CHARLES reluctantly summoned his Parliament in 1640 – for the first time in “eleven years’ tyranny”, as they called it — and acceded to their demands. But Protestant firebrand John Pym then reignited the feud with his ‘Grand Remonstrance’, a wide-ranging indictment of the King’s governance and his failure to crush Catholic rebellion in Ireland.
On January 4th, 1642, the King himself burst into the Commons to arrest Pym and four equally troublesome MPs, an unwarrantable invasion and a grievous error of judgment. Charles fled to Oxford, and gathered an army. His opponents at Westminster also raised troops, and the country found itself at civil war.
By 1646, it was evident that Charles was losing. He turned to the Scots for help, but they had neither forgotten nor forgiven, and handed him over to Westminster. A specially assembled Parliament, from which all Charles’s sympathisers had been expelled, pronounced him guilty of treason, and on a snowy January 30th, 1649, King Charles I was publicly beheaded in Whitehall.
By convention, the King did not enter the Commons, and no British monarch has set foot there since. As it happened, Pym and the others had been tipped off and were not present, leaving Charles looking rather foolish.