Dissenters in England

Dissenters in England

The term dissenters refers to those who officially or unofficially separate themselves from an established or state church. This term is sometimes used interchangeably in the context of early modern English history with Nonconformists.

However, nonconformity is a later development within the larger dissenter movement, usually denoting those who disagreed with the state church in both practice and principle. In England, religious dissenters did not constitute a single discernible movement or aktivitas but a series of protests against the established Church of England during the 16th to 18th centuries.

While the history of religious dissent is as old as Christianity itself, dissent in England can certainly be traced to the time of John Wycliffe and the sect known as the lollards. Wycliffe was a 14th century English university professor whose greatest contribution was his translation of the Scriptures into the English vernacular. He believed that the Bible was the supreme authority for religious matters, that the clergy should not own property, and that the Catholic understanding of transubstantiation had no basis in Scripture.


While his ideas were condemned by the Catholic Church, the later, more radical sect of the lollards adopted some of his views and continued on until the time of the English reformations in the 16th century, consequently setting the stage for later religious dissents.

English dissenters began to appear once again during the time of the Protestant Reformation in England under Edward VI, Elizabeth I, the Stuart kings, and during and after the time of the interregnum of the English Civil War. Many of these had hoped for a purer reformation of religion in England and expressed their dissatisfaction with the efforts of the English monarchy to continue to control the established state church.

During the reign of Elizabeth I, many of her Protestant advisers had also hoped for a reformation in England similar to the continental reformations. They desired a total break with the vestiges of the more liturgical and episcopal structures, which they felt were entirely consistent with the medieval Catholicism from which they had separated.

During this period, dissenters and Nonconformists began to refer to the group now commonly known as Puritans. Many of these English Puritans disliked both the structure of the episcopacy and an established state church. They began to separate themselves from the Church of England and have their own private meetings.

While Elizabeth I would attempt to get her clergy to conform, many of these dissenters would continue to spread their ideas about church government and worship, attracting more followers. In 1620, a group of these dissenters would sail to America on the May-flower and settle in New England in attempt to find religious freedom in the New World. Consequently, they transplanted their own religious dissent to America profoundly shaping both early American religion and national identify in the process.

During the time of the English Civil War (1642–51) and the interregnum (1649–60), the dissenters seized power and abolished the Church of England. They began to practice iconoclasm, destroying churches and stained glass and imprisoning many of the Anglican bishops.

Parliament was now the head of the Church of England and it quickly instituted a more presbyterian form of church government. The Westminster Assembly now became the sole and permanent committee dedicated to the reform of the English Church.

In May of 1660, Charles II was restored to the throne of England from exile in France. He made attempts to ensure some sort of religious toleration with his Declaration of Indulgence. However, the now mostly Anglican Parliament had forced him to withdraw this measure. Instead they passed what is known as the Clarendon code, which established Anglicanism as the true state religion of England and made overt threats toward any that might not conform.

The Test Act of 1673 required all persons in civil or military offices to subscribe to the oaths of supremacy and allegiance and to affirm that they did not believe in the doctrine of transubstantiation. Furthermore, they had to receive the sacrament of the Anglican Church within three months after admittance to office.

Eventually, in 1689, Parliament passed the Toleration Act, which allowed the English people to practice whatever religion they desired so long as they were trinitarian Protestants. This act however did not suspend any of their civil disabilities that went along with their dissenting religion.

The Test Act, which was expanded in 1678, was not suspended until 1828. In 1829, Parliament passed the Roman Catholic Relief Act, which began to give freedom to Roman Catholics to practice their religion freely for the first time since before the Reformation.

Consequently, many of the dissenters in English religious history survive in present-day Christian denominations. Many of these are now known as “Free Churches.” Some of these are Baptists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Methodists, Quakers, and Moravians.

Oliver Cromwell

Oliver Cromwell

The controversies over Oliver Cromwell’s character and his politics began when he was still serving as the General and the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth in England during the Interregnum of the mid-17th century.

The fact that Cromwell was the first private individual to have occupied the highest position in a major European state and had dramatic impact upon his contemporaries all over the British Isles has continued to fascinate historians and political scientists even in modern times.

A country gentleman by birth and a Puritan by faith, Cromwell, whose great-grandmother was the older sister of the Tudor statesman Thomas Cromwell, became the member of Parliament for his hometown Huntington in the parliament of 1628–29.

He first gained fame during the second session of the Long Parliament (1641-42), where he urged Parliament to fight against the treacherous plot of King Charles I against the House of Commons, and to take control over the army, which had been sent to Ireland to suppress the Catholic rebellion.


After the English Civil War broke out, 43-year-old Cromwell joined the Parliamentary Army in the summer of 1642, leading a cavalry unit composed of lightly armed volunteers with devotion and capacity but without noble blood.

In the battlefields Cromwell, although an inexperienced commander, led his highly disciplined soldiers to successive victories over the Royalist Army in East Anglia. In January 1644, he outmaneuvered the Bohemian prince Rupert, the nephew of King Charles I and a war veteran in continental battles, and defeated the Royalist cavalries at the Battle of Marston Moor.

Because of his military successes, he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant general in charge of cavalry in the parliamentarian New Model Army under the leadership of the general Lord Thomas Fairfax. In 1646, Cromwell played a decisive role in securing the surrender of the Royalists at Oxford, which ended the First Civil War.

During the interval between the two civil wars, Cromwell was the only general to be allowed to hold his parliamentary seat. He made a few attempts to persuade his colleagues, especially the radical Puritan members of Parliament, to reach a compromise with King Charles I, but his conciliatory efforts were frustrated by the king’s refusal to give up his dream of divine kingship.

After the Scottish Army intervened into English affairs, the Second Civil War broke out, and General Cromwell was forced back to battle against the joint forces of the English Royalists and the Scottish Presbyterians.

In August 1648, he executed brilliantly the Battle of Preston Pans, which resulted in the complete defeat of the Scottish interventionists. After cleansing the Royalist remnants in northern England, he marched back to London.

One day before his arrival, Colonel Pride, persuaded by Henry Ireton, Cromwell’s son-in-law, who was supported by officers of the New Model Army, had purged 110 hostile members from the Long Parliament.

The Pride’s Purge scared another 160 members away and left a “rump” (merely enough for a quorum). The Rump Parliament voted to rename England as a commonwealth on January 4, 1649. In the Rump Parliament, Cromwell became a relentless advocate for trying to convict King Charles of war crimes and for being a traitor to the English people. The king was executed on January 30.

