The early Stuarts and the Commonwealth
England in 1603
Economy and society

At the beginning of the 17th century, England and Wales contained more than four million people. The population had nearly doubled over the previous century, and it continued to grow for another 50 years. The heaviest concentrations of population were in the southeast and along the coasts. Population increase created severe social and economic problems, not the least of which was a long-term price inflation. English society was predominantly rural, with as much as 85 percent of its people living on the land. Small About 800 small market towns of several hundred inhabitants facilitated local exchange, and, in contrast to most of western Europe, there were few large urban areas. Norwich and Bristol were the biggest provincial cities, with populations of around 15,000. Exeter, York, and Newcastle were important regional centres, though they each had about 10,000 inhabitants. Only London could be ranked with the great continental cities. Its growth had outstripped even the doubling of the general population. By the beginning of the 17th century, it contained more than a quarter of a million people and by the end nearly half a million, most of them poor migrants who flocked to the capital in search of work or charity. London was the centre of government, of overseas trade and finance, and of fashion, taste, and culture. It was ruled by a merchant oligarchy, whose wealth increased tremendously over the course of the century as international trade expanded.

London not only ruled the English mercantile world, but it also dominated the rural economy of the southeast by its insatiable demand for food and clothing. The rural economy was predominately agricultural, with mixed animal and grain husbandry practiced wherever the land allowed. The population increase, however, placed great pressure upon the resources of local communities, and efforts by landlords and tenants to raise productivity for either profit or survival were the key feature of agricultural development. Systematic efforts to grow luxury market crops like wheat, especially in the environs of London, drove many smaller tenants from the land. So , too , did the practice of enclosure, which allowed for more productive land use by large holders at the expense of their poorer neighbours. There is evidence of a rural subsistence crisis lasting throughout the first two decades of the century. Marginally productive land came under the plow, rural revolts became more common, and harvest failures resulted in starvation rather than hunger, both in London and in the areas remote from the grain-growing lowlands—such as north Wales and the Lake District. It was not until the middle of the century that the rural economy fully recovered and entered a period of sustained growth. A nation that could barely feed itself in 1600 was an exporter of grain by 1700.

In the northeast and southwest the harsher climate and poorer soils were more suited for sheep raising than for large-scale cereal production. The northeast and southwest were the location of the only significant manufacturing activity in England, the woolen cloth industry. Wool was spun into large cloths for export to Holland, where the highly technical finishing processes were performed before it was sold commercially. Because spinning and weaving provided employment for thousands of families, the downturn of the cloth trade at the beginning of the 17th century compounded the economic problems brought about by population increase. This situation worsened considerably after the opening of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), as trade routes became disrupted and as new and cheaper sources of wool were developed. But the transformation of the English mercantile economy from its previous dependence upon a single commodity into a diversified entrepôt that transshipped dozens of domestic and colonial products was one of the most significant developments of the century.

The economic divide between rich and poor, between surplus and subsistence producers, was a principal determinant of rank and status. English society was organized hierarchically with a tightly defined ascending order of privileges and responsibilities. This hierarchy was as apparent in the family as it was in the state. ThereIn the family, as elsewhere, male domination was the rule; husbands ruled their wives, masters their servants, parents their children. But if hierarchy was stratified, it was not ossified; those who attained wealth could achieve status. The social hierarchy reflected gradations of wealth and responded to changes in the economic fortunes of individuals. In this sense it was more open than most European societies; old . Old wealth was not preferred to new, and an ancient title conferred no greater privileges than recent elevation; the humble could rise to become gentle, and the gentle could fall to become humble.

During the early 17th century a small titular aristocracy peerage composed of between 75 and 100 peers formed the apex of the social structure. Their titles were hereditary, passed from father to eldest son, and they were among the wealthiest subjects of the state. Most were local magnates, inheriting vast county estates and occupying honorific positions in local government. The peerage was the military class of the nation, and in the counties peers held the office of lord lieutenant. Most were also called to serve at court, but at the beginning of the century their power was still local rather than central.

Below them were the gentry, who probably composed only about 5 percent of the rural population but who were rising in importance and prestige. The gentry were not distinguished by title, though many were knights and several hundred purchased the rank of baronet (hereditary knighthoods) after it was created in 1611. Sir Thomas Smith defined a member of the gentry as “he that can bear the port and charge of a gentleman.” The gentry were expected to provide hospitality for their neighbours, treat their tenants paternally, and govern their counties. They served as deputy lieutenants, militia captains, and most importantlyimportant, as justices of the peace. To the justices fell the responsibility of enforcing the king’s law and keeping the king’s peace. They worked individually to mediate local disputes and collectively at quarter sessions to try petty crimes. As the magistracy the gentry were the backbone of county governance, and they maintained a fierce local independence even while enforcing the edicts of the crown.

Beneath the gentry were those who laboured for their survival. There were many prosperous tenants who were styled yeomen to denote their economic independence and the social gulf between them and those who eked out a bare existence. Some were the younger sons of gentlemen; others aspired to enter the ranks of the gentry, having amassed sufficient wealth to be secure against the fluctuations of the early modern economy. Like the gentry, the yeomanry were involved in local government, performing most of the day-to-day, face-to-face tasks. Yeomen were village elders, constables, and tax collectors, and they composed the juries that heard cases at quarter sessions. Most owned sufficient freehold land to be politically enfranchised and to participate in parliamentary selections. Filling out the ranks of rural society were husbandmen, cottagers, and labourers. Husbandmen were tenant farmers at or near self-sufficiency; cottagers were tenants with cottages and scraps of land, dependent on a range of by-employments to make ends meet (“an economy of makeshifts”); and labourers were those who were entirely dependent on waged employment on the land of others. They were the vast majority of local inhabitants, and their lives were bound up in the struggle for survival.

In towns, tradesmen and shopkeepers occupied the ranks below the ruling elites, but their occupational status clearly separated them from artisans, apprentices, and labourers. They were called the middling sort and were active in both civic and church affairs, holding the same minor offices as yeomen or husbandmen. Because of the greater concentrations of wealth and educational opportunities, the urban middling sort were active participants in urban politics.

Government and society

Seventeenth-century government was inextricably bound together with the social hierarchy that dominated local communities. Rank, status, and reputation were the criteria that enabled members of the local elite to serve the crown either in the counties or at court. Political theory stressed hierarchy, patriarchy, and deference in describing the natural order of English society. The most common visual description of this political community was the metaphor of the body politic. Like the human body, government and society were organic and their parts interdependent. Each element had its special and essential tasks to perform, without which the body could not function. At the head was the king, whose rule was based upon divine right and whose conception of his role in the state came closer to personal ownership than corporate management. Most of the aristocracy and gentry were the king’s own tenants, whose obligations to him included military service, taxes, and local office holding. The monarch’s claim to be God’s vice-regent on earth was relatively uncontroversial, especially since his obligations to God included good governance. Except in dire emergency, the monarch could not abridge the laws and customs of England nor seize the persons or property of his subjects.

The monarch ruled personally, and the permanent institutions of government were constantly being reshaped. Around the king was the court, a floating body of royal servants, officeholders, and place seekers. Personal service to the king was considered a social honour and thus fitting to those who already enjoyed rank and privilege. Most of the aristocracy and many gentlemen were in constant attendance at court, some with lucrative offices to defray their expenses, others extravagantly running through their fortunes. There was no essential preparation for royal service, no necessary skills or experiences. Commonly, members of the elite were educated at universities and the law courts, and most made a grand tour of Europe, where they studied languages and culture. But their entry into royal service was normally through the patronage of family members and connections rather than through ability.

From among his court the monarch chose a privy councilthe Privy Council. Its size and composition remained fluid, but it was largely composed of the chief officers of state: the lord treasurer, who oversaw revenue; the lord chancellor, who was the crown’s chief legal officer; and the lord chamberlain, who was in charge of the king’s household. The archbishop of Canterbury was the leading churchman of the realm, and he advised the king, who was the head of the established church. The privy council Privy Council advised the king on foreign and domestic policy and was charged with the administration of government. It communicated with the host of unpaid local officials who governed in the communities, ordering the justices to enforce statutes or the deputy lieutenants to raise forces. In these tasks the privy councillors relied not only upon the king’s warrant but upon their own local power and prestige as well. Thus, while the king was free to choose his own councillors, he was constrained to pick those who were capable of commanding respect. The advice that he received at the council table was from men who kept one eye on their localities and the other on the needs of central policy.

This interconnection between the centre and the localities was also seen in the composition of Parliament. Parliament was another of the king’s councils, though its role in government was less well defined than the privy council’s Privy Council’s and its summoning was intermittent. In the early 17th century, Parliament was less an institution than an event; it was convened when the king sought the aid of his subjects in the process of creating new laws or to provide extraordinary revenue. Like everything else in English society, Parliament was constituted in a hierarchy, composed of the king, lordsLords, and commonsCommons. Every peer of the realm was personally summoned to sit in the House of Lords, which was dominated by the greatest of the king’s officers. The lower house was composed of representatives selected from the counties and boroughs of the nation. The House of Commons was growing as local communities petitioned for the right to be represented in Parliament and local gentry scrambled for the prestige of being chosen. It had 464 members in 1604 and 507 forty years later. Selection to the House of Commons was a mark of distinction, and many communities rotated the honour among their most important citizens and neighbours. Although there were elaborate regulations governing who could choose and who could be chosen, in fact very few members of the House of Commons were selected competitively. Contests for places were uncommon, and elections in which individual votes were cast were extremely rare.

Members of Parliament served the dual function of representing the views of the localities to the king and of representing the views of the king to the localities. Most were members of royal government, either at court or in their local communities, and nearly all had responsibility for enforcing the laws that were created at Westminster. Most parliaments Parliaments were summoned to provide revenue in times of emergency, usually for defense, and most members were willing to provide it within appropriate limits. They came to Parliament to do the king’s business, the business of their communities, and their own personal business in London. Such conflicting obligations were not always easily resolved, but Parliament was not perceived as an institution in opposition to the king any more than the stomach was seen as opposing the head of the body. Upsets there There were upsets, however, and, increasingly during the 17th century, king and Parliament clashed over specific issues, but until the middle of the century they were part of one system of royal government.

James I (1603–25)

James VI, king of Scotland (1567–1625), was the most experienced monarch to accede to the English throne since William the Conqueror, as well as one of the greatest of all Scottish kings. A model of the philosopher prince, James wrote political treatises like such as The Trew Law of a Free Monarchy (1598), debated theology with learned divines, and reflected continually on the art of statecraft. He governed his poor nation by balancing its factions of clans and by restraining the enthusiastic leaders of its Presbyterian church. In Scotland, James was described as pleasing to look at and pleasing to hear. He was sober in habit, enjoyed vigorous exercise, and doted on his Danish wife, Anne, who had borne him two male heirs.

But for all of these qualities, James I was viewed with suspicion by his new subjects. Centuries of hostility between the two nations had created deep enmities, and these could be seen in English descriptions of the king. There In them he was characterized as hunchbacked and ugly, with a tongue too large for his mouth and a speech impediment that obscured his words. It was said that he drank to excess and spewed upon his filthy clothing. It was also rumoured that he was homosexual and preyed upon that he took advantage of the young boys brought to service at court. This caricature, which has long dominated the popular view of James I, was largely the work of disappointed English office seekers whose pique clouded their observations and the judgments of generations of historians.

