Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Preface
- Contents
- Introduction: On the Character of English History
- 1 Roman Britain
- 2 Saxon England
- 3 The Anglo-Norman State
- 4 Common Law and Charter
- 5 The High Middle Ages
- 6 The Nation-State
- 7 The first Elizabethan Age
- 8 The Civil War
- 9 The Withdrawing Roar
- 10 The Century of Success
- 11 The first British Empire
- 12 The Age of Everything
- 13 War and Peace
- 14 Victorian Ages
- 15 Imperial and Edwardian
- Postscript
- Further Reading
- Index
- Frontmatter
- Preface
- Contents
- Introduction: On the Character of English History
- 1 Roman Britain
- 2 Saxon England
- 3 The Anglo-Norman State
- 4 Common Law and Charter
- 5 The High Middle Ages
- 6 The Nation-State
- 7 The first Elizabethan Age
- 8 The Civil War
- 9 The Withdrawing Roar
- 10 The Century of Success
- 11 The first British Empire
- 12 The Age of Everything
- 13 War and Peace
- 14 Victorian Ages
- 15 Imperial and Edwardian
- Postscript
- Further Reading
- Index
Summary
During the first half of the seventeenth century something very odd happened in England … a body of gentlemen and townsmen supported by a handful of dissident peers had the amazing effrontery to challenge the King, the bishops, most of the peerage, and their gentry supporters; it even defeated them… Thus the middle of the seventeenth century saw the eclipse of the monarchy … of the peerage … and of the Anglican Church… Why did all this happen?
lawrence stone, The Crisis of the AristocracyMen were to look back to the reign of Queen Elizabeth as an epoch of unexampled unanimity, a unanimity grounded on moral feeling, if not inspired by heaven itself. The very stars in their courses had seemed to fight for them, Providence having provided a common focus in the war with Spain. Few things afforded patriots more legitimate pride than the loyalty of the English Catholics to the heretic heroine in the crisis year 1588, the year of the Armada, and every schoolboy once cherished the tale of Master Stubbs who, with one hand cut off for libelling the Queen's government, raised his hat with the other and cried ‘God save the Queen!’ Beneath the surface of this ‘happy time of lenity’, of course, there were deep and dangerous currents of tension, and men knew that ‘the times might be altered’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- A Short History of England , pp. 139 - 159Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1967