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Although the Plantagenet kings of the 14th and 15th centuries were fairly successful in some ways （e.g., in their relations with Scotland, and their tight control of Wales）, foreign wars and domestic unrest prompted a revival of baronial activity, reminiscent of the 13th century troubles. This time the instability was caused by the two branches of the Plantagenet family, the House of Lancaster and the House of York between 1455 and 1485.The name Wars of the Roses was, in fact, coined by the great 19th century novelist Sir Walter Scott, but it has become the accepted way of referring to these battles between the great House of Lancaster, symbolized by the red rose, and that of York, symbolized by the white.

In 1453 England was at last defeated in the Hundred Years’ War. At that time power in England was in the hands of a number of rich and ambitious nobles. Because the Hundred Years’ War ended, they had to seek a new outlet for their ambition by an attempt to dominatethe government at home. There was also a mass of unemployed soldiers. The interests of the majority of the common people were not deeply engaged.

In 1455, after Henry VI （1422-1461） had completely lost his reason and government put into the hands of a protector, war broke out between the Yorkists led by Richard, Duke of York, and the Lancastrians led by John Beaufout, Duke of Somerset. More wars were fought between the two sides in 1459 and 1460. In 1461 the Duke of York’s son, Edward, emerged the victor, and was proclaimed as Edward IV （1461-1483）. Edward reigned for most of the duration of these wars. He set about restoring the finances of the Crown and the disrupted export trade of the country, and gave the country a measure of prosperity.

Edward IV died in 1483 and his thirteen-year-old son was proclaimed his successor as Edward V （1483）. While awaiting his coronation the new king and his younger brother were lodged in the Tower of London⁵. Edward IV’s brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, had been appointed to the office of Protector. The young king Edward V and his brother mysteriously disappeared. They were probably murdered in the Tower. Richard of Gloucester was crowned in great splendor and became Richard III. To some historians, Richard III was guilty of the murders of Edward V and his brother. However, his guilt has never been proved and there is today a society dedicated to proving his innocence.

On August 22, 1485 at Bosworth Field in Leicestershire the last battle of the Wars of the Roses was fought between Richard III and another claimant to the throne, Henry Tudor, part-Welsh grandson of Owen Tudor and descendant of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. In the battle Richard III lost his crown and his life. Soon after his victory, Henry Tudor married Elizabeth of York （Edward IV’s daughter）, thus uniting the Houses of Lancaster and York and putting the country under the rule of the Tudors.

Although the Wars of the Roses were waged intermittently for thirty years, ordinary people were little affected and went about their business as usual. From these wars feudalism received its death blow. No less than 80 nobles of royal blood were killed in the wars. The great medieval nobility was much weakened and discredited. The king’s power now became supreme.

Five Tudor monarchs ruled England and Wales for just over two hundred years. In a short time span they achieved a great deal. Henry Tudor became Henry VII （1485-1509）. He gave England very firm rule. He refilled the royal treasury through loans, subsidies, property levies and fines; he forbade the nobles to keep excessive power; and he made it clear to all foreign powers who might hope to disrupt his country by reviving old hostility that this would bedangerous. By careful diplomacy Henry VII was able to neutralize all threats to himself and to his heirs. He gave England peace at home and abroad, which meant that he was able to build up England’s navy and foreign trade. England’s new international prestige was reflected in the eagerness of other European royal families to make marriage alliances with his children. Yet although a strong king, Henry VII was a very different type of king from any European monarchs of that time.

They were keen to make nation states where the monarch was absolute. In other words, they had total power, under no obligation to discuss their policies with any consultative body. This was not possible for Henry VII because, as we have seen, Parliament in England was already a fairly important body which had to be consulted, if only to get grants of pounds agreed upon.