In fact, James showed his abilities from the first. In the counties through which he passed on his way to London, he lavished royal bounty upon the elites who had been starved for honours during Elizabeth’s parsimonious reign. He knighted hundreds as he went, enjoying the bountiful entertainments that formed such a contrast with his indigent homeland. He would never forget these first encounters with his English subjects, “their eyes flaming nothing but sparkles of affection.” On his progress James also received a petition, putatively signed by a thousand ministers, calling his attention to the unfinished business of church reform.

Triple monarchy

James had one overriding ambition: to create a single unified monarchy out of the congeries of territories he now found himself ruling. He wanted a union not only of the crown but of the kingdoms. He made it plain to his first Parliament that he wanted a single name for this new single kingdom: he wanted to be king not of England, Scotland, and Ireland but of Great Britain, and that is what he put on his seals and on his coins. He wanted common citizenship, the end of trade barriers, and gradual movement toward a union of laws, of institutions, and of churches, although he knew this could not be achieved overnight. The chauvinism of too many English elite, however, meant he was not to achieve all of his goals. A common coinage, a common flag, the abolition of hostile laws, and a joint Anglo-Scottish plantation of Ulster were all he was able to manage. Even free trade between the kingdoms was prevented by the amateur lawyers in the English House of Commons. Having failed to promote union by legislation, he tried to promote it by stealth, creating a pan-British court and royal household, elevating Scots to the English peerage and Englishmen to the Scottish and Irish peerage, rewarding those who intermarried across borders, and seeking to remove from each of the churches those features objectionable to members of the other national churches. Progress was negligible and, under his son Charles I, went into reverse.

Religious policy

The Millenary Petition (1603) initiated a debate over the religious establishment that James intended to defend. The king called a number of his leading bishops to hold a formal disputation with the reformers. The Hampton Court Conference (1604) saw the king in his element. He took a personal role in the debate and made clear that he hoped to find a place in his church for moderates of all stripes. It was only extremists that he intended to “harry from the land,” those who, unlike the supporters of the Millenary Petition, sought to tear down the established church. The king responded favourably to the call for creating a better-educated and better-paid clergy and referred several doctrinal matters to the consideration of convocation. But only a few of the points raised by the petitioners found their way into the revised Canons canons of 1604. In fact, the most important result of the conference was the establishment of a commission to provide an authorized English translation of the Bible, the King James Version (1611).

Indeed, James’s hope was that moderates of all persuasions, Roman Catholic and Protestant alike, might dwell together in his church. But his plan He offered to preside at a general council of all the Christian churches—Catholic and Protestant—to seek a general reconciliation. Liberals in all churches took his offer seriously. He sought to find a formula to encompass Catholics within the Calvinist English church was overthrown by the hotheadedness of Guy Fawkes, a convert to Roman Catholicism, and his confederates, who conspired to assassinate the king, lords, and commons for suspending or ameliorating the laws against Catholics if they would take a binding oath of political obedience. Most Catholics were attracted by the offer, but James’s plans took a tremendous knock when an unrepresentative group of Catholics, disappointed that this son of a Catholic queen had not immediately restored Catholic liberties, plotted to kill him, his family, and his leading supporters by blowing up the Houses of Parliament in the course of a state opening, using gunpowder secreted in a cellar immediately beneath the House of Lords. The failure of the Gunpowder Plot (1605) led to reprisals against Catholics and prevented James from going any further than exhibiting humane leniency toward them in the later years of his reign. Nevertheless, James’s ecumenical outlook did much to defuse religious conflict and led to 20 years of relative peace within the English church.

Finance and politics

To a king whose annual budget in Scotland was barely £50,000, England looked like the land of milk and honey. But in fact , James I inherited serious financial problems, which his own liberality quickly compounded. Elizabeth had left a debt of more than £400,000, and James, with a wife and two sons, had much larger household expenses than the unmarried queen. Land and duties from customs were the major sources of royal revenue, and it was James’s good fortune that the latter increased dramatically after the judges ruled in Bate’s case (1606) that the king could make impositions on imported commodities without the consent of Parliament. Two years later, under the direction of James’s able minister Robert Cecil, Earl earl of Salisbury, impositions were levied on an expanded list of goods, and a revised book of rates (1608) was issued in 1608 that increased the level of duties. By these measures customs revenues grew by £70,000 a per year.

But even this windfall was not enough to stem the effects of inflation on the one hand and James’s own free spending on the other. By 1606 royal debt was more than £600,000, and the crown’s financial ministers had turned their attention to prerogative income from wardships, purveyance, and the discovery of concealed lands (i.e., crown lands on which rents and dues were not being paid). The revival and rationalization of these ancient rights created an outcry. As early as 1604 Salisbury was examining proposals to commute these fiscal rights into an annual sum to be raised by a land tax. By 1610 negotiations began for the Great Contract between the king and his taxpaying subjects that aimed to raise £200,000 a year. But at the last moment both royal officials and leaders of the House of Commons backed away from the deal, the government believing that the sum was too low , and the leaders of the Commons that a land tax was too unpopular. The failure of the Great Contract drove Salisbury to squeeze even more revenue out of the king’s feudal rights, including the sale of titles. This policy violated the spirit of principles about property and personal liberty held by the governing classes and, along with impositions, was identified as a grievance during James’s first parliamentsParliaments.

There was much suspicion that the Scottish king would not understand the procedures and privileges of an English Parliament, and this suspicion was reinforced by James’s speeches in evidence at the opening of the first session of the Parliament of 1604–10. The conventional ban upon the selection of outlaws to the Commons led to the Buckinghamshire Election Case (1604). The Commons reversed a decision by the lord chancellor and ordered Francis Goodwin, an outlaw, to be seated in the House of Commons. James clumsily intervened in the proceedings, stating that the privileges of the Commons had been granted by the grace of the monarch, a pronouncement that stirred the embers of Elizabethan disputes over parliamentary privilege. Although a compromise solution to the case was found, from this time forward the Commons took an active role in scrutinizing the returns of its members. A standing committee on elections was formed, and the freedom of members from arrest during sessions was reasserted. Some wanted to go even further and present the king with a defense of the ancient rights of their Househouse. But this so-called apology was the work of a minority and was never accepted by the whole House of Commons or presented to the king.

Factions and favourites

As in the previous reign, court politics were factionalized around noble groups tied together by kinship and interest. James had promoted members of the Howard family to places of leadership in his government; Henry Howard, Earl earl of Northampton, adeptly led a family group that included Thomas Howard, Earl earl of Suffolk, and Thomas Howard, Earl earl of Arundel. All managed to enrich themselves at the expense of the king, whose debts reached £900,000 by 1618. A stink of corruption pervaded the court during these years. The Howards formed the core of a pro-Spanish faction that desired better relations with Spain and better treatment of English Catholics. They also played upon the king’s desire for peace in Europe.

The Howards were opposed by an anti-Spanish group that included the queen, ; George Abbot, Archbishop archbishop of Canterbury, ; and William Herbert, Earl earl of Pembroke. This group wished to pursue an aggressively Protestant foreign policy and, after the opening of the Thirty Years’ War, to support James’s son-in-law, Frederick V, the elector Frederick of the Palatinate. It was the anti-Spanish group that introduced the king to George Villiers, reputedly one of the handsomest men in Europe. Through Villiers they sought a conduit to power.

Even at the time it was thought unseemly that a lover should be provided for the king at the connivance of the queen and the archbishop. But Villiers was nobody’s fool, and, while he succeeded spectacularly in gaining James’s confidence, he refused to be a cipher for those who had advanced him. Soon he had risen to the pinnacle of the aristocracy. First knighted in 1615, he was created duke of Buckingham in 1623, the first nonroyal duke in half a century. Buckingham proved an able politician. He supported the movement for fiscal reform that led to the disgrace of Lord Treasurer Suffolk and the promotion of Lionel Cranfield, later Earl earl of Middlesex. Cranfield, a skilled London merchant, took the royal accounts in hand and made the unpopular economies that kept government afloat.

Buckingham, whose power rested upon his relationship with the king, wholeheartedly supported James’s desire to reestablish peace in Europe. For years James had angled to marry his son Charles to a Spanish princess. There were, however, many obstacles to this plan, not the least of which was the insistence of the pope that the marriage lead to the reconversion of England to Roman Catholicism. When negotiations remained inconclusive, James, in 1621, called his third Parliament with the intention of asking for money to support the Protestant cause. By this means he hoped to bully Philip IV of Spain into concluding the marriage negotiations and into using his influence to put an end to the German war.

Parliament, believing that James intended to initiate a trade war with Spain, readily granted the king’s request for subsidies. But some members mistakenly also believed that the king wished their advice on military matters and on the prince’s marriage. When James learned that foreign policy was being debated in the lower Househouse, he rebuked the members for their temerity in breaching the royal prerogative. Stunned, both because they thought that they were following the king’s wishes and because they believed in their freedom to discuss such matters, members of the Commons prepared the Protestation of 1621, exculpating their conduct and setting forth a statement of the liberties of the Househouse. James sent for the Commons journal and personally ripped the protestation from it. He reiterated his claim that royal marriages and foreign policy were beyond the ken of Parliament and dryly noted that less than a one-third of the elected members of the House house had been present when the protestation was passed.

The Parliament of 1621 was a failure at all levels. No legislation other than the subsidy bill was passed; a simple misunderstanding among the members had led to a dramatic confrontation with the king; and judicial impeachments were revived, costing the king the services of Lord Chancellor Bacon. James, moreover, was unable to make any progress with the Spaniards, and supporting the European Protestants drained his revenue. By 1624 royal indebtedness had reached £1 million. The old king was clearly at the end of his power and influence. His health was visibly deteriorating, and his policies were openly derided in court and country. Prince Charles (later Charles I) and Buckingham decided to take matters into their own hands. In 1623 they traveled incognito to Madrid.

Their gambit created as much consternation in England as it did in Spain. James wept inconsolably, believing that his son would be killed or imprisoned. The Spaniards saw the end of their purposely drawn-out negotiations. Every effort was made to keep Charles away from the infanta, and he only managed to catch two fleeting glimpses of the heavily veiled princess. Nevertheless, he confided in Buckingham that he was hopelessly in love. Buckingham and John Digby, Earl earl of Bristol, the ambassador to Spain, were almost powerless to prevent the most damaging concessions. Charles even confessed himself willing to be instructed in the Catholic faith. Yet the more the prince conceded, the more embarrassed the Spaniards became. Nothing short of an ultimate Catholic reestablishment in England would be satisfactory, and they began to raise obviously artificial barriers. Even the lovesick prince realized that he was being humiliated. Shame turned to rage as he and Buckingham journeyed home.

There they persuaded the bedridden king to call another Parliament for the purpose of declaring war on Spain. The Parliament of 1624 was given free rein. All manner of legislation was passed; subsidies for a trade war with Spain were voted; and issues of foreign policy were openly discussed. Firmly in control of political decision - making, Charles and Buckingham worked to stave off attacks upon on James’s fiscal policies, especially the granting of monopolies to royal favourites. The last Parliament of James’s reign was his most successful. On March 27, 1625, the old king died.

