1

Charles I
king of Great Britain and Ireland

Born November 19, 1600 • Scotland

Died January 30, 1649 (aged 48) • London • England
king (1625-1649), Ireland • king (1625-1649), England • king (1625-
Title / Office
1649), Scotland
Political Affiliation Cavalier
House / Dynasty House of Stuart
•spouse Henrietta Maria 
• father James I 
• mother Anne of Denmark
• daughter Mary of Orange 
Notable Family Members • daughter Henrietta Anne of England 
• son James II • son Henry Stuart, Duke of Gloucester 
• son Charles II 

• sister Elizabeth Stuart
Battle of Naseby • Bishops’ Wars • English Civil Wars • First English Civil
Role In
War • Battle of Preston

What is Charles I known for?

Charles I was the king of Great Britain and Ireland from 1625 to 1649. Like his
father, James I, and grandmother Mary, Queen of Scots, Charles I ruled with a heavy
hand. His frequent quarrels with Parliament ultimately provoked a civil war that led to
his execution on January 30, 1649.

What was Charles I’s early life like?

Charles I was born in 1600 to James VI of Scotland (who later became James I)
and Anne of Denmark. He was a sickly child and was devoted to his brother, Henry, and
sister, Elizabeth. He was devastated when Henry died in 1612 and when his sister left
England to marry Frederick V in 1613.
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How did Charles I become king of Great Britain and Ireland?

When his brother, Henry, died in 1612, Charles became heir to the throne. He formed an
alliance with the duke of Buckingham. In the last 18 months of his father’s reign, Charles
and the duke decided most issues. After James I died on March 27, 1625, Charles
ascended the throne. Not long after, he married Henrietta Maria, sister of the French
king Louis XIII.
What was the relationship between Charles I and Parliament like?
From the beginning of his reign, Charles I demonstrated a distrust of the House of
Commons. Parliament was critical of his government, condemning his policies of
arbitrary taxation and imprisonment. On several occasions, Charles I dissolved
Parliament without its consent. In 1641 Parliament presented to Charles I the Grand
Remonstrance, listing grievances against the king.

Why was Charles I executed?

On January 20, 1649, Charles I was brought before a specially constituted court and
charged with high treason and “other high crimes against the realm of England.” He
refused to recognize the legality of the court because, he said, “a king cannot be tried by
any superior jurisdiction on earth.” He was nonetheless executed on January 30.

Charles I, (born November 19, 1600, Dunfermline Palace, Fife, Scotland—died January

30, 1649, London, England), king of Great Britain and Ireland (1625–49),
whose authoritarian rule and quarrels with Parliament provoked a civil war that led to
his execution.

Charles was the second surviving son of James VI of Scotland and Anne of Denmark. He

was a sickly child, and, when his father became king of England in March 1603
(see James I), he was temporarily left behind in Scotland because of the risks of the
journey. Devoted to his elder brother, Henry, and to his sister, Elizabeth, he became
lonely when Henry died (1612) and his sister left England in 1613 to marry Frederick V,
elector of the Rhine Palatinate.

All his life Charles had a Scots accent and a slight stammer. Small in stature,
he was less dignified than his portraits by the Flemish painter Sir Anthony
Van Dyck suggest. He was always shy and struck observers as being silent and
reserved. His excellent temper, courteous manners, and lack of vices
impressed all those who met him, but he lacked the common touch, travelled
about little, and never mixed with ordinary people. A patron of the arts
(notably of painting and tapestry; he brought both Van Dyck and another
famous Flemish painter, Peter Paul Rubens, to England), he was, like all
the Stuarts, also a lover of horses and hunting. He was sincerely religious, and
the character of the court became less coarse as soon as he became king. From
his father he acquired a stubborn belief that kings are intended by God to rule,
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and his earliest surviving letters reveal a distrust of the unruly House of

Commons with which he proved incapable of coming to terms. Lacking
flexibility or imagination, he was unable to understand that those political
deceits that he always practiced in increasingly vain attempts to uphold
his authority eventually impugned his honour and damaged his credit.
In 1623, before succeeding to the throne, Charles, accompanied by the duke of
Buckingham, King James I’s favourite, made an incognito visit to Spain in
order to conclude a marriage treaty with the daughter of King Philip III. When
the mission failed, largely because of Buckingham’s arrogance and the Spanish
court’s insistence that Charles become a Roman Catholic, he joined
Buckingham in pressing his father for war against Spain. In the meantime a
marriage treaty was arranged on his behalf with Henrietta Maria, sister of the
French king, Louis XIII.

