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“Henrietta Maria has been looked at far too much through the male gaze – it’s time for another perspective”
Leanda de Lisle speaks to Emily Briffett about her new study of Charles I’s reviled queen Henrietta Maria – and reveals why she doesn’t deserve her rotten reputation
Your book tells the fascinating story of Henrietta Maria, challenging the myths surrounding her life. To begin with, can you please introduce her to us? Henrietta Maria was a Bourbon princess. She was the daughter of King Henry IV (“the Great”), a warrior king assassinated by a Catholic fanatic when she was just a baby. Her mother, Marie de Medici, ruled France as regent for many years. At the age of 15, Henrietta Maria married Charles I of England, Scotland and Ireland, later becoming the mother of Charles II and James II. Read more | Who were the Medici? An important aspect of Henrietta Maria to address is her legacy. How has the Stuart queen been seen through history? She is probably the most reviled consort to have ever worn the crown of the three kingdoms, but she was ultimately a victim of parliamentary propaganda of the period. In her lifetime she was described as the “popish brat of France” and a whore, and was said to have worn the britches in her marriage. Ever since, she’s been perceived as the original “bad woman”: Eve, the corrupter who seduced her husband into evil. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/08/GettyImages-1216141326webready-2fd4c10.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Portrait of Queen Henrietta Maria of France (1609-1669) queen consort of England, Scotland, and Ireland as the wife of King Charles I" title="Portrait of Queen Henrietta Maria of France (1609-1669) queen consort of England, Scotland, and Ireland as the wife of King Charles I (Photo by Photo 12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)" /> How did she come to be so hated? As the old adage goes, history is written by the victors – those who overthrew the house of Stuart in 1688. A myth then grew up that English Protestantism played a pivotal role in the creation of our democracy, and indeed our sense of nationhood. Therefore, being a Catholic, Henrietta Maria was associated with Charles’s authoritarianism and is wrongly assumed to have been, in part, responsible for it. Beyond this, I actually think her legacy shaped that of Charles I. To ensure that she is believable in the role of the seductress corrupting him into evil, Charles has to be perceived as weak and feeble. So, though it’s true that he was a sickly child, we often don’t hear that he was actually extremely athletic and physically strong in adulthood. How much do we actually know about Henrietta Maria’s character? One of the fascinating things about studying the 17th century is that a myriad of sources exist from different people and places, which provide us with a more well-rounded picture of a person’s life than might be possible in previous centuries. In comparison to some English sources, the French saw Henrietta Maria far more positively: as her father’s daughter, as incredibly brave and as a martyr for her faith through her suffering in support of her husband. They describe a remarkable woman, who was respected for her political and diplomatic acumen. We can also get a sense of her personality from her own letters. She wrote many letters – especially during the Civil War – and in them she comes across as someone who was very affectionate and passionate. Something I particularly like about her is that she seems to have been funny and really quite naughty – she liked to make light of grim situations. One time, on her way back from Holland to England, horrendous storms plagued her fleet, sinking two of her ships. Fearing that they might die, some of her ladies openly confessed their sins out loud. When they made it to shore, Henrietta Maria then teased them about their secrets. She often made jokes about herself as well – even when she was in some horrendous situations. What type of society was Henrietta Maria born into? Henrietta Maria was born into the fun and feminine French court, where women could speak on stage, advertising a female perspective in a way they did not in the English court. As I mentioned at the start, her mother was also the regent of France for much of her childhood. This must have provided her with a very particular perspective on what was possible for women, and given her a sense that women could, and should, have a voice. It’s also important to remember that her father introduced the Edict of Nantes in 1598 (later confirmed by her mother and brother), which gave Protestants religious rights in France. So she came from a society where you could be a Catholic and practise your faith, and you could also be a Protestant and practise your faith – which was very, very different from England. Her father also firmly believed in forming alliances with Protestant powers against their great rivals, the Catholic Habsburgs. When she married Charles, I think she saw it very much in this tradition. Read more | The Habsburgs: the dynasty that wouldn’t die Would you say that this upbringing encouraged her to be tolerant of other faiths? I’d say so. There’s a great story about when Henrietta Maria first arrived in England in 1625, and she was asked: “Can you stand the Huguenots [French Protestants]?” She replied, “Was not my father one?”, because her father had been a Protestant in his youth and later converted to Catholicism. Her doctor, who was in charge of caring for her life, was a Protestant. Later on, her dearest and closest friends were not only Protestants, but the leaders of the Puritan-inclined faction at court, who shared similar views in terms of aggression towards the Habsburgs. So yes, I’d say she took a rather tolerant view in that respect. I think she hoped she would be able to encourage her husband to offer persecuted British Catholics something similar to the Edict of Nantes. Read more | What was the Habsburg jaw? What was Henrietta Maria’s own religious life like, both publicly and privately? Henrietta Maria was of course a committed Catholic, and her public standpoint was that she needed to openly protect persecuted British Catholics and set an example to them, as well as to potential converts. She was careful to ensure she attended Catholic mass wherever she was, even though English Catholics were not permitted to attend mass. She was even permitted to build a chapel at Somerset House, which displayed the baroque Mass in all its spiritual power and beauty. In terms of her private religious standpoint, we know that she read plenty of spiritual books about the life of Christ. While she was very aware that she was a queen, the daughter and wife of kings and the mother of a future king, she also recognised that she was a human being, like other human beings, so wanted to consider the suffering Christ endured and pursue an inner Christian humility. However, there’s another interesting side to Henrietta Maria’s private faith which came from her mother. Because Eve tempted Adam in the Garden of Eden in the Christian faith, women were perceived as flawed, weak and corrupting. What