Lesson video

Hello everyone and welcome back to your second lesson of the inquiry question, looking at how civil war broke out in 1642.

In the last lesson we looked at the Thirty Years' War and how that caused the relationship between Charles and parliament to break down.

Now, there are three main reasons for this.

One, the religious conflict, as Charles tried to navigate Catholics and Protestants and trying to get them to settle their differences, not just in England, but also in the continent in Europe.

Secondly, economic problems as Charles entered into that war, he needed money in order to do so.

And parliament spent a lot of time trying to create deals with Charles before they would then accept to raising taxes and giving them out wealth.

And then thirdly, and more importantly, with the political problems that happened to Charles, he really was a strong believer in the divine right of kings.

And he takes that one step farther in 1629 when he starts his personal rule.

And this is why he completely gets rid of parliament, dissolves them for 11 years much to that anger.

And this is what we are going to be studying this lesson.

And it's going to be very, very interesting.

And so before we get started, please make sure you've got everything you need.

That is a pen and paper, pause now, if you need to go and get them, and then we will begin.

Okay, so to start, can you please write down today's date in the top right hand corner of your piece of paper and the title, Charles I's Personal Rule, please make sure to underline both of them and just pause me once you complete that.

Before we delve in and look at how the relationship between Charles I and parliament broke down, I want to go back and just have a think about what a typical relationship between king and parliament usually looked like.

Now, you can see on the left hand part of the screen is a mediaeval drawing of king and parliament.

And I want you to think about what can you learn about this relationship from this source and the best way to do this is to first of all zoom in on one detail within the source.

And you might want to then use the sentence starter in this image, I can see, just zoom in on something that you think is going to answer that question.

And then what you want to think about is the meaning of that.

What can you learn from this? What can you infer? Okay, have a go at that.

Try and to think of one, if not two bits of information that you can learn about the relationship between king and parliament from this source, and then we'll come back and go through our answers.

Excellent, really, really well done.

It's quite difficult doing source analysis.

So really good attempts with whatever that you've written.

And what I'm going to do now is go through a couple of my own ideas.

These might be different from yours, and that's kind of the beauty of source analysis.

Lots of people will come up with different things.

And as long as it links to the question, that's absolutely great.

So as I said, my ideas might be different.

That doesn't necessarily mean that yours are wrong, but also feel free to write them down, if you think that you need to add them to your work.

So the first thing that I decided to zoom in on in this image is the fact that you can see the king right at the top of the source.

He is above everyone else.

And therefore, what I've learned about the relationship between king and parliament is that the king therefore is the most important.

And we know this anyway from our knowledge from last lesson because of the king's ability to cool parliaments, but also to dissolve it whenever he wants.

It's down to the king whether the parliament is in session or not.

And the second thing that I decided to zoom in on is the fact that parliament is in this image in the first place.

Clearly, the king needs parliament in order to rule.

Otherwise they wouldn't be there in this drawing.

They clearly have quite a lot of importance, even if they're not the most important in the country.

I mean, also we know this to be true from last lesson as well, as parliament was responsible for raising taxes to the king, they were responsible for increasing the king's wealth, especially in times of war.

So this was the usual relationship.

The king would be the most important, but he would always need parliament in order to raise funds, especially in times of war.

Okay, so we're now going to go into more detail about what happens with Charles I and how his relationship with parliament changes.

So in June 1628, Charles agreed parliament Petition of Right, you'll remember at this time, he's involved in Thirty Years' War, he dissolved parliament which meant that he wasn't getting those taxes.

He was losing out the money, trying to fund this war.

So he calls back parliament because he realises, okay, yeah, I definitely need some money and parliament again, they're trying to manipulate him.

And they say, look, you can only get this money, if you agree to our Petition of Rights.

And essentially what parliament were trying to do was just to change Charles's behaviour so that he wasn't kind of using all of the authority and he just scaled back on his power slightly.

So for instance, they wanted him to stop imprisoning people without trial, so that they'd just be a bit fairer and he agrees to this so this looks great.

It looks like the relationship between Charles and parliament is improving immensely which is fantastic.

However, in August 1628, the Duke of Buckingham is assassinated and quite dramatically.

There's a man called John Felton who was a military man who felt that Buckingham had stole his job promotion from him so he found Buckingham and stabbed him to death very violently, which of course left Charles I heartbroken, as his best friend died.

And this is really why the relationship between Charles and parliament takes the time for the worst.

