Gunpowder Plot-(1605), the conspiracy of English Roman Catholics to blow up Parliament and King James I, his queen, and his oldest son on November 5, 1605. The leader of the plot, Robert Catesby, together with his four coconspirators—Thomas Winter, Thomas Percy, John Wright, and Guy Fawkes—were zealous Roman Catholics angered by James’s refusal to grant more religious toleration to Catholics. They apparently hoped that the confusion that would follow the murder of the king, his ministers, and the members of Parliament would provide an opportunity for the English Catholics to take over the country. In the spring of 1605 the conspirators rented a cellar that extended under the palace at Westminster. There, Fawkes, who had been fighting in the Spanish Netherlands, concealed 36 (some sources say fewer) barrels of gunpowder. The conspirators then separated until the meeting of Parliament. In the interim the need for broader support persuaded Catesby to include more conspirators. One of these, Francis Tresham, is believed to have warned his Catholic brother-in-law Lord Monteagle not to attend Parliament on November 5, upon which Monteagle alerted the government to the plot. Fawkes was discovered in the cellar on the night of November 4–5 and under torture revealed the names of the conspirators. Catesby, Percy, and two others were killed while resisting arrest, and the rest were tried and executed (January 31, 1606). The plot bitterly intensified Protestant suspicions of Catholics and led to the rigorous enforcement of the recusancy law, which fined those who refused to attend Anglican services. In January 1606 Parliament established November 5 as a day of public thanksgiving. The day, known as Guy Fawkes Day, is still celebrated with bonfires, fireworks, and the carrying of “guys” through the streets.

James I-(born June 19, 1566, Edinburgh Castle, Edinburgh, Scotland—died March 27, 1625, Theobalds, Hertfordshire, England), king of Scotland (as James VI) from 1567 to 1625 and first Stuart king of England from 1603 to 1625, who styled himself “king of Great Britain.” James was a strong advocate of royal absolutism, and his conflicts with an increasingly self-assertive Parliament set the stage for the rebellion against his successor, Charles I. James was the only son of Mary, Queen of Scots, and her second husband, Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley. Eight months after James’s birth his father died when his house was destroyed by an explosion. After her third marriage, to James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, Mary was defeated by rebel Scottish lords and abdicated the throne. James, one year old, became king of Scotland on July 24, 1567; Mary left the kingdom on May 16, 1568, and never saw her son again. During his minority James was surrounded by a small band of the great Scottish lords, from whom emerged the four successive regents, the earls of Moray, Lennox, Mar, and Morton. There did not exist in Scotland the great gulf between rulers and ruled that separated the Tudors and their subjects in England. For nine generations the Stuarts had in fact been merely the ruling family among many equals, and James all his life retained a feeling for those of the great Scottish lords who gained his confidence. The young king was kept fairly isolated but was given a good education until the age of 14. He studied Greek, French, and Latin and made good use of a library of classical and religious writings that his tutors, George Buchanan and Peter Young, assembled for him. James’s education aroused in him literary ambitions rarely found in princes but which also tended to make him a pedant. Before James was 12 he had taken the government nominally into his own

hands when the Earl of Morton was driven from the regency in 1578. For several years more, however, James remained the puppet of contending intriguers and faction leaders. After falling under the influence of the Duke of Lennox, a Roman Catholic who schemed to win back Scotland for the imprisoned Queen Mary, James was kidnapped by William Ruthven, 1st Earl of Gowrie, in 1582 and was forced to denounce Lennox. The following year James escaped from his Protestant captors and began to pursue his own policies as king. His chief purposes were to escape from subservience to Scottish factions and to establish his claim to succeed the childless Elizabeth I upon the throne of England. Realizing that more was to be gained by cultivating Elizabeth’s goodwill than by allying himself with her enemies, James in 1585–86 concluded an alliance with England. Thenceforward, in his own unsteady fashion, he remained true to this policy, and even Elizabeth’s execution of his mother in 1587 drew from him only formal protests. In 1589 James was married to Anne, the daughter of Frederick II of Denmark, who, in 1594, gave birth to their first son, Prince Henry. James’s rule of Scotland was basically successful. He was able to play off Protestant and Roman Catholic factions of Scottish nobles against each other, and through a group of commissioners known as the Octavians (1596–97), he was able to rule Scotland almost as absolutely as Elizabeth ruled England. The king was a convinced Presbyterian, but in 1584 he secured a series of acts that made him the head of the Presbyterian church in Scotland, with the power to appoint the church’s bishops. When James at length succeeded to the English throne on the death of Elizabeth I (March 24, 1603), he was already, as he told the English Parliament, “an old and experienced king” and one with a clearly defined theory of royal government. Unfortunately, neither his experience nor his theory equipped him to solve the new problems facing him; and he lacked the qualities of mind and character to supply the deficiency. James hardly understood the rights or the temper of the English Parliament, and he thus came into conflict with it. He had little contact with the English middle classes, and he suffered from the narrowness of his horizons. His 22-year-long reign over England was to prove almost as unfortunate for the Stuart dynasty as his years before 1603 had been fortunate. There was admittedly much that was sensible in his policies, and the opening years of his reign as king of Great Britain were a time of material prosperity for both England and Scotland. For one thing, he established peace by speedily ending England’s war with Spain in 1604. But the true test of his statesmanship lay in his handling of Parliament, which was claiming ever-wider rights to criticize and shape public policy. Moreover, Parliament’s established monopoly of granting taxes made its assent necessary for the improvement of the crown’s finances, which had been seriously undermined by the expense of the long war with Spain. James, who had so successfully divided and corrupted Scottish assemblies, never mastered the subtler art of managing an English Parliament. He kept few privy councillors in the House of Commons and thus allowed independent members there to seize the initiative. Moreover, his lavish creations of new peers and, later in his reign, his subservience to various recently ennobled favourites loosened his hold upon the House of Lords. His fondness for lecturing both houses of Parliament about his royal prerogatives offended them and drew forth such counterclaims as the Apology of the Commons (1604). To parliamentary statesmen used to Tudor dignity, James’s shambling gait, restless garrulity, and dribbling mouth ill-befitted his

exalted claims to power and privilege. When Parliament refused to grant him a special fund to pay for his extravagances, James placed new customs duties on merchants without Parliament’s consent, thereby threatening its control of governmental finance. Moreover, by getting the law courts to proclaim these actions as law (1608) after Parliament had refused to enact them, James struck at the houses’ legislative supremacy. In four years of peace, James practically doubled the debt left by Elizabeth, and it was hardly surprising that when his chief minister, Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, tried in 1610–11 to exchange the king’s feudal revenues for a fixed annual sum from Parliament, the negotiations over this so-called Great Contract came to nothing. James dissolved Parliament in 1611. The abortive Great Contract, and the death of Cecil in 1612, marked the turning point of James’s reign; he was never to have another chief minister who was so experienced and so powerful. During the ensuing 10 years the king summoned only the brief Addled Parliament of 1614. Deprived of parliamentary grants, the crown was forced to adopt unpopular expedients, such as the sale of monopolies, to raise funds. Moreover, during these years the king succumbed to the influence of the incompetent Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset. Carr was succeeded as the king’s favourite by George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, who showed more ability as chief minister but who was even more hated for his arrogance and his monopoly of royal favour. In his later years the king’s judgment faltered. He embarked on a foreign policy that fused discontent into a formidable opposition. The king felt a sympathy, which his countrymen found inexplicable, for the Spanish ambassador, Diego Sarmiento de Acuña, Count of Gondomar. When Sir Walter Raleigh, who had gone to Guiana in search of gold, came into conflict with the Spaniards, who were then at peace with England, Gondomar persuaded James to have Raleigh beheaded. With Gondomar’s encouragement, James developed a plan to marry his second son and heir Charles to a Spanish princess, along with a concurrent plan to join with Spain in mediating the Thirty Years’ War in Germany. The plan, though plausible in the abstract, showed an astonishing disregard for English public opinion, which solidly supported James’s son-in-law, Frederick, the Protestant elector of the Palatinate, whose lands were then occupied by Spain. When James called a third Parliament in 1621 to raise funds for his designs, that body was bitterly critical of his attempts to ally England with Spain. James in a fury tore the record of the offending Protestations from the House of Commons’ journal and dissolved the Parliament. The Duke of Buckingham had begun in enmity with Prince Charles, who became the heir when his brother Prince Henry died in 1612, but in the course of time the two formed an alliance from which the king was quite excluded. James was now aging rapidly, and in the last 18 months of his reign he, in effect, exercised no power; Charles and Buckingham decided most issues. James died at his favourite country residence, Theobalds, in Hertfordshire. Besides the political problems that he bequeathed to his son Charles, James left a body of writings which, though of mediocre quality as literature, entitle him to a unique place among English kings since the time of Alfred. Chief among these writings are two political treatises, The True Lawe of Free Monarchies (1598) and Basilikon Doron (1599), in which he expounded his own views on the divine right of kings. The 1616 edition of The Political Works of James I was edited by Charles Howard McIlwain (1918). The Poems of James VI of Scotland, 2 vol., were edited by James Craigie (1955–58). In addition, James famously oversaw a new authorized

English translation of the Bible, published in 1611, which became known as the King James Version.

