January 30 is observed in England and elsewhere in the English-speaking world as the martyrdom of King Charles I, monarch and saint. On this day, white roses are laid at the foot of the king's statue in London.

To modern eyes, Charles appears an unlikely candidate for sainthood. Haughty, headstrong and short-sighted, he held stubbornly to the divine right of kings when a prudent monarch would have accommodated himself to the demands of the dawning modern age.

Charles was not prudent. Whatever qualities may be ascribed to a king who once tried to cram an Anglican prayer book down the throats of his fiercely Presbyterian Scottish subjects, prudence is definitely not one of them.

Yet, when he was humbled by the civil war that he might have avoided had he been willing to compromise, when he was reduced to pitiful status of a prisoner on trial for his life, Charles showed that he possessed at least one royal virtue: courage.

His Puritan conquerors wanted to make sweeping changes in the English constitution and the English church. They knew it would be easier for them to make these changes if they could claim to be acting under the king's authority. Had Charles been a coward, intent only on saving his own skin, they would have had their way. But they misjudged their man. They could kill him if they dared, but he would not consent to be their rubber stamp.

And so, as Winston Churchill wrote, "A strange destiny had engulfed this King of England. None had resisted with more untimely stubbornness the movement of his age. He had been in his heyday the convinced opponent of all we now call our Parliamentary liberties. Yet as misfortunes crowded upon him he increasingly became the physical embodiment of the liberties and traditions of England."

Nowhere was this "strange destiny" more evident than at the king's trial. Dragged before a kangaroo court that had no legitimacy under law or custom, he refused to dignify the proceedings by making an answer to the charges against him.

"I am your King," he declared, speaking for once without the stammer that had dogged him all his life. "I have a trust committed to me by God, by old and lawful descent. I will not betray that trust to answer to a new unlawful authority."

And again: "It is not my case alone, it is the freedom and liberty of the people of England. And, do you pretend what you will, I must justly stand for their liberties. For if power, without law, may make law, may alter the fundamental laws of the kingdom -- I do not know what subject he is in England can be sure of his life, or anything he can call his own."

When he persisted in his refusal to acknowledge the authority of the court, he was forcibly removed from the chamber. He was not even permitted to speak when he was sentenced to death. But, as he was removed for the second time, he managed to cry out: "I am not suffered to speak ... Expect what justice others may have."

Prophetic words. Charles was succeeded by a military dictatorship under Oliver Cromwell.

Charles I died with a nobility that recalled Shakespeare's line, "Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it."

But Churchill wrote him a better epitaph: "He cannot be claimed as the defender of English liberties, nor wholly of the English Church, but none the less he died for them, and by his death preserved them not only to his son and heir, but to our own day."