In Our Time

by Melvyn Bragg

  MELVYN BRAGG: Can we just clear this up? The first civil war we are talking about, 1642–6, and they thought that was the end of it, a lot of people, and they have gone and negotiated peace; and the thing that really triggered the [trial] was the second civil war of 1648–9, which they laid squarely, and Diane thinks fairly and squarely, at the door of Charles I, don’t you?

  The frontispiece of Eikon Basilike portrays Charles I as Christ, kneeling with a crown of thorns.

  DIANE PURKISS: Well, I think it is impossible not to lay that at the door of Charles I. He was offered fairly good deals by Cromwell and Ireton, [which] certainly would have saved his life, would have ensured the continuation of the monarchy. And that was what everyone had been aiming for in the first civil war, anyway.

  Yet there he had been, before the second civil war, apparently holding out the hand of friendship to people like Oliver Cromwell and his son-in-law Henry Ireton whom he was negotiating with while plotting their destruction, which naturally alienated them. David Wootton suspected that, for many of the military figures, it became fairly apparent that the only way they were going to stop Charles was to kill him. It seems, too, that Charles feared he would be assassinated while in captivity. Usually he was immaculate, but Justin Champion had an explanation for his comparatively dishevelled state at the trial and for his fuller beard: he had not wanted anyone to shave him in case they cut his throat.

  JUSTIN CHAMPION: It is enormously difficult for us to recognise: Charles does believe he is appointed by God. He is almost bemused, especially in the court, when nobody will help him. You know the tip of his silver cane is meant to have fallen off. ‘Help me?’ Nobody does. It is almost that he is incapable, but that, I think, gives him the stubborn authority to challenge the court.

  Looking around the room, Charles despised the commissioners ranged before him. He only recognised two or three faces, according to David Wootton, and thought that the rest were nobodies put up to try him, whose presence was a form of contempt for him, and that may have contributed to his misjudgement of the situation.

  DAVID WOOTTON: He has always been treated with respect and he cannot imagine an England without a king. And that’s why he thinks parliament in the end must do a deal with him. Right up until the beginning of the trial, he is convinced they must do a deal with him, because there is no alternative king, and England without a king is unimaginable. He thinks he has a veto on any settlement.

  There was disagreement in the studio over how smart Charles was in his assessment of the threats he faced. Diane Purkiss suggested he was great at plotting but that, in the end, this did him no good. It was what her grandmother would have called ‘silly cunning’. He was within an ace of being summarily murdered, as other rulers had been, and yet he could not see the bigger picture.

  MELVYN BRAGG: What was the bigger picture?

  DIANE PURKISS: The bigger picture was the fact that it had become possible for everybody else in the country to imagine the country without a king, to imagine a country ruled by the army grandees rather than by himself, and that, indeed, is what happened.

  MELVYN BRAGG: Is that true? At that time, in 1649, do you think it was possible for people in the country to imagine that?

  DIANE PURKISS: Yes, I think it was. I don’t think it was possible for every single person, but I think it was possible for the people in charge of him to imagine that, and that was what he resolutely refused to see.

  Since assassination was always an option, the action of the commissioners was all the more remarkable. They were breaking with all custom by putting a king on trial, and they had to believe that providence was on their side or else, as Justin Champion put it, they were ‘blowing it big time’. The commissioners thought they were doing God’s will, while Charles thought he was divinely appointed. For people like Cromwell, God was clearly supporting the side of parliament as it had defeated Charles twice in the wars. They were still so worried, though, Diane Purkiss said, that they interviewed a prophetess, Elizabeth Poole of Abingdon, who told them she had had a divine revelation saying parliament had every right to try Charles, but not to hurt him.

  JUSTIN CHAMPION: Those radical puritans are constantly anxious that they have got it wrong. If we look at Cromwell’s meditations and letters at this time, he is constantly going back to bits of the Old Testament and looking at the parallels. ‘Have I got it right? Is this a time of necessity? Is this a time of providence? Or what happens if I’ve got it wrong?’ So these people are anxious not that they are making a mistake, in a civil or a legal way, but that they are doing the Antichrist’s work.

