The man known to history as King Charles I was born on the 19th of November 1600 at Dunfermline Palace in Scotland. His father was King James VI of Scotland, who had ruled that kingdom since he was an infant in the mid-1560s. Charles’ mother was Queen Anne, a princess of the Danish royal family who had married James in 1589. Charles was the fourth child born to James and Anne and Charles’ eldest brother Henry Frederick had been born in 1594, followed by a sister Elizabeth in 1596. Another daughter named Margaret had followed late in 1598, but she had died from a mysterious illness, the exact nature of which remains unclear, in March 1600, several months before Charles’ own birth. Charles’ parents would go on to have several more children in the 1600s, but all died in infancy and so Charles would grow up effectively as the youngest of three children alongside his older brother Henry and sister Elizabeth. Charles’ first years were spent in Scotland as a royal prince there. The Scottish court, like most of those in Europe, had been itinerant and moved from place to place during the late medieval period, but by the sixteenth century it was becoming more fixed in its abode and much of Charles’ first years were either spent in Edinburgh or Holyroodhouse. His care was entrusted to Lord and Lady Fyvie, while it was assumed that he would not be king unless some misfortune were to befall his older brother Henry, who lay directly in line to the Scottish throne. Charles developed his ability to talk later than most children, while he was a sickly infant, one who probably suffered from rickets which weakened his ankles in his youth. In the spring of 1603, when he was just two and a half years old, the trajectory of Charles’ life was altered when Queen Elizabeth I of England died without a direct heir, bringing the House of Tudor to an end to the south of Scotland. Charles’ father, King James, was descended from King Henry VII and so was able to claim the English throne as a consequence. Thus, in April 1603 the Scottish royal family headed south to London where James became King James I of England, Scotland and Ireland. The Stuart royal line would forever more spend their time in London and England rather than Edinburgh and Scotland. In England as he grew up Charles was credited with being a dedicated student. His education was entrusted to Thomas Murray, a Scottish Presbyterian scholar who was one of many individuals who headed south from Scotland to England to join the new Stuart court in the south in 1603. Murray would subsequently become provost of Eton. Under his guidance Charles excelled at the core subjects of the humanist education which all of Europe’s royal children were taught by the early seventeenth century, they being rhetoric, Latin, philosophy and divinity. Charles’ abilities in theological disputation were particularly notable and his elder brother is reputed to have stated on one occasion that he would consider promoting Charles to the position of archbishop of Canterbury, the most senior clerical position within the Church of England, when he became king. More broadly, Charles showed himself to be a determined young man in overcoming both his physical disabilities, but also the stutter which he developed in childhood and traces of which were evident in his speech throughout his later life. Despite this, he learned to express himself well and also mastered some of the courtly arts such as horse-riding and hunting. In November 1612, when he was just approaching his twelfth birthday, the most defining event of Charles’ life occurred. That autumn plans had been finalised for the marriage of his older sister Elizabeth to Frederick, Elector Palatine of the Palatinate in western Germany. During the pre-wedding celebrations in London, Charles’ brother Henry Frederick came down with a mysterious illness. The exact nature of it has never been completely determined, but it is believed that it may have been typhoid fever. In any event, Henry never recovered and he died from the sickness on the 6th of November 1612. With this Charles became the heir designate to the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland. More personally, the grief at the sudden loss of his brother was compounded by the departure of his sister Elizabeth for married life in Germany once her wedding was solemnised in 1613, leaving Charles a very suddenly isolated child in England. In the years that followed, his education continued, but with the added stress of now being the heir apparent to the throne. Suddenly a prince of the blood was not being educated to become a senior noble, but a ruler of Britain and Ireland. Charles’ teenage and early adult years were shaped in many ways by the political intrigues of his father’s court. James was an otherwise successful ruler who had a serious flaw when it came to bestowing huge amounts of patronage, wealth and favour on a series of court favourites, figures such as Robert Carr, first earl of Somerset, who for a time in the mid-1610s rose to a position of major eminence at the Stuart court. However, he was replaced in the king’s affections from 1615 onwards by a young courtier by the name of George Villiers. In the years that followed he Villiers was showered with titles and wealth, eventually being created as Duke of Buckingham within the British peerage, a dispensation which made him the only duke in England and the country’s premier noble. In tandem Buckingham began placing his clients and followers in senior positions all over England and Ireland, effectively building up a network which allowed him to govern much of the Stuart realms. In time Buckingham also won over Charles, such that by the late 1610s there were effectively three individuals ruling the Stuart dominions, the king, Charles as heir and Prince of Wales, and Buckingham. Villiers’s influence would continue into Charles’ own reign in the mid-1620s. Much of what James, Charles and Buckingham were concerned with in the late 1610s and into the 1620s was the subject of Charles’ potential marriage. As the heir to three thrones Charles was one of the most eligible bachelors in Europe. His marriage might be used to recalibrate the diplomatic landscape of Europe the continent at a time when France and Spain were bitter rivals for supremacy in Western Europe and the Thirty Years War had just erupted in Central Europe. The choice for England was whether to thread an independent path, as it had done throughout the reign of Queen Elizabeth in the second half of the sixteenth century, or to ally with Spain or France. A marriage alliance with Spain, whereby Charles would marry Infanta Maria Anna, the daughter of King Philip III, had been proposed as early as 1614, but negotiations only entered an intense period from the late 1610s onwards