Charles I

Richard Cust

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317864370
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Charles I was a complex man whose career intersected with some of the most dramatic events in English history. He played a central role in provoking the English Civil War, and his execution led to the only republican government Britain has ever known. Historians have struggled to get him into perspective, veering between outright condemnation and measured sympathy.

Richard Cust shows that Charles I was not unfit to be a king, emphasising his strengths as a party leader and conviction politician, but concludes that, none the less, his prejudices and attitudes, and his mishandling of political crises did much to bring about a civil war in Britain. He argues that ultimately, after the war, Charles pushed his enemies into a position where they had little choice but to execute him.

Chapter 1

A political apprenticeship, 1600–1622

Prince of Wales

Early one morning in 1623, Matthew Wren was summoned to Whitehall to meet his patron, Lancelot Andrewes. He had recently returned from Spain where he had been acting as Prince Charles’s chaplain during the farcical bid to marry the Infanta. In an atmosphere heavy with conspiracy, he was ushered into the presence of Andrewes and his fellow anti-Calvinists, Richard Neile and William Laud, and charged to tell them ‘how the Prince’s heart stands to the Church of England that when God brings him to the crown we may know what to hope for’. Wren’s reply is one of the most interesting early assessments that we have of Charles. He was careful to cover himself, emphasising that he attended on the prince for only two months of the year, then only in his closet and at meal times. But he delivered the opinion that while

my master’s learning is not equal to his father’s, yet I know his judgement to be very right; and as for his affections for upholding the doctrine and discipline of the church, I have more confidence of him than of his father, in whom they say is so much inconstancy in some particular cases.

Neile and Laud then proceeded to argue over this verdict until Wren was dismissed, still not quite sure whether he had told them what they wanted to hear.¹

Wren’s assessment proved remarkably astute. He was certainly right about Charles’s loyalty to the Church of England, or at least to the hierarchical, non-puritan church that the anti-Calvinists wanted. Right up to his death this was probably his most consistent priority. He was also right about Charles being less learned than his father. Charles was intelligent and well educated, and probably had a more refined aesthetic taste than any other English monarch, but he could not match his father’s native wit or assured grasp of ideas. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the whole episode, however, was the uncertainty it revealed about the young prince’s religious and political inclinations. He was 22 when Wren delivered his verdict and few heirs to the throne in this period could have remained quite so inscrutable to those whose futures depended on them. But Charles was very much a late developer, largely as a consequence of a difficult and precarious childhood.

He was born at Dunfermline Castle on 19 November 1600 and throughout his early years suffered from a combination of poor health and lack of parental attention. When his family moved south in March 1603, on James’s accession to the throne of England, Charles remained behind in Scotland because he was considered too sickly to cope with the journey. When he did finally come to England, in July 1604, it was difficult to find a noble family to look after him because of fears that he might die on their hands. He was eventually placed with Sir Robert Carey and his wife Lady Elizabeth who provided him with a stable home until 1613 when he was considered old enough to set up his own household. During these early years, Charles saw little of his parents or his elder brother and sister, Henry and Elizabeth, and such contact as he had was often discouraging. There is a story of Prince Henry teasing him when he was nine by snatching off Bishop Abbot’s hat, placing it on his head and telling him that he was such a swot that when he was king he would make him archbishop of Canterbury. He was also largely ignored by the general public who devoted most of their attention to the glamorous Henry. This hardly changed even when he became heir to the throne after Henry’s death from typhoid fever in November 1612. There was surprisingly little of the romantic gossip which normally attaches to a future king; and after a flurry of dedications of literary works to him in the year after Henry’s death, aspiring authors looked elsewhere. It was, perhaps, indicative of his lack of impact that when he was installed as Prince of Wales in 1616, the bishop of Ely made the Freudian slip of praying for Prince Henry.²

Charles’s public profile remained remarkably low until about 1619. This was partly a consequence of personal difficulties. There were still doubts about his health and physical development which led the Venetian ambassador to report as late as 1616 that he would not be ready to marry for another two or three years. He was also notably shy and diffident, completely lacking in the self-confidence which enabled Henry to project himself as the focus of a popular cult dedicated to the revival of chivalry. Above all, however, it was due to James’s determination to keep him under his thumb. Towards the end of his life Henry, like a Hanoverian Prince of Wales, had threatened to establish a reversionary interest which would offer an alternative to the king’s court as a focus for politics and policy making. The prince became identified with an Elizabethan policy of war and alliance with Protestant powers on the continent. This was something James went out of his way to prevent in the case of his second son, not least because he planned to marry him to a Catholic. He announced ‘that the young prince [would] be kept within a stricter compass than the former’ and allowed only five of Henry’s household of over a hundred to be continued in office.³ He also kept him on a tight rein in terms of exercising the responsibilities appropriate for a future monarch. Charles attended with his father on state occasions, such as the opening of the 1614 Parliament, but he was not allowed to accompany him on his progress to Scotland in 1617, in spite of his express desire to learn the customs of the kingdom he would one day rule. In addition, he appears to have been largely excluded from influence over patronage. In 1616, one of the few occasions when there is evidence of him intervening in a suit, his petition for the bishopric of Carlisle on behalf of his chaplain, George Carleton, was brushed aside in favour of a much more obscure candidate backed by George Villiers.⁴ James made life difficult for his son during his adolescence, and Charles lacked the assertiveness to stand up to him, instead showing himself almost pathetically eager to please. However, the young prince was able to form one relationship which gave him a measure of confidence and support, with George Villiers.

