Beheading of King Charles I
Canon Professor Michael Hull writes:
The Scottish Prayer Book (1929) commemorates the Beheading of King Charles I on 30 January, the date of his execution in 1649 outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall. There is a disquieting irony in Charles’s advocacy of the first Scottish Prayer Book (1637) and the commemoration of his martyrdom posthumously added to the SPB in later iterations. Just under four centuries later, Charles’s beheading casts into relief two things: the primacy of conscience and the ignominy of capital punishment.
The divine right of kings stands tall in Charles’s story and for it, among other things, he bent his head on the scaffold. Divine-right theory likens and directly connects the authority of a monarch to the authority of God. Divine-right theory was entrenched in Britain under the Stuarts and supported by the lion’s share of Anglican divines in their day. With this authority, it follows, comes great responsibility; and Charles, who took his authority and responsibility most seriously to heart, was unwilling to share a scintilla thereof with Parliament. The theory is hardly original to the Stuarts, to be sure; but along the trajectory of the Holy Roman emperors and mediaeval popes, it is rooted in the (mis)conception of God willing and awarding temporal power to anointed rulers and spiritual power to the church with the peppering of absolute authority to both and little recourse to anyone else.
Charles professed clearly and boldly, to the point of brutal death, to follow his conscience in recognising no authority in Parliament. And though most would deem his conscience erroneous and the divine-right theory indefensible today, we cannot help but laud his vocation from and obedience to God as he understood them. The takeaway is for us to ask ourselves if we have a devotion like his. It is reported that before the axe fell, Charles said, ‘I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown; where no disturbance can be, no disturbance in the world’ echoing 1 Cor. 9.25. Again, though our thinking be removed from his by almost four centuries, his devotion to his principles gives us pause in terms of following his conscience even under pain of death.
Charles’s ignominious decapitation also gives us pause. Charles was the victim of capital punishment. Perhaps we are not used to thinking along those lines, yet that is, in fact, the truth, viz. the state, in the person, of Parliament pronounced and executed a judgement of the death penalty upon Charles. Recall it was only in 2004 that the death penalty was completely abolished in the UK. Whilst that abolition is a very good thing, the ignominy of violence and violent death remains all-too present today. Commemorating the indefensible beheading of man, not because of his anointing, but because of his humanity, affords us the opportunity to reflect upon the human dignity of every child of God. ‘Rich and poor have this in common: The Lord is the Maker of them all’ (Prov. 22.4).
To deplore the violence done to Charles is to deplore the violence done to every person, no matter their wealth or poverty by any human standard. That they are made in God’s image and likeness, and that the King of Kings died on the throne of the Cross in Atonement for their sins, means their worth is inestimable. Their significance as daughters and sons of God and sisters and brothers of Jesus should preclude violence to their persons. The sad truth of our day is that about a million people worldwide lose their lives to violence each year in the early twenty-first century and many more suffer a ghastly array of physical, sexual and mental ferocities.
All told, we can learn a great deal in commemorating Charles. He is a martyr for the Christian faith as he understood it and a fatality of a sentence no civilised state would today impose. It is reported that Charles awoke before dawn in St James’s Palace on Saturday 30 January 1649 and, upon opening the curtains said, ‘I have great work to do today’. He asked for a second shirt to keep warm and avoid shivering from cold which could have been interpreted as shaking from fear. Charles’s devotion to his beliefs allowed him dignity in his suffering. Charles’s commemoration is an opportunity for us to examine our consciences in terms of our devotion to our beliefs. And the test case, if you will, may be our steadfastness in standing tall against the violence waged against our sisters and brothers, not only here but abroad. As long as our fellow human beings are victims of violence, we have the prospect of putting our devotion to the test vis-à-vis our consciences and not fearing even our own suffering and death (Rev. 12.11). We have great work to do today.
The Reverend Canon Professor Michael Hull has been an Assistant Priest at St Vincent’s since 2015. He is also the Principal of the Scottish Episcopal Institute.
