On the 12th of July 927, the monarchs of Britain gathered at Eamont Bridge in what is now Cumbria to recognize a single ruler for the first time in history. This was not merely a coronation of a new king, but the birth of a unified political entity known as the Kingdom of England. Before this moment, the island was a fractured landscape of warring petty kingdoms, a chaotic patchwork known as the Heptarchy, which included East Anglia, Mercia, Northumbria, Kent, Essex, Sussex, and Wessex. The man who achieved this unification was Aethelstan, the grandson of Alfred the Great, who had spent decades fighting to hold back the Danish Vikings. Aethelstan did not just inherit a kingdom; he conquered the last remaining Viking stronghold at York, thereby making him the first Anglo-Saxon ruler of the whole of England. The title King of the English, or Rex Anglorum in Latin, was first used to describe him in one of his charters in 928, marking a definitive shift from regional rulers to a sovereign state. This unification was fragile, however, as Northumbria repeatedly changed hands between English kings and Norwegian invaders until it was definitively brought under English control by Eadred in 954. The political unity of England was a complex process that took place over many decades, beginning in 886 when Alfred the Great reoccupied London from the Danish Vikings and adopted the title King of the Anglo-Saxons to reflect his control over both Wessex and western Mercia. This style would go on to be inherited by his son, Edward the Elder, and grandson, Aethelstan, both of whom greatly expanded the authority of the House of Wessex during their respective reigns. The kingdom has remained in political unity ever since that pivotal moment, despite centuries of dynastic struggles and foreign invasions.
The Norman Transformation
The peace of the Anglo-Saxon era shattered on the 28th of September 1066, when William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, landed in Sussex to claim a throne that had been promised to him. The previous king, Harold Godwinson, had just defeated a Norwegian invasion at the Battle of Stamford Bridge on the 25th of September, only to be forced to march his exhausted army south to face the Normans. The armies of Harold and William faced each other at the Battle of Hastings on the 14th of October 1066, where the English army, or Fyrd, was defeated, and Harold and his two brothers were slain. William was crowned on the 25th of December 1066 in Westminster Abbey, London, but he was not planning to absorb the Kingdom into the Duchy of Normandy. As a mere duke, William owed allegiance to Philip I of France, whereas in the independent Kingdom of England he could rule without interference. This conquest led to the transfer of the English capital city and chief royal residence from the Anglo-Saxon one at Winchester to Westminster, and the City of London quickly established itself as England's largest and principal commercial centre. The Normans introduced a new feudal element to the English military, where the king's tenants-in-chief were obligated to provide mounted knights for service in the royal army. The total number of knights owed was called the knight-service, and historian Richard Huscroft estimates this number was around 5,000. In reality, the knight-service was greater than any king would actually need in wartime, serving primarily to assess how much scutage the king was owed to pay for mercenaries. The political landscape shifted dramatically, with the counties of England established for administration by the Normans, in most cases based on earlier shires established by the Anglo-Saxons. All English monarchs after 1066 ultimately descend from the Normans, and the distinction of the Plantagenets is conventional, beginning with Henry II as from that time, the Angevin kings became more English in nature.
Edward III was the first English king to have a claim to the throne of France, and his pursuit of this claim resulted in the Hundred Years War, which pitted five kings of England of the House of Plantagenet against five kings of France of the Capetian House of Valois. The war lasted from 1337 to 1453, and although the English won numerous victories, they were unable to overcome the numerical superiority of the French and their strategic use of gunpowder weapons. England was defeated at the Battle of Formigny in 1450 and finally at the Battle of Castillon in 1453, retaining only a single town in France, Calais. During the Hundred Years War, an English identity began to develop in place of the previous division between the Norman lords and their Anglo-Saxon subjects. This was a consequence of sustained hostility to the increasingly nationalist French, whose kings and other leaders, notably the charismatic Joan of Arc, used a developing sense of French identity to help draw people to their cause. The kingdom had little time to recover before entering the Wars of the Roses, a series of civil wars over possession of the throne between the House of Lancaster and the House of York, each led by different branches of the descendants of Edward III. The end of these wars found the throne held by the descendant of an initially illegitimate member of the House of Lancaster, married to the eldest daughter of the House of York: Henry VII and Elizabeth of York. The Wars of the Roses lasted from 1455 to 1487, and the English were no longer in any position to pursue their French claims and lost all their land on the continent, except for Calais. The conflict transformed the nature of English governance, as the evolution of the English Parliament began to take shape during the reign of Edward III, laying the groundwork for the constitutional monarchy that would emerge centuries later.
