Charles I: personal rule

The personal rule, 1629-40

On 23 August 1628, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham was stabbed to death with a "tenpenny knife" wielded by John Felton, an alienated soldier, who had continually been refused promotion by Buckingham. Although applauded by many, Felton was taken to London and executed on Tyburn Hill in November 1628.

1. The King's servants

	After the dissolution of the 1629 Parliament, Charles decided to rule without recourse to Parliament. When his opponents realized this, many of them made peace with the King and joined his service.
	One such was William Noy (1577-1634) who had led the attack on monopolies in 1621. In 1631, he became attorney general, and specialized in resurrecting and reintroducing long-forgotten taxes.

	Another was Sir Dudley Digges (1583-1639), who had led the House of Commons in criticizing Charles I's ministers. He sat on the Court of High Commission and became Master of the Rolls (1636).
	Richard Weston, 1st Earl of Portland (1577-1635) had opposed the wars with Spain and France, but in 1628 became Lord High Treasurer. A secret Roman Catholic, he persuaded Charles to make peace with Spain.
	Sir Francis Cottington (1578?-1652) was an enemy of Buckingham, but in 1628 became a privy councilor, and in 1629 Chancellor of the Exchequer. He too was secretly a Roman Catholic, as was Sir Francis Windebank (1582-1646) Secretary of State from 1632.

William Juxon

	The crypto-Catholicism of Charles I's chief advisors was widely suspected and deeply resented. Charles' whole administration was seen as inclining to Roman Catholicism, even though most of Charles I's servants were Protestants, including William Laud and his protegé William Juxon (who succeeded Richard Weston as Lord Treasurer).
	In December 1634, Charles I was the first English King since the Reformation to receive a papal emissary - Gregorio Panzani. (Sent as a spy by Urban VIII, Panzani's inability to speak English, or even fluent French, along with his personal vanity rendered him a complete failure in the role).
	After Buckingham's death Charles was increasingly influenced by Henrietta Maria. From the 1630s, he sought her advice over major policy decisions and appointments.
	Because Charles appointed to high office only those who agreed with him, lived an isolated life in a very formal court, and never called Parliament, he lost touch with public opinion. Profoundly underestimating the widespread hostility to his reign, he simply pressed forward with unpopular policies.

2. Finance

During the 1630's Charles continued to collect tonnage and poundage, impositions, and in addition revived ancient royal levies. All violated the principle of no taxation without consent.

In 1629, an attempted tax strike by merchants was broken by Charles, and a leading merchant, Richard Chambers fined £2,000 and imprisoned for speaking out against the illegal taxes.

"…merchants were in no part of the world so screwed and wrung as in England."
Richard Chambers

The income from these levies increased, as trade revived after the slump of the 1620s - England had made peace with France in 1629, and with Spain in 1630.

An ancient custom - not enforced for a century- required that all men with landed income worth more than £40 p.a. should present themselves for knighthood at the King's coronation. In 1630, Charles fined those who had failed to do so. This "Distraint of Knighthood" was based on an act of 1278.
Charles granted monopolies - not for new inventions - but simply as a way of getting money.
He levied fines for those encroaching on royal forests - reckoning the area of the forests as they were in the reign of Edward I (1239-1307)

The most unpopular of Charles taxes was Ship Money. In 1634, Charles taxed the coastal counties to pay for the support of the Royal Navy and in 1635, he extended the levy to the inland counties. He levied Ship Money each year until 1640.
Those who refused to pay were summarily imprisoned.
Most English taxes at this time impacted only the wealthy - only large landholders paid parliamentary subsidies, and customs duties were mostly on luxury goods. Ship Money, in contrast, was paid by quite poor people, who could often ill afford it.

In 1637, the wealthy Buckinghamshire landowner, John Hampden refused to pay his twenty shillings Ship Money assessment. In the Court of Exchequer, he lost the case, but five of the twelve judges found for Hampden.

The Ship Money trial was a cause celèbre.
One contemporary diarist, Thomas Knyvett, recorded how he tried to attend a session of the trial, but although he “was up by peepe of the day”, he “was so far from getting into the room that I could not get near the door by 2 or 3 yards”.

