Charles I's Personal Rule 1629-1640
Why Did Charles I Rule Without Parliament?
In March 1629, Charles I dissolved Parliament and did not call it again for eleven years. This period is known as the Personal Rule. Charles believed in the divine right of kings — the idea that monarchs were appointed by God and did not need to consult their subjects through Parliament. He had clashed repeatedly with MPs who refused to grant him taxation and who criticised his religious and foreign policies. By governing alone, Charles hoped to avoid those conflicts entirely.
Charles dissolved Parliament in March 1629 and did not call another until April 1640. Historians usually call the period the Personal Rule. The label “Eleven Years’ Tyranny” comes from later Whig historians who were hostile to Charles, not from people at the time.
Financing the Personal Rule: Ship Money
Without Parliament, Charles could not raise taxes by consent. He revived and extended ship money, an old coastal levy, and from 1635 demanded it from inland counties too. Revenue rose dramatically — in 1636 around 90% was collected. Charles argued the Crown could levy ship money without Parliament in times of national danger.
The most famous challenge came from John Hampden, a Buckinghamshire gentleman, who refused to pay twenty shillings in 1637. His trial became a national event. Although Charles won the legal case by seven votes to five, the narrow margin undermined the principle: five judges ruled ship money was unconstitutional. Hampden became a popular hero of parliamentary opposition.
Charles used other prerogative devices to raise money. Distraint of knighthood fined landowners who had failed to be knighted at his coronation — an ancient obligation they had long ignored. Forest laws were revived, fining landowners who had encroached on royal forests. Monopolies were granted to companies in exchange for payments to the Crown. These measures were technically legal but deeply resented as arbitrary impositions.
Laudian Religious Reforms
Charles’s Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, introduced a programme of religious reform that alarmed many Protestants. Laud emphasised ceremony, beauty in worship, and the authority of bishops. He moved communion tables to the east end of churches and railed them off, resembling Catholic altars. He ordered clergy to wear vestments and enforced uniformity through the Church courts. Critics accused him of trying to reintroduce Catholicism by the back door.
Laud also used the Court of Star Chamber and the Court of High Commission to silence opponents. William Prynne, Henry Burton and John Bastwick were imprisoned and had their ears cut off in 1637 for publishing pamphlets attacking Laudian practices — an act of brutal censorship that generated public outrage rather than submission.
Laud moved communion tables to the east end of churches and railed them off, used the Star Chamber to silence critics, and enforced the use of vestments. Puritans saw this as a return towards Roman Catholic practice.
The Scottish Crisis and Bishops' Wars
In 1637, Charles and Laud attempted to impose a new Anglican Prayer Book on Scotland. The Scots were strongly Calvinist and regarded the Prayer Book as papist interference. Its introduction sparked a riot in Edinburgh, then widespread resistance. In 1638 Scottish Presbyterians signed the National Covenant, pledging to defend their Kirk against religious innovation.
Charles lacked the army and money to coerce Scotland. Two Bishops’ Wars followed (1639 and 1640), both ending in English humiliation. In the Treaty of Ripon (1640), Charles agreed to pay the Scottish army £850 per day while they occupied northern England. He could no longer govern without parliamentary finance. Necessity, not goodwill, forced him to recall Parliament.
Charles called Parliament in April 1640 (the Short Parliament), but MPs insisted on discussing grievances before granting supply. Charles dissolved it after three weeks. The military crisis deepened, and in November 1640 he was forced to call the Long Parliament. This Parliament immediately attacked Charles’s ministers — Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, was impeached, then condemned by an Act of Attainder and executed in May 1641. Archbishop Laud was imprisoned, later executed in 1645. Parliament also passed the Triennial Act, requiring Parliament to meet at least once every three years.
The Personal Rule had held together in peacetime only because its financial and religious measures, while unpopular, had not provoked outright rebellion. The Scottish crisis exposed its fatal weakness: without Parliament, Charles lacked the resources to wage war. The period demonstrated that in early modern England, the Crown could not govern effectively without parliamentary cooperation, however much it might wish to.