"Tyrant, traitor, murderer and public enemy": was Charles I really that bad?
The reviled king was condemned to death as a “Tyrant, Traitor, Murderer and Public Enemy”. But on the 400th anniversary of his accession, how fair does that judgment seem today?
On 9 July 1637, King Charles I chaired a meeting of his Privy Council at Greenwich Palace. Among the business was the case of two draymen, William Willis and John Collins, who had been involved in a road-traffic collision. They had allowed their cart to crash into that of the Earl of Exeter, a member of the powerful Cecil family. A local jury had cleared Willis and Collins of any wrongdoing, but the king was not happy with that outcome.
Charles and his council overturned the verdict, ordering that the two men be “whipped publicly through the town” as a fearsome example to others. After this, the draymen would be sent to prison, and there kept at work until further notice.
Charles I was a man who liked order. He organised his political thought around certain maxims, one of them being: “It is better the subject suffer a little than all lie out of order.” Willis and Collins certainly suffered: they were flogged and locked up. After all, one couldn’t have lowly draymen crashing into nobles’ coaches and then being acquitted: it was indecorous and subversive.
Charles was a fussy man. His government regulated everything from the lengths of taxi journeys to the wearing of fake jewellery. He once even tried to ban swearing. Bookish, thoughtful and sensitive, Charles was possessed of a heightened sense of his own honour and dignity. By the time he ascended the throne in 1625, he was also politically active, well read and fully capable of forming his own opinions – a bit too much so, perhaps, for a king.
When Charles came to power in 1625, it was a highly unusual event. He was the first adult to ascend the Scottish throne since 1390, and only the second adult male to take the English throne since Henry VIII in 1509.
He left his thrones in a strange way, too. In 1649, he was put on trial for treason against his own people, and executed publicly. His statue in London’s Royal Exchange was defaced with the Latin words Exit Tyrannus, Regum Ultimus – ‘Exit the Tyrant, the Last of the Kings’.
The trial itself had been justified on the grounds that it was legal – indeed required – for the representatives of the people to resist a tyrannical king. To its instigators, this was a moment of emergency: the killing of a king was a necessity, albeit a cruel one.
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Charles certainly had a case to answer. After his defeat in 1646 at the end of the first phase of the Civil War, he only negotiated in bad faith – and when the opportunity to start a fresh conflict presented itself in 1648, he took it.
His actions sparked renewed violence and bloodshed, and led to radical of his enemies to push for his trial, based on a well-established philosophical position, salus populi suprema lex: the safety of the people is the supreme law. Charles claimed that his trial was illegal, and many have agreed with that assessment – yet it's far from black and white.
Was Charles truly a tyrant? From a modern perspective – in an age that has given us men such as Hitler and Stalin – surely swotty, art-loving Charles hardly registers. True, he had a cruel streak. After a riot in Lambeth in 1640, he had one young lad tortured – making out the order for that punishment in his own hand – and another hanged, drawn and quartered.
Twice in the winter of 1641–42, he gave the order for soldiers to shoot protesters in the streets if they refused to go home. But he was probably no nastier than other leaders among his contemporaries – including even his son, Charles II, under whom great cruelties were committed in Scotland, and during whose reign many hundreds of English Dissenters died in horrific prisons.
Charles I was authoritarian. He liked to be obeyed, and sometimes took it personally when he wasn’t. One infamous scandal involved a fairly unlikeable man called William Prynne, who wrote a book perceived to be insulting to the queen. In 1634, Prynne was sentenced to be imprisoned, and to have his ears cut off. Come 1637, when the same man again got into trouble, it transpired that his ears had been only partially sliced the first time around. Furious, Charles personally directed the Privy Council to find out who had been at fault for that half-done job.
Charles also believed in personal sacrifice for the greater good: he applied this principle to himself, but inevitably it was his people who usually had to bear the brunt.
England was then a place riven by discord. The government was short of money – ironic, given the great wealth of the country at large – and, thanks to rising literacy and a thirst for news, growing numbers of people in England were keen to discuss politics and religion. London was expanding, too, bringing more people close to the geographic centres of politics at Whitehall and Westminster.
Throughout Charles’s life, he carried with him a grave distrust of his subjects and their desire to involve themselves in politics. During his childhood, one of his tutors had written that the people were a “many-headed monster, which hath neither head for brains, nor brains for government”. It was a sentiment Charles remembered.
