Eikonoklastes (Upon the king’s calling this last parliament) Lyrics

That which the king lays down here as his first foundation, and as it were the head stone of his whole structure, that “he called this last parliament, not more by others’ advice, and the necessity of his affairs, than by his own choice and inclination;” is to all knowing men so apparently not true, that a more unlucky and inauspicious sentence, and more betokening the downfall of his whole fabric, hardly could have come into his mind. For who knows not, that the inclination of a prince is best known either by those next about him, and most in favour with him, or by the current of his own actions? Those nearest to this king, and most his favourites, were courtiers and prelates; men whose chief study was to find out which way the king inclined, and to imitate him exactly: how these men stood affected to parliaments cannot be forgotten. No man but may remember, it was their continual exercise to dispute and preach against them; and in their common discourse nothing was more frequent, than that “they hoped the king should now have no need of parliaments any more.” And this was but the copy, which his parasites had industriously taken from his own words and actions, who never called a parliament but to supply his necessities; and having supplied those, as suddenly and ignominiously dissolved it, without redressing any one grievance of the people: sometimes choosing rather to miss of his subsidies, or to raise them by illegal courses, than that the people should not still miss of their hopes to be relieved by parliaments.

The first he broke off at his coming to the crown, for no other cause than to protect the duke of Buckingham against them who had accused him, besides other heinous crimes, of no less than poisoning the deceased king his father; concerning which matter the declaration of “No more Addresses” hath sufficiently informed us. And still the latter breaking was with more affront and indignity put upon the house and her worthiest members, than the former. Insomuch that in the fifth year of his reign, in a proclamation he seems offended at the very rumour of a parliament divulged among the people; as if he had taken it for a kind of slander, that men should think him that way exorable, much less inclined: and forbids it as a presumption to prescribe him any time for parliaments; that is to say, either by persuasion or petition, or so much as the reporting of such a rumour: for other manner of prescribing was at that time not suspected. By which fierce edict, the people, forbidden to complain, as well as forced to suffer, began from thenceforth to despair of parliaments. Whereupon such illegal actions, and especially to get vast sums of money, were put in practice by the king and his new officers, as monopolies, compulsive knighthoods, coat, conduct, and ship-money, the seizing not of one Naboth’s vineyard, but of whole inheritances, under the pretence of forest or crown-lands; corruption and bribery compounded for, with impunities granted for the future, as gave evident proof, that the king never meant, nor could it stand with the reason of his affairs, ever to recall parliaments: having brought by these irregular courses the people’s interest and his own to so direct an opposition, that he might foresee plainly, if nothing but a parliament could save the people, it must necessarily be his undoing.

Till eight or nine years after, proceeding with a high hand in these enormities, and having the second time levied an injurious war against his native country Scotland; and finding all those other shifts of raising money, which bore out his first expedition, now to fail him, not “of his own choice and inclination,” as any child may see, but urged by strong necessities, and the very pangs of state, which his own violent proceedings had brought him to, he calls a parliament; first in Ireland, which only was to give him four subsidies and so to expire; then in England, where his first demand was but twelve subsidies to maintain a Scots war, condemned and abominated by the whole kingdom: promising their grievances should be considered afterwards. Which when the parliament, who judged that war itself one of their main grievances, made no haste to grant, not enduring the delay of his impatient will, or else fearing the conditions of their grant, he breaks off the whole session, and dismisses them and their grievances with scorn and frustration.

