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By Root 1285 0

the Eikon is clearly flawed, but the poetic meaning obviously spoke to many readers: this truth about Charles’s martyrdom was powerful, more powerful than the man when alive. Following his death a handkerchief stained with his blood was said to have in it the power to heal scrofula. Those of his supporters who had, in the months around the trial, seemed to favour his execution were vindicated by the power of this image of Anglican royalism. The resonance was with Christ, but in one sense it was a more remarkable event – Charles rose again, effectively, on the very same day.79

The frontispiece of Eikon Basilike portraying Charles I, the royal martyr

21

Epilogue

England’s Freedom

The use of history, and the just rules for composure of it, have been so well and fully described heretofore by judicious writers, that it were lost labour and a needless extension of the present work to insist by way of introduction, upon either of them.

So wrote Thomas May in the preface to his The history of the parliament Of England, which began November the third, MDCXL, published ‘by authority’ in May 1647. John Langley, who had licensed it for publication, pronounced it ‘an impartial truth; and judge it fit for public view by the printing’. Authority lay in this official licence, but also in the claims of a truthful discourse. ‘I will only profess’, wrote May reassuringly, ‘to follow that one rule, truth, to which all the rest (like the rest of the moral virtues to that of justice) may be reduced’.1

It was an impossible task. May was writing against the background of the increasingly public collapse of the parliamentary coalition, splintering under the enormous pressure of making peace. By the time his book was complete, and available in a handsome folio edition, the New Model was close to rebellion against its political master and was becoming the champion of a programme for which no-one had been fighting at Edgehill. A history of the still-sitting parliament could not be anything but contested in those circumstances.

May knew this as well as anyone:

The subject of this work is a civil war, a war indeed as much more than civil, and as full of miracle, both in the causes and effects of it, as was ever observed in any age; a war as cruel as unnatural; that has produced as much rage of swords, as much bitterness of pens, both public and private, as was ever known; and divided the understandings of men, as well as their affections, in so high a degree, that scarce could any virtue gain due applause, any reason give satisfaction, or any relation obtain credit, unless among men of the same side.2

Tacitus himself had faced such difficulties, and certainly those of us labouring in the area of seventeenth-century studies have good reason to share May’s unease. May’s appeal was to the court of public opinion, ‘to the memory of any English man, whose years have been enough to make him know the actions that were done; and whose conversation has been enough public to let him hear the common voice, and discourses of people upon those actions,… whether such actions were not done, and such judgments made upon them, as are here related’.3 Like many of his contemporaries, and without much greater success, May sought to rise above the polemic and broadcast the truth, appealing to the ‘people’ and the ‘common voice’ as the arbiters of it.

May was writing for a society accustomed to viewing its present condition against much longer histories: mapping contemporary experience onto received accounts of classical history (May had translated Lucan); or against the universal Christian history. Contemporaries continually found parallels for their condition in the annals of Greek and Roman civilization, and in the Bible: precedents and examples which lent meaning to the current chaos. Political conflict arose from the disputed meanings of current affairs, understood against a historical backdrop. Meaning, politics and history were closely intertwined.

In the polemical battles of the 1640s, for this very reason, history had been much abused:

there