Charles I of England

• 1. Introduction

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  Charles I walked to his own execution on the morning of the 30th of January 1649 wearing two shirts. He had chosen them deliberately: the day was bitter cold, and he feared that shivering in the winter air might be mistaken for cowardice. "The season is so sharp as probably may make me shake," he told his attendants, "which some observers may imagine proceeds from fear. I would have no such imputation."

  He was 48 years old, a king since 1625, and within hours he would be beheaded on a scaffold erected in front of the Banqueting House at Whitehall. An estimated 300,000 people, roughly six percent of the entire English population, had died in the civil wars his reign produced. What had turned a man who sincerely believed God had placed him on the throne into the first English monarch to be tried, convicted, and publicly executed? And what kind of king was this: a devout patron of some of the finest art ever assembled in Britain, a devoted husband in his later years, and yet a ruler his own contemporaries called duplicitous, delusional, and the worst king England had seen since the Middle Ages?

• 2. A Fragile Beginning

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  Charles was born at Dunfermline Palace in Fife on the 19th of November 1600, the second son of King James VI of Scotland and Anne of Denmark. He was baptised on the 23rd of December 1600 in the Chapel Royal of Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh by David Lindsay, Bishop of Ross, and was created Duke of Albany that same day.

  He was a weak and sickly infant. When his parents and older siblings left for England in the spring of 1603, after James inherited the English throne, Charles was too fragile to travel and remained behind in Scotland, placed in the care of his father's friend Lord Fyvie. It was not until mid-July 1604, when he was three and a half, that he finally journeyed south to rejoin his family. He had walked the length of the great hall at Dunfermline without assistance, proof enough that he could bear the journey.

  In England, Lady Elizabeth Carey, wife of the courtier Sir Robert Carey, was placed in charge of the boy. She put him in boots of Spanish leather and brass to strengthen his weak ankles. His speech developed slowly, and a stammer stayed with him for the rest of his life. In January 1605, he was created Duke of York, and a presbyterian Scot named Thomas Murray was appointed as his tutor. He studied classics, languages, mathematics, and religion. By 1611, he was made a Knight of the Garter.

  Physical weakness eventually gave way to evident ability. Charles became an accomplished horseman and marksman and took up fencing. Even so, he lived in the considerable shadow of his older brother Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, whom he adored and tried to emulate. Henry was physically stronger and taller and commanded a much higher public profile. When Henry died in early November 1612, at the age of 18, of what was suspected to have been typhoid, Charles was just two weeks shy of his twelfth birthday. In November 1616, he was created Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester, inheriting the role that had seemed his brother's natural destiny.

• 3. The Spanish Disaster

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  In 1613, Charles's sister Elizabeth married Frederick V, Elector Palatine, and moved to Heidelberg. When Frederick accepted the Bohemian crown in 1619, defying the Holy Roman Emperor, the conflict that would become the Thirty Years' War ignited. England watched closely, and the English Parliament and public came to see the struggle as a polarised fight between Catholics and Protestants across Europe.

  James, meanwhile, had been pursuing a marriage alliance between Charles and Infanta Maria Anna of Spain, niece of the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand. The idea was deeply unpopular both at court and in Parliament. When James called Parliament in 1621, members wanted recusancy laws enforced, a naval war against Spain, and a Protestant bride for the Prince of Wales. James dissolved Parliament in January 1622, angry at what he saw as impudence.

  In February 1623, Charles and the King's favourite George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, travelled incognito to Spain to settle the match personally. The trip collapsed spectacularly. The infanta considered Charles little more than an infidel. The Spanish demanded his conversion to Catholicism, the toleration of Catholics in England, the repeal of English penal laws, and that the infanta remain in Spain for a year after any wedding to verify compliance. A personal quarrel erupted between Buckingham and Gaspar de Guzmán, Count-Duke of Olivares, the Spanish chief minister, forcing Charles to conduct the futile negotiations alone. When Charles returned to London in October 1623, without a bride, he was met with a rapturous, relieved public welcome. He and Buckingham then pushed the reluctant James to declare war on Spain.