Henrietta Maria’s mother reminded her was that Mary, the virgin mother of Christ and the “new Eve”, had the ear of Christ and was able to guide him. So the Virgin Mary and everything she represented as a woman, mother and partner became very important to Henrietta Maria. How much truth is there in the accusation that Henrietta Maria turned Charles Catholic? There’s no truth to it at all. If you think about it, it doesn’t make any sense. Charles I is a martyr of the Church of England, a Protestant martyr; surely he couldn’t have been Catholic? It just shows how ingrained and ridiculous our prejudices have been against her. When Henrietta Maria first arrived in England, aged 15, Charles was already extremely attached to his father’s theories about the divine right of kingship, which held at its heart the denial of papal authority. He believed that he had the right to rule not only his subjects’ bodies, but also their souls – so they should worship as he did. This didn’t leave space for Catholicism. When he was on the scaffold awaiting execution, he even reaffirmed his belief in the divine right of kingship and proclaimed that he was willing to die for the Church of England. He didn’t change; he was the same man as he was when Henrietta Maria married him. Read more | Why Charles I had to die It’s also worth pointing out that Charles continued to persecute Catholics throughout his reign. Henrietta Maria managed to mitigate this persecution in the 1630s, and there were no executions for religion during this period – to the disappointment of some MPs. But Charles was, nevertheless, still enforcing heavy fines on Catholics for not going to Church of England services. Indeed they were even heavier than those of the 1620s. Was she really “the wife who wore the britches”? There must have been times in her life when she wished she was wearing the britches, but she really didn’t. I think her marriage changed after the Bishops’ Wars (1639 and 1640), the second of which Charles lost to the Scottish rebels. As I mentioned earlier, Charles wanted his subjects to worship as he did, but his particular brand of Protestantism was quite elaborate and anti-Calvinist, whereas the Scottish Presbyterians followed the Calvinist tradition. After the first of these wars, he was forced to call a parliament – having not had a parliament for 11 years. Those in parliament were obviously extremely angry about the fact he had ruled without them for so long, so they started stripping him of his power and his chosen ministers. Overall, he was short of advice and help. It was at that point that Henrietta Maria stepped up to help her husband, which she continued to do throughout the Civil War. What she did was extremely impressive. Even the king’s enemies said he would never have been able to resist them without her help and support. So I think it’s fair to say that she was an extremely effective partner, but not dominating. She still had to follow his decisions, at least one of which she believed cost him the Civil War – his refusal to attempt to re-take London in August 1643. How did she support Charles during the Civil War? She was actually in Holland during the build-up to the Civil War and in the early months of the conflict. During that period, she raised money and arms for Charles. Most people believed that he would be beaten soundly in the first major battle of the Civil War, but of course he wasn’t, and both friends and enemies agreed that this was largely down to Henrietta Maria. She’d really saved his bacon by raising those arms and sending them back to England for him. When she returned to England, she was very helpful in many ways. She managed to encourage defectors, including senior parliamentarian commanders. She also gave a lot of good advice: Charles’s nephew Prince Rupert was extremely upset when she returned to France in 1644, because he’d grown to respect her and her advice enormously. People believed that she was firmer and more reliable than Charles. Read more | Queens know best: survival lessons from powerful historical women How did she continue to support the royalist cause after Charles surrendered? She tried several things. First of all, she attempted to encourage Charles to come to terms with his various jailers – first the Scots, then parliament and then the New Model Army. When all that failed – she was in France at this time – she then supported efforts to raise arms for the second Civil War in 1648. When the royalists lost that as well, Charles was tried as a man of blood and executed, and this had a devastating effect on Henrietta Maria. She wanted to retire to a convent at that stage and hide herself away, but Charles wrote to her before his death and said something like: “You’re vital to my cause and you’re vital to what happens to the children, and you mustn’t do any such thing.” So she did continue to support the royalist cause, but she took on a new persona, using Catholic imagery of the Virgin as the Queen of Sorrows – you don’t see it so often in England, but elsewhere you’ll see images in Catholic churches of the Virgin Mary with swords through her heart. She hoped allying herself with those who had suffered would make the Catholic royals around her feel guilty for not doing more to help Charles. So although sometimes she’s perceived as a sad woman dressed in black, actually we should think of her more like Diana, Princess of Wales, after her divorce. Diana projected this image of a suffering woman, but also a very glamorous woman who understood the suffering of others around her, and people felt a great connection with her because of this. That was also true of Henrietta Maria. She used her diplomatic skills to try and keep the royalist cause alive and still went on raising money for her son, Charles II. She never gave up. Read more | The amazing life of Jeffrey Hudson, the Queen Henrietta Maria's dwarf In your book, you note how Henrietta Maria was commonly portrayed as a cruel and bigoted mother, especially to her son Henry. What was her relationship with her family actually like? I think her children adored her. I’d argue that her relationship with her third surviving son, Henry, was weaker, but that was because he was a tiny child when the Civil War broke out and he remained in parliament’s care throughout the conflict. By the time he was finally released into her care at the age of about 12, they were strangers to each other. In the mid-1650s Charles II’s position was incredibly weak. He had very little support from France or Spain. I think Henrietta Maria believed that if Henry became Catholic, he would be able to marry somebody rich – or he could become a cardinal, and so have money, power and influence. To have had a Catholic brother would have also demonstrated Charles’s religious tolerance at a time when he was trying to secure the support of the Catholic powers by claiming he would permit British Catholics to practise their faith. When Henry refused she was very angry, proclaiming that he was dead to her. Again, this was not uncommon – Charles I’s sister did exactly the same with her children when they converted to Catholicism. These women could not afford to have their children disobey them as