Charles I Personality

English Civil War historians often focus on the dispute about its causation. The Civil War had stemmed from a compilation of issues – notably the importance of money, religion and power. However, an underlying theme of debate between historians has been the ruling of Charles I and the links of his actions to the start of the civil war. This raises the question of the importance of Charles’ actions in the trigger of the civil war and how his personality traits had effect. This essay will examine the faults in Charles personality in a role of king, and illustrate how the traits were a cause of flawed actions by Charles, namely actions in parliament and to the people, in order to show that the personality of Charles I can be linked to the English …show more content…
During the mid-1630’s, the royal government’s need for revenue produced many unusual fiscal measures. Charles no longer had the support of Parliament to grant him taxes. Therefore, he had to find other revenues to raise money. A notable levy that added to Charles’ accumulation of grievances that would later generate accusations of a mismanaged government was ship money. Charles saw ship money as a royal responsibility to be imposed upon his subjects. The ship money was seen as a highly contentious issue in Charles’ fiscal reforms as the income of the levy did not go to the exchequer but to building a stronger navy. However, the levy was originally meant for wartime crises. Charles had bypassed the original purpose and declared it as an annual, national tax which proves an example of how Charles could be legally correct, but politically wrong. Historian D.R Watson stated that making ship money a new general land tax was, ‘typical of Charles legalism and political incompetence.’ Charles’ opposition, John Pym, declared that the unprecedented tax was, "against all former precedents and laws” and that the Charles would have known that his "reputation and conscience" was at risk by defending the tax. Charles also liked to see himself as an advanced king, however he lacked a very important aspect of being a leader - the devotion of his subjects. During the period of his personal rule, he made certain measures of taxation into trials of loyalty. The knighthood fines were a century old fine that affected individuals who had not been knighted and owned land. This levy, however did not occur large individual sums, did create some apprehension and suspicion from a sector of the population with a substantial amount of power. Charles’ fiscal transformations and reforms created a lot of distrust of from his subjects which had damaging consequences for his political