Transcription
The ascension of the House of Stuart in 1603 was the dawn of a new, uncertain age for England. Elizabeth had offered stable rule for so long that the vast majority of people had known no other monarch. Changes in the religious, economic, and political landscape left James I facing an entirely new set of challenges during his reign, ones that would soon throw England into turmoil. In this video, we will see England wrestle with civil war and revolution while it establishes the foundations of its global empire.
The Rise of Parliament
We have to begin with Parliament. Parliament had been getting more powerful for centuries. From its days of butting heads with the crown over taxes for the Hundred Years' War, it had become an integral part of government. The Tudors had leaned on it to support their major policies like Henry’s Break With Rome and Elizabeth’s religious reforms, even if the increasingly Puritan membership of Parliament wished she'd gone further into Protestantism.
The ascension of the Stuarts was a chance for Parliament to assert and expand its growing authority. With few prior connections or loyalists to call upon to control Parliament, James I found himself constantly at odds with the institution. Parliament was disproportionately Puritan compared to the population, so the more moderate James already had his work cut out for him. The brief unity they experienced in response to the Gunpowder Plot in November 1605, where a group of Catholic conspirators headed by Guy Fawkes planned to blow up Parliament while the King was in attendance, did not last.
James’ lavish spending demanded money that Parliament was not eager to give him. James tried to circumvent them by raising customs duties, forcing loans, and granting monopolies to chosen private individuals or companies. Parliament considered these actions illegal and protested. James dissolved Parliament in 1610 and 1614 over the dispute, but they were not easily cowed. In 1624, Parliament passed the Act of Monopolies to end the king’s power to grant them to whoever he wanted. It was the first time that Parliament had directly legislated away a power from the king, and it was not going to be the last.
But it was under James’ son, Charles I, that issues with Parliament would boil over to consume the country. Much like his father, Charles frustrated Parliament with his attempts to raise money without its permission. The crown retained power over war and peace, but Charles’ decision to go to war with France and Spain simultaneously did not please Parliament, who resisted his attempts to raise taxes to pay for it. Charles responded with ‘forced loans’ where wealthy men, many of them MPs, were compelled to give him money or face imprisonment. Dozens of powerful wealthy men were treated this way. But Charles angered the common people too, especially in the south, when he effectively declared martial law and seized people’s homes to house the militia he was raising for the war.
In 1628, Parliament responded directly to his actions with the Petition of Right. It declared that no one should be forced to pay a tax, loan, or gift that had not been voted by Parliament, no one would be imprisoned without knowing the charges, that soldiers should not be forcibly billeted in people’s homes, and martial law will not be declared. The Petition of Right was a landmark moment in political thought and defined the fundamental aspects of the English idea of freedom and liberty. It was the freedom from an arbitrary and unaccountable government that could abuse its citizens without care for their rights. This didn’t deter Charles, who dissolved Parliament the following year.
For the next 11 years, Charles ruled by Royal Prerogative without the nuisance of Parliament. His raising of custom duties, reinstitution of medieval forest laws, implementation of a nationwide ship tax, and his imprisonment of those who refused to pay it turned Charles from a typical monarch butting heads with Parliament to an absolutist king who posed a direct danger to the rule of law.
The Civil War
Parliament wasn’t summoned again until 1640 when Charles needed them to fund the suppression of a rebellion in Scotland. But now Parliament was out for blood. They forced Charles to accept a Parliament meeting at least once every 3 years, and began impeachment proceedings against several of Charles’ ministers. Most importantly Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, who was tried and ultimately executed for abuses of power in Ireland. Charles reluctantly agreed to sign the death warrant, a decision he came to regret.
Charles’ moderate religious views were also intolerable to the Puritanical Parliament. Charles was an Arminian, who revered the ceremony and grandeur of the Church of England and favoured the continued existence of bishops. Parliament mostly disagreed, and came to see Charles as little better than a Catholic. In 1641, Ireland broke out into rebellion. Charles and Parliament both insisted on controlling the militia raised to put it down, each fearing the other would use it to secure their own power. By now, the relationship between the two was unsalvageable.
