Death of Divinity

A COFFIN FOR KING CHARLES by C. V. Wedgewood. 307 pages. Macm///an. $5.95.

Since William the Conqueror's day, murder most foul has taken the lives of some half-dozen English kings. But priest and poet always agreed that heaven trembled at such impious acts, for even the most pitiless tyrant ruled by divine right. Oliver Cromwell changed all that. He had King Charles I slain in broad daylight, and explained that God willed it so; he made regicide and revolution fashionable.

Men of Stone. Other leaders in history have felt that they were doing God's bidding, but none with the sublime certitude of Cromwell. To the brilliant, humorless Puritan who routed the Royalist armies in England's civil war and ruled the nation for a decade until his death in 1658, "providence and necessity" seemed synonymous. In this finely etched account of the winter of 1648-49, the height of Cromwell's career, British Historian C. V. Wedgewood shows how relentlessly he invoked both, to strip away the "divinity that doth hedge a king."

Though beaten on the battlefield, friendless and imprisoned, King Charles stubbornly insisted on his divine right to rule and refused to acknowledge Parliament's supremacy. Cromwell and his Republican supporters were determined that the King should die after an elaborately rigged state trial. After ramming the indictment through Parliament, Cromwell handpicked 59 judges to try the King, and sat among them himself. The prosecutor hectored the royal prisoner, who was not even permitted to defend himself. Roundheads in the gallery shouted: "Execution! Execution!" One of the judges finally leaped to his feet, crying: "Have we hearts of stone? Are we men?" Cromwell shut him up: "What ails thee? Art thou mad?"

Groan of Ages. Of Charles, as of Shakespeare's Duncan, it was said that nothing in his life so much became him as his leaving of it. Calmly mounting the scaffold outside his own banquet hall at Westminster, the King said, more in sadness than in reproach: "I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible Crown, where no disturbance can be." When Charles's head was cut off, a witness recalls, "such a groan went up from the crowd as I never heard before, and I desire I may never hear again."

As soon as he was rid of the King, Cromwell set up an even more harshly authoritarian regime, which was duly overthrown in the royal Restoration of 1660 when Charles II ascended the throne. Miss Wedgewood, who has lucidly portrayed the era in two previous books, The King's War and The King's Peace, avoids taking sides in this final volume on Charles. But, as she suggests, many another despot in succeeding wars and revolutions was to cite Cromwell's "blow for liberty" as a precedent for murder. Few have dared to claim God's sanction as well.

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