Commonwealth

England was formally declared a commonwealth on May 19, 1649. General Cromwell, his colleagues in the army, and the Rump abolished the kingship, the House of Lords, and the Stuart administrative institutions with the intention of reconstructing the state of people with all original just power under God. In reality, the commonwealth was governed by the Council of State, accountable to the Rump and elected by and among its members.

In August 1649, Cromwell landed his army in Dublin against the Irish rebels, who had proclaimed Charles II, the son of Charles I, their new sovereign. Within a year, Cromwell defeated the rebels in their strongholds of Drogheda and Wexford.

In the following years, the New Model Army devastated all of Ireland, where about one-third of the people were killed either as a result of the war, the persecution of Catholics, the forced ethnic relocation of the Celts, or starvation.

In May 1650, after assigning Henry Ireton to govern Ireland, Cromwell marched to Scotland, where Charles II had been crowned king. Since Lord Fairfax refused to be involved in the Scottish campaign, Cromwell was commissioned the general of the New Model Army, and thus assumed the highest leadership position of the commonwealth.

Cromwell first defeated the Scottish army at Battle of Dunbar in 1650, and then crushed the Scottish monarchists led by Charles II at the Battle of Worcester in northern England in September 1651. The subjugation of Scotland finally concluded the civil war in the British Isles and resulted in the expansion of the Commonwealth to include both Scotland and Ireland.

However, added to the 600,000 Irish victims of the war were 60,000 Scottish and 200,000 English deaths. In Europe, such a death toll was unprecedented at the time and might have only been exceeded during the world wars of the 20th century.

Domestic Policy

At home, Cromwell was preoccupied by the restoration of law and order in England. He imposed restrictions on uncompromising Catholics and Anglicans, and at the same time promoted a policy of toleration toward all non-Anglican Protestants and Jews.

However, a Puritan himself, he did not give Protestants freedom to materialize their sectarian claims in the Commonwealth. He excluded Ranters and Quakers from the policy of toleration, because they were too ecstatic and mystic in practicing their faith and too defiant of the state authority.

Of his fellow Puritans, he first dispersed the diggers for their radical demand for land reform, he then destroyed the rebellious levellers in the New Model Army for their mutinies and advocacy of equal right to both men and women, and, finally, he suppressed the militant fifth monarchists, who attracted many Puritan officers and soldiers in the army, for their accusation that he “took the crown off from the head of Christ, and put it upon his own.”

Cromwell was an ardent providentialist, inspired by the faith in divine wisdom to guide his policies. He was also a pragmatist, who sought to organize different religions within the framework of a Puritan-styled Church of England.

Therefore, he sincerely hoped that his moderate policy of religious tolerance would ultimately ease the century-long religious frictions among his people and transform their inner religious conscience into a civil obligation of obedience of authority in the name of public order.

Some of his fellow Puritans, though in the minority, were determined to establish a godly kingdom on earth. The constant clashes between Cromwell and his power base often rendered his policies impracticable in the Commonwealth.

Foreign Policy

Cromwell’s foreign policy was brilliantly designed and executed. A staunch antipapist, he did not execute English diplomacy in hopes of a lasting peace with its Catholic rivals on the Continent. However, the Navigation act of 1651 redirected English foreign policy from settling old scores with Catholic France and Spain to meeting new challenges from Calvinist Dutch dominance of international trade and commerce.

The act required all international trade of England, both imports and exports, be carried in English ships with one exception: Ships of a country exporting its native-produced goods might be permitted. This act eventually excluded all foreign ships, especially the targeted Dutch ships, from trade profits from the emerging British Empire.

The First Dutch War broke out in 1652. Within two years, the antagonistic navies fought nine battles. In 1653, Cromwell ordered a blockade of the Netherlands, and forced the Dutch to agree to a peace dictated by England. A peace treaty was signed in 1654, which recognized English supremacy in the Channel.

While the Dutch War was in progress, unrest at home continued to mount with a growing demand for extending voting rights and redistributing property. In April 1653, Cromwell dissolved both the Council of State and the Rump Parliament, replacing them with a new council and the so-called Barebone’s Parliament, comprising 140 members from the New Model Army and local congregations. This government survived for about nine months and was abandoned in December 1653.

Soon, the army leaders drafted a new constitution, the Instrument of Government, which entrusted the state authority to Cromwell as Lord Protector, eventually enabling the general to exercise his personal rule over England with the support of the military elites.

In next five years, despite English victories over the Dutch in 1654 and over the Spanish island of Jamaica in the West Indies in 1655, Cromwell’s personal rule garnered less and less popular support from the English people.

He made a few attempts to restore a parliamentary government, but apparently never figured out how the medieval constitutional formula “King in Parliament” could be adapted to his faith in people’s power under divine guidance.

When the general and Lord Protector died in September 1658, his son Richard (1626–72) succeeded him in title and power. Without possessing his father’s charisma, determination, or ability, Richard resigned in May 1659. The army took over the government of the Commonwealth, and its leaders began to contemplate restoring monarchy.

In April 1660, General Monck, one of Cromwell’s lieutenants, quietly persuaded the temporarily reinstated Rump Parliament to invite Charles II back to England, and then dissolve itself. The Long Parliament was finally closed. The bloody and unnatural war that had ravaged England for about two decades was finally over, and the Commonwealth was dead.

Cromwell’s legacy was temporarily suspended when his body was exhumed from its grave and hanged on a gallows in a macabre form of legal retribution by the monarchists. His spirit, however, would certainly come back in the efforts of other modern revolutionaries.

Robert Clive - British Empire Builder

Robert Clive - British Empire Builder

Robert Clive went to India as a clerk of the British East India Company. Through daring and ability he was instrumental in defeating the French and their Indian allies. He consolidated British power in Bengal in the Battle of Plassey in 1757 and twice served as governor of Bengal.

The English (later British) East India Company was established in 1600, the French East India Company in 1664. The goal of both was to establish trading stations in India, and neither harbored territorial goals until after Emperor Aurangzeb’s death in 1707, when the Mughal Empire began to disintegrate.

The French governor-general at Pondicherry (the leading French trading station in India) Joseph Dupleix (1697–1764) was first to make alliances with native rulers and train Indian soldiers (called sepoys) under French command and with European firearms. Through these means Dupleix gained land and influence for France. Significantly Dupleix’s forces captured the British Fort St. George (Madras) in 1746 and took Robert Clive, a clerk recently arrived from England, prisoner.

