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| Regime Change in the 17th Century |
| Thirty years of instability in England |
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C.H.L. George (aeogae)  |
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Published 2006-05-04 05:05 (KST) |
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In Shining a Light on Forgotten Voices I promised to share my PhD findings with OhmyNews readers. But before I go into details, I need to tell you a little bit about 17th-century England.
My work focuses on the period between 1660 and 1714, when England was ruled by the Stuart family. Stories of England's kings and queens might seem old-fashioned nowadays. We tend to prefer looking at how ordinary men, women and children lived.
However, an interest in the comings and goings of the Stuart family shouldn't be dismissed as elitist history. Their sex lives and fertility problems, their religious convictions and posturings, and other personal foibles had an enormous impact not only on their own fates--sometimes leading to political exile or even violent death--but also on that of the general population, because the monarch was the center of power.
Charles II, who ruled between 1660 and 1685, is best remembered for his mistresses.
His affairs often lasted for years, and they were not at all secret. His mistresses were strong women who occupied prominent social positions at the royal court. Their children received titles and married into England's most powerful families.
Somewhat ironically Princess Diana and her successor as wife to Prince Charles, Camilla, now the Duchess of Cornwall, are both descended from rival mistresses of the 17th-century Charles.
Charles II married Catherine of Braganza in 1662, but they had no children. Consequently the throne was inherited by his brother, James II, in 1685.
I always imagine James as being oafish and unpleasant next to the dark-eyed charm of his roguish older brother. I suspect that I have been reading too many historical romances. Charles II is a particularly popular figure with British romantic novelists and half the female historians I know are in love with him.
James II was married twice. His eldest child, Mary, from his first marriage, was partly or nominally responsible for turfing him off the throne in 1688, as we shall see.
James' problem was that he was very publicly Catholic, while the country he ruled was politically Protestant.
Traditional histories will tell you that when James II came to the throne in 1685, Englishmen and women were proud Protestants and associated Catholicism with enemy countries such as France and Spain.
This is not the entire picture. There was a sizeable English Catholic community, particularly in the North, and it is not really known what the general population felt about the Church.
However, the fact that printers in London frequently produced anti-Catholic texts and pictures shows that there was definitely a market for it.
In the early 1680s, moreover, there was a long-running campaign to exclude James from the royal succession because of his religious beliefs.
At a parliamentary level this was orchestrated by England's elite social groups, the gentry and the aristocracy, but there was also rioting in the street.
Despite all this, James was fairly popular at the start of his reign. Things only began to go wrong when he attempted to grant religious freedoms to Catholics and to radical Protestants who worshipped outside the state church.
James's opponents invited his son-in-law, the Dutchman William of Orange, to England to force the king to change his policies.
They perhaps never intended to replace James with William; they simply wanted to teach him a lesson. Yet the arrival of the Dutchman, who thought fit to bring along an invasion force in 1688, did lead to a regime change. After some toing-and-froing James fled the country, leaving the throne apparently empty.
There are those who say that James did it because he did not want to suffer the same fate as his father, Charles I.
The small and rather delicately built Charles I had his head chopped off in 1649 after two civil wars between his supporters and the English parliament.
James must have been deeply affected by these events, so I would not be surprised if this was why he made things so easy for William. However, the story did not end there. Once in exile, James continued to fight for his crown, and even his grandson, the famous "Bonnie Prince Charlie," had a great many supporters when he attempted to claim the throne in the mid-18th century.
William III and his wife, Mary II, were first cousins, both sharing Charles I as a grandfather. As James II's daughter, Mary had a stronger claim to the throne, but she insisted on joint rule, with her husband in charge of the government.
After Mary's death in 1694, William continued as sole ruler until the end of his life.
Mary was far more popular than William, who was somewhat dour and deficient of charm. He was also distrusted because, although a Protestant, he was not a member of the Church of England.
It was therefore with a sigh of relief that the Anglican establishment greeted the accession of Mary's sister, Anne. in 1702. She was devoted to the Church of England and her reign looked as if it might be the start of a new period of stability.
Yet it was not to be.
Anne was the last of the Stuart monarchs. She suffered through 18 pregnancies, and of the five children that were born alive, none reached adulthood.
Much of her rule was dominated by the need to secure support for her designated successor, a distant cousin called Sophia who lived in the small German electorate of Hanover.
Many people said that James II's son, who styled himself James III, would have been a far more suitable heir. Some even tried to persuade him to convert to Protestantism so that he could take the throne without opposition, but he was such a devout Catholic that he refused.
Instead James led a failed rebellion against Anne's successor, George I, in 1715.
Princess Sophia had died just a few weeks before Anne in 1714, after greatly looking forward to becoming Queen of England.
From the early 1680s onwards the royal succession was never entirely certain. First James' right to the throne was in dispute, then there were those who doubted the legitimacy of William and Mary, and finally there were the fears over who would succeed Anne.
The old idea, strenuously put forward by Charles I, was that the monarch was appointed by God and that no man had the right to dispute this idea.
The fact that the royal succession was debated and legislated in parliament and other political arenas over a period of 30 years, may have made many Englishmen and women realize that monarchy could be regularly interfered with by earthly powers.
Charles I's execution and the subsequent years of republican rule before Charles II became king in 1660, had seemed acceptable to some, but a seriously abhorrent perversion of the natural order to many others.
Perhaps the instability of the final 30 years of Stuart rule softened historical memory and thus made the regicide and republic slightly less repugnant to those who had shuddered at the very idea of it.
In my next article I will be looking at the lives of ordinary men and women in Stuart England. My aim as always is to provide background for a later article on my PhD findings.
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| This article is part of a series. |
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©2006 OhmyNews
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