Civil war, the protectorate, and the restoration (1625-1660)

When James I's son Charles ascended the throne in 1625, England was well on its way to civil war. As we have already seen, the causes were both religious and political. The days were long past when Elizabeth had steered a course of moderation and compromise be­tween Protestant extremism and lingering loyalty to Catholicism. By the second quarter of the seventeenth century, the Puritan move­ment had developed into a powerful enemy of the Anglican es­tablishment. When Charles I (1625-1649), following James, at­tempted to crack down on organized religious protest, he met with violent opposition. In Parliament, the lawyers and landlords who controlled the House of Commons withheld more and more funds from the executive functions of government. Charles responded by trying to rule without the support of Parliament, through his chief supporters and agents in the Church (Archbishop William Laud) and the army (Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Stratford), in what amounted to a government of royal absolutism. But the strategy was doomed to failure: dissatisfaction in the country was too virulent; Parlia­ment had grown too strong and was determined to call the king and his supporters to account. Laud and Wentworth were imprisoned and executed. As Parliament set about voting wholesale reforms of both church and state, Charles left London and established his army at Nottingham. By August of 1642, England was in the throes of open civil war. The king's supporters, many of them carefree, long-haired reckless young "Cavaliers" from families of country gentry, were no match militarily for the Parliamentary forces, made up primarily of grimly determined Puritans who wore their hair cropped off severely and were therefore known as "Roundheads." Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658), commander of the Parliamentary forces, had molded his men into a fearless and disciplined New Model Army (known as "Iron­sides"), which fought all the more fiercely because it saw itself as the agent of God's vengeance and punishment. By the beginning of 1649, the royalist forces had been defeated and King Charles himself was a prisoner. The more radical element in Parliament was deter­mined to have the king executed. To achieve this, they managed to expel those more moderate members who found the idea of killing the king repugnant, however determined they may have been in their political opposition to him. Charles I was tried as an enemy of the English people by a Parliament reduced to about fifty of its most extreme and vindictive members, and on January 30, 1649, he was beheaded. Andrew Marvell (1621-1678), perhaps the subtlest poet of the seventeenth century and he a minor figure in Cromwell's government, later evoked this terrible moment in "An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return to Ireland":

That thence the Royal Actor borne,

The tragic scaffold might adorn;

While round the armed bands

Did clap their bloody hands. (lines 53-56)

After a brief period of confusion when the Rump Parliament, as it was called, tried to govern on its own, Cromwell took the power of government into his own hands and established what he called the Protectorate (1653-1658). This was in effect a military dictatorship, and it was not to endure for very long. Cromwell died in 1658, and those who were unhappy began to establish contacts with Charles I's eldest son, who had set up a government in exile in Paris. By 1660 the English people had had enough of harsh Puritan rule, and Charles II (1660-1685) returned in what we call the "Restoration" of the monarchy. A new Parliament was elected, and England returned to the form of government it had known before the war. English society, however, had been deeply altered by the Civil War and the experience of Cromwell's Protectorate. Although loyal to Charles II, Parliament had a new sense of its importance in directing the affairs of the country. In general the old authoritarian and hierar­chical pattern of Elizabethan and Jacobean England was reconsti­tuted along looser, more tolerant lines. Religiously and politically, England had more than ever before become a country of multiplicity and diversity. The Anglican Church and the monarchy had been re­stored to prominence, but never again would these institutions dominate English life as they had done, or as they had tried to do, before the Civil War.