"And thus said Shimei when he cursed, Come out, come
out, thou bloody man, and thou man of Belial: The LORD hath returned upon thee
all the blood of the house of Saul, in whose stead thou hast reigned; and the
LORD hath delivered the kingdom into the hand of Absalom thy son: and, behold,
thou art taken in thy mischief because thou art a bloody man.—King James Bible
2 Samuel 16:7, 8.[1]
So ye shall not pollute the land wherein ye are: for blood
it defileth the land: and the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed
therein, but by the blood of him that shed it.
—King James Bible Numbers 35:33.
"Even his virtues were misinterpreted and scandalously
reviled. His gentleness was miscalled defect of wisdom; his firmness,
obstinacy; his regular devotion, popery; his decent worship, superstition; his
opposing of schism, hatred of the power of godliness.
Mark Kishlansky's new biography of Charles I is an extremely
controversial work.
Kishlansky believes that Charles has been misunderstood by
history a viewpoint that is not shared amongst the majority of historians
who study the English revolution. For Kishalnsky Charles was not a "man of
blood" as General Thomas Harrison called him and that history has much-maligned
this monarch.
Kishlanksy's book is an aggressive defence of both Charles
and the monarchy in general. "Princes are not bound to give an account of
their actions, but to God alone" Kishlanskyhas taken the quote and turned
it into a historical perspective.
According to him "Charles I is the most despised
monarch in Britain's historical memory. Considering that among his predecessors
were murderers, rapists, psychotics and people who were the mentally
challenged, this is no small distinction."
One of the basic premises of writing a biography is to put
the individual being written about the context of their times. In this case,
the English revolution. The revolution caused widespread devastation and
hundreds of thousands were killed and wounded a reigning monarch is executed a
republic declared, and the House of Lords abolished, but there is very little
of this drama in Kinshlansky's book. One of the main protagonists of the
revolution Oliver Cromwell only gets one mention.
Given that the English revolution was primarily a political
and religious dispute, Kishlanksy's heavy emphasis on the individual mistakes,
misjudgments and general bad luck of the monarch is typical of his historical
methodology. In many senses, this biography is primarily a political
rehabilitation of Charles. The book takes on the form of a polemical essay
rather than a history book.
It is not surprising that Kinshlansky's historiography
regarding Charles has been a challenge in academia. As Clive Holmes explains“Mark Kishlansky, in his rather implausible attempt to
create a historiographical uniformity, cites a series of quotations from a wide
range of historians. He then triumphally demonstrates that a proportion of
these comments are dubious or just plain wrong. I have argued here that
Kishlansky's attempt to reconfigure the king as open and accessible by a study
of his progress itself entails overstatement and misunderstanding. Kevin
Sharpe's guarded judgement on this topic, 'it may still remain true that Charles
was less than assiduous in cultivating his people in general and his
influential subjects in particular, is more compelling.51 But, ultimately,
isolation is not simply a matter of propinquity; we do not need to imagine
Charles as physically inaccessible, locked away from his people in either Van
Dyck's studio or his damp hunting lodges, to judge him isolated.
His isolation was a function of his refusal to engage in meaningful dialogue with 'the people who count', and of his consequent failure to understand both the limitations imposed on his actions by the administrative structure of England and the political and legal prejudices of those who staffed that machinery at all levels. Kishlansky does not engage specifically with all the negative comments that he recites in his introduction, imagining that his vigorous refutation of some points will explode every aspect of the professional consensus - Richard Cust's 'straw man' may be a better image - that he has constructed. But some of the arguments he dismisses by implication seem basically right: not least Gardiner's sense that it was the king's lack of empathy, his 'want of imaginative power', that was at the root of his failure is still a most telling judgement”.[2]
His isolation was a function of his refusal to engage in meaningful dialogue with 'the people who count', and of his consequent failure to understand both the limitations imposed on his actions by the administrative structure of England and the political and legal prejudices of those who staffed that machinery at all levels. Kishlansky does not engage specifically with all the negative comments that he recites in his introduction, imagining that his vigorous refutation of some points will explode every aspect of the professional consensus - Richard Cust's 'straw man' may be a better image - that he has constructed. But some of the arguments he dismisses by implication seem basically right: not least Gardiner's sense that it was the king's lack of empathy, his 'want of imaginative power', that was at the root of his failure is still a most telling judgement”.[2]
Kishlansky defended his love affair with Charles in his
reply to Clive Holmes, Nearly every conflict between subjects and sovereign in
the early part of the reign of Charles I resulted from fear: fear that the king
would introduce popery, fear that the king would govern without Parliament,
fear that the king would not obey the law. Although Charles attempted to allay
each of these concerns, he learned to his cost that there was something
irrational about them, that his subjects 'had not the will to be pleased'.Leading men of his realm misinterpreted his intentions, misapprehended his
aspirations, misunderstood his motives and misconstrued his character. He could
not see himself as the king that they feared and therefore, could do little to
allay their suspicions. In the end, he could only conclude that he was a case
of mistaken identity.[3]
This theme of Charles not being understood is a continual
theme of the book. The theme is so strong even Amazon deemed it important
enough to put it on the cover blurb saying "In Mark Kishlanksy's brilliant
account it is never in doubt that Charles created his catastrophe, but he was
nonetheless opposed by men with far fewer scruples and less consistency who for
often quite different reasons conspired to destroy him. This is a remarkable
portrait of one of the most talented, thoughtful, loyal, moral, artistically
alert and yet, somehow, disastrous of all this country's rulers".