Charles I (1625–49)

Father and son could hardly be more different than were James and Charles. Charles was shy and physically deformed. He had a speech defect that made his pronouncements painful for him and his audiences alike. Charles had not been raised to rule. His childhood had been spent in the shadow of his brother, Prince Henry, who had died in 1612, and Charles had little practical experience of government. He was introverted and clung tenaciously to a few intimates. His wife, Henrietta MariaMaria—French, French, Roman Catholic, and hugely unpopular, received unpopular—received Charles’s loyalty despite great political cost. So did Buckingham, who survived the change in monarchs and consolidated his grip on government.

The politics of war

Along with his kingdom, Charles I inherited a domestic economic crisis and the war with Spain. A series of bad grain harvests, continued dislocation of the cloth trade, and a virulent plague that killed tens of thousands all conspired against the new king. Under the pressure of economic crisis, members of the Parliament of 1625 were determined to reform the customs and to limit the crown’s right to levy impositions. The traditional lifelong grant of tonnage and poundage was thus withheld from Charles so that reform could be considered. But reform was delayed, and, despite the appearance of illegality, the king collected these levies to prevent bankruptcy.

The Spanish war progressed no better than the domestic economy. Buckingham organized an expedition to Cádiz, but its failure forced Charles to summon another Parliament. From the start the Parliament of 1626 was badly managed, and members of both Houses houses thirsted for Buckingham’s blood. Where James had sacrificed his ministers to further policy, Charles would not. Parliament was dissolved without granting any subsidies.

On the advice of his council the king decided to replace the lost subsidies by a benevolence, or forced loan. Lists of wealthy subjects were compiled and privy councillors traveled the land, attempting to persuade them to give freely. Fiscally the loan was a great success, but politically it was a catastrophe. More than £260,000 was raised within a single year, a sum equal to five subsidies. But the demand for money that could not be gotten in a parliamentary way profoundly alienated the ruling elites. A number of prominent gentlemen refused to contribute to the loan, and they were imprisoned “by the special command of the king.” In the Five Knights’ Case (1627) the judges uneasily ruled that the prisoners could not be bailed as they were not accused of specific offensesCharles now fell back upon desperate remedies. All his predecessors had collected “forced loans” at times of imminent crisis when there was no time to await parliamentary elections, returns, and the vote of subsidies. It was widely accepted that the king must have discretion to require loans from his subjects in such circumstances—loans that were routinely converted into grants when the next Parliament met. What was unprecedented was the collection of forced loans to replace lost parliamentary subsidies. The £260,000 Charles collected in 1627 was precisely the sum he had turned down when it was made conditional upon his surrender of Buckingham to the wrath of the Commons. But he collected it at a heavy price: Charles was compelled to lock up 180 refusers, including many prominent gentry. However, he refused to show cause for his imprisonment of five leading knights, controversially relying on a rarely used discretionary power to arrest “by special commandment” those suspected of crimes it was not in the general interest to make public—a contingency normally used to nip conspiracies in the bud. The inevitable result was furor in the next Parliament, to which he again had to go cap in hand because he was desperate for money to fund simultaneous naval wars against the two superpowers, France and Spain. Lawyers, such as Sir Edward Coke, and country gentlemen, such as Sir John Eliot, now feared that the common law insufficiently protected their lives and liberties. This sentiment was compounded by the fact that soldiers were being billeted in citizens’ homes, ; local militias were forced to raise, equip, and transport men to fight abroad, ; and provost marshals declared martial law in peaceful English communities.

Yet the extremity of these expedients was matched by the seriousness of the international situation. Incredibly, England was now at war with both France and Spain, and Buckingham was determined to restore his reputation. Instead, the campaign of 1627 was a disaster, and the duke’s landing at the Île de Ré a debacle. It was hard to see how Charles could protect him from his critics once the Parliament of 1628 1628–29 assembled.

The defeats of 1627 made emergency taxation more necessary than ever, and the new Parliament, 27 of whose members had been imprisoned for refusing to contribute to the loan, assembled with a sense of profound disquiet. It was proposed to grant the king five subsidies for defense but to delay their passage until the Petition of Right (1628) could be prepared. The petition asserted four liberties: freedom from arbitrary arrest; , freedom from nonparliamentary taxation; , freedom from the billeting of troops; , and freedom from martial law. Couched in the language of tradition, it was presented to the king as a restatement of ancient liberties. In this spirit he accepted it, more in hope of receiving his subsidies than in fear that the petition would restrain his actions.

Between the two sessions of this Parliament, the Duke duke of Buckingham was assassinated (August Aug. 23, 1628). While the king wept in his palace, people drank to the health of the assassin in the streets; Buckingham had become a symbol of all that was wrong in the nationcountry. But with the king’s favourite removed, there was a void in government. Buckingham had been in charge of military and domestic policy, and there was no one else who had the confidence of the king or the ability to direct the royal program. When Charles I, grief-stricken, attempted to manage the second session of Parliament by himself, all the tensions came to a head. In the Commons some members wanted to challenge violations of the Petition of Right, especially the continued collection of tonnage and poundage without parliamentary authority. Others were equally agitated about changes in religious policy caused by the emergence of Arminianism (see below). When the level of bitterness reached new heights, the king decided to end the session. But before he could do so, two hotheaded members physically restrained the speaker , while the Three Resolutions (1629), condemning the collection of tonnage and poundage as well as the doctrine and practice of Arminianism, were introduced. Parliament broke up in pandemonium, with both king and members shocked by the “carriage of diverse fiery spirits.”

Peace and reform

The dissolution of the Parliament of 1628 in 1629 and the king’s clear intention to govern for a period without this troublesome institution necessitated a reversal of policy. Over the next two years, peace treaties ended England’s fruitless involvement in continental warfare in which more than £2 million had been wasted and royal government brought into disrepute. The king was also able to pacify his subjects by launching a campaign of administrative and fiscal reform that finally allowed the crown to live within its own revenues. Customs increased to £500,000 as both European and North American trade expanded. Under capable ministers like such as Richard Weston, Earl earl of Portland, prerogative income also increased. Ancient precedents were carefully searched to ensure that the crown received its full and lawful dues. Fines were imposed on those who had not come forward to be knighted at the king’s accession. These distraints of knighthood yielded more than £170,000. The boundaries of royal forests were resurveyed and encroachers fined. Fees in the court of wards were raised and procedures streamlined. With effort and application annual royal revenue reached £1 million.

The most important of Charles’s fiscal schemes was not technically a design to squeeze monies into the royal coffers. While the king’s own rights might underwrite the needs of government, they could do nothing toward maintaining the navy, England’s sole military establishment. Thus, Charles expanded the collection of ship money, an ancient levy by which revenue was raised for the outfitting of warships. Although ship money was normally only collected in the ports in times of emergency, Charles extended it to inland communities and declared pirates a national menace. At first there was little resistance to the collection of ship money, but, as it was levied year after year, questions about its legitimacy were raised. Hampden’s The case of John Hampden (1637) turned upon the king’s emergency powers and divided the royal judges, who narrowly decided for the crown. But legal opinion varied so significantly that revenue dropped, and the stirring of a taxpayer revolt could be felt.

Religious reform

Fears about the state of the church, which erupted at the end of the Parliament of 1628, had been building for several years. Charles had become drawn to a movement of church reform that aroused deep hostility among his Calvinist subjects. The doctrines of predestination and justification by faith alone formed the core of beliefs in the traditional English church. Yet slowly competing doctrines of free will and the importance of works along with faith, advocated by the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius, spread to the English church. Arminians were viewed as radical reformers despite the fact that their leaders were elevated to the highest positions in church government. In 1633 William Laud, one of the ablest of the Arminians, became archbishop of Canterbury. Laud stressed ceremony over preaching. He believed in the “beauty of holiness” and introduced measures to decorate churches and to separate the communion table from the congregation. Both of these practices were reminiscent of Roman Catholicism, and they came at a time when Protestants everywhere feared for the survival of their religion. Nor did it help that the queen openly attended mass along with some highly placed converted courtiers. Anti-popery was the single strain that had united the diverse elements of Protestant reform, and it was now a rallying cry against innovations at home rather than abominations abroad.Laud’s movement for church reform was soon exported to the king’s Presbyterian subjects in Scotland. Charles ruled three kingdoms with different customs, laws, and religions. His desire to bring them into conformity was always strong, though his ability to do so was weak. In 1637 the attempt to introduce a new prayer book in Scotland was met with riot and ultimately with rebellion. Neither the king nor the Scots would brook an attack on what each saw as their own church. In 1638 a Scottish National Covenant bound the nation to resist innovations in religion

, and the following year an army of defense was raisedBut perhaps Laud’s greatest offense was to promote the authority of the clergy in general and of the bishops in particular, against the laity. He challenged head-on the central thrust of the English Reformation: the assault on the institutional wealth and power of the church as a clerical corporation. He wanted to restore the authority of the church courts and threatened to excommunicate the king’s judges if they persisted in trying cases that belonged to ecclesiastical jurisdiction. He also tried to restore the value of tithes and prevent the misappropriation of churchyards for secular purposes. Moreover, he sought to penalize those who did not pay the (much-enhanced) levies for the refurbishment of church buildings. Menacingly, in Scotland and Ireland (as a prelude, many assumed, to actions to come in England) he tried to renegotiate by a policy of surrender the terms on which all former monastic and cathedral lands were held. In all this he appeared to act more like an aggressive papal nuncio than a compliant appointee of the royal supreme governor of the church, and Charles I’s purring complaisance in Laud’s activities was unendurable to most of his subjects. The master of Westminster School was whipped in front of his pupils for saying of Laud that, like “a busie, angry wasp, his sting is in the tayl of everything.” Others were flogged through the streets of London or had their ears cut off for “libeling” Laud and his work. He alienated not only everyone with a Puritan scruple but everyone with a strong sense of the supremacy of common law or with an inherited suspicion of clerical pride. No wonder the archbishop had so few friends by 1640.

His program extended to Ireland and—especially disastrously—to Scotland. Without consulting Parliament, the General Assembly, the Scottish bishops in conclave, or even the Scottish Privy Council, but rather by royal diktat, Laud ordered the introduction of new canons, a new ordinal, and a new prayer book based not on the English prayer book of 1559 but on the more ceremonialist and crypto-Catholic English prayer book of 1549. This was met by riot and, eventually, rebellion. Vast numbers of Scots bound themselves passively to disobey the “unlawful” religious innovations. Charles I decided to use force to compel them, and he twice sought to use troops raised by a loyal (largely Catholic) Scottish minority, troops from Ireland, and troops from England to achieve this end.

The Bishops’ Wars (1639–40) brought an end to the tranquillity of the 1630s. Charles had to meet rebellion with force, and force required money from Parliament. He genuinely believed that he would be supported against the rebels, failing to comprehend the profound hostility that Laud’s innovations had created in England. The Short Parliament (1640) lasted less than a month before the king dissolved it rather than permit an extended discussion of his inadequacies. He scraped some money together and placed his troops under the command of his able and ruthless deputy, Thomas Wentworth, Earl earl of Strafford. But English troops fighting for pay proved no match for Scottish troops fighting for religion. In 1640 the Scots invaded England and captured Newcastle, the vital source of London’s coal. Charles was forced to accept a humiliating treaty whereby he paid for the upkeep of the Scottish army and agreed to call another Parliament.

