Topic 3.2 Notes – The English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution

The Struggle Over Sovereignty in Stuart England

England already had a tradition that kings needed Parliament for taxation and legislation, so the Stuarts ran into limits that rulers like Louis XIV in France pushed past more successfully. Parliament was still an elite body, not a democracy.

• House of Lords included nobles and bishops.
• House of Commons was dominated by gentry, landowners, lawyers, and merchants.
• These elites cared about property, customary rights, and political influence. They feared arbitrary royal power because it threatened all three.

Three tensions kept feeding each other:

• Taxation and lawmaking: could the king rule and raise money without Parliament?
• Religion and power: the Church of England was tied to royal authority, so church disputes were also political disputes.
• The three kingdoms: England, Scotland, and Ireland had different religious systems, which made one-policy-for-all rule dangerous.

The names you need together are James I, Charles I, Oliver Cromwell, James II, and William III and Mary II. This sequence takes you from early Stuart claims of royal authority to civil war, republican rule, restoration, and the Glorious Revolution.

Cromwell, Charles I, and later Stuart monarchs

Why the English Civil War Happened

Political and constitutional causes

James I defended divine-right monarchy. Charles I pushed even harder and worked badly with Parliament.

The Petition of Right in 1628 said the king could not tax without Parliament, imprison people arbitrarily, quarter troops in homes, or use martial law in peacetime. Charles accepted it, then ignored its spirit.

His Personal Rule from 1629 to 1640, often called the Eleven Years’ Tyranny, convinced many that he wanted near-absolutist rule. The clearest example was ship money, a tax traditionally used for coastal defense in emergencies but extended inland during peacetime. John Hampden became the famous resister.

Religious causes

Religion made the constitutional fight feel urgent. Charles married the Catholic Henrietta Maria, and Archbishop William Laud promoted ceremonial Anglican worship that Puritans thought looked too Catholic. Puritans wanted a more thoroughly Protestant church.

Scotland made everything explode. Charles tried to impose Anglican-style worship on Presbyterian Scotland. Scots answered with the National Covenant in 1638, then the Bishops’ Wars forced Charles to recall Parliament because he needed money.

Breakdown into war

1. Short Parliament met in 1640 and was dissolved quickly.
2. Long Parliament attacked royal policies and advisers like Strafford and Laud.
3. The Irish Rebellion of 1641 raised the key question of who controlled the army.
4. In 1642 Charles tried to arrest five members of the Commons.
5. Trust collapsed, and civil war began.

The English Civil War and the Revolutionary Experiment

The war pitted Royalists (Cavaliers) against Parliamentarians (Roundheads). Parliament had major advantages: London, the navy, and richer commercial regions.

English Civil War support in 1642

This map makes those advantages easy to see. Parliament held London and much of the southeast and east, and those resources helped it outlast the king.

Oliver Cromwell helped build the New Model Army, a disciplined professional force. Its victory at Naseby in 1645 destroyed Charles’s main army.

Inside Parliament’s side, people disagreed sharply.

• Presbyterians wanted a more limited settlement.
• Independents backed more religious flexibility.
• Levellers pushed broader male participation, equality before the law, regular elections, and toleration.

The Putney Debates in 1647 show an AP favorite point: even the revolutionaries had limits. England did not become democratic.

The war turned revolutionary in this order:

1. Charles kept negotiating and provoking new conflict.
2. The Second Civil War broke out in 1648.
3. Pride’s Purge removed MPs willing to keep bargaining.
4. The Rump Parliament tried and executed Charles I in 1649.

That regicide was a direct rejection of divine-right monarchy.

Under the Commonwealth and later Protectorate, monarchy and the House of Lords were abolished. Cromwell’s brutal campaigns in Ireland, especially Drogheda and Wexford, mattered a lot. The Instrument of Government made him Lord Protector, but the regime looked more like military rule than stable liberty. The Restoration of Charles II in 1660 showed the republic did not last.

The Glorious Revolution and the Constitutional Settlement

Old tensions returned under Charles II. The Test Acts excluded Catholics from office, and the Exclusion Crisis produced Whigs and Tories.

Under James II, the fear came back fast. He was openly Catholic, kept a standing army, used dispensing power, issued Declarations of Indulgence by royal authority, and lost more support after the Trial of the Seven Bishops. The birth of a Catholic son raised fears of a Catholic dynasty.

The crisis of 1688 moved quickly:

1. William of Orange was invited in.
2. James II fled, and Parliament treated that as abdication.
3. William III and Mary II took the throne.
4. Jacobite resistance continued in Ireland and Scotland.
5. Battle of the Boyne in 1690 helped secure William’s rule.

The settlement mattered more than the invasion itself.

• English Bill of Rights (1689) barred suspending laws, taxation, and a peacetime army without Parliament; it also protected free elections, petitioning, and speech in Parliament.
• Toleration Act (1689) gave limited freedom to Protestant dissenters.
• Act of Settlement (1701) secured Protestant succession.

The result was parliamentary sovereignty and constitutional monarchy.

Why This Topic Matters

The Civil War proved monarchy could be challenged and even overthrown, but Cromwell also proved that getting rid of a king did not automatically create liberty. The lasting defeat of absolutism came with the Glorious Revolution, when monarchy survived but became dependent on Parliament for taxation, law, and army funding.

This still was not democracy. Power stayed with propertied elites. Catholics, women, and most ordinary people remained excluded. England’s importance in AP Euro is that it became the seventeenth-century alternative to absolutist monarchy.