Charles I of England

Charles I is the only English monarch to have been tried and executed by his own subjects. King of England, Scotland and Ireland from 1625, he clashed with Parliament over taxation, religion and royal power, ruled for eleven years without it, and was drawn into civil wars in all three kingdoms. Defeated, he was beheaded in London in January 1649, and the monarchy was abolished until his son's restoration in 1660.

Charles was born on 19 November 1600 at Dunfermline in Scotland, the second son of James VI and Anne of Denmark. When his father also became king of England in 1603, the frail infant was left behind for a year; he walked late, spoke late and stammered all his life. His elder brother's death in 1612 made him heir. In 1623 he and his father's favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, travelled in disguise to Madrid to win the hand of the Spanish infanta; the trip failed, and they returned to press for war with Spain.

Charles succeeded his father on 27 March 1625 and soon married the French Catholic princess Henrietta Maria. His reign began badly. Buckingham's expeditions against Spain and France failed, and Parliament refused him the money he wanted. Charles collected customs duties without its approval, demanded a forced loan and jailed those who would not pay. He accepted Parliament's Petition of Right of 1628, against taxation without consent and imprisonment without trial, but kept collecting the duties. Buckingham was assassinated that August. When MPs held the Speaker in his chair in March 1629 to pass resolutions against the king, Charles dissolved Parliament.

For the next eleven years Charles governed without Parliament. He made peace with France and Spain and raised money through old feudal rights, monopolies and ship money, a naval levy he extended to inland counties in peacetime. Ship money brought in £150,000 to £200,000 a year in the mid-1630s, but John Hampden's refusal to pay became a cause, and the judges upheld the tax by just seven votes to five. Archbishop William Laud enforced ceremony and uniformity in the Church, punishing critics harshly. He also built one of the finest art collections ever assembled.

The crisis began in Scotland. In 1637 Charles imposed a new prayer book there without consulting the Scottish Parliament or Church, provoking riots and a national covenant against it. In the second of the Bishops' Wars, in 1640, the Scots invaded and occupied the north of England. Bankrupt, Charles had to recall Parliament. The Long Parliament, which met in November 1640, had his minister Strafford executed, abolished the prerogative courts and declared ship money illegal. In January 1642 Charles entered the Commons with soldiers to arrest five members, but they had fled. He left London, and on 22 August 1642 raised his standard at Nottingham.

In the English Civil War Charles ruled from Oxford, but after the royalist defeat at Marston Moor in 1644, Parliament's New Model Army crushed his main army at Naseby on 14 June 1645. In 1646 he surrendered to the Scots, who handed him to Parliament in January 1647. Confined on the Isle of Wight after an escape, he made a secret pact with the Scots that started a second civil war in 1648. The army, led by figures such as Oliver Cromwell, purged Parliament of moderates in December 1648. A special court, attended by 68 of its 135 commissioners, tried Charles for treason. He refused to recognise its authority. Condemned as a tyrant, he was beheaded outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall on 30 January 1649.

England became a republic, the Commonwealth, until the monarchy returned in 1660. Royalist writings built a cult of Charles the martyr, and in 1660 he was added to the Church of England's calendar. Historians have mostly judged him harshly: Ronald Hutton called him the worst English king since the Middle Ages, though Kevin Sharpe offered a more sympathetic view.

Our 1650 map shows the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotland shortly after his execution, at the time of the Commonwealth.