this made them look weak, and would limit their ability to help the cause of their dynasty. The real tragedy is that when Henry and another son, James, later went to fight on the continent, she wrote letters worrying about them and proclaiming how much she was looking forward to seeing the family be united after Charles II’s restoration. Unfortunately, Henry died a few months after that restoration, and she was devastated by it, so to say she was unloving is wholly untrue. How do you think Henrietta Maria should be seen now? Henrietta Maria has been looked at far too much through the male gaze – it’s time for another perspective. We should try and see her on her own terms, through her eyes. We can then see both her strengths and weaknesses, and uncover the real life of a woman who has been endlessly caricatured, but is utterly fascinating. Henrietta Maria: Charles I’s warrior queen During her years as queen of England, Scotland and Ireland, Henrietta Maria attracted vicious Puritan abuse – and occasional volleys of cannon fire. Based on new archival research, Leanda de Lisle profiles a queen who sacrificed her reputation – and, very nearly, her life – fighting her husband’s cause in the Civil War Leanda de Lisle is the author of Henrietta Maria: Conspirator, Warrior, Phoenix Queen (Vintage, 2022). Buy it now on Amazon, Waterstones or Bookshop.org This article was first published in the September 2022 issue of BBC History Magazine
Henrietta Maria: Charles I’s warrior queen
During her years as queen of England, Scotland and Ireland, Henrietta Maria attracted vicious Puritan abuse – and occasional volleys of cannon fire. Based on new archival research, Leanda de Lisle profiles a queen who sacrificed her reputation – and, very nearly, her life – fighting her husband’s cause in the Civil War
Sixteen warships hunted Henrietta Maria through a stormy North Sea. In February 1643, 40 years after Elizabeth I’s golden age, England was at war with itself. Charles I was fighting the forces of parliament and their navy wanted to capture his queen as she returned to England from a diplomatic mission in Holland. The bad weather cloaked her disembarkment on the Yorkshire coast – but Henrietta Maria was not yet safe. At 5am, parliament’s navy entered Bridlington Bay and fired on the cottage where Henrietta slept. “The balls were whistling upon me,” she told Charles. She grabbed her clothes, and dashed with her ladies to the shelter of a ditch, clutching her dog, Mitte. The shot, “singing around us in fine style”, killed a sergeant 20 paces away. His body lay “torn and mangled with their great shot” as they lay in the ditch, “the balls passing over our heads and sometimes covering us with dust”. It was two hours before the tide turned and parliament’s ships were forced back out to sea. No other princess of Europe had to face such dangers. But Henrietta Maria was every inch a daughter of the warrior, Henri IV of France – and not just in courage. She also “had infinite wit and a brilliant mind”, a French courtier recalled. Yet this is not how history remembers her. Henrietta Maria’s reputation is lost in the eye of a storm of sexist tropes. In the 17th century, women were judged creatures of emotion, not reason, and it often seems Henrietta Maria has never been allowed to grow up from her childhood to the mature political operator she became. But the voice of a very different character emerges in never before published letters, previously hidden in the closed archives of Belvoir Castle in Leicestershire and quoted here for the first time. It is the voice of a living woman, as she grows from a distressed child bride to a warrior queen. Child of the enemy When Henrietta Maria arrived in England in 1625 she was the first French princess to marry an English king since Margaret of Anjou wed Henry VI in 1445. Like Margaret, Henrietta was only 15. And she was similar to Margaret in another key respect: she was regarded as a child of the enemy. In 1445, England was losing the Hundred Years’ War with France; in 1625, England’s Protestant co-religionists were being defeated in Europe by counter-Reformation forces. England’s new Catholic queen was described as a “lovely creature”, with “large, black eyes”, her “teeth pretty” and “big mouth… nicely made”. But tensions between England and France were reflected in quarrels with her young husband. Charles’s mentor, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, exacerbated their differences. In 1626, Charles replaced many of Henrietta Maria’s closest friends and ladies in waiting with Buckingham’s female relations, and a woman reputed to be Buckingham’s mistress: Lucy, Countess of Carlisle. It was said that Buckingham wanted to place Lucy as Charles’s mistress too. In a letter from the closed Belvoir archive, written to a former leading member of her household, Henrietta Maria expresses herself with all the drama a teenager can muster. She complains she has had to hide to write to him, “like a prisoner who cannot talk to anyone, neither to describe my misfortunes, nor to call upon God to pity a poor, tyrannised princess to do something to alleviate her suffering”. Miserably, she announces: “I am the most afflicted person on earth.” She begs him to talk to her mother “and reveal to her my woes”. “I say adieu to you,” she continues, “and to my friend St George, to the Countess of Tillieres, and all the women and girls who [I know] have not forgotten me. I have not forgotten them either.” She fears her heart will break. “Is there any remedy for my suffering, which is killing me? Goodbye bitterness. Goodbye to those from whose actions I will die if God does not have pity on me.” Henrietta Maria told Charles she would have nothing to do with Lucy Carlisle. But within a few months, Lucy had become the queen’s great favourite. Even at 16, Henrietta Maria was a political animal and so she made Charles’s would-be royal mistress an ally, with the aim of employing her in a pro-French diplomatic strategy. Although the story of Charles’s reign has traditionally been given a masculine focus, the women around him were as powerful and fascinating as any at the Tudor courts. As Henrietta Maria matured into a young woman, so her relationship with Charles also improved. Then, in the summer of 1628, came the assassination of the widely hated Buckingham. Letters to Marie de Medici about gardens, pictures, clothes and matters of diplomacy now turned to her personal account of the fatal attack. Buckingham was “killed with a knife”, she told her mother, his only words were “I am dead”. The shaky mother With Buckingham gone, the king and queen grew still closer, and in 1630 their son, the future Charles II, was born. Charles’s letter to his mother-in-law reveals him sitting with his wife, who is telling him she wants to add a few words, to show her mother she is recovering well. He passes her his note, and what follows is the very shaky handwriting of the exhausted queen: “Your most humble and most obedient daughter and servant, Henriette Marie.” Puritans came to see the royal couple’s deep love for one another as a threat. They disliked the ceremonial style of Protestantism that Charles preferred over their stripped down