Early modern Britain

• 1. Introduction

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  Early modern Britain, meaning the island of Great Britain across roughly the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, fought almost without pause. From 1700 to 1850 alone, the country was drawn into 137 wars or rebellions, and apart from one famous defeat it generally came out ahead. This documentary asks how a realm that spent much of the 17th century turned against itself came to command trade routes around the globe. It asks how two separate kingdoms, each with its own government, ended up under a single crown and then a single legislature. And it asks who paid, in money and in human lives, for the prosperity that followed.

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• 2. Tudor Power

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  In 1485 Henry Tudor was crowned after his victory at the battle of Bosworth Field. Some scholars date the start of early modern Britain to that moment. His win closed the Wars of the Roses, which had claimed an estimated 105,000 lives. Henry VII's reign was largely peaceful, and that calm gave art and commerce room to thrive. England would not see a major war on its own soil again until the English Civil War of the 17th century.

  Gunpowder helps explain what Henry VII and his son Henry VIII were riding. Across the continent, new technologies such as gunpowder, together with social and ideological shifts, were wearing down the feudal nobility and strengthening the sovereign. The two Tudor kings greatly increased the power of the English monarchy in the same way. Henry VIII went further by turning the Protestant Reformation against the Roman Catholic Church. He confiscated the property of the monasteries and declared himself head of the new Anglican Church.

  The Star Chamber was the most notable new institution of a Tudor state that grew centralized and rationalized. A bureaucracy took shape, and educated officials now ran and managed the government.

  The divine right of kings gave the monarch's new power a basis in principle. James I, a later king, became a major champion of the idea and wrote extensively on it.

  Money had become central to the work of government, and the forces that weakened the old aristocracy lifted the commercial classes. Their growing wealth gave them great power, yet the structure of government did not reflect it. That mismatch would feed a long contest between monarch and parliament throughout the 17th century.

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• 3. Elizabeth's Golden Age

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  William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson are the best-known names of what many historians call the English Renaissance. The label describes a cultural movement of the 16th and 17th centuries, heavily influenced by the Italian Renaissance. It brought a flowering of English music, especially the English adoption and development of the madrigal. Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene stands as the most famous English epic poem of the age. Under Elizabeth I, who reigned from 1558 to 1603, Shakespeare and others wrote plays that broke away from England's earlier style of theatre.

  Leonardo, Michelangelo and Donatello sit at the center of a scholarly dispute over that label. Cultural historians have increasingly criticised the idea of an English Renaissance. Some argue it had no real tie to the aims of these northern Italian artists. Others reply that the name matters less than the undeniable artistic flowering under the House of Tudor, which peaked with Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

  The Elizabethan Religious Settlement quieted the quarrel between Protestants and Catholics, at least for a time. Parliament was not yet strong enough to challenge royal absolutism. Historians admire the age partly for its contrasts. It was a brief stretch of largely internal peace, sitting between the English Reformation and the 17th-century struggles over religion and over the powers of crown and parliament.

  England also looked fortunate beside its neighbors. The Italian Renaissance had ended under foreign domination of the peninsula. France was consumed by religious battles that the Edict of Nantes only settled in 1598. The English had been pushed out of their last outposts on the continent, so the centuries-long conflict with France went mostly quiet. At home, the reforms of Henry VII and Henry VIII had left an effective government, and the country began to profit from trans-Atlantic trade.

  Spain was the one great rival. The Anglo-Spanish War of 1585-1604 grew out of skirmishes in Europe and the Americas. Some say it was the first world war, since it was fought on two continents and two oceans, the Atlantic and, just barely, the Pacific. The war would outlast the queen herself by a year.

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• 4. Scotland's Crown and Church

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  The University of St Andrews was founded in 1413, and Glasgow followed in 1450 and Aberdeen in 1495. The Education Act 1496 added to a century of marked advances in Scottish learning. In 1468 James III married Margaret of Denmark and received the Orkney Islands and the Shetland Islands as her dowry, the last great gain of Scottish territory.