Clive escaped, took a commission in the British East India Company’s army, and in a brilliant maneuver, defeated the forces of the ruler of Hyderabad, France’s major ally in the Deccan, and captured an important port called Arcot against great odds. As a result Dupleix was recalled to France in disgrace. Clive then took a page from Dupleix’s book and began to train sepoys.


In 1756, the new Mughal governor of Bengal, Siraj-ud-Daula, sent an army against the British trading settlement at Calcutta. Most of the 146 English men and women who could not flee died in a dungeon in which they were imprisoned. This episode, called “The Black Hole of Calcutta,” gave Clive the pretext he needed for expanding British power in Bengal.

He recaptured Calcutta and with a small force of 1,000 Europeans and 2,000 sepoys and eight pieces of artillery decisively defeated Siraj-ud-Daula’s 35,000 infantry, 15,000 cavalry, and 50 cannons manned by Frenchmen, with only 22 Europeans killed and 49 wounded. This was the famous Battle of Plassey, after which Clive made a pro-British Indian governor of Bengal under his tutelage until he returned to England in 1760.

In recognition the British government ennobled him as Baron Clive of Plassey. Britain and France were once again enemies between 1756 and 1763 during the Seven Years’ War when Britain’s superior navy blocked French reinforcements from reaching India. In 1761, Britain captured Pondicherry, finally ending French imperial aspiration in India.

Clive returned to India in 1765 as governor of Bengal to settle problems that had arisen since his departure. He made an agreement with the now very weak Mughal emperor whereby the British East India Company was made revenue eksekutif for the provinces of Bihar and Bengal, making it de facto territorial ruler of this huge Indian territory.

After organizing the administration of Bengal, Clive returned to Britain in 1767. He faced a parliamentary inquiry instigated by his enemies for corruption while in India but was exonerated. Depressed by the charges, he committed suicide in 1774.

Clive’s was a remarkable career of empire building. He played a crucial role in the elimination of France from India and set the stage for the British Empire on the subcontinent. For this reason he is called Clive of India.

Church of England

The Church of England was the national and reformed church established and amended by parliamentary statutes during the English Reformation of the 16th and 17th centuries. Its institutions included Governorship in the Monarchy, Prelateship in the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the threefold episcopal ministry: bishops, priests, and deacons.

Its theological doctrines and liturgies sought to absorb truths from the Bible, the early Christian tradition, and reason, and to comprehend Catholic, humanist, and reformed elements of the time. The Church of England was not a theocracy, because in these two centuries, the legislative authority belonged to “King in Parliament.”

The Church of England was established in 1534 by the parliamentary Act of Supremacy, which recognized Henry VIII (r. 1509–47) as the “only supreme head on earth” of the Church of England, or the Anglican Church.


The Reformation Parliament (1529–36) abrogated papal authority and declared royal supremacy, but made no attempt theologically or liturgically to break with the Catholic past. Rather, the Six Articles enacted by the Parliament of 1539 reiterated Catholic teachings and practices and put a check on the spread of the embryonic Protestantism in England.

The ambiguities left from the reforms were tested after Henry VIII’s death. Under Edward VI (r. 1547–53), antipapal rhetoric increased, the apparatus of worship became simplified, and the Parliament reformed the Church of England to meet Calvinist essentials. Then, Queen Mary I (r. 1553–58) restored Catholicism, persecuted Calvinist heretics, and pushed her Protestant subjects into exile, or confined their worship in rural cells.

Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603) undertook the precarious task of reconstructing the Church of England according to Henry VIII’s blueprint and simultaneously finding a satisfactory settlement for the great majority of her subjects.

In 1559, her first Parliament enacted a new Act of Supremacy, which established her, using a slightly softer tone than her father’s, as the “supreme governor” of the Church of England. Despite the political independence from the papal authority, the church remained administratively and judicially the same. The convocations of Canterbury and York survived.

The diocesan hierarchy and administrative systems continued. The church courts, the ecclesiastic laws, and judicial proceedings followed basically medieval precedents and routines. Under the queen, one novel practice was to require Anglican clergy to take an oath of allegiance to the queen, as all her civil servants did.

In 1563, Parliament sanctioned the Thirty-Nine Articles. In 1571, under the queen’s personal instruction, a slightly altered version was approved by the convocation of the Church of England and was printed as an appendix to the Book of Common Prayer, a revision of Thomas Cranmer’s book of the same title issued originally in 1549.

While the Articles and the Book adopted some of the Protestant theological teachings and liturgical regulations (especially in the administration of baptism and Holy Communion) into the Church of England, they held firmly royal supremacy as the church’s foundation and episcopacy as its government.

Canterbury Cathedral

The Book served as the textbook, compelling local people to weekly church attendance and other services in liturgical uniformity and in the English vernacular, which managed to mask the differences between Catholic and Calvinistic followers within the church.

Although the queen’s sincere and meticulous compromise won the people’s broad acceptance, she could not pacify ardent opposition to her settlement. Neither was she able to persuade all her subjects to conform to the national and reformed church required by the Act of Uniformity of 1559.

The Marian bishops and their followers adamantly rejected her breach with Rome and her governorship of the church. After Pope Pius VI issued a bull in 1570 deposing her and absolving her Catholic subjects from allegiance, a series of plots were carried out against her life, including one led by her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1586.

At the same time, radical Calvinists refused to conform to the Church of England because of their resentment of its episcopal structure. To a great extent, the Catholic conspiracies confirmed the Calvinist conviction that the Church of England had to be purified of the accreted institutions, doctrines, and liturgies inherited from medieval Catholicism.

King James Bible

In the 17th century, both the popish plots, real or imagined, and radical movements of the Puritans would test the vitality of the Elizabethan Church of England. At the Hampton Court conference of 1604, the first Stuart king, James I (r. 1603–25), met his Puritan subjects to receive their petition for purifying the Catholic remnants from the Church of England. The king commissioned a panel of 54 to produce an authorized English Bible.

The so-called James I Version was finished in 1611, and the Church of England began to have its own standardized book for centuries to come. However, at the same conference, the king was displeased by the demands of the Puritan nonconformists to reform the episcopacy, and later responded to it with his succinct statement “No bishop, no king.”

Afterward, the Gunpowder Plot by Catholic extremists, aiming at blowing up all of royalty at the opening session of Parliament of 1605, further inflamed anti-Catholic sentiment in England, and helped the Puritan cause to gain growing support from its popular base.

The leading Puritan parliamentarians under King Charles I (r. 1625–49) became infuriated when the king refused to transform the Church of England toward congregational structure, and they linked the episcopal structure of the church to the king’s personal tyranny.

