One of my favorite history classes at Concordia University, Irvine was the history of early modern England (this will be a surprise to Dr. Daniel van Voorhis given this was before my redemption arc as a changed student). Not only did this class spark an interest in British history, but also put me on the path of back to the Anglican tradition of my birth.

The very term “English history,” dredges up images of dusty, boring history, totally removed from any modern relevance. The truth of the matter could not be more different. From the late 1400s to the early 1700s, England was nearly entirely transformed from a feudal, medieval Roman Catholic kingdom to a modern, Protestant country on the verge of industrialization. To me one of the most interesting stories of this metamorphosis is the English Civil War (itself a series of civil wars across Great Britain and Ireland, with numerous different factions).

The central character of this saga is Charles I of England, also king of Scotland and Ireland. To put it bluntly, Charles was not an able politician. After his old brother Henry died, he was thrust into power as a shy, quiet man with a difficulty for making allies. His father’s reign had left Charles with a multitude of political and religious problems including a royal deficit, religious division, and acrimony between the crown and the English parliament. Any of these issues would’ve been difficult for a gifted statesman, but for most of his reign, Charles was not the man for the hour. Unable to resolve his relationship with the English parliament, he needlessly stumbled into a religious war in Scotland, ultimately sparking the wars that would take his own life.

Again, to modern readers, even to Anglicans, all of this can sound rather dull. Why bother spending a day on one particularly inept king? Despite his lack of political acumen, ultimately Charles was the victor and not his enemies. It’s in his death rather than his life, that Charles has his greatest triumph. By 1648 his armies had been defeated across the British Isles, twice over. An armed coup had purged the parliament, ending negotiations and had put him on an extrajudicial show trial. In a few short years, Charles went from the center of the political life to the weakest subject, someone whose life down to the very last detail was entirely determined by others.

Yet oddly, it was this moment that he shined. Charles, losing his consistent awkwardness and stammer, powerfully and sympathetically argued that it was not he who had destroyed the liberties of England but rather his captors, who had engineered a military junta bent on having its enemies killed:

And you pretend what you will, I stand more for their liberties – for if power without law may make laws, may alter the fundamental laws of the kingdom, I do not know what subject in England can be sure of his life or anything that he calls his own.

Through speeches like this, Charles seemed to win over even the staged crowd in the courtroom. Winston Churchill in his A History of the English-Speaking Peoples noted that in these exchanges, “…misfortunes crowded upon him he increasingly became the physical embodiment of the liberties and traditions of England…In the end he stood against an army which had destroyed all Parliamentary government, and a tyranny more petty than any seen before or since.” The judges ultimately told Charles to pipe down, after all it is not for prisoners to question the authority of their judges. Witheringly, Charles pointed out, “Sir, I am no ordinary prisoner.”

Back here in 2024, the rest of us are ordinary people. Yet sometimes we too can feel like Charles in 1648. We vote, but it can seem like the link between our own volition and acts of the government are tenuous at best. We want to register our annoyance or protest the decision from some faceless corporate or political power, only to find that apparently there is no one in particular to even lodge a grievance with, much less get satisfaction from. Life in the 21st century sometimes feels like it is being tossed to and fro by waves we can barely perceive, much less control. But perhaps these moments of felt powerlessness is when we can best pursue our vocation in life.

To ruin the ending, the institutions Charles stood for had the final victory. The new regime collapsed after less than a dozen years. Owing no small part to how he conducted himself at his trial. the crown was restored, the Church of England was revived and even now there is a new Charles on the throne, one curiously sympathetic to modernity’s critics. Nearly 200 years later, an Anglican priest named John Keble lamented the social and spiritual condition of England. Like Charles’ time and our own, Keble’s world was one filled with decay, decline, and seeming powerlessness. But:

[The Christian] may have to wait long, & very likely pass out of this world before he see any abatement in the triumph of disorder & irreligion. But, if he be consistent, he possesses, to the utmost, the personal consolations of a good Christian : he has that encouragement, which no other cause in the world can impart in the same degree: —he is calmly, soberly, demonstrably, sure, that, sooner or later, his will be the winning side, & that the victory will be complete, universal, eternal. He need not fear.

The Rev’d John Keble, National Apostasy, 1833, preached St. Mary’s, Oxford

Below is a lay homily I preached last year at my old church, All Saints Anglican Cathedral, in Long Beach, CA.

Today in the ACNA calendar is the commemoration of King Charles the Martyr who was executed January 30th 1649. For many it’s an obscure relic of a time that doesn’t really make sense to us modern Americans. We have no kings, and America has no established churches. We might like royal gossip but the idea of a royal saint seems quaint, maybe even irrelevant. Though Charles’ time is very removed from our own, his life and more importantly his death, can still be instruction to us today.  Before I get to the application of today’s saint, I do want to give a brief rundown of King Charles I’s life and times, ending in his martyrdom. 

It’s important to remember that Charles is not the only royal saint on our calendar. There’s Oswald of Northumbria, Margaret of Scotland and Alfred the Great. But most of these royal saints are honored for how they lived. Charles is one of the few who we primarily honor for how he died.

Charles was the second Stuart king of England and also ruled Scotland and Ireland. The situation in each of the kingdoms was complicated. Religiously, it was very diverse. Their native Scotland was officially Protestant with a strong Presbyterian majority but with a significant minority of those who wanted a church more like the Church of England, with bishops and liturgy. In Ireland, the church was officially Protestant along Anglican lines but the vast majority of the population were either Roman Catholic or Presbyterians in the north. In England, most were Protestants but were divided whether the Church of England was fine as it was – a middle way between the Lutheran and Calvinist reformations while retaining its connection to the ancient and medieval church in our ministry and liturgy – or whether it needed to be changed in a more radical direction.