as Maria Anna entered her teenage years and marriage became plausible. The Spanish Match, as it became known, was debated on for years to come as it held out the possibility of a huge financial windfall for England from the coffers of Spain, at that time the wealthiest nation in the world owing to the gold and silver bullion shipments it received every year from the Americas. King James also hoped that a Spanish alliance with the Habsburgs would put him in a better position to negotiate the restoration of his daughter Elizabeth and son-in-law, the Elector Palatine, to their lands in Germany, where they had been roundly defeated in the early stages of the Thirty Years War. However, the Spanish Match was deeply unpopular amongst significant sections of the political community in the Stuart realms, in large part because of Spain’s position as the great defender of Roman Catholicism in Europe. Throughout the late 1610s and early 1620s these negotiations for the proposed union of Charles and Infanta Maria Anna were primarily carried out between diplomats in London and Madrid and the ambassadors of the two nations, but late in 1622 Charles determined to intervene more directly in events. He and Buckingham would set off incognito to visit Spain and finalise the match, believing that most matters were decided upon and an appearance in person in Madrid would bring about a conclusion to the alliance. Therefore they set off for Spain, arriving in Madrid early in March 1623. There they received a somewhat cold welcome, the Spanish being in no mood to finalise a diplomatic wedding arrangement, particularly so as the war in Central Europe was going well for the wider Habsburg interest which ruled both Spain and the Austrian dominions. In such circumstances an English alliance was less desirable. Consequently, while Charles and Buckingham were not rebuffed entirely in Spain, their visit there did not result in the finalising of a marriage alliance and there was no possibility that they would be allowed to return to England with the Infanta Maria Anna, an ambition which they had briefly held. While the mission to Spain in 1623 might have been unsuccessful from a diplomatic perspective, but it was extremely influential in shaping Charles’ personality and his approach as a ruler in years to come. In Madrid the pair came into contact with one of the most lavish courts in the world, steeped in a century of wealth from Spain’s overseas empire. Moreover, it possessed all the trappings of an autocratic monarchy where successive rulers like King Charles V and King Philip II had exercised a form of royal majesty of a kind rarely seen in England. Charles was impressed by this absolutism and the manner in which King Philip IV, who had recently become ruler of Spain, presided over a government which had little time for consulting with the wider political nation in Spain. The Spanish court was also a major centre of European artistic patronage and surrounded at the court by what was then the greatest collection of Renaissance paintings in Europe, Charles was inspired to become a major art patron himself, which he became in England in the 1630s. Thus, while the Spanish Match was not brought to success by the mission of 1623, the visit to the Habsburg court in Madrid was formative for Charles, whose artistic sensibilities and desire for a more autocratic type of rule were fostered by it. Charles and Buckingham returned to England in the autumn of 1623, now determined to change direction and pursue war against Spain following their snubbing in Madrid. But before any such war could be initiated it would need to have the consent of parliament in England, as well as and its financial backing. Luckily, much of the political nation was keenly in support of war with the Spanish, though the powerful Lord Treasurer, Lionel Cranfield, earl of Middlesex, was an impediment. Accordingly, Charles and Buckingham spent much of 1624 trying to initiate impeachment proceedings against Middlesex. All of this was occurring while the king’s health was deteriorating. James had suffered from a range of maladies including arthritis, kidney stones and gout in his later years and was often ill for protracted periods of time. By early 1625 it was clear that he did not have long left to live and when he died on the 27th of March it was something of a relief to a man who was suffering considerably in an age prior to effective medical treatments for many of the issues which plagued him. Hence was it that Charles subsequently ascended as King Charles I of England, Scotland and Ireland in the spring of 1625. He was just 24 years of age and determined to rule the Stuart kingdoms in a different manner to how his father had. The first issue at hand for Charles was war with Spain. Parliament had voted through several financial subsidies in 1624 which provided the necessary financial backing for a conflict, and even in the final months of James’ reign it was clear that war was inevitable. However, it was Charles who formally initiated the Second Anglo-Spanish War. It would be a mixed affair, one which Charles only prosecuted in a limited fashion after an enormously costly naval expedition to the Spanish city of Cadiz in the autumn of 1625 ended in complete failure. Buckingham had overseen the endeavour and Charles was reluctant to investigate what had gone wrong for fear it would embarrass the duke, who continued to hold a position of pre-eminence at the Stuart court following James’ death and Charles’ accession. Thereafter England did not launch another large expedition against the Spanish, while Spain for its part was bogged down in dealing with affairs elsewhere in Europe, notably in northern Italy during the late 1620s. Therefore, while the Anglo-Spanish War dragged on until 1630, it was only fully prosecuted in 1625 and 1626 and thereafter half-heartedly. When it came to an end neither side had gained or lost much of anything other than vast sums of money. While the war with Spain was something of a non-event when it finally broke out, the breakdown of negotiations surrounding the Spanish Match did have the highly significant impact of driving England towards France in the European system of alliances. No sooner had it become clear that Charles would not marry the Spanish Infanta thaten negotiations were opened between England and France for Charles to marry Princess Henrietta Maria, a sister of King Louis XIII of France. Once these negotiations were initiated they were much more speedily advanced than had been the case with the proposed Spanish union. Accordingly, a proxy marriage was entered into between Charles and Henrietta at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris on the 1st of May 1625. Henrietta then proceeded to England where the union was more