  The Spanish debacle left a lasting mark. Charles had seen firsthand how court diplomacy could fail in humiliating fashion, and he returned with his animosity toward Spain hardened and his loyalty to Buckingham intact. Two years after that disastrous visit, he turned to France instead, and within months he was a married king.

• 4. Parliament and Prerogative

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  On the 1st of May 1625, Charles was married by proxy to the fifteen-year-old French princess Henrietta Maria in front of the doors of Notre Dame de Paris. They met in person on the 13th of June 1625 in Canterbury. He had already seen her once, briefly, when passing through Paris on his way to Spain.

  His new marriage came wrapped in political danger from the start. Charles had privately promised his brother-in-law Louis XIII that he would relax restrictions on English Catholics, a promise directly contradicting what he told Parliament. Worse, the secret marriage treaty had loaned seven English naval ships to France, and those ships were used to suppress the Protestant Huguenots at La Rochelle in September 1625. He was crowned on the 2nd of February 1626 at Westminster Abbey, but Henrietta Maria refused to participate in a Protestant ceremony and was absent.

  At the centre of Charles's belief about kingship was a conviction he shared with his father but held far more rigidly: the divine right of kings. James had been willing to temper his ambitions through compromise; Charles believed he had no need to compromise or even to explain himself. "Princes are not bound to give account of their actions," he wrote, "but to God alone." Parliament saw a tyrannical absolute monarch. Charles saw subjects overstepping their proper bounds.

  The clashes came rapidly. Parliament limited its authorisation of tonnage and poundage customs duties to one year rather than for life, as previous sovereigns since Henry VI had enjoyed. Charles collected them anyway. A disastrous naval expedition against Spain, led by Buckingham, gave the Commons grounds for impeachment proceedings against the Duke. Charles had two MPs who spoke against Buckingham, Dudley Digges and Sir John Eliot, arrested at the door of the House. The outrage forced him to release them within a week. On the 12th of June 1626, the Commons issued a direct protestation demanding Buckingham's removal. Charles dismissed Parliament rather than his friend.

  To raise money without Parliament, he levied a "forced loan" and imprisoned without trial those who refused to pay, a right the King's Bench upheld in the "Five Knights' Case" of November 1627. Parliament, summoned again in March 1628, responded with the Petition of Right, adopted on the 26th of May, demanding that he acknowledge he could not tax without consent, imprison without due process, impose martial law on civilians, or quarter troops in private homes. Charles assented to the petition on the 7th of June, then by month's end had prorogued Parliament and reasserted his right to collect customs duties regardless.

• 5. The Personal Rule

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  On the 23rd of August 1628, Buckingham was assassinated. According to Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon, Charles "threw himself upon his bed, lamenting with much passion and with abundance of tears" and remained grieving in his room for two days. While the public rejoiced, the gulf between Crown and people widened sharply.

  Buckingham's death had one unexpected consequence. Without the favourite as a focus of domestic quarrels, Charles's troubled marriage to Henrietta Maria began to improve. By November 1628, their old disputes were resolved. She became pregnant for the first time, and together they built a court celebrated as a model of formality, morality, and family life.

  In March 1629, after members of the Commons held the Speaker Sir John Finch down in his chair to prevent a royal adjournment, reading resolutions against Catholicism and Arminianism aloud while he was physically restrained, Charles dissolved Parliament and imprisoned nine parliamentary leaders, including Sir John Eliot. He then ruled without Parliament for eleven years, a period later called the Personal Rule, or the "eleven years' tyranny".

  Without parliamentary grants, Charles had to improvise revenue. He revived the Distraint of Knighthood, a law dormant for over a century requiring men who earned £40 or more annually from land to have presented themselves at his coronation in 1626 to be knighted, and began fining those who had not. He also imposed ship money. Previously collected only during wartime and only from coastal regions, Charles extended it to the whole kingdom in peacetime, arguing there was no legal bar to doing so. Between 1634 and 1638, it brought in £150,000 to £200,000 annually. England's twelve common law judges ruled it within the King's prerogative, though some had reservations. When John Hampden was prosecuted in 1637-38 for non-payment, the judges found against him by the narrow margin of 7 to 5.