One consistent source of tension was Charles’ religious policy. It’s hard to imagine for us today, but no one really imagined our modern world of religious liberty. For most rulers, Protestant or Catholic, they felt that their obligations under Romans 13 required them to be God’s agent to defend good and punish evil. For Charles this meant restoring unity among Christians and the Church of England’s apostolic and sacramental nature. With his Archbishop William Laud, whose martyrdom is earlier last month on January 10th, the beauty of churches were restored, the real spiritual presence of Jesus in Holy Communion was re-emphasized and the power of the government was used to enforce this policy. This earned Charles accusations of “popery.” Peter Lake, a historian noted that this allegation was either “a species of irrationality or a form of paranoia,” as Charles firmly believed in in the reformed Articles of Religion (which we can find in prayerbook).

All these tensions blew up by the late 1630s, first in Scotland over Charles’ attempt to institute bishops and liturgy in the Church of Scotland, then in England and Ireland in the 1640s. By 1646, the war had gone against Charles with major defeats. From there the king’s routine went back and forth between being a prisoner – sometimes of the Scots, sometimes of the English parliament – and negotiating on the terms of peace. Since 1641 parliament’s demand was for the abolition of bishops and liturgy, something Charles refused. By 1648, Charles had made many concessions in a treaty, but he refused to “set God’s house out of order,” by allowing them to abolish the apostolic nature of the Church. 

Charles told parliament that “I cannot give my consent…as I am a Christian …I am satisfied in the judgment that this order was placed in the Church by the Apostles themselves, and ever since their time has continued in all Christian Churches throughout the world…” In late 1648 there was a military coup where the army stormed the capitol, purging the parliament from all members who favored the compromise treaty. This group instead decided they would try Charles and, in the words of Cromwell, “cut his head off with his crown on it.” The trial was boycotted by the appointed judges but ended with its expected sentence, Charles would be put to death on January 30th. In the morning Charles told Bishop Juxon, “I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown.” For 12 years the Church of England was functionally abolished, the bishops were removed and the Book of Common Prayer was banned, but by 1660, the government collapsed and Charles’ son restored both the crown and the Church of England. 

Though the causes for the start of the civil wars were many, the ultimate cause of Charles’ execution is singular. Dr. Mandell Creighton, historian and Bishop of London put it best when he wrote,

Had Charles been willing to abandon the Church and give up episcopacy, he might have saved his throne and his life. But on this point Charles stood firm: for this he died, and by dying saved it for the future.

Though this story is nearly 400 years ago, there are three lessons for us today. Charles’ example teaches us that saints are complicated Christians, to live our vocation as we find it, and how to stand for the truth.

Charles was a complicated man. Honest Christians had strong views on the issues of his day and Charles could often be a stubborn and intense man. Though a faithful husband and Christian, Charles was admitted to be an imperfect, inflexible king and sometimes a difficult, frustrating friend. Yet Charles’ life shows us that imperfection does not have to be an obstacle to sainthood. When it came to the finish line, Charles ended faithfully. We probably won’t end up on the calendar of saints but we all have the choice to let our sins end our race or to finish it faithfully. 

Charles is also a model of vocation. None of us here are likely to be a monarch any day soon but each of us are given our own vocation and sphere of authority even if it’s just over ourselves. Like Charles we will give an answer to God for how we stewarded our time on earth. In the end, he used his vocation as a king who had sworn to defend the Church. It would’ve been easy to let it be deformed and broken rather than face beheading. While our daily vocations don’t face these stakes they are given to us by God anyways to be as faithful as we can.

Lastly, Charles gives us a model of how to stand for the truth, regardless of the cost. It may seem odd to us, but in Charles’ day people had strongly held views on things like church government, liturgy and even vestments. For them these represented higher stakes issues of how to be faithful to God and His word. In the Book of Common Prayer it says it is “ evident unto all, diligently reading Holy Scripture…that from the Apostles’ time there have been these Orders of Ministers in Christ’s Church,—Bishops, Priests, and Deacons.” Similarly we are given not just His word but, as Paul the Apostle tells us, His own body and blood in the Lord’s Supper

For us, Charles deserves honor for sacrificing himself rather than allow an armed conspiracy to abolish the way God had instituted His church and one of the ways He manifests His grace to us. Without it, it is very likely that the Anglican tradition would’ve died early on, long before it had a chance to spread to the rest of the world. For us today as Anglicans and Christians in one sense, our stakes are lower. In southern California it is not very likely any of us will go on trial for our faith. But in another sense the stakes are much higher. In an increasingly unbelieving age the controversy is not over how God wants His church set up or how He is present in communion but rather whether God’s Word can be trusted on issues of life and sin, or whether God exists at all. These issues aren’t just splitting Anglicanism apart at the seams but rather the whole Church and in fact the whole world. In another time of controversy, Lord Ashley-Cooper, a famous evangelical Anglican wrote to a well known Anglo-Catholic friend of his,

“We will fight about these another day. In this day we must contend earnestly for the faith once delivered and it must be done together. We have to struggle, not for apostolic succession but for the very atonement itself, for the sole hope of the fallen and the sacrifice of the Cross. What say you?”

We know what Charles would say, what do we say?