British History - Tudors & Stuarts 1485 - 1714

THE PILGRIM FATHERS

On December 15th, 1620 a very different colony was established father north by just over 100 English Puritan farmers and craftsmen. These colonists became known as the Pilgrim Fathers. They were seeking a place where they could worship without persecution. They left Plymouth in a ship called the Mayflower and dropped anchor off Cape Cod in Massachusetts. The colony flourished when native American farmers taught the settlers how to grow corn (maize). In the autumn of 1621 they held their first harvest supper. They feasted on geese, turkeys, duck, shellfish, watercress and wine and invited the native Americans to the first Thanksgiving Day. That day, towards the end of November, is now a national holiday in the United States. Families and neighbours meet together to share the traditional Thanksgiving meal of turkey, cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie.

THE EARLY SETTLERS

The first settlers' houses were built of wood, of which there was plenty in the surrounding fortress. The roofs were made of thatch and later of thin sheets of hardwood called shingle. The first chimneys were made of stone and later of brick. The colonists' life was hard: they spun thread, wove cloth, and tanned leather for jackets and shoes, and made candles from fat or beeswax. Although there was plenty of land to grow crops and they were free from religious persecution life was tough for these first settlers so that even after ten years, their colony still numbered only about 300 people.

In 1636, Roger Williams established a permanent settlement at Providence, Rhode Island (the smallest state in the United States). Williams was a Puritan minister who was driven out of Massachusetts because he accused the Puritans of not being tolerant enough. Williams bought the land from two native American Narragansett chiefs. Setting up a new colony held many dangers - land had to be cleared, even in the harsh winter, and supplies were scarce. However, by 1643 there were four settlements in Rhode Island which united in 1663.

The Mayflower took 102 Puritan colonists and 47 crew safely across the Atlantic. The ship was only about 30 metres long and 6 metres wide. The height of the space below deck was only one metre (high enough for a small child) and there were no portholes. Here the men, women and children rolled about and were sick as the ship was tossed around by the ocean swell for two months. The only water available for washing was sea water. Nevertheless, only one colonist and four crew died on the epic voyage.

1620: Pilgrim Fathers sail from Plymouth to colonize America. They arrive at Cape Cod and found the Plymouth Colony.

1621: James I calls third Parliament: it votes money for English involvement in Thirty Years War. Great Protestation asserts the rights of Parliament; petition against Catholicism.

1623: George Villiers, Jame's favourite, becomes Duke of Buckingham. Charles and Duke of Buckingham fail to negotiate Spanish marriage. First English settlement in New Hampshire.

1624: James calls fourth Parliament. Marriage arranged between Charles and Henrietta Maria of France.

1625: James dies: succeeded by Charles I. Charles marries Henrietta Maria. Parliament votes customs' duties for king for one year only.

1626: Charles summons second Parliament which impeaches Buckingham and is dissolved. War with France. Charles collects taxes without Parliament's approval.

1628: Charles calls his third Parliament: MPs present Petition of Right, and oppose king's collction of taxes.

CHARLES I

ON JAMES I'S DEATH IN 1625, his son Charles I inherited a difficult financial situation. Parliament believed that ''the King should live of his own'', meaning that money from taxes and Crown lands should pay all government expenses, and also the expenses of the Court.
It was usual for Parliament to vote a new sovereign money for life in the form of customs duties. However, James I had found expenses rising faster than income. This was partly due to inflation, caused by the arrival of gold and silver from the Americas. James resorted to a variety of methods to raise money, including creating the title of baronet and selling it to wealthy candidates. Irritated at Charles's attempts to ignore them, Members of Parliament voted taxes to Charles for one year only. Charles had a constant struggle to find money by other means to finance himself. Finally he raised taxes without Parliament's consent, but this led to a bitter conflict with those wanting to protect the rights of Parliament.

PARLIAMENT'S PETITION OF RIGHT

In the first four years of his reign Charles I called three Parliaments and disagreed with all of them. At the root of the problem were money and war: first against Spain, and then against France to support the Huguenots (the French Protestants). Parliament was all for the war, and voted funds for it - but at a price. That price was embodied in the Petition of Right, presented to the king by the House of Commons in 1628. It demanded an end to: martial law; billeting of troops on people; imprisonment without trial; and forced loans and taxes (raised without the consent of Parliament). The king was forced to accept the petition.