formally entered into during the summer. With this, England allied itself with France in its continental struggle with Spain, a major diplomatic shift which ensured amity between England and France for several decades to come. On a more personal level the marriage between Charles and Henrietta was successful, with the two being fond of one another. They would have nine children together, though only six would survive beyond infancy, Charles born in 1630, Mary in 1631, James in 1633, Elizabeth in 1635, Henry in 1640 and Henrietta in 1644. Yet the union proved problematic for the political classes in England, many of whom were suspicious of the Roman Catholicism of their new queen. Throughout Charles’ reign charges of his being a crypto-Catholic continued to be levelled against him on the grounds that he had absorbed some of his wife’s religion and the same concerns dogged his and Henrietta’s children for the remainder of the seventeenth century. Theat way in which Henrietta became a lightning rod for disaffection with Charles’ rule was in large part owing to wider discontent about the new king and his autocratic methods. These were quickly on display. In 1627 Charles dispensed with the standard method of obtaining financial support from the nation by requesting a subsidy through parliament and instead simply sent out demands for what became known as ‘forced loans’ based on the royal prerogative. In tandem he began extraordinary recourse to martial law to requisition goods for the war effort and to billet soldiers and mariners in towns across England and Wales. All of this met with immense resistance within parliament and in the wider political community. Hence, in the course of the spring and early summer of 1628 the king found himself being assailed to accept a declaration of the political restrictions which applied to him. The result was the Petition of Right which was passed by parliament on the 7th of June 1628, a document which has been viewed as a major addition to the Magna Carta of the thirteenth century in expressing the inalienable rights of individuals under the law in England. The Petition of Right might have led to a growing consensus between the crown and parliament had Charles been in any way predisposed to compromise with the political nation. But this was most assuredly not the case. Instead he was developing a growing commitment to dispensing with parliament altogether. Some of this was owing to the fallout from the death of Buckingham. Villiers had been retained in charge of England’s war effort by Charles despite his seeming military incompetence. This had created immense resentment in some circles and so it was that on the 23rd of August 1628 Buckingham was stabbed to death by an English military veteran, John Felton, at the Greyhound Inn in Portsmouth while he was in southern England preparing a new military foray against Spain. Such was the extent of Buckingham’s unpopularity by the autumn of 1628 that Felton’s actions were widely celebrated across England. But Charles was furious. This, combined with his clash with parliament over the Petition of Right and other matters, convinced him that he should now try to recreate the sort of absolutist monarchy that he had seen on display in Spain back in 1623. Accordingly, early in 1629 he dissolved parliament. It would not be reconvened for eleven years, a period in which Charles would govern through a small coterie of officials who wereas personally loyal to him and which has come to be known as the ‘Personal Rule’ by historians of the period. The Personal Rule was characterised by the king’s reliance on a clique of civil and religious officials into whose hands Charles placed immense authority. In the religious sphere none was as powerful as William Laud, a former religious advisor to Buckingham whom Charles had made Bishop of Bath and Wells in 1626. Two years later he was promoted to the bishopric of London and finally in 1633 he was appointed as Archbishop of Canterbury, the greatest religious office in England, when that see fell vacant. With Laud as his instrument, Charles initiated a campaign to establish a uniformly conservative version of Protestantism in England, one which is often termed Arminianism after the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius. Through this Charles sought to create a unified church, one which curbed the growth of evangelical Protestantism and the Puritans, a scion of English Protestantism who favoured a form of worship along the lines pioneered by Jean Calvin in Geneva in the 1540s. These efforts to centralise church authority were run through Laud, a firm believer in episcopalianism, the idea of ruling a church firmly through bishops and officials. Laudianism, Arminianism and other efforts by Charles to impose strict control over the Church of England would be a central issue which led to the conflicts of his later reign. In the secular sphere Charles came to rely in the years following Buckingham’s assassination on Thomas Wentworth, a member of parliament who had established himself as a great supporter of the king’s in the late 1620s, appointed as President of the Council of the North and then made a member of the Privy Council in 1629. He would be most keenly associated with Ireland, though, where Charles appointed him as his viceroy in 1632. Wentworth, who was eventually created earl of Strafford, governed the kingdom as Charles’ representative for the remainder of the 1630s and into the early 1640s. Throughout this period he established himself as the most keen advocate of royal absolutism in Charles’ dominions, using the policies of ‘Thorough’, a term used to denote the creation of a powerful central government by the raising of extensive taxes and revenues. In this way the king and his officers would not be forced to seek the consensus of parliament and the political nation for his policies and could govern in an absolutist manner. We might ask at this juncture who the monarch that was seeking to rule in such an absolutist manner in the 1630s was.? Charles was an individual whose personality was shaped in his early years by having been the spare heir, to use a modern term, one who was supposed to play second fiddle to his older brother and ended up becoming king instead. He never fully lost the speech impediment which he had suffered from as a child and his personality reflected this, always being reserved and cautious. On a personal level he was generous and a devoted father and husband, but there was most certainly an authoritarian streak to Charles, one which was considerably responsible for the clashes he would enter into from the late 1630s onwards. Though he was constantly attacked by his enemies as a crypto-Catholic, Charles was actually a committed Protestant, though one who