Basilikon Doron-is a treatise on government written by King James VI of Scotland, later King James I of England, in 1599. Basilikon Doron (Βασιλικὸν Δῶρον) in the Greek language means royal gift. It was written in the form of a private letter to the King's eldest son, Henry, Duke of Rothesay, born 1594. After Henry’s death in 1612, James gave it to his second son, Charles, born 1600, later King Charles I. Seven copies of it were printed in Edinburgh in 1599, and it was republished in London in 1603, when it sold in the thousands. This document is separated into three books, serving as general guidelines to follow to be an efficient monarch. The first describes a king’s duty towards God as a Christian, the second focuses on the roles and responsibilities in office and the third concerns proper behaviour in the daily lifestyle. As the first part is concerned with being a good Christian, James instructed his son to love and respect God as well as to fear Him. Furthermore, it is essential to closely study the Scripture (the Bible) and especially specific books in both the Old and New Testaments. Lastly, he must pray often and always be thankful for what God has given him. In the second book, James encouraged his son to be a good king, as opposed to a "tyrant", by establishing and executing laws as well as governing with justice and equality. To boost the economy, it is important to invite foreign merchants into the country and base the currency on gold and silver. According to James, a good monarch must be well acquainted with his subjects and therefore it would be wise to visit all kingdoms every three years. During war, he should choose old but good Captains to lead an army composed of young and agile soldiers. In the court and household, he should carefully select loyal gentlemen and servants to surround him. When the time came to choose a wife, it would be best if she were of the same religion and have a generous estate. However, she must not meddle with government politics, but perform her domestic duties. As for the inheritance, to ensure stability the kingdom should be left to the eldest son, and not divided among all the children. Lastly, it is most important to James that his son would know well his own craft, which is to properly govern over his subjects. To do this, he must study the laws of his own kingdom and actively participate in the Council. Furthermore, he must be acquainted with mathematics, for military purposes, and world history, for foreign policy. The final portion of the Basilikon Doron focuses on the daily life of a monarch. For instance, James advised his son to eat meat to be strong for traveling and during war time. He must also beware not to drink and sleep excessively. Furthermore, his wardrobe should always be clean and proper and he must never allow his hair and nails to grow long. In his writing and speech, he should use honest and plain language. All of these guidelines composed a basic code of conduct to be followed by all monarchs and heads of state to rule and govern efficiently. James assembled these directions as a result of his own experience and upbringing. He therefore offered the Basilikon Doron to his son with the hope of rendering him an effective ruler, and perhaps, to pass it down to future generations. The Basilikon Doron repeats the argument for the divine right of kings, as set out in The True Law of

Free Monarchies, which was also written by James. It too warns against "Papists" and derides Puritans. It advocates removing the Apocrypha from the Bible. The published Basilikon Doron may well have been intended to portray the king in a favourable light. James Sempill assisted James in composing it. Robert Waldegrave, who was bound to secrecy, printed seven copies at the king's behest. Henry Taylor said that he printed it on Waldegrave's press. Richard Royston, and later William Dugard, printed further copies. The Basilikon Doron criticises both Roman Catholics and Puritans. This is in keeping with the king’s philosophy of following a "middle path", as reflected in the preface to the 1611 King James Bible.

Great Contract-was a plan submitted to James I and Parliament in 1610 by Robert Cecil. It was an attempt to increase Crown income and ultimately rid it of debt. Cecil suggested that, in return for an annual grant of £200,000, the Crown should give up its feudal rights of Wardship and Purveyance, as well as New Impositions. The plan was eventually rejected by both James and Parliament: the failure of his cherished project was thought by some to have hastened Cecil's early death in 1612. Whether it would have helped the financial situation remains a matter of speculation: it has been suggested that the financial settlement at the Restoration of Charles II was partly inspired by the Great Contract. On the other hand, James I was so extravagant in financial matters that it is uncertain whether any permanent solution of his difficulties was possible - however, it is important to consider how, at the point of Elizabeth's death, the Crown was £400,000 in debt, and thus the financial problems of James' reign are not necessarily all of his own arbitration.

Jacobus Arminius- (born October 10, 1560, Oudewater, Netherlands—died October 19, 1609, Leiden), theologian and minister of the Dutch Reformed Church who opposed the strict Calvinist teaching on predestination and who developed in reaction a theological system known later as Arminianism. His father died when Arminius was an infant, and one Theodore Aemilius adopted the child and provided for his schooling in Utrecht. On the death of Aemilius in 1575, Rudolf Snellius (Snel van Roijen, 1546–1613), a professor at Marburg and a native of Oudewater, became the patron for his further education at the universities of Leiden (1576–82), Basel, and Geneva (1582–86). After brief stays at the University of Padua, in Rome, and in Geneva, Arminius went to Amsterdam. He was ordained there in 1588. In 1603 Arminius was called to a theological professorship at Leiden, which he held until his death. These last six years of his life were dominated by theological controversy, in particular by his disputes with Franciscus Gomarus, his colleague at Leiden. Considered a man of mild temperament, Arminius was forced into controversy against his own choice. He had earlier affirmed the Calvinist view of predestination, which held that those elected for salvation were so chosen prior to Adam’s fall, but he gradually came to have doubts about this teaching. To him predestination seemed too harsh a position, because it did not provide a place for the exercise of human free will in the

process of salvation. Hence, Arminius came to assert a conditional election, according to which God elects to eternal life those who will respond in faith to the divine offer of salvation. In so doing, he meant to place greater emphasis on God’s mercy. After his death some of his followers gave support to his views by signing the Remonstrance, a theological document written by Johannes Uyttenbogaert, a minister from Utrecht, in 1610. Remonstrant Arminianism was debated in 1618–19 at the Synod of Dort (Dordrecht), an assembly of the Dutch Reformed Church. The synod included delegates from Reformed churches in England, Germany, and Switzerland, as well as delegates from the Dutch church, all of whom were supporters of Gomarus. Arminianism was discredited and condemned by the synod, the Arminians present were expelled, and many others suffered persecution.

Hampton Court Conference- meeting held at Hampton Court Palace, near London, in January 1604, in response to the Millenary Petition, in which the Puritans set forth their demands for reform of the Church of England. The conference was presided over by King James I and attended by the bishops and the Puritan leaders. Among the reforms discussed were changes in church government, changes in The Book of Common Prayer, and a new translation of the Bible. James rejected most of the Puritans’ demands and was firm in his rejection of any change in the episcopal form of church government. When confronted with the issue, he said that he had learned in Scotland “No bishop, no king.” He accepted the Puritans’ request for a new translation of the Bible, which led to the one important result of the conference, the preparation of the Authorized (King James) Version of the Bible (1611).

The Trew Law Of Free Marchier- is a treatise or essay of political theory by James VI of Scotland (later to be crowned James I of England too).[1] It is believed James VI wrote the tract to set forth his idea of kingship, in contrast to the contractarian views espoused by, among others, George Buchanan (in De Jure Regni apud Scotos, 1579). James VI had the work published in 1598. It is considered remarkable for setting out the doctrine of the divine right of kings in Scotland, and latterly England, for the first time. James saw the divine right of kings as an extension of the apostolic succession.

Short Parliament- (April 13–May 5, 1640), parliament summoned by Charles I of England, the first to be summoned for 11 years, since 1629, and the prelude to the Long Parliament. Determined to impose the Anglican liturgy on the Scots, Charles sent an army northward in the first of the so-called Bishops’ Wars. The campaign was abortive, and Charles then called a new parliament to grant the subsidies that he desperately needed for a second campaign. Parliament, led by such men as John Pym, balked, citing numerous grievances over the previous decade, including the crown’s questionable collection of a tax known as ship money. Moreover, it set

May 7 as the date for a debate on the Scottish question, a debate that was apt to lead to a petition against the war. Charles thereupon dissolved Parliament on May 5. The dissolution further weakened Charles’s position and strengthened the will of the Scots, who invaded England in the second Bishops’ War. The result was the Long Parliament.

Long Parliament- the English Parliament summoned in November 1640 by King Charles I; it has been so named to distinguish it from the Short Parliament of April–May 1640. The duration of the Long Parliament has been held to have extended either until April 1653, when its remaining members were forcibly ejected by the Cromwellian army, or until March 1660, when its members, finally restored, passed an act for its dissolution. Legally the act of 1660 was as invalid as the ejection of 1653, because it lacked royal assent. An act of the Convention Parliament of April–December 1660 can be said to have finally dissolved the Long Parliament, though the Convention was itself not a lawful parliament because it had not been summoned by the king; its acts were reinforced by later legislation.

Charles I summoned both the Short and Long Parliaments in 1640 because only the Parliament could raise the money he needed to wage the second Bishops’ War against the Scots, who were resisting his attempts to impose episcopacy on them. Because of disputes he dismissed the Short Parliament hastily; the Scots then invaded northern England, and, in order to buy them off, a fresh recourse to Parliament was unavoidable. The Long Parliament proved much more intransigent than the Short, however. During its first nine months it brought down the king’s advisers, swept away the machinery of conciliar government developed by the Tudors and early Stuarts, made frequent sessions of Parliament a statutory necessity, and passed an act forbidding its own dissolution without its members’ consent. Tension between the king and Parliament steadily increased, notably upon Charles’ abortive attempt to arrest five of its members in January 1642, and the Civil Wars broke out later that year. After the king was finally defeated in the field (1646), new members were elected to replace those who had joined the king (the “recruiters”), but real power passed to the army. In December 1648 Col. Thomas Pride carried out what came to be known as “Pride’s Purge.” Acting on behalf of the generals, he secluded more than half of the 460 members of the Commons and several of the handful of peers still in attendance. Most of the remainder refused to take their seats (at least until long after the regicide) or to recognize the legitimacy of what the army had done at Pride’s Purge. The surviving group, known to historians as the Rump, brought Charles I to trial and execution in January 1649; it was forcibly ejected in 1653. After the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, the Rump was restored in May 1659 and expelled in October. It was reestablished in December 1659, and, after those excluded in 1648 had joined it, it dissolved itself; the newly elected Convention Parliament then opened negotiations for the restoration of Charles II.

