Bradshaw’s speech needs to be read in the context of the comments by Charles I to which he was responding, a speech which most historians agree played at least as well with contemporary opinion. Bradshaw may read now as if it was stirring stuff, but he was on the defensive, fully aware that Charles had hit home when he claimed that, compared to them, he was the real defender of traditional law. Nor was this a new theme for Charles, for it was exactly what he had been saying with great subtlety and much intellectual sophistication since 1641. (The subtlety and sophistication having initially been provided by his ghost-writer, Sir Edward Hyde.)
Moreover, as Richard Cust stresses in his major new biography of him, Charles actually believed this stuff. Talk about ‘divine right’ and ‘absolute power’ misses the point. Almost everyone, including most of the members of the high court of justice, believed that the king was God’s Anointed and that his power was ‘absolute’, which is hardly surprising when contemporary Englishmen had almost always previously associated the denial of such things with popery. The standard complaint of his critics was that he should rule more like Elizabeth I. But Charles thought that he was ruling like Elizabeth I. Same with religion. It wasn’t that Charles was any less ‘Protestant’ than his critics; it was that they disagreed about what being a Protestant meant. Most historians would now say that Charles was less right when he claimed that his was the traditional form of ‘Protestant’ Christianity (in contradiction to his opponents, who claimed that they were the real traditionalists), but that wasn’t at all obvious at the time and is a point that is still hotly debated.
Nor was his talk of wanting to work with Parliament dishonest. A point historians have only very recently begun to stress is that we should not forget that, unlike any of his predecessors within living memory, he had actually sat in a Parliament and not just in an honorary capacity either – one of the latest historiographical fashions is to see him as the leading figure in the 1624 Parliament, with him having used it to try to manipulate his father. He thus knew what it was like to manage a Parliament from the inside and so was correspondingly more inclined to see low motives behind his opponents’ high talk. When he felt that the 1625, 1626 and 1628 Parliaments had betrayed him, he meant that personally, that men with whom he had worked closely in 1624 had failed to deliver on policies for which they had hitherto been gung-ho (war with Spain) now that it really mattered. By 1629 Charles could feel that he had twice given them the benefit of the doubt and that they had twice let him down. And he had a point. It was not that he somehow failed to see Parliament as the high-minded guardian of the national interests. Parliament wasn’t that and thinking that it was was a mistake he had made already. No, seventeenth-century Parliaments really were inconsistent, factious, petty-minded and often short-sighted. It is just that the smarter thing would have been to accept them for what they were, rather than to expect them to prove that they were better than that.
But he wasn’t politically stupid. One thing that Cust is very good on is how tactically astute he could be. Charles wasn’t a natural politician, but he was much smarter than his modern popular image. That was also his undoing. If he had been just the naïve idealist, a two-dimensional believer in his ‘divine right’, his critics would easily have outmanoeuvred him. There would have been no need to depose him or even to fight a civil war. The usual round of factional infighting at court would have done the trick. Indeed, that is pretty much what his leading critics in Parliament thought they were doing in 1640-2 and many of them continued to think in such terms right to the very end. Charles however played dirty and proved to be rather good at it. That was why he was able to fight Parliament in 1642 and why he was able to hold out against them until 1646.
garius’s poker analogy for the trial is a good one, but only if one recognises that the regicides’ bluff was also called. The most recent professional historian to have written in detail about the trial, Sean Kelsey, has turned the conventional interpretation on its head. (One of his articles on the subject is available online.) Far from wanting to execute Charles, most of the members of the high court of justice only envisaged the trial as a prelude to further negotiations. Faced with the apparent threat of execution, Charles was supposed to make some sort of acknowledgement of his errors (not necessarily an actual guilty plea) and only then would they have begun negotiating. Even Cromwell would probably have preferred a deal on that basis. This backfired because, in hoping that Charles would plead, they gave him lots of chances to claim the (other) moral high ground. He mistakenly thought he had nothing to lose. Forced into this unexpected corner, the members of high court of justice – or rather the minority of them who were prepared to act – found themselves having to follow through the threat. They would doubtless have said, and indeed did say, that Charles deserved his fate, but it may not have been the one most of them had really wanted for him.
