CHARLES I., the second son of James I. of England, and VI. of Scotland, born in 1600. The death of his elder brother, Henry, Prince of Wales, in 1612, opened for him the succession to the throne. He received an excellent education, and was of a gentle and serious, but weak and obstinate disposition. In 1623, he, ac companied by his friend and favorite, the Duke of Buckingham, undertook a journey incognito to Madrid, in quest of the hand of a Spanish princess. This match being broken off through the ar tifices of Buckingham, Charles, in 1625, espoused Henrietta Maria, daughter of Henry IV. of France, and the same year he succeeded his father to the throne. Charles was a man thoroughly inocu lated with the dictum of the "divine right of kings," and speedily brought himself into collision with the growing intelligence of the age he lived in. Un der the advice of bad ministers, as Straf ford, Laud, and Buckingham, he adopted tyrannous measures for the support of the royal authority against the progress ing power of the people as represented by the lower house of Parliament. The levying of unjust taxes, and the adop tion of illegal modes of raising money supplies, soon precipitated the inevitable collision between the crown and the con stitution. After dissolving two Parlia ments, Charles summoned a third in 1628, which voted the king £280,000, but refused to pass this vote into law, until the king gave his solemn assent to the Petition of Rights—the second charter of English liberties, as it has been termed—by which he bound himself to abstain from forced loans and other illegal taxes, and from arbitrary impris onments, and the billeting of soldiers upon the people. Charles, after subscrib ing to this covenant, violated his prom ise, and finding that the Commons were determined to vindicate their rights, dis. solved Parliament on the 10th of March, and committed five of its members to prison for contumacy. Charles now de termined to govern alone by calling no more Parliaments; and ship-money was for the first time levied from the inland counties. At length the king and his advisers provoked an open revolt in Scot land by forcing a liturgy (a thing Pres byterians abhorred) upon her people; whereupon they abolished episcopacy, kept up a determined front, and Charles in vain determined to coerce them. Un der these circumstances, he, in 1640, as sembled a new Parliament, the members of which were moderate men, but still men who were indisposed to countenance his arbitrary proceedings. He accord ingly dissolved that body, and was com pelled to come to a truce with the Scots, who had entered the N. of England in
force. The houses met again in the same year, brought in a bill of attainder against Strafford and had him executed; imprisoned Laud, abolished the Star Chamber and High Court of Commission, and curbed the royal prerogative in other important matters. Things now went on from bad to worse, and both parties had become so thoroughly embittered and disgusted that no other course was left but a final arbitrament by the sword. The king raised the royal standard at Nottingham in August, 1642, and to it flocked the majority of the nobility, gentry, and yeomanry of the land; the Parliament troops, on the other hand, being composed of the citizens of towns and the artisans of London. The battle of Marston Moor was the first signal blow inflicted on the royal cause. The hotly disputed battle fought at Naseby, in Northamptonshire, June 14, 1645, was that which decided the fate of Charles. Six months after this decisive defeat, Charles, tempted by his evil genius, withdrew to Scotland, a country in which his name was held in odium, owing to the persecutions of Laud; where, throw ing himself upon the more than doubtful fidelity of Lord Leven, the Scottish gen eral, and his army, he was delivered up by the Scots to the English Parliament upon payment of £400,000. The fallen monarch was first confined by the par liamentary commissioners in Holmby House, Northamptonshire. Here he was seized by the army (which had now dis severed itself from the Parliament), or, in other words, by Cromwell, and re moved to Hampton Court, whence, after a futile attempt to escape, he was taken to Carisbrooke Castle, in the Isle of Wight. Here he carried on negotiations with the Parliament, who were willing to restore him under certain conditions, in order thus to overrule and break down the ascendant military power. But Cromwell, anticipating them, again seized the king's person, had him con veyed to Hurst Castle, near Lymington, Hampshire; and then, clearing out and crushing Parliament by "Pride's purge," prepared for the closing act of the great drama by having the captive sovereign brought to London, and put upon his trial before a High Court of Justice ap pointed for the occasion, on the charge that it was treason in a king to levy war against his Parliament. This trial began on Jan. 20, 1649, and lasted during four sittings. Sentence of death was pronounced upon him. Charles was exe cuted Jan. 30, 1649, in the 49th year of his age, and the 24th of his reign.