years of the reign of his most sacred majesty (1905). This collection includes the writings of Dr. Michael Hudson, Sir Thomas Herbert, Major Huntington, Sir John Berkeley, John Ashburnham, Sir Henry Firebrace, and Colonel Edward Cooke. I will focus here on Thomas Herbert’s and Philip Warwick’s memoirs that were published at the turn of the century as Tory responses to the publication of the memoirs of Ludlow, Denzil Holles, Thomas Fairfax, and Sir John Berkeley, all four published by the Whig printer Darby in association with the deist John Toland (Worden 1-2; Goldie 214).
- 5 The original copy is kept at the National Library of Wales (Llangibby Castle NRA 28773). A copy of (...)
- 6 “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34).
6Thomas Herbert (1606-1682) served as official attendant to the captive Charles from the beginning of 1647 until the King’s death. A Presbyterian who had fought in the parliamentary army under Essex and Fairfax, Herbert did not become a royalist despite the sympathy for the King he expresses in his memoirs – he even continued to serve Cromwell during the 1650s (Fritze; Mackenzie). In the 1670s, William Dugdale urged him to set down an account of Charles I’s final months (Threnodia Carolina 1678), which was published in 1702 under the title of Memoirs of the Last Two Years of the Reign of the Unparalleled Prince of Very Blessed Memory, King Charles I. The “Advertisement to the Reader” specifies that this book contained “the most material passages of the two last years of the life of that excellent and unparallelled Prince, which were carefully observed and related by the author in a large Answer of a Letter wrote to him by Sir William Dugdale” (sig. A2-A2v).5 The better to arouse emotions in the reader, Herbert, who refers to himself in the third person narrative, appears to share the King’s emotions as the day of execution approaches: “Mr Herbert was in some Consternation to see his Majesty so much discompos’d, and wept” (93). Similarly, the monarch appears to be deeply moved by his children’s last visit as their words “drew Tears of Joy and Love from his Eyes” (125). Much in the vein of the Eikon Basilike, Herbert frequently refers to Charles’s daily prayers and readings in order to foreground his spiritual authority (106). As the execution approaches, the King takes on the full stature of a martyr; his moral virtues (prudence, patience, fortitude) are extolled, and his few words (“God forgive their impiety”) echo those of Christ:6
Nevertheless, his Faith overcoming his Fear, he continu’d his accustomed Prudence and Patience, so as no outward Perturbation could be discerned, with Christian Fortitude submitting to the good Pleasure of the Almighty, but never breaking out into a Passion, or uttering a reproachful or revengeful Word against any that were his Adversaries saying only, God forgive their Impiety. (Herbert 108-109)
7Herbert thus presents the King as standing above worldly matters, while his execution becomes a sacrilegious act. He also describes in detail the emotions of the spectators, hoping his description will “[encline] generous Hearts to a Sympathy in [the King’s] Sufferings” (112). The crowd, he wrote, “shed Tears” while the King remained undisturbed (117). For Herbert himself, enduring “the sight of that Violence they upon the Scaffold would offer the King” was nearly unbearable (134). The account ends with a solemn description of the execution: “after his Majesty had spoken a little, the fatal Stroke was given by a disguised Person” (135).
- 7 See, in his Memoirs, Thomas Herbert’s letter to William Dudage dated 3 November 1681, starting in t (...)
8According to his Memoirs, Herbert’s loyalty to Charles I did not waver after the regicide, the word “regicide” designating here, strictly speaking, the King’s execution understood as a sacrilege. Herbert recounts that his “last office,” carried out with the help of William Juxon, bishop of London, was “to take care of the King’s body” (135). He records every detail of the private, night-time funeral “in the Royal Chappel of St George within the Castle of Windsor,” thereby challenging the official silence imposed by the new regime (Highley).7 Because the Book of Common Prayer was forbidden, Bishop Juxon conducted the service in silence (Potter 241). With his account, Herbert dispelled doubt about the burial site and contributed to building the myth of the royal martyr. However, it should be born in mind that it was commissioned by royalists – probably by William Dugdale – more than twenty years after the execution. Rather than reflecting Herbert’s immediate impressions, the Memoirs may have served primarily as a calculated piece of propaganda, as suggested by a quote from the Eikon Basilike:
This brief Narrative shall conclude with the King’s own excellent Expression, Crowns and Kingdoms are not so valuable as my Honour And Reputation; those must have a Period with my Life, but these survive to a glorious kind of Immortality, when I am dead and gone; a Good Name being the Embalming of Princes, and a sweet Consecrating of them to an Eternity of Love and Gratitude, amongst Posterity. (Herbert 144)
9These words are presented as prophetic. Yet, by 1702, when Herbert’s Memoirs were actually published, the King’s “Honour and Reputation” had already been restored with the accession of Charles II. This propagandistic dimension is reinforced by the inclusion of several royalist texts in his testimony, all copiously describing the King’s sacrifice. Among them, The Princely Pelican. Royal Resolves Presented in sundry Choice Observations, Extracted from his Majesty’s Divine Meditations echoes the tone and purpose of the Eikon Basilike (1649).
