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Charles (Name of a number of European)

the name of a number of European sovereigns and princes, were noted in the order of their respective countries, viz.:

CHARLES I., the second son of James I. of England, and VI. of Scotland, born in 1600. The death of his elder brother, Henry, Prince of Wales, in 1612, opened for him the succession to the throne. He received an excellent education, and was of a gentle and serious, but weak and obstinate disposition. In 1623, he, accompanied by his friend and favorite, the Duke of Buckingham, undertook a journey incognito to Madrid, in quest of the hand of a Spanish princess. This match being broken off through the artifices of Buckingham, Charles, in 1625, espoused Henrietta Maria, daughter of Henry IV. of France, and the same year he succeeded his father to the throne.

Charles was a man thoroughly inoculated with the dictum of the "divine right of kings," and speedily brought himself into collision with the growing intelligence of the age he lived in. Under the advice of bad ministers, as Strafford, Laud, and Buckingham, he adopted tyrannous measures for the support of the royal authority against the progressing power of the people as represented by the lower house of Parliament. The levying of unjust taxes, and the adoption of illegal modes of raising money CHARLES I. a supplies, soon precipitated the inevitable collision between the the crown and the constitution. After dissolving two Parliaments, Charles summoned a third in 1628, which voted the king £280,000, but refused to pass this vote into law, until the king gave his solemn assent to the Petition of Rights-the second charter of English liberties, as it has been termed by which he bound himself to abstain from forced loans and other illegal taxes, and from arbitrary imprisonments, and the billeting of soldiers upon the people. Charles, after subscribing to this covenant, violated his promise, and finding that the Commons were determined to vindicate their rights, dis solved Parliament on the 10th of March, and committed five of its members to prison for contumacy. Charles now de CHARLES I. termined to govern alone by calling no more Parliaments; and ship-money was for the first time levied from the inland counties. At length the king and his advisers provoked an open revolt in Scotland by forcing a liturgy (a thing Presbyterians abhorred) upon her people; whereupon they abolished episcopacy, kept up a determined front, and Charles in vain determined to coerce them. Under these circumstances, he, in 1640, assembled a new Parliament, the members of which were moderate men, but still men who were indisposed to countenance his arbitrary proceedings. He accord- CHARLES I.

CHARLES III. mgly dissolved that body, and was com- CHARLES II., born in 1630, was called pelled to come to a truce with the Scots, who had entered the N. of England in force. The houses met again in the same year, brought in a bill of attainder against Strafford and had him executed; imprisoned Laud, abolished the Star Chamber and High Court of Commission, and curbed the royal prerogative in other important matters. Things now went on from bad to worse, and both parties had become so thoroughly embittered and disgusted that no other course was left but a final arbitrament by the sword.

The king raised the royal standard at Nottingham in August, 1642, and to it flocked the majority of the nobility, gentry, and yeomanry of the land; the Parliament troops, on the other hand, being composed of the citizens of towns and the artisans of London. The battle of Marston Moor was the first signal blow inflicted on the royal cause. The hotly disputed battle fought at Naseby, in Northamptonshire, June 14, 1645, was that which decided the fate of Charles.

Six months after this decisive defeat, Charles, tempted by his evil genius, withdrew to Scotland, a country in which his name was held in odium, owing to the persecutions of Laud; where, throwing himself upon the more than doubtful fidelity of Lord Leven, the Scottish general, and his army, he was delivered up by the Scots to the English Parliament upon payment of £400,000. The fallen monarch was first confined by the parliamentary commissioners in Holmby House, Northamptonshire. Here he was seized by the army (which had now dissevered itself from the Parliament), or, in other words, by Cromwell, and removed to Hampton Court, whence, after a futile attempt to escape, he was taken to Carisbrooke Castle, in the Isle of Wight. Here he carried on negotiations with the Parliament, who were willing to restore him under certain conditions, in order thus to overrule and break down the ascendant military power. But Cromwell, anticipating them, again seized the king's person, had him conveyed to Hurst Castle, near Lymington, Hampshire; and then, clearing out and crushing Parliament by "Pride's purge, prepared for the closing act of the great drama by having the captive sovereign brought to London, and put upon his trial before a High Court of Justice appointed for the occasion, on the charge that it was treason in a king to levy war against his Parliament. This trial began on Jan. 20, 1649, and lasted during four sittings. Sentence of death was pronounced upon him. Charles was executed Jan. 30, 1649, in the 49th year of his age, and the 24th of his reign. وو to the throne by a people sickened of civil broils and entered London May 29, 1660, his birthday, amid universal rejoicing. He is known as the Merry Monarch. The trial, condemnation, and execution of the "regicides," as they were called, or of so many then living as had been most active in the death of his father, was one of the first of the many mournful features of his reign. Next, the Act of Conformity ejected about 2,000 conscientious clergymen from their cures. The Dutch war followed, which began gloriously, but ended by their fleet, under De Ruyter, appearing in the Thames, sailing up the Medway, taking Sheerness, burning several ships, and insulting Harwich. A ministry known as the Cabal, which urged the king to repeat the errors of his father by exalting his prerogative above the privileges. of parliament and the laws of the land, brought the country into thorough contempt in the eyes of Europe. His reign was one of the most corrupt and licentious of modern times, and can only compare in history with that of Louis XV. of France, Charles died in 1685, in the 55th year of his age, and the 25th of his reign. He left no legitimate issue.

