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Charles I: author of his own downfall? Graham Goodlad examines differing interpretations of the part played by King Charles I in the outbreak of the civil war.

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In outline the disastrous events of Charles I's reign are well known to students of the seventeenth century. The king's inability to work with Parliament led, four years after his accession, to a conscious decision to govern without its collaboration. During the ensuing period of 'personal rule'--sometimes known as the 'eleven years' tyranny'--important sections of the political nation were alienated in disputes over innovation in the Church of England and the king's exploitation of non-parliamentary sources of revenue. In 1637, an ill-advised attempt to impose an Anglican form of worship on the predominantly Presbyterian Scottish nation triggered a series of events that brought England and Scotland to the point of military confrontation. The need to raise money, in order to resist the invader from north of the border, compelled Charles to recall Parliament in 1640. The king was then forced to sacrifice his leading adviser, Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Stratford, and to acquiesce in the entrenchment of Parliament's right to sit and in the dismantling of the machinery of royal prerogative government. By 1642 the division of the governing class into two opposing factions had become a reality. After a botched attempt to arrest his leading parliamentary critics Charles abandoned his capital and the two sides began preparing for armed conflict. The subsequent period of civil war ended, in January 1649, in the trial and execution of the king and the abolition of the monarchy.

Charles I's role in the unfolding of this catastrophe has ensured for him an almost universally unfavourable press, redeemed perhaps by respect for the dignity with which he met his death on the scaffold in Whitehall. Broadly speaking, historians of the Whig school viewed him as an ambitious yet also unintelligent ruler, intent on the unwarranted assertion of royal power, whose actions led to the comprehensive rejection of absolute monarchy in Britain. Charles was out of step with the solid good sense of his subjects and, by outraging their sense of the legitimate constitutional restraints on monarchical authority, he brought about his own thoroughly deserved downfall. Such an interpretation echoed the contemporary verdict, of the republican writer Lucy Hutchinson, that Charles was 'the most obstinate person in his self-will that ever was, and was so bent upon being an absolute uncontrollable sovereign that he was resolved to be such a king or none'. It was crucial to the self-image of the parliamentarian side in the civil wars that Charles was the aggressor, whom they were fully justified in resisting. In the words of one of the king's opponents, Lord Saye and Sele, the conflict that broke out in 1642 was 'a war made to destroy the Parliament of England--that is, the government of England--in the very root and foundation thereof'.

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Is this focus on Charles' intentions and failings as an individual merited? This article examines the evolution of his reputation as historians have sought to make sense of the outbreak of civil war. How far was the crisis of Charles'...

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