Henry VIII, son of Henry VII, is usually remembered as the English king who had six wives one after another. He divorced twice and executed two of his wives for supposed adultery. Yet in spite of this rather frivolous image he is regarded as a great king. He took his father’s work in rebuilding the power of the monarch stages further. He tightened England’s control over its remote border areas and over Ireland; he placed local government not in the hands of great aristocrats jealous for personal power but in the hands of the gentry. These men were made Justices of the Peace with full power over law and administration in the provinces. They were directly responsible and loyal to Henry himself. In foreign affairs Henry VIII was aided by Thomas Wolsey, Archbishop and Lord Chancellor. Together they created for England a new active role in Europe. At one point in 1517 England managed to bring all the important states of Europe to London to discuss international peace. Later England was able to ally with both of the superpowers of the day—France and the Habsburg Empire. It was a triumph in terms of prestige.

Henry VIII was above all responsible for the religious reform of the Church. There were 3 main causes: a desire for change and reform in the Church had been growing for many years and now, encouraged by the success of Martin Luther （1483-1546）, many people believed its time had gone; the privilege and wealth of the clergy were also resented; and Henry needed money.

The reform began as a struggle for a divorce and ended in freedom from the Papacy. Henry VIII wanted to divorce Catherine of Aragon because she could not produce a male heirfor him. But Pope Clement VII refused to annul his marriage to Catherine for he was living in fear of Charles of Spain, the Holy Roman Emperor, who happened to be Catherine’s nephew. Henry’s reform was to get rid of the English Church’s connection with the Pope, and to make an independent Church of England. He made this break with Rome gradually between 1529 and 1534. He dissolved all of England’s monasteries and nunneries because they were much more loyal to the Pope than to their English kings. The laws （e.g., the Act of Succession of 1534 and the Act of Supremacy of 1535） which made his reform possible had three important effects: they stressed the power of the monarch and certainly strengthened Henry’s position（Henry took the title Supreme Head of the Church of England in 1535）; Parliament had never done such a long and important piece of work before. Its importance grew as a result too; and although Henry simply wanted to get rid of Papal interference and did not want to alter theology in any way, his attack on the Pope’s power encouraged many critics of the abuses of the Catholic Church to expect some movement away from Catholicism towards Protestant ideology. He tried to pass a law to correct this error in popular thinking in the 1540s. It did not work. Instead his earlier comments about reading the Bible for themselves encouraged the English people to criticize their priests, and Church teachings, and to be in favor of further changes.

Henry VIII was followed by his children Edward VI （1547-1553）, Mary Tudor（1553-1558）, and Elizabeth I （1558-1603）. Real religious change came in his son Edward’s time, and people call his switch to Protestant theology “The Reformation”. Mary Tudor, however, was still a devout Catholic like her Spanish mother Catherine of Aragon. When she became Queen after Edward she married Philip I of Spain and attempted to forcibly reconvert England to Roman Catholicism. Many people were persecuted for their Protestant religious views. At least 300 Protestants were burnt as heretics. People call her “Bloody Mary”. Mary is also remembered as the monarch who lost the French port of Calais⁶, the last British possession on the Continent, during a renewed war with France. Thanks to Mary, Protestantism and nationalism were now forever synonymous. The reign of Elizabeth I, a Protestant Queen, was greeted with relief and a high tide of nationalism. England has been Protestant ever since.

Elizabeth was 25 when she came to the throne. She was Henry VIII’s daughter by Ann Boleyn whom he beheaded. She reigned England, Wales and Ireland for 45 years and sheremained single. She made political use of the offers of marriage made by Philip II of Spain and others. Elizabeth’s reign was a time of confident English nationalism and of great achievements in literature and other arts, in exploration and in battle.

Elizabeth and Parliament

Generally speaking, Elizabeth was able to work with Parliament. This was because the Puritans in the House of Commons were still loyal to the Queen although they demanded further religious reform; and Elizabeth only called Parliament at infrequent intervals when she needed its political support. Besides, Elizabeth avoided troubling Parliament too often for pounds by making strict economies at Court. But Elizabeth’s relationship with Parliament was often turbulent. Parliament had grown in status since Henry VIII’s day and hoped to receive recognition of this in two ways. It wished its customary right of free speech confirmed in writing; and it wanted to be allowed to start discussion of important questions at will, not by invitation. Elizabeth would not permit either thing. They conflicted with her royal prerogative to decide certain important questions herself. Elizabeth treated 5 questions as personal and private. These were her religion, her marriage, her foreign policy, the succession to the throne, and her finance.

