The Stuarts and the Shah

You wouldn't think at first glance that the Feast of King Charles the Martyr, executed 377 years ago today in London, would have much to do with current events in Iran.

But recently I've been reading both my old friend Gareth Russell's excellent new biography of King James I (1566-1625), which I finished last night and which at the end goes briefly into some of the related challenges and tragedies faced by his son and successor Charles I, and for the second time Andrew Scott Cooper's "The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran." And for all the vast differences between 17th-century Britain and 20th-century Iran, I was struck by at least one parallel.

Reading both books, I found myself often feeling a burning resentment against the kind of literally puritanical religiosity that undermined (and eventually toppled) both monarchies, whether Scottish Presbyterianism in James's early reign, English Puritanism in his later reign and his son's, or militant Shia Islam in the Shah's. In all three cases, a monarch who was genuinely personally religious himself (admittedly, Charles perhaps more so than his father) was nevertheless stridently and relentlessly opposed and criticised by dour clerics who found the Monarchy to be insufficiently "godly." (The Kirk didn't want James's wife Queen Anne to have a coronation, both because elements of the ceremony were thought "papist" and because they feared, correctly, that there might be drinking and dancing.)

An even more curious parallel is that in both countries, an unholy alliance was formed between this kind of strict religious zeal (which today we might call "Right-wing") and the more secular "democratic" kind of opposition (which might be called "Left-wing") to the monarch for being (allegedly) too authoritarian. Of course, in both cases, when the religious fanatics actually took power, they imposed a regime that was far more oppressive than the Monarchy had ever been, though fortunately the English version lasted only 11 years; Iran has now endured 47, almost my entire life.

Will Iran ever get its May 1660? One can live in hope.