Commontide
Anglican Commemoration
King & Martyr
January 30 · d. 1649
also known as Charles Stuart, Charles I of England
Charles I, King of England, Scotland and Ireland, was born in 1600 and executed outside the Banqueting House at Whitehall on 30 January 1649, after a trial whose authority he refused to acknowledge. He died declaring that he died a Christian in the profession of the Church of England. At the Restoration the Convocations of Canterbury and York entered him in the Kalendar as King Charles the Martyr, and from 1662 until 1859 the Book of Common Prayer appointed a proper service for his day.
Charles Stuart was never meant to be king. He was a second son, born at Dunfermline Palace in Scotland in 1600, and it was his elder brother Henry who was being raised for the throne. Then Henry died in 1612, and Charles, at eleven, became the heir. At fifteen he was made Prince of Wales. At twenty-four, three weeks short of his twenty-fifth birthday, his father died and he was king of three kingdoms.
He was a king who believed his office came to him from God and could not be handed back. For eleven years, from 1629 to 1640, he governed without calling a Parliament at all. He backed his Archbishop, William Laud, in a programme of ceremony and order in the churches, and in 1637 that programme was pushed onto Scotland in the form of a new prayer book. The Scots would not have it. There was a riot in St Giles, then a Covenant, then two wars against his own northern kingdom. That same year his prerogative court, the Star Chamber, sentenced three men who had written pamphlets against bishops, William Prynne, Henry Burton and John Bastwick, to the pillory, to have their ears cut off, to ruinous fines and to imprisonment at the ends of the kingdom; Prynne was branded on the cheek besides. The crowds who watched pitied the prisoners, and remembered.
Then came the moment his own conscience never let go of. In 1641 Parliament moved against his ablest minister, Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford. Charles had promised him protection. With a mob at the gates and his wife's safety in question, Charles signed the bill that sent Strafford to the block, even though Strafford had written first to release him from his word. Eight years later, standing on a scaffold of his own, he would call that the sin his own death was repaying.
The wars came, and he lost them. In May 1646, beaten and running, he turned up at Little Gidding, the small praying household of Nicholas Ferrar, which he had visited twice in better years; in 1633 he had borrowed one of their Gospel harmonies and sent it back annotated in his own hand. Now John Ferrar hid the king two days at Coppingford and got him away to Stamford. Three years of captivity followed. From Newcastle in August 1646 he wrote his son a rough draft of a letter about what a king may not surrender, saying that whoever persuades you to part with the sword "does but in a civil way desire you to be no king."
On 20 January 1649 he was brought into Westminster Hall to face a court set up by the Commons alone, the Lords having refused. He would not take off his hat, and he would not plead. "I would know by what power I am called hither," he said, "by what authority, I mean lawful; there are many unlawful authorities in the world, Thieves and Robbers by the highways." He was found guilty on 27 January. On the 29th he took leave of his two youngest children still in England. Taking the eight-year-old Duke of Gloucester on his knee, he said, "Sweetheart, now they will cut off thy father's head." The boy looked hard at him, and he said again, "Heed, my child, what I say."
He came to the scaffold just before two o'clock the next afternoon. The soldiers stood so thick that the crowd could not hear him; what he said survives because Bishop William Juxon, beside him, took it down. He named his own sin first: God forbid, he said, that he should be so poor a Christian as not to say that God's judgments were just upon him, for "an unjust Sentence (Strafford) that I suffered for to take effect, is punished now by an unjust Sentence upon me." He forgave everyone, and said he did not wish to know who had brought him there. Then he went further than forgiveness: "my charity must go further. I wish that they may repent," praying with St Stephen that it not be laid to their charge. He declared that he died a Christian according to the profession of the Church of England, as he had found it left him by his father, and added, "I have a good Cause, and I have a gracious God; I will say no more."
Juxon told him there was but one stage more, and it would carry him from earth to heaven. Charles answered, "I go from a corruptible, to an incorruptible Crown; where no disturbance can be, no disturbance in the World." Juxon said, "You are exchanged from a Temporal to an eternal Crown; a good exchange."
