The Scruples that Beget a “King and Martyr”

It was long traditional in the Church of England to commemorate the Execution of King Charles I as that of a “King and Martyr.” This observance dates back to the Restoration of  the monarchy in 1660 after which Charles was formally declared a martyr and saint by the Church of England in 1662 and indeed would be the only person so canonized by the English church.  Nonetheless, observance was removed from the formal Calendar of the Church under Queen Victoria though the feast has continued to be observed quite widely by Anglo-Catholics down to the present day. 

This invites consideration of how it came to be possible for him as King to be put on trial at all and in addition how he could come to be considered a martyr and thus a saint. 

The trial and execution of Charles I in the winter of 1649 brought into collision two fundamentally opposed understandings of kingship: one grounded in divine right and traditional constitutional forms, the other in popular sovereignty and accountability to “the people.” 

For Charles, kingship was a divinely instituted office in which the monarch was accountable immediately to God, not to any human court. This underlay his repeated refusal to plead, and his insistence on asking “by what authority, I mean lawful,” he was called to answer the charges brought. He considered that as the Lord’s anointed he stood above ordinary jurisdiction. Thus he could be advised, petitioned, or in extremis even deposed through the mechanisms of the historic constitution, but he could not be arraigned as a private delinquent before a court composed of his subjects. 

He upheld a view that went back to the Reformation settlement after the break with Rome made by King Henry VIII according to which it was the triad of King, Lords, and Commons which together constituted Parliament. This meant that the House of “Commons” acting alone, without the Lords and without the crown, was not a true Parliament and could not create a lawful court to try its own sovereign. Hence in his view to have acknowledged such a body as judge would have been to betray both his coronation oath and the divinely ordained structure of the realm and constitution

Charles saw himself indeed as entrusted with the “welfare and liberty” of his people by God; thus his claim, that he stood more for their liberties than did his judges, was not mere rhetoric but a reflection of a view in which liberty lay in fixed, known laws protected by a divinely sanctioned ruler. The anointing at his coronation marked the king as a sacred person, invested with spiritual as well as temporal responsibility.

In sharp contrast, the court and what has come to be known as the “Rump Parliament,” relied upon a newly emergent understanding of kingship as a conditional trust derived from the people and subject to legal scrutiny. By declaring that “the people are, under God, the original of all just power,” and that the Commons represented that people, they inverted the traditional hierarchy. The king became not an unjudgeable sovereign, but a magistrate who could forfeit his office by violating fundamental laws and liberties. On this view, levying war against Parliament and people constituted treason, even when committed by the king himself. 

The creation of the entirely new High Court of Justice to try Charles was thus both a symptom and an instrument of a new conception: the monarch as servant of the commonwealth, subject to law, and liable to punishment when deemed to have to have become a “tyrant.”

These competing understandings of kingship collided in the proceedings at Westminster Hall. Every move Charles made—his refusal to remove his hat before the court, his refusal to plead, his insistence on addressing the “people” and “their liberties”—was framed by the older sacrally inflected, corporate vision of the constitution. Every move the court made—refusing to debate jurisdiction, pressing him to plead as an ordinary defendant, proceeding to sentence him in his absence—asserted the new theory that even a king might be tried as a “public enemy.” The execution itself, on a public scaffold outside the Banqueting House, dramatized the triumph, however temporary, of the notion that the king could be unmade in law and in body by those who claimed to act in the name of the people

The aftermath further underlined the divergence. Royalists and high churchmen memorialized Charles as a martyr-king whose blood testified to the sacredness of traditional kingship and its union with the church. For his regicidal opponents, the execution marked the rejection of divine-right claims and the assertion that sovereignty lay ultimately with “the people,” not the crown. 

Beneath all this there was however, also a religious polarization which also meant that both sides came to see the conflict as fundamentally about the nature of the church also. 

Charles sought to preserve what he understood as the apostolic and sacramental integrity of the Church of England. The parliamentary majority, by contrast––increasingly dominated by Calvinist theology––sought to purify the church of what they regarded as popish corruptions and to subordinate ecclesiastical policy to parliamentary oversight rather than royal prerogative. 

This meant that theological differences became inseparable from constitutional differences. Could the king unilaterally determine religious policy, or did Parliament possess an ultimate voice in ecclesiastical governance? These questions could not be separated, because in the English constitution, the church was established by parliamentary statute (as made clear by the Act of Supremacy, 1534), yet the king held the title of Supreme Governor.

The Scottish Solemn League and Covenant (1643), which committed the Westminster Assembly to develop a church polity closer to Scotland’s presbyterian system, further radicalized the religious stakes. Charles, therefore in turn, faced not merely the loss of authority over the Church of England, but the possible dismantling of the episcopal structure that he regarded as essential to the church’s apostolic authenticity. This was not a question of personal preference; it was, in Charles’s understanding, a question of the church’s very nature and standing within the universal Catholic communion. All of which becomes highly relevant to the question of his claim to martyrdom (which it should also be noted would of itself entail sanctity).

The perhaps single crucial moment came during what is known as the Treaty of Newport negotiations (from September-November 1648), conducted while Charles was confined to Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight. 

Ultimately it seems clear that as part of these negotiations Parliament offered Charles not merely his life but restoration to the throne, and a limited constitutional settlement—but only if he would agree to abandon the episcopacy and accept a presbyterian form of settlement for the Church of England, at least temporarily. This was the decisive test and here it seems clear that Charles, with full knowledge of the consequences, categorically refused. 

He wrote that he could not abandon the bishops, for doing so would transform the Church of England from a part of the “one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church” into “a sect.” Thus his refusal was not born of his political views or mere personal obstinacy, but for an expressly theological conviction: namely that the apostolic succession transmitted through bishops was non-negotiable for the church’s identity and validity. That this was what sealed Charles’s fate is what grounds the claim that he died a martyr quite independent of the wider politics that surrounded this complex episode of history. 

There is, however, a wider dimension which cannot be explored here now, but it is very important to note the implications for how the church itself should be understood, and the nature of the bonds which the structure of an authentically catholic ecclesiology require. 

And here there is the added interest that this was all in play after the Reformation and the Church of England’s separation from the jurisdiction of Rome. This raises issues which continue to matter––namely exactly what the bonds are that unite Anglicans in the Communion and indeed all bishops in the church.