  After James III died in 1488, during or after the Battle of Sauchieburn, his successor James IV ended the quasi-independent rule of the Lord of the Isles. For the first time the Western Isles came under effective royal control. In 1503 James IV married Margaret Tudor, the daughter of Henry VII, which laid the foundation for the later Union of the Crowns. His reign is often seen as a cultural flourishing, with the European Renaissance reaching Scotland. He was the last Scottish king known to speak Gaelic.

  A treaty of 1512 extended the Auld Alliance so far that all Scots and French became nationals of each other's countries. France repealed that status only in 1903, and in Scotland it may never have been repealed. A year after the treaty, the alliance proved disastrous. James IV had to invade England to support the French, who were under attack from Henry VIII. At the battle of Flodden the invasion was stopped decisively. The king, many of his nobles and over 10,000 troops were killed. The song The Flooers o' the Forest commemorates the loss, and it echoes the poem Y Gododdin, which mourns a similar tragedy in about 600.

  In 1528 James V escaped from the regents with the help of his redoubtable mother. He set about subduing the rebellious Highlands and the Western and Northern isles, as his father had before him. He married the French noblewoman Mary of Guise. His reign went fairly well until another failed campaign against England ended in defeat at Solway Moss in 1542. He died shortly afterward, and the day before his death he heard that his wife had given birth to a daughter, the future Mary, Queen of Scots. He is supposed to have said in Scots that "it cam wi a lass, it will gang wi a lass," a reference to the House of Stewart, which began when Walter Stewart married the daughter of Robert the Bruce. The Earl of Arran, James Hamilton, became regent.

  Within two years Henry VIII launched the Rough Wooing, a military attempt to force a marriage between the infant Mary and his son Edward. In May 1544 a large English army burnt Edinburgh. After Henry VIII died, forces under the English regent Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset, won the Battle of Pinkie in 1547, the climax of the campaign. They followed it by occupying Haddington. At the age of five Mary was sent to France as the intended bride of the heir to the French throne. Her mother stayed in Scotland to look after the interests of Mary and of France.

  The teachings of Martin Luther, and then of John Calvin, were already reaching Scotland. Patrick Hamilton, influenced by Luther, was executed in 1528. George Wishart, whose ideas were proto-Calvinist, was burnt at the stake for heresy in St Andrews in 1546 by Cardinal Beaton. The executions did nothing to stop the spread of the new ideas, and Beaton was assassinated shortly afterward. A brief civil war in 1559-60 followed, in which English intervention at the siege of Leith on the Protestant side proved decisive. Parliament adopted a Reformed confession of faith in 1560, while Mary was still in France. John Knox, a disciple of both Calvin and Wishart, was the most influential figure. Roman Catholicism survived, remaining strong in parts of the Highlands.

  Mary returned to Scotland after the death of her husband, Francis II of France. She stayed Catholic but tolerated Protestantism, and the Reformation remained somewhat precarious during her reign. After seven years she lost control of Scotland and was held for a time in Lochleven Castle, where she was forced to abdicate. She escaped and tried to regain the throne by force. Defeat at the Battle of Langside in 1568 sent her fleeing to England. There she became a focal point for Catholic conspirators and was eventually executed on the orders of her kinswoman Elizabeth I. Her infant son James VI had been left with regents and, after her deposition in 1567, was raised as a Protestant.

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• 5. From Civil War to Revolution

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  Within eight hours of Elizabeth's death in 1603, James VI of Scotland was proclaimed James I of England in London. The news met no protest or disturbance. One man now ruled two separate kingdoms, each keeping its own government and cabinet, and they stayed distinct until the Acts of Union 1707. Historians name the following years after the kings. The Jacobean era, 1603-1625, denotes a style of architecture, visual arts, decorative arts and literature. The Caroline era, 1625-1642, covers the reign of Charles I over both countries.

  The English Civil War, fought from 1642 to 1651, set Parliamentarians, called Roundheads, against Royalists, called Cavaliers. The first war (1642-1646) and the second (1648-1649) pitted supporters of Charles I against the Long Parliament. The third (1649-1651) set supporters of Charles II against the Rump Parliament. It ended with a Parliamentary victory at the Battle of Worcester on the 3rd of September 1651.

