Kingdom of England

• 1. Introduction

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  The Kingdom of England was born on the 12th of July 927, when the monarchs of Britain gathered at Eamont Bridge, in what is now Cumbria, to recognise a single man as king of the English. His name was Æthelstan, and the realm he founded would endure for exactly 780 years. How did a collection of fractious Anglo-Saxon territories become one of the most powerful states in medieval Europe? How did a kingdom survive Viking conquest, Norman invasion, civil war, and religious revolution, only to dissolve itself by treaty? And what made England's parliament so decisive that even a king could be put on trial and executed for ignoring it?

• 2. From Heptarchy to Kingdom

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  Before there was a Kingdom of England, there were seven: East Anglia, Mercia, Northumbria, Kent, Essex, Sussex, and Wessex. The Anglo-Saxons called this arrangement the Heptarchy, and for generations its kingdoms jostled against one another. The arrival of Viking raiders in the 9th century scrambled that balance entirely.

  Wessex proved the most resilient. In 825, its kings absorbed Kent and Sussex. By 827, Northumbria had submitted to Egbert of Wessex at Dore, briefly making him the first king to reign over a united England. That unity did not last, but it pointed toward what was coming.

  In 886, Alfred the Great retook London from the Danish Vikings. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that after his restoration, "all of the English people not subject to the Danes submitted themselves to King Alfred." Asser, a contemporary, added that Alfred "restored the city of London splendidly and made it habitable once more." His work included reoccupying the nearly deserted Roman walled city, building quays along the Thames, and laying a new street plan.

  Alfred did not call himself King of England. He took the title King of the Anglo-Saxons, reflecting joint authority over Wessex and western Mercia. His son Edward the Elder, who reigned 899-924, and his grandson Æthelstan continued that expansion. In 927, Æthelstan conquered the last remaining Viking kingdom, York, and the title "Rex Anglorum" - King of the English - was first applied to him in one of his own charters in 928. Northumbria would change hands repeatedly after that, but Eadred finally brought it under permanent English control in 954.

• 3. A Kingdom Twice Conquered

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  In 978, Æthelred the Unready came to the throne, and the Viking threat returned with new ferocity. Swein Forkbeard, King of Denmark, led a campaign of invasions that lasted a quarter-century and culminated in the Danish conquest of England in 1013. Swein died on the 2nd of February 1014, and Æthelred was briefly restored. But in 1015, Swein's son Cnut launched another invasion. By 1016, Cnut and Æthelred's successor Edmund Ironside had agreed to divide England between them. Edmund died on the 30th of November 1016, leaving the whole kingdom under Danish rule.

  Danish control lasted 26 years, until the death of Harthacnut in June 1042. Harthacnut was the son of Cnut and Emma of Normandy, who had herself been the widow of Æthelred the Unready. With no heirs of his own, Harthacnut was succeeded by his half-brother Edward the Confessor, an Anglo-Saxon, returning the kingdom to its older line.

  Edward died childless in January 1066, and England faced its second conquest in a generation. His brother-in-law was crowned King Harold, but William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy, claimed the throne for himself. William landed in Sussex on the 28th of September 1066. Harold's army was in York, fresh from a victory against Norwegian invaders at the Battle of Stamford Bridge on the 25th of September. Harold marched south without delay and without fully resting his troops. At the Battle of Hastings on the 14th of October 1066, the English army was defeated, Harold and his two brothers were killed, and William emerged victorious. William was crowned on the 25th of December 1066 in Westminster Abbey.

  Crucially, William had no intention of absorbing England into Normandy. As Duke of Normandy he owed allegiance to Philip I of France. As King of England, he could rule without that interference. The Norman Conquest also shifted the English capital from Winchester to Westminster, and the City of London quickly established itself as the kingdom's principal commercial centre.

• 4. War, Wales, and the Parliament

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  Edward I completed the conquest of Wales in 1282 by defeating Llywelyn ap Gruffudd and his brother Dafydd ap Gruffudd. Edward's campaign was brutal; the massive castles he built at Conwy, Harlech, and Caernarfon stand as evidence of the repression that followed. In 1284, the Statute of Rhuddlan formally assumed the lands of the Princes of Gwynedd as English territory and imposed English-style shire counties on the region. In 1301, Edward created the title Prince of Wales for his heir, the future Edward II, a title that has endured.

  Edward III, who reigned 1327-1377, transformed England into one of the most formidable military powers in Europe. His claim to the throne of France set off the Hundred Years' War from 1337 to 1453, pitting five English kings of the Plantagenet house against five French kings of the Capetian House of Valois. English forces won numerous victories but could not overcome French numerical superiority or 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 Calais from all its continental holdings.

  Edward III's reign also saw a development with far longer consequences than any military campaign: the evolution of the English Parliament. That institution, combined with the strain of the Hundred Years' War, also accelerated the formation of something new. During those long decades of hostility to France, an English identity began to form in place of the old division between Norman lords and Anglo-Saxon subjects. The charismatic Joan of Arc was one of the figures who sharpened French national feeling; English identity grew partly in response to that pressure.

