Divine right, debt and management

James VI of Scotland became James I of England in 1603. He was a serious theorist of divine-right monarchy — and he inherited Elizabeth's debts and her unresolved religious tensions.

• Religion: the Millenary Petition (1603) produced the Hampton Court Conference (1604). Puritans gained little beyond the new Bible translation (the Authorised Version, 1611). The Gunpowder Plot (5 November 1605) hardened anti-Catholic feeling for a century.
• Finance: the Great Contract (1610) — exchanging feudal dues for a fixed parliamentary income — failed, leaving the Crown dependent on impositions, wardship and the sale of honours. The Addled Parliament (1614) passed nothing.
• Favourites: George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham monopolised patronage and, after the humiliating failure of the Spanish Match (1623), dragged England into war.

Do not read Jacobean politics backwards from 1642. Revisionists insist that James's parliaments were occasional events, not a standing opposition, and that conflict was usually about money and management. If you assume an inevitable slide, you will misread every source you are given.

Why finance became constitutional

War, taxation and the Petition of Right

Charles I succeeded in 1625. Within four years he had lost the confidence of his parliaments.

• War and money: failed expeditions to Cádiz (1625) and the Île de Ré (1627) were financed by the Forced Loan (1626–27). The Five Knights' Case (1627) established that men could be imprisoned without stated cause on the king's command — an alarming precedent.
• The Petition of Right (1628) condemned non-parliamentary taxation, arbitrary imprisonment, billeting and martial law. Charles accepted it and then, in practice, disregarded much of it.
• Religion: Charles's promotion of Arminians — anti-Calvinist, ceremonialist clergy — convinced many Protestants that the Church was being steered back towards Rome.
• 1629: the Commons held the Speaker in his chair to pass the Three Resolutions against innovation in religion and tonnage and poundage. Charles dissolved Parliament and did not call another for eleven years.

Eleven years without Parliament

Whether the 1630s were a tyranny or a period of competent government is the great interpretative question of this unit.

• Finance without Parliament: distraint of knighthood, forest fines, monopolies, and above all ship money — traditionally a coastal levy, extended inland from 1635. In Hampden's Case (1637) the judges upheld it, but only by 7 to 5 — hardly a ringing endorsement, and refusal spread.
• Laudianism: Archbishop William Laud (from 1633) enforced ceremonial uniformity — altars railed at the east end, the beauty of holiness. To Puritans this was popery by instalments. Prynne, Burton and Bastwick were mutilated in 1637 for saying so.
• The British problem: the imposition of a new Prayer Book on Scotland in 1637 provoked riot, the National Covenant (1638), and the Bishops' Wars (1639 and 1640). Charles could not pay for a war, so he had to recall Parliament.

Kevin Sharpe's The Personal Rule of Charles I (1992) argued the 1630s were peaceful, orderly and reasonably popular — that the crisis came from Scotland, not from English constitutional discontent. That is a direct assault on the Whig narrative of an inevitable slide, and any source you meet from the 1630s must be read with the question: is this evidence of deep grievance, or of ordinary grumbling?

Ship money and its meaning

Why war, and why then?

Two parliaments in 1640: the Short (April–May) and the Long (from November). The Long Parliament initially united in dismantling the Personal Rule.

• 1641 reforms: the Triennial Act; the abolition of Star Chamber and High Commission; the declaration that ship money was illegal; the attainder and execution of Strafford (May 1641).
• The split: unity broke over religion and over trust. The Irish Rebellion (October 1641) made an army necessary — and nobody would trust Charles with it. The Grand Remonstrance (November 1641), a catalogue of grievances, passed by just 159 votes to 148: the House was now split in two.
• The point of no return: in January 1642 Charles entered the Commons to arrest the Five Members. They had gone. He had proved that he could not be trusted and could not be feared. He left London; war began in August 1642.

The examinable structure of causation: long-term (finance, religion, the multiple kingdoms), medium-term (the Personal Rule, Laudianism, Scotland), short-term (the Irish Rebellion, the militia, the Five Members). Rank them — and be able to say what would have had to be different for war to be avoided.

Which phase?

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

From Edgehill to the scaffold

Parliament won because it could pay and because it built a professional army.