Oliver Cromwell- (born April 25, 1599, Huntingdon, Huntingdonshire, Eng.—died Sept. 3, 1658, London), English soldier and statesman who led parliamentary forces in the English Civil Wars; he was lord protector of England, Scotland, and Ireland from 1653 to 1658 during the republican Commonwealth. As one of the generals on the parliamentary side in the English Civil War against King Charles I, Cromwell helped to bring about the overthrow of the Stuart monarchy, and, as lord protector, he raised his country’s status once more to that of a leading European power from the decline it had gone through since the death of Queen Elizabeth I. Cromwell was born at Huntingdon in eastern England in 1599, the only son of Robert Cromwell and Elizabeth Steward. His father had been a member of one of Queen Elizabeth’s parliaments and, as a landlord and justice of the peace, was active in local affairs. Robert Cromwell died when his son was 18, but his widow lived to the age of 89. Oliver went to the local grammar school and then for a year attended Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. After his father’s death he left Cambridge to look after his widowed mother and sisters but is believed to have studied for a time at Lincoln’s Inn in London, where country gentlemen were accustomed to acquire a smattering of law. In August 1620 he married Elizabeth, daughter of Sir James Bourchier, a merchant in the City of London. By her he was to have five sons and four daughters. A man of outstanding gifts and a forceful character, he was one of the most remarkable rulers in modern European history, for although a convinced Calvinist, he believed deeply in the value of religious toleration. At the same time Cromwell’s victories at home and abroad helped to enlarge and sustain a Puritan attitude of mind, both in Great Britain and in North America, that continued to influence political and social life until recent times. Cromwell was descended indirectly on his father’s side from Henry VIII’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, who had assisted Oliver’s great-grandfather and grandfather in acquiring significant amounts of former monastic land in Huntingdon and in the Fenland. Oliver was the eldest surviving son of the younger son of a knight; he inherited a modest amount of property but was brought up in the vicinity of his grandfather, who regularly entertained the King’s hunting party. His education would have presented him with a strong evangelical Protestantism and a powerful sense of God’s providential presence in human affairs. During his early married life Cromwell, like his father, was profoundly conscious of his responsibilities to his fellow men and concerned himself with affairs in his native Fenland, but he was also the victim of a spiritual and psychological struggle that perplexed his mind and damaged his health. He does not appear to have experienced conversion until he was nearly 30; later he described to a cousin how he had emerged from darkness into light. Yet he had been unable to receive the grace of God without feeling a sense of “self, vanity and badness.” He was convinced that he had been “the chief of sinners” before he learned that he was one of God’s Chosen. In his 30s Cromwell sold his freehold land and became a tenant on the estate of Henry Lawrence at St. Ives in Cambridgeshire. Lawrence was planning at that time to emigrate to New England, and Cromwell was almost certainly planning to accompany him, but the plan failed. There is no evidence that Cromwell was active in the opposition to Charles I’s financial and social policies, but he was certainly prominent in schemes in East Anglia to protect local preachers from the religious policies of the King and Archbishop

William Laud. He had strong links with Puritan groups in London and Essex, and there is some evidence that he attended, and perhaps preached at, an underground conventicle.

Ship Money- in British history, a nonparliamentary tax first levied in medieval times by the English crown on coastal cities and counties for naval defense in time of war. It required those being taxed to furnish a certain number of warships or to pay the ships’ equivalent in money. Its revival and its enforcement as a general tax by Charles I aroused widespread opposition and added to the discontent leading to the English Civil Wars.

After bitter constitutional disputes, Charles dismissed Parliament in 1629 and began 11 years of personal rule; during this time, deprived of parliamentary sources of revenue, he was forced to employ ship money as a financial expedient. The first of six annual writs appeared in October 1634 and differed from traditional levies in that it was based on the possibility of war rather than immediate national emergency. The writ of the following year increased the imposition and extended it to inland towns. The issue of a third writ in 1636 made it evident that Charles intended ship money as a permanent and general form of taxation. Each succeeding writ aroused greater popular discontent and opposition, and upon the issue of the third writ John Hampden, a prominent parliamentarian, refused payment.

His case, brought before the Court of Exchequer in 1637, lasted six months. The judges, headed by Sir John Finch (later Baron Finch), decided 7 to 5 in favour of the crown; but the highhanded opinions of Finch provoked widespread distrust of Charles’s courts, whereas the narrowness of the decision encouraged further resistance. Charles’s writs of 1638 and 1639 fell far short of their goal. In 1641, by an act of the Long Parliament, ship money was declared illegal.

Bishops Wars- (1639, 1640), in British history, two brief campaigns that were fought between Charles I and the Scots. The wars were the result of Charles’s endeavour to enforce Anglican observances in the Scottish Church and of the determination of the Scots to abolish episcopacy. A riot in Edinburgh in 1637 quickly led to national resistance in Scotland; and, when in November 1638 the General Assembly at Glasgow set Charles’s orders at defiance, he gathered an English force and marched toward the border in 1639. Lacking sufficient funds and lacking confidence in his troops, however, Charles agreed, by the Pacification of Berwick, to leave the Scots alone. The first Bishops’ War thus ended without battle.

Misunderstandings broke out as to the interpretation of the pacification treaty; and Charles, having discovered that the Scots were intriguing with France, determined again on the use of force. To raise money, he once more called a Parliament in England (April 1640). This Short Parliament, as it was called, insisted first on discussing grievances against the government and showed itself opposed to a renewal of the war against the Scots. Charles thereupon dissolved

Parliament and raised a new expedition on his own. The subsequent military successes of the Scots in the second Bishops’ War and their seizure of the whole of Northumberland and Durham made it necessary for Charles to summon the Long Parliament (November 1640), thus precipitating the English Civil War.

William Laud- born Oct. 7, 1573, Reading, Berkshire, Eng.—died Jan. 10, 1645, London), archbishop of Canterbury (1633–45) and religious adviser to King Charles I of Great Britain. His persecution of Puritans and other religious dissidents resulted in his trial and execution by the House of Commons. Laud was the son of a prominent clothier. From Reading Grammar School he went on to St. John’s College, Oxford, and until he was nearly 50 combined the successful but unspectacular careers of academic and churchman. He was soon associated with the small clerical group, followers of the patristic scholar Lancelot Andrewes, who, in opposition to Puritanism, stressed the continuity of the visible church and the necessity, for true inward worship, of outward uniformity, order, and ceremony. In 1608 Laud entered the service of Richard Neile, bishop of Rochester, with whose help he secured a succession of ecclesiastical appointments. From 1611 he was a royal chaplain and came gradually to the notice of King James I. His lifelong conflict with John Williams, later bishop of Lincoln and archbishop of York, began when both sought advancement through the patronage of Charles’s favourite, the Duke of Buckingham. During Buckingham’s years of power, Laud was his chaplain and confidant, and he established a dominant voice in church policies and appointments. He became a privy councillor in 1627 and, a year later, bishop of London.

In his London diocese, Laud devoted himself to combating the Puritans and to enforcing a form of service in strict accordance with the Book of Common Prayer. The wearing of surplices, the placing of the communion table—railed off from the congregation—at the east end of the chancel, and such ceremonies as bowing at the mention of the name of Jesus were imposed, though cautiously enough to avoid unmanageable opposition. Churches, from St. Paul’s Cathedral down to neglected village chapels, were repaired, beautified, and consecrated. To religious radicals, all such reforms seemed moves toward popery.

At Oxford, where Laud was chosen president of St. John’s in 1611 and chancellor in 1629, new statutes, new endowments, and new buildings improved the university, both as a centre of learning and as a training ground for Laudian religion. On the death of George Abbott in 1633, Laud became archbishop of Canterbury, but he had already, by instructions issued in the King’s name and by his ruthless energy in the royal prerogative courts of Star Chamber and High Commission, extended his authority—with varying success—over the whole country.

Persecution of Puritans.

From 1634 to 1637 visitations of every diocese (including, after strong resistance by Williams, that of Lincoln) showed the extent of deficiencies within the Anglican Church and the strength of Puritan practices. A succession of detailed orders from the Archbishop laid down the remedies. Preaching, to Puritans the essential task of the ministry, was to Laud a most dangerous source of “differences” in religion to be curtailed and controlled. In London his attack on Puritan “lectureships” culminated in the overthrow of the “feoffees for impropriations,” the City organization for buying up tithes and church patronage for the benefit of Puritan clergy. The printed word was dangerous, too: celebrated Puritan propagandists such as Alexander Leighton and William Prynne were mutilated and imprisoned. Occasionally, Laud was less harsh than his enemies admitted, especially to the clergy. But he rejected all conciliation of the Puritan movement, whose strength and qualities he never understood. He had, in fact, much in common with some forms of it: the unrelenting quest for the godly life, the intolerant certainty of his own rectitude, the hatred of corruption and extravagance. He could do much to diminish inefficiency, pluralism, absenteeism, and sheer idleness. But his wider efforts to overcome the poverty of clergy and parishes and restore something of the church’s position as a great and powerful landowner had extremely limited success.

To Laud, the strength of the church was inseparable from that of the state. Conflict between royal and ecclesiastical power was a possibility he never faced: under Charles I both could be exalted simultaneously. Holding no state office, he used his position on the privy council and his influence over the King to attack “the Lady Mora” (delay) in what he considered her first personification, the treasurer Richard Weston, and afterward in other ministers. His most effective direct impact on government was in the social policy he applied through the council and the courts. Exacting landlords and unscrupulous officials were attacked, and the poor were protected against everyone except the state itself.

In all this his one constant ally was Thomas Wentworth (later the earl of Strafford), from 1633 lord deputy in Ireland. Laud and Wentworth corresponded regularly and frankly on their joint struggle to establish “thorough,” as their rigorous policy came to be called. But by 1637 both began to see, dimly, the storm that was about to break upon them. The further trial of Prynne, together with other radical Puritans such as Bastwick and Burton, demonstrated not success for Laudian suppression but rather huge popular support for the opposition. The resistance of the gentry was consolidated by the extended demand for “ship money,” the most hated of Charles’s non-parliamentary levies. Attempts by Charles and Laud to impose Anglican forms of worship in Scotland provoked fierce resistance there. English forces were sent northward, and in 1639 the “Bishops’ Wars” began.

John Hampton-

Thomas Wentworth 1st earl of Strafford,- (born April 13, 1593, London—died May 12, 1641, London), leading adviser of England’s King Charles I. His attempt to consolidate the sovereign power of the king led to his impeachment and execution by Parliament. Wentworth was the eldest surviving son of Sir William Wentworth, a Yorkshire landowner. Educated at St. John’s College, Cambridge, and at the Inner Temple, he was knighted by James I in 1611. His marriage to Lady Margaret Clifford, daughter of the impoverished earl of Cumberland, established a link with an ancient and noble family still influential in the north. Wentworth represented Yorkshire in the parliaments of 1614 and 1621 and Pontefract in 1624. His wife died childless (1622), and he married Arabella Holles, daughter of John, earl of Clare, a peer out of favour at court who brought Wentworth into touch with the critics of the King’s expensive and inefficient policy of war against Spain and, from 1627, against France. Along with other critics of the court he was prevented from sitting in the Parliament of 1626, and later in the year he refused to subscribe to the forced loan imposed to pay for the war, and was for some time under arrest. Despite his record of opposition to the King’s policy, Wentworth was approached by the crown—anxious to strengthen its position in the north—with the offer of a barony (1628). He was appointed lord president of the north (virtually governor of England north of the Humber) and in 1629 was given a seat on the Privy Council.

Wentworth’s return to the service of the court, coming so soon after his vehement opposition to it in Parliament, startled even some of his closest friends. His conduct was no doubt partly inspired by personal ambition, though he had logical reasons for his change of front since in the summer of 1628 the King gradually abandoned his war policy.