The Long Parliament

With his circumstances more desperate than ever, Charles I summoned Parliament to meet in November 1640. The king faced a body profoundly mistrustful of his intentions. The reform movement in the Commons was led by John Pym, a minor Somerset yeoman landowner, who was prominent by his oratorical skills in debate and his political skills in committee. Pym was a moderate, and for the next three years he ably steered compromises between those who wanted too much and those who would settle for too little. In the Lords, Viscount Say Saye and Sele and the Earls earl of Warwick and Manchester the earl of Bedford worked in tandem with Pym and his allies, leading or following as occasion required.

The Long Parliament (1640–53) opened with the imprisonment of Strafford and Laud, the architects of the Scottish fiasco. Strafford was put on trial and ultimately attainted for treason. The dubious legality of the charges against him forced the Commons to proceed by bill rather than impeachment, and thus both the House of Lords and the monarch had to approve the charge. The Lords were cowed by crowds of angry London mobs citizens and apprentices and Charles by the mistaken belief that Strafford’s blood would placate his opponents. But Strafford’s execution in May was just the beginning.

In fact, parliamentary reform took two different tacks. The first was to limit the king’s constitutional authority in order to protect the existence of Parliament and the liberties of the subjectsubjects. The second was to reconstitute the church. In February the Triennial Act (1641) was passed, mandating the summoning of Parliament every three years. In May the king’s power to dissolve the Long Parliament was removed. Charles was forced to accept both bills. Meanwhile, the Commons relentlessly investigated the legal basis of the king’s fiscal expedients, amending the laws that Charles had so scrupulously followed. Ship money and distraints of knighthood were declared illegal, royal forests were defined, and the prerogative courts of High Commission and Star Chamber were abolished. Again the king acceded.

Church reform proved more treacherous. Parliamentary leaders agreed that Charles and Laud had introduced intolerable innovations, but where some were satisfied by their removal, others wished that they be replaced by even greater novelties. In December 1640 an orchestrated petitioning campaign called upon Parliament to abolish episcopacy, root and branch. Pym and his supporters were as yet unwilling to propose such a sweeping change, fearing lest it divide the Commons and create a crisis with the Lords. Nevertheless, the equally radical proposal to remove the bishops from the upper House house was passed in May, and, when the Lords rejected it, the Commons responded with the Root and Branch Bill.

Pym’s fear that the religious issue might break apart the parliamentary consensus was compounded by his fear of provoking the king to counterattack. Throughout the first six months of the session, Charles had meekly followed Parliament’s lead. But there were ominous signs that the worm would turn. His leading advisers, the queen among them, were searching for military options. The radical attack upon the church allowed the king to portray himself as the conservator of religious matters as “they were in the purest time of Queen Elizabeth’s days.” “the pure religion of Queen Elizabeth and King James” without “any connivance of popery or innovation”—a coded repudiation of Laudianism and Arminianism. Week by week, sympathy for the king was growing, and in August Charles determined to conclude a peace treaty with the Scots. This successful negotiation removed the crisis that had brought the Long Parliament into being. When Charles returned to London at the end of November, he was met by cheering crowds and a large body of members of the two Houseshouses, who were unaware that he had been behind a failed attempt to arrest the leading conservator and overturn the Scottish settlement.

While the king resolved one crisis in Scotland, another emerged in Ireland. Catholics, stung by the harsh repression of Strafford’s rule and by the threat of plantation and of the direct rule from England planned by the Long Parliament, rose against their Protestant overlords and slaughtered thousands in a bloody rebellion. Though the reality was grim enough, the exaggerated reports that reached London seemed to fulfill the worst fears of a popish plot. Urgently an army had to be raised, but only the king had military authority, and in the present circumstance he could not be trusted with a force that might be used in London rather than Londonderry. In despair over the situation in Ireland and deeply suspicious of the king’s intentions, the leaders of the Long Parliament debated the Grand Remonstrance, a catalog of their grievances against the king.

The Grand Remonstrance (1641) divided the Commons as nothing else had. It passed by only 11 votes, and the move to have it printed failed. Many were appalled that the remonstrance was to be used as propaganda “to tell stories to the people.” For the first time, members of Commons began to coalesce into opposing factions of royalists and parliamentarians.

The passage of the Grand Remonstrance was followed by Pym’s attempt to create a militia. Bills were proposed to put the army under parliamentary control and to give Parliament the right to nominate officerstransfer control of the militia (the appointment of lords, lieutenants, military officers, etc.) from the crown to Parliament. The political situation had reached a state of crisis. In Parliament, rumours spread of a royal attack upon the Houseshouses, and at court wild talk of an impeachment of the queen was reported. It was Charles who broke the deadlock. On Jan. 4, 1642, he rode to Westminster intending to impeach five members of the Commons and one of the Lords on charges of treason. It was the same device that had already failed in Scotland. But, because the king’s plan was no secret, the members had already fled. Thus, Charles’s dramatic breach of parliamentary privilege badly backfired. He not only failed to obtain his objective but also lost the confidence of many of the moderates left in Parliament. After ensuring the safe departure of his wife and children out of the country, Charles abandoned his capital and headed north.

The initiative had returned to Pym and his allies, who now proceeded to pass much of their stalled legislation, including the exclusion of the bishops from the Lords and the Impressment Bill (1642), which allowed Parliament to raise the army for Ireland. In June a series of proposals for a treaty, the Nineteen Propositions (1642), were was presented to the king. They The proposals called for parliamentary control over the militia, the choice of royal counselors, and religious reform. Charles rejected them outright, though in his answer he seemed to grant Parliament a coordinate power in government, making the king but one of the three estates. The king, however, had determined to settle the matter by main force. His principal advisers believed that the greatest lords and gentlemen would rally to their king and that Parliament would not have the stomach for rebellion. On Aug. 22, 1642, the king raised his standard bearing the device “Give Caesar His Due.”

Civil war and revolution

The Civil War war that began in 1642 was a war within three kingdoms and between three kingdoms. There was a civil war in Ireland that pitted the Catholic majority against the Protestant minority, buttressed by English and Scottish armies. This war festered nastily throughout the 1640s and was settled only by a devastating use of force and terror by Oliver Cromwell in 1649–50 and his successors in 1651–54. Whenever they were in the ascendancy, the Catholic Irish were willing to send armies into England to assist Charles I, on condition that he give them religious freedom and effective control of the political institutions of the Irish kingdom. After the Cromwellian conquest, the English set out to destroy the power and wealth of the Catholic elite—at one point even proposing to transport every native Catholic from 26 of the 32 counties of Ireland into the western region comprising the 5 counties of Connacht and County Clare; in the event, they settled for a confiscation of two-fifths of the land and its redistribution to Protestant Englishmen.

Scotland also was embroiled in civil war, but, at one time or another, all the groups involved demonstrated a willingness to send armies into England. The Anglo-Scottish wars were fought from 1643 to 1646, resumed from 1648 to 1651, and resulted in an English military occupation and complete political subjugation (the incorporation of Scotland into an enhanced English state) that lasted until the Restoration in 1660.

And then there was the English Civil War that began in 1642, a war that neither king, Parliament, nor nation the country wanted. It was a war that was as dangerous to win as to lose. The parliamentarians could only maintain the fiction that they were fighting to “preserve the safety of the king,” as the commission of their commander, Robert Devereux, Earl earl of Essex, stated. The king’s fiction was that he was opposing a rebellion. Most of the nation country remained neutral, hoping that differences would be composed and fighting ended.

The first years of war were as halfhearted as these justifications. Parliament held the tactical advantages of controlling the navy and London. While the navy protected the coast from foreign invasion, London provided the funds and manpower for battle. The king held the strategic advantage of knowing that he had to recapture his capital. He relied upon the aristocracy for men and arms. In the first substantial engagement of the war, at the Battle of Edgehill (1642), Charles’s cavalry proved superior to Parliament’s, and he followed this first encounter by marching to on the capital. At Brentford (1642), on the outskirts of London, the City militia narrowly averted the king’s triumph. For the next two years, however, the war was fought to a desultory standstill.

Almost from the beginning, the members of Parliament were divided over their goals. A war group argued that Charles could not be trusted until he learned the lesson of military defeat. A peace group countered that the longer the war ground on, the less likely Charles would be to compromise. Both of these groups were loose coalitions, and neither of them dominated parliamentary politics. Until his death in 1643, Pym steered a course between them, supporting the Oxford Propositions (1643) for peace as well as creating the administrative machinery to raise and finance armies. The excise, modeled on impositions, and the monthly assessments, modeled on ship money, increased levels of taxation to new heights. The king burdened the communities his forces controlled just as heavily.

In 1643 the war widened. Charles negotiated a cease-fire with the Catholic rebels in Ireland that allowed him to bring Irish troops to England. Parliament negotiated the Solemn League and Covenant (1643) with the Scots, who brought an army to England in return for guarantees of a Presbyterian presbyterian church establishment. Initially Parliament benefited most. A combination of English and Scottish troops defeated royalist forces at the Battle of Marston Moor (1644) and took York. But ultimately , religious differences between Scottish Presbyterians and English Independents vitiated the alliance. As the parliamentary commanders bickered, their forces were defeated at Lostwithiel (1644) and at Newbury (1644). While another round of peace negotiations began, the unsuccessful Uxbridge Proposals (1645), Parliament recast its military establishment and formed the New Model Army.

There was little new about the New Model Army other than centralization. Remnants of three armies were combined to be directed by a parliamentary committee. This committee included the parliamentary generals who were displaced by the Self-Denying Ordinance (1645), an act that excluded members of Parliament from civil and military office. The New Model Army was commanded by Sir Thomas Fairfax, Baron Fairfax, and eventually the cavalry was led by Lieutenant-General Lieut. Gen. Oliver Cromwell.

The new parliamentary army was thought so weak that the king hoped to crush it in a single blow and thus end the war. Instead, the Battle of Naseby on June 14, 1645, delivered the decisive blow to the royalists. Even though the parliamentary forces only just managed to carry the day , despite their numerical superiority, their victory was decisive. It destroyed the king’s main armies and left open a path to the west, where his other substantial forces were defeated at Langport (1645). The following year, the king surrendered to the Scots, erroneously believing that they would strike a better bargain.

For four years the political divisions at Westminster had been held in check by the military emergency. But the king’s defeat released all restraints. In Parliament coherent parties began to form around the religious poles provided by Presbyterians and Independents and around the political poles of peace and war. Denzil Holles, one of the five members of Parliament Charles had tried to arrest in 1642, came to head the most powerful group. He pushed through a Presbyterian presbyterian church settlement, negotiated a large loan from the city City of London, and used the money to ransom the king from the Scots. Holles’ Holles’s peace plan was to remove the main points of difference between king and Parliament by disbanding the army and settling the disputes about the church, the militia, and the rebellion in Ireland. His party was opposed by a group led by Sir Henry Vane the Younger and Oliver Cromwell, who desired toleration for Independents and were fearful of disbanding the army before an agreement was reached with Charles I.