When Charles next sees them in session in 1629, some of the members of parliament openly celebrated Buckingham's death.

Do you remember? They hated the fact that he had such a close relationship with Charles.

They were very jealous of that and so some celebrated it, which of course, infuriated Charles.

He couldn't believe how awful they would be.

So therefore, with the relationship well and truly breaking down this point, Charles refuses parliaments author of tonnage and poundage.

So this was the tax that was responsible for providing the Monarch with the core amount of wealth.

And Charles said, no, I don't want it, take it back on, I'm going to my own methods to make money.

He completely turns away from parliament.

And that is that.

What you have in 1629 is the dissolution of parliament.

Charles has finally had enough of parliament, causing him problems and he decides he is going to rule by himself.

What happens is that he sends John Finch, who's the Speaker of the Commons who announced to parliament that the time has come and they are finally going to be shut down, but the MPs are completely outraged by this.

And they hold down John Finch in his chair to try and prevent him from making that announcement.

And the more, Puritan MPs locked the doors and start to really quickly vote through laws to try and limit Charles the first rule.

They're really, really concerned about the fact that without having parliament there to kind of give Charles some advice and argue some of his policies, that he might just use the power by himself and go absolutely crazy with changing England beyond recognition.

Charles was absolutely horrified by this reaction, remember, he'd been put in charge of England by God himself through the divine right of kings.

So this idea that these normal people would stand against him, he could not agree with at all.

So he dissolves parliament and this would prove to be the last time that he would see them for 11 years.

Okay, I'd just like you to pause the video here and just have a quick think about this question.

What problems might Charles face by ruling without parliament? To help you, think about the powers that parliament had at this time? And also think about how the people of England might react to him dissolving parliament.

So just maybe three ideas that you have, if you can do more, then fantastic and just pause the screen as you complete that.

Excellent work, really, really well done.

I'm going to go through three main reasons that I've come up with.

Again, these might be different to yours.

It's absolutely fine, but as always feel free to add these to your notes, if you wish.

So problem number one, which I'm sure all of you managed to get, Charles can no longer use taxes to raise money.

Remember he told parliament, your tonnage and poundage, I don't want it.

He then decides to solve this problem quite easily, but much to the annoyance of everywhere else by increasing fines, for instance.

So there are a lot of Royal forests around the country and people would steal from them.

They might steal wood.

They might hunt in them.

And what Charles did is he increased the fines so that he would then get more money from people breaking the law.

And also, and probably the thing that people hated the most within 1635, he made changes to ship money.

Now this was a tax that only coastal towns paid to fund the nation's Navy.

But then Charles realised, well, everyone in the country benefits from us having a good Navy, not just the coastal towns.

So I'm going to make this a tax that everyone pays, which obviously is going to anger lots of people.

So the second problem, obviously, parliament are going to be enraged that they are out of a job for the next 11 years.

So they start to publicly argue against the king and with ship money.

So remember, this is Charles just raising his own tax.

He's like, right, I know this is a job for parliament, but I'm just going to do it myself.

And MPs were absolutely outraged by this.

And one called John Hampden even tried to take this case to court to say that Charles was absolutely breaking the law.

However, it comes down to the divine right of kings again.

The king's word is law.

And if Charles goes against what used to be the laws in the past, and that's absolutely fine because remember what Charles does is essentially God's will and therefore people can't go against it.

And problem number three, publications start to increase that criticised Charles's rule as member of the public are annoyed about the increase in tax that they're having to pay.

And they're worried about having a king that seems to have absolute power.

And they're worried about whether he might use that power negatively, but again, Charles backed himself by saying again, it comes down to the divine right of kings.

I am not chosen to rule the country by you, the people.

I owe you, nothing.

So I'm not going to change my behaviour for you.

It was God that chose me to be on the throne.

And therefore I can use this phone how I wish to.

Okay, so now that we've looked at political and economic points of tension, we're now going to revisit the religious divisions within England at this time.

So you will remember from last lesson that the main division of Christianity was between the Protestants and the Catholics.

Now they disagreed on many things, but one of the main differences with it was that Protestants believed that to practise Christianity effectively, Then you needed to have a really clear connection to God.

So they believe that was achieved by having no distractions within the church.

And devoting that time spent reading the Bible.

They wanted their church to be plain.

They wanted that priests to wear very plain robes because they didn't think that the priests were anymore important than the general public.

So they didn't want their priest to appear as if they were more wealthy or anything like that.

Now, the Catholics disputed this, they completely went against these ideas.