favoured the high Anglican style of worship which with its love of ritual and rich adornment within churches struck radical evangelicals as a thinly disguised form of Roman Catholicism. Perhaps Charles’ most defining characteristic, though, was his lack of scruples. For Charles the ends most certainly justified the means when it came to running his realms and it was this Machiavellianism which ensured that he placed so much power in the hands of unscrupulous supporters such as Wentworth in the 1630s, men who would back his designs unquestioningly. It should be noted separately that Charles was a keen promoter and patron of the arts in seventeenth-century England. He established Sir Anthony van Dyck, a leading Flemish painter who had made his name in the Dutch Republic and Italy in the 1620s, as the official court painter in London. More notably he patronised the Dutch master Peter Paul Rubens, who painted a famous series of panels depicting the king on the ceiling of the Banqueting House at the government seat at Whitehall in Westminster. Charles also sponsored Hubert Le Sueur to erect a large equestrian monument which stands today at Trafalgar Square. While Le Sueur’s work is extant today, Charles reconstruction of much of St Paul’s Cathedral in London is not, as the portions of it which Charles was responsible for renovating were destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666. Other major artistic and literary figures who benefited from Charles’ patronage and support included the great architect Inigo Jones, while John Donne’s writing and poetry obtained royal favour in his last years. More broadly, Charles was an art connoisseur and his collection included a wide array of works by Renaissance masters such as Titian, Durer, Holbein and Raphael, many of which works are found in London’s museums down to the present day. While Charles was patronising a Carolingian court renaissance in England, his realms were experiencing a range of different problems in the 1630s. These differed according to which region one was in. For instance, one of the primary problems in England was that posed by the Puritans, radical Protestants who existed in large numbers across the country. They were adamant that they would not accept crown efforts through Laud and other bishops to enforce centralised control over the Church of England. Inadvertently, the persecution of the Puritans had the by-product of fostering English colonial efforts overseas as a great many of those who settled England’s colonies in North America during the seventeenth century were Puritans and other religious radicals fleeing persecution at home. In Ireland Charles had a problem in so far as Wentworth’s heavy-handed methods of governing the country had fostered a country party of New English planters, led by Richard Boyle, first earl of Cork, who wanted to govern Ireland in their own interest and not according to Wentworth’s dictates. Finally, in Scotland the Scottish Church or Kirk was utterly opposed to allowing Laud to impose bishop-centred administration of the country or episcopalianism. By the 1630s Scotland had decades of experience of a largely decentralised church where individual religious communities were governed by elders or presbyters. They would resist any such centralising attempts by the king and Laud over the Scottish Kirk. In the end it was efforts to change the religious administration of Scotland which first sparked the decade of conflict which would eventually result in Charles being deposed and executed. In 1637 Charles and Laud attempted to impose a standardised prayer book into Scottish religious services, one which constituted a significant departure from what the Scottish Presbyterians had become accustomed to. This was a delicate move, one which provided evidence of how out of touch the Stuarts had become from Scottish politics since they had headed south in 1603 to govern Britain from London. Street riots and organised protests amongst the Scottish church leaders, nobles and gentry ensued from the efforts to impose the prayer book and in 1638 a National Covenant was drawn up and signed by the leaders of Scottish religious and political life, whereby they stated their intention to resist any efforts by the crown or outside forces to introduce innovations to the Scottish Kirk. By innovations they meant the likelihood that Charles would now seek to impose conformist bishops to run the Scottish church. A showdown was brewing. What is known as the First Bishops War erupted between Charles’ government and his Scottish subjects in 1639 over his efforts to reform the Scottish church and introduce both the standardised prayer book and bishops to run the Kirk. The plan was for Wentworth to oversee raising an army in Ireland with the aid of the earl of Antrim in the north of the country, one which would then proceed across the North Channel to Scotland while a complementary English force advanced north into southern Scotland. However, matters stalled in Ireland and only one minor battle was fought during the war before a ceasefire of sorts developed in the autumn. The Scots were unsure how to proceed at this juncture, while Charles found himself in a difficult situation. He lacked the financial means necessary to wage a full-scale war against his Scottish subjects and would have to recall parliament for the first time in over a decade, as he wished to obtain a financial subsidy from his English subjects. Although he was ideologically opposed to doing so, he agreed that writs could be issued for a new parliament late in 1639, but when the assembly gathered at Westminster in mid-February 1640, the parliamentarians, led by John Pym, the MP for Tavistock, made it clear that they would not agree to a financial subsidy until Charles began to take seriously the question of political, economic and religious reforms which they wanted addressed. Infuriated, Charles dissolved the parliament after just a few weeks, a brevity which has led to the gathering becoming known as the Short Parliament. However, before long Charles would have no choice but to come sheepishly back to parliament willing to make concessions in return for cash. In the autumn of 1640 news reached Charles in London of a dreadful development to the north. In actions which began the Second Bishops War, which in reality was simply a continuation of the previous year’s half-hearted campaign, the Scots had gathered an army and marched into northern England. A few weeks later they seized the town of Newcastle. This was the epicentre of English coal production in the seventeenth century and London and southern England relied on supplies of the fuel to keep their homes warm over the winter. Consequently Charles would need to raise an army to prosecute the Scots. Hence he had no