Charles I of England

Charles I was king of England, Scotland and Ireland from 1625 until his execution in 1649. His conflicts with Parliament over taxation, religion and royal authority led to the Wars of the Three Kingdoms and the temporary overthrow of monarchy in England.

In Jean Plaidy’s Myself, My Enemy, the daughter of Henry IV of France, Princess Henrietta Maria, becomes a pawn in a political strategy to stabilize relations between two countries when her father marries her to Charles I of England. In Antonia Fraser’s The Life and Times of King James VI of Scotland, I of England, this biography follows James VI of Scotland as he became James I of England and ruled over the joined crowns after Elizabeth I’s death. Other novels featuring Charles I of England include Michael Arnold’s Traitor’s Blood, Bernard Cornwell’s A Crowning Mercy, Giles Kristian’s The Bleeding Land, Christopher Nicole’s Sword of the Devil, and Philippa Gregory’s Virgin Earth.

In non-fiction, Charles I of England is discussed in Antonia Fraser’s The Weaker Vessel, Linda Porter’s Royal Renegades, Gareth Russell’s The Palace, and Tracy Borman’s The Stolen Crown. In Antonia Fraser’s The Weaker Vessel, the Weaker Vessel examines women’s lives in seventeenth-century England, using biography, legal history and social history to challenge the assumption that women were merely passive dependants.