Parliament declared its control of the militia under a Lord General, but Charles responded on January 4th 1642 by marching into Parliament with armed men demanding the arrest of 5 leading MPs. All of them had already fled, and Parliament would not have surrendered them even if they were there. This naked display of royal power and Parliamentary resistance was the proverbial Rubicon. There was no solution but war. Charles fled to York where he began raising an army of his own. Parliament too formalised its control of the militia and called up troops.
The First English Civil War was fought between Royalists, nicknamed the Cavaliers for the high number of cavalry officers, and the Parliamentarians, also known as Roundheads for the rounded haircuts popular with their troops. Generally speaking, the north and west of England plus Wales were Royalist, while the south and east rallied to Parliament. Charles seemed to have the upper hand at first, winning the first major battle at Edgehill in October 1642, but he failed to press his advantage onto London. The next year the Royalists won more victories at Bristol, Newbury, and elsewhere, but the tide turned against them in 1644 when a Scottish army arrived to help Parliament. The Royalists suffered a grave defeat at the Battle of Marston Moor in July 1644, but it was the Battle of Naseby in June 1645 that delivered an irrecoverable defeat upon the Royalists. Most of the Royalist army was destroyed. Momentum shifted fully to Parliament, who proceeded to capture the Royalist headquarters at Oxford the following year. Charles fled north where he surrendered to the Scots, who then delivered him over to Parliament. Some 300,000 people had been killed by the time fighting stopped.
The capture of Charles ended the First Civil War, but Parliament was uneasy at the rising power of the army used to defeat him. Led by Oliver Cromwell, the army faction was more aggressively puritan even than Parliament, and had gained much power through the war. Still the king, Charles remained under house arrest for almost 2 years as Parliament decided what to do with him. Then in 1648, a fresh wave of Royalist uprisings broke out. Cromwell crushed them in months, but the experience proved to him that Charles’ mere existence posed a threat to any new order Parliament hoped to build. In December 1648, Cromwell and his allies forcibly seized control of Parliament, drove out the moderates, and brought Charles to trial for treason. In abusing his royal power, they argued Charles had committed an offence against God, the law, and the nation, all three of which he was supposed to serve. The trial was a farce. Parliament’s legal arguments were new and undeveloped, the conclusion foregone, and Charles did not even dignify the court with a response to the charges. On January 26th 1649, Charles was condemned to death for high treason. 4 days later, the King of England lost his head on a scaffold outside Whitehall Palace.
The Commonwealth
With Charles’ execution, England was declared a Commonwealth with Parliament as the sole authority. Cromwell spent the next few years dealing with remaining Royalists, first in Ireland, where Cromwell’s brutality towards the Catholics included massacres and the mass seizure of Irish land to be given to his allies. He was gentler to the Protestant Scots who he marched against in 1650 after they declared Charles’ exiled son, Charles II, as king. By 1653, Cromwell found Parliament to be ineffective and frustrating, so dissolved it and declared himself Lord Protector. With financial independence and the loyalty of the army, there was little Parliament could do to stop him.
Cromwell proceeded to implement an aggressive Puritanical order in England. His regional major-generals acted as the morality police for his regime, instituting sweeping moral laws including a ban on gambling, fines for drunkenness and obscenity, and punishment for anyone who worked on the Sabbath. He was effectively a military dictator, albeit a pious one. However oppressive and unpopular Charles I had been, almost everyone in England agreed that Cromwell was worse. Parliament despised him, as did most average Englishmen. The absurdity of some of his laws, such as the banning of Christmas decorations and women’s cosmetics, made him a figure of mockery as much as fear. So awful was his reign that even committed Parliamentarians found themselves longing for the old monarchy.
When Cromwell finally died in 1658, his son Richard was quickly sidelined by the unthinkable: Parliament invited the exiled Charles II, whose father they’d executed barely 10 years earlier, to return to the throne. Charles II returned to London in triumph on May 29th 1660. However, the country and the monarchy would never be the same. Parliament had forever secured its supremacy over the crown. The ideals of a limited government, responsible to its people and accountable to the higher principles of Common Law and the rights of men was there to stay.