• Resources: Parliament held London, the navy, the customs and the wealthiest counties. The Solemn League and Covenant (1643) brought in the Scots.
• The New Model Army (1645), and the decisive victory at Naseby (14 June 1645), where the capture of Charles's correspondence also destroyed his credibility.
• Radicalisation: the Levellers; the Putney Debates (autumn 1647), in which soldiers argued about who should have a voice in choosing a government — a question not settled for centuries.
• The Second Civil War (1648) convinced the army that Charles was incorrigible. Pride's Purge (December 1648) removed the MPs who would still negotiate; the Rump tried him. He was executed on 30 January 1649; monarchy and the Lords were abolished.

Regicide was not a plan; it was an outcome. Very few in 1642 wanted a republic. Explaining how a war fought in the king's name ended with the king's head is one of the great essay questions of this unit.

Commonwealth, Protectorate, Restoration

Eleven years of experiment, and not one settlement that could be defended without an army.

• The Commonwealth (1649–1653): Cromwell's brutal campaigns in Ireland (Drogheda and Wexford, 1649) and victory in Scotland (Dunbar 1650, Worcester 1651). Cromwell dissolved the Rump by force in April 1653.
• The Protectorate (1653–1658): the Instrument of Government (1653) — the only written constitution in English history. The rule of the Major-Generals (1655–57) was widely resented. In 1657 Cromwell was offered the crown and refused it; he died on 3 September 1658.
• Collapse: Richard Cromwell could not hold the army. General Monck marched south, the Long Parliament was recalled, and Charles II returned in 1660 on the terms of the Declaration of Breda.

The judgement to argue: every republican regime failed for the same reason — none could combine legitimacy with consent. Power rested on the army; the army was hated and expensive; and once Cromwell's personal authority was gone, nothing held. Say that, evidence it across 1649, 1653 and 1657, and you are arguing rather than narrating.

Why the republic failed

Build the Stuart spine

Tap the events in chronological order, earliest first.

Whig, Marxist, revisionist, post-revisionist

This is the most heavily contested field in English history. Placing an extract or a source in the right tradition is half the battle.

Test, don't recite: Morrill's religious reading is strong — the Grand Remonstrance split the House on broadly religious lines. But ship money and Strafford were not religious grievances. Naming that tension is the analysis.

Interpretation → historian

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

The enquiry and the essay

OCR Unit Group 1: 1 hour 30 minutes, 50 marks, 25% — a source-based enquiry and a period-study essay.

• Enquiry sources in this unit are ferociously partisan — parliamentary declarations, royal proclamations, newsbooks, sermons, Clarendon's later history. That is a feature, not a bug: a Royalist newsbook of 1643 is superb evidence for what Royalists needed people to believe, and that is a historical fact worth having.
• Never write 'this source is biased.' Write instead: who produced it, when, for whom, to what end, and what does my knowledge tell me it is getting wrong or leaving out?
• In the essay, take a position on causation and hold it. 'How far was Charles I responsible for the outbreak of civil war?' requires you to weigh the king against structures, against Scotland, against religion — and then to decide.

Why Parliament won the war

The world turned upside down

The collapse of censorship in 1641 and of church discipline in the 1640s produced an explosion of religious and political ideas that terrified the very men who had made the revolution.

• Print: pamphlets and newsbooks in unprecedented numbers. For the first time, national political argument reached a mass audience.
• Sects: Baptists, Quakers (from the 1650s), Ranters, Fifth Monarchists — and the Diggers, who in 1649 began cultivating common land at St George's Hill on the argument that the earth was a common treasury.
• The Levellers pressed for a wide male franchise and a written constitution — the Agreement of the People, debated at Putney in 1647. Cromwell and Ireton resisted precisely because they saw where an argument from natural right must lead: to the propertyless voting.
• Political thought: Hobbes's Leviathan (1651) is a direct response to this chaos — order at any price.

This is Christopher Hill's territory. The World Turned Upside Down (1972) recovered these radicals and argued they represented a genuine alternative revolution, defeated by the propertied men who had won the war. Critics reply that the sects were small, and that Hill mistook a noisy fringe for a movement. Both positions are arguable — which is what makes it an excellent essay question.

Why Putney matters

The big ideas to carry into the exam

You now have the whole of OCR's Early Stuarts unit and the historiography that surrounds it. Press Finish to see your score.