Andrew Lacey. The Cult of King Charles the Martyr. Woodbridge and Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2003. viii + 310 pp. $85.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-85115-922-5.
Reviewed by Michael Mendle (Department of History, University of Alabama)
Published on H-Albion (March, 2004)
Had he been confronted by Machiavelli's famous question, "whether it is better to be loved or feared," Charles I, in life having experienced little of either, would scarcely have known what to answer. His career, however, suggests the shrewdest response would have been "Plan C": for him, it was best to be pitied. He thrived when abused, and won by losing. Even as prince, victimization had been his strongest suit, when, returning from the Spanish marriage venture, he and Buckingham played the role of dutiful pawns of a foolish king. Later, in 1629 and 1630, he gathered the first measure of support after the events surrounding the Petition of Right, securing the services of able administrators and lawyers and an ideological underpinning for later civil-war royalism, from those who thought the "opposition" (or whatever it was) had gone too far. The pattern repeated itself in 1642, when Charles put together an armed party--precisely what he longed for and could not acquire in the preceding year and a half--out of people who regarded his losses as harbingers of their own. Even after military defeat, in 1646 and 1647, Charles again bounced back, with parliamentary conservatives and some radicals (including John Lilburne) convinced that his destruction anticipated their own, and equally convinced that the chastened king would make common cause with them against the "real" enemy, whoever that might be.
The locus classicus of the pattern, of course, was the Protestant canonization attendant upon Charles's execution on January 30, 1649. The extraordinary hold of the event and its perpetuation in historical memory is the province of Andrew Lacey's ambitious undertaking, The Cult of King Charles the Martyr. Chronologically, the range is vast. Lacey examines antecedent components of the cult before 1649, its formation in 1649, the 1650s, and early in the Restoration, and its vicissitudes in the political and cultural climates of the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Lacey usefully concludes with a notice of the cult today, even to the 1980 restoration of January 30 to the Calendar of the Church of England, albeit as a "minor commemoration." Concerned both to read the cult of commemoration into each succeeding age, and to seek in its transformations a litmus paper of changing issues and concerns, Lacey engages a formidable range of primary sources and secondary literature. Naturally his gaze lingers on the effusion of January 30 sermons. Lacey's perseverance, triumphing over the seeming monotony of the genre, is rewarded by a cold-war Kremlinologist's ability to tease out the tiniest variations or deviations from the core position. Thus, most notably, Lacey suggests that the intensely personal element in the cult was both its greatest attraction and its Achilles' heel. The identification of Charles with Christ (strengthened by the belief in the king's healing touch) drove the cult forward for decades. But along with the obvious teetering along the edge of blasphemy (which gave Milton some of his best opportunities), the ever-increasing remoteness of January 30 took its toll. Situational political similarities--as those of the early and mid-1680s--could provide temporary revivals, but in the long run, the main direction of the cult could only be downhill.
The Cult of King Charles the Martyr, therefore, is a welcome introduction to a vast literature, moving usefully beyond the King's Book and its counters (well studied elsewhere) to survey a wider terrain. Nevertheless, not all questions are as thoroughly addressed as they might have been. While Lacey argues strongly that the "cult did not appear out of nowhere" (p. 47), he neglects some of the best sources for his argument. In the medium term, there were important occasional sermon series that clearly provided models for imitation and further development, the sermons James I and VI adored in commemoration of Plot Day and his deliverance from the Gowrie conspiracy. Closer to hand were the March 27 sermons attending to the anniversary of Charles's accession. From 1640 forward, these became a marker of militant royalism; an accidental counter-genre emerged in 1644, when a parliamentary Fast Day conveniently fell on March 27, and George Gillespie and John Bond studiously ignored mention of the anniversary in their cock-a-hoop performances before the Commons.
