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The Personal Rule (also known as the Eleven Years' Tyranny) was the period from 1629 to 1640, when King Charles I of England, Scotland and Ireland ruled without recourse to Parliament. The King was entitled to do this under the Royal Prerogative. His actions caused discontent among the ruling classes, but the effects were more popular with the common people. Charles had already dissolved three Parliaments by the third year of his reign in 1628. After the murder of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, who was deemed to have a negative influence on Charles' foreign policy, Parliament began to criticize the king more harshly than before. Charles then realized that, as long as he could avoid war, he could rule without Parliament. Whig historians sometimes called this period the Eleven Years' Tyranny, a term meant to foreshadow the political ruptures of the English Civil War. More recently, however, scholars have described the eleven years as a period of "Creative Reform", due to the measures taken by Charles to restructure English politics. ==Background== In the Medieval period, government in England was very much centred on the King. He ruled personally, usually assisted by his Council, the Curia Regis. The council members were chosen by the King, and its membership varied greatly, but members often included powerful nobility and churchmen, senior civil servants, and sometimes certain members of the King's friends and family. Early parliaments began to emerge under Edward I, who wished to implement taxation changes and wide-ranging law reforms, and sought to gain the consent of the nation. Nevertheless, calling a parliament was an expensive and time-consuming process, requiring many personal invitations (for the House of Lords) and elections in the shires and chartered cities and boroughs. So parliaments would only be summoned on particularly important occasions. Once a parliament had finished its business, the King would dissolve it, and perhaps not summon another for an extended period; in the meantime, the Curia Regis – that is, the King with his chosen advisers – would make laws ("ordinances"), spend money, and carry on the business of government. From the 14th to the 16th centuries, the acknowledged powers of Parliament grew. In particular, it was established that Parliament was the only body that could authorise nationwide taxation and excise. There were practical underpinnings to these powers, for those who elected representatives to Parliament at this time were the same people the monarch had to rely on to collect and remit taxes on a large scale: the landed gentry. If a sovereign were to attempt to impose new taxes without consulting the gentry then the gentry could have simply refused to collect the taxes, and the monarch would have had little feasible recourse. Once summoned, a parliament could take the opportunity to submit policy proposals to the monarch ("bills"), which would be expected to take precedence over ordinances if signed into law by the monarch, although (s)he was under no obligation to grant the Royal Assent to any such proposal. However, monarchs did increasingly use parliaments more widely in lawmaking as a way of gaining popular support for their policies. One example was during the English Reformation, when the Reformation Parliament acting at Henry VIII's instigation passed a succession of laws regulating the church in England. The first of the Stuart monarchs to rule England, James I, was a peaceable monarch. However, James' personal extravagance caused him to be perennially short of money and he was obliged to summon parliaments often. Successive parliaments thereupon sought to turn the King's financial woes to their advantage, requiring various policy concessions before voting taxes. In 1625, James was succeeded by his son Charles I, who immediately plunged England into an expensive and ultimately unsuccessful war with Spain, in an attempt to force the Catholic Spanish King Philip IV to intercede with the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II on behalf of Charles's brother-in-law, Frederick V, Elector Palatine, the husband of Charles's sister Elizabeth, to regain the Electorate of the Palatinate and his hereditary lands, which the Emperor had taken from him. Parliament's protests about the war's mismanagement by the Duke of Buckingham, and others of Charles' policies, primarily regarding taxation and other methods of acquiring funds, and Charles' refusal to compromise, eventually led to Charles dissolving Parliament in March 1629. He also made peace with Spain and France, largely because the financial burden of waging these wars could not be sustained without funds that Parliament alone could provide. For the next eleven years, Charles governed with only an advisory council of royal appointees. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Personal Rule」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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