Charles I of England — the divine right of kings met the executioner’s axe

Summary

Charles I reigned over England, Scotland, and Ireland for almost twenty-four years, from his accession in March 1625 to his execution on 30 January 1649; on that cold morning he was beheaded with a single stroke of the axe on a scaffold erected outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall, condemned by a court of his own subjects as a "tyrant, traitor, murderer, and public enemy." He was the only English king ever tried and executed by his people, and his death briefly abolished the monarchy itself.

Charles fell because he could not reconcile his conception of kingship with the reality of his power. He believed, as a matter of religious conviction, that he ruled by divine right and answered to God alone — that Parliament existed to serve the king, not to share in governing him. For eleven years, from 1629 to 1640, he governed without summoning Parliament at all, raising revenue through expedients that many regarded as illegal and enforcing a high-church religious uniformity that alarmed his Puritan and Presbyterian subjects.

The system broke when Charles tried to impose his religious policy on Scotland. The resulting Bishops' Wars bankrupted him and forced him to recall Parliament in 1640 to pay for them; the Parliament he summoned instead dismantled his prerogative government. By 1642 king and Parliament were at war. Charles lost the First Civil War by 1646, surrendered, and then — fatally — negotiated in bad faith from captivity, secretly allying with the Scots to launch a Second Civil War in 1648 that cost thousands more lives.

That second war was his death warrant. The victorious army, convinced that no settlement with Charles could ever hold, purged Parliament of members who still sought compromise and established a High Court of Justice to try the king for treason. Charles refused throughout to recognize the court's authority, insisting that no earthly tribunal could judge a sovereign. He was convicted, sentenced, and executed within the space of ten days. The monarchy was abolished and a republic, the Commonwealth, proclaimed in its place.

Timeline

A king who would not be limited

Charles came to the throne in 1625 reserved, dignified, and immovably certain that the authority of kings descended from God and was not subject to negotiation with their subjects. This conviction was not unusual in early-seventeenth-century Europe, but in England it collided with a Parliament that had grown accustomed, over generations, to controlling the purse and asserting the liberties of the subject. The two views of where sovereignty ultimately lay could be papered over in calm times; under a king as inflexible as Charles, and amid the religious passions of the age, they could not.

The friction was constant from the start. Parliament distrusted Charles's favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, resented his foreign wars, and forced upon him in 1628 the Petition of Right, a landmark assertion that the king could not tax or imprison without due process. Charles accepted it under pressure and chafed against it immediately. In 1629 he dissolved Parliament and resolved to rule without it. For the next eleven years — the Personal Rule, which his enemies called the "eleven years' tyranny" — he governed alone, financing the state through revived feudal dues and contested levies such as ship money, which he extended to inland counties without parliamentary consent. The structural fault was now exposed: a king who claimed unlimited authority but lacked the standing army and bureaucracy that absolute monarchs elsewhere possessed, governing a political nation that had not consented to be ruled this way.

The wars that unmade him

What broke the Personal Rule was religion in Scotland. Charles, advised by Archbishop Laud, tried in 1637 to bring the Presbyterian Scottish church into line with high-church Anglican worship by imposing a new prayer book. Scotland erupted. The National Covenant bound its signatories to resist, and the Bishops' Wars of 1639–1640 saw a Scottish army humiliate the king's forces. Bankrupt and beaten, Charles had no choice but to recall the English Parliament he had avoided for over a decade, because only Parliament could vote the taxes to fight.

The Long Parliament that assembled in November 1640 had no intention of simply funding the king. It dismantled the instruments of the Personal Rule, declared ship money illegal, abolished the prerogative courts, and sent Charles's chief minister, the Earl of Strafford, to the block. When Charles attempted in January 1642 to arrest five leading members of the Commons in person and failed, the breach became unbridgeable. He left London, raised his standard at Nottingham in August 1642, and the country divided into Royalist and Parliamentarian camps. The First Civil War was decided by the rise of the disciplined, ideologically committed New Model Army, which destroyed the main Royalist force at Naseby in June 1645. By 1646 Charles had surrendered.

He might still have kept his throne. The victors were prepared to negotiate a constitutional monarchy, and protracted talks followed his capture. But Charles, convinced that his opponents were divided and that God would yet vindicate him, negotiated in bad faith — signing a secret "Engagement" with a faction of the Scots in 1647 that brought a Scottish army into England on his behalf and ignited the Second Civil War in 1648. The army crushed it and emerged convinced that Charles was a "man of blood" with whom no agreement could ever be trusted. That conviction, more than any abstract principle, sealed his fate.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

The execution did not found a stable republic. The Commonwealth, and then Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate, governed England without a king until Cromwell's death in 1658; within two years the experiment collapsed, and in 1660 Charles's exiled son returned as Charles II in the Restoration. The new regime exacted a reckoning: the surviving regicides who had signed the death warrant were hunted, several executed, and the bodies of Cromwell, Bradshaw, and others exhumed and posthumously hanged. Charles I was reinterred at Windsor and, in royalist devotion, venerated as a martyr — "King Charles the Martyr" — with a cult and a feast day on 30 January.

The deeper consequence outlasted the personalities. The trial and execution established, in fact if not in settled law, that an English king was not above the law and could be called to account by the political nation — a principle that the Restoration could not erase. When the next king, James II, again pressed the prerogative too far, he was deposed in 1688 with far less bloodshed, and the constitutional monarchy that emerged accepted the supremacy of Parliament that Charles had died refusing to concede. Charles lost his head defending the proposition that the sovereign and the subject were "clean different things"; the long result of his fall was the demonstration that, in England, they were not.

Lessons

References

• Execution of Charles I WIKIPEDIA
• Trial of Charles I WIKIPEDIA
• Charles I of England WIKIPEDIA
• Why Charles I was executed LONDON MUSEUM