  By 1455, the kingdom plunged into the Wars of the Roses, civil conflict between the House of Lancaster, whose symbol was the red rose, and the House of York, whose symbol was the white rose. Both were descendants of Edward III. The wars ended with Henry VII, a Lancastrian, on the throne, married to Elizabeth of York, the eldest daughter of the Yorkist line.

• 5. The Tudors Remake the Kingdom

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  Henry VIII is the monarch most associated with the English Reformation, but the changes his reign set in motion reshaped nearly every institution in the kingdom. During the 1530s, he overthrew the authority of the Catholic Church within England, replaced the Pope as head of his own English Church, and seized the Church's lands. The result was a variation of Catholicism that became progressively more Protestant over time.

  England's new religious alignment had a geographic logic. Scotland was also gradually adopting Protestantism, while the major continental powers, France and Spain, remained Catholic. Those alignments would drive European politics for the rest of the 16th century.

  In 1535-1542, Henry VIII enacted the Laws in Wales Acts, which incorporated Wales fully into England. Wales was henceforth represented in Parliament, and its separate legal and administrative system, in place since Edward I, was replaced with English law.

  Calais, England's last continental possession, was lost in 1558 during the reign of Philip and Mary I. Their successor, Elizabeth I, who reigned 1558-1603, consolidated the Protestant Church of England and built up England's naval strength on foundations Henry had laid. By 1588, that navy was strong enough to defeat the Spanish Armada, which had aimed to invade England and install a Catholic monarch. Elizabeth's reign also began the colonisation of the Americas, laying what would become the foundations of the British Empire.

  The House of Tudor ended with Elizabeth's death on the 24th of March 1603. James VI of Scotland then inherited the English throne as James I, uniting the two crowns in his own person while the kingdoms themselves remained legally separate.

• 6. Parliament Against the Crown

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  The Stuart kings misjudged the power of the English monarchy twice, and Parliament brought them down both times. Charles I introduced new forms of taxation without parliamentary approval, which triggered the English Civil War of 1641-1645. Parliament defeated Charles, and on the 19th of May 1649, the Rump Parliament declared England a Commonwealth, abolishing the monarchy and the House of Lords. Charles I had been executed in January of that year.

  Oliver Cromwell was the most powerful figure in the new republic. In April 1653, frustrated by the Rump Parliament's refusal to dissolve itself, Cromwell and the Army Grandees forcibly ended its session. A new constitutional arrangement, the Instrument of Government, gave executive power to a Lord Protector for life, with triennial parliaments each sitting at least five months. Article 23 of that document named Cromwell as the first Lord Protector. A second constitution, the Humble Petition and Advice, allowed the Lord Protector to nominate his successor. Cromwell named his son Richard, who became Lord Protector on the death of Oliver on the 3rd of September 1658.

  Richard proved unable to maintain his authority and retired into obscurity. The Commonwealth was restored briefly, but that arrangement also proved unstable, and the exiled Charles II was returned to the throne in 1660. The Tenures Abolition Act of 1660 abolished feudal tenure, knight-service, and related legal rights, converting once-feudal lands to monetary rent arrangements.

  The second Stuart crisis came in 1688, when James II attempted to reintroduce Roman Catholicism, a century after its suppression under the Tudors. Parliament invited William of Orange, a Dutch prince, to take the throne. James was exiled. William and his wife Mary II were crowned by Parliament, not by hereditary right. This Glorious Revolution established, as a constitutional and legal matter, that no English monarch could govern without Parliament's consent. William also reoriented English foreign policy to support the Dutch Republic against Louis XIV of France, a reversal of the Stuart-era alliance.

• 7. The End of a Kingdom

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  The Kingdom of England did not fall. It negotiated itself out of existence. The process began with a succession crisis. William III died in 1702, and his sister-in-law Anne inherited the thrones of England and Scotland. Her only surviving child had died in 1700. The English Act of Settlement of 1701 gave the English crown's succession to the Protestant House of Hanover. Getting Scotland to accept the same succession became the central aim of English strategy.

  The two kingdoms had been in personal union since 1603, but remained legally independent. By 1704, that arrangement was under strain: the Scottish Act of Security allowed the Scottish Parliament to choose a different monarch, which threatened to split the crowns and create an independent Scottish foreign policy in the middle of a major European war.

  Scotland's incentives included financial gain and the removal of English trade sanctions imposed through the Alien Act of 1705. A Treaty of Union was agreed on the 22nd of July 1706. Under the Acts of Union of 1707, the parliaments of England and Scotland were mutually abolished. Their assets united "for ever, into the Kingdom by the name of Great Britain." On the 1st of May 1707, the Kingdom of England ceased to exist as a separate political entity.

  The laws of England were not dissolved. The legal jurisdiction of England and Wales continued, while Scotland retained its own laws and courts. That same structure persisted through the 1801 union with Ireland, which formed the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. In 1922, the Irish Free State seceded, and the state was renamed the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland - the constitutional descendant that still carries the English Parliament's home at Westminster as the seat of its legislature.