On the Privy Council Wentworth seems to have advocated the paternalist government that distinguished the early years of the King’s personal rule: closer supervision of justices of the peace and more effective implementation of the Poor Laws, of laws against enclosure, and of measures for dealing with famine, though he was not above privately making profit out of the corn shortage of 1631. As lord president of the north he quelled all defiance of his authority and made many enemies by his insistence on the honour due to him as the King’s representative, but his administration was on the whole just and efficient; he supervised the local justices and curbed the often tyrannous excesses of local magnates. In 1631 he was deeply distressed by the death of his much-loved wife, though he provoked scandalous rumours not long afterward by secretly marrying (October 1632) Elizabeth Rodes, the young daughter of a neighbouring squire.

Lord deputy of Ireland.

The King meanwhile had appointed him lord deputy of Ireland. Taking up his office in the summer of 1633, he immediately set himself to consolidate the royal authority, break the power of the dominant clique of “new English” landowners, extend English settlement, improve methods of agriculture, increase the productivity of the land, and stimulate industry and trade. His ultimate goal was to assimilate Irish law and customs to the English system and to make a prosperous Protestant Ireland into a source of revenue to the English crown.

Wentworth continued his effective and firm-handed administration of Ireland until 1639, when he was recalled to England by King Charles. The King needed advice and support in handling a Scottish revolt precipitated by an ill-conceived attempt to enforce episcopacy on the Scots. Wentworth was created earl of Strafford (1640) and was expected to resolve the crisis. But his policy of making war on Scotland proved disastrous for both himself and the King. The English Parliament, called especially to vote money for the war, proved recalcitrant, and Strafford, in command of the English army, failed to prevent the Scots from overrunning the northern counties. The King, unable to pay his own troops or to buy off the Scots, was compelled by joint English and Scottish action to call a new Parliament in November 1640.

Strafford was the chief target of attack from both nations. He was advised to leave the country, but the King relied on his help and assured him that he should not suffer in life or fortune. Detained by illness, he reached Westminster on November 10 with the intention of impeaching the King’s opponents in Parliament for treasonable correspondence with the Scots. The leader of the Commons, John Pym, acted first by impeaching Strafford before he could take his seat in the House of Lords.

His trial began in March 1641. The basic accusation was that of subverting the laws and was supported by a charge that he had offered to bring over the Irish army to subdue the King’s opponents in England. More detailed charges rested on his administration in Ireland and the north. He conducted his defense with great skill, and it looked at one point as though he might be acquitted. Pym therefore introduced a bill of attainder (i.e., a summary condemnation to death by special act of Parliament). The Commons passed it by a large majority; the Lords, intimidated by popular rioting, passed it, too, but by a much smaller majority.

Fiscal Feudalism-

Charles I- (born November 19, 1600, Dunfermline Palace, Fife, Scotland—died January 30, 1649, London, England), king of Great Britain and Ireland (1625–49), whose authoritarian rule and quarrels with Parliament provoked a civil war that led to his execution.

Charles was the second surviving son of James VI of Scotland and Anne of Denmark. He was a sickly child, and, when his father became king of England in March 1603, he was temporarily left behind in Scotland because of the risks of the journey. Devoted to his elder brother, Henry, and to his sister, Elizabeth, he became lonely when Henry died (1612) and his sister left England in 1613 to marry Frederick V, elector of the Rhine Palatinate (see James I).

All his life Charles had a Scots accent and a slight stammer. Small in stature, he was less dignified than his portraits by the Flemish painter Sir Anthony Van Dyck suggest. He was always shy and struck observers as being silent and reserved. His excellent temper, courteous manners, and lack of vices impressed all those who met him, but he lacked the common touch, travelled about little, and never mixed with ordinary people. A patron of the arts (notably of painting and tapestry; he brought both Van Dyck and another famous Flemish painter, Peter Paul Rubens, to England), he was, like all the Stuarts, also a lover of horses and hunting. He was sincerely religious, and the character of the court became less coarse as soon as he became king. From his father he acquired a stubborn belief that kings are intended by God to rule, and his earliest surviving letters reveal a distrust of the unruly House of Commons with which he proved incapable of coming to terms. Lacking flexibility or imagination, he was unable to understand that those political deceits that he always practiced in increasingly vain attempts to uphold his authority eventually impugned his honour and damaged his credit.

In 1623, before succeeding to the throne, Charles, accompanied by the duke of Buckingham, King James I’s favourite, made an incognito visit to Spain in order to conclude a marriage treaty with the daughter of King Philip III. When the mission failed, largely because of Buckingham’s arrogance and the Spanish court’s insistence that Charles become a Roman Catholic, he joined Buckingham in pressing his father for war against Spain. In the meantime a marriage treaty was arranged on his behalf with Henrietta Maria, sister of the French king, Louis XIII.

n March 1625, Charles I became king and married Henrietta Maria soon afterward. When his first Parliament met in June, trouble immediately arose because of the general distrust of Buckingham, who had retained his ascendancy over the new king. The Spanish war was proving a failure and Charles offered Parliament no explanations of his foreign policy or its costs. Moreover, the Puritans, who advocated extemporaneous prayer and preaching in the Church of England, predominated in the House of Commons, whereas the sympathies of the king were with what came to be known as the High Church Party, which stressed the value of the prayer book and the maintenance of ritual. Thus antagonism soon arose between the new king and the Commons, and Parliament refused to vote him the right to levy tonnage and poundage (customs duties) except on conditions that increased its powers, though this right had been granted to previous monarchs for life. The second Parliament of the reign, meeting in February 1626,

proved even more critical of the king’s government, though some of the former leaders of the Commons were kept away because Charles had ingeniously appointed them sheriffs in their counties. The failure of a naval expedition against the Spanish port of Cádiz in the previous autumn was blamed on Buckingham and the Commons tried to impeach him for treason. To prevent this, Charles dissolved Parliament in June. Largely through the incompetence of Buckingham, the country now became involved in a war with France as well as with Spain and, in desperate need of funds, the king imposed a forced loan, which his judges declared illegal. He dismissed the chief justice and ordered the arrest of more than 70 knights and gentlemen who refused to contribute. His high-handed actions added to the sense of grievance that was widely discussed in the next Parliament.

By the time Charles’s third Parliament met (March 1628), Buckingham’s expedition to aid the French Protestants at La Rochelle had been decisively repelled and the king’s government was thoroughly discredited. The House of Commons at once passed resolutions condemning arbitrary taxation and arbitrary imprisonment and then set out its complaints in the Petition of Right, which sought recognition of four principles—no taxes without consent of Parliament; no imprisonment without cause; no quartering of soldiers on subjects; no martial law in peacetime. The king, despite his efforts to avoid approving this petition, was compelled to give his formal consent. By the time the fourth Parliament met in January 1629, Buckingham had been assassinated. The House of Commons now objected both to what it called the revival of “popish practices” in the churches and to the levying of tonnage and poundage by the king’s officers without its consent. The king ordered the adjournment of Parliament on March 2, 1629, but before that the speaker was held down in his chair and three resolutions were passed condemning the king’s conduct. Charles realized that such behaviour was revolutionary. For the next 11 years he ruled his kingdom without calling a Parliament.

In order that he might no longer be dependent upon parliamentary grants, he now made peace with both France and Spain, for, although the royal debt amounted to more than £1,000,000, the proceeds of the customs duties at a time of expanding trade and the exaction of traditional crown dues combined to produce a revenue that was just adequate in time of peace. The king also tried to economize in the expenditure of his household. To pay for the Royal Navy, so-called ship money was levied, first in 1634 on ports and later on inland towns as well. The demands for ship money aroused obstinate and widespread resistance by 1638, even though a majority of the judges of the court of Exchequer found in a test case that the levy was legal.

These in fact were the happiest years of Charles’s life. At first he and Henrietta Maria had not been happy, and in July 1626 he peremptorily ordered all of her French entourage to quit Whitehall. After the death of Buckingham, however, he fell in love with his wife and came to value her counsel. Though the king regarded himself as responsible for his actions—not to his people or Parliament but to God alone according to the doctrine of the divine right of kings—he recognized his duty to his subjects as “an indulgent nursing father.” If he was often indolent, he exhibited spasmodic bursts of energy, principally in ordering administrative reforms, although

little impression was made upon the elaborate network of private interests in the armed services and at court. On the whole, the kingdom seems to have enjoyed some degree of prosperity until 1639, when Charles became involved in a war against the Scots.

The early Stuarts neglected Scotland. At the beginning of his reign Charles alienated the Scottish nobility by an act of revocation whereby lands claimed by the crown or the church were subject to forfeiture. His decision in 1637 to impose upon his northern kingdom a new liturgy, based on the English Book of Common Prayer, although approved by the Scottish bishops, met with concerted resistance. When many Scots signed a national covenant to defend their Presbyterian religion, the king decided to enforce his ecclesiastical policy with the sword. He was outmanoeuvred by a well-organized Scottish covenanting army, and by the time he reached York in March 1639 the first of the so-called Bishops’ Wars was already lost. A truce was signed at Berwick-upon-Tweed on June 18.

On the advice of the two men who had replaced Buckingham as the closest advisers of the king—William Laud, archbishop of Canterbury, and the earl of Strafford, his able lord deputy in Ireland—Charles summoned a Parliament that met in April 1640—later known as the Short Parliament—in order to raise money for the war against Scotland. The House insisted first on discussing grievances against the government and showed itself opposed to a renewal of the war; so, on May 5, the king dissolved Parliament again. The collection of ship money was continued and so was the war. A Scottish army crossed the border in August and the king’s troops panicked before a cannonade at Newburn. Charles, deeply perturbed at his second defeat, convened a council of peers on whose advice he summoned another Parliament, the Long Parliament, which met at Westminster in November 1640.

The new House of Commons, proving to be just as uncooperative as the last, condemned Charles’s recent actions and made preparations to impeach Strafford and other ministers for treason. The king adopted a conciliatory attitude—he agreed to the Triennial Act that ensured the meeting of Parliament once every three years—but expressed his resolve to save Strafford, to whom he promised protection. He was unsuccessful even in this, however. Strafford was beheaded on May 12, 1641.

Charles was forced to agree to a measure whereby the existing Parliament could not be dissolved without its own consent. He also accepted bills declaring ship money and other arbitrary fiscal measures illegal, and in general condemning his methods of government during the previous 11 years. But while making these concessions, he visited Scotland in August to try to enlist anti-parliamentary support there. He agreed to the full establishment of Presbyterianism in his northern kingdom and allowed the Scottish estates to nominate royal officials.