Civil War

Although the Puritans’ frustration alone might not have caused the breakout of the Civil War in 1642, the uncompromising antipapal and antiepiscopal attitude of the Puritan politicians and military men undoubtedly shaped the fate of England and its church in the next 20 years.

After the regicide of 1649, General Oliver Cromwell, a Puritan providentialist and a pragmatic politician, was forced to suppress his fellow Puritan extremists, the levellers and the followers of the fifth monarchism, in order to preserve the episcopal organization in his Puritan-styled Church of England.

During the Restoration (1660–88), endeavors were made among different religious leaders to find a new settlement, but King Charles II (r. 1660–85) and the Anglicans now in power refused to recognize the nonconformists who had been previously ordained to serve in their congregations.

The king expelled about 2,000 of them from the church after they refused to pass the test, defined by the Act of Test of 1673 as taking oaths of allegiance and receiving Holy Communion in the Church of England.

The national church became schismatic, and the specter of the Civil War loomed. When the nation faced a very real possibility of the restoration of Roman Catholicism under James II (r. 1685–88), Parliament met in 1688 to contemplate how to contend with the crisis.

In Parliament, the majority of the Tories supported royal authority, but cared about the future of the Church of England more than King James II; the Whigs favored parliamentary supremacy, but were willing to work with the Tories in order to prevent Catholic resurgence.

After suffering military defeats at the hand of the king’s opponents, James II abandoned the throne and fled to France at the end of 1688. In 1689, Parliament offered the Crown jointly to Mary (r. 1689–94), the Anglican daughter of James I, and her husband, William III (r. 1689–1702), the Calvinist duke of Orange.

In the same year, Parliament required William and Mary to accept the Bill of Rights, which was designed to guarantee the members of Parliament freedom of speech and immunity from prosecution for their opinions presented in parliamentary debates.

In 1689, the Parliament also adopted the Toleration Act, which offered some freedom of worship to the nonconformist Protestants; their right to hold public offices, however, was still technically restricted by the Act of Test of 1673, which would be finally repealed in 1828. But the Catholics did not gain religious freedom until 1829.

Political and religious struggles continued to disrupt the English life from the Glorious Revolution in England to the succession of the first Hanoverian king, George I (r. 1714–27), when the restoration of Catholicism became not only barred by law but also less and less realistic. However, the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89 was the great landmark in the history of the Church of England.

In general, the religious strife and bloodshed that had troubled England for more than a century began to subside, and the national and reformed church began to operate within the Elizabethan framework of the church constitution. Moreover, the church spread throughout the British Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries, and hundreds of episcopacies all over the empire lived under the governorship of English monarchs.

Today, the Church of England is still the religion of the English monarchy but no longer enjoys any privileges over other religions in the British parliamentary democracy. The archbishop of Canterbury, as St. Augustine’s successor, is honored as the universal primate among the Episcopalian believers in more than 400 dioceses all around the world, but he exercises no authority over them. At the same time, the church is currently playing an important role in women’s ordination, Christian ecumenical dialogue, and interfaith communications among world religions.

Charles II - English Monarch

Charles II was born on May 29, 1630. His upbringing was tumultuous, given his father, King Charles I’s, power struggles with Parliament. As early as his teenage years, Charles II accompanied his father in military operations and was even put in command of some regiments.

Charles I had previously sent his wife, Henrietta Maria, to France for safety, where she had received a warm welcome. She was the daughter of Henry IV, king of France and Navarre, and Marie de Médicis, of the ruling family of the city of Florence in Italy.

Eventually, Charles I was imprisoned, tried for treason, and executed. Charles II then became the king of both England and Scotland. In June 1650, Charles arrived in Scotland, promising to recognize that the Presbyterian Church was the dominant sect in Scotland.

The Scottish Covenanting Army under David Leslie was defeated by Oliver Cromwell, now virtually the ruler of England, at Dunbar in September 1650. A year later, determined to press his right to the throne, Charles and Leslie invaded England. Cromwell would ever after call his victory at Worcester his “crowning mercy.” For some 45 days, Charles remained in hiding before he could make his escape to France.


Cromwell ruled in England until his death, when his son, Richard, assumed the role. However, he was unable to muster public support and resigned in May 1659. Charles was called back to England, and he returned on his 30th birthday—May 29, 1660.

Charles’s reign was seen by most as a welcome return to normality after the harsh Protectorate of Cromwell, who had eventually divided England up to be ruled by major-generals answerable only to him. Even the theaters had been closed because of strict Puritan morality—not to be opened again until Charles had become king. Determined to be a very different king than his father had been, Charles was careful to avoid the frictions over church and state that had cost his father so much.

At home, he attempted to find some common ground between the Scots Covenanters and the Church of England. Although his efforts eventually ended in failure, he permitted on the whole both churches to follow the dictates of their own consciences. While his efforts at ecclesiastical reform did not meet his expectations, Charles’s relations with Parliament—his father’s sworn enemy—were much more fruitful.

In 1665, growing commercial rivalry at sea led Parliament to encourage Charles to declare war on the Netherlands. While the British Navy was large, the Dutch had more gifted commanders. To complicate matters further, Charles was distracted in the middle of the war by the Great Fire of London and the great plague of London and was unable to wage the war fully against the Dutch.

A peace was reached in 1667, leaving conditions almost unchanged from before the war began. With an eye toward the future, Charles continued the aktivitas of modernizing the British fleet.

Revenge on the Dutch

In 1670, Charles’s determination to have revenge on the Dutch led to the Treaty of Dover with Louis XIV king of France, who would attack the Dutch in 1672. Charles, whose finances were subject to the approval of Parliament, agreed by the secret treaty to become a Catholic (he already had Catholic sympathies from his mother) and to support Louis in his coming war with the Dutch.

Charles II in Netherlands

Knowing nothing of his secret agreements, Parliament urged Charles to support the Dutch against the French. Charles, without actively going to war against his ally Louis, made peace with the Dutch at Westminster in 1674.

With military matters settled, the question of the succession to the throne became a dominant concern of Charles. Lacking any legitimate heirs, the next in line to the throne was his brother James, the duke of York. James was a proven military leader, but unlike his brother, he was openly Roman Catholic.

Consequently, the Protestants in Parliament moved to kafetaria his succession to the throne. Two test acts, which involved allegiance to the Church of England, had already been passed to kafetaria Roman Catholics from sitting in either house of Parliament, the House of Commons or the House of Lords.

A “Popish Plot,” inflamed by an Anglican agitator named Titus Oates inflamed sentiments against the Catholics in 1678 and was one of the reasons that Charles dissolved Parliament in 1679, despite its having sat without interruption since he had come to the throne in 1660.

