Eikon Basilike

Eikon Basilike, a work whose full title is Εικων Βασιλική: The Portraiture of His Sacred Majesty in his Solitudes and Sufferings. It was published immediately after the execution of Charles I. (1649), and within a twelvemonth ran through fifty editions in various languages. Written in the first person, it professes to be Charles's own composition, and if it be a forgery, it is certainly one of the cleverest of the kind. It is no blind apology, for, to take but a single example, it does not vindicate the death of Strafford: 'I,' says its author, 'am so far from excusing or denying that compliance on my part (for plenary consent it was not) to his destruction, whom in my judgment I thought not, by any clear law, guilty of death, that I never have any touch of conscience with greater regret.' Though Milton and others did at the time insinuate doubts whether the work was not by some secret coadjutor, doctor or prelate, yet generally it was accepted as the king's, until, in a fifteen months' correspondence (1660-62) with Clarendon and the Earl of Bristol, Dr John Gauden laid claim to the sole authorship: 'This book and figure [the frontispiece] was wholly and only my invention, making, and design, in order to vindicate the King's wisdom, honour, and piety.' Born at Mayland, Essex, in 1605, that trimming churchman was educated at Bury St Edmunds and St John's College, Cambridge; in 1640 became vicar of Chippenham in Cambridgeshire, and in 1641 was appointed by the parliament dean of Bocking in Essex, in 1659 master of the Temple. In November 1660, the month before he is first known to have advanced his claim, he was raised to the bishopric of Exeter, whence, in 1662, he was translated to Worcester. He died two months later, on 20th September 1662, and was buried in Worcester Cathedral, where his wife erected a statue of him, holding a copy of the Eikon. Gauden professed to have begun the work in or about the year 1647, and to have submitted a MS. copy of it to the king 'in the Isle of Wight, by the favour of the late Marquis of Hertford, which was delivered to the king by the now Bishop of Winchester.' On the other hand, those who maintain that the work was by Charles, assert that he had written the first six of its twenty-eight chapters before the battle of Naseby (1645). The question, one of much complexity, is not yet settled either way; to discuss it thoroughly is here impossible. Enough, that historians generally, from Lingard to Green, have pronounced against Charles; whilst some of those who have sifted his claims are in his favour, as Dr C. Wordsworth, in Who wrote Iēōn Basilikē? (1824-28), and E. J. L. Scott, in his edition of the work (1880). But see W. B. Odgers in the Modern Review (1880), Doble in the Academy (1883), and E. Almack's Bibliography of the King's Book (1896).