Colonisation and the Americas
Reforms at home occurred alongside dramatic expansion abroad in what historians label the First British Empire. In Ireland, English and Scottish colonisation of Ulster at the initiative of the crown preceded the mass seizure and redistribution of Irish land by Cromwell. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic the first lasting English colony in the Americas was set down at Virginia. Despite the challenges of settlement, a steady stream of colonists followed and the start of tobacco cultivation in 1612 made the colony economically profitable. In 1620, English Puritans dissatisfied with the religious climate at home landed at Plymouth Rock aboard the Mayflower. By the time the Civil War broke out, more than 50,000 English people had travelled to the Americas.
English colonisation of the Americas was not a coordinated central process. It was a piecemeal effort from mostly private individuals who migrated for a variety of reasons. For the Pilgrims, it was a religious venture to escape religious restrictions at home and build a deeply Protestant society of their own. The same arguments against government tyranny and freedom from taxation that had contributed to the Civil War also sent Englishmen to a frontier life in the Americas. Similarly, frontier life offered the promise of land, which was in scarce supply for regular people in England. The economic success of the American colonies only drew in more settlers eager to make their fortune across the Atlantic.
Administering these colonies was also not a uniform thing. Royal colonies like Virginia and New York were managed by the crown and their appointed officials. Proprietor colonies meanwhile like Pennsylvania and Maryland were privately owned and typically elected their own leaders. Charter colonies were a middle ground where the crown granted private settlers or companies the right to settle in an area. England relied on colonial officials in these colonies to collect taxes and upon its soldiers to maintain order. However, England’s influence on daily affairs was limited, by simple distance if nothing else. This freedom from English oversight allowed the American colonies to develop their own culture that emphasizes freedom, autonomy, and minimal government intervention that would come back to bite the English.
Maintaining these colonies led to conflict with several parties. Firstly, the Native Americans who already inhabited the land. Native-Settler relations vary hugely based on which native group and which settlers we’re talking about and when. In the early years, the small number of colonists favoured trade and cooperation with the native groups. However, by the late 17th and early 18th century the rapidly growing settlements became more aggressive in displacing and destroying native communities. English law did not recognize native land claims and so new colonists had no qualms about clearing the native Americans off their desired land. This led to several conflicts such as the Pequot War of the 1630s and King Philip’s War of the 1670s, so named after Metacom, the Pokanoket chief fighting the English, who took the English name of Philip.
Then there were the other European powers, chiefly France, who were attempting to colonize the Americas as well. Conflicts in Europe often played out in the colonies, and wars over resources and land were common. Native Americans found themselves caught between these warring European powers. Most famously the Iroquois Confederacy who allied themselves with the English after decades of conflict with the French known as the Beaver Wars.
Aside from the continental colonies, the Caribbean colonies were also crucial to England’s new empire. The production of valuable goods, especially sugar, from these colonies mostly by slave labour made them some of the most lucrative colonies of the crown. Protecting these colonies and the shipments coming back from Spanish and French competitors encouraged mass investment in the navy and improvements in naval tactics that allowed the Royal Navy to dominate the sea. Unfortunately, it also resulted in a great many skilled sailors who turned to piracy to prey upon the rich colonies and ships of the area. The Golden Age of Piracy raged from the 1650s to 1730s, powered by the riches on offer from England’s Caribbean colonies.
The English in Africa and Asia
There’s no talking about the colonisation of Americas without talking about England’s role in the slave trade. The new colonies needed more labourers than it had settlers, and with naval technology advanced enough to make trips to Africa reliable, England had its labour source. The Portuguese were the first to open the Atlantic Slave Trade, but the British became one of its major players. The weak native states along Africa’s West Coast were easy pickings for slavers. Most of the time, the British traded with native Africans to do the slave-catching for them, offering guns and wealth in exchange for human beings. Those human beings then had to endure the several week long ordeal of the Atlantic Passage before settling in for a miserable unfree life in a distant land with little to no hope of escape.
