King Charles I of England

   Another name for Charles was Charles I Stuart.

  General Notes:

Charles I (1600-49), king of Great Britain and Ireland, in 1623 proceeded in company with Buckingham to the Spanish court, Madrid, to win the hand of the Spanish Infata. The English people, however, hailed with joy the rupture with Spain which ensued upon Charles’s pique at his failure. But he immediately dashed his people’s Protestant hopes by marrying the French (Roman Catholic) princess Henrietta Maria by proxy. Succeeding his father in 1625, he was soon involved in controversy with Parliament, particularly regarding the revenues rendered necessary by the extravagant policy of Buckingham; after Buckingham’s assassination (1628) he yielded his will to Queen Henrietta, whose influence over him was unbounded, and in the end fatal. In 1626, by the aid of loans and pawning the crown jewels, he fitted out two expeditions against Cadiz, which ended in failure. Charles was not by nature a tyrant, perhaps not even a bigot; but the force of his two chief advisors - Laud (made arcbishop of Canterbury, 1633) and Strafford drove him not only into violating the liberties which Englishmen held dear, but into irritating the conscience of England by carrying out Laud’s High Church ideas. He levied and raised money by granting monopolies and demanding ship money from the seaports (1634). In 1639 Laud drove the Scots to rebellion by his attempts to force a liturgy on them. These two events induced Charles to summon Parliament, of which two - the ‘Short Parliament’ (of three weeks’ duration) and the ‘Long Parliament’ - met in 1640. The Long Parliament impeached Strafford and forced Charles to assent to a bill enacting that Parliament could not be dissolved save with its own consent. Thus began the long struggle between Charles and Parliament; and the Long Parliament outlasted him. Charles hoped to win the Scots to his side. His return to London was marked by the Grand Remonstrance. The royal standard was raised at Nottingham, and civil war broke out. It ended with the disastrous battle of Naseby (1645). He surrendered himself to the Scots at Newark in 1646, who gave him up to the English; the story of his execution at Whitehall has a dignity which in part redeems his character. He was a pattern of the domestic virtues, but he was both too obstinate and too weak to cope with the tremendous issues he raised. [World Wide Illustrated Encyclopedia, 1935]

