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King Charles I 1625-1649
John Phelps, Court Clerk at the Trial of King Charles I
John Phelps was a clerk of the Court that convicted Charles I and condemned him to death. Here is some background on King Charles I.
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Charles I of the House of Stuart was born November 19, 1600 at Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland. While King, he levied huge taxes, imposed martial law, and repressed religious liberties, especially those of the Puritans. This eventually led Parliament to arrest and try him for crimes.
Charles was the son of King James I of Scotland and Anne of Denmark. Charles' early childhood was spent in the shadow of his taller, more physically fit, and healthier elder brother, Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, who died when Charles was twelve years old, making Charles the heir apparent to the throne.
Three months later at age 25, on June 13, 1625, in a plan to lessen tension between England and Spain, his father sent the Duke of Buckingham to negotiate marriage between the Catholic Spanish and Protestant English crowns. Spain refused, leading the Buckingham and Charles to pressure James to declare war on Spain. His father died on 27 March 1625, and Charles ascended to the throne. He was crowned February 2, 1626 in Westminster Abbey, in London.
Protestant Charles Weds Catholic Henrietta of France
Charles was a shy and dignified figure, and was intially popular with his Protestant subjects, but he immediately offended them when on 1 May 1625 he married by proxy the devoutly Catholic sister of the King Louis XIII of France, 16 year old Henrietta-Marie.
Parliament had a substantial role in the granting money to the king and adopted the tactic of withholding grants until its grievances were redressed. The Parliament of 1625 refused money, demanded ministers it could trust, and was soon dissolved by Charles. In 1626, Parliament attempted to begin impeachment proceedings against the Duke of Buckingham and Charles; the King dissolved their assembly.
The Duke of Buckingham led a naval expedition against Spain that went badly. The House of Commons began impeachment proceedings against Buckingham. In a show of support for Buckingham, Charles had two members of the House of Commons who had spoken out against Buckingham arrested. Charles had secretly agreed as a condition of marrying Henrietta to provide the French with English ships as a condition of marrying Henrietta Maria. Instead, in 1627 Buckingham led an unsuccessful expedition to Cádiz, Spain (1625) and two disastrous attempts to relieve French Protestants in La Rochelle, France (1627 and 1628). Buckingham's fortunes fell further.
The subsequent war required huge expenditures which the treasury could not sustain. Charles levied huge new taxes and imposed martial law, making him extremely unpopular with both the House of Lords and the Commons. He also vigerously repressed the Puritans.
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| Official portrait of King Charles I in his robes of state by Anthony van Dyck. |
Still in need of money to wage war, he resorted to quartering troops with the people and imposed "forced loans," and imprisoned without trial those who refused to pay. He followed these acts in 1628 by imposing martial law, forcing private citizens to feed, clothe and house soldiers and sailors, which implied the king could deprive any individual of property or freedom without justification.
Forced to call Parliament again in 1628, he was compelled on June 7, 1628 to agree to the Petition of Right, which declared all rulings by Charles illegal, in return for a badly needed subsidy. Charles adjourned Parliament when it declared that his continued collection of customs duties was a violation of the Petition. Buckingham was assassinated on 23 Augut 1628 and the parliamentary session of 1629 was bitter. It closed dramatically with a resolution condemning unauthorized taxation and attempts to change existing church practices. Charles reacted by imprisoning nine parliamentary leaders.
Charles' reigned without Parliament resulted in a bitter struggle for supremacy between the king and Parliament that finally resulted in the English civil war.
The Years of No Parliament
Charles governed without Parliament for 11 years after 1629, which were marked by popular opposition to strict enforcement of the practices of the Established Church by Archbishop William Laud and to the ingenious if disingenuous devices employed by the government to obtain funds. The royally controlled Courts of High Commission and Star Chamber waged a harsh campaign against nonconformists and recusants (Catholics).
Between 1620 and 1643, religious dissatisfaction, mostly from Puritans and those opposed to the King's purported Catholic leanings, lead to large scale voluntary emigration, which later came to be known as The Great Migration. Of the estimated 80,000 emigrants from England, approximately 20,000 settled in North America, mostly in New England. The colonists settling in New England were mostly prosperous families with some education.