Villiers became firmly established as James’s favourite and homosexual lover during 1615. Much of the time their relationship was akin to that of doting father and surrogate son, with Villiers spending much more time in James’s company than Charles and referring to him as his ‘Dear Dad’. The young prince found this extremely hurtful, and an incident in 1616 when, in the presence of the court, he turned a water fountain on Villiers and soaked him to the skin, was perhaps indicative of his frustration. At first Villiers (from 1617 earl, then later marquis and duke, of Buckingham) made little effort to soothe Charles’s feelings, but he was sufficiently astute to recognise the dangers in alienating the future king and eventually set about cultivating his friendship. The breakthrough came in the summer of 1618 when the favourite provided an elaborate banquet for the king at his house at Wanstead, without inviting the prince who was staying nearby. Charles was reported to be very upset, and Buckingham, realising that he had gone too far, immediately rode over to apologise. A week later he held an even more splendid banquet for Charles, as well as his father, which came to be known at court as ‘the friends’ feast’. From this point onwards the relationship between the two blossomed. Charles began to address Buckingham using James’s nickname of ‘Steenie’ and signing his letters ‘your constant, loving friend’. Before the end of year he had given him his reversion of the office of lord admiral, and was said to be allowing him to handle ‘all his business of importance’. By the beginning of 1620 Buckingham was reported by the Venetian ambassador to be ‘as great a favourite with the prince as with his father’. This was to be the most secure and fulfilling relationship of Charles’s early years. He seems to have found in Buckingham a replacement for the elder brother he had never really known; and increasingly he turned to him for guidance and help, particularly in dealings with his father.⁵

Between 1619 and 1621 a series of incidents showed Charles beginning to emerge from his shell and take a more prominent role in politics. The first of these was in March 1619 when both his parents fell seriously ill. Ann eventually died, with Charles attending at her bedside and then taking on the responsibility for managing her funeral. James recovered, but at one point he briefed Charles on how to take over, telling him to trust in the wisdom of his councillors, especially Buckingham, and protect the Church of England and its bishops. This episode showed Charles being thrust into a more adult role than any he had experienced before and finding that he was able to cope.⁶

The second incident was the crisis in the Palatinate that allowed Charles for the first time to develop a distinctive political identity. The Palatinate was to be the issue that dominated English foreign policy for the next 20 years. The crisis began in September 1619 when Frederick of the Palatinate in Rhineland Germany accepted an invitation to become ruler of Bohemia. This escalated the religious conflict in Europe, which had begun the previous year when Protestant nobles in Bohemia had rebelled against the Holy Roman Emperor, and also ensured that England became involved because Frederick had married Charles’s sister Elizabeth in 1613. To punish Frederick, Spain, the Emperor’s Hapsburg ally, invaded the Palatinate in August 1620. Frederick and Elizabeth were driven first of all out of Bohemia and then out of the Palatinate, where resistance to the Spanish finally collapsed in 1622. James was determined to keep England out of a continental religious war, but dynastic loyalty demanded that he do something to rescue his son-in-law. He therefore set about reviving negotiations begun in 1614–17 for a marriage between Charles and the Spanish Infanta, hoping that the Palatinate could be restored to Frederick and Elizabeth by diplomatic means. However, there was also a strong lobby in England that welcomed the prospect of armed intervention in support of the Protestant cause, and for a time in 1620 it looked as if Charles might be offering himself as its leader.⁷

Charles’s sympathy for his sister and brother-in-law probably dated back to the period when they were in England for their wedding. He had spent a good deal of time in their company and developed a warm, if fleeting, friendship with Frederick. Unlike his father, he welcomed the fateful decision to accept the crown of Bohemia, openly declaring how glad he was that ‘my brother is so ripe of judgement and so forward in inclination for the good of Christendom’. During the following months he took a particular interest in the Bohemians’ struggle, and was said to have declared that their ‘claims’ were ‘well founded’. Then, when news came that the Spanish had invaded the Palatinate, he was influential in persuading James to issue a declaration supporting the Union of Protestant Princes in Germany. It was said that ‘he spoke strongly in council and this encouraged many of the councillors while it dismayed the opponents’. The defeat of Frederick and the Bohemian army at the Battle of the White Mountain in November 1620 was said to have caused him such grief that he spent two days locked up in his room.⁸ All of this happened at a time when it also looked as if Charles was about to take up the chivalric mantle laid down by Prince Henry. During his youth he had aroused considerable admiration for his skill in horseman-ship and the knightly exercise of ‘running at the ring’. Now, in March 1620, he made his first entry at an accession day tilt, leading the procession dressed in full armour and then jousting with various offspring of the aristocracy. This made a considerable impression on contemporaries since the accession day tilt was the central event in the revival of English chivalric culture.⁹ At last Charles was beginning to assume an identity in the eyes of the public; and there was speculation that he might also be about to develop a reversionary interest of his own, based on revived chivalric values and a Protestant war policy. But this was premature. It was some time before Charles was to become sufficently self-assured to risk contradicting his father. Although he was reported to be unenthusiastic about the negotiations for a Spanish marriage, he continued to cooperate with the project; and when he made an offer to fight for the Palatinate in person he qualified it with the proviso that he would go only ‘if the king my father will give me leave’.¹⁰

The third episode that brought Charles into...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1 A political apprenticeship, 1600–1622
• Chapter 2 Charles and Buckingham, 1623–1628
• Chapter 3 The Personal Rule, 1629–1640
• Chapter 4 Charles and the British Problem, 1625–1638
• Chapter 5 Charles and the outbreak of the civil war, 1639–1642
• Chapter 6 Charles and civil war, 1642–1649
• Conclusion
• Index