But war weariness in both Parliament and nation the country swept all before it. In January 1647 Charles was returned to English custody, and Holles moved forward with his plan to send a portion of the army to Ireland, assign a small force to English garrisons, and disband the rest. But in this he reckoned without the army. In the rank and file, concern about arrears of pay, indemnity, and liability for impressment stirred the soldiers to resist Irish service. A movement that began over material grievances soon turned political as representatives were chosen from the rank and file to present demands through their officers to Parliament. Holles attempted to brush this movement aside and to push through his disbandment scheme. At this the army rose up, driving out those of its officers who supported the disbandment, seizing Charles at Holmby House on June 3 and demanding the impeachment of Holles and his main supporters. At the beginning of August 1647, the army marched into London, and Holles, with 10 of his allies, fled the capital.

The army’s intervention transformed civil war into revolution. Parliament, which in 1646 had argued that it was the fundamental authority in the nationcountry, by 1647 was but a pawn in a new game of power politics. The perceived corruption of Parliament made it, like the king, a target of reform. Initiative was now in the hands of the king and the army, and Charles I tried to entice Cromwell and Henry Ireton, the army’s leading strategist, to bargain his restoration for a tolerant church settlement. But the officers were only one part of a politicized army that was bombarded with plans for reorganizing the state. Among the most potent plans were those of the Levelers, led by John Lilburne, who desired that a new compact between ruler and ruled, the Agreement of the People (1647), be made. This was debated by the council of the army at Putney in October. The Levelers’ proposals, which had much in common with the army’s, called for the reform of Parliament through elections based upon a broad franchise and for a generally tolerant church settlement. Turmoil in the army led Fairfax and Cromwell to reassert military discipline, while the machinations of Charles led to the second Civil War (1648).

Charles had now managed to join his English supporters with discontented Scots who opposed the army’s intervention in politics. Though the fighting was brief, it was bloody. Fairfax stormed Colchester (1648) and executed the ringleaders of the English rebellion, and Cromwell and several New Model regiments defeated the invading Scots at the Battle of Preston (1648).

The second Civil War hardened attitudes in the army. The king was directly blamed for the unnecessary loss of life, and for the first time alternatives to Charles Stuart, “that man of blood,” were openly contemplated. Parliament , too , was appalled by the renewal of fighting. Moderate members believed that there was still a chance to bring the king to terms, despite the fact that he had rejected treaty after treaty. While the army made plans to put the king on trial, Parliament summoned its strength for one last negotiation, the abortive Treaty of Newport. Even now the king remained intransigent, especially over the issue of episcopacy. New negotiations infuriated the army, because it believed that Parliament would sell out its sacrifices and compromise its ideals. On Dec. 6, 1648, army troops, under the direction of Colonel Col. Thomas Pride, purged the House of Commons. Forty-five members were arrested, and 186 were kept away. A rump of about 75 active members were left to do the army’s bidding. They were to establish a High Court of Justice, prepare a charge of treason against the king, and place him on trial in the name of the people of England. Pride’s Purge was a last-minute compromise made to prevent absolute military rule. With Cromwell deliberately absent in the north, Ireton was left to stave off the argument, made by the Levelers, that Parliament was hopelessly corrupt and should be dissolved. The decision to proceed by trial in the High Court of Parliament was a decision in favour of constitutional forms, however much a shadow they had become.

The king’s trial took place at the end of January. The Court of Justice was composed of members of Parliament, civilians, and army officers. There was little enthusiasm for the work that had to be done. No more senior judge than John Bradshaw could be found to preside, and he wore a hat ringed with iron in fear of assassination. The charges against the king, however politically correct, had little legal basis, and Charles deftly exposed their weakness. But like Strafford before him, Charles was to be sacrificed to the law of necessity if not the law of England. On Jan. 30, 1649, at the wall of his own palace, Charles I was beheaded. A witness recorded in his diary, “such “Such a groan went up as I had never before heard.”

Commonwealth and Protectorate

The execution of the king aroused hostility not only in England but also throughout Europe. Regicide was considered the worst of all crimes, and not even the brilliance of John Milton in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649) could persuade either Catholic or Protestant powers that the execution of Charles I was just. Open season was declared against English shipping, and Charles II was encouraged to reclaim his father’s kingdomthree kingdoms.

Despite opposition and continued external threats, the government of the Commonwealth was declared in May 1649 after acts had been passed to abolish the monarchy and the House of Lords. Political power resided in a Council of State, the Rump Parliament (which swelled from 75 to 213 members in the year following the king’s execution), and the army. The military was now a permanent part of English government. Though the soldiers had assigned the complex tasks of reform to Parliament, they made sure of their ability to intervene in political affairs.

At first, however, the soldiers had other things to occupy them. For reasons of security and revenge, Ireland had to be pacified. In the autumn Oliver Cromwell, with a large detachment of troops, defeated royalist and Catholic forces at Drogheda and Wexford (1649), where he put civilian populations to the sword. Large parts of the northern Irish provinces were confiscated and used to pay off soldiers’ arrears. While the suffering that Cromwell meted out horrified the Irish, it propitiated those who demanded revenge for the massacres of 1641. Cromwell’s reputation soared, and he was the logical choice to command the forces that now had to face another grave challenge. In 1650 Charles II landed in Scotland, was declared king, and assembled a formidable army. Cromwell’s military skills were never more in evidence than at Dunbar (1650), where his heavily outnumbered forces decisively defeated the Scots. But the war dragged on for another year. When England was invaded, Cromwell again defeated Scottish forces at Worcester (1651)of 1649, Cromwell crossed to Ireland to deal once and for all with the Irish Confederate rebels. He came first to Drogheda. When the town refused to surrender, he stormed it and put the garrison of 3,000 to the sword, acting both as the avenger of the massacres of 1641 (“I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgement of God upon those barbarous wretches who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood”) and as a deliberate instrument of terror to induce others to surrender. He repeated his policy of massacre at Wexford, this time choosing not to spare the civilian population. These actions had the desired effect, and most other towns surrendered at Cromwell’s approach. He departed Ireland after nine months, leaving his successors with only a mopping-up operation. His reputation at a new high, Cromwell was next put in charge of dealing with those Scots who had welcomed Charles I’s son, Charles II, to Scotland and who were soon to crown him at Scone as king of all of Great Britain and Ireland. Although outnumbered and in a weak defensive position, Cromwell won a stunning victory in the Battle of Dunbar on Sept. 3, 1650. A year later to the day, having chased Charles II and a second Scottish army into England, he gained an overwhelming victory at Worcester. Charles II barely escaped with his life.

Victorious wars against the Irish, Scots, and Dutch (1652) made the Commonwealth a feared military power. But the struggle for survival defined the Rump’s conservative policies. Little was done to reform the law. An attempt to abolish the court of chancery created chaos in the central courts. Little agreement could be reached on religious matters, especially on the vexing question of the compulsory payment of tithes. The Rump failed both to make long-term provision for a new “national church” and to define the state’s right to confer and place limits on the freedom of those who wished to worship and gather outside the church. Most ominously, nothing at all had been done to set a limit for the sitting of the Rump and to provide for franchise reform and the election of a new Parliament. This had been the principal demand of the army, and the more the Rump protested the difficulty of the problem, the less patient the soldiers became. In April, when it was clear that the Rump would set a limit to its sitting but would nominate its own members to judge new elections, Cromwell marched to Westminster and dissolved Parliament. The Rump was replaced by an assembly nominated mostly by the army high command. The Nominated Parliament (1653) was no better able to overcome its internal divisions or untangle the threads of reform than the Rump. After five months it dissolved itself and returned power to Cromwell and the army.

The problems that beset both the Rump and the Nominated parliaments Parliament resulted from the diversity of groups that supported the revolution, ranging from pragmatic men of affairs, lawyers, officeholders, and local magistrates whose principal desire was to restore and maintain order to zealous visionaries who wished to establish heaven on earth. The republicans, like Sir Henry Vane the Younger, hoped to create a government based upon the model of ancient Rome and modern Venice. They were proud of the achievements of the Commonwealth and reviled Cromwell for dissolving the Rump. But most political reformers based their programs on dreams of the future rather than the past. They were millenarians, expecting the imminent Second Coming of Christ. Some were social reformers like , such as Gerrard Winstanley, whose followers, agrarian communists known as Diggers, believed that the common lands should be returned to the common people. Others were mystics, like those called such as the Ranters, led by Laurence Claxton, who believed that they were infused with a holy spirit that removed sin from even their most reprehensible acts. The most enduring of these groups were the Quakers (Society of Friends), whose social radicalism was seen in their refusal to take oaths or doff their hats and whose religious radicalism was contained in their emphasis upon inner light. Ultimately, all of these groups were persecuted by successive revolutionary governments, which were continually being forced to establish conservative limits to individual and collective behaviour.

The failure of the Nominated Parliament led to the creation of the first British constitution, the Instrument of Government (1653). Drafted by Maj. Gen. John Lambert, the Instrument created a lord protector, a Council of State, and a reformed Parliament that was to be elected at least once every three years. Cromwell was named protector, and he chose a civilian-dominated Council to help him govern. The Protectorate tackled many of the central issues of reform head-on. Commissions were appointed to study law reform and the question of tithes. Social legislation against swearing, drunkenness, and stage plays was introduced. Steps were taken to provide for the training of a godly ministry, and even a new university at Durham was begun.

But the protector was no better able to manage his parliaments Parliaments than had been the king. The Parliament of 1654 immediately questioned the entire basis of the newly established government, with the republicans vigorously disputing the office of lord protector. The Parliament of 1656, despite the exclusion of many known opponents, was no more pliable. Both were a focus for the manifold discontents of supporters and opponents of the regime.

Nothing was more central to the Cromwellian experiment than the cause of religious liberty. Cromwell believed that no one church had a monopoly on truth and that no one form of government or worship was necessary or desirable. Moreover, he believed in a loosely federated national church, with each parish free to worship as it wished within very broad limits and staffed by a clergy licensed by the state on the basis of their knowledge of the Bible and the uprightness of their lives, without reference to their religious beliefs. On the other hand, Cromwell felt that there should be freedom for “all species of protestant” to gather if they wished into religious assemblies outside the national church. He did not believe, however, that religious liberty was a natural right, but one conferred by the Christian magistrate, who could place prudential limits on the exercise of that liberty. Thus, those who claimed that their religion permitted or even promoted licentiousness and sexual freedom, who denied the Trinity, or who claimed the right to disrupt the worship of others were subject to proscription or penalty. Furthermore, for the only time between the Reformation and the mid-19th century, there was no religious test for the holding of public office. Although Cromwell made his detestation of Catholicism very plain, Catholics benefited from the repeal of the laws requiring attendance at parish churches, and they were less persecuted for the private exercise of their own faith than at any other time in the century. Cromwell’s policy of religious tolerance was far from total, but it was exceptional in the early modern world.