  In 1649 Gerrard Winstanley started the Diggers, who hoped to reform the social order through small egalitarian rural communities built on farming. They were one of several nonconformist dissenting groups to emerge in those years. The war also led to the trial and execution of Charles I, and his son Charles II went into exile. England became first a Commonwealth, from 1649 to 1653, and then a Protectorate, from 1653 to 1659, under the personal rule of Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell's ill-prepared son Richard took over with very little support. The military and religious groups that had backed his father began quarreling with each other.

  In 1660 the remaining members of the Long Parliament turned against the anarchy and confusion that followed Cromwell's death. Many people felt widespread revulsion at the intense moralism and high taxes of the Rule of the Major-Generals in 1657, and nostalgia for royal tradition ran strong. George Monck, a former Cromwell supporter, led the movement for restoration. From Breda in Holland, Charles II issued the Declaration of Breda, promising generosity and a willingness to leave the settlement to Parliament. He landed at Dover amid great enthusiasm on the 26th of May 1660.

  The new Cavalier Parliament passed the Clarendon Code to shore up the re-established Church of England, so that only genuine members of that church could hold office. The Great Plague of London of 1665-66 cost 1000 deaths a day at its worst. The Great Fire of London burned out the main commercial districts and destroyed 13,000 buildings, though few lives were lost.

  In 1670 Charles signed the Secret Treaty of Dover with his first cousin Louis XIV. Louis agreed to aid him in the Third Anglo-Dutch War and to pay him a pension. Charles secretly promised to convert to Catholicism at an unspecified future date, and he did so on his deathbed. In 1672 he tried to introduce religious equality for Catholics and non-Anglican Protestant dissenters through his Royal Declaration of Indulgence. Elite opinion rejected it, and Parliament forced him to withdraw it.

  In 1679 Titus Oates made highly exaggerated revelations of a supposed Popish Plot. They sparked the Exclusion Crisis when it emerged that Charles's brother and heir, James, Duke of York, was a Catholic. The question was whether to bar James from the succession. The crisis produced the first political parties. The Whigs demanded that James never reach the throne. The Tories held that interfering with the legitimate succession went against God's will, and they backed both the king and James. After the failed Rye House Plot of 1683 to murder Charles and James, some Whig leaders were executed or forced into exile. Charles had dissolved Parliament in 1681 and ruled alone until his death on the 6th of February 1685.

  When Charles died, his brother became James II and ruled with Tory support. He pushed a series of highly unpopular proposals to restore Catholicism to England. The Monmouth Rebellion broke out in the west and was brutally suppressed. Elite opinion turned strongly against the king, and in late 1688 the elites invited William III and Mary II to govern. James went into exile in France. William ruled from 1689 to 1702, with Mary as nominal co-ruler until her death in 1694. Through the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the English Bill of Rights, a precedent was set that British monarchs could not govern without the consent of Parliament.

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• 6. Union and Jacobites

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  The 1st of May 1707 is the birthday of the united Kingdom of Great Britain. The parliaments of Scotland and England had each approved the Acts of Union, ratifying the Treaty of Union of 1706. Deeper political integration had been a key policy of Queen Anne, who reigned from 1702 to 1714. Negotiations between the two countries began in earnest in 1706 under the guidance of the Queen and her advisors.

  Months of fierce debate followed in both capitals and across both kingdoms. In Scotland the argument sometimes dissolved into civil disorder, most notably through the notorious Edinburgh Mob. Union was deeply unpopular among ordinary Scots, and talk of an uprising was widespread. Scottish proponents argued that refusing would only bring union on worse terms. The financially disastrous Darien scheme had left the Parliament of Scotland near-bankrupt, and it reluctantly accepted the proposals. Robert Burns later pointed at supposed payoffs to Scottish parliamentarians when he wrote, "We're bought and sold for English gold, Such a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation!" Recent historians have stressed instead that the vote was legitimate.

  Forty-five Scottish Members joined all the existing English Members in the new House of Commons of Great Britain. Sixteen Scottish representative peers joined the existing English peers in the new House of Lords. Anne, already queen of both countries, became the first occupant of the unified British throne.

