Civil war, republic and the Glorious Revolution

In 1642 war broke out between Charles I and Parliament. Parliament’s armies won, the king was tried and beheaded in January 1649, and England was ruled as a republic, eventually under Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector, until the monarchy was restored in 1660. In 1688 Parliament and leading nobles invited the Dutch prince William of Orange to replace the Catholic James II, and the Bill of Rights of 1689 put lasting limits on the Crown.^•

Why war came

Charles I believed he ruled by divine right. He raised taxes without Parliament, ruled without it for eleven years from 1629, and backed church reforms that many Protestants saw as creeping Catholicism. Rebellion in Scotland in 1638 and Ireland in 1641 forced him to recall Parliament, and the quarrel over who should control the army to crush the Irish rising tipped England into war. Historians increasingly speak of the “Wars of the Three Kingdoms”, since Scotland and Ireland were central to the story.^•

War and revolution

The fighting divided counties, towns and families. Parliament held London, the navy and the richer south-east; the king drew support from the north, the west and much of Wales. Parliament’s New Model Army, with Cromwell commanding its cavalry, won decisively at Naseby in 1645. Historians such as Charles Carlton estimate that a larger share of England’s population died in the civil wars, mostly from disease, than in the First World War.^•

Victory opened up astonishing debates. In 1647 soldiers and officers argued at Putney about whether every man should have the vote; one, Thomas Rainsborough, declared that “the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he”. Levellers, Diggers, Quakers and others imagined a different England. After the king’s execution, the monarchy and the House of Lords were abolished. Cromwell’s armies conquered Ireland and Scotland, and in England Puritan rule brought restrictions on theatres, alehouses and festivities that made it unpopular.^•

Restoration and 1688

Charles II’s return in 1660 was widely celebrated, but the deeper question returned when his Catholic brother James II tried to promote Catholics and rule around Parliament. In November 1688 William of Orange landed at Torbay with a Dutch army; James fled. The “Glorious Revolution” was less bloodless in Scotland and Ireland, where it was followed by war, the Boyne and penal laws against Catholics. In England, the Bill of Rights established that the monarch could not suspend laws, raise taxes or keep an army in peacetime without Parliament’s consent, and barred Catholics from the throne.^•

The result was a Protestant constitutional monarchy, a powerful Parliament and, before long, a state able to borrow, tax and fight wars on a scale few rivals could match. The English later told this as a story of steady, sensible progress towards liberty, the “Whig interpretation of history”, though historians such as Steve Pincus stress that 1688 was a real and divisive revolution.^•

Why it matters today