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 Charles
was born in 1600, son of James VI of Scotland (who upon the death of Queen
Elizabeth in 1603 became James I of England as well). In 1625 he became king
of England and Scotland, although the governments of the two countries
continued to be independent until the time of Queen Anne. Most of his reign
was devoted to a struggle with the House of Commons of the English
Parliament, a struggle that erupted into civil war and ended with the
beheading of the king for treason by order of Parliament.
A war which was, in one sense, about taxation, was in another sense about
religion. The Parliamentary armies were led by Oliver Cromwell (a collateral
descendant of Henry VIII's advisor Thomas Cromwell), a staunch Puritan and a
military genius. He began by opposing Charles in the name of liberty, but
since it soon became clear that Cromwell himself was no friend to liberty,
his battle cry became the Puritan faith. Wherever his troops went, they
smashed stained-glass windows and pictures and statues, stabled their horses
in churches, and burned vestments and Prayer Books. [A correspondent from
Ely informs me that this practice was not universal. For example, Cromwell
ordered his soldiers not to vandalize Ely Cathedral.] At the end, when
Charles was Cromwell's prisoner, he was required to assent to a law
abolishing bishops in the Church of England. He had previously given his
consent to such an abolition in Scotland, where the Puritans were in the
majority, but here he dug in his heels and declared that Bishops were part
of the Church as God had established it, and that he could not in conscience
assent to Cromwell's demand. His refusal sealed his doom, and it is for this
that he is accounted a martyr, since he could have saved his life by giving
in on this question. He was brought to trial before Parliament, found guilty
of treason, and beheaded 30 January 1649. On the scaffold, he said (I quote
from memory and may not have the exact words):
No man in England is a better friend to liberty than myself, But I must tell
you plainly that the liberty of subjects consists not in having a hand in
the government, but in having that government, and those laws, whereby their
lives and their goods may be most their own.
That is to say, one may reasonably ask of a government that it establish
justice in the land; so that judges do not take bribes, so that innocent men
are not convicted of crimes, while the guilty are convicted and punished, so
that honest men need fear neither robbers nor the sheriff. One may further
ask that taxes be not excessive, and that punishments be not
disproportionate to the crime. Charles would have said, "Do not ask whether
the laws were made by men whom you elected. Ask whether they are reasonable
and good laws, upholding justice and the public weal." He would have invited
comparison of his record in this respect with that of the Long Parliament
(which sat for twenty years without an election, and whose members came to
think of themselves as rulers for life, accountable to no one) and Cromwell
(who eventually dissolved Parliament and ruled as a military dictator, under
whose rule the ordinary Englishman had far less liberty than under Charles).
In his struggle with his opponents, Charles considered himself to be
contending for two things:
(1) the good of the realm and the liberty and well-being of the people,
which he believed would be better served by the monarch ruling according to
ancient precedent, maintaining the traditional rights of the people as
enshrined in the common law, than by a Parliament that ended up denying that
it was either bound by the law or accountable to the people; and
(2) the Church of England, preaching the doctrine of the undivided Church of
the first ten centuries, administering sacraments regarded not as mere
psychological aids to devotion but as vehicles of the presence and activity
of God in his Church, governed by bishops who had been consecrated by
bishops who had been consecrated by bishops... back certainly to the second
century, and, as many have believed, back to the Twelve Apostles and to the
command of Christ himself.
In his Declaration at Newport, in the last year of his life, he said:
I conceive that Episcopal government is most consonant to the Word of God,
and of an apostolical institution, as it appears by the Scripture, to have
been practised by the Apostles themselves, and by them committed and derived
to particular persons as their substitutes or successors therein and hath
ever since to these last times been exercised by Bishops in all the Churches
of Christ, and therefore I cannot in conscience consent to abolish the said
government.
In a day when religious toleration was not widespread, King Charles I was
noteworthy for his reluctance to engage in religious persecution of any
kind, whether against Romanists or Anabaptists.
His attitude toward accusations of witchcraft is noteworthy. His father,
King James I, had written a book on witchcraft, and considered himself an
expert on the subject. Under his reign, persecutions of witches were
frequent. Public hysteria brought many suspects to the stake. It was
Charles's practice to have women accused of witchcraft brought before him,
and in most cases, he concluded that they were old and sick or wandering in
their wits, and he gave them money and sent them home.
Charles was never a Roman Catholic, and firmly refused all urgings to become
one, saying that he believed the Church of England to be more truly Catholic
than the Church of Rome. However, there were many Roman Catholics in his
family. His mother, Anne of Denmark, had converted to Rome. His own wife,
Henrietta Maria, a French princess whom he had married in what was
originally a political alliance but ended as a love match, was a Roman
Catholic. His oldest son Charles became a Roman on his deathbed, and his
second son, later James II, became one while still healthy, and lost his
throne on account of it. It was accordingly not surprising that the Puritans
accused him of being secretly disposed toward Rome, and that they regarded
all his moves toward religious toleration as part of a Roman Catholic plan
to seize the government.
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