Conflict with Parliament

In March 1625, Charles I became king and married Henrietta Maria soon afterward.
When his first Parliament met in June, trouble immediately arose because of the general
distrust of Buckingham, who had retained his ascendancy over the new king. The
Spanish war was proving a failure and Charles offered Parliament no explanations of
his foreign policy or its costs. Moreover, the Puritans, who
advocated extemporaneous prayer and preaching in the Church of England,
predominated in the House of Commons, whereas the sympathies of the king were with
what came to be known as the High Church Party, which stressed the value of the prayer
book and the maintenance of ritual. Thus antagonism soon arose between the new king
and the Commons, and Parliament refused to vote him the right to levy tonnage and
poundage (customs duties) except on conditions that increased its powers, though this
right had been granted to previous monarchs for life.

The second Parliament of the reign, meeting in February 1626, proved even
more critical of the king’s government, though some of the former leaders of
the Commons were kept away because Charles had ingeniously appointed
them sheriffs in their counties. The failure of a naval expedition against the
Spanish port of Cádiz in the previous autumn was blamed on Buckingham and
the Commons tried to impeach him for treason. To prevent this, Charles
dissolved Parliament in June. Largely through the incompetence of
Buckingham, the country now became involved in a war with France as well as
with Spain and, in desperate need of funds, the king imposed a forced loan,
which his judges declared illegal. He dismissed the chief justice and ordered
the arrest of more than 70 knights and gentlemen who refused to contribute.
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His high-handed actions added to the sense of grievance that was widely
discussed in the next Parliament.
By the time Charles’s third Parliament met (March 1628), Buckingham’s
expedition to aid the French Protestants at La Rochelle had been decisively
repelled and the king’s government was thoroughly discredited. The House of
Commons at once passed resolutions condemning arbitrary taxation and
arbitrary imprisonment and then set out its complaints in the Petition of
Right, which sought recognition of four principles—no taxes
without consent of Parliament; no imprisonment without cause; no quartering
of soldiers on subjects; no martial law in peacetime. The king, despite his
efforts to avoid approving this petition, was compelled to give his formal
consent. By the time the fourth Parliament met in January 1629, Buckingham
had been assassinated. The House of Commons now objected both to what it
called the revival of “popish practices” in the churches and to the levying of
tonnage and poundage by the king’s officers without its consent. The king
ordered the adjournment of Parliament on March 2, 1629, but before that the
speaker was held down in his chair and three resolutions were passed
condemning the king’s conduct. Charles realized that such behaviour was
revolutionary. For the next 11 years he ruled his kingdom without calling a
Parliament.
In order that he might no longer be dependent upon parliamentary grants, he
now made peace with both France and Spain, for, although the royal debt
amounted to more than £1,000,000, the proceeds of the customs duties at a
time of expanding trade and the exaction of traditional crown dues combined
to produce a revenue that was just adequate in time of peace. The king also
tried to economize in the expenditure of his household. To pay for the Royal
Navy, so-called ship money was levied, first in 1634 on ports and later on
inland towns as well. The demands for ship money aroused obstinate and
widespread resistance by 1638, even though a majority of the judges of the
court of Exchequer found in a test case that the levy was legal.
These in fact were the happiest years of Charles’s life. At first he and Henrietta
Maria had not been happy, and in July 1626 he peremptorily ordered all of her
French entourage to quit Whitehall. After the death of Buckingham, however,
he fell in love with his wife and came to value her counsel. Though the king
regarded himself as responsible for his actions—not to his people or
Parliament but to God alone according to the doctrine of the divine right of
kings—he recognized his duty to his subjects as “an indulgent nursing father.”
If he was often indolent, he exhibited spasmodic bursts of energy, principally
in ordering administrative reforms, although little impression was made upon
the elaborate network of private interests in the armed services and at court.
On the whole, the kingdom seems to have enjoyed some degree of prosperity
until 1639, when Charles became involved in a war against the Scots.
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The early Stuarts neglected Scotland. At the beginning of his reign Charles
alienated the Scottish nobility by an act of revocation whereby lands claimed
by the crown or the church were subject to forfeiture. His decision in 1637 to
impose upon his northern kingdom a new liturgy, based on the English Book
of Common Prayer, although approved by the Scottish bishops, met with
concerted resistance. When many Scots signed a national covenant to defend
their Presbyterian religion, the king decided to enforce his ecclesiastical policy
with the sword. He was outmanoeuvred by a well-organized
Scottish covenanting army, and by the time he reached York in March 1639
the first of the so-called Bishops’ Wars was already lost. A truce was signed
at Berwick-upon-Tweed on June 18.
On the advice of the two men who had replaced Buckingham as the closest
advisers of the king—William Laud, archbishop of Canterbury, and the earl
of Strafford, his able lord deputy in Ireland—Charles summoned a Parliament
that met in April 1640—later known as the Short Parliament—in order to raise
money for the war against Scotland. The House insisted first on discussing
grievances against the government and showed itself opposed to a renewal of
the war; so, on May 5, the king dissolved Parliament again. The collection of
ship money was continued and so was the war. A Scottish army crossed the
border in August and the king’s troops panicked before a cannonade
at Newburn. Charles, deeply perturbed at his second defeat, convened a
council of peers on whose advice he summoned another Parliament, the Long
Parliament, which met at Westminster in November 1640.
The new House of Commons, proving to be just as uncooperative as the last, condemned
Charles’s recent actions and made preparations to impeach Strafford and other
ministers for treason. The king adopted a conciliatory attitude—he agreed to
the Triennial Act that ensured the meeting of Parliament once every three years—but
expressed his resolve to save Strafford, to whom he promised protection. He was
unsuccessful even in this, however. Strafford was beheaded on May 12, 1641.