- 8 The manuscript of Warwick’s Memoirs, “Memoires or Reflexions vpon the reigne of King Charles the fi (...)
10Like Thomas Herbert, Philip Warwick (1609-1683) was close to the King. He served as his private secretary when the King was held captive, first at Hampton Court, and then on the Isle of Wight (Smith). He wrote his memoirs between 1675 and 1677, but they were only published posthumously in 1701, just before those of Herbert, as a response to the earlier publication of Whig memoirs by Toland and Darby. On several occasions, Warwick draws attention to the time that elapsed between the events narrated and the time of writing, admitting “writing from a fraile memory and some old ill-digested notes” (207).8 Still the pages that deal with the King’s final months are much detailed and consistent with Warwick’s position as Charles I’s confidant at court, as well as his ability to access the “secret springs” of the times:
These Memoires were written by a Gentleman of great Integrity and Wisdom, who, by means of his Stations and Employments under King Charles the First, of blessed memory, and near attendance on his person, had great opportunities of knowing the most considerable occurrences of those Times, with the Secret Springs by which they mov’d. (Warwick A3)
11Warwick’s Memoirs are overtly apologetic, as they aim to “rectify mistakes, and rescue the Memory of that Injur’d Prince from the false Imputations and Indignities that have been cast upon Him” (A3). His determination to set the record straight is reflected in his account of the King’s imprisonment until the moment he was seized by Major Anthony Rolph on 30 November 1648, after which “he never saw him [the King] more” (331). Until that time, Warwick, who was a member of the House of Lords, hoped that an agreement could be reached between the King and Parliament.
12Although Warwick’s tone is less empathetic and more political than Herbert’s, his Memoirs reveal a strong affective bond between the King and his secretary for whom remembering was “dolefull” (324). As in Herbert’s testimony, the sufferings and the patience of the King are designed to arouse compassion in the reader. Warwick evokes the King’s emotions by reporting a conversation they had together: “I never saw him shed tears but once, and he turned presently his head away; for he was then dictating to me somewhat in a window, and he was loth to be discerned […] but I can safely take my oath they were the biggest drops, that I ever saw fall from an eye; but he recollected himself, and soon stifled them” (324).
- 9 “Murder” and its derivatives are here used systematically to condemn the execution: “they murdered (...)
13This sympathetic and humane portrait of the monarch is coupled with a highly polemical and scathing account of the proceedings against the sacred person of the King, with his “murder” portrayed as an absolute scandal.9 Warwick systematically denounces the violence of the “pretended High Court of Justice” (336), degrading all the actions of those who took part in what he calls a “mock-tryall.” He describes the Commons as “this traitorous and tumultuous body” (336), and ultimately holds the Army fully responsible for all that happened (333). The execution of the King is presented as a paroxysm of violence, with the very wording reflecting the sacrilegious brutality of the deed. Charles’s enemies are dehumanized and called “nefarious men, who thirsted after the King’s blood would now brutishly suck it: so they give sentence upon him to sever his head from his body” (339).
14This brutal description of the execution serves as a foil to the King’s “steddy and majestic” attitude during his trial (339, 344). Charles I appears to be acutely aware of his fate and of his enemies’ barbarity: “[the King] took notice of some engines his murderers had made, that in case he would not willingly submit, they might by violence have pull’d him down; at which he smiled, as if he had bin contented, that they shewed the world the barbarity of their natures, and he the equanimity of his own” (344). We are also told that the King “submitted cheerfully unto the providence, that was dispens’d unto him” (345); he “smiled at the foul appellations of Tyrant, Traytor, etc.” (337-338).
15The King’s words reported by bishop Juxon come as a confirmation of the monarch’s readiness for his martyrdom and retrospectively justify the cult that was set up at the Restoration: “these rogues, (for that was his term) in whose hands I am; they thirst after my blood, and they will have it; and God’s will be done” (Warwick 340-341). The parallel with Christ, which is central to royalist martyrological literature, is also taken up by Warwick quoting the King’s words: “Now, (says he) let the rogues come: I have heartily forgiven them” (343). But this becomes even more striking in the final description of the execution, as death and martyrdom are connected. In Warwick’s ritualised and clinical account, the King becomes a Christlike victim, a saint, and a martyr: “At last he laid down his head, strecht out the hand, as the sign, and the Executioner let drop the hatchet, which severed it from his body. And thus, this Saint and Martyr rested from his labours, and follows the Lamb” (346).
16In sum, for both Warwick and Herbert, who stayed by the King’s side until the end of his life, it seemed crucial to describe Charles I’s execution in detail and to arouse compassion for his person. Yet they were the exception: John Ashburnham and John Berkeley, two gentlemen equally close to the King who had attempted to negotiate with the army, stopped their narratives before the King’s trial, and did not promote the Cult of the royal martyr.10 Their aim was to show that they had done their utmost to negotiate a settlement and prevent a regicide, and their accounts logically covered the period during which they had played an active role in attempting to save the monarch. On the contrary, Warwick and Herbert, who attended the King to the very end, actively constructed the royal martyr paradigm– a paradigm which other memoirists writing from a republican standpoint contested.