Meanwhile, Parliament reassembled in London after a recess, and, on November 22, 1641, the Commons passed by 159 to 148 votes the Grand Remonstrance to the king, setting out all that

had gone wrong since his accession. At the same time news of a rebellion in Ireland had reached Westminster. Leaders of the Commons, fearing that if any army were raised to repress the Irish rebellion it might be used against them, planned to gain control of the army by forcing the king to agree to a militia bill. When asked to surrender his command of the army, Charles exclaimed “By God, not for an hour.” Now fearing an impeachment of his Catholic queen, he prepared to take desperate action. He ordered the arrest of one member of the House of Lords and five of the Commons for treason and went with about 400 men to enforce the order himself. The accused members escaped, however, and hid in the city. After this rebuff the king left London on January 10, this time for the north of England. The Queen went to Holland in February to raise funds for her husband by pawning the crown jewels.

A lull followed, during which both Royalists and Parliamentarians enlisted troops and collected arms, although Charles had not completely given up hopes of peace. After a vain attempt to secure the arsenal at Hull, in April the king settled in York, where he ordered the courts of justice to assemble and where royalist members of both houses gradually joined him. In June the majority of the members remaining in London sent the king the Nineteen Propositions, which included demands that no ministers should be appointed without parliamentary approval, that the army should be put under parliamentary control, and that Parliament should decide about the future of the church. Charles realized that these proposals were an ultimatum; yet he returned a careful answer in which he gave recognition to the idea that his was a “mixed government” and not an autocracy. But in July both sides were urgently making ready for war. The king formally raised the royal standard at Nottingham on August 22 and sporadic fighting soon broke out all over the kingdom.

Putney Debates- were a series of discussions, which took place in 1647, between members of the New Model Army – a number of the participants being Levellers – concerning the makeup of a new constitution for England.

After seizing the City of London from Presbyterian opponents in August 1647, the New Model Army had set up its headquarters at Putney. The debates began at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Putney, in the county of Surrey (now in South West London), starting on 28 October 1647 but moved to the nearby lodgings of Thomas Grosvenor, Quartermaster General of Foot, on 29 October. The debates lasted until 11 November.

The radicals wanted a constitution based upon manhood suffrage ("one man, one vote"), biennial Parliaments and a reorganisation of parliamentary constituencies. Authority was to be vested in the House of Commons rather than the King and Lords. Certain "native rights" were declared sacrosanct for all Englishmen: freedom of conscience, freedom from impressment into the armed forces and equality before the law.

Commander-in-chief Fairfax was unwell and could not be present, so Cromwell sat in the chair. Cromwell flatly refused to accept any compromise in which the King was overthrown, while Henry Ireton pressed the case that his own The Heads of the Proposals[4] covered all of the concerns raised by the New Agents in The Case of the Armie. The New Agents accepted the meeting, sending Robert Everard (identified on the first day of the Putney Debates as 'Buff Coat') and another New Agent from Col. Whalley's Regiment only identified as 'Bedfordshire Man' (this was possibly Trooper Matthew Weale, a signatory of the Case of the Armie and the Agreement of the People). Other members of the Army present were Colonel Thomas Rainsborough (MP for Droitwich), his brother Major William Rainsborough, and the Agitators Edward Sexby and William Allen. The New Agents also brought John Wildman and Maximillian Petty, two civilian advisors who had been involved with Army affairs since at least July 1647.

The debates opened on 28 October and were transcribed by secretary William Clarke and a team of stenographers. From 2 November however, all recording ceased. The debates were not reported and Clarke's minutes were not published at the time. They were lost until 1890 when they were rediscovered at the library of Worcester College, Oxford, and subsequently published as part of the Clarke Papers.

Cromwell and Ireton's main complaint about the Agreement was that it included terms for near universal male suffrage, which Ireton considered to be anarchy. Instead they suggested suffrage should be limited only to landholders. The Agitators, on the other hand, felt they deserved the rights in payment for their service during the war. Thus Thomas Rainsborough argued:

Mercantilism- economic theory and practice common in Europe from the 16th to the 18th century that promoted governmental regulation of a nation’s economy for the purpose of augmenting state power at the expense of rival national powers. It was the economic counterpart of political absolutism. Its 17th-century publicists—most notably Thomas Mun in England, Jean-Baptiste Colbert in France, and Antonio Serra in Italy—never, however, used the term themselves; it was given currency by the Scottish economist Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations (1776).

Mercantilism contained many interlocking principles. Precious metals, such as gold and silver, were deemed indispensable to a nation’s wealth. If a nation did not possess mines or have access to them, precious metals should be obtained by trade. It was believed that trade balances must be “favourable,” meaning an excess of exports over imports. Colonial possessions should serve as markets for exports and as suppliers of raw materials to the mother country. Manufacturing was forbidden in colonies, and all commerce between colony and mother country was held to be a monopoly of the mother country. A strong nation, according to the theory, was to have a large

population, for a large population would provide a supply of labour, a market, and soldiers. Human wants were to be minimized, especially for imported luxury goods, for they drained off precious foreign exchange. Sumptuary laws (affecting food and drugs) were to be passed to make sure that wants were held low. Thrift, saving, and even parsimony were regarded as virtues, for only by these means could capital be created. In effect, mercantilism provided the favourable climate for the early development of capitalism, with its promises of profit.

Later, mercantilism was severely criticized. Advocates of laissez-faire argued that there was really no difference between domestic and foreign trade and that all trade was beneficial both to the trader and to the public. They also maintained that the amount of money or treasure that a state needed would be automatically adjusted and that money, like any other commodity, could exist in excess. They denied the idea that a nation could grow rich only at the expense of another and argued that trade was in reality a two-way street. Laissez-faire, like mercantilism, was challenged by other economic ideas.

Charles II- byname The Merry Monarch (born May 29, 1630, London—died Feb. 6, 1685, London), king of Great Britain and Ireland (1660–85), who was restored to the throne after years of exile during the Puritan Commonwealth. The years of his reign are known in English history as the Restoration period. His political adaptability and his knowledge of men enabled him to steer his country through the convolutions of the struggle between Anglicans, Catholics, and dissenters that marked much of his reign. Charles II, the eldest surviving son of Charles I and Henrietta Maria of France, was born at St. James’s Palace, London. His early years were unremarkable, but before he was 20 his conventional education had been completely overshadowed by the harsh lessons of defeat in the Civil War against the Puritans and subsequent isolation and poverty. Thus Charles emerged into precocious maturity, cynical, self-indulgent, skilled in the sort of moral evasions that make life comfortable even in adversity.

But though the early years of tawdry dissipation have tarnished the romance of his adventures, not all his actions were discreditable. He tried to fight his father’s battles in the west of England in 1645; he resisted the attempts of his mother and his sister Henrietta Anne to convert him to Catholicism and remained openly loyal to his Protestant faith. In 1648 he made strenuous efforts to save his father; and when, after Charles I’s execution in 1649, he was proclaimed Charles II by the Scots in defiance of the English republic, he was prepared to go to Scotland and swallow the stringently anti-Catholic and anti-Anglican Presbyterian Covenant as the price for alliance. But the sacrifice of friends and principles was futile and left him deeply embittered. The Scottish army was routed by the English under Oliver Cromwell at Dunbar in September 1650, and in 1651 Charles’s invasion of England ended in defeat at Worcester. The young king became a fugitive, hunted through England for 40 days but protected by a handful of his loyal subjects until he escaped to France in October 1651.

His safety was comfortless, however. He was destitute and friendless, unable to bring pressure against an increasingly powerful England. France and the Dutch United Provinces were closed to him by Cromwell’s diplomacy and he turned to Spain, with whom he concluded a treaty in April 1656. He persuaded his brother James to relinquish his command in the French army and gave him some regiments of Anglo-Irish troops in Spanish service, but poverty doomed this nucleus of a royalist army to impotence. European princes took little interest in Charles and his cause, and his proffers of marriage were declined. Even Cromwell’s death did little to improve his prospects. But George Monck, one of Cromwell’s leading generals, realized that under Cromwell’s successors the country was in danger of being torn apart and with his formidable army created the situation favourable to Charles’s restoration in 1660.

Most Englishmen now favoured a return to a stable and legitimate monarchy, and, although more was known of Charles II’s vices than his virtues, he had, under the steadying influence of Edward Hyde, his chief adviser, avoided any damaging compromise of his religion or constitutional principles. With Hyde’s help, Charles issued in April 1660 his Declaration of Breda, expressing his personal desire for a general amnesty, liberty of conscience, an equitable settlement of land disputes, and full payment of arrears to the army. The actual terms were to be left to a free parliament, and on this provisional basis Charles was proclaimed king in May 1660. Landing at Dover on May 25, he reached a rejoicing London on his 30th birthday.

Restoration settlement

The unconditional nature of the settlement that took shape between 1660 and 1662 owed little to Charles’s intervention and must have exceeded his expectations. He was bound by the concessions made by his father in 1640 and 1641, but the Parliament elected in 1661 was determined on an uncompromising Anglican and royalist settlement. The Militia Act of 1661 gave Charles unprecedented authority to maintain a standing army, and the Corporation Act of 1661 allowed him to purge the boroughs of dissident officials. Other legislation placed strict limits on the press and on public assembly, and the 1662 Act of Uniformity created controls of education. An exclusive body of Anglican clergy and a well-armed landed gentry were the principal beneficiaries of Charles II’s restoration.

But within this narrow structure of upper-class loyalism there were irksome limitations on Charles’s independence. His efforts to extend religious toleration to his Nonconformist and Roman Catholic subjects were sharply rebuffed in 1663, and throughout his reign the House of Commons was to thwart the more generous impulses of his religious policy. A more pervasive and damaging limitation was on his financial independence. Although the Parliament voted the king an estimated annual income of £1,200,000, Charles had to wait many years before his revenues produced such a sum, and by then the damage of debt and discredit was irreparable. Charles was incapable of thrift; he found it painful to refuse petitioners. With the expensive

disasters of the Anglo-Dutch War of 1665–67 the reputation of the restored king sank to its lowest level. His vigorous attempts to save London during the Great Fire of September 1666 could not make up for the negligence and maladministration that led to England’s naval defeat in June 1667.

