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.
Richard II, the last Plantagenet king of the senior line, was deposed in London on 30 September 1399 and replaced by his cousin Henry of Bolingbroke, who took the throne as Henry IV. Within five months Richard was dead at Pontefract Castle in Yorkshire — most likely starved to death on the new king’s quiet instruction — at the age of 33. He had reigned for twenty-two years, and he lost his crown in a single summer, undone less by foreign enemies than by his own treatment of the great nobles of his realm.
Richard had come to the throne in 1377 as a boy of ten, the grandson of Edward III, and his minority and early reign were shadowed by powerful magnates who curbed and humiliated him. In 1387–88 a group of senior lords, the Lords Appellant, used a hostile “Merciless Parliament” to destroy the king’s favorites and reduce him to a figurehead. Richard never forgot it. After years of careful, even successful, government in the 1390s, he turned in 1397 to a calculated revenge: he had the leading Appellants killed, imprisoned, or exiled, packed Parliament, extracted forced loans, and ruled as something close to an absolute monarch, claiming the laws were in his own breast.
The single act that destroyed him followed the death in February 1399 of his uncle, John of Gaunt, the richest man in England. Richard confiscated the vast Lancastrian inheritance and converted the existing exile of Gaunt’s son, Henry Bolingbroke, into banishment for life. The rule of inheritance was the foundation of the whole noble order; by seizing one duke’s lawful estate, Richard taught every magnate in England that nothing they owned was safe. When the king then sailed to Ireland with much of his strength, Bolingbroke landed in Yorkshire to reclaim his birthright, and the nobility flocked to him.
Richard returned to find his support evaporated. He surrendered at Flint Castle in August 1399, was carried to the Tower, and on 30 September was made to renounce the crown; Parliament confirmed his deposition and a long bill of charges. Henry IV was crowned on 13 October. A failed plot to restore Richard early in 1400 made the deposed king too dangerous to keep alive, and he died at Pontefract around 14 February 1400. The usurpation he provoked left the Lancastrian title clouded by the manner of its taking — a flaw that, three generations later, would help open the dynastic bloodletting of the Wars of the Roses.