Salient: An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria College, Wellington, N.Z. Vol. 12, No. 2, March 16th, 1949.

A Martyr

A Martyr

But to claim Charles Stuart as a noble martvr for his people is quite ridiculous. Not only was he too, interested entirely in personal aggrandisement, but he was willing to stoop to any low subterfuge to further this end. No history of the period—except the sentimentality of his catamite Clarendon, or the anonymous nonsense of the Eikon Basilike—can conceal this. His character was petty and mean. Certainly, like his ecclesiastical flunkeys Andrews and Laud, he posed as the great humanitarian, defender of the people against the greedy Puritans, but unfortunately, the vice of greed was the epitome of social progress in the seventeenth century. It was only when linked with a backward-looking absolutism, together with such superstitious frills as "divine right," that greed was a vice at all. The demands of social progress prohibit absolute standards.

And certainly the Puritan cause could boast even greater humanitarians than Charles could ever pretend to be What about Hartlib. Winstanley, Lilburne, or the academic Milton?

If ever there was a university graduate who absolutely despised academic aloofness from the passionate currents of his times, it was Milton. Straight from the loins of that rising class "solely occupied in improving their lands or their commercial capital." his attitude to the outbreak of 1640 was predetermined. But at first he remained passive. "I calmly awaited the issue of the contest." he wrote, "which I trusted to the wise conduct of Providence and the courage of the people."

This was always his firm belief—"vox populi. vox Dei." He believed that God had "put the sword into the people's hand," and that since the Parliamentary cause had His benediction, its victory was inevitable. But he never lost sight of the fact that whether or not God's war was won, depended ultimately not on God, but on the people into whose hands the sword was put.