However other people claim that the War broke out as result of religious reasons. This is because England had been a Protestant country for a hundred years when Charles came along. Charles was married to a catholic lady, named Henrietta Maria. Many people thought that the King was a secret catholic and planned to change England into a Catholic country and thought that they might be in danger. Another thing that added to this out burst was that the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, had an Idea of beautifying the Churches as they had started to get in very poor conditions. This was all well and good till the supposedly ‘Protestant Churches’ were starting look as though they were in fact catholic churches. This caused a great up rise with in the Puritan/Protestant churches and was in fact a great mistake.
Some people think that the chief reason for the war was because of economic reasons. They say that the King was careless and spent his money any old how. The King was always short of money and hired a clever lawyer William Noy to find old taxes and laws passed hundreds of years ago, as a cruel way of getting money out of the public. These included the Knighthood Law, Forest Law, Monopolies, Ship money. Many people got angry at the deceptive tricks Charles played.
Apart from these reasons, some people blame long or short- term causes for the war such as ‘The Grand Remonstrance’. This was a personal attack against the King. It was a book listing all his faults and only covered a short period of time and therefore was a short- term cause for the war. As a result of this, King Charles got very angry and stormed into Parliament to try and arrest John Pym and the others involved in this act. As it happened, they had already fled but King Charles had already done the damage. He was the first and last King to ever go into the House of Commons. This outraged many people and was another situation which people blamed as a short- term cause for the war.
After gathering this information together, I think that Parliament were right in questioning the King’s methods and ways of ruling as the King needed help and was reluctant to ask for it. The King was reliant on the idea of ‘The Divine Right of Kings’ and did whatever he thought was right. I think that if the King had of allied with the MPs and called Parliament regularly, then the Civil War could have been prevented. But as it happened, the King was too arrogant and brought the Civil War on himself.
By Chris Cousins