17In their Memoirs, Lucy Hutchinson (1620-1681) and Edmund Ludlow (1617-1692) offer a markedly different perspective on the execution of the King. To account for what they regarded as tyrannicide – that is to say the necessary elimination of a wicked king, wielding absolute power and trampling the laws of the land (Turchetti 33) –, both adopt a rhetoric of brevitas, which stands in sharp contrast to the elaborate, pathos-filled narratives of Herbert and Warwick. To a large extent they seem to follow Erasmus’s conception of brevitas in the De Copia:
Laconic brevity must […] eschew all introductory paragraphs and emotion-rousing passages. [The speaker] must set out his matter in simple and summary form […]. He must be content merely to give information, and refrain from expansions, asseverations, similes, illustrative examples, maxims, acclamations, anecdotes, fables, allusions, and witty remarks, unless any of these is so essential that it would be a crime to leave it out. (Erasmus 657)
18This choice is not surprising, as John Hutchinson (the focus of Lucy Hutchinson’s Memoirs) and Edmund Ludlow were signatories of the King’s death warrant and also witnesses to the final days the King. In their view, the execution was an act of justice which could be rationally and scripturally justified. Referring to the Bible, both claimed that the judges would be called into account if they let King shed more innocent blood. They rejected the royalist propaganda that stirred emotions, and chose instead to appeal to conscience and reason (MacGillivray 172-173; Crawford). In this respect, they stand closer to Milton’s Eikonoklastes (October 1649) than to Eikon Basilike, which was clearly intended to undermine the Commonwealth by arousing compassion for the fallen monarch (Zwicker 37-38; Staines 106-107). The concision of their accounts is not a weakness but functions as a counterpoint to the more copious descriptions that followed in the wake of the Eikon Basilike.
19Ludlow was a staunch Commonwealthman, a regicide according to the royalists, and a supporter of the abolition of the monarchy. He wrote his memoirs while in exile in Vevay in Switzerland (Ludlow 1698, 1). These memoirs were published posthumously in 1698, after being heavily revised by John Toland, as Blair Worden demonstrated in his groundbreaking edition of part of the original manuscript, The Voyce of the Watch Tower, now held at the Bodleian Library. Worden showed that whole sections of the manuscript were cut or re-written, with the clear intent of downplaying its providential framework and to rearrange a narrative that Toland found sometimes “patchy and disorganized” and far too religious (Worden 22-31, 63). The resulting 1698 version is “about three-fifth as long as the corresponding pages of the manuscript” (57). Toland’s editorial intervention favoured “clearness,” “perspicuity” and “brevity” – words which he himself inserted into the printed version (63).
20In the published Memoirs of 1699, Ludlow’s account of the execution is factual, with minimal authorial intervention. He records the presence of a doctor and of Bishop Juxon the day before Charles’s execution (282), as well as the visit of “the Duke of Glocester and the Lady Elizabeth” (283), yet he passes over in silence the King’s emotional state. In contrast, he provides some information about the decision to erect the scaffold near the Banqueting House (283). There is no mention of Thomas Herbert, who attended the King until the very end, presumably for political reasons, as Herbert, unlike Ludlow, had not signed the King’s death warrant. Ludlow’s description omits the physical act of severing the monarch’s body from his head. His terse style suggests deliberate restraint, even though, as one of the judges, he had attended “eleven of the meetings of the King’s judges” (Ludlow 1894, n. 1):
The next day about eight in the morning Jan. 30. the King, attended by a guard, was brought from St. James’s through the park to Whitehall, where having drunk a glass or two of red wine, and stayed about two hours in a private room, he was conducted to the scaffold out of a window of the Banqueting House; and having made a speech, and taken off his George, he kneeled down at the block, and the executioner performed his office. (Ludlow 1894, 219)
21For Ludlow, the execution of the King was the logical culmination of a sequence of political decisions carefully reconstructed from his own experience and from contemporary accounts of the King’s trial (Ludlow 1978, 58; Peacey). The narrative follows in detail the Parliament and Army’s proceedings, recording the charges that were brought against the King who was accused of subverting the laws of the land (Ludlow 1698, 276). The reader is supplied with precise information regarding the composition of the High Court of Justice (275). Some words of the King are quoted, but they are carefully chosen to avoid evoking the slightest sympathy. For instance, Ludlow selects the moment when Charles claimed that he was “accountable only to God for his Actions” (277), and not “intrusted by the people” who are “[his] by inheritance” (276), underlining the King’s personal responsibility for his own downfall. This account aligns with Ludlow’s opposition to “an accommodation with the King,” which he calls “unsafe to the people of England, and unjust and wicked in the nature of it” (267).
