Religious Turmoil Inflicted By King Charles “Personal Rule”
Religious Turmoil Inflicted By King Charles “Personal Rule”
From 1630-1642, during the heart of King Charles I reign in England, over 25,000 dissatisfied Puritans migrated across the Atlantic Ocean to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. That was the single largest migration of any group to America. What triggers that kind of overwhelming relocation? Numerous English subjects were highly dissatisfied with the rash religious decisions of Charles I. While Parliament reacted to Charles’ economic and political changes, the King’s subjects reacted to his religious moves. In this essay, I will address the religious anxiety created by King Charles I that resulted in this mass exodus
The fact that King Charles I had a devout Catholic wife did not help matters. The Queen affiliated with Jesuit priests and thus in the eyes of the English people, Charles associated with Jesuits. The royal couple used large sums of tax money to redecorate existing English churches and to build new religious structures. They made a big fuss over religious monuments. These actions led the people to believe that Charles was striving for reconciliation with the Catholic Church. He deployed Armenians to run the new religious facilities. Armenians in general were Calvinist, but on the surface appeared to be Catholics. This also caused the English people to suspect that Charles wished to reunite with Rome. His impeachments of bishops and priests made the English wonder about the religious direction that Charles was pushing toward.
During this period, the English Church prospered and no one dared to toy with the Anglican Church after the reign of Mary Tudor. Charles broke one of the ideals of the Anglican Church by giving clergy a higher rank in status and power. He made a distinction between clergy and common folk, an idea that had been abolished over a hundred years prior in England. He also reintroduced Popish ceremonies into the Anglican Church, angering a mass of Puritans in England. The accumulation of these events enacted by Charles I, upset the balance of religious unity in England. It almost pushed England into religious war, a situation England had avoided while most of Europe had resorted to combat. The religious maneuvers were handled hastily by Charles and almost put in England in a decline.