What is strange and steadying about the rest of the account is how ordinary it is. He took off his cloak and gave Juxon the jewel of St George with the single word, "Remember," and put his cloak back on. He asked whether his hair was well. He told the executioner, "You must set it fast," and that the block might have been a little higher, and that when he put out his hands, then. Then he stooped and laid his neck down.
They buried him a few days later at Windsor, at night, in a vault that already held Henry VIII, with four men attending. The parliamentary governor of the castle refused Juxon leave to read the burial office out of the Prayer Book, and Juxon would not improvise something else, so a king went into the ground with nothing said over him. Westminster Abbey had been denied him on purpose, so that no one should come to the grave. Eleven years later the church he had died professing put his name in its calendar, and for nearly two centuries said prayers over him every 30 January that no one had been allowed to say at his burial.
Charles named his own sin before he named anyone else's. Standing where he had every excuse to protest his innocence, he said that God's judgments were just upon him, and pointed to the man he had abandoned to save himself. That is a harder thing than forgiving, and he did the forgiving too, refusing even to learn who had condemned him, and then going past forgiveness to wish them repentance and peace. You will not stand on a scaffold. But you will stand somewhere, sometime, with a real grievance in your hands and a genuine fault of your own underneath it, and you will have to choose which one you name first. Which would you rather be caught holding?
The evidence for Charles is unusually thick and unusually partisan, and the two facts are related. The nearest thing to a verbatim record of his death is a pamphlet printed within days, King Charls His Speech Made upon the Scaffold, issued by special authority from the press of Peter Cole in 1649; it rests in turn on the shorthand taken by Bishop William Juxon, who was his own chaplain and had every reason to render him at his most dignified. The trial is worse served: no complete official transcript survives, and what we have are partial contemporary printings, such as King Charles, His Trial (London, 1649). Sir Thomas Herbert, a gentleman of the bedchamber and an eyewitness, wrote his memoir around 1678, some twenty-nine years afterwards and under a restored monarchy that rewarded flattering accounts. John Nalson assembled trial documents in 1684; Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, wrote and rewrote his history over decades and it was published in 1702-04. The parliamentary side is represented by the Journals of the House of Commons and, in argument, by Milton's Eikonoklastes of 1649. A modern reader should notice that almost every narrative source is a partisan of one side or the other, and that the earliest of them is the most devotional.
The dates need care. English dates of the period are Old Style, ten days behind the Continental calendar, so 30 January 1649 is 9 February by Gregorian reckoning. Separately, the English civil year began on 25 March, which is why contemporary documents date the execution 1648, and why the 1837 memorial slab at Windsor still gives that year. Neither is an error. The day of the burial is genuinely unsettled: the College of St George says 7 February, other accounts say 8 or 9 February, and no source here settles it.
The paper trail for the procedure is clear enough. On 6 January 1649 the Commons, sitting without the Lords, voted 29 to 26 to try the King and established a High Court of Justice; 135 commissioners were appointed and 68 ever sat; John Bradshaw presided; 59 signed the death warrant, two of them men who had not been present when sentence was passed.
Two things circulate about Charles that the earliest printing contradicts. The modern paraphrase "I would go from a corruptible crown to an incorruptible crown" is not what the 1649 pamphlet prints, and the pamphlet also says he gave Juxon the George alone and put his cloak back on again; the later summary adding a sash and the cloak is not supported. The maxim "No bishop, no king" is his father's, not his.
