King Charles Arrests Parliament: English Civil War Ignites

Charles I did not come alone. He marched into the House of Commons on January 4, 1642, with 400 armed soldiers at his back, intent on arresting five members of Parliament for treason. No English monarch had ever entered the Commons chamber uninvited. The act itself was a constitutional violation that shocked even his supporters. When Charles arrived, the chamber was mostly empty. The five men had been warned and slipped out through a back entrance minutes earlier. Speaker William Lenthall dropped to his knees before the king and delivered one of the most consequential sentences in parliamentary history: "May it please your Majesty, I have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place but as the House is pleased to direct me." It was a polite way of saying the Speaker served Parliament, not the Crown. Charles scanned the benches, realized his targets were gone, and muttered that "all my birds have flown." He left the chamber having arrested nobody, looking like a bully who had walked into the wrong room. The botched raid destroyed whatever remained of Charles''s political authority. For years, he had governed without Parliament, levying taxes through royal prerogative and imprisoning opponents without trial. The personal rule, as his supporters called it, or the "Eleven Years'' Tyranny," as his opponents preferred, had already poisoned the relationship between Crown and Commons. The attempted arrest proved that Charles would use military force against elected representatives. Within months, England descended into civil war. The conflict lasted until 1651 and killed roughly 200,000 people in a nation of five million, a higher per-capita death rate than World War I. Charles was tried for treason by his own Parliament, convicted, and beheaded outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall on January 30, 1649. The institution he tried to arrest by force outlived him by centuries.