Charles I Ascends: The Path to English Civil War

Charles I inherited three kingdoms and managed to start a civil war in each one. When he became King of England, Scotland, and Ireland on March 27, 1625, upon the death of his father James I, he took over realms already strained by religious conflict, parliamentary assertiveness, and chronic underfunding of the crown. Within two decades, he would be at war with his own subjects, and within 24 years, he would lose his head on a scaffold outside his own banqueting hall. Charles believed in the divine right of kings with a fervor that made compromise impossible. He married the Catholic French princess Henrietta Maria, alarming Protestant England. He appointed William Laud as Archbishop of Canterbury, whose High Church reforms angered Puritans who saw them as a return to Catholicism. When Parliament refused to fund his policies, Charles dissolved it and ruled without it for eleven years, financing his government through unpopular measures like ship money, a medieval tax he extended to inland counties. Scotland broke first. When Charles tried to impose a new prayer book on the Scottish Kirk in 1637, Edinburgh erupted in riots. The Scots raised an army, and Charles, unable to fund a military response without Parliament, was forced to recall it. The Long Parliament of 1640 immediately began dismantling royal power, executing the king's chief minister, the Earl of Strafford, and abolishing the Star Chamber. By 1642, king and Parliament had raised rival armies, and the English Civil War began. Charles lost. Parliamentary forces under Oliver Cromwell defeated the Royalists, and Charles was tried by a specially created court for treason against the English people. He was executed on January 30, 1649, maintaining his dignity on the scaffold and wearing an extra shirt so he would not shiver in the cold and appear afraid. His execution made England a republic for the only time in its history, an experiment that lasted eleven years before his son was restored to the throne.