Paying for his wars and his alliances forced Charles I to turn to Parliament, which he treated as his personal chequing account. This was a time in history, after all, when Britain tried to populate its colonies with all the religions it wanted to get rid of. That Catholic-Protestant animosity beset his entire reign, and eventually erupted in the Thirty Years’ War. This in turn irritated Parliament, which wanted Charles to marry a Protestant in the first place. He was crowned in Westminster Abbey, by which time one of the central challenges of his reign had emerged: his Catholic wife, Henrietta Maria, the youngest daughter of the king of France, whom Charles married when she was 15, refused to take part in what she considered to be the heathen Protestant ceremony. He only became the heir apparent after his older brother died, in 1612. Charles I was a sickly child: he had a stammer, and probably rickets to boot. Nor – like our own shy, awkward, jug-eared former Prince of Wales – did he seem like much of a leader at first.
He was the son of James VI of Scotland who later became James I of England because he was the first cousin twice removed of Queen Elizabeth I, who died childless. Unlike our King Charles, Charles I’s claim to the throne had its soft spots.
He was the last British monarch to believe, absolutely, in the divine right of kings – that, as he once said, “princes are not bound to give account of their actions but to God alone.” Because he was enacting the will of God, he could therefore follow his own conscience, and he often didn’t have one. The first Charles (1600 - 1649) was crowned in 1625. The late Queen Elizabeth II looks at a painting of Charles I in 2018 with curator Per Rumberg at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.
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