Among opponents, royalists were again active, though by now they were reduced to secret associations and conspiracies. In the west, Penruddock’s rising (1655) in the west , the most successful of a series of otherwise feeble royalist actions in March 1655, was effectively suppressed, but royalist opposition led to the imposition of military rule by means of the appointment of regional major-generals. They were so extremely unpopular, however, that despite their effectiveness Cromwell reacted by reducing both the standing army and the level of taxation on all. He also appointed senior army officers “major generals,” raising ultra-loyal militias from among the demobbed veterans paid for by penal taxation on all those convicted of active royalism in the previous decade. The major generals were also charged with superintending “a reformation of manners”—the imposition of strict Puritan codes of social and sexual conduct. They were extremely unpopular, and, despite their effectiveness, the offices were abolished within a year.

By now it was apparent that the regime was held together by Cromwell alone. Within his personality resided the contradictions of the revolution. Like the gentry, he desired a fixed and stable constitution, but, like the zealous, he was infused with a millenarian vision of a more glorious world to come (see millennialism). As a member of Parliament from 1640, he respected the fundamental authority that Parliament represented, but, as a member of the army, he understood power and the decisive demands of necessity. In the 1650s many wished him to become king, but he refused the crown, preferring the authority of the people to the authority of the sword. When he died in 1658, all hope of continued reform died with him.

For a time, Richard Cromwell was elevated to his father’s titles and dignity. But , but he was no match in power or skill. The republicans and the army officers who had fought Oliver tooth and nail now hoped to use his son to dismantle the civil government that under the Humble Petition and Advice (1657) had come to resemble nothing so much as the old monarchy. An upper House of Lords had been created, and the court at Whitehall was every bit as ceremonious as that of the Stuarts. While some demanded that the Rump be restored to power, others clamoured for the selection of a new Parliament on the basis of the old franchise, and this took place in 1659. By then there was a vacuum of power at the centre; Richard Cromwell, incapable of governing, simply left office. A rebellion of junior officers led to the reestablishment of the Rump.

But all was confusion. The Rump was incapable of governing without financial support from the city City and military support from the army. Just as in 1647, the city City demanded military disbandment and the army demanded satisfaction of its material grievances. But the army was no longer a unified force. Contentions among the senior officers led to an attempt to arrest Lambert, and the widely scattered regiments had their own grievances to propound. The most powerful force was in Scotland, commanded by George Monck, once a royalist and now one of the ablest of the army’s senior officers. When one group of officers determined to dissolve the Rump, Monck marched his forces south, determined to restore it. Arriving in London, Monck quickly realized that the Rump could never govern effectively and that only the restoration of Charles II could put an end to the political chaos that now gripped the state. In February 1660 Monck reversed Pride’s Purge, inviting all of the secluded members of the Long Parliament to return to their seats under army protection. A month later the Long Parliament dissolved itself, paving the way for the return of the king.

The later Stuarts
Charles II (1660–85)
The Restoration

Charles II arrived in London on the 30th birthday of what had already been a remarkably eventful life. He came of age in Europe, a child of diplomatic intrigues, broken promises, and unfulfilled hopes. By necessity he had developed a thick skin and a shrewd political realism. This was displayed in the Declaration of Breda (1660), in which Charles offered something to everyone in his terms for resuming government. A general pardon would be issued, a tolerant religious settlement would be sought, and security for private property would be assured. Never a man for details, Charles left the specifics to the Convention Parliament (1660), which was composed of members of the competing religious and political parties that contended for power amid the rubble of the Commonwealth.

The Convention declared the restoration of the king and the lords, disbanded the army, established a fixed income for the king by maintaining the parliamentary innovation of the excise tax, and returned to the crown and the bishops their confiscated estates. But it made no headway on a religious settlement. Despite Charles’s promise of a limited toleration and his desire to accept Presbyterians into the Anglican fold , as detailed in the Worcester House Declaration (1660), enthusiasts from both left and right wrecked every compromise.

It was left to the Cavalier Parliament (1661–79) to make the hard choices and to demonstrate that one of the changes that had survived the Revolution revolution was the independence of Parliament. Despite Charles’s desire to treat his father’s adversaries leniently and to find a broad church settlement, the Cavalier Parliament established sought to establish a rigid Anglican orthodoxy. It began the alliance between squire and parson that was to dominate English local society for centuries. The bishops were returned to Parliament, a new prayer book was authorized, and repressive acts were passed to compel conformity. The imposition of oaths of allegiance and nonresistance to the crown and an oath recognizing the king’s supremacy in the church upon all members of local government in the Corporation Act (1661) and then upon the clergy in the Act of Uniformity (1662) led to a massive purge of officeholders. Town governors were put out of their places, and nearly a one-fifth of all clergymen were deprived of their livings. Authority in the localities was now firmly in the hands of the gentry. The Conventicle Act (1664) barred dissenters Nonconformists (Dissenters) from holding separate church services, and the Five Mile Act (1665) prohibited dispossessed ministers from even visiting their former congregations.

This program of repressive religious legislation was the first of many missed opportunities to remove the underlying causes of political discontent. Though religious dissenters were not a large percentage of the population, their treatment raised the spectre of permanently divided local communities and of potentially arbitrary government. This legislation (the Clarendon Code) is inappropriately associated with the name of Lord Chancellor Clarendon, for he, as well as the king, realized the dangers of religious repression and attempted to soften its effects. Indeed, in central government the king relied upon men of diverse political backgrounds and religious beliefs. Clarendon, who had lived with the king in exile, was his chief political adviser, and Charles’s brother James, Duke duke of York (later James II), was his closest confidant and was entrusted with the vital post of lord admiral. Monck, who had made the restoration possible, was raised to Duke duke of Albemarle and continued to hold military authority over the small standing army that, for the first time in English history, the king maintained.

War and government

Charles II could not undo the effects of the Revolutionrevolution, but they were not all negative. The Commonwealth had had to fight for its survival, and in the process England had become a potent military power. Wars against France and Spain had expanded English colonial dominions. Dunkirk and Jamaica were seized, Barbados was colonized, and the North American colonies flourished. Colonial trade was an important source of royal revenue, and Charles II continued Cromwell’s policy of restricting trade to English ships and imposing duties on imports and exports. The Navigation Acts (1660 and 1663) were directed against the Dutch, still the most powerful commercial force in Europe. The Cromwellian Navigation Act (1651) had resulted in the first Anglo-Dutch War (1652–54), and Charles’s policy had the same effect. In military terms the Dutch Wars (1665–67; 1672–74) were a standoff, but in economic terms they were an English triumph (see Anglo-Dutch Wars). The American colonies were consolidated by the capture of New York, and the policy of the Navigation Acts was effectively established. Colonial trade and English shipping mushroomed.

In the long run Charles’s spasmodically aggressive foreign policy solved the crown’s perpetual fiscal crises. But in the short run it made matters worse. The Great Plague of London plague (16651664–66) and fire the Great Fire of London (1666) were interpreted as divine judgments against a sinful nation. These catastrophes were compounded when the Dutch burned a large portion of the English fleet in 1667, which led to the dismissal and exile of Clarendon. The crown’s debts led to the Stop of the Exchequer (1672), by which Charles suspended payment of his bills. The king now ruled through a group of ministers known as the Cabal, an anagram of the first letters of their names. None of the five was Anglican, and two were Roman Catholic.

Charles had wearied of repressive Anglicanism, underestimating its strength among rural gentry and clergy, and desired comprehension and toleration in his church. This fit with his foreign-policy objectives, for in the Treaty of Dover (1670) he allied himself with Catholic France against Protestant Holland. In exchange he received a large subsidy from Louis XIV and, and in the treaty’s secret clauses, known only to the king’s Catholic ministers, the promise of an even larger one if Charles undertook, at some unspecified moment, to declare himself a Catholic. That moment came for the king on his deathbed, by which time his brother and heir, the Duke duke of York, had already openly professed his conversion. In 1672 Charles promulgated the Declaration of Indulgence, which suspended the penal code against all religious nonconformistsNonconformists, Catholic and dissenter Dissenter alike. But a declaration of toleration could not bring together these mortal enemies, and the king found himself faced by a unified Protestant front. Parliamentary Anglicans would not vote money for war until the Declaration declaration was abrogated. The passage of the Test Act (1673), which the king reluctantly signed, effectively barred all but Anglicans from holding national office and forced the Duke duke of York to resign the admiralty.

The Popish Plot

Anti-Catholicism united the disparate elements of English Protestantism as did nothing else. Anglicans vigorously persecuted the Protestant sects, especially Quakers and Baptists, who were imprisoned by the thousands whenever the government claimed to have discovered a radical plot. John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), which became one of the most popular works in the English language, was composed in jail. Yet dissenters held out against persecution and continued to make their converts in towns and cities. They railed against the debauchery of court life, naming the Duke duke of York, whose shotgun wedding had scandalized even his own family, and the king himself, who acknowledged 17 bastard children but did not produce one legitimate heir. Most of all they feared a Catholic revival, which by the late 1670s was no paranoid delusion. The alliance with Catholic France and rumours of the secret treaty, the open conversion of the Duke duke of York, heir to the throne, and the king’s efforts to suspend the laws against Catholic officeholders were potent signs.

Not even the policy of Charles’s new chief minister, Thomas Osborne, Earl earl of Danby, could stem the tide of suspicion. An Anglican, Danby tried to move the crown back into alliance with the majority of country gentry, who wanted the enforcement of the penal code and the end of the pro-French foreign policy. He arranged the marriage of Mary (later Mary II), the eldest daughter of the Duke duke of York, to William of Orange (later William III), the Dutch stadtholder. Yet, like the king, Danby admired Louis XIV and the French style of monarchy. He attempted to manage Parliament, centralize crown patronage, shore up royal finance, and maintain a standing army—in short, to build a base for royal absolutism. Catholicism and absolutism were so firmly linked in the popular mind the that Danby was soon tarred by this broad brush. In 1678 a London dissenter Dissenter named Titus Oates revealed evidence of a plot by the Jesuits to murder the king and to establish Roman Catholicism in England. Although both the evidence and the plot were a total fabrication, England was quickly swept up in anti-Catholic hysteria. The murder of the Protestant magistrate who had first heard Oates’s revelations lent credence to a tissue of lies. Thirty-five alleged conspirators in the Popish Plot were tried and executed, harsh laws against Catholics were revived and extended, and Danby’s political position was undermined when it was revealed that he had been in secret negotiation with the French. Parliament voted his impeachment and began to investigate the clauses of the Anglo-French treaties. A second Test Act (1678) was passed, barring all but Anglicans from Parliament, and an exception for the Duke duke of York to sit in the lords Lords was carried by only two votes. After 18 years Charles II dissolved the Cavalier Parliament.

The exclusion crisis and the Tory reaction

The mass hysteria that resulted from the Popish Plot also had its effects on the nation’s country’s governors. When Parliament assembled in 1679, a bill was introduced to exclude the Duke duke of York from the throne. This plunged the state into its most serious political crisis since the Revolutionrevolution. But, unlike his father, Charles II reacted calmly and decisively. First he co-opted the leading exclusionists, including the Earls earl of Shaftesbury, the earl of Halifax, and the earl of Essex, into his government, and then he offered a plan for safeguarding the church during his brother’s reign. But when the Commons passed the Exclusion Bill, Charles dissolved Parliament and called new elections. These did not change the mood of the country, for in the second Exclusion Parliament (1679) the Commons also voted to bypass the Duke duke of York in favour of his daughter Mary and William of Orange, though this was rejected by the Lords. Again Parliament was dissolved, again the king appealed to the country, and again an unyielding Parliament met at Oxford (1681). By now the king had shown his determination and had frightened the local elites into believing that there was danger of another civil war. The Oxford Parliament was dissolved in a week, the “Whig” (Scottish Gaelic: “Horse Thief”) councillors, as they were now called, were dismissed from their places, and the king appealed directly to the nation country for support.