In 1637-38, John Hampden was tried for refusing to pay a tax of ship money, which greatly increased public indignation. Meanwhile Charles's deputy in Ireland, Thomas Wentworth Earl of Strafford, was carrying out a wide program of reforms through his oppressive policy of "Thorough."
Renewed Struggles with Parliament
As the years passed, it became more obvious that the people were restless. In 1637, The Archbishop of Cantebury Laud forced the High Church liturgy and the Book of Common Prayer into general use in Scotland, which immediately caused rioting. Laud saw the English and Scottish Churches as one being within the whole of the Catholic Church. This change to the religious liturgy completely demolished Puritanism. The Scots were furious and assembled an army in the North of England.
Unable to wage war effectively, Charles in May, 1640, summoned the so-called Short Parliament, which demanded redress of grievances before granting funds and was dissolved.
Another attempt to carry on the war without Parliament failed, and the famous Long Parliament was summoned in November. Under the leadership of John Pym, John Hampden, and Sir Henry Vane (the younger), Parliament secured itself against dissolution without its own consent and brought about the death of Strafford, the abolition of the courts of high commission and Star Chamber, and the end of unparliamentary taxation.
Charles professed to accept the revolutionary legislation, though he was known to hold strong views on the divine right of monarchy. Parliament's trust in the king was further undermined when his queen was implicated in the army plot to coerce Parliament, and Charles was suspected of complicity in the Irish rebellion (1641) and its resulting atrocities, especially in Ulster. In 1641, Parliament presented its Grand Remonstrance, calling for religious and administrative reforms and reciting in full its grievances against the king. Charles repudiated the charges, and his unsuccessful attempt to seize five opposition leaders of Commons in violation of traditional privilege was the fatal blunder that precipitated war.
Charles was forced to face a final defeat after the Five Members confrontation, when he had no alternative but to face a trial of arms. His opposition leader was Oliver Cromwell, in charge of the Parliamentary army. This resulted in the terrible Civil War.
There were no decisive victories in the civil war until Charles was defeated at Marston Moor (1644) and Naseby (1645). In 1646 he gave himself up to the Scottish army, which delivered him to Parliament. He was ultimately imprisoned by Cromwell's army leaders, who were now highly suspicious of Parliament. Charles escaped (Nov., 1647) to Carisbrooke, on the Isle of Wight, where he concluded an alliance with the discontented Scots, which led to the second civil war (1648) and another royalist defeat. Two years of negotiation followed, for which Charles was unsuited.
At the end, when Charles was Cromwell's prisoner, he was required to assent to a law abolishing bishops in the Church of England. He had previously given his consent to such an abolition in Scotland, where the Puritans were in the majority, but here he dug in his heels and declared that Bishops were part of the Church as God had established it, and that he could not in conscience assent to Cromwell's demand. His refusal sealed his doom, and it is for this that he is accounted a martyr by the Church of England, since he could have saved his life by giving in on this question.
Parliament, now reduced in number by Pride's Purge and controlled by Charles's most powerful enemies, established a special high court of justice, which brought Charles to trial before Parliament. John Phelps served as a clerk to the court. King Charles was found guilty of treason, deposed, and beheaded on Jan. 30, 1649 at Whitehall, London, England. He was buried in St. George's Chapel, Windsor, Berkshire, England. To the royalists he became the martyred king and author of the Eikon Basilike. By his opponents he was considered a double-dealing tyrant.
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| "The most abhorrent outrageous execution, performed on the most serene and most grandly powerful Carl Stuart, king in Great Britain, France and Ireland etc. in London before Whitehall Palace, Tuesday 30 January [Julian] / 9 February [Gregorian] in the year 1649, between 2 and 3 pm." The execution took place outside the Banqueting House, Whitehall. |
When King Charles' son Charles II regained the throne during The Restoration, both court clerks Andrew Broughton and John Phelps found it expeditious to leave England. They lived out their lives in exile, convicted in absentia and sentenced to death, in Vevay, Switzerland. American descendant and ambassador to Germany Wlliam Walter Phelps later erected a monument to John Phelps. John Phelps is buried alongside Edward Ludlow, one of the judges who condemned Charles I, and his fellow clerk Andrew Broughton.