Personal Rule 1629-40

• The Personal Rule, also known as the Eleven Years' Tyranny, was the period in England from 1629 to 1640 when King Charles I ruled as an autocratic absolute monarch without recourse to Parliament.
• Charles claimed that he was entitled to do this under the royal prerogative and that he had a divine right.
• Charles had already dissolved three Parliaments by the third year of his reign in 1628.
• After the murder of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, who was deemed to have a negative influence on Charles' foreign policy, Parliament began to criticize the king more harshly than before.
• Charles then realized that, as long as he could avoid war, he could rule without the need of Parliament.
• Whig historians such as S.R. Gardiner called this period the "Eleven Years' Tyranny", because they interpret Charles's actions as highly authoritarian and a contributing factor to the instability that eventually led to the English Civil War.
• More recent historians such as Kevin Sharpe called the period "Personal Rule", because they consider it to be a more neutral term, and some such as Sharpe have argued that there were some positive aspects of the period.
• In the medieval period, government in England was very much centred on the king.
• The king ruled personally, usually assisted by his council, the curia regis.
• The council members were chosen by the king, and its membership varied greatly, but members often included powerful nobility and churchmen, senior civil servants, and sometimes certain members of the king's friends and family.
• Early parliaments began to emerge under Edward I, who wished to implement taxation changes and wide-ranging law reforms, and sought to gain the consent of the nobility.
• The appointment of William Laud to the role of Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633 signalled this shift most of all.
• Laud also placed the altar at the East end of the Church and insisted on kneeling for the reception of the sacrament.
• William Laud's policy 'the beauty of holiness' described how Christian worship should be couched in ceremony and splendour to further devotion.
• The Church was generally accepted as becoming more ceremonial in its style of worship, such as through the acceptance of the installation of Laudian altar rails.
• There was a noticeable shift in the Church of England towards a more sacramental and ceremonialist direction under Charles I.
• Charles I's government aimed to squash dissent legalistically, by making use of the Court of High Commission and the Star Chamber.
• William Laud imposed a rule which decreed all ministers should wear a surplice when performing a service.
• Opposition from the Church of Scotland as well as radical Puritans was strong and consistent throughout Personal Rule, but there was little opposition from the English population at large.
• Three dissenters – William Prynne, Henry Burton (theologian), and John Bastwick – were pilloried, whipped and mutilated by cropping and then imprisoned indefinitely for their publication and authorship of anti-episcopal pamphlets in 1637.
• William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, emphasised the usage of the Book of Common Prayer in all services, enforced by episcopal visitation.
• During Personal Rule, the Caroline government was able to exert a greater force on the Church without the influence of Parliament.
• Parliament was the only body that could authorise nationwide taxation and excise during the 14th to the 16th centuries.
• Those who elected representatives to Parliament at this time were the same people the monarch had to rely on to collect and remit taxes on a large scale: the landed gentry.
• If a sovereign were to attempt to impose new taxes without consulting the gentry then the gentry could have simply refused to collect the taxes, and the monarch would have had little feasible recourse.
• Once summoned, a parliament could take the opportunity to submit policy proposals to the monarch ("bills"), which would be expected to take precedence over ordinances if signed into law by the monarch, although the monarch was under no obligation to grant the Royal Assent to any such proposal.
• The Commons voted for its own adjournment on 10 March 1629, leading to the King's dissolution of Parliament.
• Charles resurrected an all-but-forgotten law called the "Distraint of Knighthood", in abeyance for over a century, which required any man who earned £40 or more from land each year to present himself at the king's coronation to be knighted.
• A large fiscal deficit had arisen in the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I.
• Ship money, paid directly to the Treasury of the Navy, provided between £150,000 to £200,000 annually between 1634 and 1638, after which yields declined.
• England was the least taxed country in Europe, with no official excise and no regular direct taxation.
• The prosecution of John Hampden for non-payment in 1637–38 provided a platform for popular protest, and the judges only found against Hampden by the narrow margin of 7–5.
• Sales of Royal lands, especially the large expanses of under-developed Royal forests, also contributed to finances.
• Charles was primarily reliant on volunteer forces for defence and diplomatic efforts to support his sister, Elizabeth, and his foreign policy objective for the restoration of the Palatinate.
• Charles also raised funds from the Scottish nobility, at the price of considerable acrimony, by the Act of Revocation (1625), whereby all gifts of royal or church land made to the nobility since 1540 were revoked, with continued ownership being subject to an annual rent.
• The chief tax imposed by Charles was a feudal levy known as ship money, which proved even more unpopular, and lucrative, than tonnage and poundage before it.
• Charles and his advisers developed various schemes to raise additional revenue without recourse to Parliament.
• Opposition to ship money steadily grew, but the 12 common law judges of England declared that the tax was within the king's prerogative, though some of them had reservations.
• Nationwide taxation was generally accepted as an emergency measure or for special purposes, such as war, and was understood to require Parliament's authorisation.
• Even in peacetime, the traditional sources of the King's revenue were strained to fund the business of government.