A century, six key questions

Like every AQA breadth study, 1D is organised around key questions that run across the whole period, not a narrative:

• How far did the monarchy change?
• To what extent, and why, did relations between Crown and Parliament change?
• Why, and with what results, were there disputes over religion?
• Why, and with what results, was there economic and social change?
• How important were ideas and ideology?
• How important was the role of key individuals and groups?

The Stuart trap: students narrate the Civil War and stop. But half the marks live after 1649 — the Interregnum, the Restoration settlement, Exclusion, 1688 and the constitutional settlement of the 1690s. Do not run out of road.

A Scottish king and an English Parliament

James VI of Scotland became James I of England in 1603, uniting the crowns but not the kingdoms. He was an intellectual theorist of divine-right monarchy — and an inheritor of Elizabeth's debts.

• Religion: the Millenary Petition (1603) from moderate Puritans led to the Hampton Court Conference (1604), which yielded the King James Bible (1611) but little reform. The Gunpowder Plot (5 November 1605) hardened anti-Catholicism.
• Finance: the Great Contract (1610) — a proposal to trade feudal dues for a fixed annual income — collapsed, leaving the Crown reliant on impositions, wardship and the sale of titles. The Addled Parliament (1614) passed no legislation at all.
• Favourites: George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, monopolised patronage; the failed Spanish Match (Charles and Buckingham's Madrid journey, 1623) turned him briefly popular and then toxic.

Revisionist point worth borrowing: Jacobean conflict was mostly about money and management, not an inevitable constitutional collision. Conrad Russell argued that Parliaments were occasional events, not a permanent opposition institution. Treat 1603–25 as functional, not doomed.

Why James I stayed poor

Personal Rule and the road to war

Charles I succeeded in 1625. His combination of Arminian churchmanship, fiscal expedients and an inability to explain himself produced breakdown.

• Petition of Right (1628): Parliament condemned forced loans, arbitrary imprisonment and billeting. Buckingham was assassinated later that year.
• The Personal Rule, 1629–1640: eleven years without Parliament. Revenue came from ship money — extended to inland counties, and challenged in Hampden's Case (1637), which the Crown won only narrowly (7–5). Archbishop Laud's ceremonial reforms convinced many that a popish plot was under way.
• The British problem: imposing a new Prayer Book on Scotland (1637) triggered the National Covenant (1638) and the Bishops' Wars (1639–40). Defeat forced Charles to recall Parliament: the Short Parliament (April 1640) and the Long Parliament (November 1640).
• 1641: the Triennial Act, the execution of Strafford (May), the Irish Rebellion (October), the Grand Remonstrance (passed by 159–148 in November). In January 1642 Charles tried to arrest the Five Members and lost London. War began in August 1642.

Interpretation alert. Kevin Sharpe's The Personal Rule of Charles I (1992) argued the 1630s were a period of competent, popular government, not a tyranny in slow collapse — and that the crisis came from Scotland, not from English constitutional grievance. John Morrill called the conflict 'the last of the wars of religion'. Both directly attack the older Whig narrative of an inevitable slide.

The trigger from the north

From Naseby to the Protectorate

The wars destroyed the king; they did not produce a settlement.

• New Model Army (1645) and the crushing parliamentary victory at Naseby, 14 June 1645.
• Radicalisation: the Levellers and the Putney Debates (autumn 1647) raised questions about the franchise and the basis of political authority that would not be answered for centuries.
• Pride's Purge (December 1648) removed MPs who would still treat with the king. The Rump tried Charles I and executed him on 30 January 1649. Monarchy and the House of Lords were abolished.
• Commonwealth (1649–1653): Cromwell's campaigns in Ireland (Drogheda and Wexford, 1649) and Scotland (Dunbar 1650, Worcester 1651).
• The Protectorate (1653–1658) under the Instrument of Government — England's only written constitution. The Major-Generals (1655–57) were deeply unpopular; Cromwell refused the crown in 1657 and died on 3 September 1658.

Key breadth insight: every republican experiment failed for the same reason — none could combine legitimacy with consent. That sentence, evidenced, is worth more than three paragraphs of narrative.

Which Stuart moment?

Tap a development, then the phase of the century it belongs to.