Calvinism, and they blamed the influence of the queen. “Ordinary women can, in the night time, persuade their husbands to give them new gowns,” so might not the queen, they asked, “by her night discourses, incline the king to popery?” This was quite untrue. Charles was a passionate Protestant. But it served to tarnish him. In ancient Greek and Christian myth, it was women who brought evil into the world. Ugliness is symbolic of sin and, even when young, Henrietta Maria is still described as if she were already a sick woman in middle age, while being cast as a seductive Eve to Charles’s Adam, leading the king astray. When Charles’s religious reforms, which included the introduction of a new prayer book, triggered rebellion in Presbyterian Scotland, the rebels’ allies in England used Henrietta Maria’s Catholic faith as a means of further tarring the king. She was vilified from the pulpits as a “popish brat of France” and, as hatred against Catholics was fanned to new heights, mobs were sent to attack her house. In February 1641, she wrote a letter to the French secretary of state for foreign affairs, terrified that she faced her “ruin on earth”. Buckingham had warned her years before that, “there had been queens in England who had lost their heads”. Now her letter prepared the ground for her possible flight to Paris. The following October a Catholic rebellion broke out in Ireland. Charles’s enemies used the massacres of Protestant settlers to attract new recruits to their cause, with fake news spinning further atrocity stories and pointing the finger of blame at the queen. In February 1642, on the eve of the Civil War, Henrietta Maria left for Holland with her daughter Mary, the new bride of William of Orange. Defending the ‘White King’ Charles I was said to have been the only English monarch ever crowned in white. To his supporters, the white robes would become a symbol of his innocence. To his enemies, he was instead the ‘White King’ of ancient prophecy, a doomed tyrant. Today the popular image of Charles is just as extreme. It is of a weak and failed king. However, the real Charles was resilient and courageous. He would prove a tough enemy to beat in the conflict ahead – thanks, in great part, to Henrietta Maria’s help. The queen had not travelled to Holland simply to save her own skin, but to act as Charles’s chief diplomat and party leader in Europe, as well as his arms buyer. It was a formidable task, and in the Dutch republic she faced anti-royalist prejudice. When she tried to sell royal jewels, obstacles were put in her way. In one letter she warned Charles: “Dear Heart… can you send me a warrant under your hand, which gives me full power to deal with my jewellery, since the merchants say a woman cannot sell jewellery during the lifetime of her husband.” Once they were sold, she was confident she could “buy gunpowder, arms and cannon here”. Charles responded quickly and, as Henrietta Maria began using the money to buy arms, she also deployed her political skills to undermine parliament’s efforts to gain European support for their cause. In a further letter, she informed the French foreign minister that: “The English rebels, under the name of parliament” had sent an agent to Holland, claiming that “the king and I” wanted to re-establish Catholicism in England. “I hear they have also sent an agent to France on the same pretext of religion. Whoever he is, I hope he will not be heard nor received, since he comes from rebels against God and against their king.” In a later letter to the French minister, Henrietta Maria thanked him for “the services you give me”. What kind of services is indicated months later when she expresses her gratitude for his stopping a shipment of “arms prepared for the rebels”. Opening the king’s cabinet The queen returned to England in February 1643 with men, money and arms. After her dangerous landing in Yorkshire, she spent months raising royalist morale in the north, eating in sight of the soldiers, and recruiting men. The royalists had gained superiority in Yorkshire by late June, when Charles called for her to join him in his wartime capital at Oxford. Parliament sent cavalry to intercept the queen and her men, but she escaped again and, still en route to meet Charles, the ‘generalissima’ (as she jokingly called herself) captured Burton upon Trent in a “bloody” and “desperate” battle. After the war turned against Charles in 1644, Henrietta Maria returned to France and, despite being seriously ill (probably with tuberculosis), she continued to raise money and arms. The defeat of the king at Naseby in Northamptonshire in 1645 proved, however, to be a decisive propaganda, as well as military, victory for his enemies. His correspondence was captured and letters between Charles and the queen were carefully chosen and edited to ‘prove’ that he was the mere vassal of a foreign, Catholic wife. These letters were published under the title ‘The Kings Cabinet Opened’, along with a commentary depicting Henrietta Maria as a transgender perversion of nature. It pointed to shocking examples of her mannishness, such as when “you see she marcheth at the head of an army and calls herself the generalissima!” “This,” one parliamentary journalist wrote, “is the Dear Heart which hath cost him almost three kingdoms”, and the true “wearer of the breeches”. The maxim ‘cherchez la femme’ (seek out the woman) already held true in England when looking for where to cast the blame for failures in male leadership. Margaret of Anjou had ridden with armies in defence of her husband during the Wars of the Roses. After he died, he was judged a saint, while she was blamed for the wars and condemned by Shakespeare as a “she wolf of France”. After Charles’s kingdoms were lost, and he was executed, he too was judged a saint (though the title Charles the Martyr is largely forgotten). Yet Henrietta Maria – who lived to see her son’s restoration to the English throne, and died in France in 1669 – remains the caricature of parliamentary propaganda: the victim of our continued and unacknowledged sexual prejudices. Her real fault, as Charles I acknowledged, was merely “that she is my wife”. This article was first published in the January 2018 edition of BBC History Magazine
Your guide to King Charles I, the deposed monarch who lost his head
What was Charles I like as king? How did his actions contribute to Civil War? And why was he executed? Leanda de Lisle answers key questions on the Stuart monarch, who was brutally deposed and later charged as a public enemy…