  This was, effectively, the first attempt to try a monarch for war crimes and it was not done furtively but in public. This action in the open light of day was something that David Wootton found to admire, even though he did not have much sympathy for the way in which Cromwell and his associates conducted the trial otherwise.

  DIANE PURKISS: One reason that they felt themselves capable of dethroning and executing a king was because [some] were expecting to be ruled by Christ the King any day now. People actually say things like, ‘We have identified Charles as one of the ten horns of the beast from the Book of Revelations.’

  Others believed that the blood of the dead was actually crying out from the ground. The perception of the dead as murder victims, and the atrocities in the battles, meant that some actually felt a sense of obligation to lay those bones to rest. All the while, Charles refused to enter a plea and, by 27 January, the court had heard all the evidence it wanted and retired to the Painted Chamber to consider the sentence. Lord Bradshaw returned to declare to the court why Charles was guilty and this, Justin Champion said, was when Charles suddenly realised they were going to sentence him to death. He had a moment in which he uttered ‘either a haughty “huh”, as in “what do I care?”, or an agonised “haw”, as if he has suddenly got the view’, two interpretations on which royalists and parliamentarians were divided. Then, denounced as a tyrant, Charles was taken away.

  There was a delay while parliament made preparations for the execution, choosing the location in front of the Banqueting House, erecting the platform and passing the legislation permitting the killing. Charles had shown composure and restraint throughout the trial, but parliament was still concerned that he would break loose on the platform and struggle. On Tuesday 30 January 1649, he was led out.

  DAVID WOOTTON: They have put staples where they can chain him down if he tries to struggle and they have put up a block that is only 10 inches high. Normally a gentleman would kneel and the block would be about 2ft high, and would fit neatly under his neck. And they ask Charles to put his head on the block, and he knows he is going to have to lie down to do this, and he says, ‘Why can’t the block be higher?’ The reason the block can’t be higher is that they are afraid of him struggling.

  Charles spoke to those around him, and his words were recorded. He spoke with great dignity, and then he put his head down on the block, and raised his hair under his hat so that the executioner could get a good blow. David Wootton added that the executioner and his assistant were wearing fake moustaches and fake hair as a disguise, frightened of being murdered in reprisal, something that was to happen to Isaac Dorislaus a few months later at the hands of royalist agents. And Charles died what might be called a noble death, in what some soon called a martyrdom. Justin Champion mentioned a work probably written by Charles’s chaplain, Eikon Basilike (the king’s image), but attributed to Charles himself, which came out soon after the death, presenting Charles as Christ, kneeling with a crown of thorns.

  As for the regicides, there was some peace until Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660. At first, he said he would show mercy to those who fought against him. Soon, though, a royalist parliament was elected and the regicides were under threat. Some were already dead, some fled, many were tried and sentenced to life imprisonment. Several were hanged, drawn and quartered. Some were executed posthumously.

  DIANE PURKISS: They actua
lly dig up the bodies of Cromwell and Ireton, and hang them on a gibbet at Tyburn. It is important not to underestimate how vindictive the Restoration regime is and, though Charles II does come in saying he is not going to do anything nasty and he is going to be a very peaceful kind of figure, it doesn’t turn out that way at all.

  In the view of Justin Champion, the trial of Charles I resonated not only through English history but also through European and global history, becoming the model for subsequent revolutions, whether the Americans in 1776, the French in 1789 or Fidel Castro in the 1950s. This first political trial of a head of state for crimes against the people, however inaccurate a charge that may have been, became an icon in itself. And, for all that, the trial showed it is ‘almost still too complicated, even with our ability to forget the past, to imagine carrying an axe and killing a king’.

