10. In 1628, Parliament passed the Petition of Right, limiting the king’s power and increasing their own. Charles decided to ignore it.
Relations between Charles and Parliament were already fraught by the time he imposed the ‘forced loans’ in 1627. In sum, Charles’s handling of royal spending, religious matters, and continued fostering of Buckingham already meant that Parliament was a noisy place to spend an afternoon if you were the king in the 1620s. But the ‘forced loans’ were the final straw. In direct response, a group of MPs drew up the Petition of Right in 1628. This document prevented the king from imprisoning people without trial, raising taxes without permission, and imposing his royal prerogative in Parliament.
How did Charles respond? Well, he nominally agreed to it, as it was a lot easier to get Parliament to raise money for the wars, albeit with the immortal words: ‘kings are not bound to give account of their actions but to God alone’. Parliament was delighted, but nonetheless Charles did not stick to his word. In his mind, he was deciding between the will of the people and God, whose lieutenant he was. Thus, within a few weeks he re-asserted his right to raise taxes as it pleased him. These actions would come back to haunt him.
