I thought I had quit worrying about our national political scene, but of course the worry is inescapable. I have been wrong concerning almost everything to do with Donald Trump—and not just a little bit wrong, but sensationally so. I was convinced that it was impossible for him to be elected in 2016. I am convinced that he cannot be elected in 2024. But then the sardonic aphorism of H. L. Mencken steals upon the mind: “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.” Does it not seem that a detailed and circumstantial criminal indictment, thus far answered only by petulance, might be a serious impediment? As a result of a trip to the library last week, I am worried. For after a long hiatus occasioned mainly by the Covid situation, I have been able to return to spending a few hours now and then in the Firestone Library pursuing what I indulgently call research.
I face two problems. The first, not new but newly much more acute, is that most of the books I want to look at have been removed to a “remote storage” facility. The paging service is fairly quick, but the system itself is still a grievous downgrade from the glory days when Firestone was truly “open stack.” To fetch something from remote storage, you need already at least to suspect that the book is worth fetching. No footnote, printed bibliography, or even book review can replace walking slowly down a range of books already carefully arranged for you by expert librarians by subject relevance. It usually takes about ninety seconds of flipping through a book’s pages to know whether you want to spend time with it or not. It takes a good deal more time than that to order unseen something that may well turn out to be useless to you. This wastes your own time as well as that of circulation librarians and unseen book-fetchers. The second difficulty might be described as the candy store problem. It is that wandering up and down random stacks, one comes upon alluring random titles of a distracting character. Thus, straying far from fifteenth-century France, I found myself in seventeenth-century England, where I chanced upon a seductive book by an erudite if somewhat eccentric historian glorying in the name of Esmé Wingfield-Stratford: King Charles the Martyr, 1643-1649. Its subject, obviously, was the period of the final years of King Charles I, decapitated under a parliamentary warrant of treason on January 30, 1649. It’s a terrific book.
A once-popular comic history of England, 1066 and All That, summarizes the English Civil War of the seventeenth century as a central historical event “consisting in the utterly memorable Struggle between the Cavaliers (Wrong but Wromantic) and the Roundheads (Right but Repulsive).” That is an amusing way of putting it at only the minor expense of trivializing a major episode in political and ecclesiastical history. Wingfield-Stratford, while capable of the amusing aside, takes things more seriously. The convincing paradox he advances is this: the vengeful Presbyterian parliamentarians in believing they were putting an end to the British monarchy were in fact guaranteeing its restoration. Oliver Cromwell, aware of this danger, did all he could to prevent the execution; but he was outmanoeuvred and thus overpowered by the fanaticism of the radicals in Parliament. That is the “take away” from Wingfield-Stratford’s book.
Historical parallels do exist, but some are more compelling than others. The parallel martyrdoms of Charles Stuart and Donald Trump are far from exact. Indeed, they are tenuous, but there are still enough similarities to disturb me. King Charles was a pretty lousy monarch. He was a poor administrator easily influenced by dubious lieutenants. But he was an excellent martyr. If he had put a high priority on self-preservation, he could certainly have avoided death. The issue for which he went to the scaffold was the ecclesiastical governance of the national church. The victorious Parliament demanded presbyterian governance in which the individual parish ministers had much power. The King, by statute “head of the church”, insisted on the continuity of episcopacy, a church overseen by diocesan bishops. It is true that these views were not without political implications. Charles’s father, King James I, had succinctly opined, “No bishop, no king.” According to Malcolm’s famous line about the Thane of Cawdor in Macbeth, “Nothing in his life so became him as his manner of leaving it.” This truly could be said of Charles. His deportment in his imprisonment and on the scaffold was a testament to dignified courage. It might erase in the popular mind the hauteur of several episodes of his reign. In the wake of the king’s execution there appeared a book, the Eikon Basilike: the portraicture of His Sacred Majestie in his solitudes and sufferings. It is presented as though the monarch’s own memoir of his imprisonment, and I see little reason to doubt that it is. The title of the book is Greek for “the picture of the King.” And the picture is that of an ethically noble, long-suffering, and very attractive man. The book became an enduring best-seller, and reinforced at the popular level the idea that the man had been a saint. It won for Charles in death a true popularity that had eluded him in life. One might even say that martyrdom was his only possible route to reputational salvation.
It took only about a decade for monarchy to be restored in England. When it was, terrible punishments were inflicted on some still-living signers of the King’s death warrant and unpleasant desecrations visited upon the interred remnants of the dead ones. Severed heads decorated the palings of the Thames bridges.
I now come to the political parallel which, while hardly dramatic, does have me worried. Mr. Trump, with lots of encouragement, is presenting himself as a martyr, victim of a “witch-hunt” and selective prosecution. Never mind that no martyr on the books has ever led so sybaritic, pampered, and self-indulgent a life. Never mind that through the long months of Document Gate he was treated not with kid but gossamer gloves by government officials not generally conspicuous for their patient tolerance of illegality. Unfortunately, there is enough of a revanchist tone to some of the left-wing gloating to allow those so inclined to doubt that the majesty of the rule of law is the actual animating passion of his adversaries. And our politics du jour is that of the “so inclined”. Dogmatic, abrasive, and (very often) ignorant certainty has replaced any pretense of civilly debating debatable matters. Trump is not a martyr; he is a hoarder of impressive memorabilia who thinks that military secrets are "cool". Those are two things more different than chalk and cheese. Nor is he in any conceivable sense the paladin of any Christian cause, as he has claimed in a recent pronouncement that should be deeply offensive to all Christians—though alas probably won’t be. But even the most tenuous parallels between 1649 and 2023 are worrisome to me. The law of unforeseen and unintended consequences still operates, and usually malignly.
*Esme Wingfield-Stratford, King Charles the Martyr, 1643-1649 (London : Hollis & Carter, 1950)