22The Bodleian manuscript, A Voyce from the Watch Tower, which covers the years 1660-77, is far less impersonal and, above all, far more religious than the printed version which adopts a tone that is compatible with Whig views (Ludlow 1978, 48). Ludlow’s style, Worden observes, is “blunt and at times splenetic,” and different from the printed memoirs with their “polite, measured, almost stately phraseology” (47). According to Worden, Ludlow’s original text would “have seemed dangerously seditious cant,” which the memoirist seems to have been aware of, as he suggests in the manuscript that if ever his memoir was “made publique” it had to be “rectified, and amended” (54-55). These words are not included in Toland’s edition that cuts Ludlow’s interventions in the text as well as his more radical view of the monarchy. More generally, this type of deletion reflects Toland’s desire to turn Ludlow’s radicalism into moderate Whig ideology.
23Ludlow introduces a flashback into his narrative when reporting the debate on the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion (June 1660), from which he was excluded. This section, spanning eighteen manuscript pages (Voyce 762-780, in Ludlow 1978, 126-148), has no equivalent in the printed Memoirs (Mahlberg 196). It offers a providential narrative that started on 3 November 1640, abounding in biblical parallels, all pointing to the King’s guilt, in particular at the moment of his trial when the “Lord was pleased to strengthen the hearts and the hands of all that acted therein” (Ludlow 1978, 767; Worden 131). The narrative of the trial (Ludlow 1978, 765) quickly develops into an eleven-page justification of tyrannicide, largely based on the Bible. Once again, the execution, as an event, is omitted from the original manuscript, leaving us to speculate about the nature of Ludlow’s account in the now lost first part. However, the continued republication of Toland’s revised version of the Memoirs throughout the eighteenth century reveals the enduring influence of radical republican ideas within constitutional monarchy. Indeed, Ludlow’s Memoirs remained an important source for later historians, most notably Catharine Macaulay, in her account the King’s execution in her History of England (Vallance 231).
24Lucy Hutchinson’s Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson (composed between 1664 and 1667) also vindicate tyrannicide. From her early critique of the King in the opening digression (66-67) to her condemnation of his repeated refusal to cooperate, Hutchinson presents the execution as inevitable and morally justified (Gheeraert-Graffeuille 2022, 267-293). This criticism of the Stuart king culminates in a factual account of his trial and execution, which is devoid of any sort of empathy, as Charles Stuart is portrayed as “an implacable enemy to the Commonwealth” (234). Although John Hutchinson, her husband and confidant, was present at the trial, she does not give a day-by-day chronicle of the trial. The event is reported in one concise, synthetic paragraph, emphasizing the King’s cruelty, arrogance, and contempt for his people. His refusal to “plead” – namely his silence, his “disdainful” gestures, his loyalty to his so-called “evil counsellor,” Thomas Wentworth – are all elements that are meant corroborate the sentence of the High Court:
In January 1648[/9] the court sat and the King was brought to his trial, and a charge drawn up against him for levying war against the Parliament and people of England, for betraying their public trust reposed in him, and for being an implacable enemy to the commonwealth. But the King refused to plead, disowning the authority of the court, and after three several days persisting in contempt thereof, he was sentenced to suffer death. One thing was remarked in him by many of the court, that when the blood spilt in many of the battles where he was in his own person, and had caused it to be shed by his own command, was laid to his charge, he heard it with disdainful smiles, and looks and gestures which rather expressed sorrow that all the opposite party to him had been cut off, than that any were: and he stuck not to declare in words, that no man’s blood spilt in this quarrel troubled him but only one, meaning the Earl of Strafford. (Hutchinson 234)
25Hutchinson’s terse account of the trial, like Ludlow’s, was meant to counterbalance the mythologizing of the royal martyr. Admittedly the manuscript of the Memoirs was given no publicity at the moment of writing, as it hardly circulated before its publication in 1806 by one of her husband’s descendants, Julius Hutchinson. Had it been published at the turn of the seventeenth century, Lucy Hutchinson’s Memoirs might have proved even more subversive than Ludlow’s due to their corrosive style. Furthermore, many markers in the text suggest that she had potential readers in mind, as her aim was explicitly to “instruct the erring children of [Colonel Hutchinson’s] generation” (16). Anyhow, Hutchinson reconstructs, from the inside, the logic that drove her husband and the other commissioners to vote the King’s death. She thus provides us with a reasoned apology of tyrannicide that combines a republican discourse with the biblical rhetoric of the “man of blood” (Crawford). In her view, the Colonel’s participation in the trial of “Charles Stuart, that man of blood” was a moral duty and a patriotic responsibility – it was also an act of obedience to divine will (234).
