So can we remove him from office?

[u/Material-Garbage7074]

[u/Material-Garbage7074]

Not totally, but it is also true that they were the first to take such a revolutionary step

[u/userrr3 → u/Material-Garbage7074]

Charles I was absolutely not the first regicide. Not even in England.

[u/Material-Garbage7074 → u/userrr3]

But they were the first to try and execute him, right? I believe it is something profoundly different from a conspiracy hatched in the shadows

[u/userrr3 → u/Material-Garbage7074]

If you merely open the link and search the page for "executed" you can find lines like this one:

193 Didius Julianus of Rome executed on orders by the senate

[u/Material-Garbage7074 → u/userrr3]

The point is, I don't think it's the same thing, because the English Puritans executed the institution at that time too. This aspect is linked to the particular nature of this regicide.

Kantorowicz argued that the king was both a natural body and a political body. The origin of this concept can be traced back to the idea of ​​the mystical body of the Church, a term coined by Paul of Tarsus and referring to the Christian community as composed of all the faithful, present, past and future. Theologians distinguished between the corpus verum of Christ, or the host, and the corpus mysticum, or the Church.

Starting from Thomas Aquinas, we began to talk about the corpus Ecclesiae mysticum and the Church became an autonomous entity on a mystical level. Subsequently, the fight for the investiture led some imperial writers to invoke a corpus reipublicae (a term with which the State was generically indicated) as opposed to the corpus ecclesiae.

In the 13th century, the term corpus reipublicae mysticum was used to indicate the mystical body of the state. In this sense, the continuity of the state was guaranteed by the corpus mysticum of the kingdom, which, like the corpus mysticum of the Church, never dies.

However, according to this perspective, the king was only one of the elements of the body politic (although he was considered the most important) and this did not lead directly to the two-body theory of the king as a secular equivalent of the two bodies of Christ.

In fact, the analogy fails if one considers one particular aspect, namely that the head of the mystical body of the Church, Christ, was eternal, while the king was merely an ordinary mortal.

It was easy to distinguish the individual king from the state, but it would not have been possible to say the same of the dynasty, the crown or the royal dignity.

Another aspect that assimilated the royal dignity to that of Christ was the sacredness of kings, symbolized by the anointing with sacred oil (the term Christ derives from the Greek χριστός, in turn a translation of the Hebrew māshīah, and both terms have the meaning of anointed), which could transform the nature of those who received it, making them a person by nature and a person by grace.

We must also remember that - as written by Marc Bloch - the French and English monarchs had the privilege of Chrism, blessed oil mixed with balm which, originally, was reserved only for bishops (the remaining kings of the states of Europe had to be satisfied with the consecrated oil), a rite which had played a role in the belief according to which the alleged thaumaturgical power of the sovereign's miraculous touch could be traced back to it and that it came - ultimately - from God himself.

In his essay Regicide and Revolution, Michael Walzer hypothesizes that the English revolutions (and French, but this already had a precedent) did not only aim at the elimination of the mortal body of the king, but also of his political body, since it would have been possible to proclaim the end of the monarchy only if the king, understood not only as a natural body, but also and above all as a political body, had been killed.

The death of the natural body alone would not have affected the people's trust in the king, which could have been easily transferred from the deceased to the living: the revolution also and above all intended to eliminate the idea of ​​political incarnation, as demonstrated by Cromwell's famous expression We shall cut off his head with a crown on it (and also Cet homme doit régner ou mourir by Saint-Just).

This is why a public regicide is radically different from a plotted regicide. The revolutionaries didn't behead just one man or just one king: they beheaded an entire belief system.

[u/userrr3 → u/Material-Garbage7074]

Yeah I'm not reading all that. Shout out to you for writing it though (or shame for asking a chat bot to do so, can't tell, ain't reading it). Fact of the matter is the French killed their King and now live in a republic and the English killed a King and still live in a monarchy with one chamber of their parliament consisting of unelected nobles selected by the monarch.