THE STUARTS AND THE CENTURY OF POLITICAL UNREST AND SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS

In the Elizabethan period Puritanism became a well Rooted characteristic of English society. The puritans were hostile to official Church authorities, they were also against ostentatious dress and hair style, ceremonies and music and they had very strict moral values.

JAMES I

After  Elizabeth's death (1603), the English throne passed into the hands of the STUARTS. James Stuart VI of Scotland was crowned JAMES I of England, and he brought out a cultural shift. The two countries were peacefully  united under the same king. James tried to rule without the help of Parliament which was summoned only three times when he needed to raise money. With James' accession, the court still had a central position in society; Catholics, who had hoped the new king would reinstate some of the rights they had been deprived of under Elizabeth, organized a plot to blow up the House of Parliament on the 5^th November 1605 but they were discovered before their plan could be carried out. James was a peace-loving and scholarly king: his court was disorderly, indecorous and in constant financial crisis. His passion for his favourites and the money and honours, he gave them, made him unpopular.

James  I died in 1625 and the throne passed to his son CHARLES I. During his reign he ruled the country as an absolute monarch causing great hostility in Parliament: he was temperate, chaste and serious; his court was better ordered than his father's.

CHARLES I

During the reign of Charles I English society became affected by religious differences. Non-conformists and Dissenters belonged to groups that had separated from Anglicanism, as the Puritans. They were elected to Parliament by landowners, by the middle class, and by all those who disliked absolute monarchy: they became the leaders of the opposition to the crown.

•      In 1625 Charles imposed taxation without parliament consent, and so he became unpopular.

•      In 1628 Parliament presented the "Petition of Rights" in which there were two most important points: 1) no taxes should be levied without Parliament's approval; 2) no one should be imprisoned except on a formal and justifiable charge. à the king rejected the Petition.

•      In 1629 he suspended Parliament and embarked on a period of 11 years of "personal rule"

•      In 1640 the king called the Parliament to raise money to go against the Scots. The Commons, organized by Puritan leaders, refused to grant the king's requests and attacked the crown for unparliamentary  taxation.

•      In 1642 began the first conflict between Parliament and the king. So a Parliamentary Army was created and civil war broke out. The leader of this Puritan army was Oliver Cromwell.

•      In 1645 the parliamentary broke the Royalists' resistance  at Naseby.

•      In 1649 Charles I was executed in January

•      In 1653 A republic was instituted in London with the name of  the "Commonwealth", Cromwell become its Lord Protector.

•      In 1658 Cromwell died, and no one seemed able to  succeed him. Thus the Commonwealth collapsed.

•      In 1660 the Parliament voted to restore Charles II to the throne. The monarchy was restored.

 CHARLES II

Charles II was called back from France after he had promised to respect the conditions imposed by Parliament, he was a powerless king who is remembered for the easy morality of his court. Charles II had a fine mind. During the Restoration, Parliament had asserted its supremacy and two new political parties were born: 1)the  TORIES who supported the king and represented conservative values; 2) the  WHIGS who were more progressive and tolerant . During the reign of Charles II, London was a large town . In 1665-1666 two catastrophes, the plague and a fire hit the city.

 Between 1660 and 1700 a new kind of society was born: Protestant, and Middle class. It was a society which valued commerce, stability, self-interest and respectability. When Charles died in 1685 with no legitimate children  JAMES II, his brother, ruled for three difficult years.

JAMES II

He was Catholic and his main design was to impose the catholic religion on a nation that was for most part Protestant, he frequently attacked the Church of England and appointed Catholics to important public positions. The result was in 1688 the Revolution which deposed the king without shedding any blood. It was called the "Bloodless Revolution". Parliament offered the vacant throne to William of Orange  and his wife Mary à their reign established a relationship between the Crown and Parliament.

CULTURAL ASPECTS

Early 17^th century poetry was both secular and religious; it was a poetry which delighted in wit, logical argumentation and conceits as in GEORGE HERBERT'S religious poems, which express the extreme complications of spiritual life in the same style as Donne's metaphysical poetry.

On the court side the elegant CAVALIER poets celebrated the courtly ideal of good life in a reckless, anti-Puritan and easy-going mood whose themes were transience, love and seize-the-day attitude.

On the revolution side, ANDREW MARVELL and JOHN MILTON, the greatest poets of the age, celebrated the Triumphs of the Commonwealth, supporting religious toleration and republicanism.

During both James I's and Charles I's reigns, the MASQUE  was one of the principal and most elaborate entertainments the court had to offer. à the masque was an allegorical theatrical form in which the spectacular and musical elements predominated over plot and character, and its complicated symbolism expressed in verse, song and dance, was intended to glorify the court:  à they were performed at court in a theatrical space modified by the proscenium arch which was introduced by INIGO JOHNES, the architect who designed the most successful masque.

THE PURITAN CLOSURE of the THEATRES in 1642 put an end to such extravagances, but also to the greatest period of English drama which coincided with William Shakespeare's lifetime.  

When the theatres were reopened, they mainly presented witty and satirical comedies whose tone was bawdy and cynical. The RESTORATION DRAMA  was very different from the kind of drama Shakespeare and his successors had written. We have playwrights like WILLIAM COGREVE, GEORGE ETHEREGE and WILLIAM WYCHERLEY. The new comedy was free from the constraints of Puritan morality à its main subject is sex, sexual attraction and sexual intrigue. Its characters are obsessed with fashion, money and gossip. The dissolute new morality was only one side of the literary context of the Restoration à if the earl of ROCHESTER  was the typical Restoration "man of mode", a libertine and a rake, JOHN BUNYAN'S religious allegory "Pilgrim's Progress" firmly re-established moral order.

The 17^th century was also the age of revolution in philosophy and science.                                                                                    The leading figures of the transformation were:

•      FRANCIS BACON à  promoted a new mode of scientific and philosophical enquiry based on experiment and direct observation of nature.

•      THOMAS HOBBES  àhad a materialistic and pessimistic view, where all sensations are just motions of matter and man is a selfish entity.

•      JOHN LOCKE à the founder of empiricism and political liberalism.

•      ISAAC NEWTON à formulated a proper scientific method. His law of gravity changed the conception of the universe from metaphysical mystery to mechanical entity.

The CIVIL WARS  had turned the world upside down and skepticism, introspection and self-criticism characterized the late 17^th century. The RESTORATION had to rely on reason and facts, and passions had to be kept under control. The English Renaissance had been characterized by dynamism and expansive optimism, vitality and creative tension and in its coexistence of old and new cultural world views it had celebrated the causes of risks-taking and explorations.

At the end of the 17^th century REASON, COMMON SENSE and MODERATION were what society desired with passionate intensity and prose was the genre which could now better convey them: it is not the prose of the revolutionary years but the disciplined medium which could narrate the details of everyday life. à so the time was ripe for the RISE of the NOVEL in the following century.