TO SUM UP:      The STUARTS and the 17th CENTURY

1603: after Elizabeth I, JAMES I came to the throne. He was king of both Scotland and of England. James believed to own the divine rights and he acted as an absolute monarch. He desired to rule without the Parliament, therefore his attitude caused its hostility towards the royal power. In addition, James became unpopular because of debts and financial crisis he brought to the reign. In 1625 the throne passed into the hands of CHARLES I . Like his father, he aroused the hostility of the Parliament, because of his conviction to own divine rights.

During his reign, the war between the monarchy and the Parliament began : Charles I imposed taxes without the Parliament’s consent, as a consequence it presented the Petition of Rights, in 1628. It was a document that said taxes had to be levied with Parliament’s consent and people could not be imprisoned without a valid charge. The king rejected it.

1642: The Commons and the mercantile classes sided with the Parliament, while the House of Lords, the Catholics and the aristocracy with the king.

Oliver Cromwell was the leader of the Parliamentary Army. It defeated the Royalists in 1645 . In 1649 the king was executed, and the Royal Family exiled to France. A republic was instituted in England: the COMMONWEALTH. When Cromwell died, it collapsed: therefore in 1660 the monarchy was restored and CHARLES II came back from France. He was a powerless king, but he was able to manipulate policies.

Two opposite groups were born in Parliament: the TORIES, who sided with the king and nobility (conservative values) and the WHIGS, who represented the emerging classes and liberal values. The Anglican Church was fully restored and the Puritans were repressed.

Between 1660 and 1700 merchant classes represented a new kind of society, that valued commerce and stability, and that did not want to repeat the previous tragic events at all.

In 1685 Charles II died and JAMES II succeeded; he aimed at imposing the Catholic religion on a nation most of all Protestant. As a consequence, in 1688 he was deposed with the “Bloodless Revolution” and his nephew WILLIAM OF ORANGE came to the throne.

However, the 17th century was also a period of achievements, most of all in science, art and colonialism. In the matter of poetry, it was both religious and secular. George Herbert’s poems expressed the complications of spiritual life right as John Donne’s metaphysical poetry. In addition, many poets fought in the civil wars: the cavalier poets sided with the court and celebrated its values and ideals; on the other side, Andrew Marvell and John Milton were on the revolution side, celebrating republicanism.

During the century, the MASQUE was one of the most important entertainments of the court. It was a form of theatrical representation in which the musical and spectacular effects predominated. The elaborate symbolism, expressed in verse, aimed at glorifying the court. Masques began after dinner and sometimes lasted until dawn. With the Puritans’ closure of the theatres in 1642 all performances ended, and when theatres reopened they presented witty and satirical comedies.

Restoration drama was very different from earlier form of drama: its main subject is sex, and the characters are obsessed with money and fashion. In the matter of science and philosophy, Francis Bacon’s philosophical research was based on experiment and direct observation of nature; Thomas Hobbes argued that sensations are only motions of matter; John Locke was the founder of empiricism and liberalism. Isaac Newton, finally, formulated the law of gravity that changed the conception of the world.