He never shied from controversy, either, and it was when dealing with controversial topics that his authoritarian side dominated. In religion, Charles favoured a new, ornate and ritualised form of worship. He disliked those who disagreed, especially the so-called ‘Puritans’ who preferred church practice to be much plainer. Charles believed that their form of worship – which emphasised reading, careful listening and participation – was populist and anarchic. His government used the bishops to harass dissident clergymen and writers.
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Another of Charle's most persistent problems was money. He knew that the English state was "press beyond her strength" and, in the 1620s, desperately needed to increase military spending. A furious war was raging on the continent, and Charles found himself fighting both Spain and France.
Many argued that there was only one legitimate way of raising tax: ask parliament. The English parliament, though, was reluctant to provide the necessary finance without first airing “grievances”. So in 1626, Charles started to contemplate ruling without them. He levied a ‘Forced Loan’ – in effect, a direct tax that didn’t require parliamentary sanction. He argued that this was an emergency and that, in such cases, it fell to the king to levy funds – even if he hadn’t first obtained permission from the people. Worse, in order to ensure that the Forced Loan was collected, Charles imprisoned those who didn’t pay.
It was here that a key technique he used to rule came to the fore. Charles allowed the issue to come to the law courts – but made sure that he won. In 1627, five imprisoned knights had sued for habeas corpus – demanding that they be allowed to challenge before a court the justification for what they claimed to be their unlawful detention. Before the case was heard, though, Charles personally interviewed the 12 judges to make sure that they were on his side. Unsurprisingly, they ruled in his favour – that he could imprison people without demonstrating a cause.
A showdown followed. Parliament pushed for a ‘Petition of Right’ stating certain key freedoms. Taxation without parliamentary grant was declared illegal, as was imprisonment without cause being shown. Charles reluctantly allowed the petition – but then prorogued parliament and recalled all print copies of the petition, ordering that they “be made waste paper”. It was then reissued but qualified with a series of his objections.
In the summer of 1628, Charles’s fears about his people were dramatically confirmed. His unpopular favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, was stabbed to death in Portsmouth. Buckingham’s killing was widely celebrated – indeed, his funeral was held at night to prevent the attendance of jeering crowds. And Charles had other reasons for fearing his subjects. Within months of ascending the throne, he had married the young and vivacious French princess Henrietta Maria. The queen’s father, Henry IV of France, had been assassinated years earlier; in addition, she was a Catholic – and anti-Catholic sentiment was rife. No wonder she and her husband worried for her safety.
More discord followed in 1629. When parliament returned that January, MPs started arguing again about tax and religion. Exasperated, Charles decided to send away the quarrelling politicians – but when his order arrived, a small group of MPs restrained the Speaker in his chair and passed a series of inflammatory motions. Charles was furious, and vowed to rule without parliament for as long as he could. Dissident MPs were imprisoned; after their leader, Sir John Eliot, died in the Tower of London, Charles refused to let his wife bury him at home in Cornwall.
What followed was a period of ‘Personal Rule’ sometimes seen as a manifestation of Charles’s alleged tyranny. Clearly, he wanted to rule without parliament; he believed that parliaments were “of the nature of cats, that ever grow cursed with age”.
But was royal rule so bad? The country was at peace, and some later looked back on these as halcyon days. Charles raised enough money to run a functioning government. It was how he did so that became the problem, and one issue in particular sparked controversy. There is no doubt that the navy needed serious investment. The obligation to pay for ships had traditionally fallen on the coastal counties and towns; now Charles – not unreasonably – extended this inland. By doing so, though, he was effectively creating a new tax – without parliament.
Once more, Charles turned to his judges. He would allow Ship Money to be tested in the courts, and he would win. The king’s lawyers argued that this was an emergency situation, so it was the monarch’s duty to raise money for necessary defence. This he could do without parliament because, his attorneys argued, as “the King of England... He is an absolute Monarch”. The judges – men who had been picked by the crown – agreed, though remarkably by only the tightest of margins.
Ship Money seems obscure today, but at the time people worried that it gave the king an unlimited right to seize property simply by declaring an ‘emergency’. Whether or not Charles was a tyrant, he was building an absolutist monarchy. As the politician John Culpepper observed: “If the laws give the king power in any danger of the kingdom, whereof he is Judge, to impose what and when he please, we owe all that is left to the goodness of the king, not to the law."