other option but to recall parliament which he had only so recently dissolved with assertions that he would not tolerate any demands for political reform in return for money. In this manner a new parliament met in early November 1640. In contrast to the Short Parliament which had sat for just a few weeks earlier that spring, the new parliament would last in one shape or another for the next twenty years and is consequently known to history as the Long Parliament. Much like when King Louis XVI of France convened the Estates General in France in 1789, matters soon slipped out of Charles’ control and within days of the parliament convening in November 1640 it was clear that the parliamentary opposition had a wide range of grievances which they wanted redressed in return for providing financial support to the king against the Scots. However, unlike in the later French instance, Charles would organise his supporters to resist parliament, leading to civil war. The nature of the opposition which Charles faced in parliament was multi-faceted. On the one hand there were many individuals who wanted their political grievances redressed. It had been eleven years since parliament had been able to call on the monarch to reform a wide range of matters to do with the administration of England and Wales. They were determined to take advantage of the opportunity offered by the crisis of 1640. Others had economic grievances. For instance, there wereas all manner of calls for reform of the customs and trade system in England, while the City of London’s mercantile community were aggrieved about the situation in Ireland where they had been coerced into contributing to the Ulster Plantation back in King James’ time and then had their estates confiscated by the crown in the mid-1630s after investing hundreds of thousands of pounds in the same, the equivalent of hundreds of millions of pounds in today’s money. But perhaps the most significant core of the parliamentary opposition faced by Charles came from the Puritans, those hard-line Protestants who favoured Calvinism and other forms of evangelical Christianity. They wanted to be able to worship in freedom in the Stuart realms and were determined to exact concessions to that effect from the king as the price of their financial contribution towards alleviating the crisis. The aggressive nature of this opposition was seen within days of the opening of the Long Parliament when its members impeached Wentworth, arrested him and detained him in the Tower of London awaiting trial. The impotence of the king at this juncture was seen in that he could do little to prevent the downfall of one of his foremost servants. When his trial opened in the spring of 1641 Strafford was accused of executing a tyrannical government and was also accused of treason. The trial proceeded quickly and Strafford was found guilty. Charles initially refused to sign his death warrant, but did so on the 10th of May after claiming that he felt his position and his family were now threatened by parliament. Strafford was beheaded two days later. Yet parliament did not stop there and in the months that followed drew up the ‘Grand Remonstrance’ a document outlining hundreds of perceived failings in Charles’ government which they wanted addressed in return for their continued financial and logistical aid. The second half of 1641 and first half of 1642 saw a gradual descent into civil war in England and an extension of the unrest across all of Britain and Ireland. In August 1641 the Treaty of London was agreed between the crown and the Scots, whereby they agreed to leave much of northern England in return for major concessions in the spheres of politics and religion. But this would only prove a temporary hiatus. It was overshadowed by the outbreak of a massive rebellion in Ireland in late October 1641, one which saw large parts of the country overrun by a confederacy of Irish and Old English interests by early 1642, though Dublin, Cork and a number of other towns remained under royalist control. With Ireland overrun, Scotland having effectively defeated the crown in a war and demonstrated its independence, and parliament ascendant in England, Charles realised he needed to act or risk becoming a mere pawn in events. Accordingly, on the 3rd of January 1642 Charles ordered the attorney general to bring charges against the leaders of the opposition in parliament, men such as John Pym, Denzil Holles and Edward Montagu, second earl of Manchester, who were the leaders of the opposition to him. The king then left London himself, an action which is retrospectively viewed as a mistake, as in doing so he left behind the huge cache of arms and ordnance in the Tower of London. Over the next several months both the king and parliament began taking steps to build up their military forces in advance of an armed struggle. Negotiations continued over a range of issues, but it was clear by the late summer that the two sides were drifting ever further apart. When Charles effectively declared war on parliament at the end of August it was more an acknowledgement of the existing state of affairs than a bolt from the darkness. Throughout most of what is known as the First English Civil War Charles made his base of operations out of the town of Oxford, site of one of Europe’s oldest universities. His wife, the much reviled French Catholic Queen Henrietta Maria, spent much of the civil war period in exile in either the Dutch Republic or France, along with several of their younger children. At Oxford Charles established a new court of his supporters, but life here was very different to what it had been in the capital during the 1630s. Oxford was ill prepared to deal with the influx of tens of thousands of new inhabitants and by 1643 the city was a mass of waste and disease, compounded by the quartering of a large royalist army in the surrounding countryside to protect the town should parliament attempt to seize the king. From here Charles oversaw a war effort which sought to defeat parliament and restore him to his rightful position of authority, all while also trying to bring the Scots to heel and to crush the revolt in Ireland. The civil war was a mixed affair over the next two years. The first major clash between parliament and the royalists was fought at Edge Hill on the 23rd of October 1642, though both sides then largely abandoned any campaigning for the winter so that it was 1643 before military clashes intensified. Fighting focused in 1643 on Gloucester where Prince Rupert, a continental cousin of Charles’, emerged as the foremost royalist commander. A major battle at Newbury in September of that year ended in a draw of sorts. Much more consequential was the parliamentary victory at Marston Moor outside York in northern England on the 2nd