Between 1679 and 1681, the struggle continued between the Parliament and the king. At about this time, the Rye House Plot was discovered, which included an apparent attempt to assassinate the king. Public sentiment veered toward the king again, and the last four years of Charles’s reign passed mostly uneventfully. A much-needed alliance with Parliament remained largely intact.

When Charles II died on February 6, 1685, the people remembered him for his bright court life, his colorful mistresses, and the style that graced his reign. For the British, Charles II would always be remembered as the “Merry Monarch.”

Charles I - English Monarch

Charles I - English Monarch

Charles I, the most tragic king of the House of Stuart, was born at Dunferline in Fifeshire in Scotland on November 19, 1600. Charles was the second son of James VI of Scotland and Anne of Denmark. When Charles was three, his father became king of England in March 1603, on the death of Queen Elizabeth I, the last from the House of Tudor.

Charles became heir to the throne in 1612, when his elder brother Prince Henry died. In November 1616, he was made Prince of Wales, and thus first in line to succeed his father on what were now the combined thrones of England and Scotland.

On the death of his father, Charles became King Charles I on March 27, 1625. He almost immediately married Henrietta Maria, King Louis XIII’s sister. During this period, he became heavily influenced by George Villiers, duke of Buckingham. Villiers had also been a favorite of James I.

Buckingham propelled England into a distastrous policy of foreign intervention that the economy of the country simply could not support. Buckingham was widely disliked, and although he was impeached by Parliament in 1628, he was killed before he could lead another failed international expedition.


Divine Right of Kings

The main point of contention between Charles and the Parliament was his belief in the divine right of kings. His father, James I, had taught him that, as king, he was answerable only to God. Indeed, the impeachment of Buckingham by Parliament was as much a challenge to Charles’s belief in absolute royal authority as it was an attack on the king’s favorite courtier.

While Parliament conceded that the king had a right to appoint his own government ministers, members of Parliament felt that Charles should govern with their advice and consent. Parliament attempted to use the voting of subsidies for the king’s government as leverage to gain such equality with the king in matters of governing the kingdom.

Religion also became an issue. Although the country had been officially Protestant since the Act of Supremacy in 1534 established the king as the head of the Church of England, Charles’s queen, Henrietta Maria, carried out private Roman Catholic religious rites in the court. Even more, the king himself favored Catholicism rather than the Church of England, the religion of the state.

Charles dissolved Parliament three times during his reign. He also imprisoned in the Tower of London his chief parliamentary opponent, Sir John Eliot, who died in the Tower in 1632. When Charles dismissed his fourth Parliament in March 1629, he played out his belief in the divine right of kings and ruled as the sole authority in England. He did not call another Parliament for 11 years.

Deprived of subsidies voted by the other governing bodies, Charles depended on ship money, a royal levy first applied to towns that depended on maritime trade for their livelihood, but later extended to inland cities. Charles also sold monopolies, giving to royal favorites control of certain industries in return for funds, a thinly disguised attempt at royal influence peddling in return for financial gain.

Charles’s attitude toward religion also became a political point of crisis. The archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, who governed the Church of England in the name of the king, was head of the “High Church Party,” which in effect was still similar in many ways to Roman Catholicism, more often than not referred to now in England as the Church of Rome, as distinguished from the Church of England.

Laud and the king further affronted supporters of Parliament during the years of the king’s personal rule because the monarchy was turning more to bishops for counsel than to nobles.

At the same time, the rise of Sir Thomas Wentworth, the earl of Strafford, was seen as another indication of the king’s belief in royal absolutism. Wentworth was appointed president of the Council of the North and was later to rule Ireland.

Wentworth’s determination to rule in the king’s name had made a close friend of Archbishop Laud, but an army of enemies among those opposed to the king’s growing authoritarian rule. In the end, the crisis came in September 1639, when Archbishop Laud had attempted to impose his vision of the Church of England, with its Book of Common Prayer, on Scotland.

Reformation

The Protestant reformation under John Knox followed a different path in Scotland than it had in England. Scottish Presbyterianism was violently opposed to the Church of England’s neo-Catholic hierarchy and it was Laud’s ambition to impose the Church of England upon Scotland, supported by Wentworth and the king, that led the Scottish to assert their rights in defense of their Presbyterian Church in 1638.

When an attempt to come to an agreement with the king failed at Glasgow, open rebellion broke out in Scotland in September 1639. Believing Scottish liberty to be under siege by Charles I, hundreds of veterans of the Thirty Years’ War flocked to the Scottish army.

Wentworth advised Charles to summon Parliament to raise money for an army to defend England from a likely Scottish invasion. When Parliament was called in April 1640, its members, especially those in the House of Commons, quickly asserted Parliament’s right to share in the governing of England with the king. On May 5, 1640, Charles closed what became known in history as the Short Parliament.

On his own again, Charles called Wentworth to northern England, where he attempted to raise an army to face the Scots. In response, the Scots crossed the historic boundary between England and Scotland, the River Tweed, in August 1640. By this time, an unspoken alliance united the Scottish Presbyterians with leading opponents of Charles’s absolutism in Parliament.

The Scottish invasion forced Charles to convene Parliament again in November 1640. Parliament, furious at Charles’s virtual dictatorship, struck back. Wentworth and Laud were brought before Parliament by an act of attainder, denied legal advice, and imprisoned.

Wentworth was soon executed, in an act of parliamentary absolutism as strong as any that Charles had ever been accused of by Parliament. The crisis came to a head in October 1641, when the Irish Catholics rose up in bloody rebellion against the Protestants.

Charles and the Parliament engaged in a back-and-forth battle of legislation, each attempting to bring the other under control. The unprecedented forced entry by Charles into Parliament in January 1642 brought to an end any hopes of compromise.

Charles abandoned London to Parliament and raised the royal standard at Nottingham in August 1642, making Oxford the temporary royal capital. The first battle of what would be the English Civil War took place at Edgehill in October 1642, but was inconclusive.

The earl of Essex withdrew his parliamentary forces after the battle, leaving the road to London open to Charles. But the king did not press his advantage, and Essex was soon able to gather reinforcements to block the way. In 1643 Parliament formed an alliance with the Scots against the king.

Partly from exposure to the Scottish military tradition, Sir Thomas Fairfax began to form the New Model Army, perhaps the first truly professional force in British history. Oliver Cromwell, an English squire, emerged as the driving force behind the New Model, which scored decisive victories over the king at Marston Moor (1644) and Naseby (1645).

