So this might not be the right place to ask this and if not I apologize. Anyway, my question is this: was reign of Charles I really unreasonable? So many people call him a failed absolute monarch and consider his personal rule without Parliament to be 11 years of tyranny. But when you compare him and to a lesser extent his father to Elizabeth I, they were fairly similar. By that I mean all three ignored Parliament's advise and treated it as a tax lever. So was it really Charles who went to far in his actions with Parliament or was it that Parliament tried take more power than before? Also, was his personal reign really as big of a disaster as historians like to make it out to be? I mean looking at his personal rule, it really wasn't that bad. According to Wikipedia
"Despite the King's unconventional methods of raising money, the absence of Parliamentary taxation limited the tax burden during the Personal Rule. This combined with the country's avoidance of the Thirty Years' War that was ravaging Europe made the 1630s a time of relative prosperity in England compared to the Continent, which in turn helped to make the Personal Rule popular with the common people, who had no political influence with parliaments in any case. Charles became especially popular with commoners in rural areas, this not uncoincidentally being the constituency where the King would find his most reliable support in the coming Civil War."
It seems to me Charles I's reign was only unpopular with the nobles who had lost their power when no parliament was called.
Basically, was Charles or Parliament at fault and are historians correct about Charles being a tyrant?