26What emerges from Hutchinson’s relation and justification of the trial is that not all the signatories were true to their commitment; some, like Francis Ingoldsby, recanted in order to save their lives (279). Hutchinson contrasts their attitudes with that of John Hutchinson, the only true martyr of her story, who lost his life for voting the King’s death. By consistently portraying him as a martyr, both in the main body of the text and in the highly programmatic dedication to her children, she in a sense fills the gap left by the King’s martyrdom (Vallance 230; Sharpe 394):
being persuaded neither his estate, honour, wife, children, nor his own life weighed anything with him in the balance against Christ and his interest, and having often cheerfully set them at the hazard, he at last joyfully parted with them all at God’s call and for God’s cause. The more God chastened him, the more he loved him, kissing the rod and rejoicing in the scourge that drove him nearer to God. (Hutchinson 22)
27The Colonel’s martyrdom thus ironically echoes that of the King, whose own death receives hardly any visibility in the Memoirs. But there is no triumphalism in this evocation, as Lucy Hutchinson reports that her husband signed the King’s death warrant “very much against his own will,” and that he acted as a commissioner because he “[held himself obliged by the covenant of God and the public trust of his country reposed in him” (234). When the Convention Parliament asked the Colonel to justify his former conduct, he reportedly declared that “they yielded him just cause to repent that ever he forsook his own blessed quiet to embark in such a troubled sea, where he had made shipwreck of all things but a good conscience” (279-280). His death in captivity in 1664 left Lucy Hutchinson in the same “troubled sea,” tragically disenchanted at the “mutability of some, and the hypocrisy of all others, and the servile flattery of all” (278). Even in an avowedly republican memoir, the execution of the King can convey a powerful sense of tragedy (Gheeraert-Graffeuille 2022, 297).
28As a matter of fact, a majority of memoirs do not offer clear-cut views of the King’s execution. The writings explored so far represent extremes on the political spectrum: eulogists at one end and regicides at the other. They also reflect contrasted uses of language, ranging from the copious language of emotions to an essentially factual and laconic style. For most memorialists, whether pro-King or pro-Parliament, the act of regicide was inherently unspeakable, a source of uneasiness and perplexity. Their works were marked by various forms of reticence, which the OED defines as the “maintenance of silence,” or the fact of passing something over in silence, or the reluctance or avoidance to speak/to write. However, such reticence does not mean that the execution of the King was unimportant and that their accounts were not politicized; rather it reflects the difficulty and complexity of representing such an unthinkable event.
29Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon (1609-1674), was a royalist historian and minister to Charles I and Charles II. His History of the Rebellion was combined with a Life when it was published in 1702. This experience-based narrative, which was not originally intended to be published (Hyde 3), shares many features with Restoration memoirs and is often considered as such by historians (Ludlow 1978, 2), particularly as it was meant as a response to the Whig memoirs published in 1698-1699 (Denzil Holles; Thomas Fairfax; Edmund Ludlow). In his History, Clarendon, like his fellow royalists, called the execution “the most execrable murder that ever was committed since that of our blessed Saviour” (vol. 4, 488). Still, he keeps the narrative of the event to a minimum, preferring to analyse rather than depict events, and arouse emotional immediacy (Brownley 39-40; MacGillivray 216). Hence his refusal to dramatize the King’s physical sufferings and death, consciously avoiding the style of Eikon Basilike:
the saint-like behaviour of that blessed martyr, and his Christian courage and patience at his death; are all particulars so well-known, and have been so much enlarged upon in a treatise peculiarly applied to that purpose, that the farther mentioning it would but afflict and grieve the reader, and make the relation itself odious; and therefore, no more shall be said here of that lamentable tragedy. (Hyde 488)
30The King’s death is even less visible in the Life, which was published separately in 1759, than in the 1702 History, being only mentioned in passing as part of the news received by the Duke of York and future King (James II): “Whilst the Prince was at the Hague, He received the shocking account of the Murder of the King his Father; and soon after, the Queen wrote to him from Paris, advising him to repair into France, as soon as possible” (216).
31Clarendon’s reticence in his History was criticized in the eighteenth century (Siebert 14-16). For example, David Hume, the author of the History of England, reproached him for failing to exploit the scene’s pathetic and tragic potential, arguing that history should also be read and experienced aesthetically – not only morally and politically. In his view, Clarendon did not provide an aesthetically satisfactory representation of the King’s death because he was too emotionally engaged in the event he described (Siebert 16-24):
Lord Clarendon, when he approaches towards the catastrophe of the royal party, supposes, that his narration must then become infinitely disagreeable; and he hurries over the king's death, without giving us one circumstance of it. He considers it as too horrid a scene to be contemplated with any satisfaction, or even without the utmost pain and aversion. He himself, as well as the readers of that age, were too deeply concerned in the events, and felt a pain from subjects, which an historian and a reader of another age would regard as the most pathetic and most interesting, and, by consequence, the most agreeable. (Hume 140)
- 11 “And here I cannot but let myself loose to say, that no man can shew me a source from whence these (...)
32Another reason why Clarendon says so little about the execution may lie in his reluctance, despite his affection and reverence for the monarch, to perpetuate the cult of the Martyr King. However close the two men may have been at the time of the first Civil War, they did not share the same views on the institution of monarchy. In the 1630s Clarendon had questioned Charles’s personal rule, an opposition which he documents at the beginning of the History of the Rebellion and which he does not disown elsewhere.11 This critical stance reaches a climax in Clarendon’s mixed portrait of the King as a monarch, which contrasts with more hagiographical accounts. This is the conclusion to his “character,” situated right after the relation of the King’s execution:
To conclude: he was the worthiest gentleman, the best master, the best friend, the best husband, the best father, and the best Christian, that the age in which he lived had produced. And if he was not the best King, if he was without some parts and qualities which have made some kings great and happy, no other prince was ever unhappy who was possessed of half his virtues and endowments, and so much without any kind of vice. (Hyde 492)
33In his analysis of the causes of what he considers a regicide, Clarendon distances himself from providential interpretations, instead favouring contingency and personal causation, as he refused the notion that “heaven and earth conspired it” [the execution], and that “the stars designed it” (491). Indeed, he adds, “treachery proceeded not from any treasonable purpose to do him any harm, but from particular and personal animosities against other men” (491). From this angle, Clarendon’s silence is not mere omission but a meaningful narrative choice, one that reveals the difficulty royalist writers faced when representing the “unspeakable.”