Much less therefore did he call this last parliament by his own choice and inclination; but having first tried in vain all undue ways to procure money, his army of their own accord being beaten in the north, the lords petitioning, and the general voice of the people almost hissing him and his ill acted regality off the stage, compelled at length both by his wants and by his fears, upon mere extremity he summoned this last parliament. And how is it possible, that he should willingly incline to parliaments, who never was perceived to call them but for the greedy hope of a whole national bribe, his subsidies; and never loved, never fulfilled, never promoted the true end of parliaments, the redress of grievances; but still put them off, and prolonged them, whether gratified or not gratified; and was indeed the author of all those grievances? To say, therefore, that he called this parliament of his own choice and inclination, argues how little truth we can expect from the sequel of this book, which ventures in the very first period to affront more than one nation with an untruth so remarkable; and presumes a more implicit faith in the people of England, than the pope ever commanded from the Romish laity; or else a natural sottishness fit to be abused and ridden; while in the judgment of wise men, by laying the foundation of his defence on the avouchment of that which is so manifestly untrue, he hath given a worse soil to his own cause, than when his whole forces were at any time overthrown. They therefore, who think such great service done to the king’s affairs in publishing this book, will find themselves in the end mistaken; if sense and right mind, or but any mediocrity of knowledge and remembrance, hath not quite forsaken men.

But to prove his inclination to parliaments, he affirms here, “to have always thought the right way of them most safe for his crown, and best pleasing to his people.” What he thought, we know not, but that he ever took the contrary way, we saw; and from his own actions we felt long ago what he thought of parliaments or of pleasing his people: a surer evidence than what we hear now too late in words.

He alleges, that “the cause of forbearing to convene parliaments was the sparks, which some men’s distempers there studied to kindle.” They were indeed not tempered to his temper; for it neither was the law, nor the rule, by which all other tempers were to be tried; but they were esteemed and chosen for the fittest men, in their several counties, to allay and quench those distempers, which his own inordinate doings had inflamed. And if that were his refusing to convene, till those men had been qualified to his temper, that is to say, his will, we may easily conjecture what hope there was of parliaments, had not fear and his insatiate poverty, in the midst of his excessive wealth, constrained him.

“He hoped by his freedom and their moderation to prevent misunderstandings.” And wherefore not by their freedom and his moderation? But freedom he thought too high a word for them, and moderation too mean a word for himself: this was not the way to prevent misunderstandings. He still “feared passion and prejudice in other men;” not in himself: “and doubted not by the weight of his” own “reason, to counterpoise any faction;” it being so easy for him, and so frequent, to call his obstinacy reason, and other men’s reason faction. We in the mean while must believe that wisdom and all reason came to him by title with his crown; passion, prejudice, and faction came to others by being subjects.

“He was sorry to hear, with what popular heat elections were carried in many places.” Sorry rather, that court-letters and intimations prevailed no more, to divert or to deter the people from their free election of those men, whom they thought best affected to religion and their country’s liberty, both at that time in danger to be lost. And such men they were, as by the kingdom were sent to advise him, not sent to be cavilled at, because elected, or to be entertained by him with an undervalue and misprision of their temper, judgment, or affection. In vain was a parliament thought fittest by the known laws of our nation, to advise and regulate unruly kings, if they, instead of hearkening to advice, should be permitted to turn it off, and refuse it by vilifying and traducing their advisers, or by accusing of a popular heat those that lawfully elected them.

“His own and his children’s interest obliged him to seek, and to preserve the love and welfare of his subjects.” Who doubts it? But the same interest, common to all kings, was never yet available to make them all seek that, which was indeed best for themselves and their posterity. All men by their own and their children’s interest are obliged to honesty and justice: but how little that consideration works in private men, how much less in kings, their deeds declare best.

“He intended to oblige both friends and enemies, and to exceed their desires, did they but pretend to any modest and sober sense;” mistaking the whole business of a parliament; which met not to receive from him obligations, but justice; nor he to expect from them their modesty, but their grave advice, uttered with freedom in the public cause. His talk of modesty in their desires of the common welfare argues him not much to have understood what he had to grant, who misconceived so much the nature of what they had to desire. And for “sober sense,” the expression was too mean, and recoils with as much dishonour upon himself, to be a king where sober sense could possibly be so wanting in a parliament.

