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 * England in the 1600s**


 * Background**

England was the only major state in Europe that was not heavily involved in Thirty Years' War. At the time of the feud on the continent, the people of the British Isles were fighting a civil war. **On one side, an extreme group of Calvinists called Puritans emphasized the rights and power of Parliament**. **The more moderate English Protestants within the state church, the Church of England, moved in favor of royal authority. The British civil war was fundamentally both a religious and a political conflict.**

Ironically, **the seventeenth century was time of cultural and economic expansion and success for the British**. Great writers William Shakespeare and Henry Purcell were catalysts to an evolving English language and national culture. The textile industry and production of wool and sheep were the large source of wealth. Merchants created the "putting-out system" of cottage industry and brought commercial capitalism to England. Society's richest were still landowners, not merchants, at this point however. The class systems that developed would play an important role in the distribution of power in Parliament as the years passed.

Elizabeth I was a brilliant leader and a clever manipulator. She successfully won the support and respect of Parliament and was thus able to govern almost completely as she pleased. When she died, the next in line to the the throne was **a Scotsman from the Stuart family, __James I__. He was a foreigner and possessed none of Elizabeth's charm. Parliament saw that a rude, unpleasant man had taken the throne and openly showed their dislike for the new monarch. As if to increase the tension, James was an unashamed proponent of royal absolutism. He believed that kings ruled by divine right; they ruled with a mandate from God.**

Parliament was composed of the House of Lords and the House of Commons. Since King Henry VIII had closed all the English monasteries, there were no abbots in Parliament. Clergy in general played a lesser role in secular government than it did in many of the states of mainland Europe. The House of Lords was populated by wealthy noblemen while the Commons was composed of landed gentrymen as well as merchants and wealthy townsmen.

The amount of variety among the classes of the English Parliament was unusually high. That being said, almost all the members of Parliament owned land. As such, they feared a monarch with the power to tax. Many members were also lawyers or Puritans. Puritans opposed the Church of England and lawyers feared that an absolute monarch would endanger the common law system. This body represented a significant wealth and strong interests. It was a force to be reckoned with and no King could hope to last long in opposition to such a group.

**The First Civil War**


 * When James I died, his son, __Charles I__, came to the throne**. Parliament mistrusted him as much as his father. In 1629, the friction between Parliament and the [[image:charlesI.jpg width="227" height="372" align="right" caption="Charles I Of England"]]King intensified. **Charles had attempted to rule without Parliament**, which only convened at the summons of the King. He wanted to modernize the navy and hoped to pay for this expensive project with tax revenue that he would collect independently from Parliament. Landowning taxpayers were worried.


 * The Scots rebelled in 1637, antagonized by attempts to force the Anglican church on Presbyterian Scotland.** Charles called for a session of Parliament, and when they opposed him, he dissolved it completely and called for new elections. Unfortunately for Charles, all the same men returned. The voters had acted against the will of the king, and **Parliament was reinvigorated. Instead of helping the king put down the rebellion in Scotland, it used the unrest as an excuse to impose its own demands**. These demands included the execution of royal advisers, the abolition of King Henry VIII's Star Chamber (a court for controlling noblemen) and Elizabeth I's High Commission (used to maintain the religious climate after the reformation), and the abolition of the Bishop as a part of Anglican Church.


 * By 1642, Charles and Parliament were at war** (House of Commons- [|Protests] against Charles). Parliament led a successful military campaign with an effective modern army. **__Oliver Cromwell__ commanded a highly effective division in this New Model Army that used Protestant religious fervor to lift morale and increase the will to fight**. **Cromwell quickly became the most highly regarded political and military figure in England**. After Parliament defeated Charles I, Cromwell came to believe that the only lasting solution for an untrustworthy man like Charles I was an execution. Parliament, wary of beheading a King, hesitated when faced with Cromwell's suggestion. In what historians would later call "Pride's Purge," **Cromwell moved against Parliament, which shrank to a tenth of its former size. He left a group of about 50 members in power. Charles was beheaded in 1649 ([|Charles's Execution Speech]** )


 * England under Cromwell**
 * Cromwell established the __Commonwealth of the British Isles__**, which he declared a unified republic. Despite his extraordinary Puritan piety, Cromwell **established religious toleration in Britain for everyone except atheists and Catholics.**

Ireland was livid. In what is known as the "plantation" of Ulster, a large group of Protestants settled in Northern Ireland. A foreign and despised Presbyterian system was imposed on Ireland's native Catholic clergy and people.