Charles was forced to agree to a measure whereby the existing Parliament could not be
dissolved without its own consent. He also accepted bills declaring ship money and
other arbitrary fiscal measures illegal, and in general condemning his methods of
government during the previous 11 years. But while making these concessions, he visited
Scotland in August to try to enlist anti-parliamentary support there. He agreed to the
full establishment of Presbyterianism in his northern kingdom and allowed the Scottish
estates to nominate royal officials.

Meanwhile, Parliament reassembled in London after a recess, and, on

November 22, 1641, the Commons passed by 159 to 148 votes the Grand
Remonstrance to the king, setting out all that had gone wrong since his
accession. At the same time news of a rebellion in Ireland had reached
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Westminster. Leaders of the Commons, fearing that if any army were raised to
repress the Irish rebellion it might be used against them, planned to gain
control of the army by forcing the king to agree to a militia bill. When asked
to surrender his command of the army, Charles exclaimed “By God, not for an
hour.” Now fearing an impeachment of his Catholic queen, he prepared to take
desperate action. He ordered the arrest of one member of the House of
Lords and five of the Commons for treason and went with about 400 men to
enforce the order himself. The accused members escaped, however, and hid in
the city. After this rebuff the king left London on January 10, this time for the
north of England. The queen went to Holland in February to raise funds for
her husband by pawning the crown jewels.
A lull followed, during which both Royalists and Parliamentarians enlisted
troops and collected arms, although Charles had not completely given up
hopes of peace. After a vain attempt to secure the arsenal at Hull, in April the
king settled in York, where he ordered the courts of justice to assemble and
where royalist members of both houses gradually joined him. In June the
majority of the members remaining in London sent the king the Nineteen
Propositions, which included demands that no ministers should be appointed
without parliamentary approval, that the army should be put under
parliamentary control, and that Parliament should decide about the future of
the church. Charles realized that these proposals were an ultimatum; yet he
returned a careful answer in which he gave recognition to the idea that his was
a “mixed government” and not an autocracy. But in July both sides were
urgently making ready for war. The king formally raised the royal standard
at Nottingham on August 22 and sporadic fighting soon broke out all over the
kingdom.

Charles I

Childhood
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Charles's personality as a politician was shaped by a difficult childhood. He was born on 19

November 1600, the third child of James VI of Scotland and his wife Anne of Denmark. During
his early years he suffered from a combination of poor health and lack of parental affection.
When he moved to England after James's accession in 1603 it was difficult to find a noble family
to look after him because of fears that he might die on their hands; and he grew up very much in
the shadow of his glamorous elder brother Prince Henry and his sister Elizabeth. It was not until
Henry's death in 1612 that people began to take notice of him. What they found was a shy and
extremely gauche adolescent, with a pronounced stammer which he never got rid of and a
tendency to fits of rage and jealousy, directed particularly towards the young men who
dominated his father's affections. An incident in 1616 when, in the presence of the court he
turned a water fountain full in the face of George Villiers and soaked him to the skin was
indicative of his early frustrations.