KING AGAINST PARLIAMENT

The quarrel between the king and Parliament continued, because Charles refused to stop collecting his own taxes after the time limit set by Parliament. The Commons passed three resolutions condemning the actions of Charles and his ministers. When the Speaker of the House, Sir John Finch, tried to announce that the king had dismissed Parliament, the Members of Parliament held him in his chair while the resolutions were put to the vote, and the doors were barred against Black Rod, the royal messenger from the House of Lords. Today, the Commons slam their door in Black Rod's face whenever he comes to summon them to hear the Queen's Speech in the Lords at the opening of Parliament. After this incident Charles did dissolve Parliament, and he ruled for 11 years without it. Like his father James I, Charles firmly believed in the doctrine of the divine right of kings, and rejected the role of Parliament to run the country.

THE CIVIL WAR

THE ENGLISH CIVIL WAR OF 1642 to 1646, or Great Rebellion as some people called it, was sparked off by religion. Charles tried to impose bishops on the Scottish Church, and the Presbyterians refused to accept them. They signed a Covenant to resist, and raised an army. Charles made peace, but it did not last. He had to summon Parliament to obtain money to pay for his army, but dissolved it after three weeks. Then the Scots invaded England, and Charles persuaded them to halt on payment of £850 a day. Desperate, he had to call Parliament again in 1640.
This Parliament began by impeaching Strafford and Laud, the king's hated ministers, for treason, and later had Strafford executed. They abolished two ancient courts - Star Chamber and High Commission - which Charles had used to raise money illegally. John Hampden and John Pym led Members of the Commons to insist on reforms. Charles tried to arrest them and three other Members for treason. He failed, and soon armed conflict broke out. The opposing sides were the Parliamentarians, or Roundheads (they had their hair cut short), and the Royalists, or Cavaliers - because they wore long hair like the knights (chevaliers in French) of old.

BATTLES OF THE CIVIL WAR

The king's main support was in the west; Parliament held the east, and London. The actual fighting took place in a relatively small part of the country. But the impact of the Civil War was felt everywhere, not least because family loyalties were split. Early battles were inconclusive: the king's forces had better cavalry under the command of his nephew Prince Rupert )who had fought in Europe in the Thirty Years War). But the Parliamentary army, with its musketeers and pikemen, proved steadfast on the whole against the cavalry attacks. They were also later trained to charge and proved so steady in attack that Rupert called these well-trained forces Ironsides. Led by Oliver Cromwell, the Ironsides defeated Rupert and the Royalist army at Marston Moor in 1644 and won all the north of England. Parliament was so impressed it reorganized its forces into a New Model Army, based on Cromwell's Ironsides. This army grew to 20,000 men and was strictly disciplined, properly equipped, and regularly paid. It was led by General Fairfax with Cromwell as second-in-command. It defeated the king at the battle of Naseby in 1645, the last major battle of the Civil War. Charles escaped to Scotland but was handed over to Parliament by the Scots. Eventually, Parliament came to the conclusion that it could not trust the King and Charles became the only British monarch to be tried for treason and executed.

THE COMMONWEALTH

THE EXECUTION OF Charles I left England firmly in the hands of Parliament and its army. For the next 11 years the country did not have a king. This period was called the Commonwealth against Dutch, French and Spanish support for the young Charles II, as well as Scottish and Irish rebellions. Charles II was proclaimed king in Scotland, and the Irish also rallied to the Royalist cause. Cromwell took an army to Ireland, where he subdued the Royalists with great severity. Charles and an army of Scots marched into England, where they were defeated by Cromwell at Worcester. Charles escaped to France.

CROMWELL AND PARLIAMENT

The country was governed by the so-called Rump Parliament, made up of those Members of the Commons remaining when Cromwell and the army had forced through Charles I's trial and execution. It was this Parliament that had declared the Commonwealth and also abolished the House of Lords. Members of the Rump were mostly Puritans. Oliver Cromwell, however, was the real power in the land. He turned the Rump out, and called a new Parliament, nominated by the Army and the independent Nonconformist Churches. It was nicknamed Barebone's Parliament, after one of its more extreme religious Members, Praise-God Barebone. This Parliament also failed to provide a strong government.

CROMWELL: LORD PROTECTOR

From 1653 Oliver Cromwell ruled as Lord Protector. He was offered the Crown by Parliament but refused to be King Oliver. As Protector, Cromwell made the country peaceful and also made it stronger abroad. He allowed some religious freedom, except for Catholics in Ireland. He put down the Levellers who believed in the abolition of distinctions of rank. Cromwell still used his army to enforce what he thought was right. To maintain his army he had to increase taxes which made him very unpopular. Cromwell died, probably of cancer, in 1658.

CHARLES II

CROMWELL WAS GIVEN  a king's funeral. At this time no one was sure who should replace him - though most people wanted to return to having a monarchy. Before he died, Oliver Cromwell nominated his son to succeed him. Richard Cromwell was a weak and mild man and the Army, still the main power in the land, turned him out. Amid all the chaos, General George Monk, commander in Scotland, organized new elections, and a fresh Parliament recalled Charles II from exile to be king in 1660. Charles travelled from Holland with 100 ships, and timed his entry into London to coincide with his birthday. He was received with great popular acclaim.

