Overview
The scene has all the stuff of Victorian melodrama: Night; a room in the palace of St. James's dimly lit by guttering torches. On trestles in the center an open coffin, and within it, the body of Charles I, head and torso now reunited. Armed guards watch over it. Enter a figure with a wide-brimmed hat well pulled down and cloak drawn round the lower part of the face. For several moments, the visitor, Oliver Cromwell, gazes at the features of the dead king. Then, "Cruel Necessity" he is heard to mutter, before retiring as stealthily as he came.This scene, commemorated in a painting by Paul Delaroche, may well be myth, but the chronicle of the first half of the seventeenth century is, in a very real sense, an account of the conflict between Charles Stuart and Oliver Cromwell and the beliefs that impelled them. King and subject were almost exact contemporaries (nineteen months separated their birth dates). Both were possessed of a deeply divine mission. Both were profoundly religious. Both were immovably stubborn. Their ideals set them upon a collision course which culminated in one of the most dramatic events in history: The execution of a reigning sovereign on Tuesday, 30 January, 1649.
The King and the Gentleman intriguingly parallels the lives of the foreign-born aesthete-prince and the down-to-earth representative of a struggling squirearchy. Its publication marks a double commemoration- the quartercentenary of Cromwell's birth, and the three-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of Charles' death.