When faced with these facts, few historians would deny the rightness of Belloc’s contention. But it remains true that these causes, all of which moved to one effect, are not actually operative within the minds of most academic historians when they set down the story. What use would an Hegelian have for that splendid ride that headed off the flight of the King? His theory cannot admit that wild contingency, full of the drama of human existence, to have altered the course of history. He is bound by his own dialectic. Neither the free will of Drouet, nor the strength of the man’s horse, nor the quality of his skill, can genuinely enter Hegelian history; nor can they enter the systems of Spengler and those contemporary historians influenced by him, because _systems_ of constructs cannot admit of the drama of historical contingency. What modern vulgarian, conditioned by our mechanical theories about sex, can _really_ understand Marie Antoinette—so Catholic at the end, and always so much the woman! Theories of history can take these contingencies and admit them as _facts_, but they can not use them in their over-all explanations. These historians are not humanists, but are men who would like to be scientists in a realm that escapes the purely scientific. For an insight into Belloc’s humanist penetration, one could do little better than to read him on King Charles I of England. For centuries Charles has been a puzzle to students of history: carrying with him all the glamour of the Stuarts, he was certainly the noblest of that ill-omened house (if one except James Francis Edward), and yet why did he let Strafford go to his death? This moral failure of the King is contradicted by his heroism through the whole civil war, from the raising of the royal standard at Nottingham to his execution. Charles simply does not look like a well-intentioned weakling: we cannot think of him as a coward at one instant and a hero at the next; there is a constancy about his whole life, and how can this constancy be understood in the light of the death of Strafford? Explained it must be, if the English Civil War is to make sense. Belloc, uniting the Newmanian technique of converging probabilities with the insight of a humanist, draws this sketch of the man’s character: I may compare the effects of his inward strength to the effects produced by one kind of resistance against an impact.