  ROMULUS AND REMUS

  The Capitoline Museums in Rome contain a small but magnificent room known as the ‘chamber of the she-wolf’. Its marble walls are covered in Latin inscriptions and colourful murals, and its floor has an elaborate mosaic, but the centrepiece is a bronze statue of a wolf suckling two human infants, an image revered by Romans as a symbol of their city. A similar object was described by Cicero as adorning the Roman Forum more than 2,000 years ago. The statue depicts the most celebrated of Rome’s foundation myths: the children are the twins Romulus and Remus who, according to tradition, having been left to die, were discovered and fed by the wolf and miraculously survived. Romulus went on to give his name to Rome, the city he founded. Remus was killed. It is a powerful story and one that encapsulates many of the peculiarities of ancient Rome, its society and people.

  The Capitoline Wolf is a bronze statue of the mythical she-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus.

  With Melvyn to discuss Romulus and Remus were: Dame Mary Beard, professor of classics at the University of Cambridge; Peter Wiseman, emeritus professor of classics and ancient history at the University of Exeter; and Tim Cornell, emeritus professor of ancient history at the University of Manchester.

  At the heart of this discussion were three questions: what stories did Romans tell about their foundation and why, and when did the stories originate? Melvyn called on Mary Beard for a basic outline of the Romulus and Remus story and, noting that there were lots of different versions, she offered a composite. This started in Alba Longa, a small town outside the future site of Rome, where the brothers Numitor and Amulius were rival kings. Amulius deposed Numitor, the rightful ruler, before disposing of Numitor’s male family and making his daughter a virgin priestess so that she would not have children to challenge him.

  MARY BEARD: But he doesn’t manage that because the daughter, who is called Rhea Silvia, gets pregnant; she says the father is the god Mars. In some versions she says he appeared from the flame of her temple fire in the form of a phallus. So she is pregnant. It turns out to be divine twins, if Rhea Silvia’s story is true.

  Amulius asked his servants to get rid of the twins, and they were left in baskets by the Tiber where they were found not by humans but by a she-wolf who suckled the twins and kept them alive long enough for a shepherd to find them. This shepherd was Faustulus, who took the twins to be raised by his wife Acca Larentia. Once they are adults, they are reunited with the deposed Numitor and reinstate him on the throne of Alba Longa.

  MARY BEARD: They would like to have a city themselves. They think they are going to have to wait a very, very long time if they have to wait until Numitor has finished his rule at Alba Longa, so off they go to a nearby place, which is going to be Rome, and decide to establish a city there.

  Romulus and Remus then had a contest in which they asked the gods to help them decide which of them should rule the city and name it. Looking for signs from the heavens, Remus saw six vultures and claimed victory, only for Romulus suddenly to see twelve and claim that victory was his. He started to build a rampart, but the quarrel continued and Romulus killed his twin and took command of what would be Rome.

  Following that summary, Melvyn turned to Peter Wiseman who took up the question of why it was said the twins were suckled by a wolf, and why they had been left out to die. The exposure story, he said, was found in the Bible with Moses and the bulrushes, as it was in the Oedipus myth, where it was used as a way of showing how someone, who appeared to come from nowhere, did in fact have a significant background. These children were always the product of pregnancies that someone did not want.

  PETER WISEMAN: Sometimes it is because the queen herself is pregnant but has a dream or some oracle that tells that her offspring is going to have a disastrous career, so they try to frustrate the will of the gods by destroying the child; and that kind of story shows that you can’t do that, and eventually the gods will make sure the child survives and comes back.

  Often in these stories there was the exposure, but the suckling by a wild animal was rarer. Peter Wiseman told of exceptions such as Paris, prince of Troy, who was son of Priam and Hecuba, and Hecuba had a dream that he would be responsible for the fall of Troy and he was exposed to die, only to be suckled by a she-bear. Then there was an Arcadian called Telephus, who was exposed to die on Mount Parthenion and was suckled by a doe, and he went on to become a hero. Cyrus, the king of the Persians, was reputedly suckled by a bitch.

