In 1613, Prince Charles’s sister Princess Elizabeth married Friedrich V, Elector Palatine of the Rhine, and moved to Heidelberg. In 1617, the Habsburg Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, a Catholic, was elected king of Bohemia. The next year, the Bohemians rebelled, defenestrating the Catholic governors. In August 1619, the Bohemian diet chose Elector Friedrich V, who led the Protestant Union, as their monarch, while Ferdinand was elected Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II in the imperial election.

Frederick’s acceptance of the Bohemian crown in defiance of the emperor marked the beginning of the turmoil that would develop into the Thirty Years’ War. In 1620, King Friedrich was defeated at the Battle of White Mountain near Prague and his hereditary lands in the Electoral Palatinate were invaded by a Habsburg force from the Spanish Netherlands. King James I-VI, however, had been seeking marriage between Prince Charles and Emperor Ferdinand’s niece, Infanta Maria Anna of Spain, and began to see the Spanish match as a possible diplomatic means of achieving peace in Europe.

The daughter of King Felipe III of Spain and Portugal and of Archduchess Margaret of Austria who was the daughter of Archduke Charles II of Inner Austria and Maria Anna of Bavaria and thus the paternal granddaughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I. Her elder brother was the Archduke Ferdinand, who succeeded as Emperor Ferdinand II in 1619.

Prior to her Imperial marriage to her cousin Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand III, Infanta Margaret’s consideration as a possible wife for Charles, Prince of Wales, provoked a domestic and political crisis in the Kingdoms of England and Scotland.

The proposed marriage between Charles, Prince of Wales and Infanta Margaret of Spain, negotiate d heavily by King James I-VI, proved unpopular with both the public and James’s court. The English Parliament was actively hostile towards Spain and Catholicism, and thus, when called by King James I-VI in 1621, the members hoped for an enforcement of recusancy laws, a naval campaign against Spain, and a Protestant marriage for the Prince of Wales.

King James’s Lord Chancellor, Francis Bacon, was impeached before the House of Lords for corruption. The impeachment was the first since 1459 without the king’s official sanction in the form of a bill of attainder. The incident set an important precedent as the process of impeachment would later be used against Charles and his supporters the Duke of Buckingham, Archbishop William Laud, and the Earl of Strafford.

King James insisted that the House of Commons be concerned exclusively with domestic affairs, while the members protested that they had the privilege of free speech within the Commons’ walls, demanding war with Spain and a Protestant princess of Wales. Like his father, Charles considered discussion of his marriage in the Commons impertinent and an infringement of his father’s royal prerogative. In January 1622, James dissolved Parliament, angry at what he perceived as the members’ impudence and intransigence.

Charles and Buckingham, James’s favourite and a man who had great influence over the prince, travelled incognito to Spain in February 1623 to try to reach agreement on the long-pending Spanish match. The trip was an embarrassing failure. The infanta thought Charles little more than an infidel, due to his Protestantism, and for that reason the Spanish Court at first demanded that he convert to Catholicism as a condition of the match.

The Spanish Court insisted on toleration of Catholics in England and the repeal of the English penal laws, which Charles knew Parliament would not agree to, and that the infanta Margaret remain in Spain for a year after any wedding to ensure that England complied with all the treaty’s terms. A personal quarrel erupted between Buckingham and the Count of Olivares, the Spanish chief minister, and so Charles conducted the ultimately futile negotiations personally. When he returned to London in October, without a bride and to a rapturous and relieved public welcome, he and Buckingham pushed the reluctant King James I-VI to declare war on Spain.

With the encouragement of his Protestant advisers, King James summoned the English Parliament in 1624 to request subsidies for a war. Charles and Buckingham supported the impeachment of the Lord Treasurer, Lionel Cranfield, 1st Earl of Middlesex, who opposed war on grounds of cost and quickly fell in much the same manner Bacon had.

King James told Buckingham he was a fool, and presciently warned Charles that he would live to regret the revival of impeachment as a parliamentary tool. An underfunded makeshift army under Ernst von Mansfeld set off to recover the Palatinate, but it was so poorly provisioned that it never advanced beyond the Dutch coast.

By 1624, the increasingly ill King James I-VI was finding it difficult to control Parliament. By the time of his death in March 1625, Charles and Buckingham had already assumed de facto control of the kingdom.

In early 1625, King James was plagued by severe attacks of arthritis, gout, and fainting fits, and fell seriously ill in March with tertian ague and then suffered a stroke. He died at Theobalds House in Hertfordshire on March 27, 1625 during a violent attack of dysentery, with Buckingham at his bedside. He was succeeded by the Prince of Wales as King Charles I of England, Scotland and Ireland.

Early reign

With the failure of the Spanish match, King Charles and Buckingham turned their attention to France. The prospective bride was Princess Henrietta Maria de Bourbon of France the youngest daughter of King Henri IV of France (King Henri III of Navarre) and his second wife, Marie de’ Medici, and was named after her parents.

Henrietta Maria first met her future husband in 1623 at a court entertainment in Paris, when he was on his way to Spain with the Duke of Buckingham to discuss a possible marriage with Infanta Maria Anna of Spain. Searching elsewhere for a bride, Charles sent his close friend Henry Rich, 1st Earl of Holland, to Paris in 1624. A Francophile and godson of King Henri IV of France, Holland strongly favoured a marriage with Princess Henrietta Maria, the terms of which were negotiated by James Hay, 1st Earl of Carlisle.

On May 1, 1625 Charles was married by proxy to the 15-year-old French princess Henrietta Maria de Bourbon of France in front of the doors of Notre Dame de Paris.They met in person on 13 June 1625 and married in Canterbury.

Henrietta Maria was aged fifteen at the time of her marriage, which was not unusual for royal princesses of the period. Opinions on her appearance vary; her niece Sophia of Hanover commented that the “beautiful portraits of Van Dyck had given me such a fine idea of all the ladies of England that I was surprised to see that the queen, who I had seen as so beautiful and lean, was a woman well past her prime. Her arms were long and lean, her shoulders uneven, and some of her teeth were coming out of her mouth like tusks…. She did, however, have pretty eyes, nose, and a good complexion…”

King Charles delayed the opening of his first Parliament until after the marriage was consummated, to forestall any opposition. Many members of the Commons opposed his marriage to a Catholic, fearing that he would lift restrictions on Catholic recusants and undermine the official establishment of the reformed Church of England.

Charles told Parliament that he would not relax religious restrictions, but promised to do exactly that in a secret marriage treaty with his brother-in-law King Louis XIII of France. Moreover, the treaty loaned to the French seven English naval ships that were used to suppress the Protestant Huguenots at La Rochelle in September 1625. Charles was crowned on February 2, 1626 at Westminster Abbey, but without his wife at his side, because she refused to participate in a Protestant religious ceremony.