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

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.