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LEFT CHABLES 426 CHARLES I. Belgium, in the province of Hainault, on the navigable river Sambre, 33 miles S. of Brussels. The town is the center of the large coal-basin of Charleroi, and its chief manufactures are iron, glass, fire-arms, cutlery, slates, woolens, leather, tobacco, sugar, soap, rope, etc. The fortress of Charleroi was built in 1666 and named after Charles II. of Spain. The town has sustained several memorable sieges, and been successively possessed by the Spaniards, Austrians, and French. It felt the fury of the German invasion in the first year of the World War. The town was held by a combined force of French and British, the former commanded by General Lan- rezac and the latter by General French. The Second German army under Von Buelow attacked the town on Aug. 21, 1914. _ Fierce street fighting ensued, first one side and then the other being driven from the town, but stubbornly returning to renew the fight. On the 22d, the enemy was re-enforced by another army under Von Hausen, and the French be- ing heavily outnumbered, were forced to withdraw. The town remained in the hands of the Germans until the latter were driven out of Belgium in the vic- torious Allied drive in the fall of 1918. Pop. about 29,000. CHARLES, the name of a number of European sovereigns and princes, were noted in the order of their respective countries, viz.: CHARLES I., the second son of James I. of England, and VI. of Scotland, born in 1600. The death of his elder brother, Henry, Prince of Wales, in 1612, opened for him the succession to the throne. He received an excellent education, and was of a gentle and serious, but weak and obstinate disposition. In 1623, he, ac- companied by his friend and favorite, the Duke of Buckingham, undertook a journey incognito to Madrid, in quest of the hand of a Spanish princess. This match being broken off through the ar- tifices of Buckingham, Charles, in 1625, espoused Henrietta Maria, daughter of Henry IV. of France, and the same year he succeeded his father to the throne. Charles was a man thoroughly inocu- lated with the dictum of the "divine f"ignt of _ kings," and speedily brought hnnself into collision with the growing intelligence of the age he lived in. Un- der the advice of bad ministers, as Straf- ford, Laud, and Buckingham, he adopted tyrannous measures for the support of the royal authority against the progress- mg power of the people as represented by the lower house of Parliament. The levymg of unjust taxes, and the adop- tion of illegal modes of raising money supplies, soon precipitated the inevitable collision between the crown and the con- stitution. Afte^: dissolving two Parlia- ments, Charles summoned a third in 1628, which voted the king £280,000, but refused to pass this vote into law, until the king gave his solemn assent to the Petition of Rights — the second charter of English liberties, as it has been termed — by which he bound himself to abstain from forced loans and other illegal taxes, and from arbitrary impris- onments, and the billeting of soldiers upon the people. Charles, after subscrib- ing to this covenant, violated his prom- ise, and finding that the Commons were determined to vindicate their rights, dis- solved Parliament on the 10th of March, and committed five of its members to prison for contumacy. Charles now de- 7 CHARLES I. termined to govern alone by calling no more Parliaments; and ship-money was for the first time levied from the inland counties. At length the king and his advisers provoked an open revolt in Scot- land by forcing a liturgy (a thing Pres- byterians abhorred) upon her people; whereupon they abolished episcopacy, kept up a determined front, and Charles in vain determined to coerce them. Un- der these circumstances, he, in 1640, as- sembled a new Parliament, the members of which were moderate men, but still men who were indisposed to countenance his arbitrary proceedings. He accox'd-