THE MARTYRDOM OF CHARLES.

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 27, 1 February 1930, Page 8

THE MARTYRDOM OF CHARLES.

The article in the "Star" entitled "The Execution of Cliarles I." is written with euch glib assurance that the ill-instructed may be tempted to accept it as history. Dignity and foi*titude may invest a death with •"a halo of romance/' "but King Charles' claim to martyrdom rests on something more substantial. Bishop Creighton wrote: "Charles I. saved the Church of England by his death when life was offered as a price for abandoning her." Charles' devotion to the_ Church of England was not part of his life but life itself. To adapt a sentence of Victor Hugo, he was not English, but Anglican. To have written an article about the life and death of Charles I. without mentioning the Church or England is something of an achievement, but it argues a sorry understanding of the history of the seventeenth centuj'y. It is simply a misuse of words to write of the^ King's "unconstitutional methods," and of his defying tno authority of Parliament." Neither the constitution" nor the '"authority of Parliament existed in the first half of the seventeenth century. Lord Morley, in his life of Cromwell, wrote (I quote from memory), "Law, tradition and popular feeling were on the side of the King." I hold no brief for the divine rigut of kin<rs, but it was not the crude absurdity that many suppose. Its place in the development of political thought and national life 18 well brought out in Mr. Bernard Shaw 8 ptey "St. .Toan," especially in the preface. Charles and Cromwell differed about the divine right of kings, but they seem to have thought much alike about the "authority of Parliament. Perhaps it would be more correct to say in popular phraseology that Cromwell thought the same "with knobs 011." The accusation of lying is often made against the King, but not substantiated. I do not know quite what is meant by "subterfuge." The King did not always tell everybody everything they wanted, to know. A subterfuge might be defined as a; clever move by the other side. Oliver Cromwell said, "The King was the uprightest and most conscientious man of his three kingdoms. A. RUSSELL ALLEEjTON.