The king also appealed to his cousin Louis XIV, who feared exclusion as much as Charles did, if for different reasons. Louis provided a large annual subsidy to increase Charles’s already plentiful revenues, which had grown with English commerce. Louis also encouraged him to strike out against the Whigs. An attempt to impeach the Earl earl of Shaftesbury was foiled only because a Whig grand jury refused to return an indictment. But the earl was forced into exile in Holland, where he died in 1683. The king next attacked the government of London, calling in its charter and reorganizing its institutions so that “Tories,” “Tories” (Irish: “Thieving Outlaws”), as his supporters were now called, held power. Quo warranto proceedings against the charters of many urban corporations followed, forcing surrenders and reincorporations that gave the crown the ability to replace disloyal local governors. (See Whig and Tory.)

In 1683 government informants named the Earl earl of Essex, Lord William Russell, and Algernon Sidney as conspirators in the Rye House Plot, a plan to assassinate the king. Though the evidence was flimsy, Russell and Sidney were executed and Essex took his own life. There was hardly a murmur of protest when Charles II failed to summon a Parliament in 1684, as he was bound to do by the Triennial Act. He was now fully master of his state—financially independent of Parliament and politically secure, with loyal Tory servants predominating in local and national government. He died in 1685 at the height of his power in 1685.

James II (1685–88)
Church and king

Unlike his brother, James II did not dissimulate for the sake of policy. He dealt plainly with friend and foe alike. James did not desire to establish Catholicism or absolutism and offered ironclad guarantees for the preservation of the Anglican church. He did desire better treatment for his coreligionists and the repeal of the Test Acts. James came to the throne amid declarations of loyalty from the ruling elite. The Parliament of 1685 was decidedly royalist, granting the king customs revenues for life as well as emergency military aid to suppress Monmouth’s Rebellion (1685). The Duke James Scott, duke of Monmouth, an illegitimate son of Charles II, was Shaftesbury’s personal choice for the throne , had Exclusion succeeded. He Monmouth recruited tradesmen and farmers as he marched through the west country on the way to defeat at the Battle of Sedgemoor. The rebellion was a fiasco, as the local gentry refused to sanction civil war. Monmouth was executed, and more than 600 of his supporters were either hanged or deported in the brutal aftermath of the rebellion, the Bloody Assizes (1685).

The king misinterpreted Monmouth’s failure to mean that the nation country would place the legitimate succession above all else. During the rebellion, James had dispensed with the Test Act and appointed Catholics to military command. This led to a confrontation with Parliament, but the king’s dispensing power was upheld in Godden v. Hales GoddenHales (1686). James made it clear that he intended to maintain his large military establishment, to promote Catholics to positions of leadership, and to dispense with the penal code.

These decisions could hardly have come at a worse moment. In France , Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, the legislation that had protected the rights of French Protestants for nearly a century. The repression of Huguenot congregations inflamed English public opinion. Thus, the king’s effort on behalf of Catholics was doomed from the start. He had vainly hoped the Parliament of 1685 would repeal the Test Acts. When his attempt to open the universities to Catholics was met by rigid opposition, he forced a Catholic head upon Magdelan College, Oxford, but only after an open break with the fellows and unpleasant publicity. Moreover, his effort to forge an alliance with dissenters Dissenters proved unsuccessful. When James showed favour to William Penn and the Quakers, his leading Anglican ministers, the Earls Henry Hyde, earl of Clarendon, and Lawrence Hyde, earl of Rochester, resigned.

By now the king was set upon a collision course with his natural supporters. The Tory interest was made up of solid support for church and king; it was James’s mistake to believe that they would support one without the other. In 1687 he reissued the Declaration of Indulgence, which suspended the penal laws against Catholics and dissentersDissenters. This was a temporary measure, for James hoped that his next Parliament would repeal the penal code in its entirety. To that end he began a systematic investigation of the parliamentary boroughs. Agents were sent to question mayors, lieutenants, and justices of the peace about their loyalty to the regime and their willingness to vote for members of Parliament (MPs) who would repeal the Test Acts. Most gave temporizing answers, but those who stood out were purged from their places. For the first time in English history, the crown was undertaking to pack Parliament.

The Revolution of 1688

The final crisis of James’s reign resulted from two related events. The first was the refusal of seven bishops to instruct the clergy of their dioceses to read the Declaration of Indulgence in their churches. The king was so infuriated by this unexpected check to his plans that he had the bishops imprisoned, charged with seditious libel, and tried. Meanwhile, in June 1688 Queen Mary (Mary of Modena) gave birth to a male heir, raising the possibility prospect that there would be a Catholic successor to James. When the bishops were triumphantly acquitted by a London jury, leaders of all political groups within the state were persuaded that the time had come to take action. Seven leading Protestants drafted a carefully worded invitation for William of Orange to come to England and to investigate the circumstances of the birth of the king’s heir. In effect, the leaders of the political nation had invited a foreign prince to invade their land.

This came as no surprise to William, who had been contemplating an invasion since the spring of 1688. William, who was organizing a the Grand Alliance against Louis XIV, needed England as an ally rather than a rival. All Europe was readying for war in the summer of 1688, and James had powerful land and sea forces at his disposal to repel William’s invasion. The crossing, begun on October 19, was a feat of military genius, however propitious the strong eastern “Protestant wind” that kept the English fleet at anchor while Dutch ships landed at Torbay (November 5). William took Exeter and issued a declaration calling for the election of a free Parliament. From the beginning, the Anglican interest flocked to him. James could only watch as parts of his army melted away.

Yet there was no plan to depose the king. Many Tories hoped that William’s presence would force James to change his policies; many Whigs believed that a free Parliament could fetter his excesses. When James marched out of London, there was even the prospect of battle. But the result was completely unforeseen. James lost his nerve, sent his family to France, and followed after them, tossing the Great Seal into the Thames. James’s flight was a godsend, and, when he was captured en route, William allowed him to escape again. At the end of December, William arrived in London, summoned the leading peers and bishops to help him keep order, and called Parliament into being.

The Convention Parliament (1689) met amid the confusion created by James’s flight. For some Tories, James II was still the king; some . Some were willing to contemplate a regency ; and others to allow Mary to rule with William as consort. But neither William nor the Whigs would accept such a solution. William was to be king in his own right, and in February the Convention agreed that James had “abdicated the government and that the throne has thereby become vacant.” At the same time, the leaders of the Convention prepared the Declaration of Rights to be presented to William and Mary. The declaration was a restatement of traditional rights, but the conflicts between Whigs and Tories caused it to be watered down considerably. Nevertheless, the Whigs did manage to declare the suspending power and the maintenance of a standing army in peacetime illegal. But many of the other clauses protecting free speech, free elections, and frequent parliaments Parliaments were cast in anodyne formulas, and the offer of the throne was not conditional upon the acceptance of the Declaration of Rights.

William III (1689–1702) And and Mary II (1689–94)
The Revolution revolution settlement

The Glorious Revolution (the Revolution of 1688) was a constitutional crisis, which was resolved in England, if not in Scotland and Ireland, through legislation. The Bill of Rights (1689), a more conservative document than even the declaration, was passed into law, but and it established the principle that only a Protestant could wear the crown of England. A new coronation oath required the monarch to uphold Protestantism and the statutes, laws, and customs of the realm as well. A Triennial Act (1694) reestablished the principle of regular parliamentary sessions.

Two other pieces of legislation tackled problems that had vexed the nation country since 1640. The Mutiny Act (1689) restrained the monarch’s control over military forces in England by restricting the use of martial law. It was passed for one year only; however, though when it lapsed between 1698 and 1701, the crown’s military power was not appreciably affected. The Toleration Act (1689) was the most disappointing part of the whole settlement. It was originally intended to be part of a new comprehensive religious settlement in which most mainline dissenters Dissenters would be admitted into the church. This failed for the same reasons that comprehension had failed been failing for 30 years; the Anglican clergy would not give up its monopoly, and dissenters Dissenters would not compromise their principles. The Toleration Act permitted most forms of Protestant worship; Unitarians were explicitly excluded, as were Catholics and Jews. But the Test Acts that theoretically prevented dissenters Dissenters from holding government office or sitting in Parliament were continued in force.

A new society

In the decades before, and especially following, the Glorious Revolution, profound realignments can be seen in English society. Hitherto, the great divide was between landed wealth and urban wealth derived from trade and the law. A new fault line became ever clearer within landed society, and new ties emerged between the super-rich of the city and countryside. The old social values that had tied the peerage, or nobilitas maior (greater nobility), and gentry, or nobilitas minor (lesser nobility), withered. A new social term emerged, the aristocracy. Previously it had been used to describe not a social group but a system of government; now it referred to an elite whose wealth was vicarious, encompassing not only vast estates but also great profits from urban redevelopment—such as the Russells’ redevelopment of Covent Garden and later of Bloomsbury (from the time of Francis Russell, 4th earl of Bedford) and the Grosvenors’ development of Mayfair, Belgravia, and Pimlico (from the time of Sir Thomas Grosvenor in the early 18th century). Profits also came to them from investment in overseas trading companies and from government stock. They built elegant town houses to go with their huge country houses, often pulling down or shifting whole villages (as Sir Robert Walpole did at Houghton Hall and Philip Yorke, earl of Hardwicke, did at Wimpole) so as to produce spacious parks and noble vistas for themselves. They patronized the secular arts in one sense and the ‘‘squires’’ (another new term for the ‘‘mere” gentry) in another sense. The squires faced financial decline as their rent rolls sagged and new, expensive forms of capital-intensive rather than labour-intensive agriculture passed them by. Two new political epithets were introduced: Whig aristocrat and Tory squire. They represented two social realities and two political visions: the Whig vision of a cosmopolitan, religiously and culturally liberal society and the Tory vision of a world gone bad that had abandoned the paternalism of manor house and parish church and of the confessional state and the organic society (the body politic) in favour of a materialistic possessive individualism. Post-revolution society was based much less on the rule of social leaders voluntarily leading in public service and on private philanthropy than on a rule of law made by the elite for the elite and upon the professionalism of government. These changes to the social order made many Tories temperamentally Jacobite, not in the sense that they believed in the cause of James Edward, the Old Pretender, or Charles Edward, the Young Pretender, but in the sense that they were in perpetual mourning for the world they had lost.

The sinews of war

William III had come to England to further his continental designs, but English politics conspired against him. The first years of his reign were dominated by the constitutional issues of the revolution settlement, and he became increasingly frustrated with the political squabbling of Whigs and Tories. Moreover, holding the English throne was proving more difficult than taking it. In 1690, with French backing, James II invaded Ireland and routed Protestant forces. William personally led an army to the Battle of the Boyne (1690), where James’s forces were crushed. But the compromise settlement that he wished to impose on Ireland, which would have made it secure from French intrigue, was rejected by his plenipotentiaries reached with the Catholic leaders as the price of their abandonment of resistance (the Treaty of Limerick) was rejected by the Irish Parliament, which executed the full rigours of the penal code upon Irish Catholics.