Staple Act- The Staple Act of 1663 was one of a series of taxation laws, called the Navigation Acts. It said that all goods imported into the colonies had to got to England first and then be shipped to the colonies. It established penalties for violations. The Staple Act was part of the Navigation Acts.

Great Fire- (September 2–5, 1666), the worst fire in London’s history. It destroyed a large part of the City of London, including most of the civic buildings, old St. Paul’s Cathedral, 87 parish churches, and about 13,000 houses.

On Sunday, September 2, 1666, the fire began accidentally in the house of the king’s baker in Pudding Lane near London Bridge. A violent east wind encouraged the flames, which raged during the whole of Monday and part of Tuesday. On Wednesday the fire slackened; on Thursday it was extinguished, but on the evening of that day the flames again burst forth at The Temple. Some houses were at once blown up by gunpowder, and thus the fire was finally mastered. Many interesting details of the fire are given in Samuel Pepys’s Diary. The river swarmed with vessels filled with persons carrying away as many of their goods as they were able to save. Some fled to the hills of Hampstead and Highgate, but Moorfields was the chief refuge of the houseless Londoners.

Within a few days of the fire, three different plans were presented to the king for the rebuilding of the city, by Christopher Wren, John Evelyn, and Robert Hooke; but none of these plans to regularize the streets was adopted, and in consequence the old lines were in almost every case retained. Nevertheless, Wren’s great work was the erection of St. Paul’s Cathedral and the many churches ranged around it as satellites. Hooke’s task was the humbler one of arranging as city surveyor for the building of the houses.

The Great Fire is commemorated by The Monument, a column erected in the 1670s near the source of the blaze.

Popish Plot- 1678), in English history, a totally fictitious but widely believed plot in which it was alleged that Jesuits were planning the assassination of King Charles II in order to bring his Roman Catholic brother, the Duke of York (afterward King James II), to the throne. The allegations were fabricated by Titus Oates, a renegade Anglican clergyman who had feigned

conversion to the Roman Catholic church the year before and spent a few months as a student at two English seminaries abroad, from both of which he was expelled.

Encouraged by a fanatically anti-Catholic acquaintance, Israel Tonge, Oates informed the government of the imagined plot and eventually gained access to the Privy Council, where the king’s questioning showed Oates to be lying. But meanwhile, Oates also made a sworn deposition of his “evidence” (Sept. 28, 1678) to a Westminster justice of the peace, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, and when the latter was found murdered in October, a popular panic was engendered. Ramifications of the plot were imagined everywhere, and in all about 35 innocent people were executed. Eventually, Oates was discredited, and the panic died down.

Exclusion Crisis- ran from 1679 through 1681 in the reign of Charles II of England. The Exclusion Bill sought to exclude the king's brother and heir presumptive, James, Duke of York, from the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland because he was Roman Catholic. The Tories were opposed to this exclusion while the "Country Party," who were soon to be called the Whigs, supported it.

In 1673, the Duke of York, who had converted to Catholicism, resigned as Lord High Admiral rather than take the anti-Catholic oath prescribed by the Test Act.

Engraving showing "A Solemn Mock Procession of the Pope" held in London on 17 November 1680. The Whigs arranged to have effigies of the Pope, cardinals, friars, and nuns paraded through the streets of London and then burned in a large bonfire.

In 1673, when he refused to take the oath prescribed by the new Test Act, it became publicly known that the Duke of York was a Roman Catholic. His secretary, Edward Colman, had been named by Titus Oates during the Popish Plot (1678) as a conspirator to subvert the kingdom. Members of the Anglican English establishment could see that in France a Catholic king was ruling in an absolutist way, and a movement gathered strength to avoid such a form of monarchy from developing in England, as many feared it would if James were to succeed his brother Charles, who had no legitimate children.

Clarendon Corte-

Declaration of Breda- (1660) document issued by the exiled King Charles II in Breda, the Netherlands, making certain promises in return for his restoration to the English throne, following the end of the Protectorate government. It expressed his desire for a general amnesty, liberty of conscience, an equitable settlement of land disputes, and full payment of arrears to the army. He left the specifics to Parliament.

Cavalier Parliament- (May 8, 1661—Jan. 24, 1679), the first English Parliament after the Restoration of Charles II to the throne. It was originally enthusiastically royalist in tone, but over the years its membership changed and it became increasingly critical of many of Charles’s policies. The Cavalier Parliament is best known for the harsh laws it enacted against Roman Catholics and Protestant Dissenters.

Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st earl of Shaftesbury- (born July 22, 1621, Wimborne St. Giles, Dorset, England—died January 21, 1683, Amsterdam, Netherlands), English politician, a member of the Council of State (1653–54; 1659) during the Commonwealth, and a member of Charles II’s “Cabinet Council” and lord chancellor (1672–73). Seeking to exclude the Roman Catholic duke of York (the future James II) from the succession, he was ultimately charged with treason. Though acquitted, he fled into exile. From his maternal grandfather, Sir Anthony Ashley, and his father, Sir John Cooper, Anthony inherited estates in Dorset and Wiltshire, and, although some were lost through litigations during his minority, his inheritance was large enough to enable him to contemplate early a career in politics. On February 25, 1639, he married Margaret, the daughter of Lord Coventry, Charles I’s lord keeper; this marriage ended with her death 10 years later. At only 18, he had been elected to the Short Parliament (April–May) of 1640, but his election to the Long Parliament of the same year was disputed and he was not allowed to take his seat.

Though the first Civil War broke out in 1642, Cooper did not take up arms for the king until the summer of 1643, and in February 1644 he went over to the side of Parliament, dissatisfied with the political and religious influences uppermost at the royalist court in Oxford (the king’s headquarters) at that time. He took an active part in the operations in Dorset in 1644.

There is little evidence of his activities between 1645 and 1652, other than his marriage to Lady Frances Cecil, the earl of Exeter’s sister, in 1650, and that he became a member of a commission to aid a parliamentary committee that was to examine projects for law reform. It may have been this commission membership that secured his nomination to the Barebones Parliament (July–December) of 1653. In December 1653 he helped to persuade the more conservative majority of that Parliament to resign its powers to Oliver Cromwell, the victorious Puritan leader. As a

result, he was appointed to the Council of State established by the Instrument of Government that set up the Protectorate—with Cromwell as Lord Protector—and elected to the first Parliament that met under its terms, in 1654. His association with Cromwell ceased at the end of that year, however, probably because he disliked a regime that seemed increasingly more military than parliamentary.

In 1655 (his second wife had died in 1654) he married his third wife, Margaret Spencer, the niece of the earl of Southampton, the leading Cavalier peer remaining in England after Charles’s execution, but there is no evidence that he positively favoured a royalist restoration until 1660, when every other possible political alternative had proved unsuccessful. On May 8 he was appointed one of the 12 commissioners sent by the House of Commons to Holland to invite Charles II to return, and, after Charles had done so, Cooper was admitted to Charles’s Privy Council.

From 1660 to 1673 he held office under Charles II, becoming Baron Ashley in 1661 and earl of Shaftesbury in 1672. During this period his intelligence, his capacity for business, and his ability as a speaker in the House of Lords were generally recognized, but because of his equivocal political past he was at first given only the then-minor office of chancellor of the Exchequer. By the end of the 1660s, he had been admitted to the king’s “Cabinet Council,” and in 1672 he became lord chancellor—the last to preside in Chancery with no formal legal training other than a short spell in Lincoln’s Inn (one of the four legal schools and societies).

The Test Act- in England, Scotland, and Ireland, any law that made a person’s eligibility for public office depend upon his profession of the established religion. In Scotland, the principle was adopted immediately after the Reformation, and an act of 1567 made profession of the reformed faith a condition of public office. Such a law was not at first necessary in England, where penal laws against those who failed to conform to the established church were so severe as automatically to exclude such persons from public life. In the more tolerant climate of the late 17th and 18th centuries, Roman Catholics and Protestant dissenters were normally able to practice their religion unmolested; but the Anglican majority’s fear of subversion led to their being precluded from officeholding. The form that the test took in England was to make the receiving of Holy Communion according to the rites of the Church of England a condition precedent to the acceptance of office. It was first embodied in legislation in 1661 as a requisite for membership of a town corporation and was extended to cover all public offices by the Test Act of 1673. During the 18th century the tests were, on the whole, less strenuously applied; in Scotland, only those engaged in education were required to make profession, while in England some known Protestant dissenters openly practiced “occasional conformity.” Roman Catholics could not do that and, accordingly, were still excluded from office until an act of 1828 removed

the test and the Roman Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 abolished other legal disabilities imposed on them. The test acts themselves were formally repealed in the 1860s and ’70s, and religious tests were abolished in the universities except in connection with degrees and professorships in divinity. Scottish tests were abolished in 1889.

In Ireland, the Anglican sacramental test was introduced in 1704, and English legislation on oaths of allegiance and religious declarations became valid there in 1782. All of these provisions were abolished in 1871.

Article VI of the Constitution of the United States prescribes that “no religious test shall ever be required as qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” A similar provision is written into the constitutions of most U.S. states.

Mutiny Act- Two other pieces of legislation tackled problems that had vexed the country since 1640. The Mutiny Act (1689) restrained the monarch’s control over military forces in England by restricting the use of martial law. It was passed for one year only; however, when it lapsed between 1698 and 1701, the crown’s military power was not appreciably affected. The Toleration Act (1689) was the most...

War of Spanish Succession- (1701–14), conflict that arose out of the disputed succession to the throne of Spain following the death of the childless Charles II, the last of the Spanish Habsburgs. In an effort to regulate the impending succession, to which there were three principal claimants, England, the Dutch Republic, and France had in October 1698 signed the First Treaty of Partition, agreeing that on the death of Charles II, Prince Joseph Ferdinand, son of the elector of Bavaria, should inherit Spain, the Spanish Netherlands, and the Spanish colonies. Spain’s Italian dependencies would be detached and partitioned between Austria (to be awarded the Duchy of Milan) and France (Naples and Sicily). In February 1699, however, Joseph Ferdinand died. A second treaty, signed on June 11, 1699, by England and France and in March 1700 by the Dutch Republic, awarded Spain and the Spanish Netherlands and colonies to Archduke Charles, second son of the Holy Roman emperor Leopold I, and Naples, Sicily, and other Spanish territories in Italy to France. Leopold, however, refused to sign the treaty, demanding that Charles receive all the Spanish territories intact. The Spanish grandees likewise did not recognize it, being unalterably opposed to partition. Charles II allowed himself to be convinced that only the House of Bourbon had the power to keep the Spanish possessions intact, and in the autumn of 1700 he made a will bequeathing them to Philip, duc d’Anjou, grandson of Louis XIV of France. On November 1 he died, and on November 24 Louis XIV proclaimed his grandson king of Spain, as Philip V (the first Bourbon king of Spain), and then invaded the Spanish Netherlands. An anti-French alliance was formed (September 7, 1701) by England, the Dutch Republic, and the emperor Leopold. They were later joined by Prussia, Hanover, other German states, and

Portugal. The electors of Bavaria and Cologne and the dukes of Mantua and Savoy allied themselves with France, although Savoy switched sides in 1703. William III of England, a strong opponent of Louis XIV, died in 1702, but the government of his successor, Queen Anne, upheld the vigorous conduct of the war. John Churchill, duke of Marlborough, played the leading role in Queen Anne’s government and on the battlefield until his fall in 1711. He was ably seconded on the battlefield by the imperial general Prince Eugene of Savoy.

