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Encyclopedia of world history (facts on file library of world history) 7 volume set ( PDFDrive ) 1280

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70 Charles I On the death of his father, Charles became King Charles I on March 27, 1625 He almost immediately married Henrietta Maria, King Louis XIII’s sister During this period, he became heavily influenced by George Villiers, duke of Buckingham Villiers had also been a favorite of James I Buckingham propelled England into a distastrous policy of foreign intervention that the economy of the country simply could not support Buckingham was widely disliked, and although he was impeached by Parliament in 1628, he was killed before he could lead another failed international expedition divine right of kings The main point of contention between Charles and the Parliament was his belief in the divine right of kings His father, James I, had taught him that, as king, he was answerable only to God Indeed, the impeachment of Buckingham by Parliament was as much a challenge to Charles’s belief in absolute royal authority as it was an attack on the king’s favorite courtier While Parliament conceded that the king had a right to appoint his own government ministers, members of Parliament felt that Charles should govern with their advice and consent Parliament attempted to use the voting of subsidies for the king’s government as leverage to gain such equality with the king in matters of governing the kingdom Religion also became an issue Although the country had been officially Protestant since the Act of Supremacy in 1534 established the king as the head of the Church of England, Charles’s queen, Henrietta Maria, carried out private Roman Catholic religious rites in the court Even more, the king himself favored Catholicism rather than the Church of England, the religion of the state Charles dissolved Parliament three times during his reign He also imprisoned in the Tower of London his chief parliamentary opponent, Sir John Eliot, who died in the Tower in 1632 When Charles dismissed his fourth Parliament in March 1629, he played out his belief in the divine right of kings and ruled as the sole authority in England He did not call another Parliament for 11 years Deprived of subsidies voted by the other governing bodies, Charles depended on ship money, a royal levy first applied to towns that depended on maritime trade for their livelihood, but later extended to inland cities Charles also sold monopolies, giving to royal favorites control of certain industries in return for funds, a thinly disguised attempt at royal influence peddling in return for financial gain Charles’s attitude toward religion also became a political point of crisis The archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, who governed the Church of England in the name of the king, was head of the “High Church Party,” which in effect was still similar in many ways to Roman Catholicism, more often than not referred to now in England as the Church of Rome, as distinguished from the Church of England Laud and the king further affronted supporters of Parliament during the years of the king’s personal rule because the monarchy was turning more to bishops for counsel than to nobles At the same time, the rise of Sir Thomas Wentworth, the earl of Strafford, was seen as another indication of the king’s belief in royal absolutism Wentworth was appointed president of the Council of the North and was later to rule Ireland Wentworth’s determination to rule in the king’s name had made a close friend of Archbishop Laud, but an army of enemies among those opposed to the king’s growing authoritarian rule In the end, the crisis came in September 1639, when Archbishop Laud had attempted to impose his vision of the Church of England, with its Book of Common Prayer, on Scotland reformation The Protestant reformation under john knox followed a different path in Scotland than it had in En­gland Scottish Presbyterianism was violently opposed to the Church of England’s neo-Catholic hierarchy and it was Laud’s ambition to impose the Church of England upon Scotland, supported by Wentworth and the king, that led the Scottish to assert their rights in defense of their Presbyterian Church in 1638 When an attempt to come to an agreement with the king failed at Glasgow, open rebellion broke out in Scotland in September 1639 Believing Scottish liberty to be under siege by Charles I, hundreds of veterans of the Thirty Years’ War flocked to the Scottish army Wentworth advised Charles to summon Parliament to raise money for an army to defend England from a likely Scottish invasion When Parliament was called in April 1640, its members, especially those in the House of Commons, quickly asserted Parliament’s right to share in the governing of England with the king On May 5, 1640, Charles closed what became known in history as the Short Parliament On his own again, Charles called Wentworth to northern England, where he attempted to raise an army to face the Scots In response, the Scots crossed the historic boundary between England and Scotland, the River Tweed, in August 1640 By this time, an unspoken alliance united the Scottish Presbyterians with leading opponents of Charles’s absolutism in Parliament

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