Elizabeth’s Religious Reform

Elizabeth’s religious reform was a compromise of views. She broke Mary’s ties with Rome and restored her father’s independent Church of England, i.e., keeping to Catholic doctrines and practices but to be free of the Papal control. Elizabeth desired that there should be outward conformity to the established religion, but that opinion should be left free. Her religious settlement was unacceptable to both the extreme Protestants known as Puritans and to ardent Catholics.

Elizabeth I spent nearly 20 years resisting Catholic attempts to either dethrone or assassinate her. Some Catholics wished to put her Catholic cousin Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, on the throne and return to Catholicism.

Mary was a devout Catholic and also the next heir to the English throne, and had a powerful following of Catholic lords. Sent to France as a child, she returned a young widow and in 1565 married her cousin, Lord Darnley. But she became far too intimate with her private secretary, Rizzio. Lord Darnley became very jealous and stabbed Rizzio to death at Holyrood Castle in Edinburgh. Shortly afterwards Darnley himself was killed, and Mary then married Lord Bothwell.

The nobles believed that Darnley had been murdered by Bothwell and that the Queenherself was an accomplice. They raised a rebellion and forced Mary to abdicate in favor of her son, James VI.

On fleeing to England, however, she was detained by Elizabeth in 1568 and languished in prison while plots were fermented, mostly involving the assistance of Spain. Elizabeth tried and executed Mary, after much delay and hesitation, in 1587, thus removing the conspirators’focal point. The defeat of the Spanish Armada the following year put an end to Catholic conspiracies against Elizabeth.

Elizabeth’s Foreign Policy

For nearly 30 years Elizabeth successfully played off against each other the two great Catholic powers, France and Spain, and prevented England from getting involved in any major European conflict. Through her marriage alliances which were never materialized, Elizabeth managed to maintain a friendly relationship with France. So England was able to face the danger from Spain.

After Mary Queen of Scots was executed in 1587, Philip II of Spain, with the blessing of the Pope, made an attempt to invade England in July, 1588, to overthrow the heretical Queen of England, to bring England back to Catholicism and to stop English assistance to the Netherlands where Protestant rebels were in revolt against their Spanish masters.

Philip dispatched a fleet of 130 vessels to land in and conquer England. The Armada （the Spanish fleet） sailed up the English Channel. But they proved no match for the more maneuverable smaller British ships and, having suffered heavy losses, they were dispersed by a strong gale. Driven further and further north, they were forced to sail round the North of Scotland and down the coast of Ireland. Many of the ships, however, were wrecked in their passage, and only 53 returned to their home ports.

The destruction of the Spanish Armada showed England’s superiority as a naval power. The English victory meant a decisive check to the formidable （Counter-Reformation⁷） attempt of Catholicism to recover the northern countries of Europe, and it also enabled England to become a great trading and colonizing country in the years to come.

When Elizabeth I died without an heir in March, 1603, she was succeeded by her kinsman King James VI of Scotland, son of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots. King James VI of Scotland was also James I of England, where he was the first of the Stuarts to take the throne.

Renaissance was the revival of classical literature and artistic styles in European history.The word is from French, meaning “re-birth”, and was first applied by the Swiss historian Jakob Burckhardt in 1860. Renaissance was the transitional period between the Middle Ages and modern times, covering the years 1350-1650. The Renaissance was a period of significant achievement and change. It saw the challenge of the supremacy of the Roman Catholic Church by the Reformation, the rise of humanism⁸, the growth of large nation states, the far-ranging voyages of exploration, and a new emphasis on the importance of the individual.

