Rebecca’s Quick and Dirty British History

from the Civil Wars to the Napoleonic Wars

1640: The Long Parliament begins. Charles I was forced to summon Parliament, even though he’d dismissed it, swearing never to call it again, in 1629. What he really needed was cash, and only Parliament could give him the power to tax the country as much as he needed to to make up for what he’d thrown away in a couple of stupidly-fought religious wars in Scotland. Landowners were also in a snit with him, mostly because he had been imposing a non-parliamentary tax, the Ship Money Tax, on London and the rest of the country in the mid- and late 1630s. This was a tax to enable him to build up the somewhat neglected Royal Navy and support Spain’s military action against the increasing Dutch dominance over European trade routes. The fact that he spent the money building extra-fancy ships and didn’t actually support Spain in any meaningful way didn’t really help his cause. The 1640 Parliament wasn’t going to take it any more, so they passed a bill to the effect that Parliament couldn’t be closed without its own consent, and then abolished non-parliamentary taxes, and everything that gave prerogative power to the king.

1642: War breaks out between Parliamentary forces and the King’s army. The immediate cause is a rebellion in Ireland, rumoured to have been instigated by Charles. Parliament demands control over the army in Ireland. Charles refuses. Parliament closes the theatres, because if they’re not having fun, noone’s going to.

1648: Pride’s Purge is a military coup that ousted the 231 members of the Long Parliament who were known to support a treaty with Charles I. The treaty would have reinstated him as king.

1649: The Rump Parliament, possibly the rudest name for a political body ever invented, is what’s left of the House of Commons after Pride’s Purge. The Rump declares England a Commonwealth and orchestrates the trial for treason of Charles I, who gets his head cut off. Charles’s family, including Henrietta Maria, his queen, and James Stuart, Duke of York, his brother, have fled to France.

1653: Oliver Cromwell, who had been instrumental in pushing Parliament to war against Charles I, rose to power after forming the New Model Army, which wiped the floor with Charles’s forces at Naseby in 1645. In 1649-50, he was massacring Irish forces with particular brutality in Drogheda and Wexford while the King lost his head back home. In 1653, Cromwell returns, ejects the Rump in a second coup, and rules as Lord Protector.

1658: Cromwell kicks the bucket, leaving his weak son Richard to rule. Richard is a bad idea by 1659, and people start agitating to restore the Stuart monarchy, which leads to:

1660: The Restoration. General Monck leads the new Charles II, Charles I’s son, into London. Charles’s reign is characterized by a general laxity in the moral department, as well as heightened fears about Catholic influences at court. Not without reason – Charles was said to be secretly Catholic and he was plotting with Louis XIV to institute religious toleration; he had drafted a Declaration of Indulgence (1662) to that effect, which he was forced to abandon. Instead, he brought in the Test Act (1673), which prevented Catholics from holding public office until the late 1820s. Much public fuss was directed against various of his mistresses – Louise de Keroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, came under fire for being French and Catholic, and in fact, she was instrumental in Charles’s plotting with Louis. Hence Nell Gwyn’s rumoured declaration: ‘I may be a whore, but at least I’m a Protestant whore.’ Charles II’s rule is notable for rather a lot of debauchery at court, and the introduction of female actors to the reopened stages.

Meanwhile, on the high seas, the Royal Navy is pursuing a series of trade wars against the Dutch. The first Anglo-Dutch War was fought under Cromwell (and might more properly be called the Anglo-Spanish War); the third ended in 1674.

1652-1654: The first Anglo-Dutch war was fought mostly to ensure colonial trade, and was partly caused by pirates who loved to attack wealthy Dutch merchant ships. It was provoked in 1651, when Cromwell sent a delegation to the Hague generously offering to annex Holland and use Dutch troops to drive Spain out of the Americas, consolidating England’s colonial holdings. Oddly, the Dutch sent the English home with a flea in their ear and a Dutch fleet designed to prevent the search of Dutch ships, whereupon the English got a bit huffy.

1665-1667: The second Anglo-Dutch war was also a trade war on which James II spent far too much money. It ended in singularly embarrassing defeat for the English, whose morale wasn’t helped by the one-two punch of:

1665: A devastating outbreak of the bubonic Plague, and in

1666: The Great Fire of London.