They believed that the church was God's home.

So therefore it should be decorated massively.

They should have candles.

They should have crosses because they want to show to God that they're going to make his home as beautiful as possible to show how religiously devoted they were to him.

And then as well to contrast, they wanted their priests.

They thought that priests were closer to God.

So therefore should be more important.

So they'd make them wear vestments, which is the name given to the gown.

That would be really ornately decorated with gold thread and was really expensive to make, to again, show the importance of the priests.

Now when Charles I came to the throne, there were growing fears, that Charles I was going to change the Church of England that was Protestants and he was going to shift it further towards Catholicism.

Now, some of those fears were increasing due to Charles's marriage.

You'll remember to Henrietta Maria who was a French Catholic and not only that, but Charles allowed Henrietta Maria to continue practising Catholicism within England.

And many people worried that she was having much influence on their Protestant king.

Now there's worries increasing further with Laud's reforms. So here you can see William Laud.

He was the Archbishop of Canterbury, which was essentially the most senior, most powerful position within the Church of England, other than the king himself.

And he made a lots of reforms to the church.

When we say reforms, we just mean changes, okay? He wanted to include new policies.

And these were quite Catholic-seeming policies.

Remember he is with the Protestant, but the changes he wanted to make were things that the Catholics were already doing, such as he wanted priests to wear vestments.

They didn't want them to wear these playing robes but again, wanted these really expensive luxurious, ornate robes to show the priest's importance.

And again, he wanted churches to have more decoration.

He believed that a church would be beautiful.

So therefore they should have more crosses within them.

The stained glass windows and candles as well.

Now he was met with a lot of outrage by the Puritan.

You remember they were very extreme Protestants and all of this idea of vestments, decoration, and churches, they believed to be a real offence to God because you remember that they thought that all of that wealth served as a distraction and stopped people from just really focusing on having that connection with God where they could get by reading the Bible.

So the consequences of Laud's reforms were really significant within England, but also within Scotland, which we're going to study next lessons.

It's really important that we take a pause point here just so that we can really consolidate our knowledge on Laud's reforms and their consequences.

So what I'd like you to do, you can see there's four statements here that some are true and some are false.

What I'd like you to do is write down the ones that you think are true, write them into your book.

And any that you think are false.

I'd like you to write them into your book, but also change them so that they are indeed correct.

You might have to make just a few changes to the wording in order to change the meaning.

So that is true.

Okay so just pause the screen once you complete that, and then we'll go through the answers together.

Okay, excellent work really, really well done, especially to those of you that were changing the false statements so that they would then be accurate.

Let's go through.

Statement A, Puritans were angry that Laud wanted to make churches more plain.

Now that is indeed false.

Remember Puritans were all about having a plain church.

They thought that any decorations acted as a distraction from praying to God.

So some of you in order to correct that statement, might have changed it so that Puritans were angry that Laud wanted to make churches more decorated.

And that would be how you turn that into a true statements.

And B is true, it reads Laud's reforms were disliked because the increase in decoration would make the churches appear more Catholic.

Very good.

C, false, England was a Catholic country, but Charles I was the first believed that churches should be more beautiful.

And again, for those of you that were changing that statement into being true, you would change it into England was a Protestant country, but Charles I believed that churches should be more beautiful, which was a typically more Catholic-seeming policy.

And D, true, unlike Laud, Puritans thought priests shouldn't wear vestments because they are not important in social dress plainly.

Excellent work really, really well done for getting that consolidated in your notes.

We are now going to move on the main part of the lesson where you read through the worksheet.

This is going to go into greater detail about the breakdown in the relationship with parliament, ship money and also Laud's reforms and the reactions to them.

So what I would like you to do, I'd encourage you to read these questions first now, just so that you know what key information you need to be looking through on the worksheets, and then pause this video, read the slides, and then answer the comprehension questions.

Remember, we always want to be answering them in full sentences.

Okay so just pause the screen here and then resume once you're finished.

Excellent work, really well done for completing those comprehension questions.

I'm now going to run through the answers with you and as always feel free to pause me at any point so that you can take your work, but also to improve your work.

If you feel like there's extra information that you've missed out, always try to make sure that the notes that we're completing in our book is the very best quality work that we can do.

Okay so question number one, which two events worsened the relationship between king and parliament? An acceptable answer, Thirty Years' War and assassination of the Duke of Buckingham.

Again, it's absolutely correct.

Those two definitely worsened relations, but I think we can add some detail in there and also turn this into a full sentence.