The Renaissance began in northern Italy in the early 14th century, and was typified by the universal genius of Leonardo Da Vinci⁹（1452-1519）. In England, the Renaissance was usually thought of as beginning with the accession of the House of Tudor to the throne in 1485. Politically, this marks the end of the period of civil war among the old feudal aristocracy in mid-15th century, and the establishment of a modern, efficient, centralized state. Technically, the date is close to that of the introduction of printing into England by William Caxton（1422-1491）. Culturally, the first important period in England was the reign of the second Tudor monarch, Henry VIII. This was the period of the English humanists such as Sir Thomas More （1478-1535） and the poet Sir Thomas Wyatt （1503-1542）.

The English Renaissance had 5 characteristics: （1） English culture was revitalized not so much directly by the classics as by contemporary Europeans under the influence of the classics;（2） England as an insular country followed a course of social and political history which was to a great extent independent of the course of history elsewhere in Europe; （3） owing to the great genius of the l4th century poet Chaucer, the native literature was sufficiently vigorous and experienced in assimilating foreign influences without being subjected by them; （4） English Renaissance literature is primarily artistic, rather than philosophical and scholarly; and （5） the Renaissance coincided with the Reformation in England.

The English Renaissance was largely literary, and achieved its finest expression in the so-called Elizabethan drama which began to excel only in the last decade of the 16th century and reached its height in the first 15 years of the 17th century. Its finest exponents were Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and William Shakespeare.

Poetry was also extremely rich, and reached its peak at the beginning of the 17th century in the work of Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, Shakespeare and John Donne.

James VI of Scotland succeeded Elizabeth I and became James I of England （1603-1625）. His succession brought a temporary union of the two countries but his reign, too, was troubledby religious controversy. The Puritans became very powerful in the Parliament, believing that the Reformation had not gone far enough and calling for a purer form of worship. They were happy to have James as king at first because the Scottish Church was a pure Protestant Church with democratically elected officials, in contrast to the practice of the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England whereby kings chose bishops and bishops chose all the other officials.

The Puritans were shocked when James refused all their proposals for change in 1604 with the words “no bishop, no king”. They increasingly suspected him of being a secret Catholic because of his pro-Spanish foreign policy and his son’s Spanish marriage alliance. The Catholics engineered a number of plots. Sir Walter Raleigh got involved in one of them（the Cobham’s Plot）. He was sent to the Tower of London, where he remained 13 years. In 1615, James I, being in want of money, released Raleigh, and gave him a fleet of 13 ships to go in search of a gold mine in Guiana. The expedition failed and Raleigh was accused of treason and executed at Winchester. The most famous of the Catholic conspiracies was the Gunpowder Plot of 1605¹⁰.

On November 5, 1605, a few fanatical Catholics attempted to blow King James and his ministers up in the Houses of Parliament where Guy Fawkes had planted barrels of gunpowder in the cellars. The immediate result was the execution of Fawkes and his fellow-conspirators and the imposition of severe anti-Catholic laws. The long-term result has been an annual celebration on November 5, when a bonfire is lit to burn a guy and a firework display is arranged.

The Puritan protests were more peaceful, but James had little sympathy with their demands. A new translation of the Bible into English （known thereafter as the King James or Authorized Version, and was published in 1611） was one of the few concessions. James declared that he would make them conform or harry them from the land. Many Puritans had left England for Holland. In 1620 a small group of these Puritans, numbering 201, called the Pilgrim Fathers, sailed from Plymouth in the Mayflower, and founded New Plymouth in America, Britain’s first settlement in the New World.

James I, a firm believer in the Divine Right of Kings, a belief held by most European rulers of the time, would have preferred no Parliament at all and actually did without one for seven years. But, once recalled in 1621, the House of Commons renewed its insistence on political power in return for the taxes it was constantly asked to raise. James’ reaction to hostile Parliaments was simply to dissolve them （send them home）. The result was that hecould get no pounds from Parliament. He had to use all sorts of discreditable methods to get pounds such as sale of office, sale of monopolies, and forced loans.

This made Court corruption very much worse and infuriated Parliament. James I died in 1625, leaving his son, Charles I, to cope with a problem which was to be resolved by his own violent death.