The future Charles I was born in Scotland on 19 November 1600 to King James VI of Scotland and Anne of Denmark. It was a day of Gothic horror and royal triumph, beginning with the decomposing bodies of two Scottish noblemen being gibbeted and quartered at the Market Cross in Edinburgh. The two bodies in question belonged to two noble brothers – 22-year-old John Ruthven, 3rd Earl of Gowrie, and his 20-year-old brother, Alexander – who had been killed during what James believed was a kidnap attempt against him made in league with ‘fiery’ ministers of the Scottish kirk (or ‘church’). They had feared (with reason) that James was poised to impose Crown-appointed bishops over the kirk’s Calvinist councils – known as presbyteries –which would place them under tight royal control. As the second surviving son of James VI (and I of England, from 1603), Charles did not become heir apparent until the death of his elder brother Henry in 1612. The heads of the Ruthven brothers would still be on view in Edinburgh when Charles became king aged 24, on 27 March 1625. This clash between Calvinism and the king’s belief in his right to rule Church and state would come to dominate Charles’s reign. Charles I: key dates and facts Born: 19 November 1600, Fife, Scotland Died: Age 48, 13 January 1649, Whitehall, London, England Parents: Charles was the second surviving son of King James VI of Scotland and I of England, and Anne of Denmark Spouse: Henrietta Maria, sister of the French king, Louis XIII Known for: King of England, Scotland and Ireland from 1625–49, Charles I is remembered for his belief in the divine right of kings (the idea that a monarch’s authority is bestowed by God). His clash with parliament resulted in the Civil Wars, the conflict between Royalists and Parliamentarians that wracked the British Isles in the middle of the 17th century. Found guilty of treason by parliament, Charles I was executed by beheading in 1649. His rule was followed the Protectorate, during which Oliver Cromwell (r1653–8) and later Richard Cromwell (r1658–9), ruled as Lord Protector (r1653–58), before Charles I’s son Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660 Charles I’s ruling style, and his beliefs on royalty Charles’s beliefs and ruling style were rooted in what his father had taught him, as expressed in James’s writings, and in Charles’s own personality. The first significant work to have an impact on Charles was James’s 1598 treatise ‘The True Laws of Free Monarchy’. After the Reformation in the 16th century, Protestants and Catholics had developed ‘resistance’ theories that argued kings took their authority from the people, who had the right to kill any monarch of the ‘wrong’ religion. James’s ‘True Law’ argued against this, claiming that kings drew their authority from God and therefore only God could punish them.Divine Right Kingship was a defence against religious extremists; it was not mere self-aggrandisement. The second significant work was a ‘how to rule’ handbook entitled the Basilikon Doron or ‘Royal Gift’. (It was the contents of this ‘gift’ that had so disturbed the Ruthven brothers and their kirk allies in 1600.) In the handbook, James had traced the instability he had faced as king in Scotland to the origins of Scottish Reformation. In England, Henry VIII had claimed a ‘Royal Supremacy’ over the church, giving England’s monarchs the power to direct religious change. In Scotland, by contrast, “many things were inordinately done by a popular tumult”. For this James blamed the “fiery ministers” of the kirk. The Basilikon Doron hammered home the dangers of ‘popularity’ – by which James meant demagogy that led to violent disorder – and its antidote, which was hierarchy, in church and state. James’s lessons left Charles convinced that the Church of England was “the best in the world”, keeping “the middle way” between the “pomp of superstitious tyranny” of a Catholic Church led by the Pope, and “the meanness of fantastic anarchy”, represented by those Protestants who rejected an episcopate – that is, government by bishops. Unlike his father, Charles was not a wordsmith. He used the visual – a theatre of ceremony, ritual and beauty – both at court and in church, to reform and shape a socially deferential, hierarchical society that was in his view appropriate to divine-right monarchy and sacramental kingship, in which the king was head of the church. Early on in his reign, Charles announced his determination to “establish government and order in our court from which thence may spread with more order through all parts of our kingdom”. The drunkenness and informality of James’s court was brought to an end and the strict “rules and maxims of the late Queen Elizabeth” were reintroduced. Charles also introduced a more ceremonial style of worship to the Church of England, with music in beatified settings. Charles believed he was bringing order to post-Reformation Protestantism, and that he was reviving ceremonies that existed before “corruption” by Rome. Charles I and puritan reformers: how did he react? Presbyterians in Scotland and Puritans in England saw the Church of England’s combination of Reform Protestant theology and Catholic structure as a dangerous “mingle mangle of the popish government with pure doctrine” and wished to cull pre-Reformation hangovers. They detested Charles’s ceremonial Church of England, which was at odds with a Calvinist focus on sermons, and believed that religious art was idolatrous and that music was a distraction from prayer. Charles was determined, however, that all his subjects should worship as he did, and he persecuted anyone – Catholics or Puritans – who opposed him in England and its colony of Ireland. By 1637 he had the confidence to try and extend this also to Scotland, which was an independent kingdom under the Stuart crown. His attempt to impose a Church of England-style prayer book on the Presbyterian Scots triggered a riot, and in 1639 a war with the rebels who insisted that Charles abolish episcopacy. Charles I’s personal rule and the Bishops’ War As Charles had already learned to his cost in his wars with Spain and France in the 1620s, war was expensive and he needed the taxes to pay for it. The most effective way to raise them was through parliament – but Charles had failed to do so many times. Like his father, he never appreciated parliament’s significance to the English people as representing law and liberty. Nor did he have good political instincts. Charles distrusted appeals to the emotions, in part because he had absorbed his father’s lessons concerning the dangers of ‘populism’, but also because he had no instinct for it. He found people difficult to read. Form and order mediated relationships in a way he was comfortable with. Equally, any challenge to form and order felt extremely threatening. Charles had fought bitterly with his parliaments in the 1620s, in particular over their wish to unseat his minister-favourite, the Duke of Buckingham. In 1629 – following Buckingham’s murder and further failed attempts to persuade parliament to pay for his wars – Charles settled on a policy of peace abroad and personal rule without parliament. After the first war with the Scots – the so-called Bishops’ War – ended in stalemate, Charles was forced to call a parliament in 1640, to fight a second war. But his 11 years of personal rule had created a legacy of bitterness and mistrust. This Short Parliament was dissolved within weeks without having voted the king his taxes. But when this second Bishops’ War ended in the king’s defeat, another parliament had to be called – and this Long Parliament would survive him. Charles I and Civil War The new media – of pamphlets and news-sheets, sermons and political speeches – all helped Charles’s most ruthless enemies build a narrative that would justify rebellion as a necessary defence against ‘popery’. This term