We cannot, of course, judge Charles only on his rule in England. He was king of Scotland and Ireland, too – and in both he faced huge rebellions.
He sent one of his most capable ministers to govern Ireland in 1633. Thomas Wentworth, later Earl of Stratford, was busy and bright, but was also possessed of a dangerous ideology. He believed that “reason of state” trumped law. This was similar to Charles’s belief in suppressing private interests for the public good, but it was sharper in focus and backed by a fearsome personal energy. In Ireland, Wentworth successfully played off factions against each other, and built up a military to enforce his will. His aim was to make Charles – in Ireland, at least – “as absolute a monarch as Christendom can set forth”. This generated huge resentment, which in 1641 exploded into a massive uprising against English and Scottish settlers.
By that point, Charles’s rule had already started crumbling elsewhere. Desperate to bring his kingdoms into some sort of religious unity, he had tried to impose English church practice in Scotland. This was met with fierce resistance, beginning in July 1637 with a riot in St Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh. And when Charles failed to put down the Scottish rebellion, he was forced to turn once more to his English parliament for money.
By now, the three kingdoms were cascading into Civil War. Thomas Wentworth – dubbed ‘Black Tom Tyrant’ – was put on trial and beheaded. Charles changed his approach to religion, and cultivated some he had once thought of as puritans, in the hope of winning the political game of chess. “I have somewhat altered from my former thoughts,” he noted slyly, “to satisfy the times.”
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He disavowed Ship Money, and agreed to call parliament at least once every three years. By the end of 1641, parliament was trying to remove his power to appoint his own government ministers; in 1642, they tried to strip him of his military authority, too.
Much of the blame for the problems that beset his kingdoms has been laid at Charles’s feet – and with good reason. He could be difficult to trust. From 1637, he tried to use his military power to threaten those who opposed his policies. He twice raised an army against Scotland rather than engage in serious negotiations. In November 1640 and in May 1641, he plotted to use the guns and garrison at the Tower of London to overawe London and parliament.
In autumn 1641, he facilitated a violent plot in Edinburgh against the Scottish leaders, including his kinsman the Marquess of Hamilton. Late in 1641, he gathered ‘Cavaliers’ at Whitehall Palace, ostensibly to protect his family but also to threaten parliament. Then, in the early days of 1642, he took several hundred of these men to Westminster with the aim of arresting five dissident MPs.
That was an error from which Charles never recovered. The astrologer William Lilly thought that “This rash action of the king’s lost him his crown”, as it “left scarce any possibility of reconcilement; he not being willing to trust them, nor they to trust him.” As Charles’s Cavaliers stood outside the Commons, some of them cocked their pistols and threatened to shoot MPs. Charles did not allow this to happen, but parliament feared a massacre.
The day after his attempted arrest of MPs, Charles travelled to London's Guildhall and issued reassurances that he wished to rule “like a king, not a tyrant”. Yet many were not so sure. That winter, he fled for the countryside, “so fleeting and so friendless”, as one observer put it. There had been disorderly protests even under the palace windows, and a parliamentarian polemicist at one point managed to throw into the king’s coach a pamphlet that likened Charles to Rehoboam, a tyrannical biblical king. For someone who had always feared the “many-headed monster”, it was terrifying that his subjects could get so close to his person.
So was Charles I a tyrant? Historians have deployed the term ‘legal tyranny’, referring to his making controversial policies certain that the judges – who depended on the king for promotion – would support him in the courts. Small wonder that disgruntled subjects turned to parliament as a higher authority.
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By 1642, though, Charles’s enemies had gone much further. They believed that parliament needed to control the government as well as the law: to wield the power to appoint ministers and control the militia. Their partisans had even started arguing that ‘reason of state’ allowed them to act beyond what was ordinarily legal. No longer could parliamentarians claim to be upholding the law; now they had to say they were protecting the people. It was a revolutionary idea – and there was no way that Charles would concede it without a fight.
Jonathan Healey is associate professor in social history at Kellogg College, Oxford. His latest book is The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England (Bloomsbury, 2023)
This article was first published in the April 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Authors
Jonathan Healey is associate professor in social history at the University of Oxford