Modern Britain, 1750 to the Present

Introduction

The four nations of the British Isles were torn apart by civil wars, rebellions and revolution during the seventeenth century. These were bloody and brutal conflicts. In the so-called first Civil War in England (1642–46), 14 per cent of adult males died as a result of the conflict, a higher proportion of fatalities than in the First World War. Even this paled in comparison to England's invasion of Ireland (1649–53) under Thomas Cromwell when between 25 and 50 per cent of the Irish population perished. At the heart of these dreadful conflicts was a series of questions that struck at the very legitimacy of the state. Should a monarch or a parliament rule? Who had the authority to raise taxes and armies? Should the state have the right to prescribe the religious practice of its subjects, whether Catholic or Protestant? How could Scotland and Ireland resist the imperial ambitions of England? These questions were raised again in 1688, when a small group of Whigs in Parliament enacted a coup. That coup, later described as the Glorious Revolution, displaced the Catholic king, James Stuart (he was James II in England and Ireland, but James VII in Scotland), in favour of his Protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch husband William of Orange. In the tumultuous months between William and his army arriving at Torbay in November and the installation of William and Mary as monarchs first of England and Wales in February and then Scotland in May 1689, few were sanguine that peace had arrived at last, let alone that the legitimacy and stability of the state had finally been secured. Tories were worried that the authority of the monarchy had been eroded and that they would be left out in the cold by the new regime. Some even sympathized with the Jacobites, those eager to restore James to the throne, who remained particularly strong in Ireland and Scotland where war and rebellion continued to foment. The absolute power of monarchs across the rest of Europe, except the Netherlands, was unchallenged. The prospects for the survival of the revolutionary state were not promising.

And yet by 1819 the British state was the most powerful in the world. It had transformed itself into a United Kingdom with the Acts of Union with Scotland (1707) and Ireland (1800).