Charles I’s relations with the Parliament were from the start disastrous. He, like his father, thought of his right to rule as God given— “The Divine Right of Kings”. His prerogative rights should not be challenged by anyone. This was an inflexible stand, and it encouraged confrontation with Parliament, whose members had become increasingly Puritan in sympathy. Charles encouraged the growth of a school of thought within the Church of England which Puritans believed to be very close to the old Roman Catholicism and found deeply offensive on religious and nationalist grounds. This Arminianism became popular with the high officials of the Church. It wished to restore some of the old medieval Church’s customs, and gave the bishop of the Church great respect and power. Puritanism in Elizabethan times had been a reform tendency of Elizabeth’s churchmen. As these men were removed from their positions by the Stuarts, they left the Church of England. Puritanism, as a result, quickly became a mass movement of communities up and down the country, noted for simple dress, high moral standards and very egalitarian attitudes. As the Puritans had always been the most outspoken about threats to England from Roman Catholicism they were also respected nationalists. Increasingly Charles I’s personal views on religion confirmed Puritans’ suspicions: Catholics were again worshipping at Court. The climate of the times was such that toleration of Catholicism and admiration of European Catholic countries’ culture was regarded as madness.

Charles I called his first Parliament in 1625. When he asked Parliament to vote him the usual import duties, it granted them for one year only instead of for life. The King responded by dissolving Parliament, collecting the customs duties, raising a forced loan and threatening those who refused to pay with imprisonment. Forced once more by shortage of money to call another Parliament （his third Parliament） in 1628, he found himself faced by a powerful opposition led by Sir John Eliot. It was at this Parliament that the King was forced to accept the Petition of Right, regarded as the second Magna Carta, which forbade arbitrary arrest and imprisonment and requested that no taxes should be raised without consent of Parliament; no more billeting of soldiers in private houses; and no person be tried by martial law. But a yearlater Charles dissolved Parliament. He managed by various financial measures （e.g. Shipmoney was extended to all inland towns and counties in 1635） to survive for 11 years without calling another until 1640 when, having tried to impose his High Church practices （the English Book of Common Prayer） on the Scottish Church, a rebellious Scottish army marched into England. The Scots defeated the royal forces at Newburn, and Charles was forced to conclude a treaty with the Scots at Ripon, by which it was agreed that the Scots should abstain from all acts of hostility and Charles should pay 850 pounds a day for the maintenance of the Scottish army, until the differences between them and the King should be settled.

Charles, being still in want of money and fearing a second invasion of the Scots, called his Fifth Parliament, sometimes called the Long Parliament （1640-1660）. Immediately Parliament ordered the arrests of the King’s most ruthlessly efficient ministers, Strafford and Laud. Then a whole series of measures were introduced by the Long Parliament limiting the authority of the Crown while increasing its own. The Militia Bill proposed the transfer of military command from the Crown to Parliament, and a Grand Remonstrance urged radical reforms in the Church, including the limitation of the power of bishops, and the replacement of the King’s counselors by ministers approved by Parliament. While the King and the Commons were at each other’s throats in 1641, discontented Irish Catholics took advantage of this situation to attack the settlers who had taken their land. Thousands were killed and the outcry in England was heightened by a belief that Charles had backed the Irish Catholic side. Having hesitated too long, Charles began to take action in 1642. Leading a party of swordsmen, he marched to the Commons to arrest Pym and four other members.

When he arrived there, he discovered that “all the birds were flown”. They had escaped to the city where the authorities refused to deliver them up. War was now inevitable.

It was very reluctantly that the Parliament concluded that the only way it could impress its views on such a king would be to defeat him in battle, and then impose legal conditions upon him before allowing him to reign again. This idea was important until 1645.

On August 22, 1642, in a field near Nottingham King Charles raised his standard beneath a glowering sky, and bade all his supporters to join him. Thus the First Civil War （1642-1646） began. At that time there were scarcely more than a thousand men at his command. Charles gained the support of the north and west of the country and Wales. Parliament, on the other hand, derived its strongest support from southeast England and London. Many nobles andgentry gathered round the King, while the Parliamentary army was made up of yeoman farmers, middle-class townspeople, and artisans. The Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, the Church party, were on the side of the King, the Presbyterians on the side of the Parliament. The King’s men were called Cavaliers, and the supporters of Parliament were called Roundheads because of their short haircuts.

