NEW TIMES OF THE UNITED KINGDOM

The Stuarts. The Crown and Parliament.

In 1603 Queen Elizabeth I died. The Crown passed to a distant relative, James VI
of Scotland, a member of the Stuart family. He became James I of England. The
Stuart monarchs were less successful than the Tudors. They quarrelled with
Parliament and this resulted in civil war. One of the Stuarts was executed. Another
Stuart king was driven from the throne. When the last Stuart, Queen Anne, died in
1714, the monarchy was no longer absolutely powerful as it had been in the Tudor
times.

These important changes were the result of basic changes in society. During the
17th century economic power moved into the hands of the merchant and
landowning farmer classes. The Crown could no longer raise money or govern
without their cooperation. The religious situation was also not simple. There
were people in the country who disagreed with the teaching of the Church of
England. They said that the services of the Church of England had become too
complicated and too rich. They wanted to make the Church of England more
modest, to purify it. These people were called Puritans.

When James I died in 1625, his son Charles I became king. He held the same
beliefs about the monarchy as his father. In 1629 Charles I dismissed the
Parliament. In 1642 civil war broke out between the Crown and Parliament.
Those who backed the Crown were called Royalists or Cavaliers. They were
mostly wealthy Roman Catholics. Those who backed Parliament were called
Roundheads because they wore their hair short. They were mostly middle and
lower-class Puritans.

Oliver Cromwell, a Puritan leader, who backed Parliament set up a New Model
Army. In 1649, the New Model Army defeated the King’s army and ended the war.
Cromwell and his supporters put Charles I on trial and, in 1649, beheaded him.
Cromwell took over the rule of England, now called the Commonwealth.

He finally did away with parliament and governed as a military dictator for the
Puritan minority. Many Puritans were very strict. They disapproved of dancing,
theatre-going, sports, and other popular amusements. They believed that people
should spend all their free time praying and reading the Bible. After Cromwell
died, his son Richard took over. But by 1660 Parliament decided that England
needed a monarch again. The choice was Charles II, Charles I’s son, who lived in
France.

The first Political Parties

The first political parties in Britain appeared in Charles II’ s reign. One of these
parties was a group of MPs who became known as Whigs, a rude name for cattle
drivers. The Whigs were afraid of an absolute monarchy and of the Catholic faith
with which they connected it. They also wanted to have no regular army. The other
party, which opposed the Whigs, was nicknamed Tories, which is an Irish name
for thieves. The Tories, who were natural inheritors of the Royalists, supported the
Crown and the Church. These two parties became the basis of Britain’s two-party
parliamentary system of government.

The War with Napoleon.

One by one the European countries were defeated by Napoleon, until at last most
of Europe fell under his control. In 1793, after Napoleon’s army invaded Belgium
and Holland, Britain went to war.

Britain decided to fight France at sea because it had a stronger navy and because its
own survival depended on control of its trade routes. The commander of the British
fleet, Admiral Horatio Nelson, won brilliant victories over the French navy, near
the coast of Egypt, at Copenhagen, and finally near Spain, at Trafalgar in 1805,
where he destroyed the French-Spanish fleet. Nelson was himself killed at
Trafalgar, but became one of Britain’s greatest national heroes.
The Age of Power and Prosperity.

In the 19th century Britain was more powerful and self-confident than ever. As a
result of the industrial revolution, 19th - century Britain was the “workshop of the
world”. British factories were producing more than any other country in the world.
Having many colonies, Britain controlled large areas of the world. The British had
a strong feeling of their importance.

The rapid growth of the middle class caused a change in the political balance. The
role played by the middle class in politics and government was increasingly
growing. By 1914 the aristocracy and the Crown had little power left. At the
beginning of the 20th century Britain was still one of the greatest world powers. In
the middle of the century, although it was still one of the “Big Three”, it was
considerably weaker than the USA or the USSR. By the end of the 1970s Britain
was just an ordinary country, and economically poorer than a number of other
European countries.

One of the reason for Britain’s decline in the 20th century was the cost of two
world wars. Another reason was that Britain could not spend as much money on
developing its industry as other industrial nations did: at first it needed a lot of
money for keeping up the empire, and when the empire fell apart, as much money
was needed to solve numerous economic problems connected with maintaining
friendly relations within the British Commonwealth of Nations.