The markedly superior generalship of Marlborough and Eugene brought them a series of victories over France from 1704 to 1709. A Franco-Bavarian offensive in Germany was smashed at Blenheim in 1704. The French were then driven out of the Low Countries by the battles of Ramillies in 1706 and Oudenaarde in 1708. The French were also expelled from Italy after their attempted siege of Turin was broken (September 7, 1706) by Eugene’s brilliant campaign. The only theatre of the land war in which the alliance had no real success was Spain, where Philip V successfully maintained his position.

Louis XIV sought to end the war from 1708 and was willing to give up the Spanish inheritance to the House of Habsburg. The British, however, insisted on the unrealistic demand that Louis use his army to remove his own grandson from Spain. Louis refused, broke off negotiations, and resumed the war. Two developments in 1711 altered the situation in favour of France. On April 17, 1711, Archduke Charles became heir to all the Austrian Habsburg possessions. Britain and the Dutch had no intention of continuing the war in order to give him the Spanish inheritance as well and thereby resurrect the old empire of Charles V. In Britain the enemies of Marlborough won influence with the queen and had him removed from command on December 31, 1711. With the collapse of the alliance, peace negotiations began in 1712. Because of the conflicts of interest between the former allies, each dealt separately with France. The first group of treaties was signed at Utrecht in April 1713. These and the later treaties of Rastatt and Baden ignored the will of Charles II and divided his inheritance among the powers. Louis XIV’s grandson remained king of Spain, but the treaties of Utrecht marked the rise of the power of Britain and the British colonial empire at the expense of both France and Spain.

Act of Union- (May 1, 1707), treaty that effected the union of England and Scotland under the name of Great Britain.

Since 1603 England and Scotland had been under the same monarchs. After revolutions in 1688–89 (see Glorious Revolution) and 1702–03, projects for a closer union miscarried, and in 1703–04 international tension provoked a dangerous legislative warfare between the separate parliaments of England and Scotland. On both sides of the border, however, statesmen were beginning to realize that an incorporating union offered the only mutually acceptable solution to a problem that had suddenly become urgent: Scotland’s need for economic security and material

assistance and England’s need for political safeguards against French attacks and a possible Jacobite restoration, for which Scotland might serve as a conveniently open back door. England’s bargaining card was freedom of trade; Scotland’s was acquiescence in the Hanoverian succession. Both points were quickly accepted by the commissioners appointed by Queen Anne to discuss union, and within three months they had agreed on a detailed treaty (April–July 1706).

The two kingdoms were to be united, the Protestant succession was adopted, and trade was to be free and equal throughout Great Britain and its dominions. Subject to certain temporary concessions, taxation, direct and indirect, would also be uniform; and England compensated Scotland for undertaking to share responsibility for England’s national debt by payment of an equivalent of £398,085 10 shillings. Scots law and the law courts were to be preserved. In the united Parliament, Scotland, because of its relative poverty, was given the inadequate representation of 45 commoners and 16 lords. By separate statutes annexed to the treaty, the Presbyterian Church of Scotland and the Episcopal Church of England were secured against change.

With only minor amendments the Scottish Parliament passed the treaty in January 1707, and the English passed it soon after. The royal assent was given on March 6, and the union went into effect on May 1, 1707.

Treaty of Utrecht- April 1713–September 1714), a series of treaties between France and other European powers (April 11, 1713 to Sept. 7, 1714) and another series between Spain and other powers (July 13, 1713 to June 26, 1714), concluding the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14).

France concluded treaties of peace at Utrecht with Britain, the Dutch republic, Prussia, Portugal, and Savoy. By the treaty with Britain (April 11), France recognized Queen Anne as the British sovereign and undertook to cease supporting James Edward, the son of the deposed king James II. France ceded Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, the Hudson Bay territory, and the island of St. Kitts to Britain and promised to demolish the fortifications at Dunkirk, which had been used as a base for attacks on English and Dutch shipping. In the treaty with the Dutch, France agreed that the United Provinces should annex part of Gelderland and should retain certain barrier fortresses in the Spanish Netherlands. In the treaty with Prussia, France acknowledged Frederick I’s royal title (claimed in 1701) and recognized his claim to Neuchâtel (in present Switzerland) and southeast Gelderland. In return France received the principality of Orange from Prussia. In the treaty with Savoy, France recognized Victor Amadeus II, duke of Savoy, as king of Sicily and that he should rule Sicily and Nice. The treaty with Portugal recognized its sovereignty on both banks of the Amazon River. France’s Guiana colony in South America was restricted in size.

The peace treaties involving Spain took longer to arrange. Spain’s treaty with Britain (July 13) gave Gibraltar and Minorca to Britain. The treaty was preceded by the asiento agreement, by which Spain gave to Britain the exclusive right to supply the Spanish colonies with African slaves for the next 30 years. On Aug. 13, 1713, the Spanish treaty with Savoy was concluded, ceding the former Spanish possession of Sicily to Victor Amadeus II as his share of the spoils of war. In return he renounced his claims upon the Spanish throne. The peace between Spain and the Dutch was delayed until June 26, 1714, and that between Spain and Portugal until the Treaty of Madrid (February 1715).

The Holy Roman emperor Charles VI, in what is considered the end of the War of the Spanish Succession, concluded peace with France in the Treaties of Rastatt and Baden (March 6, 1714 and Sept. 7, 1714; see Rastatt and Baden, Treaties of). Peace between the emperor and Spain was not concluded until the Treaty of The Hague (February 1720).

The question of the Spanish Succession was finally settled in favour of the Bourbon Philip V, grandson of France’s Louis XIV. Britain received the largest portion of colonial and commercial spoils and took the leading position in world trade. In international politics the settlement at Utrecht established a pattern for the next 20 years.

Rage of Party- is the name often given to the tumultuous period in English politics directly after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 until c. 1715. This period was characterized by political instability brought about by increased partisanship within Parliament and frequent elections. Eleven Parliaments met in this period, partly as a result of the Triennial Act, which meant a general election had to be held every three years. In fact, on average an election was held every two and a half years.

James II and VII- 14 October 1633O.S. – 16 September 1701)[1] was King of England and Ireland as James II and King of Scotland as James VII,[2] from 6 February 1685 until he was deposed in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. He was the last Roman Catholic monarch to reign over the Kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland.

The second surviving son of Charles I, he ascended the throne upon the death of his brother, Charles II. Members of Britain's political and religious elite increasingly suspected him of being pro-French and pro-Catholic and of having designs on becoming an absolute monarch. When he produced a Catholic heir, the tension exploded, and leading nobles called on his Protestant son-in-law and nephew, William III of Orange, to land an invasion army from the Netherlands, which

he did. James fled England (and thus was held to have abdicated) in the Glorious Revolution of 1688.[3] He was replaced by his Protestant elder daughter, Mary II, and her husband, William III. James made one serious attempt to recover his crowns from William and Mary, when he landed in Ireland in 1689 but, after the defeat of the Jacobite forces by the Williamite forces at the Battle of the Boyne in July 1690, James returned to France. He lived out the rest of his life as a pretender at a court sponsored by his cousin and ally, King Louis XIV.James is best known for struggles with the English Parliament and his attempts to create religious liberty for English Roman Catholics and Protestant nonconformists against the wishes of the Anglican establishment. However, he also continued the persecution of the Presbyterian Covenanters in Scotland. Parliament, opposed to the growth of absolutism that was occurring in other European countries, as well as to the loss of legal supremacy for the Church of England, saw their opposition as a way to preserve what they regarded as traditional English liberties. This tension made James's four-year reign a struggle for supremacy between the English Parliament and the Crown, resulting in his deposition, the passage of the Bill of Rights, and the Hanoverian succession. ames, the second surviving son of Charles I and Henrietta Maria of France, was born at St. James's Palace in London on 14 October 1633. Later that same year, James was baptised by William Laud, the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury. James was educated by tutors, along with his brother, the future King Charles II, and the two sons of the Duke of Buckingham, George and Francis Villiers. At the age of three, James was appointed Lord High Admiral; the position was initially honorary, but would become a substantive office after the Restoration, when James was an adult.

ames was invested with the Order of the Garter in 1642,[8] and created Duke of York on 22 January 1644.[5] As the King's disputes with the English Parliament grew into the English Civil War, James stayed in Oxford, a Royalist stronghold.[9] When the city surrendered after the siege of Oxford in 1646, Parliamentary leaders ordered the Duke of York to be confined in St. James's Palace.[10] In 1648, he escaped from the Palace, aided by Joseph Bampfield, and from there he went to The Hague in disguise.[11] When Charles I was executed by the rebels in 1649, monarchists proclaimed James's older brother as Charles II of England.[12] Charles II was recognised by the Parliament of Scotland and the Parliament of Ireland, and was crowned King of Scotland at Scone in Scotland in 1651. Although he was proclaimed King in Jersey, Charles was unable to secure the crown of England and consequently fled to France and exile.[12]

Exile in France[edit]

Turenne, James's commander in France

Like his brother, James sought refuge in France, serving in the French army under Turenne against the Fronde, and later against their Spanish allies.[13] In the French army James had his first true experience of battle where, according to one observer, he "ventures himself and chargeth gallantly where anything is to be done".[13] In 1656, when his brother Charles entered into an alliance with Spain—an enemy of France—James was expelled from France and forced to leave Turenne's army.[14] James quarrelled with his brother over the diplomatic choice of Spain over France. Exiled and poor, there was little that either Charles or James could do about the wider political situation, and James ultimately travelled to Bruges and (along with his younger brother, Henry) joined the Spanish army under Louis, Prince of Condé, fighting against his former French comrades at the Battle of the Dunes.[15] During his service in the Spanish army, James became friendly with two Irish Catholic brothers in the Royalist entourage, Peter and Richard Talbot, and became somewhat estranged from his brother's Anglican advisers.[16] In 1659, the French and Spanish made peace. James, doubtful of his brother's chances of regaining the throne, considered taking a Spanish offer to be an admiral in their navy.[17] Ultimately, he declined the position; by the next year the situation in England had changed, and Charles II was proclaimed King.