THE CLARENCE CODE

After the upheavals and trauma of the Civil War and Commonwealth, people feared the Puritans both on religious grounds and also as a threat to the monarchy. Parliament therefore passed a group of Acts, which were known as the Clarendon Code, named after the king's chief minister, the Earl of Clarendon. The Code compelled all clergymen and people holding office in local and national government to take Communion in accordance with the rites of the Anglican Church. People who did not attend Church of England services would be punished. Nonconformist prayer-meetings were limited to five people, and their clergy were barred from coming nearer than eight kilometres to a town. Charles II is thought to have had some Catholic sympathies, but he knew that to keep his Crown he had to support the Church of England. So he went along with Parliament's rigid laws against Catholics and Puritans alike. Only on his deathbed did he convert to the Roman Catholic faith.

THE GREAT PLAGUE

The London that Charles II returned to in 1660 was the largest city in Europe with 500,000 inhabitants (Paris had 350,000). However, health and hygiene in the city had not improved since the time of the Black Death in the Middle Ages. The streets were just as dirty and full of disease and rats were everywhere. Many houses were built closely together and streets were very narrow. This meant that any epidemic would spread rapidly.

FOCUS ON THE GREAT PLAGUE

On June 7th, 1665, Samuel Pepys noted in his famous diary that ''this day, much against my will I did in Drury Lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors''. This was the tell-tale sign that the occupants had become sick with the plague. The Great Plague, from 1664 to 1665, was an outbreak of bubonic plague in the southeast of England which killed 68,596 people - almost 20 per cent of London's population. There was no cure: bodies would be carried out at night in carts to special mass pits. Drivers rang handbells and called out ''Bring out your dead!'' They were paid well for a dangerous job. Pepys provides a gritty day-to-day account of the plague in his diaries.

THE GREAT FIRE OF LONDON

The following year saw another disaster, the Great Fire of London. This began in a baker's house in Pudding Lane and quickly swept through the crowded wooden houses. It raged for several days, until houses were blown up to make gaps which the fire could not cross. King Charles himself directed the firefighters and even worked among them. The fire was not an unmixed disaster; filthy alleys were burned down, the plague was halted, and London was rebuilt with wider streets and improved water supplies. After the fire, many new buildings were erected in stone and brick, instead of wood. Among them were 52 churches designed by the architect. Christopher Wren, including his most well-known building, St Paul's Cathedral, built in 1675-1710.

SAMUEL PEPYS'S DIARIES

We know a lot about both disasters in London thanks to the diaries of Samuel Pepys. He was a civil servant helping to improve the navy. He also had access to Charles II's Court and was a great gossip. He kept a diary for nine years but wrote it in secret and in code. The diaries were then lost, and not rediscovered until 1825. The diary has since became one of the most famous ever written in Britain. Its pages bring alive the London of Charles II with its theatres, coffee houses, horse-racing, gambling and beautiful women.

THE DUTCH WAR

The English and Dutch were rivals in fishing and trade, and when the Dutch started settlements on the Hudson River of North America among the English colonies, the merchants appealed to Parliament and war was declared. It began with an English victory in a naval battle of 300 ships off Lowestoft in 1665. In 1667, when the English fleet was unable to put to see because of lack of supplies, the Dutch sailed up the Medway, raided the naval dockyard at Chatham, and captured the flagship Royal Charles, which they took back to Holland as a war trophy. Other battles were fought during the two years that the war dragged on. One, in June 1666, in the North Sea, lasted for four days. The Dutch were led by their great admiral De Ruyter, and the English fought under George Monk, Duke of Albemarle. Both sides claimed victory.

JAMES II

CHARLES II HAD NO CHILDREN with his wife Catherine of Braganza from Portugal, but he had many mistresses who gave him 14 illegitimate sons and daughters. The most popular of his sons was James, Duke of Monmouth, called the Protestant Duke. Monmouth was a capable soldier, who had commanded English troops during the Dutch War. When Charles II died, his brother James became king in 1685, Monmouth thought he could rally the Protestant cause against the Catholic James and win the throne for himself. But he picked his time badly: James had not been king long enough to make himself unpopular, and the motley army Monmouth was able to raise was defeated at the battle of Sedgemoor, in Somerset. Monmouth was executed for treason, and so were nearly 300 of his followers. A further 800 were sold as slaves to Barbados.