34A similar reticence in recounting the death of the King is to be found in the memoirs of two gentlewomen, Anne Halkett (1623-1699) and Ann Fanshawe (1625-1680), both loyal servants to the King. The paradox that underpins their writings is that despite their devotion to Charles I, they relegated his execution to the background of their memoirs.
- 12 For her 2022 edition, Susan Trill chose to use Halkett’s own way to refer to her memoirs in her med (...)
35Anne Halkett (née Murray) probably wrote A True Account of my Life, better known as her “memoirs,” between September 1677 and April 1678 (1979, 3).12 Under the reign of James VI/I, her father, Thomas Murray, had been tutor to the duke of York (the future Charles II), while her mother, Jane Drummond, had been the governess to the duke of Gloucester and the princess Elizabeth (63). On the very first page of her memoir, Halkett signals her royalist commitments by paying homage to “the late King of blessed memory” and praises “the excellent prince […] steadfast in his religion […] and unmovable and undisturbed under all his unparalleled sufferings” (61). Her zeal in serving the King is well illustrated by the role she played in the duke of York’s escape from St James’s Palace on 20 April 1648 (83). She does not fail to claim that what urged her to act in such a bold way was “the earnest desire [she] had to serve the King” and the “zeal [she] had for His Majesty [which] made [her] not see what inconveniencies [she] exposed [herself] to” (86). The King, she also explains, “[had] approved of [Bampfield’s] choice of [Anne Halkett] to entrust with it for to get the Duke’s clothes made, and to dress him in disguise” (82). As Halkett makes it clear, the King’s “preservation” and the continuation of the monarchy were at stake in the duke of York’s escape (81). Nevertheless, despite this unquestionable devotion, she remains almost silent regarding the King’s execution, mentioning his trial and death in one single sentence – her use of the word “murder” leaving no doubt as to her allegiance to Charles I, and aligning her with all the royalists who regarded the beheading of the King as “a murder”: “The King’s misfortune daily increasing, and his enemies’ rage and malice, both were at least determined in that execrable murder never to be mentioned with horror and detestation” (88).
36Further evocations of the King’s execution appear in her meditations which, according to her editor, Susan Trill, should be read in parallel with A True Account (Halkett 2022, 3). The meditations dated 30 January 1661, 1673, 1690, reproduced in Trill’s edition, were all written on the anniversary of the King’s death, which was part of the Anglican calendar in all editions of the Book of Common Prayer from 1662 to 1859. These meditations, however, are neither concerned with the event itself nor with its circumstances, but with the commemoration of Charles’s as a martyr. On 30 January 1660, Halkett refers to “a day on which the greatest murder was committed that ever story mentioned (except the crucifying of our saviour)” (203). She thus participates, in her own way, in the cult of Charles the martyr, very much in the style of the Eikon Basilike:
Had not his Majesty come under all those trials and sufferings, how should the world and his own subjects [have] known his piety, patience, meekness and his charity, his constancy in suffering, and the heavenly ejaculations which upon all occasions he offered up to God in his solitudes, which like monuments are left to future generations to teach them how to follow what was eminent in him? (Halkett 2022, 204)
37Lady Anne Fanshawe’s (née Harrison) Memoirs similarly demonstrate paradoxical reticence. Her family moved with the court to Oxford during the Civil War. In 1644 she married Richard Fanshawe, a diplomat and a translator who served both Charles I and Charles II throughout the Civil Wars and Restoration. Fanshawe wrote her memoir around 1676 and, like Halkett, she omits to mention the execution of the King, moving seamlessly from one king to the next (Charles I to Charles II). However, her meeting with the King at Hampton court in 1647 can be read as a proleptic evocation of the King’s final moments, all the more so as the narrative of this encounter is framed by two references to the regicide. Firstly, in one long sentence, Anne Fanshawe, in the name of the royalist community, sums up almost two years of history, from late 1647 to the execution of the King on 30 January 1649, signalling the “folly” of three gentlemen of the King’s bedchamber, who helped the King flee from Hampton Court on 11 November 1647 before he was captured again on the Isle of Wight on 14 November of the same year:
This was a very sad time for us all of the King's party, for by the folly, to give it no worse name, of Sir John Berkeley, since Lord Berkeley, and Mr. John Ashburnham, of the King's bedchamber, who were drawn in by the cursed crew of the then standing army for the Parliament to persuade the King to leave Hampton Court, to which they had then carried him, and to make his escape, which design failing, as the plot was laid, he was tormented and afterwards barbarously and shamefully murdered, as all the world knows. (Fanshawe 120)
38Secondly, directly following this abrupt evocation of the regicide, Fanshawe recounts her meeting with the King in 1647, quoting his pious words, which foreshadow those spoken before his death. Her account of her own weeping adds pathos and anticipates all the tears that the King’s execution would later draw among his subjects:
I went three times to pay my duty to him, both as I was the daughter of his servant, and wife of his servant. The last time I ever saw him, when I took my leave, I could not refrain weeping: when he had saluted me, I prayed to God to preserve his Majesty with long life and happy years; he stroked me on the cheek, and said, ‘Child, if God pleaseth, it shall be so, but both you and I must submit to God's will, and you know in what hands.’ (Fanshawe 120)
39It is no wonder that this encounter, which happened in 1647, concludes with an explicit evocation of the King’s sufferings, in the vein of Eikon Basilike, with “that glorious sun” being a double reference to Charles and to the passion of Christ: “Thus did we part from that glorious sun, that within a few months after was murdered, to the grief of all Christians that were not forsaken by God” (120). Fanshawe’s silence, like Halkett’s, is loaded and can be taken as a form of reverence: by refusing to narrate the unspeakable, she preserves the King’s dignity and her own moral position.