Meanwhile, **Cromwell was having difficulty governing even in England**. His supporters dwindling, **he began to rule alone as a dictator**. Opposition rose in the form of several radical groups. One such group, the Levellers, proposed universal manhood suffrage, a written constitution, and accountability from government to the people it represented. George Fox founded the Quakers, claiming to general alarm that any believer was able to experience direct revelations of truth from God, encouraging religious gender equality and opposing a hierarchical society.


 * Cromwell had by this point alienated most of his former supporters and disbanded Parliament completely in 1653**. He placed England under military control and tried to enforce a degree of the Puritan moral code on society, in the same manner that John Calvin had in Geneva in the 1540s. Cromwell died in 1658. The people almost universally supported the decision to reestablish the monarchy, the Church of England, and Parliament in 1660. __King Charles II__ came to power in England and Scotland.
 * Restoration**


 * The legacy of Cromwell's rule was twofold. The possibility of Britain existing as a religious society died completely. The mood of the country remembered Cromwell's time as a period of religious extremism and military control. Parliament was quick to force through new legislation to prepare itself for a potential future assault. It abolished feudal payments of landholders to the king. The king's only major source of income now came from taxes by permission of** **Parliament.** Land owners benefited immediately from the Restoration. Merchants prospered under the renewed Navigation Act of 1651, which protected industrial and commercial interests.


 * The __Dissenters__,** or middle-class Puritans and Catholics who did not accept the restoration of the Anglican Church, **were excluded by Parliament from local governing bodies, teaching school, or meeting for religious purposes.** The Poor Law, which had established a system for providing care to the vast number of English poor people, was decentralized so that each parish was responsible for executing the law on its own. Impoverished people were thus unable to leave their county.

**Rising Tension**


 * The national feeling in Britain after the restoration was anti-Catholic**. However, **King Charles II had definite pro-Catholic leanings**. He admired and hoped to duplicate Catholic King Louis XIV and his absolutist system in France. Charles's brother, James, announced his conversion to Catholicism. He was the next in line to the throne and England was threatened with the prospect of a potentially Catholic King. Charles stopped enforcing the laws against Dissenters under the pretext of decreasing the religious division in England. **His opponents in Parliament accused him of trying to promote Catholicism and passed the Test Act, which required all government officials to be Protestant.** At the same time, some Parliamentary Protestants were trying to pass a law to exclude James from the throne.

__Big point__: **The men who mistrusted a powerful monarch, Catholicism and the French and who wished to prevent James from becoming King were called Whigs.** They were backed by middle class merchants who wished to keep their wealth secure from taxes and upper nobility who always opposed a King. **The royalists were called Tories** and drew their support from weaker aristocracy, those who dislike the wealthy and powerful, and felt a strong loyalty to the Anglican Church.

To the Whigs' disappointment, **James II came to power in 1685**. He accepted James I's ideas about absolute monarchy and supported a King's right to make law by his word alone. The Tories and Whigs jointly opposed James by this point. After James had a son, it occurred to many in Parliament that there could be an indefinite line of Catholic Kings.
 * Second Civil War**


 * Parliament offered the throne to James's daughter __Mary and her husband William III of Orange__. William invaded England with an invitation from** **Parliament and became King in 1689**. James II fled to France in 1690. William was interested in using England as a force in his ongoing attempt to check the power of King Louis XIV. It became one of Louis's primary goals to reinstate the Stuart Kings in England. The English also had a new reason to fight the French; if the French [[image:Willem_II_prince_of_Orange_and_Maria_Stuart.jpg width="246" height="389" align="right" caption="William III of Orange and Mary II"]]were to win a war against the English, the constitutional liberties of Englishmen would be at stake.


 * Bill of Rights**

Between 1689 and 1701, Parliament passed a set of legislation that declared:
 * **The King does not have the power to suspend laws**
 * **Only Parliament has the power to tax or raise an army**
 * **No subject could be held in jail without a trial**
 * **The King of England cannot be a Catholic**
 * **Protestant Dissenters can practice their religion**
 * **[|Bill of Rights]**

Scotland remained outside of Parliamentary jurisdiction until 1707 when the United Kingdom of Great Britain was created[|. Creation of the United Kingdom of Britain]. The Scots merged to take part in England's economic advantages in the trading companies, the colonies, and the mercantile system. They kept their own Presbyterian religious system. ([|Scotland Remains Presbyterian])


 * Glorious Revolution**

The __Glorious Revolution__ is the name historians have given to the civil war of 1688-89. The Revolution:
 * **supported Parliamentary Government**
 * **supported the right of rebellion against tyranny**
 * **restricted the power of the King**
 * **showed th****e growth of English Constitutionalism**
 * **supported the landed aristocracy**
 * **maintained that only wealthy landholders could act as members of Parliament.**

Additional Resources:
 * [|http://www.british-civil-wars.co.uk/biog/oliver-cromwell.htm>]
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