1672-1674: The third Anglo-Dutch war allied England with France, and was overtly pro-Catholic and thus unpopular. The persistent fears of Catholic plotting really blew up (not literally, as they very nearly had in 1605, on the 5^th of November, when a real Catholic plot, the Gunpowder Plot, nearly succeeded in blowing up king and Parliament) in:

1678: The Popish Plot. This was a complete fabrication by Titus Oates and his sidekick, Israel Tonge, who claimed that they had discovered a Jesuit plot to assassinate Charles II in order to assure the succession of the Catholic James, Duke of York. James was Charles’s brother, and the immediate successor to the English throne. The plot forced Charles to dissolve Parliament and ultimately led to:

1679-81: The Exclusion Crisis. This is caused by a political group who had a majority in the Commons (England’s lower house) and who come to be known later as Whigs. They were led by Anthony Ashley Cooper, the First Earl of Shaftesbury. The crisis was about excluding James Stuart, Charles’s Catholic brother, from the throne. Why? They were afraid James would ally England with the French, as well as try to institute tolerance for, or even revive Catholicism in England. (To understand why this is a big problem, look up the reign of Queen Mary I.) The crisis was consistently averted by Charles’s closing of each of three parliaments, and was finally resolved when he simply refused to summon Parliament again after 1681.

1685: Charles II dies and James Stuart, now James II of England, succeeds to the throne. It’s not long, however, before James is discovered to be devotedly and politically Catholic, intent on placing Catholics in office and bringing back the Declaration of Indulgence that Charles had abandoned. By some accounts, he was also rather addle-pated with what was possibly an advanced case of syphilis; in others, he is reported to be an active and engaged ruler. The eldest of Charles’s horde of illegitimate children, James Scott, Duke of Monmouth, is persuaded by a bunch of radical Whigs that it would be a good time to invade England and declare himself king, thus instigating Monmouth’s Rebellion. (There are some rumours of a secret marriage between Charles and Monmouth’s mother, likely invented to bolster his claim.) The rebellion is a miserable failure; hardly any of the populace rises to support him, and by the time Monmouth gets anywhere near London, he’s been thoroughly routed. He’s found, dragged out from under a bush, and brutally tortured and executed, along with his fellow captives.

James II deals with an increasingly unhappy Parliament and populace for a few years, until he gets too anxious and flees to France, fearing he’ll get his head cut off like dear old dad. He takes off twice – the first time he’s found in disguise in a boat, and hauled back in disgrace, the second time, he makes it across the water. His evident desire to leave England is taken to be an abdication, and a populace that’s generally happy to get rid of him declares a:

1688: Glorious Revolution.

1689: This bloodless ‘revolution’ resulted in Parliament inviting Mary II, James II’s daughter, and her husband, William of Orange (William III of England), to take the throne, and is marked by the introduction of the Bill of Rights, which establishes England as a constitutional monarchy. Though some of the tougher nuts on the more vigorously pro-Parliament end of the political spectrum found the Bill a bit toothless, it nonetheless established Parliament’s role as a check on the power of the throne.

1689-97: The Nine Years War. This was William’s war to ensure the English succession in his own line. The French refused to recognize his succession, supporting the Catholic James and harrying the English fleet until they defeated the French in 1692. William successfully fought James II in Ireland, where James had tried, with the help of French and Irish troops, to dig in his heels. William fought a much more difficult war against France in the Netherlands with the help of the Austrian Empire.

1702: Queen Anne, the last of the Stuarts, the younger daughter of James II, ascends the throne. Her reign is characterized by the stabilization of a system of party politics – the division between Whigs and Tories – and the War of the Spanish Succession. The Whigs are mostly characterized by their firm Protestant, pro-parliament stance. They believe in the rule of law, rather than divine-right monarchy, and are closely affiliated with the kinds of sentiments expressed by Shaftesbury during the Exclusion Crisis. They are generally opposed to the Tories, who, though they aren’t pro-Catholic, are generally less infuriated by things like, say, government posts being held by Catholics. Tories are loosely connected early on with supporting the Stuart monarchy, and later with more generally conservative politics. They tend to be associated with country gentry and large landowners – the landed interest – while Whigs come to be seen as affiliated with a new merchant class and a city interest. Whigs also supported:

1702-13: The War of the Spanish Succession. England’s involved in this continental war because of (surprise, surprise) the involvement of the French and related anti-Catholic sentiment. The French king, Louis XIV, wants to put his grandson Philip on the Spanish throne, thus consolidating his allegiance with Catholic Spain. England is just a tad upset by this, because they’d be looking at an entire coastline of Louis XIV’s rabidly Catholic and expansionist family. The war results in the rise to power of John Churchill, who becomes the Duke of Marlborough. From fairly humble beginnings, Marlborough rises to enormous wealth and power as a result of his spectacular skills as a general, as well as his early support of William’s reign. (Some preferred to ascribe his success to his skill in bedding Charles II’s slightly nutty cast-off mistresses – he was involved with Barbara Palmer (née Villiers), Duchess of Cleveland, early in his career.) Marlborough, along with Godolphin, the treasurer, basically ran England under Anne until their association with the Whig Junto (group of powerful Whigs) led to their downfall after 1710. The Tories thought that the continuance of the War of the Spanish Succession was an excuse to divert more money from the English treasury into Marlborough’s pockets and those of wealthy city merchants. Their stance against both the Whigs and the War of the Spanish Succession was eventually successful and:

1710: The Tories win a resounding victory in a general election. That means the vote of anyone who’s white, male and owns significant property, so not that general, really. A generous estimate suggests that, even after some to-ing and fro-ing about limited extensions of the franchise after the Restoration, perhaps about 1/30^th (one thirtieth – that’s not a typo) of the population had the vote. Marlborough and Godolphin had indeed managed nearly to drain the treasury – and the Tory Robert Harley, later Lord Oxford, became the de facto prime minister until 1713.