So a good answer, Charles' actions in the Thirty Years' War and parliaments celebration of the Duke Buckingham's death worsened the relationship between the king and parliament.

So you can see that how it's just been explained that little bit further.

Good, question number two, what change did Charles I make to ship money? An acceptable answer, by making it a tax everyone had to pay.

Again, correct, but not specific.

If I look back at these notes, I don't know what I'm talking about.

I've not even named the tax.

So an even better answer, ship money used to be only be paid by those living on the coast, as they benefited the most from the Navy protecting them from piracy.

Charles changed this so everyone in the country had to pay ship money.

Remember that had a very negative effect on the people.

Question number three, why did John Hampden lose his court case against Charles I? You remember, he was absolutely protesting against ship money and Charles raising taxes on his own accord when that was definitely a job that was only meant to be completed by parliament.

So an acceptable answer, because it was decided that the king's word was law.

Good but I think we can explain that a little bit further.

So good answer, the divine right of kings gave the king more power than anyone else in the country.

Due to this Charles I could not be punished for changing the ship money tax as to do so would be seen to be punishing God which was unthinkable.

So this answer really goes into more detail and explains the idea of how the king's word was law by using the concept of the divine right of kings.

So that automatically makes this answer much better, more detailed in its explanation.

Question number four, why were Puritans so outraged by Laud's reforms? Acceptable answer, they thought it was too Catholic.

Again, correct, but let's go into more detail, let's to show off our historical knowledge.

So good answer, Puritans were outraged by Laud's reforms, as they feared it was a return to Catholicism.

Puritans believed the best way to practise religion was by having a clear connection to God.

The decorations in church that Laud wanted would only be a destruction and hinder their religious practise.

Again, more explanation and detail put into that to improve.

And question number five, why were protests against Laud's reforms punished so harshly? Acceptable answer, to act as a warning to others not to protest.

Absolutely that punishment of having your ears sliced off would act as a deterrent to anyone else.

If you're still walking around and people would see you, they might ask, well, how did you use those ears? And I'm sure they would tell you, 'cause I was protesting against Laud's reforms and they would leave having a look at you and your poor deformed face and thinking, right, well, I definitely need to make sure I didn't make the same mistake as him because I want to keep my ears.

But good answer would be again, more explanation.

Puritans that protested against Laud's reforms were harshly punished as by going against Laud's policies, they were seen to be going against Charles I and therefore God himself.

Therefore harsh punishments would show the severity of the crime and also act as a warning to others not to make the same mistake.

And really, at this point, this was very different to what had happened before, before if you'd gone against the king, and these policies with the Church of England, you might be fined maybe 200 pounds.

So it's still very serious crime.

But during this point of Charles I, remember, he's really showing off his absolute authority.

That fine rised massively and also it lets to public mutilations, as you would have read about with the hacking off of the ears.

And when I was reading it, it was really horrible story about one of them who, he had his ear partially hacked off and it was just hanging off by the earlobe and the execution of the man with the axe.

He'd already left the stage.

He was just going to leave it like that.

And then sort of, he had to be told to come back, do your job properly and then he took another hack of the ear in order to get it off, gruesome stuff.

We've come to the end of the lesson, almost.

We just need to turn back to that inquiry question.

Why did the civil war break out in 1642? last pause point, we're going to focus on how the Charles I personal rule helped cause the civil war to break out in 1642.

And what I would like you to do to summarise this lesson is copy and complete these three sentences.

So you will see that they focus on the three different categories of problems that we looked at last lesson, we're continuing that through.

So the first one, Charles I personal rule helped cause civil war to break out due to the political conflict it caused.

And then you need to add some information about the relationship between the king and parliament.

Furthermore, economic problems increased for the public as, here I want you to include some knowledge about that tax that really annoyed many people within England.

And then your last sentence, lastly, Charles I personal rule led to increased religious divisions because, here you add in that information about Laud's reforms, really challenge yourself to be as detailed as you possibly can in the summary.

And just pause the screen once you get that completed.

Excellent work today, you're right.

Really, really well done for getting to the end of the lesson.

And as I said, next lesson, we're going to be looking in more detail at Laud's reforms and how they affected Scotland.

So I really look forward to seeing you back here to complete that.

In the meantime, you have the option of sharing your work with Oak National.

So if you'd like to, please ask your parent or carer to share your work on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, tagging @OakNational and #LearnwithOak, I hope you have a really great rest of your day.

And I look forward to teaching you again soon.