Do you know who the first Anglican saint was? Here’s a hint: it wasn’t Henry VIII. The title of this article says it all, but don’t feel embarrassed if you are unaware of King Charles the Martyr. Since the founding of the Episcopal Church (USA), Anglicanism’s first and longest-loved saint has been curiously absent from our province’s liturgical calendar — and this despite repeated and growing calls for his reinstatement.
Sadly, the American case is not unique. Anglicans today pay scandalously little attention to the saint whose cult fueled the Anglican imagination for centuries. Yet King Charles the Martyr witnesses to important facets of the Anglican heritage, especially the Anglican Counter-Reformation and the importance of martyrs, miracles, and relics. If it is true, as many now claim, that Anglicans are out of touch with their history and tradition, then the life and legacy of King Charles the Martyr are important for our reintegration.
Royalist Piety
When Charles I was beheaded on January 30, 1649, the large crowd that witnessed his execution rushed the scaffold. But they weren’t fueled by rage or hatred; their concerns were quite different, with roots reaching back to the medieval period. The onlookers wanted access to the king’s miraculous blood.
This undoubtedly sounds strange to us, but in themid-17th century it was wholly normal. Beginning with King Edward the Confessor in the 11th century, English kings were known as miracle workers. This was popularly known as “the royal touch,” a gift bestowed by God through the anointing that English monarchs received in their consecration. And, as the influential French medievalist Marc Bloch noted decades ago, the royal touch remains the longest lasting and most widely attested miracle in human history.
The ritual itself was quite simple. The monarch made the sign of the cross over the sick, touched the infected part(s), and prayed for healing. Initially used to cure scrofula, a widespread disease consisting of painful bodily inflammation, the royal touch was later used more widely. Kings consecrated and distributed coins called “angels”; they also blessed “cramp rings,” which were used to heal those racked by bodily pain. By the 15th century, much of this was synced with the English liturgical calendar, and Good Friday was the most popular day for performing royal miracles.
The English Reformation did not diminish the importance of the royal touch, but amplified it, along with other medieval traditions. One of the fault lines that defined the Middle Ages was the constant tension between the papacy and European monarchies. The papacy claimed to possess “plenitude of power” in both the spiritual and the political realms, but the validity of this assertion was undermined by the continued presence of wonder-working kings and queens.
Thus, in the 16th century, Roman Catholicism became the major opponent of this popular and ancient pattern of royalist piety; the Church of England, however, was one of its defenders and preservers. From the Anglican perspective, the monarch—not the pope—was the defender of the English church, and the royal touch was a God-given, miraculous vindication of this conviction.
The Anglican Counter-Reformation
Why, then, was King Charles I beheaded? The answer is found not in controversies between Anglicans and Roman Catholics, but in those between Anglicans and Puritans. Most importantly, the reign of Charles I saw the full flowering of the Anglican Counter-Reformation, a movement that began under Elizabeth I (1558-1603), and steadily gained momentum under James I (1603-25), Charles’s father.
On the one hand, the Anglican Counter-Reformation was a literary renaissance. Poetry saw a breathtaking revival in the early- tomid-17th century—John Donne and George Herbert are, perhaps, its best known representatives. No less importantly, during these same years Anglicans began composing devotional prose.
Rooted in the liturgies of The Book of Common Prayer, this literature was nurtured by the vividly emotional language of the Psalms. Lancelot Andrewes’s Private Prayers remains the apex of such writing. Anglican literature of the early 17th century was defined by unflinching, personal introspection, and the intervening centuries have not eroded its inspirational power.
On the other hand, the Anglican Counter-Reformation was a liturgical movement. Its ideals can be summed up in the phrase “the beauty of holiness.” Today, every Anglican parish bears the marks of the Anglican Counter-Reformation. One such legacy is altar rails, a unique feature of distinctly Anglican architecture.
During the reign of Edward VI (1547-53), altars were destroyed and replaced with movable tables, thereby symbolizing the Eucharist as a communal meal, rather than a sacrifice. The Anglican Counter-Reformation sought to unite the imagery of “the Holy Table” with the example of the early Church, which used altars. Together with altar rails, altars became visible reminders that the parish was a sacred space and should be reverenced as such. This dignified, outward liturgical expression perfectly mirrored the introspective drive of the movement’s devotional literature.