Charles as a young man was certainly not the stuff of which seventeenth century rulers were
supposed to be made. Yet within a few years of his accession to the throne in 1625 he had
transformed himself into a dignified, kingly figure every bit as impressive as his counterparts on
the continent. This transformation came about partly through an effort of will power and self-
control. Although lacking in confidence, Charles was acutely aware of the responsibilities of his
office and made himself play to the full what he regarded as the proper role of a king. In spite of
his stammer he regularly delivered public speeches on occasions such as the opening of
parliament and earned considerable respect for doing so. He also exercised close control over the
processes of royal government. The extent of this has been underestimated by some historians
because they have tended to be taken in by claims that he was dominated by favourites such as
the duke of Buckingham, or by his wife, Queen Henrietta Maria.

In fact, a close examination of administration and decision making suggests that Charles was
very much in charge. He diligently attended to the paperwork of government, to the extent that
one historian has described him as 'a royal swot'. He kept close control of senior appointments
and was personally responsible for such crucial decisions as the appointment of Bishop Juxon as
lord treasurer in 1636, seen by some as heralding a take over of government by the clergy He
was also in charge of decisions about going to war, making peace and summoning parliament
which were the most important a contemporary monarch had to make. The one area where his
control was less than complete was in the church, where he relied on Laud to translate his high-
church, anti-puritan vision into a reality; but even here his influence remained paramount
because Laud was always conscious of the need to fulfil his master's wishes in order to retain
favour.

Shortcomings
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Charles dominated the business of government in the way an early modern monarch was
supposed to, and, thanks to Anthony Van Dyck, he came to look the part. Van Dyck came to
England in 1632, at Charles's invitation, and in the years which followed completely transformed
the king's image. He made up for his lack of stature and immature appearance by various artistic
devices which included painting him on horseback, ageing him by about five years and giving
his face a distant, melancholy expression which was seen as a sign of wisdom. He also
incorporated into his portraits a whole series of references which reflected Charles's own views
on kingship. In Charles I with Henrietta Maria and Prince Charles and Princess Mary, 1632, the
king is presented as the supreme patriarch, a father figure who commands and protects his people
as he does his own family. The great equestrian portrait, Charles I on horseback, 1638, depicts
him as conquering hero and emperor of Great Britain at a time when he was preparing to go to
war with his rebellious Scots subjects. A third aspect of kingship was captured in Charles a la
Chasse, 1635, which shows him as the ultimate courtier, elegant, poised and relaxed,
commanding his surroundings with an air of serene self-possession and inner confidence which
was regarded as the essence of true nobility.

In spite of appearances, however, Charles lacked many of the personal qualities needed by an
early modern ruler. He had little skill in the art of man-management which was crucial when so
much depended on the king's relations with leading politicians and noblemen. Perhaps because of
his difficult early upbringing, he was never a confident judge of human character and tended
either to go overboard in his affection for those he felt were serving him loyally, like
Buckingham, or to form strong dislikes which made it very hard for him to work with certain
politicians. He also lacked confidence in the loyalty of his people and from the start of his reign
turned grants of taxation into tests of whether they loved him and trusted him. This pushed
opponents of policies such as the forced loan into having to confront the crown much more
directly than was appropriate, with damaging consequences for political stability.

Another shortcoming which can again be traced back to his lack of self-assurance, was his
unwillingness to bargain and negotiate. He tended to try to bludgeon his way through difficulties
by invoking his personal authority, assuming that once his wishes were known his subjects
would stop squabbling and obey him. This ignored the contemporary expectation that there
should be a good deal of give and take in the execution of royal policy and that where policies
were unpopular these should be blamed on royal counsellors. Charles's refusal to acknowledge
this created considerable difficulties, for example in Scotland in 1637-8 when his unwillingness
to make concessions over the use of an English-style prayer book, or to allow the bishops to bear
the blame for its introduction, turned a limited protest into full scale rebellion.

The royal masquerade

The clashes between Charles and his subjects were not just a consequence of his political style;
they also owed much to his political beliefs. Historians have found these hard to fathom because
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Charles was a man of few words and rarely wrote down what he thought; however, some
interesting insights can be gleaned from the masques performed at court during the 1630s.
Charles invested a good deal of time and energy in these productions and he and the queen
generally appeared on stage as the principal characters.

