The English Civil War & Glorious Revolution

On January 4, 1642, Charles I walked into the House of Commons with an armed guard to arrest five members of Parliament. The Speaker of the House refused to tell him where they had gone. Charles looked around, saw they had already fled, and muttered, "I see the birds have flown." He left. He would never enter the Commons again. Within months, England was at war with itself.

The confrontation had been building for decades. The English monarchy had operated for centuries on an awkward compromise: the king ruled, but he needed Parliament to raise taxes. As long as monarchs kept their spending moderate and their wars short, the arrangement held. But the Stuart kings who came to the English throne in 1603 brought with them a theory of divine right that left little room for compromise. James I told Parliament plainly that kings were "God's lieutenants upon earth" and that to question royal authority was to question God. His son Charles I inherited this conviction along with the crown.

Charles ruled without Parliament for eleven years, from 1629 to 1640, a period his opponents called the "Personal Rule" and his critics called the "Eleven Years' Tyranny." He raised revenue through obscure medieval levies, forced loans, and the extension of "ship money," a coastal defense tax, to inland counties. It was technically legal. It was also deeply resented.