From 1638, more and more people refused to pay Ship Money, until by 1640 receipts had dropped precipitately.

When Parliament finally met in 1640, it immediately complained about Ship Money and in August 1641 passed an Act declaring its illegality.

3. Laud and the Church

William Laud believed that under George Abbot's lax rule the Church of England had surrendered all its rights to laymen without a fight. He regarded the seizure and retention of monastic land as sacrilege, and wanted the wealth of the Church restored.
Laud also wanted to restore the full value of tithes. Many of these had been commuted to a set amount that did not keep up with inflation. When the clergy tried to correct this in church courts, lay courts issued prohibitions taking jurisdiction over the cases. Laud put a stop to prohibitions, ensuring that tithe disputes would be heard in the more sympathetic church courts.

The Puritan laity had also begun to increase their control over religion by financing puritan lecturers from impropriated tithes. The "Feoffees for impropriations" were set up in 1625, but in 1633 Laud obtained from the Court of Exchequer an order dissolving the organization.

In his campaign for uniformity, Laud dismissed nonconformist ministers, suppressed puritan lectureships, and prevented gentlemen from appointing the chaplains of their choice. In reaction, the gentry and the puritans began to form an alliance.

Laud alienated still more Englishmen by his policy of ordering all churches to rail in the communion table at the east end of the church and rename it an altar. This was seen by many as popish superstition.

Charles also reissued the Book of Sports - a move that many puritans regarded as irreligious and profane, because it permitted recreations like archery and dancing on Sundays.

Laud himself was widely regarded as a crypto-Catholic, plotting to return England to papal obedience. This was not true, but Laud's belief that Puritanism, not Catholicism, constituted the main threat to true religion fed Protestant suspicions.

Laud enforced his policies savagely. He used the Courts of Star Chamber and High Commission to punish critics severely
In 1630, Alexander Leighton (1568-1649) was flogged, mutilated and imprisoned for life for attacking the Bishops.
In 1634, William Prynne, a puritan lawyer was fined and had the top of his ears cut off for a pamphlet against stage plays entitled Histriomastix. Prynne said that actresses were simply prostitutes - a tactless remark given that Queen Henrietta Maria was acting in a masque at the time.
In 1637, William Prynne was in trouble again; this time for attacking the bishops.

From the title page of a complaint against the Book of Sports published (anonymously) by Henry Burton

The puritan minister, Henry Burton (1578-1648) and the physician, John Bastwick (1593-1654) also wrote against episcopacy.

	Burton. Bastwick and Prynne were all three sentenced by Star Chamber to imprisonment for life, branding, and the loss of their ears. Such corporal punishments were accepted for common criminals, but outraged public opinion when imposed on gentlemen.
	Laud thought that by the later 1630s, he was successfully imposing discipline. In fact, he merely created a backlash amongst the gentry, such that by 1640 much of the political elite wanted the abolition not merely of Laud's regime, but of all Bishops.

4. Wentworth and Ireland


Sir Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford.

Thomas Wentworth (1593-1641) was a Yorkshire baronet, who initially opposed the crown in the Parliaments of 1621 and 1624. He had been appointed sheriff of Yorkshire in 1625 to prevent him sitting in Parliament again, and was imprisoned for refusing the Forced Loan in 1627.

In 1628, he and Charles made peace, and he was appointed president of the Council of the North. In 1629 he joined the Privy Council.

In the North, Wentworth broke the opposition of local gentlemen by summoning them before Star Chamber, which fined and imprisoned them.

In 1632, Charles transferred Wentworth to the position of Lord Deputy of Ireland. He called an Irish Parliament (1634) and skillfully played off Irish Roman Catholics and Protestant settlers against one another. He raised enough money to rule without further reference to Parliament.

The harsh policies adopted commanded obedience, but at the cost of alienating virtually the whole Irish population.

Richard Boyle, 1st Earl of Cork (1566-1643) was one of the richest and most powerful settlers in Ireland. (He was also the father of Sir Robert Boyle, the philosopher-scientist who outlined Boyle's Law, and of fourteen other children). Wentworth had Boyle heavily fined for taking church property; and Boyle thereafter worked secretly but single-mindedly for Wentworth's downfall.