The masques also illustrate some of Charles's more divisive beliefs. He was deeply suspicious of
Calvinism and Puritanism which he saw as encouraging a dangerous spontaneity and
egalitarianism in both church and state. He was also fundamentally hostile to parliaments,
resenting their insistence on bargaining for redress of grievances in return for taxation and
suspecting them of pandering to the destructive impulses of a 'popular multitude'. However, in
each case his efforts to change things met with bitter opposition. Calvinism was the basis for the
religious beliefs of most English protestants in this period and any attempt to replace it with
high-church Arminianism was regarded as tantamount to a restoration of popery. Similarly his
efforts to govern without parliaments during 'the Personal Rule' (1629-40) were deeply
unpopular because the assembly was seen as 'the representative of the people' and the best
guarantee of the public welfare.

The purpose of the masque, in political terms, was to proclaim the authority of the king and
celebrate his achievements through representing his role in a constant struggle between virtue
and vice. Charles took on roles that displayed his wisdom and justice, whilst the queen was
presented as the embodiment of pure love and beauty. Between them they would create order and
harmony by subduing the disruptive forces of the anti-masque, such as puritanism and popular
rebellion. The final masque, the Salmacida Spolia of 1640, was typical, with a closing scene
which showed king and queen dancing with their attendants before a backdrop of ideally
proportioned classical buildings linked together by a bridge, whilst the chorus sang of their
unifying influence.

Some historians have regarded these masques as a form of escapism by which Charles sought to
avoid the unpalatable realities of contemporary politics. But this is to misunderstand their
purpose. If they are interpreted within a context of contemporary beliefs about the civilising
power of images they can be seen not as substitutes for reality, but guides to statesmanship. They
represented the world of politics in terms which Charles himself appears to have recognised, as a
drama of conflicting forces in which an enlightened, virtuous, noble elite, with the king at its
head, sought to subdue the disordered impulses of a plebeian and puritan multitude.

Political beliefs
The masques offer valuable evidence of how Charles thought political power operated. Steeped
as he was in the ideology of divine right kingship, he often seems to have believed that order
could be achieved by the king acting out a role and laying down patterns for his people to
observe and copy. This points to one of the most interesting contrasts with his father. Whereas
James, influenced by his upbringing in the small, intimate court of Scotland, treated politics as a
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matter of face-to-face debate and negotiation, Charles saw it more as about getting people to
conform to clear-cut ideals and images. This much is apparent from his reform of the royal court
which introduced a style of ritual similar to Louis XIV's Versailles in an attempt to create an
ideal society for his subjects to emulate. It is also evident in the Arminian practices which he
favoured in the church where liturgy and visual imagery were used to encourage reverence to a
divinely-ordained hierarchy. The problem was that this approach was fundamentally at odds with
an English political tradition based on bargain and compromise.
Charles's preference for a world in which power was confined to the king, a virtuous elite of
court nobles and the bishops in the church was not shared by his subjects; however, this was not
something which overly concerned him. As the masques confirm, he had a very limited
understanding of the fears and aspirations of most of his people, and even less in the way of
sympathy for them. This was particularly apparent during the mid-1630s when he became
involved in discussions with the papal envoy about the possibility of reuniting the English church
with Rome. How seriously Charles pursued these negotiations is unclear and in the event nothing
came of them. But the fact that he could even contemplate an action which would have horrified
his people more than almost anything else he could have done suggests a king who was
profoundly out of touch.

The final masque

The problems created by Charles's political style, his beliefs and his lack of understanding as a
ruler were revealed very clearly in the lead up to the English Civil War (1642-6). After defeat by
the Scots in The Bishops Wars(1639-40) it was important that the king give a lead in reuniting
his people and settling their differences. But this proved beyond Charles. The bitterness he felt
over his defeat and lack of support from his subjects was compounded by the guilt he
experienced when he was forced to agree to the execution of his chief minister, the earl of
Strafford, in May 1641. Increasingly he blamed his difficulties on a deliberate campaign by
puritans and parliamentarians to subvert royal authority; and his personal dislike of opposition
politicians, such as John Pym, made it very hard to build bridges.

After a promising start at the beginning of 1641, efforts at settlement fell apart and increasingly
Charles slipped into the role of a party leader, determined to destroy his enemies by whatever
means came to hand. From the spring onwards he sponsored a series of army plots and abortive
coups, culminating in the attempted arrest of the five members in January 1642. Once this had
failed civil war became virtually unavoidable. More than any other individual, it was Charles
who was responsible for this disaster. Bibliography:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/civil_war_revolution/personality_charles_01.shtml