  James II died in 1701 after spending his last years in France, where he and his son James Francis Edward Stuart claimed to be the legitimate kings. They had the support of Louis XIV and of important elements in England. The main issue was religion, since the Stuarts drew support from Catholic Europe and the Whigs in Britain were staunch opponents of Catholicism. Most Tories refused to back the Jacobites publicly, though there were numerous quiet supporters.

  The Protestant House of Hanover took the throne in 1714 with George I, after the deaths of William III in 1702 and Queen Anne in 1714. The Hanoverians were Germans and not especially popular. An island nation was vulnerable only to a seaborne invasion, which the Jacobites plotted and attempted. The major attempts were the risings of 1715 and 1745. Neither rallied significant popular support, and defeat at the Battle of Culloden in 1746 ended any realistic hope of a Stuart restoration. The historian Basil Williams concludes, "there was never any serious danger to the dynasty."

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• 7. Money and Slavery

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  By the 1720s Britain was among the most prosperous countries in the world, and Daniel Defoe boasted of it. He wrote: "We are the most diligent nation in the world. Vast trade, rich manufactures, mighty wealth, universal correspondence, and happy success have been constant companions of England, and given us the title of an industrious people."

  Other major powers chased territory and the protection of dynasties such as the Habsburgs, the Bourbons and the House of Hohenzollern. Britain had different priorities. Besides guarding the homeland from invasion, its main diplomatic goal was a worldwide trading network for its merchants, manufacturers, shippers and financiers. That required a Royal Navy so powerful that no rival could sweep British ships from the trading routes or invade the British Isles. London also helped the private sector by incorporating many privately financed London companies to open trading posts and import-export businesses abroad. Each received a monopoly over a particular region. The first was the Muscovy Company, set up in 1555 to trade with Russia. The East India Company and the Hudson's Bay Company in Canada were among the other prominent ones.

  British exports soared from £6.5 million in 1700 to £14.7 million in 1760 and £43.2 million in 1800. Britain gained dominance in the trade with India and in the lucrative slave, sugar and commercial trades that began in West Africa and the West Indies. China would be next on the agenda. Only the Netherlands emphasized trade as much as England did.

  The South Sea Bubble was the one major fiasco. The South Sea Company was presented as a trading corporation focused on South America, but its real purpose was to renegotiate government loans of £31 million through market manipulation and speculation. It issued stock four times in 1720, reaching about 8,000 investors. Prices climbed daily from £130 a share to £1,000, and insiders made huge paper profits. The Bubble collapsed overnight and ruined many speculators. Investigations showed that bribes had reached into high places, even to the king. His chief minister Robert Walpole wound it down with minimal political and economic damage, though some losers fled into exile or took their own lives.

  The Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa was set up in 1662 to trade in gold, ivory and slaves. It was reestablished in 1672 as the Royal African Company, which focused on the slave trade. British involvement in the triangular slave trade paid off handsomely in profits. An important result of the Treaty of Utrecht was a larger British role in that trade. Britain secretly negotiated with France for a thirty-year monopoly on the Spanish slave trade, known as the Asiento de Negros. Anne boasted to Parliament of taking the Asiento away from France, and London celebrated her economic coup. She also allowed colonies like Virginia to make laws that promoted black slavery. Most of the trade involved sales to Spanish colonies in the Caribbean and to Mexico, along with sales to British colonies in the Caribbean and North America.

  The historian Vinita Ricks says the agreement allotted Queen Anne "22.5% (and King Philip V, of Spain 28%) of all profits collected for her personal fortune." Ricks concludes that the Queen's "connection to slave trade revenue meant that she was no longer a neutral observer. She had a vested interest in what happened on slave ships." Britain's own sugar islands in the Caribbean, especially Jamaica, Barbados, Nevis and Antigua, supplied a steady flow of profit from slave labor.

  An income tax arrived after 1790, and it capped a longer shift in how war was paid for. Rising costs pushed the government away from royal agricultural estates and special levies toward customs and excise taxes. Taxes rose to about 20% of national income, yet the private sector gained from the growth that followed. The government worked with bankers in the City, raising large loans in wartime and repaying them in peacetime. France and Spain, by contrast, went bankrupt. Britain kept a large and expensive Royal Navy and a small standing army, and when it needed soldiers it hired mercenaries or financed allies. War demand stimulated industry, particularly naval supplies, munitions and textiles.

