Exam Question | Charles I | A Level History

Welcome back everybody, we've got another exam question here, this one being for the Stuart Britton module for A-Level History. And the question is this, it is given as a statement, and the statement reads as follows. Charles I was a failure on religion compared to that of James I. Assess the validity of this view with reference to the years 1603 to 1640. So we are given a nice little time frame that we are going to be examining this question from, so we're not going past 1640, which is nice. And we're asked to basically compare the religious policies and the responses to religious problems under both Charles I and James I, and see who was better. It's given us a position within the question, the position was that Charles was a failure compared to James. And so we're going to have to analyse this, critically evaluate it, and assess whether or not we can agree or disagree. And we're doing it again with reference to 1603 to 1640. So the best way, if we're going to plan this question, what's the best way in which we can plan it out? And the best way, in my opinion, to do that is to just start to think about all of the things that we can write about for James I relating to religion, and then talk about all the things that we can talk about for Charles I relating to religion. Talk about all the good things, talk about all the bad things, so that we can then start to put together some arguments for the essay. So, let's begin by talking about religious issues under James I. Now we know that James was generally very positive on religion. He wanted to see himself as somebody who was welcoming of other religious opinions. And that's why we see a year later, in 1604, the Hampton Court Conference. This conference was where Puritans could raise their issues they had with James's religious policies. James met with bishops and some of the changes were actually agreed to. That we can put as a little tick as something that was generally quite positive on the side of James I. We know that James was keen to be seen as a monarch who was willing to promote ideological debate. And that's why the Hampton Court Conference was arranged, to respond to the petition that was levied at James. So, that's a positive thing we can talk about. We could critically evaluate that point and say, while there were obviously some positives that took place during the Hampton Court Conference, James did reject a number of the proposals of the conference. So, for example, suggestions from Puritans that the church should be reformed along Presbyterian lines. That was something that was proposed by people who attended the conference that James rejected. So, you could argue that, on the one hand, the Hampton Court Conference was positive. On the other hand, there were other problems. But, overall, I think the Hampton Court Conference was seen as generally quite a positive aspect of religious policy during the reign of James I. So, you might be able to then conclude a point on that by saying something along the lines of, nevertheless, even though some of the proposals were rejected by James, the overall mood at the conference was generally positive. And James did meet with some bishops and changes were eventually agreed to. We could also talk about the fact that we see a new translation of the Bible. The King James variation of the Bible that was created during his reign as well. Generally quite positive. Now, let's think about some of the negatives of the James's reign. Well, at first we have, obviously, a number of pro-Catholic conspiracies. The most famous of which being the 1605 Gunpowder Plot. He was a victim of these conspiracies. Obviously, ultimately, not becoming an actual victim of these conspiracies. Not actually them not being successful. But it did show, of course, there was a lot of dissatisfaction among religious groups, especially pro-Catholic religious groups, towards James's reign. We also see that even though the Hampton Court Conference was generally quite positive, dissatisfaction from Puritans would continue after the conference. And in 1610, the Commons presented to James a petition of religion. And ultimately, James did very little with this. And in 1622, he issued an edict attacking traveling Puritan preachers and urged them to conform. So while he was initially very positive towards looking at the kind of ideological debate within religion and was keen to promote such debate, as his reign went on into the 1610 and into the 1620s, his patience, if you will, with other different ideological groups began to wane a little bit more. So we can talk about the pros and cons of James's reign. When we talk about religious issues under Charles, you could probably split this into two because there are sort of two periods that we can look at. So we could talk about the early period of Charles's reign. And then we can talk about the kind of things that were taking place into the 1630s going all the way up to 1640. So we can talk about, for example, the 1625 to 1629 period of Charles. And then we can start to see how tensions on religion began to really ramp up to 1640. So Charles was obviously a lot more suspicious of Puritanism than his father, James. And the main problem when it comes to religious policy under Charles was that he appeared to come across as somebody who was promoting quite heavily both Catholicism and Arminianism. And this was, of course, something that was quite unpopular or at least controversial during this period. And so we can talk about a number of different issues that we have here. We have the suspension of the Archbishop of Canterbury, George Abbott, in 1627. They did that for refusing to grant an Arminian sermon and then was suspended as a result. We obviously then have the Arminian by the name of William Lord, who was promoted to the Privy Council and became Bishop of Lincoln in 1628. So we can see between 1625 and 1629, quite a lot of different pro-Arminian, pro-Catholic policies were beginning to take shape. If we look at religious issues to 1640, we have a number of different things that we can talk about. We can talk about, for example, the publishing of the Book of Sports in 1633, which ultimately just only approved a certain number of activities that couldn't be taking place on a Sunday. They were ultimately all put on trial in 1637 and all three were fined £5,000 in prison for life and had parts of their ear cut off, which is not very nice. So that's some of the evidence you can use. Of course, there's more evidence that we can use and we can talk about. But overall, if we're thinking about coming to some kind of argument for this exam question, what kind of things can we talk about and what kind of points can we make? Well, we can generally see that for the most part during James's reign, we have quite a lot of positives that we can that we can refer to in terms of religious policy. There were problems. There were problems, of course, with things like the Hampton Court Conference, things like the gunpowder plot, things like the the edict in 1622. And those are obviously bad things. But then compare that to the reign of Charles, where we have, of course, the promotion of Arminianism and Catholicism in 1625 to 1629. We see the promotion of very key Arminian supporters to quite high positions. So, for example, William Lord being Bishop of Lincoln and also being promoted to the Privy Council. And then we, of course, have a number of different policies taking place in the 1630s up to 1640 with things like the Book of Sports. And then we obviously see the kind of response to these policies in terms of opposition to these policies with the emigrating Puritans. And we obviously have the high profile Star Chamber trial of 1637. So I think that generally speaking, if I was to write this essay out and I was to do an exam question on this, I would probably make the claim that compared to James I, Charles was a failure on religion. Or at least I would say that even though James I's religious policy wasn't perfect, it was certainly a lot better than that of Charles. And you can make these arguments using the evidence that I've used here. Of course, being a non-exhaustive list of evidence, you've obviously got other things that you could talk about as well. And, of course, you can build an essay from that.