When it comes to the English Civil War I incline to the view of those eminent historians Messrs Sellar and Yeatman that the Cavaliers were romantic but wrong and the Roundheads were repulsive but right. I still feel it was a pity about King Charles I though. In July 1647 he was rather comfortably imprisoned for a few weeks at Caversham and used to visit Hardwick House, just along the Thames from Mapledurham, which is quite near where I live, and from there call in to a local pub at nearby Collins End to play bowls. I think of him making his way up through the woods in the light summer evenings, perhaps pausing to look back wistfully on the fine view he would shortly never see again, down across broad paddocks to the shining river beyond.

If only he hadn’t felt so entitled… it is easy to imagine him in our times, giving a TV interview, completely misjudging the mood of the room and insisting to the end on his divine right to be a complete wally. So where he might, I suppose, have gone into a peaceable exile, instead he got the chop. But at least by all accounts he met his end with considerable dignity, as celebrated by Andrew Marvell in this week’s piece, which is an extract from a longer poem ostensibly in praise of Oliver Cromwell, the subject of the opening lines, but which is, to say the least, ambivalent about the execution of the king and gives him due credit for his behaviour on the scaffold.

Hampton: Charles was for a time imprisoned at Hampton Court, where Cromwell visited him many times to discuss ways in which the dispute between the King and Parliament might be resolved, but received no cooperation from the King.

Carisbrooke: a castle on the Isle of Wight to which Charles was transferred after an attempted escape from Hampton Court.

From ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’

What field of all the civil wars
Where his were not the deepest scars?
    And Hampton shows what part
    He had of wiser art,

Where, twining subtle fears with hope,
He wove a net of such a scope
    That Charles himself might chase
    To Carisbrooke’s narrow case,

That thence the royal actor borne
The tragic scaffold might adorn,
    While round the armed bands
    Did clap their bloody hands.

He nothing common did or mean
Upon that memorable scene,
    But with his keener eye
    The axe’s edge did try;

Nor call’d the gods with vulgar spite
To vindicate his helpless right,
    But bowed his comely head
    Down as upon a bed.

This was that memorable hour
Which first assur’d the forced pow’r.

Andrew Marvell