Charles I

Charles I (1600–49), king of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1625–49). Charles was the second son of James VI and Anne of Denmark. Born in Scotland, he moved to England in 1604 after his father ascended the English throne. He developed into a somewhat reserved, scholarly boy, who hero-worshipped his charismatic elder brother Prince Henry. Only after Henry was struck down by typhoid in 1612 did Charles, as heir apparent, move centre stage. In 1621 he was a regular attender at the House of Lords as Parliament considered whether England should intervene on the protestant side in the Thirty Years War. Public opinion favoured this, but James, as a leading protestant ruler, hoped to heal religious divisions by concluding a marriage between Charles and the Infanta Maria, sister of ‘the most catholic king’ of Spain.

Charles, now 22 and eager to be married, persuaded his father to let him make an incognito romantic journey to Spain. He set off in February 1623, accompanied by the royal favourite, Buckingham, who had become a surrogate brother to him. Two weeks of hard riding through France brought them to Madrid, where Charles, after the Spaniards had recovered from the shock of his arrival, received a royal welcome. However, custom forbade him unchaperoned access to the infanta, and when he demonstrated his love by leaping over a garden wall to greet her, she ran away. Frustration, and the growing realization that the infanta was merely a pawn in a power game to keep James from intervening in the war, opened the eyes of Charles and Buckingham to the fact that the expansion of Spanish power threatened England. When they returned home in September, without the infanta, they began constructing an anti-Spanish coalition. The adhesion of France was essential, since protestant states by themselves could never match Spanish power, and Buckingham therefore arranged a marriage between Charles and Louis XIII's sister Henrietta Maria.

James remained committed to peace, but was persuaded to call Parliament in 1624. Charles and Buckingham co-operated closely with its leading members in preparing the ground for war, but they only became free to act in March 1625, when the death of James brought Charles to the throne. The new king promptly summoned Parliament, assuming that it would complete what its predecessor had begun, but suspicion of Buckingham, who was associated with corruption and the Hispanophile attitude of James, led the Commons to make only a token grant of money. Charles could not comprehend this suspicion, and took attacks on the favourite personally. When the 1626 Parliament impeached Buckingham, following the failure of an expedition to attack Cadiz, Charles dissolved it. He then levied a forced loan to pay for another expedition, this time in support of the French protestants. When this also ended in defeat a further clash with Parliament seemed inevitable. But Charles's acceptance of the petition of right in 1628 defused the situation, and Buckingham, the bone of contention, was removed by an assassin's hand in August of that year.

When Parliament reassembled in 1629 Charles expected harmony, but the religious issue came to the fore. Charles was a high churchman and promoted Arminians, but members of Parliament were predominantly low church, equating Arminianism with ‘popery’, which they abhorred. The Commons drew up a resolution against Arminianism, and when Charles tried to prevent its discussion by dissolving Parliament, Eliot and his associates held the Speaker down in his chair so that debate could continue. Charles responded to this outrage by imprisoning the offending members and dispensing with Parliament altogether. His personal rule was far from an ‘Eleven Years Tyranny’, but Charles's continued patronage of the Arminians—in particular Archbishop Laud—outraged public opinion. So also did his resort to non-parliamentary taxation. Nevertheless, the personal rule was not threatened until the débâcle of the Bishops' wars, which left Charles with no choice but to summon Parliament. So weak was his position by late 1640 that he had to accept Acts severely curtailing his power. He also had to permit the impeachment and subsequent execution of Laud and his chief minister, Strafford. However, by deciding to abandon the Arminians he attracted support from traditional Anglicans, and conservative opinion began rallying round him when Parliament broke with convention by trying to deprive him of control over the army.

Charles had transformed himself into the guardian of the constitution, but in January 1642 he unwisely yielded to pressure from his wife and others who advocated tough measures. After impeaching his principal opponents of treason, he went down to the House of Commons, accompanied by an armed guard, entered the chamber, and demanded their arrest. But, as Charles quickly noted, ‘the birds are flown’. His attempted coup had failed and he decided to leave the capital and appeal for support to the country. In August 1642 he raised the royal standard at Nottingham in the midlands, and shortly afterwards established his headquarters at Oxford. During the civil war that ensued, Charles showed qualities of endurance and decisiveness that had hitherto lain dormant. And although he left strategy in the hands of his nephew Prince Rupert, he proved a successful commander in the field. But royalist resources were sufficient only for a short war, and Parliament had the longer purse. After his defeat at Naseby in June 1645 Charles had no hope of winning, and in May 1646 gave himself up. Yet even in defeat he was still a key figure, for everyone assumed that no blueprint for a post-war constitution could be implemented without his participation. The parliamentary army, which had emerged as a radical political force in its own right, was so concerned that in June 1647 it sent a troop of musketeers to remove the king from parliamentary guardianship and bring him closer to London. He was held captive in his own palace of Hampton Court until November, when fear for his personal safety drove him to escape and seek refuge in Carisbrooke castle on the Isle of Wight.

The political situation was now chaotic, with Parliament, the army, and the Scots all putting proposals to Charles. Confronted by this evidence of disunity among his enemies, Charles took the understandable but risky course of playing them off against each other. All over the country sentiment was flowing, if not in favour of the king, then against those who had overthrown him, and the spring of 1648 saw a series of violent outbreaks called the second civil war. These convinced the army, which ruthlessly suppressed them, that Charles was not to be trusted and that a permanent peace settlement depended on removing him. In December 1648 they ‘purged’ Parliament of its conservative members, leaving the remaining ‘rump’ free to set up a high court to try the king. Charles refused to plead, insisting that he was accountable only to God, but although his dignity and fortitude impressed all those present, the outcome was a foregone conclusion. Charles was sentenced to death and beheaded, in front of the Banqueting House in Whitehall, on 30 January 1649.

Charles had many good qualities. He loved the arts, and assembled a collection of paintings among the best in Europe. He loved his wife and children, but above all he loved God. Religion was central to his life, and was intimately involved with his commitment to order and ceremony. But his exalted view of the kingly office, his autocratic tendencies, and his lack of the common touch opened a chasm between him and his subjects which swallowed up the monarchy he struggled to preserve.

Roger Lockyer

Bibliography

Carlton, G. , Charles the First: The Personal Monarch (1983);
Gregg, P. , King Charles I (1981);
Wedgwood, C. V. , The Trial of Charles I (1964).