Of course, it is Amazon's right to promote the book anyway
it sees fit, but as the above quote suggests this has gone beyond standard
promotion. Hopefully whoever wrote the media blurb was not a historian for it
reduces history to the level of a Janet and John book. Firstly it must be said that the men who opposed Charles
both inside Parliament and out were men of principle and fought for those
principles through to the end.
Kishlanksy's adoption of the bad man theory of history does
not enlighten us about Charles or the men who fought him. Kishlansky believes of Charles that "Beneath the
reviled and excoriated King of historical reputation is a flesh-and-blood man
trapped by circumstances he could not control and events he could not shape."
Kishlanksy's belief that individuals are prisoners of external forces also does
not get us very far.
As Herbert Spencer once wrote "You must admit that the
genesis of the great man depends on the long series of complex influences which
has produced the race in which he appears, and the social state into which that
race has slowly grown...Before he can remake his society, his society must make
him."[4] Kishlanksy's aim in this book is to overturn centuries of the historiography that attempted to place Charles in the context of his times
rather than elevated him above it in some supernatural way.
He believes that the long-held view of Charles and his reign
has been distorted and the centuries-long historical narratives opposing
this view is mere "Parliamentarian propaganda."Kishlansky's rehabilitation of Charles found support in a
surprising place. A review of his book was written on the Guardian website. It
is widely sympathetic to Kishlanksy's' view. Without examining in any detail
what major historians have printed on the subject matter, it produces quotes
that back up the Kishlansky hypothesis. It uncritically quotes Kishlansky "What
began as propaganda has been transmuted into seeming fact."
The Guardian article continues Kishlanksy's theme that
Charles was battling against bad luck all through his life "Whichever side
you take, it's hard to deny that Charles was plagued from early on by almost
comical levels of bad luck. As a young man, his daring incognito voyage to
Spain to woo the Infanta turned into a fiasco. Two decades later, not only
would his armies suffer crippling losses at the battle of Naseby, but Charles's
correspondence would be captured: the public revelation of his efforts to
secure Catholic support against the forces of Parliament would be a devastating
blow to the king's reputation. A botched attempt to attack and plunder Spanish
shipping in the first year of his reign set the tone for later military
ventures: 'the winds, as always for Charles, were contrary'.[5]
Kishlanksy's defence of Charles I is absolute and unconditional.
He rejects the standard view that Charles was intransigent. He believes that
the king bent over backwards to conciliate and to compromise with Parliament.
Kishlansky is perfectly in his right as an established historian to counter
prevailing historiography. It is a little surprising that he chooses to do so
in such a limited space is astonishing. But to overturn three centuries of
historiography is going to take a lot longer than 144 pages. As one writer puts
it, the "small amounts of evidence are made to bear an enormous
argumentative burden".
Even the sympathetic Guardian reviewer was forced to admit
that Kishlanksy's hoop-jumping was in danger of turning his reconsideration of
Charles into a "whitewash."
It is not within the scope of this review to go over
Kishlanksy's previous written work, but it is evident from this new book that
his place as a pioneer of a transatlantic revisionist interpretation of early
Stuart history is secured. Kishlansky joins a growing number of major historians such
Kevin Sharpe, Conrad Russell and John Morrill who reject both the Whig and
Marxist historians who had seen the Civil Wars of the 1640s as stemming from
the growth of ideological opposition to the Stuart monarchs over the previous
half-century.
The revisionist school seek to challenge the "ideological
consensus" or as Kishlansky puts it the "fallacy of social determinism'
that has existed since the 1920s. These historians reject any severe economic
or social analysis and argue that revolutions are nothing but the work of a
tiny group of conspirators.
To conclude In any review, I try to be as generous as I can,
and on the whole, I would recommend this short narrative on the life of Charles
I was a competent introduction to the subject. If that were all it was, then I
would have no trouble, but as this is more a polemic than a history book it
needs to be answered in the future in a more detailed manner.
[1] A Sermon produced thirty
years after Charles's death
[2] CHARLES I: A Case of
Mistaken Identity[with Reply] Clive Holmes, Julian Goodare, Richard Cust
and Mark Kishlansky Source: Past &
Present, No. 205 pp. 175-237
[3] Charles I: A Case of
Mistaken Identity Author(s): Mark Kishlansky Source: Past & Present, No.
189 (Nov., 2005), pp. 41-80
[4] https://fli.institute/2014/08/19/the-great-man-theory-of-leadership/
[5] Charles I: An Abbreviated
Life by Mark Kishlansky –
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/18/charles-i-an-abbreviated-life-king-mark-kishlansky-review