was used in the 17th century to describe a form of political and spiritual tyranny which Puritans associated with the Catholic Church but which was also deployed against Arminians and any Protestants who were not full blooded Calvinists. Calvinist peers and their Puritan allies whipped up ethnic and religious hatred to create a climate of fear. Targeted and organised mob violence was used to intimidate English MPs, and misogynistic attitudes to women helped demonise Charles’s queen Henrietta Maria as the papist-in-chief. When the war broke out, parliament had control of London and the majority of England’s wealth and population. For a time, they also had the backing of the Scots. Despite these advantages it took four years for them to defeat Charles and his Royalist forces militarily. In this Charles had received a great deal of help from his much-maligned queen, who had raised money, men and arms. He had also inspired great loyalty and was described as “very fearless in his person” in battle. Following defeat, he showed equal courage in the grindstone of captivity. Imprisoned from 1646, Charles never gave up the struggle to get the best terms possible for his restoration as king. In his last negotiations with parliament before it was purged by the Puritan-led New Model Army, his final sticking points were his refusal to deny his beliefs by agreeing that episcopacy was not divinely ordained, or his brothers in arms by giving up his friends to punishment. Until the last day of his trial he hoped he could yet strike a deal. Why was Charles I executed? Charles I was put on trial in January 1649, charged with high treason and “other high crimes against the realm of England”. If Charles had accepted the legality of the tribunal, his life could have been saved. He would effectively be accepting that he had no veto that could block Commons decisions. This would mean he could be returned to the throne without any danger to parliament, “a sword always over his head [and] grown grey in the documents of misfortune”.Yet, as Oliver Cromwell reportedly warned the judges, if the king refused to plead, then in order to confirm the supreme power of the Commons, they would have to “cut off his head with the crown on it”. Charles did not accept the legality of the court and so left his judges with little choice – and he was condemned to death. Read more about the reasons why Charles I was executed Why was the death of Charles revolutionary? Until Charles’s trial in 1649, the law stated that treason was an act against the king. Charles was executed for treason against the people, as represented by parliament. But the new Puritan Commonwealth was first vested in a parliament that had been culled by military force and eventually in the Protector, Oliver Cromwell, who showed no more affection for parliaments than Charles had. The Commonwealth was detested and following the restoration of Charles II, Cromwell’s corpse was dug up and ‘executed’, like the Ruthven brothers on the day Charles was born. The rotting corpses of the anti-Episcopalians in Edinburgh and London provide grim bookends to Charles’s life story.
When Charles I was put on trial in January 1649, ordering his execution was unthinkable for many of his enemies. Yet, within a matter of days, those same enemies had sent him to the scaffold. Leanda de Lisle chronicles the brinkmanship, the bloodletting and the plots that persuaded parliament that it had no choice but to kill a king
The Painted Chamber in the Palace of Westminster was a wonder of the 13th century. But the faded images were now obscured by tapestries; the medieval world barely intruded into the new on 8 January 1649, when men in military buff coats or plain Puritan suits sat at trestle tables and debated the fate of their king. Two days earlier a high court had been established that would for the first time try a king of England. Six years into a series of civil wars between forces loyal to the king and their parliamentary enemies, this was justified on the practical grounds of preventing Charles I from raising further “commotions, rebellions and invasions”. It was also a matter of principle: that the king should have no impunity from the law. The 135 judges who had been appointed by the House of Commons were mostly army officers and radical MPs. Fifty-three attended this meeting, including the leading parliamentarian general Thomas Fairfax and his subordinate Oliver Cromwell. Charles was to be charged with having “a wicked design totally to subvert the ancient and fundamental laws and liberties of this nation, and, in their place, to introduce an arbitrary and tyrannical government”: crimes, it was declared, that deserved “exemplary and condign punishment” – in other words, death. There was no certainty of outcome. Executing the king risked provoking foreign reprisals, or a popular rising. On the other hand, if Charles accepted the legality of the tribunal, he would be accepting that he had no veto over the Commons’ decisions. He could be returned to the throne subject to parliament, “a sword always over his head… [and]… grown grey in the documents of misfortune”. Yet, as Cromwell reportedly warned, if the king refused to plead, then, in order to confirm the supreme power of the Commons, they would have to “cut off his head with the crown on it”. The wrong Protestant How had it come to this? The answer can be traced back to the 1550s when Britain had two Catholic queens. To justify their efforts to overthrow them, Protestants had argued that monarchs drew their right to rule from the people – and that the people therefore had the right to resist, even to kill, those they judged tyrants, or of the “wrong religion”. Charles was Protestant, but for some he was the wrong kind of Protestant: his love of beauty in worship idolatrous; his attachment to church government by bishops, popish. During the early years of his reign his leading ministers had stood as surrogates for attacks on the king’s policies. One was murdered, another executed for treason by Act of Parliament. Eventually the mutual mistrust between Charles and his MPs had paved the way to civil war. But there was still no talk of killing the king. In 1642 parliament claimed it was acting, not against the rightful authority of the crown, but as England’s highest court seizing a form of power of attorney. The aim was to ‘rescue’ Charles from evil counsellors, who supposedly held him in their power, and the commission for parliament’s leading general called for the “preservation of the king’s person”. But then, that same year, the Civil War erupted and, as the casualties mounted, the bitterness grew. By 1645, with the advent of a crack parliamentarian fighting force, the New Model Army, and more aggressive leadership under General Fairfax, the phrase calling for the preservation of Charles’s life had been dropped. It would have been convenient for parliament if Charles had been killed in battle as his ancestor James IV of Scots had been at the battle of Flodden in 1513. But instead Charles’s armies were defeated and he had been imprisoned. Since 1646 Charles had been playing his enemies against each other, holding out for the best terms he could get under