Personal rule of Charles I

The Personal Rule (also known as the Eleven Years' Tyranny) was the period from 1629 to 1640, when King Charles I of England, Scotland and Ireland ruled without recourse to Parliament. The King was entitled to do this under the Royal Prerogative. His actions caused discontent among the ruling classes, but the effects were more popular with the common people.

Charles had already dissolved three Parliaments by the third year of his reign in 1628. After the murder of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, who was deemed to have a negative influence on Charles' foreign policy, Parliament began to criticize the king more harshly than before. Charles then realized that, as long as he could avoid war, he could rule without Parliament.

Whig historians sometimes called this period the Eleven Years' Tyranny, a term meant to foreshadow the political ruptures of the English Civil War. More recently, however, scholars have described the eleven years as a period of "Creative Reform", due to the measures taken by Charles to restructure English politics.

The greatest problem Charles initially encountered at this stage was a continued lack of funds. The main sources of income for the King were customs duties, feudal dues and income from the King's personal estates. Nationwide taxation was widely understood to be for emergencies and special purposes, such as war, and it was by this time generally accepted that only Parliament could authorise a general tax. But even in peacetime, the traditional sources of the King's revenue were stretched to the limit to fund the business of government. So Charles and his advisers developed various schemes to raise additional revenue without recourse to Parliament.

A large fiscal deficit had arisen in the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I. Notwithstanding Buckingham's short lived campaigns against both Spain and France, there was little financial capacity for Charles to wage wars overseas. Throughout his reign Charles was obliged to rely primarily on volunteer forces for defence and on diplomatic efforts to support his sister, Elizabeth, and his foreign policy objective for the restoration of the Palatinate. England was still the least taxed country in Europe, with no official excise and no regular direct taxation. To raise revenue without reconvening Parliament, Charles resurrected an all-but-forgotten law called the "Distraint of Knighthood", in abeyance for over a century, which required any man who earned £40 or more from land each year to present himself at the king's coronation to be knighted. Relying on this old statute, Charles fined individuals who had failed to attend his coronation in 1626.

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