spite of his failings, had many fine qualities. Clarendon, who was fully conscious of them, who does not venture to call him a good king, and allows that “his kingly virtues had some mixture and alloy that hindered them from shining in full lustre,” declares that “he was if ever any, the most worthy of the title of an Honest Man, so great a lover of justice that no temptation could dispose him to a wrongful action except that it was disguised to him that he believed it just,” “the worthiest of gentlemen, the best master, the best friend, the best husband, the best father and the best Christian that the age in which he lived produced.” With all its deplorable mistakes and failings Charles I.’s reign belongs to a sphere infinitely superior to that of his unscrupulous, corrupt, selfish but more successful son. His private life was without a blemish. Immediately on his accession he had suppressed the disorder which had existed in the household of James I., and let it be known that whoever had business with him “must never approach him by backstairs or private doors.”[1] He maintained a strict sobriety in food and dress. He had a fine artistic sense, and Milton reprehends him for having made Shakespeare “the closest companion of his solitudes.” “Monsieur le Prince de Galles,” wrote Rubens in 1625, “est le prince le plus amateur de la peinture qui soit au monde.” He succeeded in bringing together during twenty years an unrivalled collection, of which a great part was dispersed at his death. He showed a noble insensibility to flattery. He was deeply and sincerely religious. He wished to do right, and was conscious of the purity of his motives. Those who came into contact with him, even the most bitter of his opponents, were impressed with his goodness. The great tragedy of his life, to be read in his well-known, dignified, but weak and unhappy features, and to be followed in his inexplicable and mysterious choice of baneful instruments, such as Rupert, Laud, Hamilton, Glamorgan, Henrietta Maria—all in their several ways working out his destruction—seems to have been inspired by a fateful insanity or infirmity of mind or will, recalling the great Greek dramas in which the poets depicted frenzied mortals rushing into their own destruction, impelled by the unseen and superior powers.
The king’s body, after being embalmed, was buried by the few followers who remained with him to the last, hastily and without any funeral service, which was forbidden by the authorities, in the tomb of Henry VIII., in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, where his coffin was identified and opened in 1813. An “account of what appeared” was published by Sir Henry Halford, and a bone abstracted on the occasion was replaced in the vault by the prince of Wales (afterwards Edward VII.) in 1888. Charles I. left, besides three children who died in infancy, Charles (afterwards Charles II.); James (afterwards James II.); Henry, duke of Gloucester (1639–1660); Mary (1631–1660), who married William of Orange; Elizabeth (1635–1650); and Henrietta, duchess of Orleans (1644–1670).
Bibliography.—The leading authority for the life and reign of Charles I. is the History of England (1883) and History of the Great Civil War (1893), by S. R. Gardiner, with the references there given. Among recent works may be mentioned Memoirs of the Martyr King, by A. Fea (1905); Life of Charles I, 1600–1625, by E. B. Chancellor (1886); The Visits of Charles I. to Newcastle, by C. S. Terry (1898); Charles I., by Sir J. Skelton, valuable for its illustrations (1898); The Manner of the Coronation of King Charles I., ed. by C. Wordsworth (Henry Bradshaw Soc., 1892); The Picture Gallery of Charles I., by C. Phillips (1896). See also Calendars of State Papers, Irish and Domestic Series; Hist. MSS. Comm. Series, esp. MSS. of J. Eliot Hodgkin, F. J. Savile Foljambe, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, Duke of Rutland at Belvoir Castle, Marquis of Ormonde, Earl Cowper (Coke MSS.), Earl of Lonsdale (note-books of parliaments of 1626 and 1628), Duke of Buccleuch at Montagu House, Duke of Portland, 11th Rep. app. pt. vi., Duke of Hamilton, pt. i., Salvetti Correspondence, 10th Rep. pt. vi., Lord Braye; Add. MSS. Brit. Mus., 33,596 fols. 21-32 (keys to ciphers), 34,171, 35,297; Notes and Queries, ser. vi., vii., viii., ix. indexes; Eng. Hist. Rev. ii. 687 (“Charles and Glamorgan” by S. R. Gardiner), vii. 176; Cornhill Mag. vol. 75, January 1897, “Execution of Charles,” by C. H. Firth. (P. C. Y.)
