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Passage Realised

Being taken back to Whitehall, he sent to the House of Commons, saying that as the time of his execution might be nigh, he wished he might be allowed to see his darling children. It was granted. On the Monday he was taken back to St. James's; and his two children then in England, the PRINCESS ELIZABETH thirteen years old, and the DUKE OF GLOUCESTER nine years old, were brought to take leave of him, from Sion House, near Brentford. It was a sad and touching scene, when he kissed and fondled those poor children, and made a little present of two diamond seals to the Princess, and gave them tender messages to their mother (who little deserved them, for she had a lover of her own whom she married soon afterwards), and told them that he died "for the laws and liberties of the land." I am bound to say that I don't think he did, but I dare say he believed so.

There were ambassadors from Holland that day, to intercede for the unhappy King, whom you and I both wish the Parliament had spared; but they got no answer. The Scottish Commissioners interceded too; so did the Prince of Wales, by a letter in which he offered as the next heir to the throne, to accept any conditions from the Parliament; so did the Queen, by letter likewise.

Notwithstanding all, the warrant for the execution was this day signed. [Chapter 33, "England under Charles the First"]

Commentary

The elegantly dressed girl with fashionable ringlets and the silk-clad boy in the picture would be Elizabeth (born 1635) and Henry, Duke of Gloucester (born 1640) — therefore, at the time of their parting from their father in January 1649 they would have been thirteen (as Dickens stipulates) and nine respectively. However, Marcus Stone has rendered the scene more pathetic by making the Princess Elizabeth seem much younger, and by by placing an armed guard at the door, apparently to take the king to the scaffold for public his beheading. In fact, the sentimental scene transpired at St. James's Palace, and the execution of the Stuart monarch took place on the day following at Whitehall Palace. Whereas Dickens makes editorial comments that hardly serve to exonerate Charles of blame, he describes the King's attitude as steadfast and even heroic as he approached the scaffold. Stone's picture without reservation enlists the reader's support for the kind and caring father in a way that Dickens's text does not.

From the opening of the chapter, Dickens is quite open in his prejudice towards the forces of Parliament and against those of the absolute monarch, Charles Stuart, despite his ambivalence about the justice of executing the king for "high treason":

I SHALL not try to relate the particulars of the great civil war between King Charles the First and the Long Parliament, which lasted nearly four years, and a full account of which would fill many large books. It was a sad thing that Englishmen should once more be fighting against Englishmen on English ground; but, it is some consolation to know that on both sides there was great humanity, forbearance, and honour. The soldiers of the Parliament were far more remarkable for these good qualities than the soldiers of the King (many of whom fought for mere pay without much caring for the cause); but those of the nobility and gentry who were on the King's side were so brave, and so faithful to him, that their conduct cannot but command our highest admiration. Among them were great numbers of Catholics, who took the royal side because the Queen was so strongly of their persuasion. [Chapter 33, "England under Charles the First"]

The pictures by both J. Mclean Ralston in the Household Edition ("'Charles the First Taking Leave of His Children' — Chap. xxxiii, Fourth Par") and Marcus Stone work in opposition to much of the text in that the illustrations enlist the viewer's sympathy for the handsome, stylishly dressed father of two young children and not a ruthless political game-player. In neither picture does he wear a crown, but has a cavalier's broad-brimmed hat at his side, and wears middle-class clothing of the period rather than royal regalia or armour. In both, moreover, a beribboned dog at his feet, a conventional symbol of fidelity, again domesticates the space, so that the soldier at the rear seems to be violating the moment of tenderness as he enters the room from the political sphere to escort the king to his execution. On the other hand, Stone does not imply that Charles Stuart is in any way a martyr, investing him with no special signs of godliness or purity, and none of the appurtenances of royalty. Apart from the sentimentality of its context, the scene might well be a cartoon study for a genre painting of the late seventeenth in Holland or eighteenth century in France, a Hals or a Chardin. Thus, in humanizing Charles the First Marcus Stone and Charles Dickens rob him of any justification to his pretensions to absolute power and divine right. Although unquestionably Parliamentarian in his political sympathies, Dickens, himself the father of half-a-dozen children by 1850, cannot justify the execution of a devoted family man: "With all my sorrow for him, I cannot agree with him that he died 'the martyr of the people;' for the people had been martyrs to him, and to his ideas of a King's rights, long before." The solid chair on which the fashionably dressed, middle-aged gentleman sits reminds us, however, that he was a ruler.

Politically, young Dickens had been a radical, that is, towards the Reform side of the Whig or Liberal party, sentiments that he communicated in the 1830s in his coverage of political speeches for the Morning Chronicle. In the 1840s he chose to spend a year in Genoa not simply because the cost of living in Piedmont was low, but because he agreed with the Liberal orientation of the government and its leadership in Risorgimento or Italian unification. In founding Household Words Dickens was explicit that the weekly journal would be Liberal in its views. As Peter Ackroyd in his biography of Dickens remarks, Dickens adopted the historical perspectives of such Liberal historians as Thomas Keightley (1837-39) and Charles Knight, the latter's Pictorial History of England in Dickens's library having been "heavily annotated by him" (583). Gillian Avery in Paul Schlicke's Oxford Companion to Dickens succinctly remarks that, although he utilised Scottish philosopher David Hume's popular six-volume History of Great Britain (1754-61), Dickens broke with the pro-Tory Scot over his apologia for the Stuarts, "whom [Dickens] cordially detested" (93). In terms of prejudice and interpretation of historical events, Dickens was much closer to Whig historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, although only the first two volumes (1848) of Macaulay's study of the development of English parliamentary democracy had appeared before Dickens published his version in thirty-nine instalments in Household Words, beginning on 25 January 1850 and concluding on 10 December 1853. The final Marcus Stone illustration for Dickens's A Child's History of England (1862, Illustrated Library Edition), however, reveals once again Dickens's ambivalence towards his subject, for he detested Charles as the oppressor of the people, but admired him as a caring parent, a model Victorian pater familias.

References

Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990.

Avery, Gillian. "A Child's History of England." The Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens, ed. Paul Schlicke. Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1999. P. 93.

Avery, Gillian, ed. Charles Dickens: "A Holiday Romance" and Other Writings for Children with All the Original Illustrations. Everyman edition. London: J. M. Dent, 1995.

Cohen, Jane Rabb. Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators. Columbus: Ohio State U. P., 1980.

Dickens, Charles. A Child's History of England in Works. Centenary Edition. 36 vols. London: Chapman and Hall; New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1910-12.

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Last modified 23 March 2013