of July 1644. With this defeat Charles was forced to abandon any efforts to secure northern England. However, small victories for the royalists that summer and autumn in the south and west of England consolidated the royalist position and ensured that the civil war continued on into 1645. By then parliament had taken steps for the creation of a new professional army under the leadership of men such as Sir Thomas Fairfax, Henry Ireton and Oliver Cromwell. The New Model Army, as it became known, would play a crucial role in Charles’ downfall in the years to come. While these military manoeuvres were occurring between 1642 and 1645, the political landscape was also constantly shifting. The war was just an extension of the negotiations between crown and parliament and those same negotiations continued throughout these years. They were stymied, though, by Charles’ unwillingness to make major concessions. In this environment he made regular efforts to bring the rebellion in Ireland to an end in an effort tothe hope that he may have been able to raise an army from there which could cross the Irish Sea to England and ensure victory over parliament. Equally, he courted the Scots, though parliament did so too and in 1643 agreed an alliance with them termed the Solemn League and Covenant, whereby they agreed to act in conjunction with each other to preserve Presbyterianism in Scotland, to bring about a Puritan-dominated church in England and to wipe out all vestiges of Popery and Roman Catholicism across the three kingdoms. In this light, they viewed Charles’ negotiations with the Irish Catholics as heinous and evidence of the long-held suspicion that Charles was a crypto-Catholic. The culmination of the First English Civil War came on the 14th of June 1645 at the Battle of Naseby. Here Charles and Prince Rupert oversaw an army of approximately 4,000 cavalry and slightly less infantry. They clashed with a parliamentarian army commanded by Fairfax, Cromwell and Ireton near Leicester in the English Midlands. The parliamentarians considerably outnumbered Charles’ forces and with the recent army reforms initiated by parliament were better armed and supplied than were the royalists. The context was a renewed royalist effort to occupy parts of the north of England, while parliament had instructed Fairfax to begin making plans to lay siege to Oxford. The battle was initiated under foggy conditions and turned into a debacle for the royalists. After hours of fighting approximately 1,000 of the royalist forces had been killed, while thousands more were captured in the rout which followed. Charles’ personal baggage train even had to be abandoned in the hasty retreat and with it his personal papers fell into parliament’s hands. These were used extensively for propaganda purposes in the weeks that followed to demonstrate to English political society that the king had been in negotiations with the hated Irish Catholic rebels. Naseby was the defining clash of the First English Civil War and with it defeat for Charles and his cause became inevitable. Defeat at Naseby saw the parliamentarians gain the upper hand in the civil war. Leicester was captured by Fairfax four days later, following which he led the New Model Army southwest to capture the English West Country, a region which had been held by the royalists since the beginning of the conflict. The important port of Chester also fell in February 1646. By that time the parliamentarians had secured the aid of the Scottish to bring the war to a definitive conclusion. The last pitched battle of the war took place at Stow-on-the-Wold in mid-March, when a force of several thousand royalists was quickly defeated by the New Model Army. Realising his cause was lost, Charles made provision at Oxford to head for the continent to seek foreign aid from France or some other power to revive the royalist effort, though his exact motives remain unclear and it may have been that he intended to try to acquire aid from the Scots by heading north and offering enormous concessions to Edinburgh if the Scots would join him against parliament. He left Oxford in disguise on the 27th of April 1646, but before he could leave Britain he was captured by a Scottish force led by David Leslie at Newark in northern England. The royalist forces at Oxford capitulated after negotiations on the 24th of June 1646, effectively bringing the First English Civil War to an end. Charles was held under house arrest by the Scots in Newcastle for eight months after his initial confinement in the summer of 1646. Thereafter an arrangement was reached between the Scots and the English parliament whereby Charles was handed over to them. He was kept under house arrest in various locations across England throughout 1647, first at Holdenby House in Northamptonshire and then at a series of stately homes in East Anglia and Hertfordshire. Throughout this time it should be emphasised that he was under house arrest and his circumstances were comfortable, with access to his own secretariat. However, parliament was able to choose who he was or was not allowed to correspond and talk to. Thus, while he was, for instance, allowed to go hunting when he wished to while at Holdenby House and request whatever books he wanted to read, active efforts were made to try to restrict him from communicating with those who were sympathetic to his causehim, individuals whoand might attempt to revive the royalist cause. This did not extend, though, to meeting with Scottish political figures and Charles was able in the course of 1647 to negotiate with these politicians to bring about an end to the war in the north. In a spiteful measure, the parliamentarians imposed the chaplains and ministers who Charles was allowed to consult with, ensuring that his religious needs were served by Puritan and Presbyterian ministers throughout late 1646 and 1647. Negotiations were underway between the king and parliament throughout this period to try to resolve the many outstanding issues between them. Much of this centred on religious matters. In both the case of the Scots and the English parliamentarians Charles offered to bring an end to any future efforts to impose episcopacy, the method of governing the church through powerful bishops in a form of centralised royal control. However, all of those who negotiated with Charles on this point in 1646 and 1647 came to the conclusion that the king viewed this simply as a temporary measure and no one had any faith that he would not try to re-impose episcopacy and his own form of religion in both England and Scotland again in the long term. Other matters under negotiation concerned Charles’ supposed tyrannical and absolutist tendencies and as a safeguard parliament wanted to be given additional powers whereby it could determine its