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Room 5 Charles I Charles I succeeded to the throne in 1625. Like his father James I, he believed fervently in the Divine Right of Kings and quickly alienated Parliament with his autocratic behaviour. Also like James, he was heavily under the sway of the Duke of Buckingham, whose ill-judged military schemes on the Continent consolidated his general unpopularity. After Buckingham's murder in 1628 Charles's struggles with Parliament continued, particularly over the imposition of taxes, leading to the King's suspension of Parliament for eleven years from 1629. Charles's attitude to religion and his domestic life aggravated his problems with his subjects. His favoured religious advisor, Archbishop Laud, oversaw an aggressive campaign to suppress Puritanism and enforce Anglican religious uniformity. However, his beloved queen, Henrietta Maria, was a devout Roman Catholic and was allowed to worship with freedom at court, fuelling suspicion both of her and of Charles. And in the midst of all these troubles he continuedto feed his own passion for acquiring art, spending vast amounts of money including £25,000 for the collection of the Dukes of Mantua. Room 5 Civil War On 10 January 1642, his conflicts with Parliament at crisis point, Charles I quit his palace of Whitehall, never to return there as a free man. On 22 August he raised his standard at Nottingham and the first of the wars between King and Parliament began. Their dramatic culmination was the execution of the King, on 30 January 1649, on a scaffold erected in front of Inigo Jones's Banqueting Hall in Whitehall. The wars ended finally in 1651 when Charles II fled, defeated, from the Battle of Worcester. The most important single factor in the Parliamentary victory was the remarkable New Model Army. Centrally organised and well supplied, it was put under the command of Sir Thomas (later Lord) Fairfax. The great military genius among its generals was Oliver Cromwell, a prominent politician who replaced Fairfax as Lord General in 1650. Cromwell emerged as the leader of the Parliamentarians, but was unable to establish a regime which reconciled the interests of Parliament, the army and the various religious factions. Finally, under pressure from the army, he took office as Lord Protector (1653), but he continued the struggle to find a satisfactory formula for government until his death. It is interesting to note that there is no significant difference in the way that soldiers from the two sides of the conflict are presented in contemporary portraiture; in most cases the poses used are derived from the paintings of Sir Anthony van Dyck, Charles I's painter. Portraits on display |
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protection. 12 May 2008 |
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