The Irish wars impressed upon William’s English subjects that, as long as the French backed James, they were now part of the great European struggle. Parliament granted William vast subsidies for the Nine Years’ War of the Grand Alliance (1688–97), more than £4.5 million in a two-year period alone, but also established a right to oversee the expenditure of public monies. This led to both economies and accountability, and it forged a new political alliance among “country” (that is, anti-court) forces that were uneasy about foreign entanglements and suspicious of corruption at court. William’s war was going badly on land and sea. The French fleet inflicted heavy losses on a combined Anglo-Dutch force and heavier losses on English merchant shipping. The land war was a desultory series of sieges and reliefs, which again tipped in favour of France.

For some time it looked as if Scotland might go its own way. Whereas in England the centre held and compromises were reached, in Scotland James’s supporters first held their ground and then crumbled, and a vindictive Parliament not only decreed a proscription of his supporters but set out to place much greater limits on the crown. James was formally deposed. Moreover, measures were taken to ensure that Westminster could not dictate what was done in Edinburgh. And there was to be religious toleration in Scotland. Episcopacy was abolished, and all those who had taken part in the persecution of covenanting conventicles in previous years were expelled from a vengeful kirk (church). There was spasmodic resistance from Jacobites, and it took several years and some atrocities—most notoriously, the slaughter of the MacDonalds, instigated by their ancient enemies the Campbells, in the Massacre of Glencoe in 1692—for William to secure complete control.

Year by year the financial costs mounted. Between 1688 and 1702 England accumulated more than £14 million of debt, which was financed through the creation of the Bank of England (1694). The bank was a joint-stock company empowered to discount bills and issue notes. It lent to the government at a fixed rate of interest—initially 8 percent—and this interest was secured by a specific customs grant. Investors scrambled for the bank’s notes, which were considered gilt-edged securities, and more than £1.2 million was raised on the initial offering. Not surprisingly, a growing funded debt created inflation and led to a financial crisis in 1696. But the underlying English economy was sound, and military expenditures fueled production.

The establishment of a funded national debt and the Bank of England was the work of the Whigs in alliance with the London mercantile establishment. The Tories and the country party were alternately suspicious and jealous of Whig success. In order to secure funds for his campaigns, William had been forced to allow the Whigs to dominate government, much against his inclination. An attempted assassination of the king in 1696 gave the Whigs an opportunity to impose an oath on the political nation that William was the “rightful and lawful king.” This directly challenged Tory consciences, which had been tender since the death of Queen Mary in 1694. Many resigned office rather than affirm what they did not believe. The ascendancy of the so-called Junto Whigs might have been secured had not European events once again intruded into English affairs. In 1697 the Nine Years’ War of the Grand Alliance ended with the Treaty of Rijswijk, in which Louis XIV formally recognized William III as king of England.

A great revulsion and war weariness now took hold of the nationcountry. Parliament voted to disband most of the military establishment, including William’s own Dutch guards, and a vigorous public debate against the existence of a standing army ensued. Taxes were slashed, accounts were audited, and irregularities were exposed. The Junto Whigs, who were associated with war and war profiteers, fell. A new coalition of country and Tory MPs, led by Sir Robert Harley, earl of Oxford, launched a vigorous campaign of retrenchment. It had not progressed very far by 1700, when the deaths of the Duke duke of Gloucester and Charles II of Spain redefined English and European priorities.

The Duke duke of Gloucester was the only surviving child of the queen’s Queen Mary’s sister, Princess Anne, despite her 18 pregnancies. Because William and Mary were childless, the duke was the long-term Protestant heir to the throne. His death created a complicated problem that was resolved in the Act of Settlement (1701), which bypassed 48 legitimate but Catholic heirs and devolved the throne upon the grandchildren a granddaughter of James I, that is, on Sophia of Hanover and her son George (later George I). In clauses that read like a criticism of the policies of William III, the act stipulated that the sovereign must be be—and could only be—married to a member of the Anglican church and that his foreign policy was to be directed by Parliament and his domestic policy by the privy councilPrivy Council. It also limited the right of the king to dismiss judges at pleasure. Although many of the more restrictive clauses of the act were repealed in 1706, the Act of Settlement asserted a greater degree of parliamentary control over the monarchy than had been obtained since 1649.

The consequences of the death of Charles II of Spain were no less momentous. Years of futile negotiations to divide the vast Spanish empire among several claimants came to an end when Louis XIV placed his grandson on the Spanish throne and began making preparations to unite the kingdoms into a grand Bourbon alliance. Louis’s aggressive stance overcame even the torpor of British public opinion, especially when he renounced William’s legitimacy and welcomed James III Edward, the Old Pretender, to his court as rightful king of England. William constructed another anti-French coalition and bequeathed to Queen Anne the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14).

Anne (1702–14)

Queen Anne, daughter of James II and the last of the Stuarts, inherited a nation country that was bitterly divided politically. Her weak eyesight and indifferent health forced her to rely more upon her ministers than had any of her Stuart predecessors, but she was no less effective for that. Anne had decided views about people and policies, and these did much to shape her reign. She detested the party divisions that now dominated central politics and did all she could to avoid being controlled by either Whigs or Tories. While she only briefly achieved her ideal of a nonpartisan ministry, Anne did much to disappoint the ambitions of nearly all party leaders.

Whigs and Tories

The most significant development in political life over the last previous quarter century had been the growth of clearly defined and opposing parties, which had taken the opprobrious titles Whigs (Scottish horse thieves) and Tories (Irish cattle rustlers). Parties had first formed during the exclusion crisis of 1679–81, but it was the Triennial Act (1694) that unintentionally gave life to party conflict. Nine general elections were held between 1695 and 1713, and these provided the structure whereby party issues and party leaders were pushed to the fore. Though party discipline was still in its infancy and ideology was a novel aspect of politics, clearly recognizable political parties had emerged by the end of the reign of William III. In general, the Tories stood for the Anglican church, the land, and the principle of passive obedience. They remained divided over the impending Hanoverian succession (see house of Hanover), wistfully dreaming that James III Edward might convert to Protestantism so that the sanctity of the legitimate succession could be reaffirmed. From their country houses, the Tories opposed an expensive land war and favoured the “blue sea” strategy of dominating the Atlantic and Mediterranean shipping lanes. Their leaders had a self-destructive streak. Only Robert Harley, Earl earl of Oxford, was a politician of the first rank, and he always shrank from being labeled a Tory. The Tories generally had a majority in the Commons and a friend on the throne, but they rarely attained power.

The Whigs stood for Parliament’s right to determine the succession to the throne, for all necessary measures to blunt the international pretensions of Catholic-absolutist France, and for a latitudinarian approach to religion and a broad, generous interpretation of the Toleration Act. They were blessed with brilliant leadership and an inexhaustible supply of good luck. John Churchill, Duke duke of Marlborough, was the outstanding military figure of his day. His victories at the Battle of Blenheim (1704) and the Battle of Ramillies (1706) rank among the greatest in British history. During the first part of the reign, his wife, Sarah, duchess of Marlborough, was the queen’s confidante, and together they the Marlboroughs were able to push Anne to support an aggressive and expensive foreign policy. Continental warfare was costing £4 million a year, paid for by a tax on land, and, after the early years, successes were few and far between. Sidney Godolphin kept Marlborough the duke supplied and financed and ably managed the Whig interest by disciplining government officeholders to vote for Whig policies in Parliament. Among these policies were was support for dissenters Dissenters who, to avoid the rigours of the Test Acts, would take Anglican communion. Both the queen and the Tories were opposed to these occasional conformists, and three bills to outlaw the practice were passed through the Commons but defeated in the Lords. When the Tories attempted to attach one of these to the military appropriations bill, even the queen condemned the maneuver.

For the first half of Anne’s reign, Whig policies were dominant. The duke of Marlborough’s victories set off a wave of nationalistic pride and forced even Tories to concede the wisdom of a land war. Unfortunately, military success built overconfidence, prompting the Whigs to adopt the fruitless policy of “no peace without Spain,” which committed them to an increasingly unattainable conquest of Iberia. Yet the capture of both Gibraltar (1704) and Minorca (1708) made England the dominant sea power in the western Mediterranean and paid handsome commercial dividends. So too did the unexpected union with Scotland (1707in 1707 (see Act of Union). Here again, Godolphin was the dominant figure, calling the Scottish Parliament’s bluff when they it announced they it would not accept the Hanoverian succession. Godolphin passed an the Aliens Act (1705) that , which would have prohibited all trade between England and Scotland—no mere scare tactic in light of the commercial policy that was crippling the Irish economy. Rather than risk economic strangulation, Scottish leaders negotiated for a permanent union, a compact the English monarchy had sought for more than a century. The union was a well-balanced bargain: free trade was established, ; Scottish Presbyterianism was protected, and the Scottish legal system were protected; and provisions were made to include 45 Scottish members in the English House of Commons and 18 members in the House of Lords. England gained security on its northern border, and the Whigs gained the promise of a peaceful Hanoverian succession.

Tories and Jacobites

Whig successes were not welcomed by the queen, who had a personal aversion to most of their leaders, especially after her estrangement from Sarah Churchill. As in the reign of William, war weariness and tax resistance combined to bring them down . Robert Harley, Earl the Whigs. The earl of Oxford , and Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, vied for leadership of a reinvigorated Tory party that rallied support with the cry “church in danger.” In 1710 a Whig prosecution of a bigoted Anglican minister, Henry Sacheverell, badly backfired. Orchestrated mob violence was directed against dissenting churches, and Sacheverell was impeached by only a narrow margin and given a light punishment. When the Tories gained power, they were able to pass legislation directed against dissentersDissenters, including the Occasional Conformity Act (1711), which forbade dissenters Dissenters to circumvent the Test Acts test acts by occasionally taking Anglican communion, and the Schism Act, which prevented them from opening schools (they were barred from Anglican schools and colleges). The Tories also concluded the War of the Spanish Succession. By the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), England expanded its colonial empire in Canada and the Caribbean and maintained possession of Gibraltar and Minorca in the Mediterranean.

But the Tories had their own Achilles’ heel. They were deeply divided over who should succeed Anne, divisions that which became public during the queen’s serious illness in 1713. Though there were far more Hanoverian Tories than Jacobite Tories (supporters of James II and his son, James IIIEdward, the Old Pretender), the prospect of the succession of a German , Lutheran prince with continental possessions to defend did not warm the hearts of isolationist , Anglican country gentlemen. Both Harley Oxford and Bolingbroke were in correspondence with James IIIEdward, but Harley Oxford made it plain that he would only support a Protestant succession. Bolingbroke’s position was more complicated. A brilliant politician, he realized that the Tories would have little to hope for from the Hanoverians and that they could only survive by creating huge majorities in Parliament and an unshakable alliance with the church. Conflict between Tory leaders and divisions within the rank and file combined to defeat Bolingbroke’s plans. After Anne died in August 1714, George I acceded to the British throne, and Bolingbroke, having tainted the Tory party with Jacobitism for the next half century, fled to France.