The Execution of a King
His allegorical engraving (image A) accompanied a pamphlet called Eikon Basilike ("The Kingly Image"), which began to circulate in Britain just weeks after the execution of King Charles I. It purported to be an autobiographical account of the king's last days and a justification of his royal policies. It was intended to arouse widespread sympathy for the king and his exiled heir, Charles II, and it succeeded admirably: the cult of Charles "King and Martyr" became increasingly popular. Here, the Latin inscription on the shaft of light suggests that Charles's piety will beam "brighter through the shadows," while the scrolls at the left proclaim that "virtue grows beneath weight" and "unmoved, triumphant." Charles's earthly crown (on the floor at his side) is "splendid and heavy," while the crown of thorns he
Grasps is "bitter and light" and the heavenly crown is "blessed and eternal." Even people who could not read these and other Latin mottoes would have known that Charles's last words were: "I shall go from a corruptible to an incorruptible Crown, where no disturbance can be."
At the same time, broadsides showing the moment of execution (image B) circulated in various European countries with explanatory captions. This one was printed in Germany, and there are almost identical versions surviving from the Netherlands. It shows members of the crowd fainting and turning away at the sight of blood spurting from the king's neck while the executioner holds up the severed head.
Questions for Analysis
1. How would you interpret the message of the first image? How might it have been read differently by Catholics and Protestants within Britain and Europe?
2. What would have been the political motives underlying the publication and display of these images? For example, would you expect the depiction of the king's execution to be intended as supportive of monarchy or as antiroyalist? Why?
3. Given what you have learned about political and religious divisions in Europe at the time of the king's execution, where do you think the first image would have found the most sympathetic audiences? Why might it be significant that the second circulated more in Germany and the Netherlands rather than in France or Spain?
A. King Charles I as a martyr.
B. The execution of King Charles I.
Former parameters and Europeans’ most basic assumptions. Not even religion could be seen as an adequate foundation on which to build new certainties, for European Christians now disagreed about the fundamental truths of their faith. Political allegiances were similarly under threat, as intellectuals and common people alike began to assert a right to resist princes with whom they disagreed. The very notions of morality and custom were beginning to seem arbitrary. Europeans responded to this pervasive climate of doubt in a variety of ways. What united their responses, however, was a sometimes desperate search for new bases on which to construct some measure of certainty in the face of such challenges.
Witchcraft and the Power of the State
Contributing to the anxiety of the age was the widespread conviction that witchcraft was a new and increasing threat to the world. Although the belief that certain individuals could heal or harm through the practice of magic had always been common, it was not until the late fifteenth century that authorities began to insist that such powers could derive only from some kind of satanic bargain. In 1484, Pope Innocent VIII had ordered papal inquisitors to use all means at their disposal to detect and eliminate witchcraft, including torture. Predictably, torture increased the number of accused witches who “confessed” to their alleged crimes. And as more accused witches “confessed,” more witches were “discovered,” tried, and executed—even in places like England and Scotland, where torture was not legal and where the Catholic Church had no influence. For both Luther and Calvin had also urged that accused witches be tried and sentenced with less leniency than ordinary criminals.
When religious authorities’ efforts to detect witchcraft were backed by the coercive powers of secular governments, the fear of witches could escalate into persecution. It was therefore through this fundamental agreement between Catholics and Protestants, and with the complicity of modern secular states, that an early modern “witch craze” claimed tens of thousands of victims in this era. The final death toll will never be known, but the vast majority of the victims were women. In the 1620s, there were, on average, 100 burnings a year in the German cities of Wurzburg and Bamberg; around the same time, it was said that the town square of Wolfenbuttel “looked like a little forest, so crowded were the stakes.” And when accusations of witchcraft diminished in Europe, they became endemic in some European colonies, as at the English settlement of Salem in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
This hunt for witches resulted in part from fears that traditional religious remedies (prayer, the sacraments) were no longer adequate to guard against the evils of the world. It also reflects Europeans’ growing conviction that only the state had the power to protect them. Even in Catholic countries, where witchcraft prosecutions began in Church courts, these cases would be transferred to the state’s courts for final judgment and punishment, because Church courts could not carry out capital penalties. In most Protestant countries, the entire process of detecting, prosecuting, and punishing suspected witches was carried out under state supervision.
The Search for a Source of Authority
The crisis of religious and political authority in Europe also led to more rational approaches to the problem of uncertainty. The French nobleman Michel de Montaigne (mohn-TEHN-yeh, 1533-1592), son of a Catholic father and a Huguenot mother of Jewish ancestry, applied a searching skepticism to all traditional ways of knowing the world and adopted instead a practice of profound introspection. His Essays, from the French word for “attempts” or “trials,” were composed during the French wars of religion and proceed from the same basic question: Que sais-je? (“What do I know?”).