“The odium and offences, which some men’s rigour, or remissness in church and state, had contracted upon his government, he resolved to have expiated with better laws and regulations.” And yet the worst of misdemeanors committed by the worst of all his favourites in the height of their dominion, whether acts of rigour or remissness, he hath from time to time continued, owned, and taken upon himself by public declarations, as often as the clergy, or any other of his instruments, felt themselves overburdened with the people’s hatred. And who knows not the superstitious rigour of his Sunday’s chapel, and the licentious remissness of his Sunday’s theatre; accompanied with that reverend statute for Dominical jigs and maypoles, published in his own name, and derived from the example of his father James? Which testifies all that rigour in superstition, all that remissness in religion, to have issued out originally from his own house, and from his own authority. Much rather then may those general miscarriages in state, his proper sphere, be imputed to no other person chiefly than to himself. And which of all those oppressive acts or impositions did he ever disclaim or disavow, till the fatal awe of this parliament hung ominously over him? Yet here he smoothly seeks to wipe off all the envy of his evil government upon his substitutes and under-officers; and promises, though much too late, what wonders he purposed to have done in the reforming of religion: a work wherein all his undertakings heretofore declared him to have had little or no judgment: neither could his breeding, or his course of life, acquaint him with a thing so spiritual. Which may well assure us what kind of reformation we could expect from him; either some politic form of an imposed religion, or else perpetual vexation and persecution to all those that complied not with such a form. The like amendment he promises in state; not a step further “than his reason and conscience told him was fit to be desired;” wishing “he had kept within those bounds, and not suffered his own judgment to have been overborne in some things,” of which things one was the earl of Strafford’s execution. And what signifies all this, but that still his resolution was the same, to set up an arbitrary government of his own, and that all Britain was to be tied and chained to the conscience, judgment, and reason of one man; as if those gifts had been only his peculiar and prerogative, entailed upon him with his fortune to be a king? Whenas doubtless no man so obstinate, or so much a tyrant, but professes to be guided by that which he calls his reason and his judgment, though never so corrupted; and pretends also his conscience. In the mean while, for any parliament or the whole nation to have either reason, judgment, or conscience, by this rule was altogether in vain, if it thwarted the king’s will; which was easy for him to call by any other plausible name. He himself hath many times acknowledged, to have no right over us but by law; and by the same law to govern us: but law in a free nation hath been ever public reason, the enacted reason of a parliament; which he denying to enact, denies to govern us by that which ought to be our law; interposing his own private reason, which to us is no law. And thus we find these fair and specious promises, made upon the experience of many hard sufferings, and his most mortified retirements, being thoroughly sifted to contain nothing in them much different from his former practices, so cross, and so reverse to all his parliaments, and both the nations of this island. What fruits they could in likelihood have produced in his restorement, is obvious to any prudent foresight.

And this is the substance or his first section, till we come to the devout of it, modelled into the form of a private psalter. Which they who so much admire, either for the matter of the manner, may as well admire the archbishop’s late breviary, and many other as good manuals and handmaids of Devotion, the lip-work of every prelatical liturgist, clapped together and quilted out of Scripture phrase, with as much ease, and as little need of Christian diligence or judgment, as belongs to the compiling of any ordinary and saleable piece of English divinity, that the shops value. But he who from such a kind of psalmistry, or any other verbal devotion, without the pledge and earnest of suitable deeds, can be persuaded of a zeal and true righteousness in the person, hath much yet to learn; and knows not that the deepest policy of a tyrant hath been ever to counterfeit religious. And Aristole in his Politics hath mentioned that special craft among twelve other tyrannical sophisms. Neither want we examples: Andronicus Commenus the Byzantine emperor, though a most cruel tyrant, is reported by Nicetas, to have been a constant reader of Saint Paul’s epistles; and by continual study had so incorporated the phrase and style of that transcendant apostle into all his familiar letters, that the imitation seemed to vie with the original. Yet this availed not to deceive the people of that empire, who, notwithstanding his saint’s vizard, tore him to pieces for his tyranny. From stories of this nature both ancient and modern which abound, the poets also, and some English, have been in this point so mindful of decorum, as to put never more pious words in the mouth of any person, than of a tyrant. I shall not instance an abstruse author, wherein the king might be less conversant, but one whom we well know was the closet companion of these his solitudes, William Shakespeare; who introduces the person of Richard the third, speaking in as high a strain of piety and mortification as is uttered in any passage of this book, and sometimes to the same sense and purpose with some words in this place; “I intended,” saith he, “not only to oblige my friends but my enemies.” The like saith Richard, Act II. Scene 1.
“I do not know that Englishman alive,
With whom my soul is any jot at odds,
More than the infant that is born to night;
I thank my God for my humility.”

