AN EIKON OF THE FAITH: CHARLES I IN THE 21ST CENTURY
Public domain.
If you spend enough time around Anglicans, chances are you will run into fans of an English king who was executed some 375 years ago. King Charles I to history and Charles the Martyr to his admirers, the monarch was polarizing in life as well as death. After a tumultuous reign that culminated in the English Civil War, Charles was beheaded on January 30th, 1649. “I am the martyr of the people,” he declared from the scaffold. Oliver Cromwell, his foe and successor as England’s ruler, saw it rather differently: the execution was a “cruel necessity” to punish tyranny.
With less violence, these perspectives endure to the present. Each year, members of the Society of King Charles the Martyr celebrate a Solemn Mass in his honor. “St. Charles,” their website explains, “refused to resign both his faith in the apostolic order, as established by Christ Himself, and the authority of his bishops to the Puritan Roundheads.” (1) They honor him for “his strong personal piety, for his protection and patronage of the Church, and his martyrdom.” Charles, in this telling, was a good man, a good Christian, and a good Anglican. His staunch support for church government by bishops and the Book of Common Prayer cost him his life in the face of Puritan extremism.
But to critics, this portrayal whitewashes a man who was dangerously incompetent at best and whose poor decisions led to thousands of deaths. Brought up to believe in his divine right to rule, Charles’s ego and allergy to compromise led him to the block, not his Christian faith. His veneration is a relic of political conservatism and has no place in a modern church. After all, even in the U.K, the anniversary of his ‘martyrdom’ has not been a public holiday since 1859!
There is more than a little truth in these criticisms. And yet I am drawn to the king, not because he was a good monarch or heroic Christian, but because of a book seldom read today by either faction in the squabble. The Eikon Basilike is Charles’s spiritual memoir, a chronicle of prayers and meditations from the chaotic 1640s. (2) Despite its intense popularity in its day, the Eikon has not endured as a devotional classic. Unlike Augustine or Julian of Norwich, whose personal reflections transcend their original context, Charles seems stuck in the 17th century. He is too concerned with events which mean little to us, and his royal power and privilege mean that few will see in his problems a mirror of their own.
I am convinced, however, that this strange book, whose title means “royal portrait,” can be a portrait for us, too. The meditations of a failed king may not speak to us as individuals, but they offer a surprising lens to view the declining mainline church in the United States. The parallels with Charles are not flattering, but they can help us see our own situation more clearly.
Throughout most of the Eikon, the king seems not to realize he is losing his kingdom. This is clearest in his prayers for military success, which Charles expects as God’s anointed ruler. “Rebuke those beasts of the people,” a typical example runs, “and deliver Me from the rudeness and strivings of the multitude.” (3) These prayers express confidence that his troubles are only minor setbacks which God must surely correct. “In God’s due time,” he trusts, his people will realize their mistake and support him again. (4) Even after the royalist military situation collapsed, Charles retained a stubborn assurance bordering on delusion. “Speaking as a mere soldier or statesman,” he wrote after a catastrophic defeat, “I must say that there is no probability but of my ruin, yet as a Christian, I must tell you that God will not suffer rebels or traitors to prosper.” (5)
Knowing that things will end with Charles’s execution, his head-in-the-sand attitude is hard for us to read, and his confidence in an unlikely deliverance bewildering. But the Reverend Benjamin Crosby brings home with uncomfortable clarity how our collective church attitude mirrors the king’s. “On the basis of the functioning of the two denominations with which I am affiliated – the Episcopal Church in which I was ordained and the Anglican Church of Canada in which I currently serve – you would not know that both institutions are facing statistical nonexistence in less than twenty years.” (6)
It’s not that we never talk about the need to evangelize or the reality of declining numbers – we do. But our actions do not suggest urgency. Like Charles, we seem mostly content to continue as usual, quietly assuming that things will turn out fine for our struggling parishes. In God’s due time, we imagine, the people will come back. The problem is not faith in God despite earthly collapse but the way that we, like Charles, assume God must sooner or later rescue us from collapse – that God’s will must be to restore the social position and power we have lost.