  Noting that Mary Beard had said there were different versions of Rome’s foundation story, Melvyn asked Peter Wiseman to offer examples, and he offered those in which Remus was not killed, or in which he and Romulus ruled together. Virgil’s version in The Aeneid has no quarrel and no fratricide.

  PETER WISEMAN: In a way, the Beard version is the one we all know, because it is in the great authors, Levy and Plutarch. This is, if you like, the privileged version but, [if] you root around in the more obscure corners of classical literature, you can find references to all kinds of different versions.

  In some versions, Remus is killed not by Romulus but by a man called Celer, who was building the rampart and took offence when Remus leapt over it, striking him dead with a shovel. Sometimes Celer hits him instinctively and sometimes on the orders of Romulus, who is then given the momentous words, ‘So perish all who cross my walls.’ There is another version in which Remus is killed as a sacrifice to make the wall stronger.

  Melvyn turned to Tim Cornell for what happened after the building of the physical city, which was the issuing of an invitation for more men to join him and his few friends at Rome.

  TIM CORNELL: The first thing Romulus does is to create an asylum, and he founds this space on the Capitoline Hill where anyone is welcome to come along: political exiles, asylum seekers and runaways and runaway slaves, criminals and more all gather there. These are the first Romans.

  This asylum aspect of the story is discussed below, but first Tim Cornell turned to what these men supposedly did to ensure their settlement had a future. At first, Romulus apparently asked neighbouring cities if they would allow intermarriage, but this was turned down as his men were not respectable. He then arranged a festival and invited the neighbours, among them the Sabines, who were living in hills to the north-east of Rome and who brought their daughters with them. It was a trap and, at a signal, all the young Romans grabbed a woman, which became known as the abduction of the Sabine women, also dubbed the rape, from the Latin rapere, which means ‘to seize’; it was the ‘seizure’ of the Sabine women, as well as rape in the conventional sense. This act led to outrage and war, and the Sabines, under Titus Tatius, came to Rome. They set up camp on the Quirinal Hill on the north-east side and captured the Capitoline, and there was then a great battle in the valley between the hills on the ground that later became the Forum.

  TIM CORNELL: This battle in the Forum takes place and, while it is raging, the women themselves intervene and urge the men to stop fighting each other, so that husbands and fathers must stop, pull themselves together and come to some agreement. The result is a joint community in which the Sabines decide to stay on, and Romulus and Titus Tatius actually become joint
kings of the new double community.

  According to legend, Romulus then created the constitution, the senate and other institutions, fought wars and helped Rome become very prosperous. Titus Tatius disappeared in mysterious circumstances, in which Romulus was sometimes implicated, and, in time, Romulus himself disappeared, with some versions of the story saying that he was taken up to heaven.

  Melvyn asked Mary Beard if she could give the earliest references for this foundation story and say how valid the story was. She answered with one word: ‘No.’ All the most detailed accounts are really from the first century BC and later, so the game with this story has been to trace that point between the first century BC and the eighth, at which the story originated, using all kinds of conjectures and guesses.

  MARY BEARD: Many people, me included, would point to a fourth-century Etruscan mirror, which has on it … I can see already Peter shaking his head … which has on it a very clear picture of an animal, that is a plausible wolf, and two kids underneath it, probably about 325 BC, perhaps 350 BC. For many people, that is a clear sign that you have a wolf and twins story, i.e. Romulus and Remus, in the fourth century BC.

  She acknowledged that there were other stories about animals and babies being suckled, and that this mirror was not unquestionably Romulus and Remus. Later, there was a clear literary reference in the work of Livy (c. 59 BC–c. AD 17) to a statue of twins and a wolf being put up in the centre of Rome in 296 bc. Peter Wiseman disputed the evidence of the mirror, saying that one of the other characters on the mirror was recognisably the god Hermes, or Mercury, which to him suggested that either the mirror depicted a totally different version of the Romulus and Remus story in which Mercury was involved, or that Mercury was involved because the twins were not Romulus and Remus but rather the Lares, guardian deities with whom Mercury was associated.