In the first major battle, Charles’ army held back Parliamentarian troops under Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, at Edgehill near Warwick （1642）. This enabled Charles to establish headquarters at Oxford. Thereafter the fortunes of the Royalists began to decline and the tide turned in favor of the Parliamentarians. Prince Rupert, the King’s young nephew, lost to Oliver Cromwell’s “Ironsides” cavalry regiment at Marston Moor （1644）. So the King lost the north. Largely responsible for victory at Marston Moor, Oliver Cromwell became lieutenant general of the New Model Army. On June 14, 1645, Fairfax and Cromwell destroyed the Royalist army at Nasby, and by autumn 1646 Parliament held most of England. Charles left Oxford in disguise and gave himself up to the Scottish army at Neward on May 5, 1646. In January, 1647, Charles was surrendered by the Scots to the Parliamentary Commissioners at Newcastle for a payment of £400 000. In February, 1647, Parliament moved the King to Holmby House, Northants. In June, William Joyce, a Cornet of Horse, with a troop of horse, took possession of the King and brought him to New market. The Grandees did not repudiate the coup. It seems likely that the Army was behind this scheme to remove Charles from Parliament’s control. In October, 1647, Cromwell allowed the regiments to elect Agitators and he discussed with them their postwar settlement—the Leveller-inspired Agreement of the People—in the Putney Debates （Oct-Nov 1647）, opposing their democratic ideas as a threat to property. In November, 1647, the King escaped from the Army to Carisbrook Castle, Isle of Wight, and made a deal with the Scots. Induced by Charles, the Scots rose in his favor under Hamilton, and invaded England, but were defeated by Crornwell at Preston （1648）. This was the beginning of the Second Civil War. On November 30, 1648, the Army took possession of the King and advanced on London. Charles was tried by a High Court of Justice, found guilty of having levied war against his kingdom and the Parliament, condemned to death, and executed on a scaffold outside the windows of the Banqueting House at Whitehall on January 30, 1649. Oliver Cromwell, who had signed the death warrant of the royal “Tyrant, Traitor, Murderer and Public Enemy”, became the most powerful man in England.

The English Civil War is also called the Puritan Revolution, because the King’s opponents were mainly Puritan, and his supporters chiefly Episcopalian and Catholic. It hasbeen seen as a conflict between Parliament and the King, but also as a conflict between the economic interests of the urban middle classes and the traditional economic interests of the Crown. The economic interests of the urban middle classes coincided with their religious（Puritan） ideology while the Crown’s traditional economic interests correspondingly allied with Anglican religious belief. The English Civil War not only overthrew feudal system in England but also shook the foundation of the feudal rule in Europe. It is generally regarded as the beginning of modern world history.

After King Charles’s execution in 1649, there was public outrage in England. In Scotland, the Scots proclaimed Charles’s son their King. Young Charles, however, was not happy with the Presbyterian religion he was pledged to uphold. He marched into England where he was defeated at Worcester （September 1651）, was pursued south and, after many adventures, finally escaped to France. The Second Civil War was over.

Meanwhile, Oliver Cromwell and the Rump 99 members of the Long Parliament who had voted for Charles’s execution declared England a Commonwealth. One of Cromwell’s first acts was to crush without mercy a rebellion in Ireland, killing all the inhabitants of the towns of Drogheda and Wexford. Another was the suppression of the Leyellers, a group within his own army who, led by John Lilburne, proposed a radical political program not at all to his taste.

Cromwell replaced the Rump with an assembly largely chosen by himself; but this lasted a few months only, and in December 1653, by an Instrument of Government, he became Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England. Ruling increasingly by decree, he instituted direct military rule by dividing the country into 11 districts commanded by major generals. This period witnessed the wanton destruction of numerous treasures in churches and cathedrals throughout the country on the grounds that they were “graven images”. Regrets about the execution of the King and the new important role or the army grew as the Puritans exerted tough control of the nation’s morals and as Oliver Cromwell became more and more a petty tyrant.