Other stuff of this sort may be read throughout the whole tragedy, where in the poet used not much license in departing from the truth of history which delivers him a deep dissembler, not of his affections only, but of religion.
In praying therefore, and in the outward work of devotion, this king we see hath not at all exceeded the worst of kings before him. But herein the worst of kings, professing Christianism, have by far exceeded him. They, for aught we know, have still prayed their own, or at least borrowed from fit authors. But this king, not content with that which, although in a thing holy, is no holy theft, to attribute to his own making other men’s whole prayers, hath as it were unhallowed and unchristened the very duty of prayer itself, by borrowing to a Christian use prayers offered to a heathen god. Who would have imagined so little fear in him of the true all-seeing Deity, so little reverence of the Holy Ghost, whose office is to dictate and present our Christian prayers, so little care of truth in his last words, or honour to himself, or to his friends, or sense of his afflictions, or of that sad hour which was upon him, as immediately before his death to pop into the hand of that great bishop who attended him, for a special relic of his saintly exercises, a prayer stolen word for word from the mouth of a heathen woman* praying to a heathen god; and that in no serious book, but the vain amatorious poem of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia; a book in that kind full of worth and wit, but among religious thoughts and duties not worthy to be named; nor to be read at any time without good caution, much less in time of trouble and affliction to be a Christian’s prayer-book? They who are yet incredulous of what I tell them for a truth, that this philippic prayer is no part of the king’s goods, may satisfy their own eyes at leisure, in the 3d book of Sir Philip’s Arcadia, p. 248, comparing Pamela’s prayer with the first prayer of his majesty, delivered to Dr. Juxton immediately before his death, and entitled a Prayer in time of Captivity, printed in all the best editions of his book. And since there be a crew of lurking railers, who in their libels, and their fits of railing up and down, as I hear from others, take it so currishly, that I should dare to tell abroad the secrets of their Ægyptian Apis; to gratify their gall in some measure yet more, which to them will be a kind of alms, (for it is the weekly vomit of their gall which to most of them is the sole means of their feeding,) that they may not starve for me, I shall gorge them once more with this digression somewhat larger than before: nothing troubled or offended at the working upward of their salevenom thereupon, though it happen to asperse me; being, it seems, their best livelihood, and the only use or good digestion that their sick and perishing minds can make of truth charitably told them. However, to the benefit of others much more worth the gaining, I shall proceed in my assertion; that if only but to taste wittingly of meat or drink offered to an idol, be in the doctrine of St. Paul judged a pollution much more must be his sin, who takes a prayer so dedicated into his mouth, and offers it to God. Yet hardly it can be thought upon (though how sad a thing!) without some kind of laughter at the manner and solemn transaction of so gross a cozenage, that he, who had trampled over us so stately and so tragically, should leave the world at last so ridiculously in his exit, as to bequeath among his deifying friends that stood about him such a precious piece of mockery to be published by them, as must needs cover both his and their heads with shame, if they have any left. Certainly they that will may now see at length how much they were deceived in him, and were ever like to be hereafter, who cared not, so near the minute of his death, to deceive his best and dearest friends with the trumpery of such a prayer, not more secretly than shamefully purloined; yet given them as the royal issue of his own proper zeal. And sure it was the hand of God to let them fall, and be taken in such a foolish trap, as hath exposed them to all derision; if for nothing else, to throw contempt and disgrace in the sight of all men, upon this his idolized book, and the whole rosary of his prayers; thereby testifying how little he excepted them from those, who thought no better of the living God than of a buzzard idol, fit to be so served and worshiped in reversion, with the polluted arts and refuse of Arcadias and romances, without being able to discern the affront rather than the worship of such an ethnic prayer. But leaving what might justly be offensive to God, it was a trespass also more than usual against human right, which commands, that every author should have the property of his own work reserved to him after death, as well as living. Many princes have been rigorous in laying taxes on their subjects by the head, but of any king heretofore that made a levy upon their wit, and seized it as his own legitimate, I have not whom beside to instance. True it is, I looked rather to have found him gleaning out of books written purposely to help devotion. And if in likelihood he have borrowed much more out of prayerbooks than out of pastorals, then are these painted feathers, that set him off so gay among the people, to be thought few or none of them his own. But it from his divines he have borrowed nothing, nothing out of all the magazine, and the rheum of their mellifluous prayers and meditations let them who now mourn for him as for Tamuz, them who howl in their pulpits, and by their howling declare themselves right wolves, remember and consider in the midst of their hideous faces, when they do only not cut their flesh from him like those rueful priests whom Elijah mocked; that he who was once their Ahab, now their Josiah, though feigning outwardly to reverence churchmen, yet here hath so extremely set at naught both them and their praying faculty, that being at a loss himself what to pray in captivity, he consulted neither with the liturgy, nor with the directory, but neglecting the huge fardel of all their honeycomb devotions, went directly where he doubted not to find better praying to his mind with Pamela, in the Countess’s Arcadia. What greater argument of disgrace and ignominy could have been thrown with cunning upon the whole clergy, than that the king, among all his priestery, and all those numberless volumes of their theological distillations not meeting with one man or book of that coat that could befriend him with a prayer in captivity, was forced to rob Sir Philip and his captive shepherdess of their heathen orisons to supply in any fashion his miserable indigence, not of bread, but of a single prayer to God? I say therefore not of bread, for that want may befall a good man and yet not make him totally miserable: but he who wants a prayer to beseech God in his necessity, it is inexpressible how poor he is; far poorer within himself than all his enemies can make him. And the unfitness, the indecency of that pitiful supply which he sought, expresses yet further the deepness of his poverty.