CHARLES EDWARD (PRINCE). See STUART FAMILY, THE.

CHARLES I., surnamed le Chauve, or the Bald, King of France, son of Louis le Débonnaire, born in 823. After his father's death in 840 he fought with his half-brother Lothaire for the empire of the Franks, and finally acquired by the Treaty of Verdun (843) all those territories between the ocean on the one part, and the Meuse, the Scheldt, the Saône, the Rhone, and the Mediterranean, on the other. But he lost southern Aquitaine to his nephew Pepin, and had to divide Lorraine with his brother Louis the German. In 875 he was crowned emperor by Pope John VIII. He died in 877.

CHARLES II., surnamed le Gros, or the Fat, King of France, also known as Charles III., Emperor of Germany, born about 832. He was the son of Louis the German, and ascended the French throne in 885 to the prejudice of his cousin, Charles the Simple, but was deposed in 887 and died the following year.

CHARLES III., King of France, surnamed the Simple, son of Louis the Stammerer, born in 879. His reign is noted for his long struggle with the piratical Northmen or Normans, to whose chief, Rollo, he eventually ceded the territory of Normandy. He died in 929.

CHARLES IV.

CHARLES IV., King of France, surnamed le Bel, or the Handsome, third son of Philippe le Bel, born in 1294, and ascended the throne in 1322. He died in 1328, without male issue, and was the last of the direct line descended from Hugh Capet.

CHARLES V., surnamed the Wise, King of France, son of King John, born in 1337. His father being taken prisoner by the English at Poitiers, the management of the kingdom devolved on him at an early age. With great skill and energy, not free, however, from duplicity, he suppressed the revolt of the Parisians and a rising of the peasants, kept the King of Navarre at bay, and deprived the English of a great part of their dominion in France. He erected the Bastille for the purpose of overawing the Parisians. He died in 1380. CHARLES VI., surnamed the Silly, King of France, son of the foregoing, born at Paris in 1368, and in 1388 assumed the government. Four years later he lost his reason, and one of the most disastrous periods of French history followed. The kingdom was torn by the rival factions of Burgundians and Armagnacs (Orleanists). In 1415 Henry V. of England crossed over to Normandy, took Harfleur by storm, won the famous victory of Agincourt, and compelled the crazy king to acknowledge him as his successor. Charles died in 1422.

CHARLES VII., King of France, born in Paris in 1403. He succeeded only to the southern provinces of the kingdom, Henry VI. of England being proclaimed King of France at Paris. The English dominion in France was under the government of the Duke of Bedford, and so skillfully did the English general conduct his operations that Charles had almost abandoned the struggle as hopeless, when the appearance of Jeanne d'Arc, the Maid of Orleans, gave a favorable turn to his affairs, and the struggle ended in the expulsion of the English from all their possessions in France, except Calais. Charles died in 1461. CHARLES VIII., King of France, son of Louis XI., born in 1470, succeeded his father in 1483. In 1491 he married Anne, the heiress of Brittany, and thereby annexed that important duchy to the French crown. The chief event in the reign of Charles VIII. is his expedition into Italy, and rapid conquest of the kingdom of Naples, a conquest as rapidly lost when a few months later Gonsalvo de Cordova re-annexed it to Spain.

Charles was meditating a renewed descent into Italy when he died in 1498. CHARLES V.

CHARLES IX., King of France, son of Henry II. and Catharine de' Medici, born in 1550, ascended the throne at the age of 10 years. His haughty and ambitious mother seized the control of the state. Along with the Guises she headed the Catholic League against the Calvinists, and her tortuous and unscrupulous policy helped to embitter the religious strife of the factions. After a series of Huguenot persecutions and civil wars a peace was made in 1570, which, two years later, on Aug. 24, 1572, was treacherously broken by the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. The king, who had been little more than the tool of his scheming mother, died two years afterward, in 1574.

CHARLES X., King of France, Comte d'Artois, grandson of Louis XV., the youngest son of the dauphin, and brother of Louis XVI., born in Versailles in 1757.

He left France in 1789, after the first popular insurrection and destruction of the Bastille, and afterward assuming the command of a body of emigrants, acted in concert with the Austrian and Prussian armies on the Rhine. Despairing of success he retired to Great Britain and resided for several years in the palace of Holyrood at Edinburgh. He entered France at the Restoration, and in 1824 succeeded his brother, Louis XVIII. as king. In a short time his reactionary policy brought him into conflict with the popular party, and in 1830 a revolution drove him from the throne. He died in 1836. His grandson, the Comte de Chambord, claimed the French throne as his heir.