Charles I 1600-49
King of Great Britain and Ireland

Charles was born in Dunfermline, the son of James VI of Scotland (later James I of England) and Anne of Denmark. He suffered from childhood frailty, which meant he had to crawl on his hands and knees until the age of seven, but overcame this to become a skilled tilter and marksman, and he excelled as a student of theology. Having been baptized as the Duke of Albany, and made Duke of York at the age of five, he became Prince of Wales in 1616, four years after the death of his brother Prince Henry had left him heir to the throne. In 1623 he travelled incognito to Madrid with his closest adviser, the 1st Duke of Buckingham, to seek the hand of a Spanish princess, but in the absence of an undertaking to convert to the Catholic faith, he was rebuffed by Rome.

He was betrothed two years later to Princess Henrietta Maria of France, with the promise that she would be allowed to practise her religion freely and to have the responsibility for the upbringing of their children until they reached the age of 13. This arrangement received a hostile reception from the growing body of Puritans, but Charles was undeterred, and three months after succeeding his father James I to the throne, he welcomed his new bride at Dover, having married her by proxy six weeks earlier. But the retinue of a bishop, 29 priests and 410 attendants that arrived with her soon tried Charles's patience, and he had them returned to France within a year. In the 12 years following the murder of Buckingham in 1628, Henrietta Maria came to exercise growing influence over the affairs of state, and it was largely at her behest that Charles dissolved no fewer than three parliaments in the first four years of his reign, and then ruled without one for 12 years.

With England now at peace with France and Spain, Charles addressed the task of refreshing his dwindling treasury with unpopular taxation of the inland counties, and of pulling Presbyterian Scotland into line with the imposition of a common prayer book. The hostility that both measures engendered forced Charles to recall parliament in 1640, but it continued to frustrate almost his every action. Worse still, to divert hostility from the queen, he was compelled to approve the Act of Attainment, by which parliament could not be dissolved without its consent, and to allow in 1641 the impeachment and execution of his loyal Lord Deputy for Ireland, the Earl of Strafford, after his secret plan to suppress the king's opponents in Ireland and England was exposed. Resentful of the power that parliament now held, Charles went to Edinburgh in an unsuccessful bid to win over the Scottish lords.

The following year, his arrival in the Chamber of the House of Commons to supervise the arrest of John Pym and four other MPs, which had been prompted by his fear that the queen would soon be impeached, made civil war inevitable; on 22 August 1642 the royal standard was raised at Nottingham, marking the start of more than three years of bitter fighting. The war effectively came to an end with the defeat of the Royalist forces in June 1645 at the Battle of Naseby, but the king spent another year trying to rally support from his refuge in Oxford before finally surrendering to the Scots at Newark on 5 May 1646. In January 1647 he was handed over to parliament and held at Holmby House near Northampton, where he exploited his comparative freedom to negotiate a treaty with the Scots and to foment a brief resurgence of civil war.

In November 1647 he escaped to the Isle of Wight, but he and his family were soon recaptured and held at Carisbrooke Castle, until the king was returned to stand trial at Westminster. His three refusals to plead were interpreted as a silent confession, and on 30 January 1649 Charles was beheaded on a scaffold erected outside the Guildhall in Whitehall, within sight of the parliament whose authority he had never been able to accept. On 7 February his body was taken for internment in the vault of Henry VIII at Windsor. Two of Charles's three sons were eventually to take the throne, as Charles II and James II (see James VII and II), and he was also survived by three daughters, the last born 10 weeks after his death.

Bibliography: Maurice Ashley, Charles I and Cromwell (1988); Christopher Hibbert, Charles I (1968); Veronica Wedgwood, The King's Peace, 1637-1641 (1955), The King's War, 1641-1647 (1958) and Trial of Charles I (1964).