Clea Mahoney
26 November 2006
Professor Samuels
English 4
The Killing of King Charles and Marvell’s “Horatian Ode”
The execution of Charles I broke the stable tradition of a monarchy in England,
and resulted in a variety of reactions from the public. Royalists sympathized with the
King and mourned his death, while the revolutionary Republicans celebrated
triumphantly. Andrew Marvell’s “An Horatian Ode” illustrates different and varying
reactions to the execution of King Charles within the text of the poem. Scholar Thomas
N. Corns asserts that “the ambiguity of the central image contributes much to the political
elusiveness of the poem,” and in fact various scholars argue for different interpretations
of Marvell’s presentation of the King based on the text of the poem (Corns 1). Corns
states that Charles is a “deceiving sham” in “the Puritan perspective,” while “in the
Royalist perspective he is a sympathetic figure of heroic proportion” (1). The image of
the King that Marvell presents balances “equivocally between the two traditions,” and the
contrasting reactions are demonstrated through Marvell’s “ambivalence towards the fall
of the King” (Corns 1). Marvell’s ambiguous and alternating representation of King
Charles’s execution provides one example of the literary reactions to this event.
On [CITE DAY], the day of his execution, King Charles memorably declared: “I
do stand more for the liberty of my subjects than any that come here to be my pretended
judges” (Kelsey 1). The trial of the King was reported in a variety of “contemporary
news books and were taken in shorthand by official recorders as well as spectators in the
galleries” (Norton). The courtroom was reportedly a dramatic scene filled with
spectators, and during the trial Charles “repeatedly denied that the court established by
Parliament had any authority over him” (Norton).
Sean Kelsey, a notable scholar on King Charles, states that Charles’s
contemporaries compared the King's tribulations with Christ's suffering at the hands of
the Pharisees,” and news sources of the time “certainly convey a morbidly idolatrous
obsession with the royal actor” (Kelsey 1). Kelsey proclaims that Charles’s trial (and
subsequent execution) shows the “revolutionary regime's reliance upon some of the
deeper, more conservative impulses of English political culture” as the Commonwealth
came to power in the aftermath (Kelsey 1).
One reaction to the execution of King Charles focuses more on England’s shift in
power—specifically, Oliver Cromwell’s rising rule. Scholar Peter Moore, in his journal
article titled “The Irony of Marvell’s Horatian Ode,” aims to show Marvell’s disapproval
of Cromwell as the new head of England. The Ode was allegedly written between
Cromwell’s return to Ireland (in 1650) and his departure for Scotland. Marvell focuses
on Cromwell’s career from the outbreak of the war to the King’s execution” in Stanzas 3
through 6 (Moore 4). Having already witnessed Cromwell’s rise to power through
“industrious valor” (Marvell 33) and portraying him as “angry heaven’s flame” (26),
Marvell goes on to describe the effect of this self-imposed ruler on the United Kingdom.
Moore states that “Marvell charges Cromwell with being a money-hungry
schemer” in his “Horatian Ode” and proclaims that Marvell holds Cromwell responsible
for the killing of Charles I (Moore 3). He outlines this claim with textual support: in the
12th and 13th Stanzas, Marvell shows how “Cromwell tricked the King into fleeing from
Hampton Court, and then chased him to Carisbrooke Castle,” after which he heads
directly into the action of the execution (11). Skipping the two years between these
events allows Marvell to ignore the matters of Charles’s plots of “Royalist uprisings and
Scottish invasion” during the Civil War, after which the Independents called for the
King’s execution (11).
Marvell seems to lean toward the side of Royalists—he wrote two poems in praise
of known Royalists (Richard Lovelace and Lord Hastings) and only praised Oliver
Cromwell when Cromwell hired him as an employee in 1653 (Moore 4). Since this poem
wasn’t published until after Cromwell’s death, Moore’s claim that any praise for
Cromwell in “An Horatian Ode” is meant to be ironic is credible. Marvell’s “description
of the King’s execution (lines 53-64)” (Moore 2) paints a positive portrait of King
Charles, as he faces his fate without attempting to “vindicate his helpless right” (Marvell
62).