Undeniable worldly failure forced the king to reconsider. If God had not restored his throne, then perhaps this was because God desired his death as an instrument for greater good. By losing with honor, Charles could testify to his religious and political principles. “Make me content to be overcome,” his prayer became, “when thou wilt have it so.” (7) By understanding himself as a martyr who chose death over compromise, Charles rationalized his defeat and interpreted it spiritually as victory. He claimed to suffer “for” his people, with his death as the “price of their redemption.” (8) He found meaning in his failure.
We, too, have found ways to explain and justify our decline. Perhaps this is just a new way of being the church in a post-Constantinian era. Maybe God is now working outside the visible boundaries of The Episcopal Church or any other denomination. Or perhaps this is our chance for radical discipleship among a small remnant instead of lukewarm, cultural Christianity.
Perhaps there is truth in our justifications; perhaps God really was calling Charles to martyrdom, too. But these rationalizations strike me as attempts to explain away deeply uncomfortable realities without confronting our role in the decline. Charles found such honesty difficult. The king has no trouble asking God for forgiveness and confessing his sins generally, (9) but when it comes to specific accusations, he almost never admits wrongdoing. Instead, he defends his actions and accuses his opponents. For example, Charles makes no apologies for his attempted arrest of five Members of Parliament, a key precursor to the Civil War. “All I desired,” he claims, was “a free and legal trial.” (10) “The malice of [his] enemies” is always to blame, not his own mistakes. (11)
We incline to similar evasions. Conservative Christians have just turned people off faith, we sometimes say, or else cultural change has made traditional church impossible. There is truth in these explanations, just as Charles’s opponents did contribute to his downfall. But like the king, we find it easier to confess to abstract sins and notice the wrongdoing of others than to repent of the specific harms we inflict as a church, as parishes, and as individuals. No account of our situation without this recognition and repentance is adequate.
11 years after Charles I’s execution, his son restored the monarchy and episcopal Church of England, both of which endure today. The mainline churches might experience a similar reversal of fortune; a century from now, our pews and Sunday school classrooms could be overflowing. But the lesson to learn from King Charles is not that worldly success sometimes follows worldly failure, but that our failures and sins do not negate the grace and power of God. What we need is not confidence in some future, visible vindication by history but faith that Christ’s power is made perfect in our weakness, here and now.
With fumbling faith, Charles reached for that power made perfect in his time of deepest need. “My greatest conquest of death,” he wrote just before his beheading, “is from the power and love of Christ, who has swallowed up death in the victory of his Resurrection and the glory of his Ascension.” (12) Judged as a king and a man, Charles left much to be desired. We can say the same of our church, and it is important to hear this judgment. But in the light of the Resurrection, the king stands as a sinner saved by grace, and as a church, we stand in the same light, with the same hope. This is not the promise of earthly victory, as the king dreamed, or parishes bursting with new members, as we sometimes do. It is the promise of forgiveness and everlasting life, which flow from the risen Lord undeterred by the sins and shortcomings of his people. It is his mercy which makes saints, not their visible success or moral perfection, and for that both Charles and we should be grateful.
http://www.skcm-usa.org/
Modern scholars typically credit John Gauden (the future Bishop of Exeter and Worcester) with “editing the Eikon from notes and drafts left by the king,” especially from the period of his captivity in 1647-8 after the royalist military cause was effectively doomed. Andrew Lacey, The Cult of King Charles the Martyr (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2003), 78-9.
Eikon, IV. Quotations from the Eikon are lightly modernized throughout.
Eikon, V.
Austin Woolrych, Britain in Revolution: 1625-1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 320.
Benjamin Crosby, “Zero Episcopalians,” Plough, December 6, 2023. https://www.plough.com/en/topics/community/leadership/zero-episcopalians
Eikon, XIX.
Eikon, XXIII.
See, for example, Eikon XIX and especially XXV.
Eikon III.
Eikon XV.
Eikon XXVIII.