  Charles also granted monopolies despite a statute forbidding them, raising an estimated £100,000 a year in the late 1630s. One was for soap, which critics pejoratively called "popish soap" because some of its backers were Catholics. Disafforestation schemes to raise money from royal forests triggered riots across England, including those known as the Western Rising. By mid-1640, he faced bankruptcy. The City of London refused to lend him money. In July he seized £130,000 in silver bullion held in trust at the mint in the Tower of London. In August, after the East India Company refused a loan, Lord Cottington seized the company's pepper and spices and sold them for £60,000, far below market value.

• 6. Scotland and the Breaking Point

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  In 1633, Charles appointed William Laud Archbishop of Canterbury. Together they imposed religious uniformity: non-conformist preachers were restricted, the liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer was enforced, church interiors were reorganised to emphasise the altar, and the Feoffees for Impropriations, an organisation that funded Puritan appointments to church livings, was dissolved. Laud prosecuted opponents in the Court of High Commission and the Star Chamber. In 1637, William Prynne, Henry Burton, and John Bastwick were pilloried, whipped, and had their ears cropped for publishing anti-episcopal pamphlets.

  Scotland proved the flashpoint. Charles had first visited Scotland since early childhood only for his Scottish coronation in 1633, and he ordered the ceremony conducted using the Anglican rite, to the dismay of Scots who had removed many traditional rituals from their practice. In 1637, without consulting the Scottish Parliament or the Kirk, he ordered a new prayer book, nearly identical to the English one, to be used across Scotland. Riots broke out in Edinburgh on the 23rd of July 1637, the first Sunday of its use, and unrest spread through the Kirk. Scots mobilised around the National Covenant, pledging to uphold reformed religion and reject innovations not authorised by Kirk and Parliament. The General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, meeting in November 1638, condemned the prayer book, abolished episcopal governance, and adopted presbyterian government.

  Charles treated this as rebellion. He raised an army without parliamentary aid and marched to Berwick-upon-Tweed, but fearing his forces were outnumbered, he did not engage the Covenanters. The Treaty of Berwick of 1639 called both the Scottish Parliament and the General Assembly, concessions that strengthened his enemies. When Charles tried again, the Scots proved far more capable: many of their soldiers were veterans of the Thirty Years' War. They defeated English forces at the Battle of Newburn in August 1640 and occupied Newcastle upon Tyne and the County Palatine of Durham. Under the humiliating Treaty of Ripon, signed in October 1640, the Scots would remain in occupation and be paid £850 per day indefinitely, a sum that only Parliament could raise. Charles had no choice but to call Parliament again.

• 7. Civil War and Captivity

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  The Long Parliament, assembled on the 3rd of November 1640, moved quickly against Charles's leading counsellors. Strafford was taken into custody on the 10th of November, Laud impeached on the 18th of December. Charles had assured Strafford that "upon the word of a king you shall not suffer in life, honour or fortune", but after Parliament passed a bill of attainder declaring Strafford guilty by a vote of 204 to 59 in the Commons, Charles reluctantly gave assent on the 9th of May 1641. Strafford was beheaded three days later.

  The episode that destroyed any remaining trust came on the 4th of January 1642. Suspecting that some members had colluded with the invading Scots, Charles entered the House of Commons with an armed guard to arrest five MPs: Pym, Hampden, Denzil Holles, William Strode, and Sir Arthur Haselrig. News of the warrant had reached Parliament first, and the five escaped by boat. Having displaced Speaker William Lenthall from his chair, Charles asked where the members had fled. Lenthall replied from his knees: "May it please your Majesty, I have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place but as the House is pleased to direct me, whose servant I am here." Charles declared "all my birds have flown" and withdrew empty-handed. No English sovereign had ever entered the House of Commons before.

