Charles I

Dismissed as ‘high and mighty’ and accused of pushing Charles I towards civil war, Henrietta Maria was a deft military mover – perhaps more so than the king himself.

The aim of Charles I’s foreign policy was to restore his nephew’s lands in the Rhineland. France, he thought, was the key to success. 

The myths that surround the ultimately tragic rule of Charles I mask the realities of a courageous and uxorious king who fell foul of a bitter struggle between two sides of English Protestantism.

Nearly 400 years after his execution, Charles I’s actions and legacy continue to divide scholarly opinion.

Why do modern Britons still find it so hard to acknowledge their revolutionary past?

Clarendon’s great ‘History’ was composed largely in exile and published after his death. Hugh Trevor-Roper discusses how the historian had originally intended this great work to be private political advice to the King.

C.V. Wedgwood analyses the life, death, and influence of Thomas Wentworth, first earl of Strafford.

C. Northcote Parkinson describes the life and times of Jeffery Hudson of Oakham, Rutlandshire, a remarkable member of Charles I's court who nonetheless measured under three feet tall.

William M. Lamont profiles the Kentish Squire who introduced the “Root and Branch” Bill in 1641, only to later change his mind and fight for King Charles and the Established Church.

David Mitchell introduces a seventeenth-century politician who hoped to see the art of government reduced to an exact science, free from “the noise and dirt of party strife.”