which he would be restored as king. In October 1647, the leadership of the New Model Army called for Charles to be tried as a “man of blood”. This was a biblical reference – “the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of the man that shed it”. But there was another, more traditional, way to dispose of a monarch: murder. In the Middle Ages, deposed kings had met mysterious deaths in prison that were ascribed to natural causes. This had encouraged the nation to unite around their successor. It would now get round the difficulties of a trial – for in English law treason remained an action against a king not by one. So in November 1647, when Charles received warnings he was to be assassinated, he had believed them, and had fled captivity. He was soon caught, and his flight was seen as an act of bad faith. Anger against Charles grew after he encouraged more bloodshed, by supporting a royalist uprising and a Scots invasion in his cause in 1648. At a prayer meeting in Windsor that April, the New Model Army had passed a resolution to call “Charles Stuart that man of blood to account”. Yet, after these royalist and Scots forces were defeated, parliament had continued to negotiate the terms of Charles’s restoration. The picture changed again, however, on 6 December 1648, when the army purged the House of Commons of those MPs opposed to a trial. Killers of the king: the men who dared to execute Charles I A twisted history So far the only precedent for the trial of a monarch was that of Charles’s Catholic grandmother Mary, Queen of Scots in 1586. Then, law, history and fact had been twisted to argue that a Scottish monarch owed the English monarch a duty of obedience so Mary could be found guilty of treason against her Tudor cousin, Elizabeth I. Now law, history and fact were twisted again. The remaining rump of MPs declared it treason for an English king “to levy war against parliament and the kingdom of England”. This was rejected in the Lords, so the Lords were made irrelevant. On 4 January the Commons declared, “that the people are, under God, the original of all just power” – just as Protestant rebels against Britain’s Catholic queens had claimed in the last century. And the declaration continued with a new assertion: as the people’s representatives, the Commons MPs held this power in trust, and their acts alone had the force of law. At a stroke they had broken the traditional constitutional trinity of king, Lords and Commons. But what had replaced it? The Commons looked frail in a Westminster guarded by soldiers who had purged its MPs. And even Fairfax had no answer. One of the purged MPs had reminded him of a biblical warning: “Who can stretch forth his hand against the Lord’s anointed, and be innocent?” Fairfax had believed that Cromwell backed him on an outcome to the trial short of Charles’s execution, even if the king refused to plead. Death in battle was one thing; judicial murder another. Now, however, Fairfax began to grasp the ruthlessness of his subordinate; as a result, he would never attend a meeting of the judges again. But nor would he publicly oppose the trial, for that would risk tearing apart his beloved New Model Army. When that trial came, it would bring to a head the intransigence and the bitterness that had characterised the king’s relationship with parliament over the past seven years. Those few days at the end of January 1649 when Charles faced his accusers would determine his fate – and his country’s. Murder, conspiracy and execution: six centuries of scandalous royal deaths Fear of the cut-throat The judges who remained after Fairfax’s departure elected a veteran London radical, John Bradshawe, as their lord president and agreed the trial would take place at Westminster Hall. The space was cleared and a raised dais built for the judges at the southern end of the hall. On it were benches covered in red baize, a raised chair and a desk. Facing these was another chair, covered in red velvet. It was here that Charles would sit. On 20 January Charles was escorted under guard out of the back of his lodging next to the palace. Inside, a roll call of the judges then began. Many names were greeted by silence – but not Fairfax’s. Wishing to remind the court that not all parliamentarians backed Cromwell, a masked Lady Fairfax shouted: “He has more wit than to be here!” Charles entered Westminster Hall just after 2pm, through a doorway close to where the judges sat: a slight figure dressed in black silk and with a long, grey beard. He had refused the barber parliament had appointed, fearful the man could one day cut his throat. For Charles, his murder still seemed a far more likely fate than a death sentence. The sergeant of arms conducted the king to the railed off area known as the bar. Charles stood in a tall hat. It remained on his head as a reminder that no one in the court was his equal, so no one in the court was legally able to be his judge. Charles’s gaze was directed at the court. Then he turned round. Behind a wooden partition and an iron railing was a line of guards armed with halberds – pikes with axe blades. Charles looked up at the far corners of the room where there were galleries accessed from private houses. These were filled with people of high status. Charles looked down, his eyes sweeping the lowlier spectators, before he faced the court again. The act of the Trial of Charles Stuart King of England was read out and Charles accused as "a tyrant, traitor, murderer and a public and implacable enemy to the Commonwealth of England". Bradshawe addressed the king: “Charles Stuart, king of England, the Commons of England, being assembled in parliament, being deeply sensible of the calamities that have fallen upon this nation, (which is fixed upon you as the principal author of it), have resolved to make inquisition for blood.” It was for this that they had “constituted this high court of justice, before which you are brought”. The 40-year-old prosecuting counsel, John Cooke, who stood on Charles’s right, prepared to speak, but Charles tapped him on the shoulder with his cane. “Hold,” he said. Cooke moved to continue, and on the third attempt Charles’s cane struck him hard enough to send its silver head crashing to the ground. A hush fell across the room. Charles waited for someone to pick it up. No one bent for their king. So he retrieved it himself. Charles could now have argued that all he did was in self-defence, but he did not take that bait. “I would know by what power I am called hither?” He believed the threat of the death sentence was an act of brinkmanship in the negotiations for his restoration as king, and that he still had cards to play. And he was right. Another war was now brewing in Ireland that only Charles could prevent. But he did not understand their red line: that first he had to accept their jurisdiction. So Charles reminded the court that he was at the point of concluding treaty negotiations with parliament and, that being the case, he wanted to know: what was their authority? Bradshawe retorted that Charles was being tried “in the name of the people of England, of which you are elected king”. “No,” Charles returned, “England was never an elected kingdom.” And if the people were represented by parliament, which was a court, where was parliament, Charles wanted to know? “I see no House of Lords here that may constitute a parliament.” “That is in your apprehension,” Bradshawe snapped. “We are satisfied who are your judges.” 