The largest contested question is the authorship of Eikon Basilike, the book of meditations published under his name within about ten days of his death, which ran to roughly thirty-five editions inside a year and did more than anything else to make him a martyr in the public mind. Its publisher, Richard Royston, is reported to have been told to prepare the press in October 1648, and the manuscript reached him through the King's chaplain Edward Simmons on 23 December 1648. By the end of the seventeenth century the book was attributed to John Gauden, later Bishop of Worcester, who claimed it and was rewarded; against that, William Levett, a groom of the bedchamber, swore he had watched Charles composing it on the Isle of Wight, and Jeremy Taylor is sometimes credited with revising it. Modern scholarship leans toward Gauden compiling and largely composing the printed text from genuine royal papers. No autograph manuscript has been identified, and the debate proceeds from printed editions and sworn testimony rather than from anything in the King's hand. The honest position, held since the seventeenth century and not resolved since, is that the book's most famous sentences cannot be quoted as his voice.
Devotion began at once, before any liturgical recognition existed. Royalist report, through Philip Henry, holds that bystanders dipped handkerchiefs in the King's blood at the scaffold, though Henry was a propagandist and no other eyewitness corroborates him. What is not in doubt is that Eikon Basilike was received with extraordinary reverence and functioned almost as an icon.
After the Restoration the Convocations of Canterbury and York added him to the calendar; the documented chain runs from the Book Annexed signed on 20 December 1661, through the service read and approved in Convocation on 26 April 1662, to the royal warrant of 2 May 1662 and the Act of Uniformity, which set "K. Charles, Martyr" at 30 January with a proper collect, Epistle from 1 Peter and Gospel from Matthew. Hundreds of commemorative sermons were printed between the 1660s and the late eighteenth century, though the observance was always more a Tory and High Church cause than a settled Anglican consensus. Queen Victoria ordered the state services discontinued on 17 January 1859. The Society of King Charles the Martyr was founded in 1894, the Royal Martyr Church Union in 1906; the Alternative Service Book restored a commemoration in 1980, and Common Worship added a new collect in 2000. Six English parish churches carry his name, among them Falmouth, consecrated in 1665, and Tunbridge Wells, built in 1676.
The scaffold quotations are from King Charls His Speech Made upon the Scaffold at Whitehall-Gate, Immediately before his Execution, printed by Peter Cole in 1649 and published by special authority; the sequence used here is the pamphlet's own, and the passages quoted are the Strafford passage, the forgiveness passage, the declaration of faith, and the exchange with Bishop Juxon on the two crowns. Spelling in circulating transcriptions varies, and the text used is the anglicanhistory.org transcription rather than a diplomatic edition. The trial words are from the excerpted record of the first day, 20 January 1649, citing King Charles, His Trial (London, 1649). The letter to the Prince of Wales, headed Newcastle, 26 August 1646, is printed in James Orchard Halliwell's Letters of the Kings of England, Now First Collected from the Originals in Royal Archives, and from Other Authentic Sources (London, 1846), volume II, page 418, where Halliwell's own note describes the document as a rough draft in the King's hand, endorsed by him, from the Clarendon State Papers. The farewell to Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Gloucester survives in Elizabeth's own written account of 29 January 1649, reproduced here from secondary retellings; no scholarly edition of her manuscript was consulted. For Eikon Basilike, the standard modern edition is Philip A. Knachel's, published by Cornell University Press for the Folger Shakespeare Library in 1966 in the series Documents of Tudor and Stuart Civilization, which prints Gauden's authorship-claim documents as an appendix; Almack's 1904 King's Classics reprint and the Project Gutenberg text serve as reading copies. Andrew Lacey's The Cult of King Charles the Martyr (Boydell, 2003) is the standard modern account of the veneration.
The critical questions raised about him since are old, not modern. Milton raised the Christ-comparison objection in print in 1649. The charge that the veneration was a political act of the restored church, performed by the institution with most to gain from it, is answerable only by saying that this is what happened. And his own record cuts both ways: the man who died for the profession of a church had, in 1637, used his prerogative court to mutilate men for writing against that church's government. The two facts sit beside each other and do not resolve.
Readings for a Martyr
Jeremiah 15:15–21Psalm 34Revelation 7:9–17Luke 12:4–12
Almighty God, you gave your servant Charles boldness to confess the Name of our Savior Jesus Christ before the rulers of this world, and courage to die for this faith: Grant that we may always be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in us, and to suffer gladly for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.