Charles I: the early years

George Villiers, 1st Duke of
Buckingham,
by Michiel van Mierevelt
Public domain

The character of Charles I

Charles was different in many ways from his shrewd father, James I and VI, and all his life he tended to latch on to stronger personalities. As if to compensate for his own insecurity, he developed an exaggerated sense of the dignity of kingship, and was inflexible and authoritarian. He became fatally identified with one particular outlook and ruthlessly excluded those with opinions which differed from his own. In his efforts to root out the disloyal, his fears became self-fulfilling. Though his accession was the smoothest since 1509, the honeymoon period did not last long. 

Charles had inherited his father's favourite, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, who, until his assassination in 1628 had a huge influence on the young king. He also inherited a poorly-led and under-resourced war with Spain, following his visit to Madrid with Buckingham in 1623 and his ludicrously unsuccessful attempt to marry a Spanish princess. He was now embarked on a vain effort to revive the glories of the Elizabethan age and to restore his sister, Elizabeth, to her husband's territory in Germany, the Palatinate, which had been overrun by Habsburg troops at the start of the Thirty Years' War.

On 11 May as part of his new pro-French and anti-Spanish policy, Charles married the fourteen-year-old Henrietta Maria of France (1609-69) by proxy. In June she arrived at Dover and the couple were married for a second time. The marriage began badly, with were many quarrels over religion and the king's friendship with Buckingham.

Queen Henrietta Maria
by Anthony Van Dyck
Public domain

Charles's first parliament: 1625

Two issues came to the fore in this parliament: money and religion.

Charles needed money for the war against Spain, but the Commons were reluctant to grant him all he asked for. They voted a mere two subsidies (c. £140,000) and granted him tonnage and poundage, which had been bestowed for life on every monarch since 1485, for one year only in the hope that this would pave the way for a thorough reform of the customs system. But the bill for tonnage and poundage had not passed the Lords by the time the Parliament was dissolved and Charles’s military commitments left him no choice but to collect the money without parliamentary consent.

This parliament also saw a serious escalation of religious differences. The prevailing Calvinist theology that had been dominant in the Church of England was now under attack from Arminians, who denied the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. The controversy between Calvinists and Arminians had begun in the Netherlands, but it took a new form in England as the Arminians became associated with 'high-church' ritual and with promulgating an extreme version of the royal prerogative.


John Pym (1584-1643), the MP for Tavistock led the Commons’ attack on the Arminian clergyman, Richard Montagu, arguing that his writings ‘tended to the disturbance of church and state’. Members were shocked when, early in July, Charles appointed him a royal chaplain. This left many of them anxious about the new king’s religious sympathies.

John Pym
Public domain

In August Charles dissolved the Parliament. In October Buckingham sent a fleet of 5,000 sailors and 10,000 soldiers to Cadiz. But the £250,000 allocated was nearly enough. The navy had been underfunded for years and was in a poor condition. The fleet limped home in November after an ignominious defeat.

Charles's second parliament: 1626

On Thursday 2 February 1626, Charles was crowned, wearing the ancient robes of Edward the Confessor.  The Catholic queen took no part in the meticulously planned ceremonies, not even entering the Abbey as a spectator. This made her the first consort in English history to dissociate herself from her husband’s coronation. 


The second Parliament of the reign met in February 1626, shortly after the  coronation. Under Pym's  management, the Commons drew up articles of impeachment against Buckingham, accusing him of abuse of his offices, the corrupt procurement and sale of honours, and even hastening James’s death by means of a ‘drink or potion’. Sir John Eliot (1592-1632), MP for Newport, Cornwall, overstepped the mark when he compared Buckingham to Sejanus (and therefore Charles to Tiberius). The king imprisoned Eliot, but was forced to release them when the House refused to do any more business until he was set free. On 15 June Charles dissolved Parliament without having received any money.

In the wake of the dismissal of Parliament many of Buckingham’s supporters, the king allowed Buckingham’s stranglehold on patronage to become tighter than ever.

The forced loan

Charles was then confronted with the problem of how to raise the money for war if Parliament refused to vote subsidies. He ordered the continued collection of tonnage and poundage and the imprisonment of those who refused to pay. In September he authorized the levying of a forced loan to raise the equivalent of five subsidies. It was claimed that this was justified because of the national emergency. Fiscally the loan was a considerable success, yet the political cost was severe. The root of the controversy lay in a fundamental ambiguity within the constitution. Those who opposed the loan did not deny that the king could raise taxes in emergencies but they asserted that at this time no such emergency existed and that therefore Charles was abusing his emergency powers.