  Recent historians have taken fresh looks at the growth of state power across the long 18th century, from about 1660 to 1837. Oliver MacDonagh described an expansive, centralized administrative state. Edward Higgs sees the state as an information gatherer, studying local registrars, the census, spies, the surveillance of Catholics and the Poor Laws. He even brings in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, led by Guy Fawkes, and draws similarities to the surveillance society of the 21st century. John Brewer described a powerful, centralized fiscal-military state.

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• 8. Wars and Empire

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  Three Anglo-Dutch Wars were fought between 1652 and 1674, driven by political disputes and growing competition between merchant fleets. Religion played no part, since both sides were Protestant. In the first war (1652-54) Britain held the naval advantage, with larger numbers of more powerful ships of the line and many captured Dutch merchant ships. Dutch naval victories marked the second (1665-67), which cost London ten times more than planned. The king sued for peace with the Treaty of Breda in 1667. In the third (1672-74), Britain counted on a new alliance with France, but the outnumbered Dutch outsailed both. King Charles II ran short of money and political support. The Dutch kept domination of sea trading routes until 1713, while Britain gained New Netherland and renamed it New York.

  Peace with the Netherlands in 1688 meant the two entered the Nine Years' War as allies against France and Spain. The costly land war in Europe forced the Dutch to spend a larger share of their military budget there, which left the English the stronger colonial power. In 1701 England, Portugal and the Netherlands sided with the Holy Roman Empire against Spain and France in the War of the Spanish Succession. The conflict lasted until 1714, and France and Spain lost. Britain gained Newfoundland and Acadia from France, and Gibraltar and Menorca from Spain. Gibraltar is still a British Overseas Territory. It became a critical naval base that let Britain control the Atlantic entrance to the Mediterranean.

  The Seven Years' War began in 1756 and was the first war waged on a global scale. It was fought in Europe, India, North America, the Caribbean, the Philippines and coastal Africa. The Treaty of Paris of 1763 effectively ended France's future as a colonial power in North America, as New France passed to Britain and Louisiana to Spain. Spain also ceded Florida to Britain. In India, France kept its enclaves but under military restrictions, which left the subcontinent's future to Britain. The result made Britain the world's dominant colonial power.

  In the 1760s and 1770s, resentment grew in the Thirteen Colonies because the British Parliament could tax colonists without their consent. Disagreement turned to violence, and the American Revolutionary War began in 1775. The colonists declared independence the following year and, with economic and naval help from France, won in 1783. The Treaties of Versailles also ended the war with the French and Spanish, and the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War ended the following year. Historians treat the loss of the United States, then Britain's most populous colony, as the dividing line between the first and second empires. Britain turned its attention from the Americas to Asia, the Pacific and later Africa.

  Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, had argued that colonies were redundant and that free trade should replace the old mercantilist policies. The growth of trade between Britain and the new United States after 1783 confirmed his view that political control was not needed for economic success.

  For its first century, the British East India Company focused on trade rather than on building an empire. That changed in the 18th century as the Mughal Empire weakened and the Company struggled with its French counterpart, La Compagnie française des Indes orientales, during the Carnatic Wars of the 1740s and 1750s. At the Battle of Plassey, the British under Robert Clive defeated the French and their Indian allies. The Company took control of Bengal and became a major military and political power. In following decades it enlarged its territories, ruling directly or through local puppet rulers under threat of force from an army that was 80% native Indian sepoys.

  In 1770 James Cook became the first European to visit the eastern coast of Australia, on a scientific voyage to the South Pacific. In 1778 his botanist Joseph Banks told the government that Botany Bay was suitable for a penal settlement. The first shipment of convicts sailed in 1787 and arrived in 1788.

  At the threshold of the 19th century, Napoleon's France challenged Britain once more, in a struggle that, unlike earlier wars, pitted the ideologies of two nations against each other. Napoleon threatened to invade Britain itself, which might have meant the fate of the continental countries his armies had overrun. Britain therefore invested large amounts of capital and resources in winning. The Royal Navy blockaded French ports and won a decisive victory over the French fleet at Trafalgar in 1805.

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