The Slave Trade stayed distant from most English people. Slavery on English soil had been banned for centuries, but plenty of African slaves found their way there as domestic slaves or in some cases during transit. An Englishman would not walk down the street and expect to see a slave, nor see one working in the fields. However, as the products of slave labour in the colonies such as sugar and tobacco flowed into England during the Stuart period, slavery had an indirect impact on people’s lives, whether they thought about it or not.
Beyond the Atlantic, the Stuart period saw England make its first inroads into India. In 1608, Captain William Hawkins arrived in the court of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir as the first official envoy for England in the subcontinent. Relations were warm at first. The Mughals were happy to trade with the English, and England’s displays of strength in muscling out rival European powers like the Dutch and French convinced the Mughals to grant them special privileges. The East India Company was granted trading posts known as ‘factories’, starting with Surat in 1612, but got many more over the following decades. Wealthier Englishmen with stock in the EIC made a lot of money off trade with India over the coming years, and access to that most precious commodity of all, tea, was welcomed. When tea arrived at the court of Charles II it was a luxury available only to the elite, but it soon spread to the other levels of society too.
A New England
Charles II was well-liked as a monarch by the masses for his affable and the sense of return to normalcy, but his role in English history - and of all monarchs after him - was less than had been his predecessors. To understand English history from here on out, we need to look even further beyond the palaces and Parliament. A great place to start are the intellectuals. The same curiosity that was driving the English to travel the world drove them to understand it. Centuries of dominance by the Classical thinkers was broken by an English Scientific Revolution.
In medicine for example, William Harvey revolutionised understanding of the human body with his insights into the heart and blood circulation. The true icon of the English Scientific Revolution was Isaac Newton. A mathematical genius, Newton’s ideas on gravity and the laws of motion became the cornerstone of humanity’s understanding of the world. He also developed calculus, a landmark moment in the story of mathematics.
England was also experiencing an agricultural revolution through the 17th century. With improved ploughs, the introduction of winter crops like turnips, new field rotations, and the introduction of fertilisers, English agricultural productivity soared. By 1720, England’s agricultural output was five times what it had been in 1420. Famines were now a thing of the past. Instead, the average Englishman could expect to enjoy meat regularly and, if he lived in the cities, might find tobacco, tea, and coffee as regular fixtures of his day. We should also address the financial revolution going on, with England embracing joint-stock companies and modern banking that would make it the commercial hub of the world. The Bank of England was founded in 1694, signalling a new level of interest and complexity in the financial landscape. A more individualistic, capitalistic economy was emerging where the absolute freedom of man to sell his labour and land free from duty or obligation to any other was now the rule. Now, the social elite were defined not by the men at their command or even the lands they owned, but by the profits their companies raked in. The government aggressively supported these traders, keen to establish a favorable balance of trade with the rest of the world. By 1700, England had overtaken the Dutch to become the greatest trading power in the world by volume.
The Glorious Revolution
The other revolution that hit England was a Glorious one. Charles II’s popular reign ended in 1685 to be replaced by his much less popular brother James II. James was the worst thing 17th century England could think of as a monarch: he was Catholic. Parliament had tried barring him from the succession, but Charles had taken advantage of Parliamentary disunity to secure his brother’s succession. James ruled for only 3 years, during which time he tried appointing Catholics to positions of power and, quite fairly, rolled back the persecution of Catholics. This wouldn’t do for Parliament, but this wouldn’t be a repeat of 1642. Instead, Parliament secretly contacted James’ daughter Mary who was married to the Dutch ruler William of Orange. The letter, signed by leaders of both parties in the Commons and several other powerful Englishmen, begged William and Mary to come to England and replace the unpopular James. Eager to bring England into an ongoing war with France, William agreed.
On November 5th 1688, William and Mary’s army landed in southern England. James scrambled to raise his army to withstand the invasion, but when people realised what was happening, they abandoned James in droves. There was no battle and James could only try to flee as William and Mary peacefully proceeded to London to replace him. James was caught by fishermen and delivered to the new monarchs, who allowed him to retire peacefully and without a fuss. The Glorious Revolution had ended the last Catholic monarch of England without firing a shot.
