Overseas Conquest and Religious War to 1648287same year. He quarreled with the Puritans over church
governance and other matters, but he managed to avoid
an open breach as they grew more powerful over the
course of his reign. Charles, however, supported the
anti-Puritan reforms of Archbishop William Laud
(1573–1645). Though Laud was no Catholic, Queen
Henriette Marie (1609–1669) heard Mass regularly.
She was the sister of Louis XIII and a strong personality
who exerted great influence over her husband. The
Puritans suspected that Charles meant to restore
Catholicism. Faith, as well as liberty and property, was
thought to be at risk.
Twenty years of increasingly bitter conflict between
Parliament and the crown led to civil war in 1642. The
Scots rebelled in 1638 when Charles tried to introduce
the English Book of Common Prayerat Edinburgh. To pay
for the Scottish war, he summoned what is called the
Long Parliament because it met from 1640 to 1660. In
response to his call for money, the Commons im-
peached Archbishop Laud and Charles’s chief minister,
Thomas Wentworth, earl of Strafford. They then abol-
ished the prerogative courts of Star Chamber and High
Commission. When Charles failed to impeach the par-
liamentary leaders he fled from London, and Parliament
decided to raise an army in its own defense.
After three years of hard fighting, the royalists
were defeated at Naseby (June 14, 1645), but serious
divisions had appeared in the parliamentary ranks. The
army was now dominated by Independents, who fa-
vored a congregational form of church government,
while the Parliament they served was controlled by
Presbyterians. The Independents refused to disband
without guaranteed freedom of conscience and the re-
moval of certain Presbyterians from Parliament. The
Scots, fearing a threat to their own Presbyterian church
order, were alarmed. Charles sought to capitalize on
these strains by abolishing the Scottish episcopate in
return for Presbyterian support, but the Scots and their
English allies were defeated by the army at Preston
(August 17–20, 1548). The victors now felt that com-
promise was impossible. In December the army cap-
tured Charles and purged the Commons of its
Presbyterian members. A court appointed by the Rump,
as the remnant of Parliament was now called, sentenced
the king to death. He was beheaded at Whitehall on
January 30, 1649.
For all practical purposes, England was governed
by the army. A republican constitution had been estab-
lished, but real power lay in the hands of Oliver
Cromwell (1599–1658), the most successful of the par-
liamentary generals. In 1653 he was named lord protec-
tor of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and
Ireland. A radical Protestant, Cromwell attempted to
reform English society along Puritan lines while follow-
ing a vigorous policy abroad. After subduing the Scots,
he fought a naval war with the Dutch (1552–54) and
started another with Spain in 1656. The Irish Catholics,
who had massacred thousands of Protestants in 1641,
were ruthlessly suppressed.
Cromwell had refused to accept the crown when it
was offered to him in 1657, but when he died in the
following year he left the Protectorate to his son
Richard. Richard’s rule was brief and troubled. He was
forced to resign after only nine months, and a Conven-
tion Parliament restored Charles II (1630–85), son of
Charles I, on May 8, 1660. The English had tired of Pu-
ritanism and military rule.The Price of Conflict: Fiscal Crisis
and Administrative Devolution
Surprisingly, this age of troubles was in many places a
time of intellectual, literary, and artistic achievement. A
distinction must be made between those regions that
were combat zones, those that remained peaceful but
were forced to assume heavy financial burdens, and
those that were virtually untouched by the fighting.
Even the most devastated regions experienced peace
for at least a portion of the century between 1560 and
1660; their recovery was sometimes rapid.
In some cases the experience of war produced liter-
ary masterpieces. The age of the religious wars was not
a golden one for France, but it produced the elegant
and skeptical essays of Michel de Montaigne
(1533–92), an antidote to sectarian madness. In Ger-
many, the wreckage of the Thirty Years’ War was nearly
complete, but it was wryly chronicled in Grim-
melshausen’s Simplicissimus. Don Quixote,one of the great-
est of all literary classics, was written by Miguel de
Cervantes (1547–1616), who had lost an arm at Lep-
anto. It is, at least in part, a satire on his countrymen’s
fantastic dreams of glory.
Political turmoil gave birth to political theory. The
English Civil War convinced Thomas Hobbes
(1588–1679) that political salvation lay in Leviathan,an
autocratic superstate, while Oceana,by James Harring-
ton (1611–77) reflected the republican ideals of the
Commonwealth. In Paradise Lost,Cromwell’s Latin secre-
tary, John Milton (1608–74), created a Puritan epic to
rival the vision of Dante. Drama, too, flourished in the
England of William Shakespeare (1564–1616) and in
the Spain of Lope de Vega (1562–1635) and Calderón