At last, Charles realized his cause was lost, and large-scale military operations ceased. Negotiations were entered into with Charles but rather than treat with Parliament in good faith, he urged on the Scots to attack again for a Second Civil War in 1647. In January 1649, Charles I was tried for treason by Parliament, with his alliance with the Scots one of the gravest of charges leveled against him. On January 30, 1649, Charles I was beheaded.

John and Sebastian Cabot - European Explorers

John Cabot

Key figures among the European explorers during the age of discovery whose exploits gave important knowledge of the Americas to their European patrons, John Cabot (c. 1451–98) and his son, Sebastian Cabot (c. 1483–1557), have long been a source of controversy and speculation regarding various aspects of their lives and achievements. Probably born in Genoa around 1451, John Cabot moved to Venice in his youth, where he became a naturalized citizen.

Believing, like Christopher Columbus, that he could reach the Far East by sailing west, he journeyed to England in the 1480s, residing mainly in Bristol until March 1496, when King Henry VII granted him the authority to launch an expedition of discovery in his name. Sailing from Bristol on May 20, 1497, with one ship and a crew of 18, he reached the North American coast on June 24. It is not known whether his son, Sebastian, accompanied him.

The precise location of his landing is a matter of some dispute but is generally believed to be Cape Breton Island. Cabot is conventionally credited with “discovering” North America on behalf of his English patrons, even though the fish-rich seas off the coast of northern North America had been visited for most of the previous century by commercial fishermen of various European nationalities.

Regardless of which European first sighted the North American mainland during this era, Cabot’s claims of discovery became the basis for English claims to North America.


Rewarded for his discovery with an annual pension of 20 pounds, Cabot launched a second voyage in 1498. He was never heard from again and is presumed to have died in or near North America. His son, Sebastian, also received a patent from the king of England to continue the explorations begun by his father.

Searching for the fabled Northwest Passage through the Americas to the Far East, he is generally believed to have explored the northern shores of North America, perhaps sailing as far as Hudson Bay, in 1508–09. In 1512, he switched patrons, entering the Spanish service under Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.

Sebastian Cabot

In 1518, he was named chief pilot, and in 1526, following the return of the ship of Ferdinand Magellan, he sailed to the Río de la Plata region of southern South America, probably searching for gold and other treasure.

In 1530, after the expedition had largely failed, he returned to Spain. In 1548, he switched patrons again, returning to England and in 1553 becoming governor of a joint-stock company, later known as the Muscovy Company, much of whose capital was expended in the failed effort to discover the Northwest Passage.

One of the company’s expeditions did reach the White Sea, culminating in a commercial treaty with Russia and substantial weakening of the Hanseatic League. Sebastian Cabot claimed for himself many of the discoveries and achievements of his father. Until the work of 19th-century scholars, it was thought that Sebastian, not John, had “discovered” North America for the English.

British North America

British North America

Italian merchant John Cabot’s 1497 voyage from England west to what is now Newfoundland, Canada, was Europe’s first contact with North America since the Vikings. Cabot’s feat intensified English attention to the New World, yet for more than a hundred years, England would trail Spain and other European nations in exploring and exploiting the hemisphere. By 1750, however, Britain, having overcome a multitude of political, religious, and economic crises, was poised to dominate North America.

Early Undertakings

During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, two efforts to establish English colonies in America ended in failure and death. In 1582, Sir Humphrey Gilbert personally led a large crew across the Atlantic to reclaim Cabot’s Newfoundland for the queen. Its unfavorable climate and competition from Spanish and Portuguese fishermen dampened Gilbert’s hopes. On the voyage home less than a year later, Gilbert perished in an Azores storm.

Somewhat more successful was Sir Walter Raleigh, Gilbert’s half brother, and, for a time, a court favorite. Raleigh mounted a new colonial project in 1585, sending five ships bearing a hundred colonists to Roanoke Island, off the North Carolina coast.


When these settlers abandoned their mission in 1586, a second group was shipped to Roanoke, including the parents of Virginia Dare, who was, in 1587, the first English child born in North America. By 1590, a series of reprovisioning and rescue missions were reporting that the colony had disappeared, leaving generations of historians to argue whether Indian warfare, internal clashes, famine, disease, or some combination of these had wiped out Raleigh’s colonial ambitions.

As the 17th century dawned, England, despite its 1588 defeat of the Spanish Armada, followed by other triumphs over Spain, was still scarcely a presence in North America. At home, rapid population growth and policies that forced subsistence farmers off the land, combined with Reformation-fueled religious conflicts, were creating both crisis and opportunity.

British colonization in America emerged as a patchwork process that sent royal courtiers, London investors, religious dissident families, and the desperately poor across the Atlantic in search of profits and new hope.

Colonial “Plantation” Before 1660

Britain’s eventual dominion in eastern North America started unpromisingly in 1607 when Jamestown was founded in the region Raleigh had earlier named “Virginia” for Elizabeth I, the presumed “Virgin Queen.”

Disciplinary measures imposed by soldier-adventurer John Smith, followed by John Rolfe’s 1614 introduction of tobacco cultivation, eventually saved Jamestown, although major crises continued. Finding capable colonists in this wild and dangerous land remained difficult; Virginians turned to indentured servitude and eventually slavery for their labor needs.

As religious conflict deepened in the mother country, British dissidents of varying faiths sought refuge, influence, and livelihoods in North America. In 1632, Maryland was founded near Virginia by George Calvert, the first baron Baltimore, a recent convert to Catholicism.

He was granted a proprietary charter by King Charles I, who wife was Catholic. Together, Virginia and Maryland composed the Chesapeake region and survived with similar economies based on tobacco and coerced labor.

Meanwhile, in the Massachusetts Bay region other dissenting Englishmen deliberately sought exile from what they saw as a religiously and politically corrupt homeland. The Pilgrims, who made their way to Plymouth in 1620, and the Puritans, who began arriving in large numbers in 1630, sought to create a religious commonwealth that would serve as a “light to the world” and end the reign of the hated Stuart monarchy.

Shrewd Puritan investors managed to assemble a joint-stock company that won Crown authorization to claim New England land. By the 1640s, more than 20,000 English men and women were living there.

Although more socially stable and economically diversified than the Chesapeake, the growing Puritan religious state experienced problems that fractured Massachusetts Bay. John Winthrop’s leadership soon sparked internal religious dissent, led by Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, resulting their 1635–36 banishment to Rhode Island. Religious differences and a desire for more land led Thomas Hooker and others to relocate in 1636 to what became Connecticut.