CHARLES II. (1630–1685), king of Great Britain and Ireland, second son of Charles I. and Queen Henrietta Maria, was born on the 29th of May 1630 at St James’s Palace, and was brought up under the care successively of the countess of Dorset, William Cavendish, duke of Newcastle, and the marquess of Hertford. He accompanied the king during the campaigns of the Civil War, and sat in the parliament at Oxford, but on the 4th of March 1645 he was sent by Charles I. to the west, accompanied by Hyde and others who formed his council. Owing, however, to the mutual jealousies and misconduct of Goring and Grenville, and the prince’s own disregard and contempt of the council, his presence was in no way advantageous, and could not prevent the final overthrow of the king’s forces in 1646. He retired (17th of February) to Pendennis Castle at Falmouth, and on the approach of Fairfax (2nd of March) to Scilly, where he remained with Hyde till the 16th of April. Thence he fled to Jersey, and finally refusing all the overtures from the parliament, and in opposition to the counsels of Hyde, who desired the prince to remain on English territory, he repaired to the queen at Paris, where he remained for two years. He is described at this time by Mme de Motteville as “well-made, with a swarthy complexion agreeing well with his fine black eyes, a large ugly mouth, a graceful and dignified carriage and a fine figure”; and according to the description circulated later for his capture after the battle of Worcester, he was over six feet tall. He received instruction in mathematics from Hobbes, and was early initiated into all the vices of the age by Buckingham and Percy. In July 1648 the prince joined the royalist fleet and blockaded the Thames with a fleet of eleven ships, returning to Holland, where he received the news of the final royalist defeats and afterwards of the execution of his father. On the 14th of January 1649 he had forwarded to the council a signed carte blanche, granting any conditions provided his father’s life were spared. He immediately assumed the title of king, and was proclaimed in Scotland (5th of February) and in some parts of Ireland. On the 17th of September, after a visit to his mother at St Germain, Charles went to Jersey and issued a declaration proclaiming his rights; but, owing to the arrival of the fleet at Portsmouth, he was obliged, on the 13th of February 1650, to return again to Breda. The projected invasion of Ireland was delayed through want of funds till it was too late; Hyde’s mission to Spain, in the midst of Cromwell’s’ successes, brought no assistance, and Charles now turned to Scotland for aid. Employing the same unscrupulous and treacherous methods which had proved so fatal to his father, he simultaneously supported and encouraged the expedition of Montrose and the royalists, and negotiated with the covenanters. On the 1st of May he signed the first draft of a treaty at Breda with the latter, in which he accepted the Solemn League and Covenant, conceded the control of public and church affairs to the parliament and the kirk, and undertook to establish Presbyterianism in the three kingdoms. He also signed privately a paper repudiating Ormonde and the loyal Irish, and recalling the commissions granted to them. In acting thus he did not scruple to desert his own royalist followers, and to repudiate and abandon the great and noble Montrose, whose heroic efforts he was apparently merely using in order to extort better terms from the covenanters, and who, having been captured on the 4th of May, was executed on the 21st in spite of some attempts by Charles to procure for him an indemnity.
Thus perjured and disgraced the young king embarked for Scotland on the 2nd of June; on the 11th when off Heligoland he signed the treaty, and on the 23rd, on his arrival at Speymouth, before landing, he swore to both the covenants. He proceeded to Falkland near Perth and passed through Aberdeen, where he saw the mutilated arm of Montrose suspended over the city gate. He was compelled to dismiss all his followers except Buckingham, and to submit to interminable sermons, which generally contained violent invectives against his parents and himself. To Argyll he promised the payment of £40,000 at his restoration, doubtless the sum owing as arrears of the Scottish army unpaid when Charles I. was surrendered to the English at Newcastle, and entered into negotiations for marrying his daughter. In August he was forced to sign a further declaration, confessing his own wickedness in dealing with the Irish, his father’s blood-guiltiness, his mother’s idolatry, and his abhorrence
- ↑ Salvetti’s Corresp. in Hist. MSS. Comm. 11th Rep. app. pt. i. p. 6.