40This reluctance to recount the execution of the King is not limited to royalist memoirists, who may have feared to desacralize the person of the monarch. It is also to be found under the pen of prominent supporters of Parliament, namely Richard Baxter (1615-1691), who was a chaplain in the Parliamentary army during the Civil War, and Thomas Fairfax (1612-1671), the Army’s General and victor of Marston Moor in 1645.
41In his posthumously published memoirs, entitled Reliquiae Baxterianae, the dissenting minister Richard Baxter aimed to give “the Reasons and Connexions of Things, as may best make the state of those Times understood by them that knew it not personally themselves” (30, §49). Despite his early support for Parliament, Baxter unequivocally distanced himself from the most radical army members in his memoirs. Although he had criticized Charles’s government and the Church of England in the early 1640s, Baxter did not support the King’s execution. To be sure, his account of the trial is devoid of compassion and pathos. Still, his description of the proceedings, which unfold with an unrelenting logic, accentuated by the repeated use of “so” and “and,” conveys his perplexity. Baxter wants to demonstrate that the trial and execution of the King were decided by an isolated minority (the “Rump and soldiers”), while many, including former allies of Parliament and the Army, disapproved of the Rump’s proceedings:
As the Lords were disaffected to these Proceedings, so were the Rump and Soldiers to the Lords: So that they passed a Vote (supposing that the Army would stand by them) to establish the Government without a King and House of Lords; and so the Lords dissolved, and these Commons sat and did all alone. And being deluded by Cromwell, and verily thinking that he would be for Democracie, which they called a Commonwealth, they gratified him in his Designs, and themselves in their disloyal Distrusts and Fears; and they caused a High Court of Justice to be erected, and sent for the King from the Isle of Wight: Collonel Hammond delivered him, and to Westminster-Hall he came, and refusing to own the Court and their Power to try him, Cook as Attorney having pleaded against him, Bradshaw as President and Judge recited the Charge and condemned him: And before his own Gate at Whitehall they erected a Scaffold, and before a full Assembly of People beheaded him. (Baxter 63, §96)
42The central focus of this account is not the King, but Cromwell, who is retrospectively accused of having orchestrated the sequence of events that led to the King’s execution. Baxter concludes that the regicide – the killing of the Lord’s anointed – not only resulted in disorientation and vanity; it also exposed the sins of the nation and undermined the godly Reformation that was then underway:
Wherein appeared the Severity of God, the Mutability and Uncertainty of Worldly Things, and the Fruits of a sinful Nation's Provocations, and the infamous Effects of Error, Pride and Selfishness, prepared by Satan to be charged hereafter upon Reformation and Godliness. (Baxter 63, §96)
- 13 “The high and excellent Tragedy, that openeth the greatest wounds and showeth forth the ulcers that (...)
For Baxter, whose words evoke Sir Philip Sidney’s definition of tragedy,13 regicide coincided with both a national and divine crisis; it was no less than “an unspeakable Injury of the Christian Name and Protestant Cause.” It is significant here that Baxter does not appeal to pathos but rather speaks as a preacher, offering a moral and providential interpretation of the event to a sinful nation (Sharpe 393-394).
- 14 “now therefore by his grace and assistance I shal set downe truly the grounds my actions during thi (...)
43Fairfax’s reluctance to deal with the execution of the King in his memoirs is more surprising than Baxter’s given that he remained the general of the New Model Army until after the trial. For this reason, and although he was neither a commissioner nor a signatory of the King’s death warrant, royalists tended to hold him responsible for the regicide. To justify his position and exonerate himself from the charge of regicide, he wrote two short memorials, probably in the 1670s.14 In the first memorial of the manuscript, “Short Memorials of Some things to be cleared during my command in the Army,” he attempts to dissociate himself from the Army’s decisions that led to the King’s death. He refers to the trial three times, but avoids direct representations of the regicide, only summarizing the events from the King’s abduction at Holmby to Pride’s Purge (21v). In this memorial, reticence is not so much silence born of reverence or horror, as a strategic rewriting of the past, designed to erase responsibility for an act deemed both politically catastrophic and morally indefensible.
