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The 17th century was a time of great political and social turmoil in England, marked by civil war and regicide. Matthew White introduces the key events of this period, from the coronation of Charles I to the Glorious Revolution more than 60 years later.
The 17th century was a period of huge political and social upheaval. From an age characterised by the Crown’s tight control of the state, the century witnessed years of war, terror and bloodshed that enveloped the kingdom, as well as the execution of Charles I and the introduction of a republic. Yet all this was again to be overthrown with the restoration of Charles II: a short-lived return to autocratic royal influence finally swept away with the installation of William and Mary as ruling monarchs.

Charles I and notions of absolutism

The origins of the English Civil Wars are firmly rooted in the actions of one man: King Charles I. As a child, Charles was never destined to succeed to the throne. The weak and sickly second son of James I, Charles had lived in the shadow of his elder brother Henry, who was educated in the ways of kingship by his father. All this changed when, in 1612, Henry contracted smallpox and died, suddenly placing Charles as heir to the throne, eventually to be crowned in his own right in 1625. The old king, James I, had been schooled in notions of compromise, forced to negotiate with his nobles on matters of religion and affairs of state. Charles, by contrast, adopted a starkly different approach, believing that his authority alone was supreme and ordained by God: defined by the principle of the ‘Divine Right of Kings’. ‘It is for me to decide how our nation is to be governed’ he wrote; ‘I alone must answer to God for our exercise of the authority he has invested in me’.[1]

Charles I’s absolutism manifested itself at a time of emerging self-confidence among the English elite. Though Parliament met only sporadically during this period – and acted mainly in an advisory role to the sovereign – by the time Charles was crowned he was already highly dependent on the gentry’s ability to raise adequate tax revenues (derived from agricultural rents, which far exceeded any other sources of income). It was this body of landowning gentlemen that constituted the bulk of Members of Parliament, men who, in theory, could by withholding his sources of income, hold the king to account. Conflict between Crown and Parliament arose for a number of reasons. In matters of religion Charles appeared to disregard the Protestant settlement secured by Henry VIII, favouring instead the Catholic mass and, in 1625, marrying a Catholic member of the French nobility, Henrietta Maria. Charles also continued to act unilaterally in matters of foreign policy and, in the face of criticism levelled by his chief advisers, dissolved Parliament in 1629. Parliament would not meet again for another 11 years.

Without Parliament to sanction his financial needs, Charles found himself in increasingly difficult circumstances. Rebellion in Scotland (provoked by Charles’s insensitive imposition of a new prayer book) required that additional revenues be raised in order to finance a military response. Reluctantly, the king convened a new Parliament in 1640.

The new Parliament that met that year was at once openly hostile to the Crown. MPs complained bitterly about the imposition of taxes and the blatant disregard of religious toleration in the north. (The Scots had rejected Charles’s prayer book and drafted a National Covenant in defiance of the king, resisting his religious reforms in favour of a simpler form of Protestant worship.) Sensing weakness in Charles’s position, key concessions were demanded from the king, and personal attacks were launched against his key ministers. Among them, Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, was to suffer the death penalty for what Parliament labelled acts of treason against the Scottish nation. A botched attempt to arrest five MPs for treason set the king directly in conflict with his people. The scene was set for civil war.

A nation at war

Fearing for his own safety, in 1642 Charles fled London, first heading north to where he believed his main support lay. At Hull, the king was refused entry to the city by the Lord Mayor, and later that year, in Nottingham, Charles raised his royal standard: the first symbol of open warfare with Parliament.

On 23 October 1642 the first true battle of the Civil Wars took place, at Edgehill in Warwickshire, resulting in stalemate between Parliamentarian and Royalist forces. For four years afterwards skirmishing and warfare erupted across the nation, as Roundheads (labelled for the Parliamentarians’ short cropped hair) and Cavaliers (a derogatory term describing the courtly dress of Royalists) pitched themselves against each other.

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Einhard was a member of Charlemagne’s court and described him as “my lord and foster-father”. He also wrote that, “no man can wr

Maurinko [17]

Answer:SINCE I have taken upon myself to narrate the public and private life, and no small part of the deeds, of my lord and foster-father, the most lent and most justly renowned King Charles, I have condensed the matter into as brief a form as possible. I have been careful not to omit any facts that could come to my knowledge, but at the same time not to offend by a prolix style those minds that despise everything modern, if one can possibly avoid offending by a new work men who seem to despise also the masterpieces of antiquity, the works of most learned and luminous writers. Very many of them, l have no doubt, are men devoted to a life of literary leisure, who feel that the affairs of the present generation ought not to be passed by, and who do not consider everything done today as unworthy of mention and deserving to be given over to silence and oblivion , but are nevertheless seduced by lust of immortality to celebrate the glorious deeds of other times by some sort of composition rather than to deprive posterity of the mention of their own names by not writing at all.

Be this as it may, I see no reason why I should refrain from entering upon a task of this kind, since no man can write with more accuracy than I of events that took place about me, and of facts concerning which I had personal knowledge, ocular demonstration as the saying goes, and I have no means of ascertaining whether or not any one else has the subject in hand.

In any event, I would rather commit my story to writing, and hand it down to posterity in partnership with others, so to speak, than to suffer the most glorious life of this most excellent king, the greatest of all the princes of his day, and his illustrious deeds, hard for men of later times to imitate, to be wrapped in the darkness of oblivion.

But there are still other reasons, neither unwarrantable nor insufficient, in my opinion, that urge me to write on this subject, namely, the care that King Charles bestowed upon me in my childhood, and my constant friendship with himself and his children after I took up my abode at court. In this way he strongly endeared me to himself, and made me greatly his debtor as well in death as in life, so that were I unmindful of the benefits conferred upon me, to keep silence concerning the most glorious and illustrious deeds of a man who claims so much at my hands, and suffer his life to lack due eulogy and written memorial, as if he had never lived, I should deservedly appear ungrateful, and be so considered, albeit my powers are feeble, scanty, next to nothing indeed, and not at all adapted to write and set forth a life that would tax the eloquence of a Tully [note: Tully is Marcus Tullius Cicero].

I submit the book. It contains the history of a very great and distinguished man; but there is nothing in it to wonder at besides his deeds, except the fact that I, who am a barbarian, and very little versed in the Roman language, seem to suppose myself capable of writing gracefully and respectably in Latin, and to carry my presumption so far as to disdain the sentiment that Cicero is said in the first book of the Tusculan Disputations to have expressed when speaking of the Latin authors. His words are: "It is an outrageous abuse both of time and literature for a man to commit his thoughts to writing without having the ability either to arrange them or elucidate them, or attract readers by some charm of style." This dictum of the famous orator might have deterred me from writing if I had not made up my mind that it was better to risk the opinions of the world, and put my little talents for composition to the test, than to slight the memory of so great a man for the sake of sparing myself.

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