The five knights' case

With the backing of the Council Charles began to billet soldiers on the poorer refusers and to imprison the more prominent. Five knights challenged the legality of their imprisonment by seeking a writ of habeas corpus. Charles was determined that their trial before the Court of King’s Bench in November 1627 should uphold his general right to imprison at will without giving a cause where reasons of state security were at stake. The judges felt uneasy about this claim and therefore only entered an interim ruling: the king had a right to imprison these particular men, but did not have a general right to imprison without showing good cause. 

The anxieties raised over this case were reinforced by other wartime policies, including the billeting of troops on the civilian population, and the imposition of martial law over large parts of the country. 

The Isle of Rhé expedition

Buckingham tried to please his parliamentary critics not by ending England's war with Spain but by opening another front by declaring war on France on behalf of the French Protestants, who were being besieged in La Rochelle. This was a change of policy as previously England and France had been part of a loose anti-Habsburg alliance. The result was that early in 1627 England and France were at war - so that England was thus at war at the same time with both the European super-powers! 

In July Buckingham personally led an expeditionary force of a thirty warships and forty transports to La Rochelle. Two thousand men landed on the Isle of Rhé and began to besiege the main French position at St Martins. But this was an ignominious failure, and in November the force struggled home to Plymouth, while the French sang the Te Deum in Notre Dame beneath some forty captured English colours. It was a moment of intense national humiliation. 

The third Parliament:the Petition of Right

With the nation humiliated and the government desperately short of money, Charles summoned his third Parliament for 17 March 1628. The members assembled in a mood of grave anxiety. Instead of mounting a direct attack on Buckingham, they drew up a Petition of Right and presented it to the king in June. It sought the king’s agreement

1. not to raise taxation without Parliament’s consent
2. not to imprison any subjects without just cause
3. not to billet troops on civilians without their consent
4. not to impose martial law on civilians

 On 7 June Charles reluctantly accepted the Petition, and, believing that it would have statutory force, the Commons promptly passed a bill for five subsidies.

The Petition of Right, Parliamentary archives
Public domain

What followed next greatly increased the king’s reputation for duplicity. When the Petition came to be printed, he instructed the royal printer to efface the original statute number with a pumice stone, thereby undermining its authority as a statute. (These dealings came to light in 1629.)

In June the House presented two Remonstrances. One attacked Buckingham's conduct of the war and the other declared that tonnage and poundage (which Charles was continuing to collect) was contrary to the Petition and ‘a breach of the fundamental liberties of this kingdom’. On the following day Charles prorogued Parliament.

The assassination of Buckingham

On Saturday 23 August 1628 the political landscape was dramatically changed by the assassination of Buckingham by John Felton, an army lieutenant deranged at being denied promotion at Portsmouth, where he was planning a further expedition to La Rochelle. Though Charles was devastated by the news, people drank to Felton’s  health, and the funeral had to be held at night to avoid demonstrations. 

Buckingham's foreign policy was a failure. In October La Rochelle surrendered. After his death, it became more difficult for the king’s critics to blame ‘evil counsellors’.The chief was the queen, who became pregnant shortly afterwards. A son was born in May 1629,  but he died the following morning. (He was delivered by vectis and forceps by the Huguenot surgeon, Peter Chamberlen, one of the first cases known in England.) Another son - the future Charles II - was born a year later.

The third Parliament: second session

During the second half of 1628 William Laud became bishop of London and Richard Montagu bishop of Chichester. By the start of 1629 the majority of sees were occupied by Laudian bishops. It looked as if the Arminians were mounting a hostile takeover of the Church of England.  At the same time Charles continued to collect tonnage and poundage and ordered the imprisonment of those merchants who refused payment.

Between 20 January and 10 March Parliament sat again. On 24 February the Commons condemned ‘the subtle and pernicious spreading of the Arminian faction’ and urged the king  to ‘confer bishoprics and other ecclesiastical preferments ... upon learned, pious and orthodox men’. 

On 2 March, hearing rumours that Parliament was again going to be prorogued, the Commons held the Speaker, Sir John Finch, in his chair, and passed a Protestation, consisting of three resolutions: 

1. that whoever introduced Arminianism and popery was an enemy of the kingdom; 
2. that whoever advised the king to collect tonnage and poundage without the consent of Parliament was also an enemy of the kingdom; 
3. and that anyone who voluntarily paid tonnage and poundage was an enemy to ‘the liberties of England’.

Charles dissolved Parliament on 9 March 1629. He then imprisoned nine members.  (Eliot remained in prison until his death in November 1632.). Eleven years would elapse before he faced another Parliament. 

Conclusion

1. In the four years since his accession Charles had alienated a significant number of his subjects and raised fundamental legal, constitutional and religious issues.
2. He would now rule without Parliament. This was perfectly legal and was also possible - provided that he could live within his means.