	Wentworth also attacked Francis Annesley, Lord Mountnorris (1585-1660) for financial corruption. Wentworth and Mountnorris became bitter enemies. In April 1635, Mountnorris publicly threatened and insulted Wentworth, who promptly brought him before a court-martial on a charge of insubordination. [Mountnorris was an army officer]. The court condemned him to death. Although Mountnorris was not executed, he was imprisoned and deprived of all his offices on the charges of corruption.
	Wentworth alienated the native Irish as much as the English settlers. Wentworth resurrected an ancient claim of the English crown to ownership of the whole of Connaught. He then coerced Irish juries to find in favor of royal title to all land. When a Galway jury found against the claim, he had the whole jury and the local sheriff arrested, imprisoned and fined enormous sums, and then seized the land for English settlers.
	Wentworth also did all he could to undermine Roman Catholicism and native customs, since he regarded these as incompatible with real loyalty to the crown.
	Before he could complete the subjugation of Ireland, Wentworth returned to England in September 1639. He was created Earl of Strafford in January 1640.

5. The Scottish troubles

When Mary, Queen of Scots abdicated in 1567, a Presbyterian church had been established in Scotland.

James VI/I made some (largely-unsuccessful) attempts to reintroduce Bishops into Scotland, and in 1618 he had forced the Five Articles of Perth through the Scottish General Assembly and Parliament.

Five Articles of Perth
1.	The sacrament of the body and blood of Christ should be received kneeling
2.	It might be administered in private to the sick
3.	When infants could not conveniently be baptized in church they might be baptized at home
4.	Children being eight years old, and after being instructed in the Lord's Prayer, Creed, Ten Commandments, and Catechism, should be brought to the bishop on his visitation, to be examined in the religious knowledge, and to receive his blessing
5.	The days commemorative of Christ's birth, passion, resurrection, ascension, and the sending down of the Holy Ghost should be kept in devout observance.

These articles were seen as an attempt to introduce Anglicanism (if not indeed Catholicism) into Scotland and met intense Scottish opposition. Nonetheless, in 1637 Charles I decided to go much further and introduce a new Prayer Book and give the Bishops real power.

In Edinburgh, riots broke out when the new Prayer Book was read. In 1638, the Presbyterians introduced a National Covenant (modeled on the Covenant of 1581) protesting the religious changes. It was to be signed by all Scots, and 300,000 signatures were gathered.

Saint Giles Cathedral where the first Prayer Book Service was read

The Scottish Church - ignoring Charles' commands to the contrary - assembled in Glasgow in November 1638, abolished episcopal government and restored presbytery.

Charles wanted to put down the rebellious Scots by force, but having little money, he was forced to raise levies of raw conscripts and mobilize the "trained bands" of England's Northern Counties. They were miserably supplied and armed. The Covenanting army, in contrast, was a highly-motivated force which included many Scottish mercenaries, just returned from the battles of the Thirty Years War. The English army retreated immediately, and the First Bishops' War ended.

In 1639, Charles was forced to sign the Pacification of Berwick, accepting the Presbyterians' demands, but secretly he continued to plot to subdue Scottish resistance.

On the advice of Strafford, he called Parliament in April 1640. He and Strafford hoped to capitalize on anti-Scottish patriotic feeling, but they miscalculated badly. Charles' offer to repeal Ship Money in exchange for subsidies failed miserably. The Members mistrusted Charles so profoundly that they thought he would simply replace Ship Money with some other illegal tax.
With nothing accomplished, Charles dissolved Parliament on 5 May 1640 only weeks after it assembled on 13 April, and so it became known as the Short Parliament.

Charles was still determined to defeat the Scots militarily. He borrowed money at exorbitant rates of interest and pressed reluctant subjects into the army.
	The Scots (who were in secret correspondence with the leaders of the English opposition, Lords Saye and Sele, and Brooke) invaded England, easily defeated Charles' disaffected army at Newburn on Tyne (28 August 1640) and seized Newcastle. This ended the Second Bishops' War.

The humiliating Treaty of Ripon (26 October 1640) required that Charles I pay for the support of the Scots army. Lacking the £850 per day this cost, Charles was once more forced to summon Parliament.

On 3 November 1640, the Long Parliament assembled.