What modern Britain should learn from Charles I

Next week marks the 400th anniversary of the accession to the throne of Charles I. This moment began what was described in England’s greatest work of history, 1066 and All That, as the ‘Central Period of English History… consisting in the utterly memorable Struggle between the Cavaliers (Wrong but Wromantic) and the Roundheads (Right and Repulsive)’.

It is worth marking this accession because the constitutional and religious drama of the Civil War still plays itself out in our political and public imagination. ‘I judge a man by one thing,’ said Isaac Foot, the father of Michael. ‘Which side would he have liked his ancestors to fight on at Marston Moor?’

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As the English-speaking world goes through a crisis of legitimacy and stability, the questions of the English Civil War find themselves of particular importance once again. Although the fault line has always been there, especially during any period of political drama. I remember John Bercow being compared with both Speaker Lenthall and Charles I on the same day, and in neither case favourably.

I must declare an interest: as chaplain to the Royal Martyr Church Union, I know exactly which side I would have wanted my ancestors to have fought on. The 400th anniversary of Charles’s accession on 27 March is a good opportunity to rehabilitate the old King from his ahistorical ‘Wrong but Wromantic’ place in the popular imagination. Scholars of the period are well aware that Charles was not stretching constitutional norms by summoning parliaments only rarely – parliament was, as historians put it, ‘an event, not an institution’.

We know, too, that Oliver Cromwell was no democrat, being content to whittle down parliament until by the time his kangaroo court tried the King, there were only 80 MPs allowed to sit in the Commons, and he had completely abolished the House of Lords.