The development of rich ceremonial in many English parishes outraged Puritans. They believed such ceremonies were blasphemous. Furthermore, as if adding insult to injury, Charles I maintained his father’s prohibition on public speculation about the doctrine of double predestination, a prohibition aimed directly at Puritan theology. These religious tensions, which were joined to political grievances of questionable integrity, ignited the English Civil War in 1642. It quickly became clear that this was a zero-sum affair; monarchy and episcopacy, traditional institutions of authority that many believed were divinely ordained, were under attack. Their enemies wanted nothing less than their complete obliteration.
Eikon Basilike
The king’s capture in 1646 aroused sympathy and support for him. So too did his continued administration of the royal touch, which galvanized pious Anglicans, and also converted some of his opponents – including his own jailers — to the royalist-Anglican cause. Nonetheless, the king was executed on January 30, 1649. In his own words, he lived and died “according to the profession of the Church of England.” This was a clear affirmation, on the king’s part, of the necessity of episcopacy and monarchy, and the validity of the Anglican Counter-Reformation.
Two developments sustained Anglican identity in the dark decade that followed. First was the cult of the king’s relics. The royal touch continued to function through items such as handkerchiefs, which were dipped in the martyred king’s blood. These miraculous events were well known and widely reported, by word of mouth and in print. The location of such relics — usually private homes—became important sites of pilgrimage for Anglicans who refused to accept that the end had already come.
The second important development was the appearance of the king’s autobiographical Eikon Basilike, or The Royal Image. A collection of 28 meditations, each of which concluded with a prayer, Charles I used his book to defend himself, pray for his people, and meditate upon death. Like other writings of the Anglican Counter-Reformation, Eikon Basilike frequently drew upon the Psalms. Its first edition, printed on the day of the king’s death, was hugely popular; 39 editions were printed in 1649 alone. But the book was quickly proscribed, and became the target of a scathing, government-sponsored polemic written by John Milton. Nonetheless, Eikon Basilike was a force to be reckoned with, and its influence proved unmatchable.
Restoration
On May 29, 1660, Charles II returned to England after more than a decade of exile. With his return, the English monarchy and the Church of England were restored amidst a surging tide of popular support. One of the new king’s first acts was the commemoration of his father as King Charles the Martyr, the first Anglican saint. A number of other saints’ days were brought back into the Anglican calendar, several of which were dedicated to royal saints such as King Edward the Confessor. The date of the Restoration, which was also Charles II’s own birthday, became an Anglican feast day.
These developments were given their final form in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, which included liturgies for King Charles the Martyr and the Restoration. According to the commemorative liturgy for the royal saint, he was murdered by “wicked men.” Such liturgical sentiment reveals that the Anglican Counter-Reformation emerged victorious in the Restoration, and that honoring martyrs, believing in miracles, and reverencing relics are part of being Anglican. King Charles the Martyr’s last words included the simple statement, “Remember.” Why don’t we?
Benjamin Guyer is a graduate student in British history at the University of Kansas.
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6 Comments
To many of us King Charles was a ghastly pro Roman king, hugely in error. Remember that at that time the Roman Church was hugely in error and the Reformation Church - of which the C of E was a part, and influenced by the Puritans as well as the reformers, stood strongly against the betrayals of Charles 1. He was to many of us neither a martyr nor a saint. He deserves no part in the list of Anglican holy ones and is far from an exemplar of anything holy. No one deserves death, but he was no martyr. God defend us from celebrating such a historical anomaly and the superstitions associated with "royal blood." Salvation is by the blood of Christ, shed upon the cross, faith in the same is the basis of justification.
There was nothing pro-Roman about King Charles I - quite the opposite, not least with his explicit avowal of Anglican orthodoxy at the time of his death. Rome, as I noted in my article, was wholly opposed to the Royal Touch, because it meant that there was a miracle occurring among Christians who were not under papal oversight. Rome was just as opposed to the royal miracle as you apparently are. You write that "he was to many of us neither a martyr nor a saint" but that confuses historical - the focus of the article - with your own sentiments (and, I suppose, those of your constituents).
