King Charles I Pt. 2

A Kings Road To War

Despairing of getting his way in Parliament, Charles decided to rule without it, which he did for eleven years from 1629 to 1640. He felt much happier. He and Henrietta Maria were now a loving couple, and he relied on her advice: she was his substitute for Buckingham (though her influence unfortunately was to stiffen his absolutist spine). Their sons Charles and James, both future kings, were born in 1630 and 1633. Charles loved hunting and enjoyed tennis and chess. Whitehall Palace was his principal residence, but he was especially fond of Hampton Court. The court’s stately formality expressed his belief in an ordered hierarchy, with himself at the summit, and he spent money on the navy and on art. He bought the Raphael cartoons, and Ingo Jones helped to design the court masques, which Henrietta Maria loved acting in. Anthony Van Dyck was appointed Court Painter.

The King enjoyed the support of the High Church bishops he had appointed. They accepted the principle of divine right and obedience to the royal will. Led by the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1633, William Laud, they were suspected by many landowners of wanting to reclaim the estates that had been taken from the monasteries in the Reformation, a hundred years previously. Some Puritans thought bishops an abominable papist relic in any case, and feared Henrietta Maria’s influence. The regime began persecuting extreme Puritans in England and, disastrously, tried to introduce the Anglican prayer book into Scotland. Charles and his advisers were badly out of touch with the Scots, and their action provoked a riot in Edinburgh Cathedral. Led by Archibald Campbell, Earl of Argyll, Presbyterian Scots signed a National Covenant of resistence in 1638 and gathered an army to defend the Kirk.