Charles I Quotes
Take this not for a threatening for I scorn to threaten any but my equals; but as an admonition from him, who, by nature and duty, has most care of your preservation and prosperity.
The King's staff had threatened Parliament before. See Dudley Carleton.
Charles I, 1600-1649, King of Great Britain & Ireland, Speech to Parliament, 1628
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Holmes was a young soldier at the battle. This quote is also sometimes attributed to General Horatio Wright, who was present at the battle and actually got the President down to safety, but we regard it as unlikely that a sophisticated, mature general would have addressed the President so rudely
In the British Constitutional Monarchy of the Victorian Era, the Queen still possessed enormous power and many in Parliament was constantly trying to have Parliament assume many of the Queen’s powers. The Prime Minister was in an awkward position. On the one hand, he was the Queen’s Prime Minister and leader of HER government. At the same time he was the leader of the political party that had won the last Parliamentary election. His party was trying to usurp some of the Queen’s powers and Peel explained to the Queen’s assistant that he would generally side with the Queen against his own party. It is doubtful that Anson and the Queen believed Peel on this point as his position as Prime Minister depended not on his being elected by the voters but by his party members of Parliament. In modern times, the British monarch has few real powers but is still very influential so there are no struggles over power with Parliament.
This was Executive Privilege of the time. The result of this type of conflict between the executive and the legislative body was a Civil War in which Parliament won. This concept of executive privilege operates to this day in America where the President typically refuses to have his special assistants and staff be questioned by Congressional investigating committees. IT also extends to documents where the President has refused to allow Congress access to papers. In the Watergate scandal, it was the Supreme Court Decision that President Nixon could not claim Executive Privilege with respect to the Watergate tapes. Their exposure forced his resignation.
“Somsteu” was the name the Africans gave to Theophilus Shepstone, 1817-1893, British Colonial African Administrator.
Charles I was King of England, Scotland, and Ireland from 27 March 1625 until his execution in 1649. He was born into the House of Stuart as the second son of King James VI of Scotland, but after his father inherited the English throne in 1603 (as James I), he moved to England, where he spent much of the rest of his life. He became heir apparent to the three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland in 1612 on the death of his elder brother Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales. An unsuccessful and unpopular attempt to marry him to the Spanish Habsburg princess Maria Anna culminated in an eight-month visit to Spain in 1623 that demonstrated the futility of the marriage negotiations. Two years later, he married the Bourbon princess Henrietta Maria of France.