The Tudor Reformation
During the 1530s, Henry VIII overthrew the power of the Catholic Church within the kingdom, replacing the pope as head of his own English Church and seizing the Catholic Church's lands, thereby facilitating the creation of a variation of Catholicism that became more Protestant over time. This aligned England with Scotland, which also gradually adopted a Protestant religion, whereas the most important continental powers, France and Spain, remained Catholic. Henry VIII oversaw the English Reformation, and his daughter Elizabeth I, who reigned from 1558 to 1603, the Elizabethan Religious Settlement, meanwhile establishing England as a great power and laying the foundations of the British Empire via colonization of the Americas. By 1588, her new navy was strong enough to defeat the Spanish Armada, which had sought to invade England to halt English support for the Dutch rebels and to put a Catholic monarch on the throne in her place. The Tudor conquest of Ireland took place under the Tudor dynasty, and following a failed rebellion against the crown by Silken Thomas, the Earl of Kildare, in the 1530s, Henry VIII was declared King of Ireland in 1542 by statute of the Parliament of Ireland. Wales retained a separate legal and administrative system, which had been established by Edward I in the late 13th century, but under the Tudor monarchy, Henry VIII replaced the laws of Wales with those of England under the Laws in Wales Acts 1535 to 1542. Wales was incorporated into England, and henceforth was represented in the Parliament. The completion of the conquest of Wales by Edward I in 1284 put Wales under the control of the English crown, and the subsequent repression was considerable, as the magnificent Welsh castles such as Conwy, Harlech, and Caernarfon attest. The Tudor period marked a shift from a continental power to a maritime one, with the loss of Calais, the last remaining continental possession of the Kingdom, in 1558, during the reign of Philip and Mary I.
The Civil War and Commonwealth
The Stuart kings overestimated the power of the English monarchy, and were cast down by Parliament in 1645 and 1688. In the first instance, Charles I's introduction of new forms of taxation in defiance of Parliament led to the English Civil War, which culminated in the execution of Charles I in 1649. The monarchy and the House of Lords were abolished, and so the House of Commons became a unitary legislative chamber with a new body, the Council of State becoming the executive. However the Army remained the dominant institution in the new republic and the most prominent general was Oliver Cromwell. The Commonwealth fought wars in Ireland and Scotland which were subdued and placed under Commonwealth military occupation. In April 1653 Cromwell and the other Grandees of the New Model Army, frustrated with the members of the Rump Parliament who would not pass legislation to dissolve the Rump and to allow a new more representative parliament to be elected, stopped the Rump's session and declared the Rump dissolved. After an experiment with a Nominated Assembly, the Grandees in the Army, through the Council of State imposed a new constitutional arrangement under a written constitution called the Instrument of Government. Under the Instrument of Government executive power lay with a Lord Protector, an office to be held for the life of the incumbent, and there were to be triennial Parliaments, with each sitting for at least five months. Article 23 of the Instrument of Government stated that Oliver Cromwell was to be the first Lord Protector. Cromwell nominated his son Richard who became Lord Protector on the death of Oliver on the 3rd of September 1658. Richard proved to be ineffectual and was unable to maintain his rule, resigning his title and retiring into obscurity. The monarchy returned in 1660, but the Civil War had established the precedent that an English monarch cannot govern without the consent of Parliament. This concept became legally established as part of the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
The Union of Crowns
The House of Tudor ended with the death of Elizabeth I on the 24th of March 1603. James I ascended the throne of England and brought it into personal union with the Kingdom of Scotland, resulting in the Union of the Crowns, with the Stuart dynasty ruling the kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland. Despite the Union of the Crowns, the kingdoms remained separate and independent states, a state of affairs which lasted for more than a century. The death of William III in 1702 had led to the accession of his sister-in-law Anne to the thrones of England and Scotland, but her only surviving child had died in 1700, and the English Act of Settlement 1701 had given the succession to the English crown to the Protestant House of Hanover. Securing the same succession in Scotland became the primary object of English strategic thinking towards Scotland. By 1704, the Union of the Crowns was in crisis, with the Scottish Act of Security allowing for the Scottish Parliament to choose a different monarch, which could in turn lead to an independent foreign policy during a major European war. A Treaty of Union was agreed on the 22nd of July 1706, and following the Acts of Union of 1707, which created the Kingdom of Great Britain, the independence of the kingdoms of England and Scotland came to an end on the 1st of May 1707. The Acts of Union created a customs union and monetary union and provided that any laws and statutes that were contrary to or inconsistent with the terms of the Acts would cease and become void. The English and Scottish Parliaments were merged into the Parliament of Great Britain, located in Westminster, London. At this point England ceased to exist as a separate political entity, and since then has had no national government. The laws of England were unaffected, with the legal jurisdiction continuing to be that of England and Wales, while Scotland continued to have its own laws and law courts.