JAMES II AND CATHOLIC PLOTS

Jame's succession was also threatened by fears of a Catholic plot. The Exclusion movement, led by the Whigs - the first political party in English history - believed the new king would try to restore the Roman Catholic religion. They wanted to exclude him from the throne. From 1688 James tried to introduce pro-Catholic measures including a Declaration of Indulgence which cancelled all laws against Nonconformists (chiefly Catholics). Seven bishops were arrested because they would not read out the Declaration in church, but were found not guilty. The arrests were very unpopular.

WHIG AND TORY

The terms Whig and Tory came into use at this time as terms of abuse for political opponents. Whig was originally a name for Scottish cattle thieves, but it was applied to those people who wanted to exclude James II from the throne because of his Catholic sympathies. James made a promise to uphold the Church of England (despite being a Catholic) to quieten the protesters. Tory was originally the name given to Irishmen whose land had been taken away and who had become outlaws. But the term Tory was given to those people who supported James II and the claims of the Crown. How the terms came to be applied to English political groups is obscure. But the name became thoroughly established in British politics.

WILLIAM AND MARY

JAMES II'S OBVIOUS ATTEMPTS to favour Catholics so angered the Protestants that Parliament invited the Dutch Protestant prince, William of Orange to come and deliver the country from its unpopular ruler. Parliament was prompted to this action by the birth of a son to James by his second wife. This pushed the claim of the Protestant Princess Mary, Jame's daughter and William's wife, into second place. William's invasion consisted of some 250 ships which anchored at Torbay in Devon in November 1688. William with his Protestant army landed to press his wife's claim to the throne. Mary had refused to accept the Crown unless Parliament also offered it to her husband. When William arrived in London James fled to France. As a result Parliament agreed that James had vacated his throne and offered the Crown to William and Mary.

IRISH PROTESTANT RULE

After he was deposed by William of Orange, Irish Catholics sided with James, while the Protestants of Ulster supported William. James went to Ireland where he raised an army. In 1689 he laid siege to Londonderry where thousands of Irish Protestants sought refuge. He failed to take the city and William finally defeated James at the battle of the Boyne in 1690. This battle is still celebrated annually by the Protestant Orangemen of Ulster. James fled back to France, where he died in 1701.

QUEEN ANNE

The Treaty of Ryswick made in 1697 between England, France, Holland and Spain had acknowledged William III as the rightful King of England, and Anne, James II's Protestant daughter, as his successor. She became Queen Anne I in 1702, aged 37, and was the last Stuart monarch. Her life was full of great personal sadness and bad health. She had 17 children but all of them died in infancy or childhood. Her reign was dominated by the War of the Spanish Succession abroad and by rivalry between Whigs and Tories at home. By the terms of the Act of Succession of 1701 the throne was to pass to the nearest Protestant heir, in the House of Hanover. Anne hated her German cousins and refused to allow them to come to England. But as her reign drew to an end she sent an envoy to the future George I, assuring him of her friendship. By so doing she played a vital role in ensuring that there was a peaceful change of dynasty. 

ACT OF UNION

The political union of England and Scotland, which James I had tried to bring about when he became King of England in 1603, was finally accomplished in 1707. The Scots did not accept the English Act of Settlement, which in 1701 had settled the Crown on the descendants of the Protestant Sophia of Hanover (grand-daughter of James I and mother of the future George I). There was an unspoken threat that Scotland might, when Queen Anne died, bring back the Catholic Stuarts by making James II's son, James Francis Edward the Old Pretender, King of Scotland. This threat brought the English Parliament to support the move towards union. The Scots had come to realize that their country could no longer prosper as an independent nation. Under the Act of Union, their Parliament gained free trade with England, and cash to pay off huge debts acquired in a disastrous colonising venture in Darien in Central America. The Scots also kept their own legal system and Presbyterian church.

BIRTH OF GREAT BRITAIN

The resulting kingdom of England and Scotland was called Great Britain. For some years after the union the people of Scotland, felt they were at a disadvantage in an unequal partnership. The English majority in the combined Parliament meant that measures which favoured England at Scotland's expense were passed. One example was a special tax on linen, which was unimportant in the south but a major industry north of the border. However, the union was in Scotland's favour as it was now able to trade with England's various colonies. After decades of conflict the two countries combined in an uneasy but peaceful alliance.

FOCUS ON THE COFFEE HOUSES

During the 1600s coffee was brought to England from the Middle East. In 1652 the first coffee house was opened in London. Coffee houses quickly spread to become popular places where people went to gossip, do business deals and discuss politics. In 1688 Edward Lloyd opened a coffee house in Tower Street, a rendezvous for people who would insure ships and their cargoes, and read a publication called Lloyd's News, which gave important shipping details. From this original 17th-century coffee house sprang the modern Lloyd's, the world's foremost shipping insurers. From about 1704 single news-sheets - the first form of newspapers - could also be bought and read at coffee houses.