The Restoration was the apogee of the cult. Early on, the Prayer Book was amended to create the office for January 30. No doubt resistances to the cult--a tantalizing if somewhat understated motif of this volume--was at an ebb. But it may be that seeking skepticism in sermons rather than elsewhere is to make even less of the little there is. The pamphlet and poetic output might have been more closely attended to. Thus while it is inevitable that Andrew Marvell's characterization of "the Royal Actor" Charles in An Horatian Ode ("He nothing common did or mean / Upon that memorable scene") should receive its proper play as epigraph and title-provider to chapter 1, a later poem sequence of Marvell has much to say about martyr cult scepticism in the 1670s. The so-called "Statue Poems" or "Horse Poems" (dating from late 1674 and 1675) concern two equestrian statues, one of Charles I and one of his son, a trope itself dripping with ridicule. The martyr's statue is dismissed as an otherwise pointless sop ("Have wee not already had enough of one [Charles II's statue] to comfort the hearts of the poor Cavaleer[s].")[1] The last, "A Dialogue between the Two Horses" contemns the cult as brutally as ever it could be done: "He that dyes for Ceremonies dyes like a fool."[2]
But Lacey's largest lost opportunity is his too-hasty dismissal of the business of the Calves-Head Club, that supposed inversion of January 30 by a motley of old Roundheads and new Commonwealthsmen, who celebrated the day with feasting, drinking, and songs. Their feasting paraphernalia, so it was said, included a calf's skull filled with wine and passed around as a sort of communion cup. Lacey, like most other expositors, declares the existence of the group "improbable" (p. 209), a fiction of the fertile Tory imagination of Ned Ward, whose The Secret History of Calves Head Clubb (1703 and frequently thereafter) and other screeds on the theme kept the subject in public view. While one recent student partially dissents, asserting that the club "did in fact exist,"[3] surely Ward's and other Tories' hysteria smacks more of Thomas Edwards's Gangraena and modern-day Satan-obsessed preachers than of coffee-house radicalism. Nevertheless, as a testament of fear of hostility to the cult of the martyr, every bit of it is relevant, and the evidence extends far beyond, and a good bit earlier, than Ward's energetic expositions. The earliest tract to mention the Calves-Head Club, to my knowledge, is dated 1692, although that date may be suppositious.[4] No doubt, however, attaches to its use in 1700, for example, in a reply to the radical William Stephen's ill-received venture into Locke-inflected revolution theory in his January 30, 1700, performance before the House of Commons.[5] The author of An Answer to Mr. Stephen's Sermon had it "Printed for the Use of the Calves-Head Club, in order to their Conversion."[6] That the figure was in play in non-Tory circles can be seen by the convoluted but unmistakable use that the Whig polemicist John Tutchin made of it in his The Apostate, a 1701 attack upon court Whigs.[7] At once central to Lacey's topic and a tell-tale of political paranoia, this desecrated cow surely deserved here the attention it has recently received elsewhere.[8]
Yet these limitations hardly outweigh the strengths of Lacey's study. Scholarship usually proceeds by steps rather than leaps; rarely is any work "definitive." By placing before us a considerable, informed, and often sensitive reading of material too easily dismissed as predictable and unenlightening, Lacey has offered both a foundation for further studies and a well-placed stepping stone for others' journeys.
Notes
[1]. "The Statue at Charing Cross," lines 16, 19, in The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. by H. M. Margoliouth, 2nd. ed. (Oxford, 1952), vol. 1, p. 190. Danby is warned, line 24, that the stops of the Exchequer could "reduce us to fourty and eight" [the date of Charles' execution in the old calendar].
[2]. "A Dialogue between the Two Horses," line 123, in ibid., p. 195.
[3]. William Kolbrener, "'Commonwealth fictions' and 'inspiration fraud': Milton and the Eikon Basilike after 1689," Milton Studies 37 (1999): p. 168.
[4]. Dan. Bergice, A Lecture Held forth at the Calves-Head Feast before a Society of Olivarians & Round-Heads ... on the Thirtieth of January, 1691/2 (London: for C. G., 1692). The apparent pseudonym and other details make the title-page date suspect.
[5]. William Stephens, A Sermon Preach'd before the Honourable House of Commons, January 30, 1699. The House disliked the sermon. Earlier Stephens paraded his knowledge of Harrington and Sydney, well attested from his other writings. On Stephens, Douglas Coombs, "William Stephens and the Letter to the Author of the Memorial of the State of England (1705)," BIHR 32 (1959): pp. 24-37.
[6]. London, 1700. See also pp. 10, 16 for further allusions to the club. This edition fetched 2d. When reissued as Reflections upon Mr. Stephens's Sermon (London, n.d.), the price had trebled to 6d. Stephens was dubbed the chaplain to the club in a contemporary newsletter (HMC Hope Johnstone Mss., 116, cited in Frank H. Ellis, ed., Poems on Affairs of State, Augustan Satirical Verse, 1660-1714, vol. 6, p. 237 n. 89). For another 1700 use, see John Dennis, "The Reverse," in ibid., p. 237, l. 97.
[7]. Lines 126-137, deploying all the key words ("Calves" [of Bethel], "Feasts," "Faction Boil'd and Roast"), damn the courtier apostates as the anti-parliament analogue of anti-monarchism: "Of Clubs 'gainst Kings we've heard of o're and o're, / But never 'gainst our Senators before."
[8]. See n. 3 above and Roger D. Lund, "The Atheist Cabal and the Rise of the Public Sphere in Augustan England," Albion 34, no. 3 (2002): pp. 391-421.
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Citation:
Michael Mendle. Review of Lacey, Andrew, The Cult of King Charles the Martyr.
H-Albion, H-Net Reviews.
March, 2004.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=9070
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