The Essays’ first premise is that every human perspective is limited. For example, in a famous essay “On Cannibals,” Montaigne argued that what may seem indisputably true and moral to one group of people may seem absolutely false to another because “everyone gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not of his usage.” From this follows Montaigne’s second main premise: the need for moderation. Because all people think they follow the true religion or have the best form of government, Montaigne concluded that no religion or government is really perfect, and consequently no belief is worth fighting or dying for. Instead, people should accept the teachings of religion on faith and obey the governments constituted to rule over them but without resorting to fanaticism in either sphere.
Another French philosopher, Blaise Pascal (pahs-KAHL, 1623-1662), confronted the problem of doubt by embracing an extreme form of puritanical Catholicism known as Jansenism (after its Flemish founder, Cornelius Jansen). Until his death, he worked on a highly ambitious philosophical-religious project meant to establish the truth of Christianity by appealing simultaneously to intellect and emotion. In his posthumous work, Pensees (Thoughts), Pascal argued that only faith could resolve the contradictions of the world, because “the heart has its reasons, of which reason itself knows nothing.”
Pascal’s Pensees expressed the author’s own anguish and awe in the face of evil and uncertainty but presented that awe as evidence for the existence of God. Pascal’s hope was that, on this foundation, some measure of confidence in humanity and its capacity for self-knowledge could be rediscovered.
Montaigne’s immediate contemporary, the French jurist Jean Bodin (boh-DAN, 1530-1596), took a more practical approach to the problem of uncertain authority and found a solution in the power of the state. Like Montaigne, Bodin was troubled by the upheavals of the religious wars. He had witnessed the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572 and, in response, developed a theory of absolute sovereignty that would (he surmised) put an end to such catastrophes. His monumental Six Books of the Commonwealth (1576) argued that the state has its origins in the needs of family-oriented communities and that its paramount duty is to maintain order. He defined sovereignty as “the most high, absolute, and perpetual power over all subjects,” which meant that a sovereign head of state could make and enforce laws without the consent of those governed: precisely what King Charles of England later argued when he tried to dispense with Parliament—and precisely what his subjects ultimately rejected. Even if the ruler proved a tyrant, Bodin insisted that the subject had no right to resist, for any resistance would open the door to anarchy, “which is worse than the harshest tyranny in the world.”’
In England, experience of the Civil War led Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) to propose a different theory of state sovereignty in his treatise Leviathan (1651). Whereas Bodin assumed that sovereign power should be vested in a monarch, Hobbes argued that any form of government capable of protecting its subjects’ lives and property might act as an all-powerful sovereign.
Hobbes’ convictions about the need for a strong state arose from his pessimistic view of human nature. The “state of nature” that existed before government, he wrote, was “war of all against all.” Because man naturally behaves as “a wolf” toward other men, human life without government is necessarily “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” To escape such consequences, people must surrender their liberties to a sovereign state, in exchange for the state’s obligation to keep the peace. Bodin had seen the ultimate goal of the state as the protection of property; Hobbes saw it as the preservation of people’s lives, even at the expense of their liberties.
Hobbes and Bodin developed such theories in response to their direct experience of political and social upheaval caused by the breakdown of traditional authorities. Their different political philosophies thus reflect a practical preoccupation with the observation and analysis of actual occurrences (empirical knowledge) rather than abstract or theological arguments. Because of this, they are seen as early examples of a new kind of discipline, what we now call “political science.”’
A similar preoccupation with observation and results was also emerging among those who sought to understand the physical universe. Historians have often referred to the rapid developments in the physical sciences in this era as the “scientific revolution,” a phenomenon that had its beginnings in the later Middle Ages (see Chapters 12 and 13) and that will be treated at greater length in Chapter 16. This term remains a useful one, even though it belittles the slow accumulation of knowledge in these centuries and ignores the contributions of scientists in earlier eras (as in the Hellenistic world, discussed in Chapter 4).
In the late sixteenth century, the construction of public playhouses—enclosed theaters—made drama an especially effective mass medium for the formation of public opinion, the dissemination of ideas, and the articulation of national identities. This was especially so in England during the last two decades of Elizabeth’s reign and that of her successor, James. Among the large number of playwrights at work in London during this era, the most noteworthy are Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), Ben Jonson (c. 15721637), and William Shakespeare (1564-1616).
Marlowe, who may have been a spy for Elizabeth’s government and who was mysteriously murdered in a tavern brawl, was extremely popular in his own day. In plays such as Tamburlaine—about the life of the Mongolian warlord Timur the Lame (see Chapter 12)—and Doctor Faustus, Marlowe created vibrant heroes who pursue larger-than-life ambitions only to be felled by their own human limitations. In contrast to the heroic tragedies of Marlowe, Ben Jonson wrote dark comedies that expose human vices and foibles. In the Alchemist, he balanced an attack on pseudo-scientific quackery with admiration for resourceful lower-class characters who cleverly take advantage of their supposed betters.
World History
