A quarrel over money, war and religion

Charles I came to the throne in 1625, believing in the divine right of kings. Almost at once he collided with Parliament over three things that would recur for a century:

• Finance: Parliament granted Charles the customs duties tonnage and poundage for one year only, not for life. Expensive, failed wars against Spain and France (led by the unpopular Duke of Buckingham) left the King desperate for money and willing to raise it without consent — the Forced Loan of 1626-27.
• Liberty: when gentlemen refused the loan, some were imprisoned. The Five Knights' Case (1627) raised the question of whether the King could jail subjects without showing cause.
• Religion: Charles favoured Arminian clergy who stressed ceremony and the authority of bishops. To many Protestants this looked like a drift back towards Catholicism.

The Petition of Right (1628) was Parliament's response: no taxation without parliamentary consent, no imprisonment without cause shown, no billeting of soldiers on civilians, and no martial law in peacetime. Charles accepted it, then largely ignored it.

What did the Petition demand?

The eleven years without Parliament

In 1629 Charles dissolved Parliament and ruled alone for eleven years — the Personal Rule, or, to its enemies, the Eleven Years' Tyranny. To govern without parliamentary taxation he revived old feudal levies:

• Ship Money: a tax traditionally paid by coastal towns for the navy, now extended inland and levied year after year. In 1637 the courts backed the King in Hampden's Case — but only narrowly (7 judges to 5), and the tax bred deep resentment.
• Religion: Archbishop William Laud enforced ceremonial uniformity and moved communion tables to the east end like altars. Puritans saw persecution; critics such as Prynne, Burton and Bastwick were mutilated in the pillory (1637).
• The trigger: Laud's attempt to impose a new Prayer Book on Scotland (1637) provoked riots and the Bishops' Wars (1639-40). Defeated and bankrupt, Charles was forced to recall Parliament.

Why it matters: the Personal Rule shows the system could function without Parliament in peacetime — but not in war. It was war with the Scots, not a grand constitutional principle, that broke it.

Why did the Personal Rule collapse?

From reform to war to the scaffold

The Long Parliament (from November 1640) dismantled the machinery of Personal Rule: it executed the King's minister Strafford (1641), abolished Ship Money and the prerogative courts, and passed the Triennial Act. But reform split into revolution:

• The Irish Rebellion (October 1641) and the Grand Remonstrance (1641) forced the question of who should control the army — the crown or Parliament.
• Charles's failed attempt to arrest the Five Members (January 1642) destroyed trust. He raised his standard at Nottingham on 22 August 1642.
• The First Civil War (1642-46) turned on Parliament's alliance with the Scots and the New Model Army. Victories at Marston Moor (1644) and decisively at Naseby (1645) broke the royalist cause.
• After a Second Civil War (1648), the army purged Parliament (Pride's Purge) and put the King on trial. Charles I was executed on 30 January 1649 — an event without precedent in English history.

Which phase of the crisis?

Tap an event, then the period it belongs to.

Commonwealth and Protectorate

England was declared a Commonwealth — a republic without king or House of Lords — governed by the Rump of the Long Parliament. Real power lay with the New Model Army and its outstanding soldier, Oliver Cromwell.

• Cromwell crushed resistance in Ireland (the storming of Drogheda, 1649) and Scotland, and defeated Charles II's invasion at Worcester (1651).
• Frustrated by the Rump, Cromwell expelled it by force in 1653. After the failed experiment of the nominated Barebones Parliament, he was made Lord Protector in December 1653 under a written constitution, the Instrument of Government.
• The Protectorate brought the rule of the Major-Generals (1655-57) and godly reformation, but never solved the problem of legitimacy. When Cromwell died on 3 September 1658, his son Richard could not hold the regime together.

The paradox of the republic: it had killed a king in the name of Parliament, yet governed through the army and a Lord Protector who was king in all but name. This is why many contemporaries welcomed a return to monarchy in 1660.

What was the Protectorate?

Restoration, and the road to 1688

In 1660, on the terms of the Declaration of Breda, Charles II was restored. But the old questions returned:

• Religion and dissent: the Clarendon Code persecuted Protestant nonconformists. Fear of Catholicism remained the great fault-line of politics.
• The Exclusion Crisis (1679-81): when it became clear Charles's heir was his Catholic brother James, a movement to exclude him from the succession split the nation. Out of this quarrel came the first true political parties — the Whigs (for exclusion) and the Tories (for the hereditary line).
• James II (from 1685): a Catholic king who defeated the Monmouth Rebellion (1685), then alarmed the political nation by promoting Catholics, issuing a Declaration of Indulgence, and prosecuting the Seven Bishops (1688). The birth of a Catholic son in June 1688 raised the spectre of a permanent Catholic dynasty.

Was there an English Revolution?

Paper 1 Section C gives you two extracts from historians and asks how convincing each is. For 1C, the great debate is over the causes and nature of the mid-century crisis:

The Whig view saw a long, almost inevitable march towards parliamentary liberty and constitutional monarchy. The Marxist view, above all Christopher Hill (The English Revolution 1640), read events as a bourgeois revolution driven by deep social and economic change. The revisionists — Conrad Russell and John Morrill — rejected both: they stressed contingency, accident and short-term failures, the problem of ruling three kingdoms (England, Scotland, Ireland), and above all religion. Morrill argued the civil war was the last of the wars of religion, not the first modern revolution.

Exam skill: do not label an extract merely as biased. Place its argument on this map, then test it against precise evidence — Ship Money, the Scottish Prayer Book, the New Model Army — and judge how far it convinces.

Interpretation to historian

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

The Glorious Revolution and its settlement

In 1688 leading politicians invited William of Orange, James's Protestant son-in-law, to intervene. William landed at Torbay on 5 November 1688; James's support melted away and he fled to France. A Convention Parliament declared the throne vacant and offered it jointly to William III and Mary II in 1689.

• The Bill of Rights (1689) barred Catholics from the throne, banned a standing army and taxation without Parliament's consent, and guaranteed free elections and frequent Parliaments. Sovereignty now lay with the Crown-in-Parliament, not the crown alone.
• The Toleration Act (1689) granted freedom of worship to Protestant dissenters (though not full civil equality).
• The Triennial Act (1694) guaranteed regular Parliaments; the founding of the Bank of England (1694) tied the state's finances to Parliament; and the Act of Settlement (1701) secured a Protestant succession.

The end-point: by 1701 England had a limited, parliamentary monarchy. The century-long question of where power lay had been answered - not by the crown, and not by a republic, but by the Crown ruling with and through Parliament.

Reading a revisionist

Build the spine of the option

Tap the events in chronological order, earliest first.

How Paper 1 is assessed

Edexcel Paper 1 (option 1C): 2 hours 15 minutes, 60 marks, 30% of the A-level.

• Section A and Section B (AO1): a choice of essays testing your understanding of change across the period in breadth.
• Section C (AO3): one compulsory question on two historians' interpretations — analyse and evaluate how convincing each is, using your own knowledge.

Note: at Edexcel it is Paper 1 (and the Coursework) that examines historians' interpretations (AO3). Primary sources (AO2) belong to Paper 2 and Paper 3.

What did 1689 settle?

The big ideas to carry into the exam

You now have the arc of option 1C and the debate that defines its Section C. Press Finish to see your score.