Thus much be said in general to his prayers, and in special to that Arcadian prayer used in his captivity; enough to undeceive us what esteem we are to set upon the rest.

For he certainly, whose mind could serve him to seek a Christian prayer out of a pagan legend, and assume it for his own, might gather up the rest God knows from whence; one perhaps out of the French Astræa, another out of the Spanish Diana; Amadis and Palmerin could hardly scape him. Such a person we may be sure had it not in him to make a prayer of his own, or at least would excuse himself the pains and cost of his invention so long as such sweet rhapsodies of heathenism and knight-errantry could yield him prayers. How dishonourable then, and how unworthy of a Christian king, were these ignoble shifts to seem holy, and to get a saintship among the ignorant and wretched people; to draw them by this deception, worse than all his former injuries, to go a whoring after him? And how unhappy, how forsook of grace, and unbeloved of God that people, who resolve to know no more of piety or of goodness, than to account him their chief saint and martyr, whose bankrupt devotion came not honestly by his very prayers; but having sharked them from the mouth of a heathen worshipper, (detestable to teach him prayers!) sold them to those that stood and honoured him next to the Messiah, as his own heavenly compositions in adversity, for hopes no less vain and presumptuous (and death at that time so imminent upon him) than by these goodly relics to be held a saint and martyr in opinion with the cheated people!

And thus far in the whole chapter we have seen and considered, and it not but be clear to all men, how, and for what ends, what concernments and necessities, the late king was no way induced, but every way constrained, to call this last parliament; yet here in his first prayer he trembles not to avouch as in the ears of God, “That he did it with an upright intention to his glory, and his people’s good:” of which dreadful attestation, how sincerely meant, God, to whom it was avowed, can only judge, and he hath judged already, and hath written his impartial sentence in characters legible to all Christendom; and besides hath taught us, that there be some, whom he hath given over to delusion, whose very mind and conscience is defiled; of whom St. Paul to Titus makes mention.

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Genius Annotation

This 1649 book is, quite literally, a tearing down of the late King Charles I’s image. A response to the King’s book Eikon Basilike (Icon of the King), it was commissioned by the Interregnum government to counter the popularity of that new “image of the king.”

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  1. Eikonoklastes (Upon the king’s calling this last parliament)
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