The Glorious Revolution shows how far England had come. Only a century before, religious differences could lead to open rebellion and mass persecution. Now, the institutions of Parliament and the crown were strong enough, and people’s faith in them also strong enough, that they could contain an issue that might have destroyed an earlier England and resolve it without a drop of blood. What’s most remarkable about this is that the full workings of England’s political system were never clarified. England is one of the few nations that operates on an unwritten constitution. There is no single document that outlines, say, the specific powers of the crown or of Parliament. England’s political constitution is instead drawn from a mix of statute law, documents like Magna Carta, legal decisions, Common Law, and unwritten traditions and conventions. Constitutions usually emerge out of revolutions or major political disruptions, but despite the unrest of the 17th century, England never decided to create one. As historians, this can be difficult as ideas and offices just pop into existence with no clear beginning - for example, there’s no agreed upon moment where Prime Ministers became a thing - but for England itself, the unwritten system allowed for natural evolution and flexibility. After the Glorious Revolution, the relative powers of the crown and Parliament would continue to evolve on this unwritten basis.
Into the 18th Century
As the 18th century dawned, things were relatively stable for England, at least at home. The accession of Queen Anne in 1701 went smoothly, and the great disruption of her reign, the Acts of Union of 1707, were generally well-received. The Acts of Union consolidated the crowns of England and Scotland into the new Kingdom of Great Britain - Ireland remained a separate kingdom and Wales was counted under England, hence the absence of Irish or Welsh symbolism on the Union Jack. The major domestic disturbance of the early 18th century were the Jacobites, Catholic supporters of the deposed James II who wanted to restore the Catholic branch of the Stuart family. The ascension of the German King George of the Hanover Dynasty following Anne’s death in 1714 caused two failed uprisings by the Jacobites in 1714 and 1719. The danger they posed came more from foreign backing than any serious threat to England’s internal order.
In Parliament, politicians had coalesced into two political informal parties. The Tories, a nickname drawn from Irish horse thieves, represented the more traditional and conservative attitude with respect for the monarchy and Anglicanism, against the Whigs, taking their name from Scottish rebels, who were more associated with Parliamentary power, limited monarchy, anti-Catholicism, and non-conformism. The Whigs dominated politics in the early 18th century, with no figure representing that better than Sir Robert Walpole, whose dominance over government affairs from 1721 to 1742 has earned him the title of Britain’s first Prime Minister, although technically no such office yet existed. That’s the unwritten constitution we mentioned at work.
England’s greatest struggles occurred away from its shores. In 1740, they were roped into the War of the Austrian Succession. The shifting alliances and convoluted claims of the participants aren’t really relevant to us, and like many wars its greatest impact on England was the increased tax burden needed to fund it. It did, however, provide an arena for the British to sharpen their military and naval tactics that would serve them well elsewhere. In 1743, George II became the last king to witness these first hand at the Battle of Dettingen when he was the last English monarch to lead his armies into battle. With the troops occupied abroad, the Jacobites tried one last attempt to seize the throne in 1745 for James II’s grandson, the Bonnie Prince Charlie, but it failed dramatically, ringing the death knell for the Jacobite cause.
Hot on the heels of the War of the Austrian Succession was the Seven Years' War fought against France from 1756. It was a war far from British soil, playing out in various colonies across the globe in what some historians have described as the first truly world war. There were two important consequences of this war. One, the immense cost that almost bankrupted Britain, which it would try to cover by taxing its American colonies, which backfired to say the least. Second, was the extension of the fighting to India. By now the EIC had dozens of factories and thousands of private troops supporting its trade - enough to pose a serious threat to Indian rulers. British efforts against the French in India as part of the war angered the ruler of Bengal in 1756, prompting a war. Britain crushed the Bengali army at the Battle of Plassey, and installed a puppet over Bengal. The age of England’s Indian empire had arrived.
England had come through Civil Wars, revolutions, and religious strife. The experience had hardened it, inspired it, and propelled its ships and settlers around the world, and raised its flag from Boston to Bengal. The sun had truly risen on the British Empire.