Robbing His Captive Shepherdess: Princess Elizabeth, John Milton, and the Memory of Charles I in the Eikon Basilike and Eikonoklastes

The contentious inclusion of an imprisoned princess's speech from Sir Philip Sidney's The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (1593) in the Eikon Basilike (1649) has long overshadowed the most significant contribution of a woman's voice to the "King's book." In three poignant passages of the Eikon Basilike, the purported book of Charles I's final prayers and meditations before his execution, Princess Elizabeth, Charles I's daughter, authorizes the account of her martyred father's final day. The critical neglect of Elizabeth's role in memorializing the executed king might at first seem surprising given that during Charles's life the young princess was beloved and respected by Royalists and Parliamentarians alike. After the regicide, however, Elizabeth's life and death as a Stuart princess registered varied reactions that fell along party lines. For Royalists, she became an emblem of the suffering Stuart monarchy; accordingly, they emphasized her misfortune in being held captive in a cold, remote castle by tyrants and refused permission to be reunited with her sister. They mourned Elizabeth's death of illness at Carisbrooke Castle on 8 September 1650 as a renewal of their grief for Charles. For Parliamentarians, by contrast, respecting her status as the sovereign's child would appear inconsistent with their decision to abolish the English monarchy on 7 February 1649.¹ This political motivation also provides insight into John Milton's significant but previously overlooked suppression of the Lady Elizabeth passages of the Eikon in his own commissioned response in Eikonoklastes (1649).² In the 1650s, in other words, Elizabeth's writing had a polarizing effect: Royalists used it as propaganda, whereas Milton and the Parliamentarians sought to silence her authorial voice to combat this Royalist strategy.

In the Eikon Basilike, a supplementary section to the text called "A Perfect Copy of Prayers Used by His Majestie in the Time of His Sufferings Delivered to Dr. Juxon Bishop of London" contains the three Lady Elizabeth passages and a paraphrase of Pamela's prayer, "A Prayer in Time of Captivitie," from Sidney's Arcadia. The first of several popular editions containing the supplementary section was printed by William Dugard on 15 March 1649.³ The first passage concerning Elizabeth, "A True Relation of the King[']s Speech to the Lady Elisabeth, and the Duke of Glo[u]cester, the Day before his Death," contains an observation of the royal family recorded by an anonymous observer.⁴ However, the next two passages, "Another Relation from the Lady Elisabeth[']s Own Hand" and "Another Relation from the Lady Elisabeth," are written from the princess's first-person perspective of "the last time I had the happiness to see [Charles I]" (281). In these three excerpts, the anonymous observer and Elizabeth herself firmly establish the young girl's authority as a witness to her father's grace under persecution.

Although it may seem counterintuitive to view the words of a child as privileged speech, Elizabeth's age and social status actually made her uniquely equipped to move an audience sympathetic to the plight of the Stuarts and of the Episcopacy that they supported. As Michael Mascuch notes in his study of the young, seventeenth-century prophet Sarah Wight, "[T]he 'child' symbolizes not so much a body's physical immaturity as an intellectual disposition toward religious knowledge and authority."⁵ In the case of Elizabeth, her defense of Charles's martyrdom would bear a sincerity that accounts by Doctor Juxon or Charles's attendants might not; her words are not those of a politically motivated supporter or, from a Parliamentarian perspective, a sycophant, but rather those of a daughter determined to serve the memory of her father.

What is at stake in the polemic between Eikon Basilike and Eikonoklastes is the collective memory and popular perception of Charles I and the English monarchy. Is the Eikon, as his supporters would contend, a monument to Charles and a record of his martyrdom? Or is it, as Milton claims, "madness to mistake this Book for a monument...