Charles I of England

Charles I of England: The King Who Could Not Bend

On the icy morning of 30 January 1649 the King of England asked for a thicker shirt. He did not want the crowd to see him shiver and mistake cold for fear. Then he walked out of a window of the Banqueting House onto a scaffold hung with black cloth, laid his head on the block, and was killed by two masked men whose names nobody recorded. The groan that went up, one witness wrote, was "such a groan by the thousands then present as I never heard before and desire I may never hear again." No English king had ever been tried and executed by his own subjects. The event has shaped the British constitution ever since.

A Second Son Nobody Expected to Reign

Charles was the second son of James VI of Scotland and Anne of Denmark, and grandson of Mary, Queen of Scots, whose Tudor blood carried his father to the English throne in 1603. He was a frail child — rickets left him unable to walk until he was nearly four — and he acquired a stammer that never left him.

He was not, however, stupid. He learned Greek and Latin and spoke French, Spanish and Italian fluently. When his elder brother Prince Henry, the golden hope of the dynasty, died in 1612, the shy stammering boy became heir apparent. He succeeded his father in March 1625.

Taxes, Buckingham, and the Petition of Right

Trouble began immediately, over money and religion. Charles married Henrietta Maria, sister of Louis XIII of France — a Catholic queen, which unsettled Protestant England from the first day. Parliament, distrustful, granted him the customs revenues of tonnage and poundage for a single year rather than for life, as was traditional. Charles took offence, imposed forced loans and simply went on collecting taxes Parliament had not voted.

In 1628 Parliament forced him to accept the Petition of Right, binding him not to imprison subjects without cause, levy taxes without consent, billet soldiers on civilians or impose martial law in peacetime. He signed it. He did not believe it limited him. That gap — between what Charles signed and what Charles thought he had agreed to — is the through-line of his entire reign. The same year his favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, was assassinated.

Eleven Years Alone

In 1629 Charles dissolved Parliament and did not call another for eleven years. The Personal Rule was funded, as UK Parliament's own account puts it, by the "non-parliamentary use of medieval laws to raise money" — most notoriously ship money, an ancient coastal levy that Charles extended inland to counties that had never paid it and had no ships.

In 1633 he made William Laud Archbishop of Canterbury. Laud's insistence on elaborate ceremony and episcopal authority convinced many English Protestants that the Church was drifting back toward Rome. Neither man intended anything of the kind, which made the misreading no less fatal.

Then Charles turned to Scotland. He imposed episcopal control on the Scottish Church in 1636 and in 1637 introduced a new Book of Common Prayer stressing ceremony over austere Presbyterian worship. The Covenanters rose, and beat his army in the Bishops' War. After an uneasy truce in 1639 they invaded England as far as Newcastle.

The Road to War

The Scots broke him financially. By October 1640 Charles was paying the Covenanters £850 a day. He had already summoned the Short Parliament that April, only for the Commons to refuse to discuss money before their grievances were heard; he dissolved it in under a month. Now he had no choice, and in November 1640 the Long Parliament assembled.

It set about dismantling his prerogative. The final rupture came over who would control the army needed to suppress rebellion in Ireland — the king, or the Commons that distrusted him. In January 1642 Charles marched into the Commons to arrest several of its members, a gross breach of parliamentary privilege and a failure on its own terms; the men had gone. He fled London and raised his standard that August.

Four years of civil war ended in Royalist defeat by combined Parliamentary and Scottish forces. Charles surrendered to the Scots in the spring of 1646, then spent two years negotiating with everyone simultaneously and honouring nothing, which persuaded his captors that no settlement with him could ever hold.

Why Charles I Is Called a Genius

He was not one, and the honest thing is to say so at the outset. Charles I is on a list of geniuses because of what happened to him and what it changed, not because of the quality of his mind.

The generous case is narrow but real. He was genuinely learned in languages, and he was a superb judge of art — EBSCO's assessment calls him "an excellent judge of artistic merit," and he assembled one of the great European royal collections and gave England a court of genuine dignity after the coarseness of his father's. In matters of taste, Charles was better than almost any monarch of his century.

In everything that his job actually required, he was worse. The standing historical verdict is that he "lacked breadth of understanding and imagination" and showed "deviousness in public matters." He could not read other people, could not judge which battles were worth fighting, and could not distinguish a principle from a preference. Historic Royal Palaces locates the failure precisely: a shy, insecure man who held an absolute conviction in the Divine Right of Kings — that God alone appointed monarchs and God alone could overrule them — and combined it with a refusal to compromise. That is not a theory a clever man abandons under pressure; it is a theory that makes compromise feel like blasphemy. It cost him a war, a kingdom and his head.

So why does he belong on the list? Because consequence is not the same as intellect, and Charles's consequence is enormous. His trial forced England to ask, in public and under oath, whether a king was above the law — and to answer no. His execution was, in EBSCO's word, traumatic, and it left a lasting uncertainty about the nature of government that Britain resolved only slowly across the next two centuries. He is here as the hinge, not as the thinker.

Legacy

The court that condemned him called him a "tyrant, traitor, murderer and Public Enemy." He refused to recognise its jurisdiction, and by all accounts conducted himself throughout with calm dignity. On the scaffold he said: "I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown; where no disturbance can be, no disturbance in the world." The official executioner, Brandon, could not be found; the men who did the work wore masks and disguises. The axe fell once and cleanly.

The monarchy returned in 1660, and forty-one surviving republicans were called to account, ten of them executed after refusing pardon. But the principle established on that scaffold could not be undone. Charles died believing he answered only to God. The lasting effect of his death was to prove that English kings answer to Parliament — the exact opposite of everything he lived for, and his most important contribution to history.

Achievements

• monarch of England (1625–1649)
• monarch of Scotland (1625–1649)
• Duke of York (1605–1625)
• King of Ireland (1625–1649)
• Knight of the Garter