Notes on Charles I, King of England
Charles, born at Dunfermline, was a sickly child, unable to speak till his fifth year, and so weak in the ankles that till his seventh he had to crawl upon his hands and knees. Except for a stammer, he outgrew both defects, and became a skilled tilter and marksman, as well as an accomplished scholar and a diligent student of theology. He was created Duke of Albany at his baptism, Duke of York in 1605, and Prince of Wales in 1616, four years after the death of Prince Henry had left him heir to the crown. The Spanish match had been mooted as early as 1614; but it was not till 17 Feb 1623, that, with Buckingham, Charles started on the romantic incognito journey to Madrid. Nothing short of his conversion would have satisfied the Spanish and papal courts; and on 5 Oct, he landed again in England, eager for rupture with Spain. The nation’s joy was speedily dashed by his betrothal to the French princess, Henrietta Maria (1609-1669); for the marriage articles pledged him to permit her the free exercise of the Catholic religion, and to give her the upbringing of their children till the age of thirteen. On 27 Mar 1625, Charles succeeded his father, James I; on June 13 he welcomed his little bright-eyed queen at Dover, having married her by proxy six weeks earlier. Barely a twelve-month was over when he packed off her troublesome retinue to France - a bishop and 29 priests, with 410 more male and female attendants. Thenceforth their domestic life was a happy one; and during the twelve years following the murder of Buckingham (1592-1628), in whose hands he had been a mere tool, Charles gradually came to yield himself up to her unwise influence, not wholly indeed, but more than to that of Strafford even, or Laud. Three parliaments were summoned and dissolved in the first four years of the reign; then for eleven years Charles ruled without one, in its stead with subservient judges and the courts of Star Chamber and High Commission. In 1627 he had blundered into an inglorious French war; but with France he concluded peace in 1629, with Spain in 1630. Peace, economy and arbitrary taxation were to solve the great problem of his policy - how to get money, yet not account for it. The extension of the ship-tax to the inland counties was met by Hampden’s passive resistance (1637); Laud’s attempt to Anglicise the Scottish Church, by the active resistance of the whole northern nation (1639). Once more Charles had to call a parliament: two met in 1640, the Short Parliament, which lasted but three weeks, and the Long, which outlasted Charles. {Burke’s Peerage and Chamber’s Biographical Dictionary} It met to pronounce Strafford’s doom; and, his plot with the army detected, Charles basely sacrificed his loyal servitor to fears for the queen’s safety, at the same time assenting to a second bill by which the existing parliament might not be dissolved without its own consent. That pledge, as extorted by force, Charles purposed to disregard; and during his visit to Edinburgh, in the autumn of 1641, he trusted by lavish concessions to bring over the Scots to his side. Instead, he got entangled in dark suspicions of plotting the murder of the Covenanting lords, of connivance even in the Ulster massacre. Still, his return to London was welcomed with some enthusiasm, and a party was forming in the Commons itself of men who revolted from the sweeping changes that menaced both church and state. Pym’s "Grand Remonstrance" justified their fears, and Charles seemed to justify the "Grand Remonstrance" by his attempt to arrest the five members (4 Jan 1642); but that ill-stricken blow was dictated by the knowledge of an impending impeachment of the queen herself. On August 22 he raised the royal standard at Nottingham; and the four years’ Civil War commenced, in which, as at Naseby, he showed no lack of physical courage, and which resulted at Naseby in the utter annihilation of his cause (June 14, 1645). Quitting his last refuge, Oxford, he surrendered himself on 5 May 1646, to the Scots at Newark, and by them in the following January was handed over to the parliament. His four months’ captivity at Holmby House, near Northampton; his seizure, on 3 Jun, by Cornet Joyce; the three months at Hampton Court; the flight on 11 Nov; the fresh captivity at Carisbrooke Castle in the Isle of Wight, these lead up to the ‘trial’ at Westminster of the "tyrant, traitor, and murderer, Charles Stuart". He had drawn the sword, and by the sword he perished, for it was the army not parliament, that stood at the back of his judges. Charles faced them bravely, and with dignity. Thrice he refused to plead, denying the competence of such a court; and his refusal being treated as a confession, on 30 Jan 1649, he died on the scaffold in front of Whitehall, with a courage worthy of a martyr. On the snowy 7th of February they bore the "white king" to his grave at Windsor in Henry VIII’s vault; in 1813 the Prince Regent had his leaden coffin opened. Six children survived him - Charles and James, his successors; Mary, Princess of Orange (1631-60); Elizabeth (1635-50); Henry, Duke of Gloucester (1639-60); and Henrietta, Duchess of Orleans (1644-70), the last born ten weeks after Charles’s final parting from his queen. [GADD.GED]

  Noted events in his life were:

• Title: Duke of Albany, 1603-1625.

• Title: Duke of York, 1605-1625.

• Title: Prince of Wales, 1612-1625.

• Title: Duke of Cornwall, 1612-1625.

• Title: Lord of the Isles, 1612-1625.

• Title: Duke of Rothesay, 1612-1625.

• Title: Earl of Chester, 1612-1625.

• Title: Earl of Carrick, 1612-1625.

• Title: King of England, 1625-1649.

Charles married Henriette Marie of France, daughter of King Henry IV of France and Marie di Medici, on 13 Jun 1625 in Canterbury Cathedral, Kent, England ²¹.^,771 (Henriette Marie of France was born on 26 Nov 1609 in Hotel du Louvre (Paris), Ile de France, France,⁷¹³ died on 10 Sep 1669 in Colombes (near Paris), Ile de France, France ⁷¹³ and was buried in 1669 in St. Denis Basilica, Seine-Saint-Denis, France ⁷¹³.)

  Noted events in their marriage were:

• Marriage by Proxy, 11 May 1625, Paris, Île-de-France, France. ⁷¹³

• Alt. Marriage, 23 Jun 1625, Canterbury, Kent, England. ⁷¹³