Charles 400: Culture and Legacy (1625-2025)

2025 marks the four-hundredth anniversary of Charles I’s accession to the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland. Charles 400 is a project that explores the ways in which the reign of Charles I (1625-1649) is portrayed in heritage and education. It brings together scholars of Stuart culture with practitioners from galleries, archives, libraries and museums and key stakeholders in post-16 education.

The project team will develop a rich web resource that presents an array of material from archives and museums across the UK exploring Charles I’s reign. This material will feed directly into post-16 History courses, offering teachers and learners an accessible repository for a range of new materials. Working closely with UK exam boards, we will make available source material from some of the UK’s leading cultural and heritage institutions, foregrounding documents (including maps), objects and spaces to present a rich picture of the reign of Charles I.

In March 2024, the project team will bring together colleagues from exam boards and cultural institutions at a workshop at Goldsmiths, University of London. The workshop will give these organisations an opportunity to explore how they would use their collections to retell the story of Charles I’s reign to make it more diverse, accessible and interesting to teachers and learners across the UK.

The project is funded by the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Academic Community scheme.

Banner image credit: Charles I and Henrietta Maria © The Metropolitan Museum of Art