own sitting and dissolution, depriving the king of his overall control of parliament in the process. Parliament was also to be given control over the appointment of a wide range of state officials and the army. All of these measures were debated under the rubric of a document entitled The Heads of Proposals. The tenor of these was mild in a situation where Charles had effectively lost the civil war, but the king was too hard-headed and convinced of his divine right to rule to accept the proposals unequivocally and in the long run it simply served to tarnish the reputation of individuals like Henry Ireton who were responsible for negotiating with the king on many of the points at hand. As the negotiations between king and parliament continued Charles was more than aware that there were divisions growing amongst his enemies. These often arose where one faction was more concerned about economic affairs or politics, while for others religion was the predominant matter. There was also growing discontent within the New Model Army about arrears of pay and a developing dissatisfaction with the way negotiations with Charles were being handled. Charles was not oblivious to all of this and had determined by the autumn of 1647 that the time might be ripe to try to escape and recommence the civil war. He was doubly incentivised to do so when he learned that at least two members of the army council, Captain Bishop and Major Thomas Harrison, had begun to argue that the king should be placed on trial and could conceivably be executed for his crimes. This possibility was still anathema to most of those involved in negotiating with Charles in 1647, such was the belief in the divine right of kings in early modern Europe, but it would become a more acceptable option to many as events unfolded. In the immediate term the upshot of these developments was that Charles escaped from Hampton Court, the scene of his latest house arrest, on the 11th of November 1647. But the plan was botched, as Charles had been informed that the governor of the Isle of Wight, Colonel Robert Hammond, was sympathetic to his situation, but instead learned when he arrived there that Hammond intended to arrest him. Thus, no sooner had Charles escaped from Hampton Court than he was arrested again and this time placed in captivity at Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight, where he would spend the next thirteen months. Despite the botched effort at escaping his captors, Charles’ fleeting release and the plans he had put in place did lead to a brief resurgence in the royalist cause in Britain. In the winter of 1647 rebellions broke out in Wales and Kent in support of Charles, followed by a Scottish invasion of northern England, Charles having shrewdly bought off large sections of the Scottish political community prior to escaping from Hampton Court. The Second English Civil War, as this new war is known, so as to distinguish it from the First English Civil War of the period from 1642 to 1646, was a short-lived affair. Sir Thomas Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell quickly gathered contingents of the New Model Army and headed north to see off the threat from the Scots. Cromwell won a major victory at the Battle of Preston in mid-August and this effectively brought the conflict to an end. In the weeks that followed royalist strongholds capitulated to parliament. In the end, all this Second English Civil War achieved was reducing the divisions which had been developing between the parliamentarians and within the army and refocusing attentions on the threat which the king posed. The end of the Second Civil War was a watershed moment in parliament’s attitudes towards Charles. The terms of his confinement at Carisbrooke Castle were more severe in 1648 than they had been throughout 1647, but he was still allowed to receive dignitaries and communicate with his followers and it was clear that the king had every intention of launching a new war if he could. Faced with this impossible set of circumstances, a growing number of individuals within parliament and the army high command began to believe that Charles did indeed need to be placed on trial and removed from affairs. On the Isle of Wight Charles was aware of exactly how precarious his situation was and engaged in an extensive correspondence with his allies, authoring as many as a thousand letters during this time. He would also appear to have entered into a relationship with Jane Whorwood, the daughter of an official who operated the royal stables at Carisbrooke. Whether it was a friendship or something more has never been fully ascertained, though the king never mentioned Mrs Whorwood in his letters to his wife on the continent. By the early winter of 1648 it was clear that Charles’ last hope lay in a compromise with parliament. A document entitled The Remonstrance of the Army was published in London that November, one which indicated that the military high command were now set on bringing the king to trial for what they knowingly referred to as, quote, “exemplary justice…in capital punishment.” Alternatively, Charles hoped that a solution might be found whereby parliament would either accept wide-ranging concessions for him or that he would abdicate in favour of his eldest son and namesake, who had turned eighteen earlier that year and who was in residence at the Hague in the Dutch Republic. These hopes were dashed, though, on the 6th of December 1648 when a commander of the New Model Army, Colonel Thomas Pride, led a detachment to Westminster and purged the Long Parliament of those members who still sought a compromise with Charles. The remaining parliamentarians, referred to as the Rump Parliament, now determined to place Charles on trial. The case commenced at Westminster Hall on the 20th of January 1649, whereat Charles stood charged with tyranny and treason. In a week of proceedings Charles refused repeatedly to acknowledge the legitimacy of the court, claiming that as god’s representative sent to rule England in his stead, he could not legitimately be placed on trial. It was Charles’ finest hour in many respects, with his defence consisting of mocking the judges, demanding to know by what right they were placing him on trial and questioning why they had had to purge parliament in order to gain a consensus for trying him. When he was found guilty on the 27th of January and condemned to death it was a theoretical victory for Charles’ enemies, but they would have preferred a more comprehensive propaganda victory over the king, whereas in actuality it had the appearance of a show trial, one which elicited significant public sympathy for Charles in the end. 59 men signed Charles’ death warrant, the 59 regicides as they would become known to history. Charles’ execution was