The Execution of Charles I appears as a historical example in a political reflection on popular power: the people may raise a monarch to greatness, then overthrow him when their allegiance reverses. The passage places the English events of 1649 beside the French upheaval of 1793, presenting the king’s fall as the violent consequence of a transformation in the people themselves.

The People as Mount and Lion

The reflection imagines royalty as an equestrian statue: the people are the horse beneath the king. At first, that horse is an ass, bearing its rider; gradually it becomes a lion and throws him. The English turning point of 1642 is associated with the people casting off the king, while 1649 marks the more extreme image of the lion devouring him. The Execution of Charles I is thus evoked not through a description of the execution itself, but through the metaphor of popular force consuming the sovereign.

Historical and Political Meaning

The passage pairs 1649 in England with 1793 in France, making the English event part of a recurring pattern rather than an isolated episode. Its central irony is that royal authority depends on the people who sustain it: they confer the crown’s apparent grandeur, yet can withdraw their support and become the power that destroys it. The reflection then contrasts that revolutionary capacity with the renewed royal idolatry of Queen Anne’s England, where, in the narrator’s account, the people had returned to bearing the pack-saddle of allegiance.