Gregg, Pauline. King Charles I.

Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1981, 450

pages.

Pauline Gregg gives a comprehensive examination of this highly important

English monarch in King Charles I. The work covers Charles’s whole life, from the

background before his birth to his eventual demise. It takes into account the many

different players in drama of the king’s life, from his relationship with his father King

James I, to his wife Henrietta Maria, the Duke of Buckingham, and eventually his

adversary Oliver Cromwell. The book was an interesting read, full of rich details, and is

well-organized, breaking the periods of his life into different sections and subsections

which are easy to follow. It looks at the mentality of the King, and how his divine rights

monarchy beliefs (like his father’s) influenced his actions.

The book is broken down into five parts: “The Prince,” “The King,” “Personal

Rule,” “Conflict,” and “Civil War.” The first of these, The Prince, covers the period from

Charles’s birth until his succession to the English throne after James I’s death in 1625. He

was the son of James I of England (James VI of Scotland) and Anne of Denmark. He had

an older brother, Henry, who died of typhoid in 1612, making Charles Prince of Wales

and the heir to the English throne. His father decided that his two children should marry

someone of a different religion, so that after his sister Elizabeth married Frederick V, the

Protestant Elector of the Palatine, it became necessary to marry Charles to a Catholic

princess, and this would become a major problem in Charles’s later life. The Spanish

devised a plan to keep James from declaring war on Spain during the tensions of the

Thirty Years War period by dangling the Spanish Infanta Maria Anna as a possible match

for Charles.
 It was during this time that James’s favorite George Villiers, the Duke of

Buckingham, decided that he should become friends with Charles because James was

becoming ill and after his death, Charles would be the monarch to please. Charles and

Buckingham became the best of friends, and even went to Spain to see the Infanta,

although they discovered there was not a chance of a marriage because Charles was not

Catholic. Later Charles found “a daughter of France” who would become his queen

Henrietta Maria, who hated Buckingham and would give Charles trouble later in life

because of her Catholicism, which she practiced in a way that offended many of the

English.

The next section, The King, covers the period from when Charles became the

King of England in 1625 until he began ruling without Parliament in 1629. These were

his early years as king, and things did not go as smoothly as he would have wanted. His

support of the clergyman Richard Montagu sparked anger among the Puritans, as he

attacked Calvinist teachings. Charles’s attempts to deal with France and Spain went awry,

with the scandal of the eight English ships and the failed attack on Cadiz. Parliament

blamed Buckingham for the disasters and tried to impeach him, but Charles refused to let

this happen and dismissed Parliament instead. This tension would only increase with

time, and after Buckingham’s death, which Parliament celebrated, the King decided he

could not work with them. He decided that he should rule without Parliament.

Personal Rule begins with the dismissal of Parliament in 1629. One of his

parliamentary critics, Thomas Wentworth, changed sides and advised the King how to

rule without Parliament. This had started because of disagreements concerning whether

or not the King had reneged on his agreement to the Petition of Right. Charles ruled
without Parliament for 11 years, and might have continued, except that his new

Archbishop William Laud’s prayer book stirred up the bees nest that was Presbyterian

Scotland, where the King had wanted the new prayer book to be implemented. Charles

was forced to call Parliament so that he could raise an army to deal with the Scots in the

Bishops Wars.

Conflict involved the trouble that Charles had with both Short Parliament, which

was moderate but which he dismissed as “radical,” and the actually radical Long

Parliament, which would not vote Charles anything until they passed a measure stating

that they had to vote to go home before they could be sent. Finally it became clear that

Charles would not accept the demands of Long Parliament, and this led to the English

Civil War, the last section of the book, which ends with the defeat of Charles’s

supporters, the Cavaliers, and the death of Charles in 1649. He was an important

monarch, and his story is one of a Constitutional struggle between the King and the

Parliament which would decide the fate of modern English history, as Parliament went on

to become the real executive power in later years.