  Charles raised the royal standard at Nottingham on the 22nd of August 1642. The war that followed swung unpredictably for years. The Battle of Edgehill on the 23rd of October 1642 ended inconclusively at nightfall. Charles won at Cropredy Bridge in June 1644 but the royalist north was lost at Marston Moor days later. At Naseby on the 14th of June 1645, Robert Dalzell, 1st Earl of Carnwath, seized Charles's bridle to pull him back from danger; the royalist soldiers misread the gesture as a signal to retreat, and the position collapsed. Charles escaped Oxford disguised as a servant in April 1646 and surrendered to the Scottish army besieging Newark. After nine months of negotiations, the Scots handed him to the English Parliament's commissioners in January 1647 in exchange for £100,000, with the promise of more to follow.

  In captivity, Charles continued to manoeuvre. Cornet George Joyce took him from Holdenby House by force on the 3rd of June 1647 in the name of the New Model Army. On the 26th of December 1647, from Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight, where Parliamentary Governor Colonel Robert Hammond had confined him, Charles signed a secret treaty with the Scots called the "Engagement": the Scots would invade England on his behalf in exchange for Presbyterianism being established in England for three years. The Second Civil War that followed in 1648 was crushed; the Scots were defeated at the Battle of Preston in August 1648, and the royalists lost any remaining chance of military victory.

• 8. Trial, Execution, and Afterlife

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  Pride's Purge, carried out on the 6th and the 7th of December 1648 by Colonel Thomas Pride, removed from Parliament all members out of sympathy with the army, leaving the Rump Parliament, which was for all practical purposes a military coup. The idea of trying a reigning king was genuinely novel: the Chief Justices of the three common law courts of England, Henry Rolle, Oliver St John, and John Wilde, all opposed the indictment as unlawful. The House of Lords rejected the charge outright. The Rump Commons declared itself capable of legislating alone and established the High Court of Justice.

  Of 135 commissioners named to the court, many refused to serve or stayed away. Only 68 attended Charles's trial, which opened on the 20th of January 1649 in Westminster Hall. John Bradshaw presided; Solicitor General John Cook led the prosecution. The charge accused Charles of using royal power to advance his personal interest rather than the public good, and of "traitorously and maliciously" levying war against Parliament. Fifty-nine commissioners eventually signed his death warrant.

  On the scaffold, Charles was separated from the crowd by ranks of soldiers, and his last words reached only those near him. He blamed his fate on his failure to prevent the execution of Strafford: "An unjust sentence that I suffered to take effect, is punished now by an unjust sentence on me." At about 2:00 in the afternoon, he said a prayer, stretched out his hands to signal readiness, and was beheaded in a single clean stroke. Philip Henry, who witnessed it, recorded that a moan "as I never heard before and desire I may never hear again" rose from the assembled crowd, and some dipped their handkerchiefs in the King's blood.

  The executioner was masked and disguised; the common hangman of London, Richard Brandon, had been offered £200 to perform the task and apparently refused at first. The clean stroke, confirmed by examination of the King's body at Windsor in 1813, suggested an experienced headsman. Charles's head was sewn back onto his body, which was embalmed and placed in a lead coffin. The commission refused burial at Westminster Abbey, and on the 9th of February 1649 he was interred in private in St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, alongside the coffins of Henry VIII and Jane Seymour.

  Ten days after the execution, a book titled Eikon Basilike, purportedly written by Charles himself, appeared for sale. It contained an apologia for royal policies and proved a powerful piece of royalist propaganda. John Milton wrote a parliamentary rejoinder, the Eikonoklastes, but it made little headway against the emotional force of the royalist text. In the Convocations of Canterbury and York of 1660, Charles was added to the Church of England's liturgical calendar as King Charles the Martyr. Churches at Falmouth and Tunbridge Wells were founded in his honour. The monarchy was abolished after his death, England became a republic, and Oliver Cromwell ruled as Lord Protector from 1653 until his death in 1658. In 1660, Charles's eldest son was restored to the throne as Charles II.

  As for the art collection that Charles had spent his reign assembling, including works by Titian, Raphael, Caravaggio, Leonardo da Vinci, and Rembrandt, and a ceiling by Peter Paul Rubens at the Banqueting House where his scaffold stood, it numbered an estimated 1,760 paintings at his death. Parliament sold and dispersed most of them.