Other aspects of this period were: establishment of colonies and colonial trade, religious toleration for all, and greater understanding of the economy. Yet Parliament feared the army’s permanent hold on power.

When Oliver Cromwell died in 1658, and was succeeded by his son Richard, the regime began immediately to collapse. One of Cromwell’s generals, George Monck, occupied London, and arranged for new parliamentary elections. The Parliament thus elected in 1660 resolved the crisis by asking the late King’s son to return from his long exile in France as King Charles II （1660-1685）. The Restoration, as it was called, was relatively smooth, and although not a perfect king, Charles II was able to capitalize on government goodwill towards him. Britain prospered under Charles. Parliament, which consisted for the most part of old Cavaliers and their sons, passed a series of severe laws called the Clarendon Code against the Puritans, now known as Nonconformists. Parliament was also afraid that Charles II would become a Catholic. They therefore passed the Test Act （1673）, which excluded all Catholics from public office of any kind.

In 1678 Titus Oates disclosed a supposed plot of the Roman Catholics to murder the King and restore the Roman Catholic religion. As a result, the nation was driven to a state of madness. More than 2 000 innocent Roman Catholics were imprisoned, and the Disabling Act forbade any Catholics to sit in either House of Parliament.

Two of the most famous literary works of the late 17th century were written by Puritans: John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, which he wrote while in prison for refusing to accept the new regulations against Dissenters, and the blind poet John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which was imbued with despair.

Religious differences came to a head when Charles II died in 1685 and, leaving no legitimate heir, was succeeded by his brother, James II （1685-1688）.

James II, brought up in exile in Europe, was a Catholic, and hoped to be able to rule without giving up his personal religious views. He was mistaken. England was no more tolerant of a Catholic as king in 1688 than 40 years ago. The English politicians rejected James II, and appealed to a Protestant king, William of Orange, James’s Dutch nephew and the husband of Mary, James’ daughter, to invade and take the English throne. William landed at Torbay on November 15, 1688 and marched upon London. In England this takeover was relatively smooth, with no bloodshed, nor any execution of the King. This became known as the Glorious Revolution.The smoothness of this takeover owed much to luck. The invitation to William came at a time when he was at peace and he was free to go, and also strong winds made it difficult for James’ navy to intercept him. Catholic favorites and advisers including theJesuits fled. James’ wife and child, followed by James went into exile. James died in France in 1701. Two important questions had to be solved: who was to rule? and with how much power? The questions were solved with a compromise. Mary was English and descended from the Stuarts. She was made co-monarch and this satisfied the Tories and the qualms about attacking the king. William and Mary jointly accepted the Bill of Rights （1689） which, excluding any Roman Catholic from the succession, confirmed the principle of parliamentary supremacy and guaranteed free speech within both the House of Lords and the House of Commons. On their acceptance of this Bill, William and Mary were crowned jointly in Westminster Abbey. Thus the age of constitutional monarchy, of a monarchy with powers limited by Parliament, began.

However, the results for Ireland and Scotland were different. James II tried to gain control of Ireland. He did not leave his realm without a fight. He laid siege to a Protestant city in Ireland, Londonderry. Its inhabitants were forced to eat all sorts of vermin before they were released by William of Orange who defeated James in battle in 1690. Ever after in Ireland this incident embittered sectarian relations. Protestants associate 1690 with Catholic cruelty and tyranny, Catholics associate it with William of Orange’s punishment of them by confiscating their lands. It has left a legacy of religious hatred. It had evil implications for Scotland, too. The Scots, especially the Catholics of the Highlands and islands, were infuriated at having their Stuart king deposed. They remained determined to work for the Stuart’s return. They did not give full support to William and Mary, nor the Hanoverian monarchs who were to follow. They regarded them both as foreign and unlawful.

During the reign of William and Mary （1688-1702）, in fact little advance was made upon the 1689 situation. In 1702, Mary’s sister, Anne, came to the throne. It was during Anne’s reign that the name Great Britain came into being when, in 1707, the Act of Union united England and Scotland.