to be speedily carried out. He spent the last days of January writing letters to his family, supporters and loved ones. To his younger sons James and Henry he wrote imploring them not to be used as pawns in any future civil conflict and to support their older brother Charles as the new head of the royal family and a king in exile. He also composed his last will and testament, a 5,000 word statement that touched in which he defendedon his defence of true religion and divine justice in Britain and Ireland. Then, on the morning of the 30th of January 1649, Charles was led out to be executed in front of the Banqueting Hall at Westminster. He famously wore two shirts that winter morning, the king having determined that he didn’t want to shiver from the cold and give anyone the impression that he was doing so out of fear. With his last words he spoke about how a subject and a sovereign were two different things and that he could not justly be executed on the orders of any court. Referring to himself as a “martyr of the people”, he claimed that everything he had done had been to preserve liberty in England. Then he forgave his executioner, the man who moments later severed the king’s head from his body. With Charles’ death in January 1649 Parliament was seemingly victorious, but it still faced considerable pockets of royalist resistance in England and Wales, while in Scotland the nation there soon declared in favour of the executed king’s eldest son and heir as King Charles II. This would result in what is sometimes called the Third English Civil War, while a major conflict was still underway in Ireland where parliamentary forces would remain fighting until 1653. But eventually the parliament emerged victorious and a Commonwealth or republic was established, dominated by Puritan war veterans such as Oliver Cromwell came to dominate it. In Cromwell’s case he was made Lord Protector of the nation in the mid-1650s and was even offered the crown himself, though he refused it. But the political experiment was a short-lived one and when Cromwell died in the autumn of 1658 many began to pine for a return of the old Stuart monarchy. As they did, negotiations were initiated with the government in exile in the Dutch Republic of Charles II and in 1660 he returned to England and was restored to the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland. His father’s clash with parliament and his subsequent execution might be said to have been in vain, but the monarchy which was restored in 1660 was a much more limited one which was increasingly answerable to parliament and which would gradually evolve over the next century or so into the constitutional monarchy of modern times, where parliament controls the political realm and the monarch of the day broadly acts in a ceremonial capacity. Upon his son’s restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660, parliament determined to declare Charles to be a martyr in the list of Anglican saints. Despite promises that he would not seek vengeance on those who had killed hism father, Charles II also systematically had the surviving regicides who had signed the death warrant in 1649 hunted down and generally killed. Perhaps surprisingly, there was no decision taken to remove Charles’ remains from where they had been interred at Windsor following his execution and reinter them at Westminster Abbey alongside his father James I. Instead a new mausoleum was intended to be placed over his grave at Windsor by the great architect of London, Sir Christopher Wren, during the Restoration era, though this was never accomplished. Charles’ time as an Anglican martyr was brought to an end in the 1890s as his historical legacy continued to deteriorate. Charles I is one of England’s most disliked kings. In surveys and commentaries over the centuries he has generally not fared well in the popular imagination or amongst professional historians assessing the relative merits and demerits of his rule. There are perhaps some good reasons for this. Charles, after all, led not just England, but the entirety of his political dominions into civil conflict from the late 1630s onwards. Between the Bishops Wars, the English Civil Wars and the Confederate War in Ireland hundreds of thousands of people were killed and millions were displaced or negatively impacted. Much of this was due to the king’s authoritarian streak and his implacability when it came to negotiating either with his Scottish subjects who did not wish to have their own idiosyncratic national church interfered with or with the English parliament who wanted a monarch who was more considerate towards the grievances of the political nation. Throughout the 1630s he stoked these problems and then when war seemed to be brewing in the early 1640s he refused to back down and instead elected for civil war. Even when he was effectively defeated in the mid-1640s he could not fully embrace compromise and his continued double dealing eventually forced a radical element within parliament and the army to do the unthinkable and kill gods anointed representative sent to govern England. But there is another way of assessing Charles’ life and reign. He was a monarch who was living through and trying to rule during a very difficult period in European history. This was an age known as the ‘General Crisis’ of the seventeenth century. Few corners of Europe managed to avoid rebellions and wars in the 1640s owing to a wide array of political, religious, social and economic upheavals. Combined with this Charles faced a radical element within his own parliament who were determined to develop a fundamentally new relationship between the crown and the political nation. He had also inherited a fractious religious landscape, one in which his efforts to centralise state control over the church were unfairly seen as crypto-Catholicism. Moreover, civil unrest of this kind was nothing new in England. There had been a major clash between the crown and the political nation on average every fifty years going back since the twelfth century. Given all of this, Charles might have reasonably expected a different kind of war than the one which eventually developed. He certainly cannot have imagined when he entered into the conflict that he would lose his crown and his head. As such, there are two ways of viewing Charles’ reign, one in which he was the author of his own misfortunes and another in which he was the victim of circumstances. The answer is most likely a combination of the two. What do you think of King Charles I? Is he unfairly vilified as a terrible king or was he dogged by a political community which had become dominated by dangerous religious and political extremists? Please let us know in the comment section, and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.