Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-vdxz6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T20:25:50.139Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Was Charles I a Tyrant?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

R. W. K. Hinton
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Charles I was charged in the indictment before the High Court of Justice, at the trial before his execution, with entertaining “a wicked design to erect and uphold in himself an unlimited and tyrannical power to rule according to his will.” To this end he had “traitorously and maliciously levied war against the present parliament.” It is usual to scoff at this. How could a king commit treason? Indeed he could not. Yet if he had set out to make himself a tyrant this was a grave offense which, though unknown to English law courts, had often been accounted in political theory as deserving death. The issue of treason is therefore without importance: however bad in law, there was certainly no lesser charge on which to bring a king to execution. The important question concerns tyranny.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , January 1956 , pp. 69 - 87
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1956

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 The Parliament of 1610 is discussed, and these opinions are cited more fully, in my article, “Government and Liberty under James I,” The Cambridge Historical Journal, XI (1953), 48 ff.Google Scholar

2 Knolles, Richard, A Brief Discourse of the Greatness of the Turkish Empire, appended to his General History of the Turks (London, 1603)Google Scholar. I have used the fourth edition, 1631.

3 From the proposed continuation of Moryson, Fynes's Itinerary (London, 1617)Google Scholar, which has been published in part by Hughes, Charles as Shakespeare's Europe (London, 1903), pp. 11–12, 39, 66.Google Scholar

4 Heylyn, , Microcosmus (Oxford, 1625), p. 605Google Scholar. In the first edition, 1621, (p. 316) the passage is shorter.

5 Shakespeare's Europe, p. 60.Google Scholar

6 Microcosmus, 1625, pp. 340–341.Google Scholar

7 Lavender, Theophilus, The Travels of Certain Englishmen (London, 1609), preface.Google Scholar

8 Chew, S. C., The Crescent and the Rose (New York, 1937), p. 511.Google Scholar

9 Butler, Charles, The Feminine Monarchy: or the History of Bees (various editions, 1609 to 1634), chap. 1.Google Scholar

10 SirElyot, Thomas, The Governor, ed. Croft (1880), pp. 6–7, 12–13Google Scholar. Elyot disapproved of the term commonweal because to him it implied common ownership, but it was often used without this meaning. He did not notice that bees have common ownership. Charles Butler knew this, but did not let it affect his analogy.

11 Quoted from Bradbrook, M. C., The Queen's Garland (Oxford University Press, 1953), pp. 59–60.Google Scholar

12 Speech at the opening of parliament, 1604. The True Law of Free Monarchies, published 1598.

13 De Jure Majestatis and The Monarchy of Man were edited by Grosart in 1879 and 1882. I have discussed Eliot more fully in Cambridge Historical Journal, XI (1953)Google Scholar. He has been unjustly neglected by writers on political thought, probably because he shares to the full the supposed defects of Bodin.

14 Six Books of a Commonweal, book 1, chap. 8.Google Scholar

15 De Jure Majestatis, pp. 90–91.Google Scholar