The Glorious Revolution came about largely because of fears concerning the establishment of a Catholic dynasty. James II was Catholic. They were OK with that as long as his daughter Mary (protestant) was in line for the throne. When he had a son who was baptized Catholic, all hell broke loose, and the parliamentary machinations that put William and Mary on the throne were undertaken. If the Glorious Revolution was bloodless, its aftermath wasn’t - the Jacobites would make serious efforts to recover the throne for the next 60 years. The battle of Culloden certainly wasn’t bloodless. It also legitimized repression of Catholics for a long time
It DID underscore the point that parliament had gained enough power to engineer royal succession.
Wasn’t the Army one of the dumping grounds for second & later sons? The oldest son who survived inherited the estate, no matter his intellect. The others could go into the Church, the Navy or a few other professions.
Possibly that was a factor, too. Woodham-Smith was delving into the reasons for the general incompetency of British commanders in the Crimean War, and citing the purchase system to underscore her point. The “too dumb to inherit the estate” remark may not have been hers, specifically, but she did make the point that the purchase system had turned the military into a dumping ground for aristocratic incompetents. Cardigan, one of the prize nincompoops, was the only son in his family. In his case, he inherited the estate anyway.
As a side note, the British system continued to evolve throughout the nineteenth century. The “Rotten Borough” system which had continued giving votes in Parliment to miniscule token districts was abolished by the Reform bill of the 1830’s. The number of people eligible to vote was gradually expanded. And it was as late as 1911 that the veto power of the House of Lords was effectively broken.
Another interesting factor - question to really knowledable history buffs here…
Unlike the French Revolution, which was a revolt against the total system; the English civil war was between parliament and the King, over power to tax etc. (?) with additional religious issues. The nobility was sitting on the sidelines through the whole thing, although obviously quite a few took the King’s side. As a result, it seems there was not the wholesale slaughter and plunder of the upper class. When the parliament proved wholly incompetent and self-serving, the original ruling class was still present and ready to step back in. (If I have this right?) The Return of the King was a collaborative compromise between the two sides.
Well, you wouldnt be the first to consider the Revolution to be a blowback from Absolutism.
P.S: I wonder if many here are not confusing the Parlements of France and the Tiers-Etat (which is the meeting the King was trying to establish and that kind of turned in something much rawer). As I am not that knowledgeable on the state of the Parlement (if there was still one, for example) just prior to the Revolution, I will leave it at that.
It is a lot more complex than that. The “nobility” weren’t separate, they were members of Parliament and really had to choose a side, if only weakly. And Parliament lost the Civil War. The New Model Army purged Parliament and ran the country. Even then you can say it was a faction of the Army, since the radical Levellers were repressed.
Still, while I agree with you about what we’re calling the nobility here, it didn’t take long once the King was out the way for the House of Lords to be closed down, so someone at the time definitely considered them to be part of the problem.
I think it’s worth adding that the republican régime ran the country for over ten years after the war had ended, which is something that people often aren’t aware of. That’s longer than most modern British prime ministers have had in office (albeit that the republican system did suffer from a number of constitutional crises in that time).
md2000:
The Restoration was brought about because, after the old constitution had been swept away, there was no real consensus achieved on what to replace it with; and once Oliver Cromwell died there was no leading figure left capable of either reconciling or bullying the various factions into any sort of cohesive support for the state. Even then, it took an extraordinary move on the part of General Monck to approach Charles I’s son, combined with the latter’s capacity to recognise that a conciliatory approach could pay big personal dividends, for the restoration to come about.
The somewhat ambivalent position of the “nobility” during all this time is perhaps demonstrated by the fact that all the parliamentary-era changes to land ownership were recognised, even by the “Cavalier Parliament”. And although the laws, institutions, and reforms of the republican régime were swept away pretty much as if they had never happened, there was surprisingly little “settling of scores” (beyond the case of the regicides). Even Richard Cromwell was left to potter around his garden in peace!
Certainly the Lords were more inclined to be Royalists and most Parliamentarian Lords were like Essex and Manchester, generally not in the New Model Army Grandee “faction”. The House of Lords was abolished (though Cromwell tried to get it back later on), but by this time a majority of the Commons had also been purged.
Well, I just read some Wikipedia. The parlements were active before the revolution as pockets of resistance against any reform, whether royal or other. This was a natural role, since they were primarily high courts, self-dedicated to guard the legality of new legislation.
I guess my surprise at the modernity of Ancien Regime is because I have interpreted the term too literally. I thought it was something medieval, It seems the was coined by the revolutionaries, history being written by winners and all.
[QUOTE=A. Gwilliam]
The somewhat ambivalent position of the “nobility” during all this time is perhaps demonstrated by the fact that all the parliamentary-era changes to land ownership were recognised, even by the “Cavalier Parliament”.
[/QUOTE]
Well, not all the parliamentary-era changes to land ownership were recognised. The confiscations of the crown lands, episcopal lands, cathedral chapter lands and the lands of several high-profile Royalists were reversed. But, crucially, those were the only permanent confiscations Parliament had ever made in the first place.
What the Long Parliament had instead done was to implement the wholesale temporary confiscation of the estates of most Royalist landowners. They had, where possible, collected the rents from those lands for the duration of the (first) Civil War and then returned them in exchange for large fines. As this was always just a quick way of raising money, it is not too surprising that this made no major difference to the overall pattern of landownership. That had never been the point.
Which nevertheless still left many Royalists pissed off in 1660. What they found so objectional was that neither the Convention nor the Cavalier Parliaments reversed those sales which had been made by some Royalists to pay those fines. So the reversals were indeed more limited than some wanted. The real story however was that a substantial proportion of all land in England had changed hands during the 1640s and the 1650s; it was just that most of it ended up back in the hands of the original owners.
[QUOTE=A. Gwilliam]
Even Richard Cromwell was left to potter around his garden in peace!
[/QUOTE]
Except that, for the first two decades after 1660, he felt it safer for that garden to be on the Continent. And for a further two decades after his return, he thought it necessary to go to extraordinary lengths to keep his identity a secret.
As for the OP, there is one significant underlying factor none of you has mentioned. Almost uniquely in Europe (including in Scotland and Ireland), famine was pretty much unknown in England after the mid-seventeenth century.
Very few, if any, of the actors in the English Civil War thought that they would end up at their destination when they started on that road. Only after the Second Civil War (short and sharp) did it become apparent that Charles could not be trusted to keep any promises he might make to Parliament, and mens’ minds turned toward a trial and a new model of state.