10 great misconceptions of the Civil War Going to the brink On the Monday Bradshawe again asked Charles to plead. Charles again asked what authority was he being tried by? Bradshawe repeated that the judges sat by the authority of the Commons. “The Commons of England was never a court of judicature. I would know how they came to be so?” Charles demanded. On the third day, Charles was asked to plead once more and once more Charles asked on what authority he was called. By now pressure to halt the trial was growing. Ministers fulminated from pulpits against the sin of regicide, while the Scots, French and Dutch ambassadors made veiled threats about what they might do if he were to be executed. Charles was, after all, a king of Scots, the uncle of the king of France and father-in-law of the Prince of Orange. The prosecuting counsel, John Cooke, was as frustrated as Bradshawe. If Charles pleaded, he could be convicted, leaving the Rump parliament to commute his sentence, subject to his good behaviour, in a supreme act of parliamentary sovereignty. But Charles had not pleaded. That night a man stopped Cooke on his way home, asking what to expect from the trial at this crucial juncture. Cooke replied bitterly: “The king must die and monarchy must die with him.” War crimes and aggression In refusing to accept the jurisdiction of the court, Charles had denied that the Commons was the superior power in the kingdom. The cost of keeping Charles alive – accepting the king’s superiority over them – was now greater than that of his death. He had left them with no choice but to cut off his head. The next day witness statements were read out to help justify what was to come. They included tales of war crimes and aggression. By the following day, 26 January, the judges had agreed that Charles would be executed if he refused a last offer to plead. Cromwell judged Charles’s fate divine providence. On the morning of Saturday 27 January, Charles was brought back into the hall, and Bradshawe reminded the court that Charles was brought before them on a charge “of treason and other high crimes… in the name of the people of England”. Lady Fairfax’s voice rang out from the gallery: “Not half, not a quarter of the people of England. Oliver Cromwell is a traitor!” But the guards in the gallery dragged her out. Bradshawe then offered Charles a last opportunity to acknowledge the jurisdiction of the court. Charles instead asked “that I may be heard in the Painted Chamber before the Lords and Commons?” The hour had come to negotiate – or so Charles hoped. But in asking to see the Lords, he was again denying the supremacy of the Commons. The sentence was now handed down. Did Oliver Cromwell ban Christmas? The Puritan assault on Christmas during the 1640s and 1650s The prisoner was addressed as one “Charles Stuart”, “tyrant, traitor, murderer and public enemy”, and, as such, he was to be “put to death by severing his head from his body”. The court stood. Charles now knew there was to be no negotiation. “Will you hear me a word, sir?” he asked. “No, sir,” replied Bradshawe. “You are not to be heard after the sentence.” But Charles I was heard again, uttering his last words on the scaffold. Those words echoed the phrase stitched on his standard at the outbreak of civil war: "Give Caesar His Due." A "subject and a sovereign were clean different things", he said. A sovereign alone had a divine right to rule. But he wanted the people's "liberty and freedom as much as anybody". These lay in the rule of law, he argued, that he had defended in court at the cost of his life. As such, "I am a martyr of the people", he said. In reality Charles’s failed kingship had seen more deaths in England as a percentage of population than would die in the trenches of the First World War. If he was not a traitor and murderer, he was not a martyr either. But he was right on one matter: the Rump parliament and the army had taken an axe to the law. And when his head fell on 30 January 1649, England faced a new tyranny. Timeline: the demise of Charles I August 1642 | Charles raises his standard at Nottingham. The commission for parliament's leading general, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, calls for the "preservation of the king's person". He is to be rescued from evil counsellors. March/April 1645 | Sir Thomas Fairfax replaces Essex as the leading general of a reformed army – the New Model Army. The phrase calling for "the preservation of the king's person" in Essex's commission is removed. May 1646 | Charles accepts military defeat and orders his armies to lay down their arms. Negotiations for the terms of Charles's restoration to his thrones in Scotland and in England begin. October 1647 | Radical elements in the New Model Army are frustrated by parliament's failure to persuade Charles to agree terms, and by the king's willingness to play his divided enemies off against each other. They demand he is tried as the cause of the civil war and "a man of blood". December 1647 | Charles secretly reaches terms with the Scots and plots a new war. March – August 1648 | The New Model Army is forced to fight a second civil war and a Scots invasion. They pass a resolution at a prayer meeting to try Charles as a "man of blood". Royalist forces are defeated. 6 December 1648 | Under Colonel Thomas Pride, troops from the New Model Army purge parliament of MPs who wish to continue negotiating with the king and who oppose the trial the army leadership now supports. 1 January 1649 | The purged Commons passes an ordinance to establish a high court of justice and declare it treason for a king of England to "levy war against parliament and the kingdom". This is rejected in the Lords as illegal. 4 January 1649 | The Commons declare "That the people are, under God, the original of all just power". As the peoples' representatives, the Commons MPs (without the Lords) hold this power in trust, and their acts alone have the force of law. 8 January 1649 | Charles's judges meet for the first time. It is hoped Charles will plead innocent. He can then be found guilty of non-capital offences, or pardoned, and restored safely to the throne. But Oliver Cromwell warns that if Charles refuses to recognise the court, they will have to carry out the threat to execute him. Fairfax does not support this and backs out. 20 January 1649 | The trial opens. The judges are fearful that executing Charles will risk uprisings at home, war in Ireland and retribution from the European powers. But he refuses to plead. 27 January 1649 | Charles has refused to plead on each day of his trial. To ensure superiority of the Commons, the judges have to pass the death penalty. He is condemned and sentence is passed that he "be put to death by severing his head from his body". 30 January 1649 | Charles I is executed in front of Banqueting House at the Palace of Whitehall. This article was first published in the July 2019 edition of BBC History Magazine