Charles I was a complex man whose career intersected with some of the most dramatic events in English history. He played a central role in provoking the English Civil War, and his execution led to the only republican government Britain has ever known. Historians have struggled to get him into perspective, veering between outright condemnation and measured sympathy.

This biography sets out to challenge recent assessments of Charles as someone ‘unfit to be king’, and emphasises his strengths as a party leader and conviction politician. These characteristics, along with his misjudgement and mishandling of crises, played a critical role in the causes of the English Civil War. Ultimately pushing Charles' enemies into a posiiton where they had little choice but to execute him.

It is an accessible narrative of the high politics of Charles’s reign as a whole, exploring developments in Scotland and Ireland as well as England. It connects this politics with religious conflict, court culture, Renaissance ideas of monarchy and the emergence of a ‘public sphere’ of news and political debate, while also offering a reassessment of topics such as the origins of the Personal Rule, the political role of Queen Henrietta Maria and Charles’s performance as a military commander.

Richard Cust is Reader in Early Modern History at the University of Birmingham. He was an undergraduate at Queen Mary College University of London, and a postgraduate at Bedford College, University of London. There he was supervised by Professor Conrad Russell and produced a 1984 PhD thesis on ‘The Forced Loan and English Politics 1626-1628.’ He was appointed to a lectureship in the Modern History Department at Birmingham in 1978 and has worked there ever since.