23 The English Revolution

In the 17th century England experienced a succession of sometimes violent constitutional upheavals by which it sought to shed the shackles of royal autocracy. The constitutional monarchy that emerged was to become a model that progressives in many other countries sought to imitate in the centuries that followed.

The power of the Crown in England had in theory been diluted since the Middle Ages by the institution of Parliament—although at this stage Parliament did not represent more than a tiny handful of nobles and other landowners, clergy and wealthy townsmen. Monarchs still behaved in autocratic ways, but they increasingly did so within the confines of laws passed by Parliament—albeit at the monarch’s bidding. More crucially, the Crown relied on Parliament to raise taxes in order to carry out the business of government—from making war to building palaces. But Parliament only met irregularly, when summoned by the monarch.

Crown and Parliament Tensions between Crown and Parliament began to emerge toward the end of the reign of Elizabeth I. However, being a pragmatic politician, Elizabeth never pushed the constitutional issues to the test. Her successor, James I, was consumed by a belief in the “divine right of kings” to do as they pleased, as their rule was sanctioned by God. This took him into a head-on conflict with Parliament, which fiercely defended its “liberties and privileges.” In response, James attempted to rule without summoning Parliament, and raised money by various unpopular means, such as selling monopolies and titles.

“Kings are justly called gods, for that they exercise a manner or resemblance of divine power upon earth.”

King James I, speech to the English Parliament, March 21, 1610

James’s son, Charles I, was brought up as a fervent believer in the divine right of kings, and was even less of a pragmatist than his father. A proud, pious, prickly man, Charles took any disinterested advice as personal criticism. When he succeeded to the throne in 1625, Parliament was dominated by Puritans, who disapproved of the lavish (albeit notionally Protestant) religious ceremonial favored by Charles, and of his choice of wife, a French Catholic princess. Like his father, Charles preferred to rule alone, but when he could not raise sufficient money by his own devices he was forced to summon Parliament, which in 1628 issued the Petition of Right, declaring the illegality of raising taxes without parliamentary approval and condemning other abuses of monarchical power. Another parliamentary hiatus—the “Eleven Years’ Tyranny”—ended in 1640, when Charles’s attempt to impose bishops on the Presbyterian Scots met with armed resistance. Needing money for war, Charles was once more obliged to summon Parliament.

The Long Parliament that began to sit in November 1640 gained Charles’s reluctant approval to a number of demands, including an insistence that Parliaments be summoned at least once every three years, and that they could not be dissolved without their own consent. But in January 1642, after Parliament had demanded control of the army, Charles marched into the House of Commons at the head of 400 soldiers and attempted to arrest his five leading opponents. They had escaped, but within a matter of months both sides—Royalists and Parliamentarians—were openly at war.

Commonwealth and Protectorate The English Civil War, which continued in fits and starts until 1651, divided the country, and also drew in the Scots and the Irish. Charles was captured in 1646, and in January 1649 was put on trial for treason, found guilty and beheaded. Kings had been overthrown and killed before, usually by dynastic rivals, but never tried and convicted of treason. It amounted to a declaration that the people—as represented by Parliament—were sovereign, and not the monarch. Indeed, Parliament proceeded to abolish the monarchy and declared England a Commonwealth.

“You have sat here too long for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go.”

Oliver Cromwell, having won the Civil War for Parliament, dismisses that body in 1653

But Parliament was not the only power in the land. The army—which under its most successful general, Oliver Cromwell, had delivered victory in the Civil War—found the new Parliament too conservative for its taste. In 1653 Cromwell led a troop of soldiers into the House of Commons and expelled the members, and later that year he became “lord protector.” On his death in 1658 Cromwell was succeeded, in monarchical fashion, by his son Richard. However, the new lord protector did not enjoy the support that his father had, and the resultant power vacuum was filled when Charles I’s son returned to England in 1660 to take the throne as Charles II.

The social contract

The philosopher John Locke published his Two Treatises of Government in 1690, implicitly justifying the recent overthrow of James II in the “Glorious Revolution.” Locke stated that men are born with certain “natural rights”—freedom, equality and independence—and only give up these rights “by agreeing with other men to join and unite into a community, for their comfortable, safe, and peaceable living one amongst another.” Thus kings rule not by “divine right” but through a “social contract,” by which subjects give up their “natural rights” for “civil rights.” If a ruler tries to deny these rights, the people are justified in seeking his overthrow. Locke’s arguments were influential on both the American and the French revolutionaries of the later 18th century.

The “Glorious Revolution” So in the end the Civil War had failed to resolve the constitutional issues that had provoked it. The Restoration of 1660 did not bring a resolution either, as Charles II was too much of a skilled political operator to address the issues head-on. But on his death in 1685 Charles was succeeded by his Catholic brother, James II, who had none of Charles’s cunning and all the doctrinaire obstinacy of his father. James’s Protestant subjects increasingly feared that the king planned to reintroduce Catholicism and to reign in the absolutist fashion of Louis XIV of France. In 1688 a group of nobles invited James’s Protestant sonin-law, William of Orange, to England. William arrived with 12,000 men and a proclamation that he would maintain “the liberties of England and the Protestant religion.” James fled to France, and in 1689 the crown was offered to William and his wife, Mary (James’s Protestant daughter), on condition that they accept the Bill of Rights, which limited the power of the Crown, and detailed the rights and liberties of the subject.

Thus the so-called “Glorious Revolution” established England as a constitutional monarchy with a minimum of bloodshed. However, power was by no means devolved to the people as a whole, but was rather held in the hands of a small, largely aristocratic, landowning oligarchy. It was to take another two and a half centuries of agitation and struggle before a truly representative democracy was established in Great Britain, with every man and woman having a say in who was to govern the country.

the condensed idea

The beginning of the end of absolute monarchies in Europe