Guns and Gear

Guns & Politics: Regicide

Susan Smith Columnist
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Quite frankly, when I looked at the recent image of Kathy Griffin holding up the bloodied decapitated head of the 45th President, I wasn’t quite sure which I found more disturbing – Trump’s head or Kathy Griffin’s face.

Now THAT is a nasty woman.

Be that as it may, appallingly ignorant Ms. Griffin, along with her equally uninformed fellow travelers, demonstrates that the United States of America doesn’t execute, whether by decapitation, hanging, burned at the stake, or any other equally gruesome method, its Presidents.  Regicide, as it were, is not necessary in America.  It is often said, actually, that one of the more brilliant aspects of the American system is that every four years the power changes without any need for that sort of thing; not so, tragically, in other nations.

Two of the more notorious, and devastating, examples of this practice resulted from the revolutions in France and in Russia.  In France, in the late 18th century, Louis XVI, followed by his wife, Marie Antoinette, was murdered by Parisian mobs, and in the very early 20th century, Nicholas II of Russia, along with his young family, was murdered by Bolsheviks, with their bodies burned afterwards.   It is universally accepted that both these revolutions were disasters, with the end result of both, regicide, being a large part of why these exercises were so devastating to their nations, both in the short, and in the long, term.

There is yet another highly civilized nation who murdered its king, this time in the mid-17th century, and that was England, with the King being Charles I.  The difference in that example of regicide and the others just described is that the English seem to want to gloss over that particularly ugly chapter in their history.  France and Russia fully acknowledge what they did, and mostly regret it, but England is strangely silent about their experiment in regicide.

Charles I was born in Scotland in 1600, the son of King James VI of Scotland, who later became James I of Britain upon the death of Elizabeth I; he was the second man in the Stuart dynasty to become King of England.  Charles became the heir to the British throne when his beloved brother, Henry, died in 1612. 

Charles was the second son of his parents’ five children, and was consistently ill and small for his age.  He was basically ignored in favor of his older brother, which resulted in the young Charles’ lifetime of being shy, withdrawn and hampered with a pronounced stutter.  Despite these trials in his upbringing, he always adored his gifted older brother, Henry, and was devastated when he died at a young age, leaving Charles the heir to the throne.

All eyes turned to Charles at that point, who seemed, at that point, destined to disappoint.

To his eternal credit, the young man demonstrated his determination to achieve the proper demeanor of a King.  He worked to improve his physique, to develop his mind and to achieve a King-like demeanor, all of which seemed impossible for the young man to achieve.  Always under the eyes of the nation, he achieved all that he had set out to do, and was a very popular Charles I when he acceded to the British throne in 1625.

Unfortunately, Charles had also inherited his father’s intransigence, and inability to compromise, which he demonstrated very early in his reign.  Britain had fought numerous and expensive wars abroad during his father’s term as monarch, and Charles’ first task was to attempt to refurbish the empty coffers left by these seemingly endless conflicts by excessive taxation of his subjects.  At the same time, he married Henrietta Maria of France, who was a devout Catholic and a daughter of King Henry IV of France, which were other almost insurmountable problems in a country plagued by religious conflicts.  Charles, of course, was a Protestant, but one who advocated a High Anglican form of worship, a very unpopular form of devotion, and who was not a fan of the Puritans, a strict religious sect who loathed anything they found to be redolent of papacy.

Unfortunately for the King, it was the Puritan sect, and not the followers of Charles I, who were growing in power and influence.

Charles was also a consummate believer in the divine right of Kings, which gave him the power, he thought, to rule without any other advice and counsel if it did not suit him.  As a result of this strongly held belief, King Charles I dissolved Parliament three times between 1625 and 1629, “resolved to rule alone,” which he did, for quite a few years.

Things did not improve for the British people during his sole reign.

Eventually, though, it became necessary for the King to “raise revenue by non-parliamentary means,” not only to address increasing unrest in both Scotland and Ireland, but also to enforce a “crackdown on Puritans and Catholics,” strenuously objecting to the King’s ruling practices, causing many English subjects to emigrate to the American colonies.  All of these factors made the intransigent young King increasingly unpopular.

Forced to recall Parliament to obtain the money he needed to fund the troops to suppress the burgeoning conflicts in Scotland and Ireland, Charles I developed an increasingly hostile relationship with the Parliamentary body, who at this point had a very large Puritanical constituency.  In 1641, the King unwisely tried to have several members of that body arrested, which was strongly resisted by the “representatives of the people.”  Charles I then made the fatal mistake of taking command of an army, which basically meant that he was declaring war on Parliament.

Thus, in 1642, the English Civil War had started. 

Charles, well-meaning man that he was, had little skill in the art of man-management which was crucial when so much depended on the “king’s relations with leading politicians and noblemen;” he also lacked confidence in the “loyalty of his people and from the start of his reign (which) turned grants of taxation into tests of whether they loved him and trusted him.”  Clearly thus affected by his childhood, he could never stop trying to “bludgeon his way through difficulties by invoking his personal authority, assuming that once his wishes were known his subjects would stop squabbling and obey him.”

War was the result, which became known as the English Civil War.  The conflict was between two groups, one known as Royalists (also known as Cavaliers, loyal to the King) and the other, the Roundheads (supporters of Parliament and the Puritans), who battled each other for 9 years, with the forces of the Roundheads’ leader, the repulsive Oliver Cromwell, eventually victorious.

Following the final Cromwellian victory over the Royalists, and the delivery by the Scots of the King to the English Parliament, the victorious rulers decided that the conflict would never end while the King was still alive.  Thus, the decision was made to try and to condemn their sovereign Lord to death for treason, at that time a crime only a King could commit.  Charles was beheaded with one stroke of a sword on January 29, 1649, and England was left without a monarch.  This led to the Protectorate of autocrat Oliver Cromwell, who ironically proceeded to dismiss the first Parliament under his rule.

There were 59 men who signed the declaration calling for the execution of the King, and though many of them lived the not very many years of the Protectorate following the murder of the King and the abolishment of the English Kingship, after the son of Charles I, Charles II, resumed the Stuart throne in England in 1660, establishing “The Restoration,” revenge was doled out, and doled out brutally.

It was said of Charles I, that “he was, if ever any, the most worthy of the title of an honest man – so great a lover of justice that no temptation could dispose him to a wrongful action, except that it were so disguised to him that he believed it to be just.”

The English populace, ever aware of their extraordinary history, continue to debate whether Charles I should have been dealt the cruel fate that befell him.

I sincerely doubt that Kathy Griffin or any of her fellow travelers will linger for any length of time in the memories of Americans, with her pathetic effort to make some sort of statement by beheading our 45th President in effigy. Useful idiots that Kathy, etc., are, they demonstrate only the complete intolerance, and idiocy, of the left.

Susan Smith brings an international perspective to her writing by having lived primarily in western Europe, mainly in Paris, France, and the U.S., primarily in Washington, D.C. She authored a weekly column for Human Events on politics with historical aspects. She also served as the Staff Director of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Children, Family, Drugs and Alcoholism, and Special Assistant to the first Ambassador of Afghanistan following the initial fall of the Taliban. Ms. Smith is a graduate of Wheeling Jesuit University and Georgetown University, as well as the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris, France, where she obtained her French language certification. Ms. Smith now makes her home in McLean, Va.