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Republic. From1649 till 1660 Britain was a republic. But the republic was not a success.

Cromwell and his friends created a government which was far more severe than Charles had been. They had got rid of the monarchy, and now they got rid of the House of Lords. The Scots were shocked by Charles’ execution. They invited his son whom he recognized as King Charles II, to join them and fight against the English parliamentarian army. But they were defeated, and young Charles himself had to escape to France. Scotland was brought under English republic and rule. Cromwell took an army to Ireland “to punish the Irish” for the killing Protestants in 1641 and for the continued Royalist rebellion there. He captured two towns. His soldiers killed the inhabitants of both towns, about 6000 people. These killings were probably not worse than the killings of Protestants in 1641, but they remained powerful symbols of English cruelty to the Irish.

The Levellers. There were people at that time who had new ideas. Their ideas seemed strange to most other people of the 17th c. These people speak about equality among all men. They called themselves Levellers. By and by of ideas of the Levellers began to attract more and more people. They also spread into the army. There appeared Levellers among the officers and soldiers. In 1649 the Levellers in the army rebelled and put forwards (âûäâèãàòü) their demands. They said that parliament must meet every two years and that all men over the age of 21 must have the right to elect MP to it. They also demanded complete religious freedom, so that all religious groups could follow their religion in the way they wished. 200 years later such demands were considered as basic citizens’ rights. But in the middle of the 17th c they had little support among the people. The rebellion of the Levellers was suppressed.

The Lord Protector. From 1653 Britain was governed by Cromwell alone. He became Lord Protector and had much more power than king Charles had had. But his efforts to govern the country through the army were extremely unpopular, and the idea of using the army to maintain (ïîääåðæèâàòü) law and order in the kingdom has remained unpopular ever since. His other innovations were unpopular too: people were forbidden to celebrate Christmas and Easter, or to play games on Sunday. When Cromwell died in 1658, he was succeeded by his son Richard. But Richard Cromwell was a poor leader and could control neither the army nor parliament. Nobody governed the country. It was clear that this situation could be saved only by the restoration of monarchy. In1660 Charles II was invited to return to his kingdom. The republic was over.

Restoration. With the restoration of monarchy, Parliament once more became as weak as it had been in the time of James I and Charles I. However, the new king, Charles II, did not want to make parliament his enemy. He punished only those MPs who had been responsible for his father’s execution. Many MPs were given positions of authority or responsibility in the new monarchy. But in general Parliament remained weak. Charles shared his father’s belief in divine right (áîæåñòâåííîå ïðàâî), and he greatly admired the all-powerful, absolute ruler of France Louis XIV. Charles hoped to make peace between the different religious groups that existed in Britain at that time. He wanted to allow Puritans and Catholics, who disliked the Church of England, to meet freely. But Parliament, whose members belonged to the Church of England, did not want to allow this. Charles himself was attracted to the Catholic Church. Parliament knew this, and many MPs were worried that Charles would became a Catholic.



The first political parties. The first political parties in Britain appeared in Charles II’s reign. One of these parties was a group of MPs who became known as Whigs (Âèãè), a rude name for cattle drivers. The Whigs were afraid of an absolute monarchy and of the Catholic faith with which they connected it. They also wanted to have no regular army. The other party, which opposed the Whigs, was nicknamed Tories, which is an Irish name for thieves. The Tories, who were natural inheritors of the Royalists of the Civil War, supported the Crown and the Church. These two parties, the Whigs and the Tories, became the basis of Britain’s two-party parliamentary system of government.

The Glorious Revolution (

The struggle over Catholicism became a crisis when James II became king after his brother’s death in 1685. James II was a Catholic. He tried to revive the importance of the Catholic Church and give Catholic important positions in government and Parliament. Parliament was alarmed and angry. The Tories united with the Whigs against James. They decided that James II had lost his right to the crown. James’s daughter Mary was a Protestant, and she was married to the Protestant ruler of Holland, William of Orange (Âèëüãåëüì Îðàíñêèé). Parliament invited William of Orange to invade England. In 1688 William entered London. James was in danger and fled from England. The English crown was offered to William and Mary. The events of 1688 went down into history as the Glorious Revolution. It was not really a revolution: in fact it was a coup d’atat (ïåðåâîðîò) organized by the ruling class. Now Parliament was much more powerful than the king. It was over the monarch was written into the Bill of Rights in 1689. The Bill of Rights stated that the king could not raise taxes or keep an army without the agreement of Parliament.

The union with Scotland. Scotland was still a separate kingdom, although both countries had the same king (James II was James VII of Scotland). The English wanted England and Scotland to be united. Scotland wanted to remove the limits on trade with England from which it suffered economically. The English Parliament promised to remove these limits if the Scots agreed to the union with England. Finally, in 1707, the union of Scotland and England was completed by an act of Parliament (àêò ïàðëàìåíòà). The stage got a new name: Great Britain. The separate parliaments of both countries stopped functioning. A new Parliament, the Parliament of Great Britain, met for the first time.

Foreighn Relations. During the 17th century Britain’s main rivals were Spain, Holland and France. There was a competition in trade between England and Holland. After three wars Britain achieved the trade position it wanted. At the end of the century Britain went to war against France. Partly it was because William of Orange had struggled with France before he came to the English throne. But Britain also wanted to limit French power, which had been growing under Louis XIV. The British army won several important victories over the French. By the treaty of Utrecht (Óòðåõò) in 1713 Britain got possession of the rock of Gibraltar, so now it controlled the entrance to the Mediterranean from the Atlantic Ocean. Colonizing foreign lands was important for Europe’s economic development. In the 17th century Britain did not have so many colonies abroad as either Spain or Holland, but it had greater variety. It had twelve colonies on the east coast of North America. In the West Indies it had new colonies where sugar was grown. Besides, by this time Britain’s East India Company had established its first trading settlements in India, on both the west and east coasts.

 

 


Date: 2015-01-02; view: 1794


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