First of all, no historian of the period that I've ever read believes that Charles wrote the Eikon Basilike. Secondly, Charles' religious policy was a singular disaster. Imposing Anglican forms of worship on people who did not want them was one of the most unnecessarily destructive acts in history and unworthy of a Christian. Had the King left well-enough alone, England might have been spared an extremely violent and destructive civil war and Charles would probably have died with his head attached to his body.
An Anglican saint and martyr? Hardly.
Puritans still among us. These people kill Christians.
Earl Fain writes: "Puritans still among us. These people kill Christians." I do hope this is not stated as a definition. Sadly Christians kill Christians as we found in Rwanda and the Balkans, Northern Ireland and beyond.
What is so sad is the seeming dismissal of Puritan spirituality. By that I mean Reformed Protestant spirituality that is behind the Westminster Confession and historically the opposition to aspects of divinity being attributed to the monarch. There are other examples of their beliefs such as the abolition of feasts, wedding rings and more to which I would not subscribe. However they were strongly opposed to the "papist" heresies and for that I am very grateful. The Puritans are one strand of our Anglican heritage at a specific time in history whose heritage is still with us in all sorts of positive ways. There were later and more "catholic" strands.
I personally deplore the dismissal of the Puritan heritage in the Anglican Church as I also deplore the so called contributions of Charles I. How sad that for some people Puritan has become an expletive part of their ad hominem attacks on brother/sister Christians whose spirituality is faithfully orthodox to our Reformed and biblical heritage. Would the writer so dismiss Presbyterians? Those who honor and follow the Westminster Confession, are they "beyond the pale?"
I think the difference at work here, Ian, is that your sense of Anglican seems largely coterminous with your sense of English. Surely, Puritanism is a part of the English tradition. So, too, was the Westminster Confession a part of English history. But the important thing to remember, not least about the Westminster Confession, is that it was an avowedly Presbyterian document, still used by Presbyterians today, but was never, ever accepted in any formal way, let alone informally, by the Anglican establishment. That is a detail of no small importance. And let us recall that when Charles II returned to England, Cromwell was exhumed and his head was stuck on a pole outside of Westminster, where it was left to decompose for thirty years (ergo, by the time it was removed, it had presumably decomposed beyond all composition). "English" and "Anglican" are very much intertwined, but they are not the same.
Although I am more than happy to recognize that there were some very blurry lines between Calvinists and Anglicans as their theologies developed in the sixteenth century - particularly when it comes to scholastic debates about predestination (Calvinists and Anglicans were both, in their own ways, the theological children of Augustine of Hippo!) - the seventeenth century saw polarization, war, and separation (especially once Toleration became a legally valid institution) between these two entities. The Anglican Counter-Reformation was decisive for Anglican identity. Anglicans today still have altar rails, fixed altars/holy tables, and art in churches. We have feast days. We have the historic, three-fold order of ancient Christianity. We celebrate Christmas and Easter. These has never changed.
If one studies both Anglican and English history from Edward VI through to the Civil War, one will have one perspective of it. However, if one studies it through to the Restoration period, one sees how profoundly effective the reforms under James I and Charles I were in shaping a distinctly Anglican identity that was quite different than Presbyterian or Puritan identities. On a historical level, of course, it is not fair to project the firm developments of the Restoration period upon earlier ages. However - and again, on a historical level - one can very easily trace the roots of Restoration-era Anglicanism back through Archbishop Laud, King Charles I, to King James I and Lancelot Andrewes, and to a lesser extent Queen Elizabeth I (no friend of Puritans!) and Richard Hooker. To look back to the Puritans is ultimately to look back to a history that never was. The Puritans in the seventeenth century recognized this, of course, which is why so many of them fled to New England in the Restoration. They knew that they had lost. This addresses Christopher's point - Charles and the royalists, like the Puritans, played a zero-sum game of "one-kingdom-one-church". Thank God we no longer live in such a world!
Do Presbyterians (along with Anglicans, Roman Catholics, Baptists, etc.) partake of "merest Christianity"? Of course they do - and the develop it how they see fit. They most emphatically do not partake of Anglicanism, nor did they want to. To argue otherwise is to argue for a history that, in the seventeenth century and after, both Anglicans and Presbyterians knew did not exist (which is why, in the face of the English establishment of the Anglican episcopate in the colonies in the 1750s and 1760s, the Calvinist theology of revolution was used as a justification for the American Revolution - which some historians, incidentally, refer to as the "Second English Civil War").