1707: Act of Union. England and Scotland are unified under Anne as Great Britain.

1714: Queen Anne dies and George I, the first of the Hanoverian succession, takes the throne. The Whigs make a comeback; Robert Walpole takes power in 1721, regaining his official position as the First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer, and becomes England’s first real prime minister.

1715: The Jacobite Rebellion. There’s a quickly put-down rebellion in Scotland in favour of James Stuart, James II’s son, who shows up late to his own rebellion. He becomes known as the Old Pretender, as opposed to the Young Pretender, his son, popularly known as Bonnie Prince Charlie.

1727: George II succeeds to the throne. His reign is characterized by a series of continental wars and by Walpole’s ministry. Walpole, before he fell in 1742 as a result of developments arising out of one of those wars, ensured the long stranglehold the Whigs had on British government in the eighteenth century.

1739: The War of Jenkins’s Ear. Captain Jenkins got his ear cut off by the Spanish in 1731, but it wasn’t used as an excuse for war until 1739, when the British began fighting Spain for colonial interests. This war is subsumed into:

1740: The War of the Austrian Succession. Why England gets involved with this is beyond anyone’s understanding. Frederick the Great invades Austrian Silesia in 1740, and Britain jumps in to help Austria against France and Spain. At this point, there’s no threat of a Catholic invasion, and Britain’s spending a bunch of money on yet another war.

1745: The `45. This is the most successful, and the last rebellion in favour of the ‘Kings across the water,’ i.e., the Stuarts. It still wasn’t very successful. Despite the fact that the French had abandoned a plan to support Charles Stuart’s claim to the throne, the Scottish clans had high hopes of seeing a Stuart king on the throne again (the first Stuart on the English throne was James VI of Scotland, James I of England – he succeeded Elizabeth I in 1603) but their hopes were dashed as soon as they actually had a good look at the Bonnie Prince of hopeless twits. He was court-bred and totally incapable of running a rebellion. Pretty doesn’t cut it in these situations, and the clans ended up massacred or shipped off to America – Culloden is the most famous battle of these.

1756-63: The Seven Years War. This was primarily a German war. The Austrians decided to ally with the French, and surround Prussia. Prussia asked for English help and the Prime Minister, William Pitt, sent it. The war ended with the peace of Paris in 1763. The Seven Years War also marked General Wolf’s victory over the French in Quebec, leaving most of Canada under British control.

1760: George II dies and George III, his grandson, succeeds him. George III’s reign is principally memorable for his loss of, first, the American colonies, and second, his mind.

1776: The Declaration of Independence begins the American Revolution.

1788-89: Regency Crisis. This was prompted by George III’s mental instability; the Prince of Wales was prepared to become regent, but his father recovered quickly and a regency became unnecessary.

1789: The French Revolution. This caused rather a lot of anxiety in Britain about the possibility of a similar revolution, but the Reign of Terror that held sway in 1792 and `93 in France served instead to garner support for fleeing French aristocrats and to heighten domestic support for the British monarchy.

1793-1815: Napoleonic Wars. These consisted of the wars of the first, second, and third coalitions, the Peninsular War, and the Hundred Days War. The first coalition lasted from 1793 until 1797, the second from 1798 to 1802 – it ended with the treaty of Amiens – and the third from 1804 – when Napoleon declared himself Emperor – to 1807, at which point Napoleon had beaten the pants off everyone in the coalition besides the British. The Peninsular War lasted the longest (1808-13) and was fought in Spain. Napoleon abdicated on April 20, 1814, and was exiled to Elba. He escaped from Elba on March 1, 1815, had a last kick at the can for a hundred days, lost conclusively to Wellington at Waterloo, and was exiled again – this time to St. Helena. (The Napoleonic Wars sort of read like the afterlife of Elvis. Or maybe ‘The Cat Came Back’)

1811: The Regency. The King had succumbed to madness, along with deafness and blindness, in 1810, and the Regency of the future George IV was established in 1811. George was notoriously dissolute, and played merry hell with the government of Britain until 1830. William IV ruled briefly, and then Victoria took the throne in 1837 and successfully repressed everyone for the rest of the century.