The monarchy restored — and then bound

The Restoration of 1660 was a restoration of the old constitution, not of absolute power: the prerogative courts were gone, ship money was gone, and the king needed Parliament for money.

• Charles II (1660–85): the Declaration of Breda promised liberty to tender consciences, but the Cavalier Parliament imposed the Clarendon Code — a persecuting Anglican settlement. The Test Act (1673) excluded Catholics from office.
• The Popish Plot (1678) and the Exclusion Crisis (1679–1681) — the attempt to bar the Catholic James, Duke of York — produced the first recognisable Whig and Tory groupings. Charles rode it out and ruled without Parliament from 1681.
• James II (1685–88) alienated even Tory Anglicans: a standing army, Catholic appointments, the Declaration of Indulgence and the trial of the Seven Bishops (June 1688). The birth of a Catholic son in June 1688 made the crisis dynastic.
• The Glorious Revolution: William of Orange landed at Torbay on 5 November 1688; James fled. The Bill of Rights (1689), the Toleration Act (1689), the Triennial Act (1694) and the Act of Settlement (1701) made the monarchy parliamentary and Protestant by statute.

Was 1688 'glorious'? The Whig tradition said a bloodless, conservative rescue of ancient liberties. Others emphasise the Dutch invasion (a fleet several times the size of the Armada), the violence in Ireland and Scotland, and the fiscal-military state that followed. 'Glorious' is a claim, not a description — say so.

What 1689 actually settled

The Stuart spine

Tap the events in chronological order, earliest first.

Whig, Marxist, revisionist, post-revisionist

No period of English history has been fought over harder. Know the camps.

How examiners want you to use this: not as decoration. If an extract is arguing that religion was the driver, name Morrill's case, then test it: the Grand Remonstrance passed by 11 votes on a broadly religious split — but ship money and Strafford were not religious grievances. Evidence, then judgement.

Interpretation → historian

Tap an argument on the left, then the historian most associated with it.

Handling an extract

The strands students forget

The 25-mark essays sample all the key questions — including the ones most classes rush.

• Ideas: divine right; the ancient constitution and common-law argument; Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651) and John Locke's Two Treatises of Government (published 1689) — political theory born from this crisis.
• Print and politics: the collapse of censorship after 1641 produced an explosion of pamphlets and newsbooks — a genuinely new political public.
• Religion: the failure to build a comprehensive Church created permanent Dissent; the 1689 Toleration Act conceded worship but not civil equality.
• Economy and state: the wars of the 1690s built the fiscal-military state — the Bank of England (1694), the national debt, and a level of taxation the early Stuarts could only dream of. The irony is exact: Parliament made the state stronger than any Stuart king had managed.

The paradox of 1688

The 2h30 breadth paper

AQA Component 1: 80 marks, 2 hours 30 minutes, 40% of the A-level.

• Section A (30 marks): one compulsory question on three primary sources, judged for their value to a stated enquiry. The discriminator is contextual knowledge: what does a Royalist newsbook of 1642 know, not know, and want you to think?
• Sections B and C (25 marks each): two essays from three. Always a judgement.

The 1D-specific warning: essays often span either side of 1660. Practise answering 'How far had the power of the monarchy changed in the years 1603 to 1702?' — you must be able to move confidently from James I to the Act of Settlement in one argument.

The Interregnum's real lesson

England was never the whole story

The clue is in the option title: Stuart Britain. Answers that stay inside England are answering half the question.

• Scotland forced the crisis: the Prayer Book of 1637, the National Covenant (1638), and the Bishops' Wars (1639–40) bankrupted Charles and compelled him to recall Parliament.
• Ireland made settlement impossible: the Rebellion of October 1641 required an army, and the question of who would command it destroyed the last chance of compromise. Cromwell's campaign of 1649 — Drogheda and Wexford — left a bitterness that shaped Anglo-Irish politics for centuries.
• Union and its failure: James I's hopes of a full union were rejected in 1607; Cromwell imposed one by force in the 1650s; it was undone at the Restoration and only achieved by treaty in 1707.

Conrad Russell's insight in one sentence: Charles I ruled three kingdoms with three churches and tried to govern them as one. The multiple-kingdom problem is not background — it is the mechanism.

The big ideas to carry into the exam

You now hold the whole arc of AQA 1D and the debate that surrounds it. Press Finish to see your score.