After Richard Cromwell's resignation as Lord Protector in 1659 and the subsequent collapse of the Commonwealth in 1660, Charles II was restored to the English throne. Although James was the heir presumptive, it seemed unlikely that he would inherit the Crown, as Charles was still a young man capable of fathering children.[19] On 31 December 1660, following his brother's restoration, James was created Duke of Albany in Scotland, to go along with his English title, Duke of York.[20] Upon his return to England, James prompted an immediate controversy by announcing his engagement to Anne Hyde, the daughter of Charles' chief minister, Edward Hyde.[21] In 1659, while trying to seduce her, James promised he would marry Anne.[22] Anne became pregnant in 1660, but following the Restoration and James's return to power, no one at the royal court expected a prince to marry a commoner, no matter what he had pledged beforehand.[23] Although nearly everyone, including Anne's father, urged the two not to marry, the couple married secretly, then went through an official marriage ceremony on 3 September 1660 in London. Their first child, Charles, was born less than two months later, but died in infancy, as did five further sons and daughters.[23] Only two daughters survived: Mary (born 30 April 1662) and Anne (born 6 February 1665).[24] Samuel Pepys wrote that James was fond of his children and his role as a father, and played with them "like an ordinary private father of a child", a contrast to the distant parenting common to royals at the time.[25] James's wife was devoted to him and influenced many of his decisions.[26] Even so, he kept a variety of mistresses, including Arabella Churchill and Catherine Sedley, and was reputed to be "the most unguarded ogler of his time."[27] With Catherine Sedley, James II had a daughter, Catherine Darnley (so named because James II was a descendant of Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley). Anne Hyde died in 1671.

William III- Dutch: Willem III; 4 November 1650 – 8 March 1702)[1] was a sovereign Prince of Orange of the House of Orange-Nassau by birth. From 1672 he governed as Stadtholder William III of Orange (Dutch: Willem III van Oranje) over Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Gelderland, and Overijssel of the Dutch Republic. From 1689 he reigned as William III over England and Ireland; it is a coincidence that his regnal number (III) was the same for both Orange and England. As King of Scotland, he is known as William II.[2] He is informally known by sections of the population in Northern Ireland and Scotland as "King Billy".[3] In what became known as the "Glorious Revolution", on 5 November 1688 William invaded England in an action that ultimately deposed King James II and won him the crowns of England, Scotland and Ireland. In the British Isles, William ruled jointly with his wife, Mary II, until her death on 28 December 1694. The period of their joint reign is often referred to as "William and Mary".

A Protestant, William participated in several wars against the powerful Catholic king of France, Louis XIV, in coalition with Protestant and Catholic powers in Europe. Many Protestants heralded him as a champion of their faith. Largely because of that reputation, William was able to take the British crowns when many were fearful of a revival of Catholicism under James. William's victory over James at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 is still commemorated by the Orange Order. His reign marked the beginning of the transition from the personal rule of the Stuarts to the more Parliament-centred rule of the House of Hanover.

Mary II- 30 April 1662 – 28 December 1694) was joint Sovereign of England, Scotland, and Ireland with her husband (who was also her first cousin), William III and II, from 1689 until her death. William and Mary, both Protestants, became king and queen regnant, respectively, following the Glorious Revolution, which resulted in the deposition of her Roman Catholic father, James II and VII. William became sole ruler upon her death in 1694. Popular histories usually refer to their joint reign as that of "William and Mary".

Mary wielded less power than William when he was in England, ceding most of her authority to him, though he heavily relied on her. She did, however, act alone when William was engaged in military campaigns abroad, proving herself to be a powerful, firm, and effective ruler. Mary, born at St. James's Palace in London on 30 April 1662, was the eldest daughter of James, Duke of York (the future James II & VII), and his first wife, Lady Anne Hyde. Mary's uncle was King Charles II, who ruled the three kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland; her maternal grandfather, Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon, served for a lengthy period as Charles's chief advisor. She was baptised into the Anglican faith in the Chapel Royal at St. James's, and was named after her ancestor, Mary, Queen of Scots. Her godparents included her father's cousin, Prince Rupert of the Rhine. Although her mother bore eight children, all except Mary and her

younger sister Anne died very young, and the King had no further legitimate children. Consequently, for most of her childhood, Mary was second in line to the throne after her father.

William and a tearful Mary were married in St. James's Palace by Bishop Henry Compton on 4 November 1677.[12] Mary accompanied her husband on a rough sea crossing back to the Netherlands later that month, after a delay of two weeks caused by bad weather.[13] Rotterdam was inaccessible because of ice, and they were forced to land at the small village of Ter Heijde, and walk through the frosty countryside until met by coaches to take them to Huis Honselaarsdijk.[14] On 14 December, they made a formal entry to The Hague in a grand procession.[15]

Mary's animated and personable nature made her popular with the Dutch people, and her marriage to a Protestant prince was popular in Britain.[16] She became devoted to her husband, but he was often on campaign, which led to Mary's family supposing him to be cold and neglectful.[17] Within months of the marriage Mary was pregnant; however, on a visit to her husband at the fortified city of Breda, she suffered a miscarriage, which may have permanently impaired her ability to have children.[18] She suffered further bouts of illness that may have been miscarriages in mid-1678, early 1679, and early 1680.[19] Her childlessness would be the greatest source of unhappiness in her life.[20]

From May 1684, the King's illegitimate son, James Scott, Duke of Monmouth, lived in the Netherlands, where he was fêted by William and Mary. Monmouth was viewed as a rival to the Duke of York, and as a potential Protestant heir who could supplant James in the line of succession. William, however, did not consider him a viable alternative and correctly assumed that Monmouth had insufficient support.

(born April 30, 1662, London—died Dec. 28, 1694, London), queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1689–94) and wife of King William III. As the daughter of King James II, she made it possible for her Dutch husband to become co-ruler of England after he had overthrown James’s government.

Although her father and mother were converts to Roman Catholicism, Mary was brought up a Protestant. In November 1677 she was married to her cousin William of Orange, stadholder of Holland and champion of Protestantism in Europe. She then settled in Holland. Her inability to bear children and William’s infidelity made the early years of her marriage unhappy, but eventually they became a devoted couple.

During the quarrel (1687–88) between James II and William over James’s pro-Catholic policies, Mary felt it her religious duty to side with her husband. Hence, she agreed to support William’s invasion of England in November 1688. James fled the country in December, and two months later Mary arrived in London. At once Mary rejected proposals, advanced particularly by the earl of Danby, that she become sole ruler to the exclusion of her husband, and on April 11, 1689, she and William were crowned joint sovereigns of England, Scotland, and Ireland. While her husband was directing military campaigns in Ireland and on the Continent, Mary administered the government in her own name, but she relied entirely on his advice. In the periods when William was in England she willingly retired from politics. She was, however, actively concerned with ecclesiastical appointments.

Mary enjoyed great popularity, and her Dutch tastes had a marked influence on English pottery, landscape gardening, and interior decoration. She never settled down happily to life in England, however, and continued to be deeply troubled by her estrangement from her deposed father. Mary died of smallpox at the age of 32.

Anne- 6 February 1665 – 1 August 1714)[1] became Queen of England, Scotland and Ireland on 8 March 1702. On 1 May 1707, under the Acts of Union, two of her realms, the kingdoms of England and Scotland, united as a single sovereign state, the Kingdom of Great Britain. She continued to reign as Queen of Great Britain and Ireland until her death.

Anne was born in the reign of her uncle Charles II, who had no legitimate children. Her father, James, was first in line to the throne. His Catholicism was unpopular in England and on Charles's instructions Anne was raised as a Protestant. Three years after he succeeded Charles, James was deposed in the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688. Anne's Protestant brother-in-law and cousin William III became joint monarch with his wife, Anne's elder sister Mary II. Although the sisters had been close, disagreements over Anne's finances, status and choice of acquaintances arose shortly after Mary's accession and they became estranged. William and Mary had no children. After Mary's death in 1694, William continued as sole monarch until he was succeeded by Anne upon his death in 1702.

As queen, Anne favoured moderate Tory politicians, who were more likely to share her Anglican religious views than their opponents, the Whigs. The Whigs grew more powerful during the course of the War of the Spanish Succession, until in 1710 Anne dismissed many of them from

office. Her close friendship with Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, turned sour as the result of political differences.

Anne was plagued by ill-health throughout her life. From her 30s onwards, she grew increasingly lame and corpulent. Despite seventeen pregnancies by her husband, Prince George of Denmark, she died without any surviving children and was the last monarch of the House of Stuart. Under the terms of the Act of Settlement 1701, she was succeeded by her second cousin George I of the House of Hanover, who was a descendant of the Stuarts through his maternal grandmother, Elizabeth, daughter of James VI and I. Anne was born at 11:39 p.m. on 6 February 1665 at St James's Palace, London, the fourth child and second daughter of James, Duke of York (afterwards James II and VII), and his first wife, Anne Hyde. Her father was the younger brother of King Charles II, who ruled the three kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland, and her mother was the daughter of Lord Chancellor Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon. At her Anglican baptism in the Chapel Royal at St James's, her older sister, Mary, was one of her godparents, along with the Duchess of Monmouth and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Gilbert Sheldon.The Duke and Duchess of York had eight children, but Anne and Mary were the only ones to survive into adulthood.

As a child, Anne suffered from an eye condition, which manifested as excessive watering known as "defluxion". For medical treatment, she was sent to France, where she lived with her paternal grandmother, Queen Henrietta Maria, at the Château de Colombes near Paris.[5] Following her grandmother's death in 1669, Anne lived with an aunt, Henrietta Anne, Duchess of Orléans. On the sudden death of her aunt in 1670, Anne returned to England. Her mother died the following year.