Young John Locke

On January 30, 1649, “the fearsome Doctor Busby” kept his students at the Westminster School indoors, but Peter Laslett thinks it likely that John Locke and his classmates could still hear the moan of the awe-struck crowd at that fateful moment when the axe fell on the neck of Charles Stuart, king of England. (The scaffold had been erected just yards away from the school.) We cannot know what impact this event made on the political imagination of young Locke, although we know that “Busby made all the students pray for Charles’ soul.” But the judicial execution of Charles I was undoubtedly traumatic in precisely Machiavellian ways: it must have both amazed and stupefied the crowd that had gathered at Whitehall in front of the Banqueting House and who were held back from the scaffold by ranks of soldiers. More than a century later, Burke could still not shake off its emotional effects.

Locke made plain that he had been marked by the events of the civil war and its aftermath. “As for myself,” Locke wrote in 1660, “I no sooner perceived myself in the world but found myself in a storm, which hath lasted almost hitherto.”