THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

In the seventeenth century, Parliament established its supremacy over the monarchy. Anger grew in the country at the way the Stuart monarchs raised money without, as tradition prescribed, getting the agreement of the House of Commons first. In addition, ideological Protestantism, especially Puritanism, had grown in England. Puritans regarded the luxurious lifestyle of the king and his followers as immortal.

This conflict led to the Civil War, which ended with complete victory for the parliamentary forces. Charles I became the first monarch in Europe to be executed after a formal trial for crimes against his people. The leader of the parliamentary army, Oliver Cromwell, became ‘Lord Protector’ of a republic with a military government which effectively encompassed all of Britain and Ireland.

By the Cromwell died, he, his system of government, and the puritan ethics that went with it (theatres and other forms of entertainment had been banned) had become so unpopular that the executed king’s son was asked to return and become King Charles II.

However, the conflict between the monarch and Parliament soon re-emerged in the reign of Charles II’s brother, James II. James tried to give full rights to Catholics, and to promote them in his government. The ‘Glorious Revolution” (‘glorious’ because it was bloodless) followed, in which Prince William of Orange, ruler of the Netherlands, and his Stuart wife Mary accepted Parliament’s invitation to become king and queen. Parliament immediately drew up a Bill of Rights, which limited some of the monarch’s power.

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

In 1707, the Act of Union was passed. Under this agreement the two kingdoms of England and Scotland became one ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain’.

Politically, the eighteenth century was stable. Within Parliament, the bitter divisions of the previous century were echoed in the formation of two vaguely opposed, loose collections of allies. One group, the Whigs, were the political ‘descendants’ of the parliamentarians. They supported the Protestant values of hard word and thrift, believed in government by monarch and aristocracy together. The other group, the Tories, had a greater respect for the idea of monarchy and the importance of the Anglican Church. This was the beginning of the party system in Britain.

The monarchs of the eighteenth century were Hanoverian Germans with interests on the European continent. The first of them, George I, could not even speak English. Perhaps this situation encouraged the habit whereby the monarch appointed one principal, or ‘prime’, minister from the ranks of Parliament to head his government. It was also during this century that the system of an annual budget drawn up by the monarch’s Treasury officials for the approval of Parliament was established.

It was cultural change that was most marked in this century. Britain gradually acquired an empire in the Americas, along the west African coast and in India. The greatly increased trade that this allowed was one factor which led to the Industrial Revolution. Other factors were the many technical innovations in manufacture and transport.

In England, the growth of the industrial mode of production, together with advances in agriculture, caused the greatest upheaval in the pattern of everyday life. Areas of common land, which had been used by everybody in a village for the grazing of animals, disappeared as landowners incorporated them into their increasingly large and more efficient farms. (There remain some pieces of common land in Britain today, used mainly as parks. They are often called ‘the common’.) Millions moved from rural areas into new towns and cities. Most of these were in the north of England, where the raw materials for industry were available. In this way, the north of the country, which had previously been economically backward, became the industrial heartland of the country. In the south of England, London came to dominate, not as an industrial centre, but as a business and trading centre.

Date: 2015-01-12; view: 1406