44To be sure, Fairfax does not recount the death of Charles I. However, in a proleptic digression, he emphasizes his grief at failing to prevent it, comparing the King to the Cedar of the Bible (2 Kings 14:9): “My afflicted & troubled mind for it & my earnest endeavours to prevent it will I hope sufficiently testifie my dislike & abhorrance of the fact & what might they not now doe having thus Cutt downe the Ceader to the lower shrubs” (22r-22v). The image of the “3-fold chord cut by the sword” and of the diseased kingdom suggests that the different parts of the body politic (people, King, Parliament) have been severed from each other (22r). Five folios later, Fairfax resumes the narrative of the trial and its consequences referring to the subsequent abolition of the monarchy, using again the image of the tree to refer to the King: “whe[n] all the power was got into Army they cut up the root of Kingly Governement” (27r). He then moves on to the “war declared against Scotland for assisting the King” (27r-27v), and to the proclamation of the “new government which was now a Commonwealth against the Kingly Power.” To a large extent, Fairfax can be said to omit the regicide on purpose: he focuses only on his own experience and emotions in the face of the event, leaving out the martyrdom of the King and the role of the commissioners. Like Baxter, he lays the responsibility on Cromwell, the embodiment of ambition and dissimulation, specifying he did not resign his commission as a General in 1650 but that it was taken from him by “the remaining part of [Parliament]” (28v).
45Andrew Hopper has argued that Fairfax’s apologetic reconstruction cannot be trusted (225-226; Gardiner 293-294). Fairfax’s denial to be associated with the Army’s decisions in 1647-1648 contradicts known facts – it is hard to believe that the General of the Army was unaware of Pride’s Purge as he yet claims (folio 16v). According to the Victorian historian Samuel Rawson Gardiner, Fairfax, in the Short Memorials, “explained his conduct, not as it had actually been, but as he fancied it ought to have been” (293). This distortion is further intensified in the edition compiled by Brian Fairfax (1633-1711), Sir Thomas’s cousin, who downplays the Puritan character of the memorials, stressing instead the General’s “Ingenuous Acknowledgment of his Publick Error” (ix-x). In his 1699 edition of Fairfax’s Short Memorials, Brian Fairfax did not want his cousin’s name to be associated with the Commonwealthmen; rather, he aimed to extol the General’s virtues and to silence his role in the King’s execution as much as possible – a role the editor would like the reader to forget. This is what he explains in the Preface: “[Fairfax’s] great Misfortune, and so he accounted it, was to be engaged in the Unhappy Wars, whereof he desired no other Memorial than the Act of Oblivion; which few that ever needed, better deserved” (iv-v; Gheeraert-Graffeuille 2024).
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46Restoration memoirs provide multiple perspectives on the execution of Charles I. In doing so, they help fill in the gaps left by general history, while also revealing the complexity of the event itself and its representation. Yet, despite being invaluable sources for history, many memoirs – whether Parliamentarian or royalist – treat the King’s death with striking silences. Only the more militant texts, such as those of Ludlow, Warwick, or Herbert, engage directly or argumentatively with the regicide. Others, even by those closest to the event, such as Hutchinson or Fairfax, express perplexity and reluctance, offering only partial or indirect accounts. In Fanshawe, Halkett, and possibly in Clarendon’s memoirs, it is as if the personal took precedence over the historical, and the emotional over the factual. In some cases, the regicide disappears, fades into the background or is even omitted entirely. These silences cannot be mere lapses of memory; they are symptoms of unresolved tensions, not only at the time of the event recounted, but also at the time of writing and publication. The problem might be aesthetic – how should such a traumatic and unprecedented act be narrated? – or political – what kind of monarchy should England embrace? Indeed, except for Ludlow or Hutchinson who opted for a republican régime, all other memoirists, whether they sided with Parliament or King during the Civil War, grappled with questions about the nature of the English monarchy. These tensions became particularly visible with a series of memoir publications at the turn of the eighteenth century by John Toland and the bookseller John Darby, for whom the memory of the Civil War was a burning issue in the context of the standing army debate (Ludlow 1978, 30). For them, the question was both political and historiographical, as memoirs were expected to serve as the material for a general history of the Civil Wars, a highly polemical and political project at the time. The preface to Holles’s Memoirs, presumably written by Toland, suggests that, as the editor of several memoirs (Ludlow’s, Holles’s, Berkeley’s), he had in mind a kaleidoscopic sort of history, combining various ideological perspectives into a complex picture of the past – a way to fill in as many historical silences as possible and keep the memory of the regicide alive: “Such as really desire to know the naked Truth […] have ever exprest a desire in their Writings of seeing the Memoirs of all parties made public, as the most effectual means of framing a true General History” (Toland x).