King Charles I in 1628, painted by Gerard van Honthorst (1590-1656), full of the legendary charm and intelligence which for so long made up for his arbitrary government, and ingenious ways of raising revenue from his subjects. The artist was introduced to the King by Charles’s sister, Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia.
Part 1 of 2
IN 1625, Charles I inherited a kingdom torn apart by competing religious convictions and hatreds. A century before, Henry VIII, chafing at political interference from Rome, had taken control of the English Church and blended its traditions with fashionable Protestant ideas from Switzerland. It was done harshly, by law, and each successive government arbitrarily changed the blend.
Charles was no different, moving the state Church back towards more traditional beliefs, and ordering fines, imprisonment and even physical mutilation for dissent. His revised service book for a very Swiss-Protestant Scotland provoked the Bishops’ Wars of 1639-1640, and ended in humiliating defeat.
The King suddenly looked weak, and could ill afford it. Back in 1628, Parliament had unexpectedly supported Sir Edward Coke’s ‘Petition of Right’, a litany of Charles’s abuses of power including arbitrary taxes, towns under martial law, forced loans to the Crown, and opponents jailed without charge or trial. Since then, the King had not consulted Parliament once, and anger was rising.
Précis
The English Reformation made religion the business of the Government, and left the country deeply divided. Charles and his Parliament disagreed bitterly on what form of religion the country should adopt, and also on Charles’s manner of rule, which his opponents claimed was arbitrary and cruel. When Charles stopped consulting Parliament entirely, the crisis came to a head. (58 / 60 words)
Part Two
An artist’s impression of King Charles I on his way to execution on a snowy January 30th, 1649. His rule had been intransigent, patronising and often barbaric, but he met his death with dignity, and his trial, hard on the heels of a military coup, was a disgrace.
CHARLES reluctantly summoned his Parliament in 1640 – for the first time in “eleven years’ tyranny”, as they called it — and acceded to their demands. But Protestant firebrand John Pym then reignited the feud with his ‘Grand Remonstrance’, a wide-ranging indictment of the King’s governance and his failure to crush Catholic rebellion in Ireland.
On January 4th, 1642, the King himself burst into the Commons to arrest Pym and four equally troublesome MPs, an unwarrantable invasion and a grievous error of judgment. Charles fled to Oxford, and gathered an army. His opponents at Westminster also raised troops, and the country found itself at civil war.
By 1646, it was evident that Charles was losing. He turned to the Scots for help, but they had neither forgotten nor forgiven, and handed him over to Westminster. A specially assembled Parliament, from which all Charles’s sympathisers had been expelled, pronounced him guilty of treason, and on a snowy January 30th, 1649, King Charles I was publicly beheaded in Whitehall.
By convention, the King did not enter the Commons, and no British monarch has set foot there since. As it happened, Pym and the others had been tipped off and were not present, leaving Charles looking rather foolish.
Précis
Although Charles gave in to his Parliament in 1640, continued criticism goaded him into a strategic mistake which soured relations with Parliament to the point of civil war. By 1646 it was turning against him. The Scots betrayed him into Westminster’s hands, and after a brief and biased trial he was found guilty of treason and executed in January 1649. (57 / 60 words)
