Charles I: An Abbreviated Life by Mark Kishlansky

[snokitty]

Charles I: An Abbreviated Life by Mark Kishlansky ? review | Books | The Guardian

Mark Kishlansky comes out swinging: "Charles I is the most despised monarch in Britain's historical memory. Considering that among his predecessors were murderers, rapists, psychotics and people who were the mentally challenged, this is no small distinction." This short life of Charles – the only king of England to be tried, condemned and publicly executed – holds England's 17th-century crisis up to the light and asks if we have misjudged its protagonist.

Kishlansky argues that the accepted view of Charles and his reign has been utterly distorted: the narratives spun by the parliamentarian propaganda of the 1640s have only grown stronger in the intervening centuries, so that we vacillate between viewing Charles as an idiot at best and a tyrant at worst. He has been called intransigent and duplicitous; GM Trevelyan thought him "selfish and stupid", while the Ladybird biography of Oliver Cromwell leaps off the fence to inform six-year-olds that "King Charles was a very stupid man". Charles's failings tend to be accepted, to a greater or lesser degree, even by his more sympathetic biographers. "What began as propaganda," says Kishlansky, "has been transmuted into seeming fact."

Charles was never meant to be king. As a child, he was overshadowed by his older brother, the heir to the throne. Prince Henry was bred to wear James I's crown: while still a teenager, he kept a learned court, assembling advisers and taking a close interest in international affairs and continental thought. Admired in England and beyond for his commitment to the Protestant faith and its defence, the prince's sudden sickness and death from a fever in 1613 came as a shock. Out of Henry's shadow stepped Charles: the younger brother was now the heir.

[HistoryGirl]

I see his point. There were other absolute monarchs that were probably worse than Charles I even within England's history there were probably worse kings. However, his absolutism came at a time when England was no longer willing to put up with it. Bad timing and lack of compromise marred his reign. He also had to deal with the problems left behind by the Tudors.