In Stanzas 17 and 18, Marvell describes the resulting scene of the King’s
execution—“that memorable Hour/ Which first assured the forc’d Power” (Marvell 6566)—in terms of Roman history and legend. During excavations in Rome, a “bloody
human head” was found, and soothsayers “interpreted the omen as predicting that Rome
would be the head of the world” (Moore 12). Marvell makes reference to this “bleeding
head” (Marvell 69) and states that although its discovery “frightened architects to run”
(70), it marked that Rome “foresaw its happy fate” (72). However, King Charles’s head
was regarded in a completely different manner; his hair was sold to the public and paying
customers were allowed to “dip handkerchiefs in the King’s blood” (Moore 12). Moore
proposes that Marvell includes this comparison “to contrast the gravity of the Romans,
who recognized a portent in their bleeding head, to…Cromwell’s troops, who –
figuratively—clapped their literally bloody hands at the opportunity to make some
money” (Moore 13).
Another reaction to the killing of King Charles is the interpretation of the event as
an act of martyrdom or self-sacrifice. Scholar Thad Bowers examines this viewpoint in
his article “Sacred Violence in Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode.’” Bowers argues that, in the
section of the poem detailing the King’s execution, “Marvell portrays Cromwell and his
fellow republicans as seeking to exploit [their] power in sacrifice” (Bowers 6). Bowers
explains that scholars often find Marvell’s description of the killing of the King to be
ambiguous, but he chooses to focus on “what this ambiguity says about the success of
sacrifice” and “Marvell’s resistance to sacrificial violence” (Bowers 6).
Bowers examines the sacrificial viewpoint by referring to the “bloody head”
described in Marvell’s poem. Since the Romans believed the discovery of this head to be
“a sign of divine favor in the form of an imperial destiny,” scholars argue that the
allusion in Marvell’s poem is meant to parallel “a similarly sacred foundation to
Cromwell’s rule” (Bowers 7). This argument loses credibility, however, in its “faulty
analogy” (7); Bowers states that Marvell embellishes on the Roman legend by making the
head bleed and frightening the architects (Marvell 69-70) and this adds a layer of
supernaturalism to the story.
Bowers argues that this contrasts with “Marvell’s account of the regicide as the
consequence of a very worldly power-play by Cromwell,” in that Cromwell simply
“eliminate[ed] his most significant enemy” (7). Although Marvell’s accounts of the
King’s death do mention blood, this “serves not to shroud the killing in sacred mystery,
but to incriminate the killers, by describing…the hands of Cromwell’s soldiers as
‘bloody’” (7). Bowers asserts that a true sacrifice would need to “affirm the king’s sole
culpability for the war,” and the poem instead places the blame on Cromwell and his
Army (7). Therefore, Cromwell’s rule is not “a sacred power,” but was “gained by a
violent usurpation that…cannot be concealed by myth” (7).
Another symbol in “An Horatian Ode” that Bowers explores is the image of
Charles I as an actor of the stage. In Line 53 of the poem, Marvell calls Charles a “royal
actor” and refers to the “tragic scaffold” of the hanging. This may refer directly to the
proximity of the scaffold to “the Banqueting House where he once performed in
masques” (9). Bowers adds support to the theory of Charles as an actor by presenting the
theory that “Marvell’s mention of clapping in a theatrical context suggests…the clapping
of an audience” (10). Marvell presents the image of the audience clapping “their bloody
hands” (Marvell 56), implying not only that the observers are a sort of theatrical audience,
but also that they are partially guilty of the killing. Since the audience of this execution
“consists of participants rather than mere observers,” this portrayal of the King’s death
(according to Bowers) makes the event a theatrical Tragedy.
Bowers also explores the possibility the Marvell may have been describing the
King’s death in terms of biblical analogy, or of Charles as a Christ-like figure. In both
the death of Charles and of Christ, Bowers lists the similarities: “both had an audience of
soldiers, their killers, and both adorned a tragic scaffold (one…a cross; the other a
beheading platform)” (11). The comparison of Charles to Christ “was a common royalist
endeavor” at the time, and Bowers argues that it is Charles’s “own carefully observed
performance” that makes him fit for martyr status (11). During his own execution, as
previously stated, Charles refrains from vulgarity (Marvell 61) and thereby behaves in a
manner of “kingly decorum” (Bowers 11).
This action in itself is ambiguous—it either “reasserts his [Charles’s] authority in
the face of the radical challenge presented by his imminent execution,” but it might also
imply that “the king is better at aesthetics than he is at genuine virtue” (11). Like Christ,
Charles is represented in this section of the poem as “too delicate and too docile a
sacrificial lamb to merit this kind of death,” and Marvell focuses on the persecutors by
presenting Charles’s death as “dignified” through the omission of his own responsibility
(11).