The only institution ever devised by men for mastering the Money Power in the State is monarchy.” Belloc? Not quite. But the statement is one with which the older Belloc was in substantial agreement. The comment belongs to Napoleon, and in 1932, the year before Belloc wrote Charles I, his book of the same name was published. It is therefore perhaps not surprising that Belloc’s study of Charles I is an amplification of this idea. For his book on the first Charles is, amongst other things, a study of the attempt by the monarchy in England to oppose the Money Power: it was the failure of this attempt which led to the temporary extinction and permanent emasculation of the British Crown. This was a disaster from which not even the energies of Charles II and James II could rescue it; and the principal factor in this collapse was the supremacy of the Rich and the accompanying privatisation of power.

In 1933, Belloc, a man of 63, was still in full flood as an author. In 1927, an American publisher asked him to write a book on Cardinal Richelieu; Belloc consented on the condition that he could first write a book on James II, a monarch whose character and fate had always held a fascination for him. James the Second was famously written over ten days in the Saharan foothills, and published in 1928. Belloc had a fascination with Monarchy – and a fascination with the challenges it encountered following the break-up of Christendom. It seemed to him inevitable that once the unity in Faith of the nations of Europe had broken down, then within these nations unity would again be threatened.

Robert Speaight, in his biography of Belloc, argues that his immersion in history during the mid-1920s and throughout the 1930s converted him from Republicanism to Monarchy. This is an unfortunate simplification, not just of Belloc’s ideas but of the supposed contradictions between those two concepts. No doubt Belloc imbibed deeply of republicanism as a young man. It was perhaps inevitable, given both his French nationality – he was not naturalized as British until 1902 – and the enormous influence on him of his time with the French artillery, that he recognise the comparative decrepitude of the French monarchy. And he did carry his admiration of Danton to the grave with him.

On the other hand, Belloc emerged much wiser from the wilderness of his parliamentary years, into which his youthful political idealism had led him. That parliamentary experience, fermented under the influences of Cecil Chesterton and Father Vincent McNabb, resulted in some of his greatest works: The Servile State, The Party System, and The House of Commons and Monarchy. And even as a youthful republican he had venerated the memory of Napoleon, a memory undamaged by that great general’s imperial pretension.

It is therefore difficult to read any of Belloc’s later works that touch upon the struggle between Monarchy and Parliament and not smell the sulphurous anger of the author at some point. Belloc knew what Parliament was and he loathed it. He knew that for a monarchy to be a good government it required that one man be good; he knew that for a democracy to be a good government it required a massive majority of parliamentarians to be good; and he knew that electioneering and the stranglehold of the political parties made this a practical impossibility.

Before discussing Belloc’s Charles I in some detail, it may be sensible to touch upon his “mixed” reputation as an historian. Belloc certainly had the intellectual apparatus to write what even moderns would currently accept as competent and accurate history.