With the end of the Cromwell Commonwealth and the Restoration of King Charles II in 1660, Britain hit its imperial stride in the New World. Between 1660 and 1732, all the colonies that would eventually break away in the American Revolution came into existence or were wrenched from European rivals. Additionally, the British made significant inroads in the Canadian Maritime regions east of New France.

In 1664, as part of a consolidation of royal power, Charles II sent a fleet of ships to seize lands along the Hudson River that had been claimed in 1609 by the Dutch West Indian Company and settled by Dutch colonists.

New Netherland, soon renamed New York, was the king’s gift to his brother James, duke of York, who became King James II in 1687. As sole proprietor of a territory that also included New Jersey and Delaware, the duke ruled autocratically, parceling out some of his holdings to favored friends.

Although he was also the duke’s personal friend, William Penn in 1681 became a very different kind of proprietor when, in payment of debts owed Penn’s late father, the king granted him an extensive holding named Pennsylvania.

To the dismay of family and his royal connections, Penn had become a member of the Society of Friends, known scornfully as “Quakers,” and his “Holy Experiment” made Pennsylvania a refuge for Friends and others fleeing religious persecution.

In 1663, Charles II rewarded eight men who had supported his return to the British throne by granting them a proprietorship that they promptly named Carolina, Latin for Charles. By 1670, Carolina was peopled mainly by Virginians, moving south for better or more expansive lands, and Englishmen from West Indian sugar plantations.

This territory became the first in North America to depend heavily on slave labor from its inception. Within 20 years, the colony was profiting from such warm-weather commodities as cotton, indigo, timber, cattle, and rice. By the early 1700s, African slaves outnumbered white settlers in this “Rice Kingdom.”

At its founding in 1732, Georgia was quite unlike other British colonies. Located between Carolina and Spanish-controlled Florida, it had a royal charter from King George II that allowed English general James Oglethorpe to fulfill his philanthropic dream of resettling poor British immigrants.

To assure the virtue of these worthy poor, this new colony’s overseers forbade alcoholic beverages and banned slavery. By 1750, however, Georgia had become a slaveholding society, much like neighboring Carolina.

Mix of Religion and Governance

Britain’s North American colonies began as a hodgepodge of religions, forms of governance, and economic systems. Clinging mainly to the continent’s eastern seaboard, colonists of different regions and settlement histories had little to do with one another.

As Britain began to consolidate its imperial power and goals in the period of political stability that followed the Glorious Revolution of 1688, its colonies experienced enormous population growth and new social and political challenges both within colonial society and in dealings with the “Mother Country.”

In 1651, during Cromwell’s regime, Parliament passed its first Navigation Act, designed to assure that growing colonial holdings, including those in North America, would produce wealth only for Britain’s benefit and not for its European rivals. Many more navigation acts would follow.

These mercantilist laws attempted to control both agricultural and manufactured goods. Many colonists, including plantation owners and New England shipbuilders, were enriched, but these laws also restricted colonial growth and trade initiatives.

As part of its aggressive commercial policy, Britain, by the 18th century, had become the world’s major trader in African slaves, surpassing the Dutch. Although the majority of slaves were destined for the sugar islands of the Caribbean, almost three hundred thousand slaves were “delivered” to the North American colonies between 1700 and the outbreak of the American Revolution.

Slave importation outstripped robust immigration of whites. No longer suffering a manpower glut, England discouraged emigration by its own people (with the exception of convicted criminals) but wooed colonists from many countries, including France, the Netherlands, and German principalities, often offering religious freedom and British citizenship.

As colonial populations increased and competed, issues of governance and home rule emerged. Many colonies had set up assemblies—Virginia’s House of Burgesses of 1619 was the first—to deal with local political problems.

These were by no means representative elected bodies, but were dominated by large landowners and other men of importance. Colonies that traced their origins to proprietors (like Calvert and the duke of York) tended to have more autocratic governments. The New England colonies generally allowed broader participation in political decision making.

Quaker Proprietor William Penn’s policies allowed more than half of Pennsylvania’s male population to have some political say. Royal governors, chosen by the king or Parliament, would often override local assemblies’ intentions. As colonial populations grew in the 1700s, so too did their thirst for effective political power.

Between the Glorious Revolution and the French and Indian War, assemblies in Pennsylvania, New York, Virginia, South Carolina, and Massachusetts often contested royal prerogatives and frequently had their way. Colonial legislators asserted their rights as British citizens to participate in lawmaking.

Britain’s imperial dominance in the 18th century was closely connected to its relationships with Native American tribal groups and its use of diplomacy, or more often war, to keep Spain and France from gaining ground in the Western Hemisphere.

Colonial policies were crafted with an eye to outflanking perceived threats from the these two powerful nations, and their native allies. Fearing that an alliance between Spain and France would imperil its colonial interests, Britain entered the 1701 War of the Spanish Succession.

In the subsequent Treaty of Utrecht of 1713, Britain gained control of much of eastern Canada and wrested from Spain its remaining colonial slave trade. More conflicts flared up in succeeding years as the three powers competed for trade preferences and territorial control. Flare-ups occurred regularly between British Carolina and Georgia, and neighboring Spanish Florida.

The “War of Jenkins’ Ear” began in 1739 when Spanish customs officials stopped suspected British smugglers and perhaps cut off the English captain’s ear. By 1744, Britain was fighting both Spain and France for North American and West Indian dominance in the War of the Austrian Succession.

Wars with Indian tribes were a constant from the earliest years of British incursion in North America. In 1622, Opechancanough, the chief who succeeded his brother, Powhatan, became convinced that whites had no intention of leaving.

He and his men attacked Jamestown, killing 300 settlers. In 1675, Wampanoag chief Metacom, known to New Englanders as King Philip, launched a major but ultimately unsuccessful effort to drive out the rapidly growing white population.

Twelve towns in Massachusetts were destroyed; a thousand whites and three thousand natives perished. At almost the same time, Virginians desperate for land were killing local Indians in an uprising known as Bacon’s Rebellion.

But European powers also made alliances with tribes, hoping to recruit their military aid against other tribes allied with their rivals. The powerful Iroquois Confederacy, centered in New York and Pennsylvania, had once helped the Dutch, but later became an important British ally during King Philip’s War. The Iroquois would help British and colonial forces attack the French and their set of Indian allies in the run-up to the 1754 French and Indian War.

By 1750, although not unchallenged, Britain’s North American empire was near its zenith. Britain’s mastery of the continent would soon be enhanced by its smashing victory in the coming war with France. Yet from that victory grew the seeds of colonial rebellion that would, before the end of the century, lose Britain a major portion of North America.

