Charles I of England
Charles I was tried and executed by his own subjects, the first European monarch to be publicly beheaded by judicial sentence. Born in Fife in 1600, he was a sickly second son with a stammer who became heir when his brother Henry died in 1612, and succeeded in 1625. He believed absolutely in the divine right of kings, and his character — reserved, evasive, incapable of treating an agreement as binding — made every crisis worse. He quarrelled with parliament from the start over money, over his French Catholic queen Henrietta Maria, and over the Duke of Buckingham. After the Petition of Right in 1628 and Buckingham's assassination, he dissolved parliament in 1629 and governed without one for eleven years, raising revenue by reviving obsolete levies, above all ship money, which the courts upheld by a bare majority. With Archbishop Laud he imposed ceremonial uniformity on the church, which Puritans regarded as crypto-Catholic. Attempting to force an English prayer book on Scotland in 1637 produced a riot, a covenant and two wars he could not fund, which forced him to recall parliament in 1640. The Long Parliament executed his minister Strafford, abolished the prerogative courts, and in January 1642 he entered the Commons with soldiers to arrest five members, who had gone. He left London and raised his standard that August. He lost the war by 1646, negotiated with everyone simultaneously, and secretly brought the Scots into a second war in 1648, which convinced the army that he could not be trusted alive. He was tried by a court he refused to recognise and beheaded at Whitehall on 30 January 1649.
- Lived: 1600 CE – 1649 CE
- Nationality: English
- Roles: king, head_of_state