The Book of Common Prayer

The Book of Common Prayer

The Book of Common Prayer contains the liturgy and main theological articles of the Anglican (Episcopal) Church. Still in use today, it has a long history dating back to the Reformation and Elizabeth I.

The Church of England was established under Henry VIII in 1534. Breaking from the Roman Catholic church and influenced by the Reformation, the church still maintained a liturgy that was quite similar to the Catholic Mass. While Henry VIII was not in favor of Protestantism, the succession of his son, Edward VI, to the throne resulted in a decidedly Protestant tilt for England under Archbishop Thomas Cranmer.

During Edward’s short reign, at Parliament’s request, Cranmer wrote a communion liturgy in English (rather than in the traditional Latin). In 1549, he completed a prayer book called The Bishops Book, which was used until Edward’s death. Cranmer drafted a statement of faith in 42 articles (sections) in 1551, but this was never officially approved.


A moderate revision was made in 1552 and used until the accession of his half sister Mary I in 1553. Mary, a staunch Roman Catholic, turned England back toward Catholicism (though without complete success), and Cranmer was burned at the stake in 1556.

In 1558, Mary died and her half sister Elizabeth I came to the throne. Elizabeth was determined to have religious peace in England, and so she sought a way for those with both Protestant and Catholic leanings to be together in one national church.

Saying she had “no desire to make windows into men’s souls,” Elizabeth nonetheless desired to bring outward observance into uniformity, without binding people’s consciences unnecessarily. From this effort comes the expression “window-dressing.”

In 1559, the issue came before Parliament. Most of the House of Commons was Protestant-leaning, and in the House of Lords (which included the church bishops), the small number of Catholic-leaning bishops were unable to sway the other lords toward retaining much in the way of Catholic practice.

Parliament requested a new liturgical book that would be a revision of the 1549 and 1551 editions, and work began on the project. Later that year, the first edition of the Book of Common Prayer was approved by Parliament and Elizabeth.

In 1562, discussion regarding the theological articles of faith concluded with the approval by Elizabeth of the 39 Articles. These were based on Cranmer’s original 42 articles with several articles condemning Anabaptism removed.

The 39 Articles were not formally added to the Book of Common Prayer until the edition of 1604. In 1662, after the restoration of the monarchy, a new version was produced that contained modest revisions, making it more accessible to the Puritans.

The 1559 edition contained 21 chapters. Beginning with the Act of Uniformity passed by Parliament, it contains several chapters that gave the order of Bible readings, including psalms and lessons for morning and evening prayers.

Most important were the liturgy for the Sunday church service, including chapters on the litany, collects (prayers), and the Holy Communion ceremony. Finally, there were chapters for the order of baptism, marriage, burial, and other short liturgies.

In 1928, a substantial revision of the Book of Common Prayer failed to pass Parliament. While some of that revision was approved as an alternate form in the 1960s, the 1662 version remains the official version for the Anglican Church of England.

Other Anglican and Episcopal Churches have approved their own versions of the Book of Common Prayer. The composition has widespread influence on Christians today, especially among those desiring structure and tradition in their prayer.

Anne - Queen of Great Britain

Anne - Queen of Great Britain

The last of the Stuart rulers, Anne was born on February 6, 1665, in London to King James II (r. 1685–88) and Anne Hyde. Although her father converted to Roman Catholicism, Anne’s uncle, King Charles II, gave orders that Anne and her sister, Mary, were to be raised Protestant. In 1683, Anne married Prince George of Denmark, and by all accounts the two were well-matched and content in marriage.

They were plagued, however, with the inability to have a family. In 1700, their 11-year-old son, William, died. After at least 18 pregnancies, 13 ended in miscarriage or stillbirth, and in the others infants did not live to the age of two. William was the only child to survive into childhood.

Anne entered the line of succession according to the 1689 Bill of Rights and succeeded her brother-in-law, William III (reigned 1689–1702). She took the throne on March 8, 1702, as queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Anne was determined to look after the Anglican Church, believing that God had entrusted it to her care.

The War of the Spanish Succession (1702–13) erupted over disputed claims to the Spanish throne. This conflict dominated Queen Anne’s reign. France, Spain, and Bavaria were pitted against Britain, the Netherlands, Austria, most of Germany, Savoy, and Portugal.


Louis XIV (1638–1715) had repudiated the Partition Treaty of 1698’s solution to the succession problem. He debarred trade with the Spanish Indies and refused British imports as he set about his expansionist agenda. The dominating figure from the allies was General John Churchill, the duke of Marlborough (1650–1722), who marched rapidly to Blenheim to defeat the French in 1704.

The Treaty of Utrecht of 1713 ended the war, and its provisions were beneficial to Britain’s colonial and commercial interests. Britain’s marine supremacy was intact. Britain received Gibraltar and Minorca in Europe, along with Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and Hudson Bay territory in North America. It won exclusive rights to supply slaves to the Spanish colonies. France was forced to recognize Protestant succession to the throne of Britain.

Statue of queen Anne

In 1707, England and Scotland combined under the Act of Union to become the single kingdom of Great Britain, making Anne the first monarch of Great Britain. The union of England and Scotland was mutually advantageous.

Scotland accepted free trade, better economic opportunity, and an intact church in exchange for recognition of the Protestant English succession to the throne. England also benefited politically and militarily by having the land and coastline of Scotland as part of its kingdom.

The parliamentary party differences between the Tories and the Whigs fully emerged during Anne’s reign. The Whigs were advocates of religious toleration, constitutional government, and the War of the Spanish Succession. The Tories adhered to the Anglican Church and divine right theory and supported the war only at early stages.

Marlborough, a Tory, had influence over the queen through his wife, Sarah Jennings (later Sarah Churchill, duchess of Marlborough, 1660–1744). Marlborough switched his loyalty to the Whigs and brought his son-in-law, Charles Spencer Sunderland, in as secretary of state. Anne excluded other Tories from office at the insistence of the Marlboroughs and Sidney Godolphin (lord high treasurer, 1702–10).

The Tories passed the Occasional Conformity and Schism Acts in 1711 and 1714, aimed at weakening the Nonconformists. But the Tory desire for putting Prince James Francis Edward Stuart, “The Old Pretender,” on the throne before the queen’s death was not fulfilled.

Anne had not produced an heir to her throne, so she arranged for the accession of a distant cousin, the Protestant Hanoverian prince George Louis (King George I, 1714–27). The Whigs were triumphant and enjoyed power for half a century. Queen Anne died on August 1, 1714, in London. She had no surviving children.