England's Revolutions: From Civil War to the Bill of Rights

How quarrels over money, religion, and royal power took England from Personal Rule and civil war to regicide, restoration, and the 1689 Bill of Rights.

Avevide · Last reviewed October 24, 2026 · 10 min read

Between 1629 and 1689, England tried almost every way of being governed that its people could imagine. A king ruled for eleven years without calling Parliament. Parliament then raised its own army against him. A purged House of Commons put the king on trial and had him beheaded, and for a decade the country had no monarch and no House of Lords. Military rule followed, then the return of the old system, and finally, in 1688, a foreign invasion that ended with a new king and queen accepting a written list of the subject's rights.

It is tempting to tell this as a straight line from tyranny to liberty. The evidence does not cooperate: the conflict pulled in Scotland and Ireland as violently as England, and historians still argue about what to call it, let alone what caused it.

This deep dive follows the thread from Charles I's collision with Parliament to the Bill of Rights, and it pauses wherever the experts disagree.

A king who governed without Parliament

The UK Parliament's history of the period dates the "Personal Rule" from March 1629 to April 1640, so called because Charles I did not summon Parliament at all in those years. Outwardly peaceful, it steadily built opposition among parts of the political elite.

Money was the first irritant. Without Parliament to vote taxes, Charles revived old laws as revenue sources. The most notorious was ship money, which turned an old obligation on coastal counties to provide ships into a cash tax on every county, including those far inland.

Religion was the second, and it proved more dangerous. In 1637 Charles introduced a new Book of Common Prayer in Scotland that stressed ceremony over the plainer worship that had dominated both the English and Scottish churches. Opponents signed or supported the National Covenant of February 28, 1638, and became known as Covenanters. They rose up and defeated the king's troops in the Bishops' War, helped by the fact that many English subjects sympathized with them.

After an uneasy truce in June 1639, Charles needed money to fight again, so he summoned a Parliament for April 1640. The Commons refused to discuss supply until its grievances were heard, and he dissolved it in less than a month; it is remembered as the Short Parliament. The renewed war went worse still. The Covenanters invaded England as far as Newcastle, and under the peace of October 1640 Charles had to pay their army 850 pounds a day until it left. He had no choice left but to call another Parliament, which met in November 1640 and became the Long Parliament.

From quarrel to war, 1641 to 1642

The Long Parliament opened with a unity of purpose between and within the two Houses, but that unity did not survive the winter of 1641 to 1642. Religious tension sharpened when radical Protestants destroyed what they saw as idolatrous images in churches during the summer of 1641.

Then came news from Ireland. In October 1641 the native Irish, largely Catholics, attacked the Protestant English and Scottish settlers who had taken their lands, and claimed Charles's authority for doing so. To many in England this looked like more proof of a Catholic conspiracy with the king at its center. The charge went into the Grand Remonstrance, a catalog of Charles's abuses since 1625, "both real and imagined" in the Parliament history's phrase, drafted by John Pym and his circle. It passed the Commons by only 11 votes in November and was presented to the king without even going to the Lords. He rejected it.

On January 4, 1642, Charles entered the Commons chamber with an armed guard to arrest Pym and four other members himself. The Speaker, William Lenthall, refused to say where they were, telling the king: "I have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place but as this house is pleased to direct me whose servant I am here." Charles replied, "I see the birds have flown."

Five days later the king left London. In March 1642 Pym and his allies pushed through the Militia Ordinance, which put command of each county's armed forces in their supporters' hands. It was an ordinance rather than an Act because it never received the royal assent. Charles answered with commissions of array for his own followers.

The wars and the New Model Army

The war began on August 22, 1642, when Charles raised his standard at Nottingham. He made his headquarters at Oxford and controlled the west; Parliament at Westminster held the south and east. To pay for its war, Parliament imposed two new taxes, the assessment and the excise on the purchase of goods. They raised far more than any earlier parliamentary taxation and were, ironically, as burdensome as any of Charles's levies.

Parliament's side split as the fighting went on. Presbyterians wanted a quick end and were willing to negotiate with the king. Independents wanted to fight hard and impose terms on a defeated monarch. Both labels began as positions on church government, which shows how deeply religion ran through the political divisions.

In 1644 and 1645 Independent commanders, above all the MP Oliver Cromwell, accused the Presbyterian Earls of Essex and Manchester of not prosecuting the war forcefully enough. In February 1645 the Independents pushed through a reorganization of the army, and in April the Self-Denying Ordinance forced members of Parliament to choose between their seats and their military commissions, though Cromwell managed to keep both. The resulting New Model Army won a run of victories that ended with the surrender of Charles and of Oxford in June 1646.

Purge, trial, and a republic

Victory raised a harder question: what to do with a defeated king. The army and the Presbyterians spent months trying to negotiate a settlement while Charles encouraged risings in England and Wales and an invasion from Scotland. The army crushed this second Civil War in 1648, and its leaders then demanded an end to talks with a king they called a "man of blood."

On December 6, 1648, Colonel Thomas Pride and his soldiers stood at the entrance to the Commons, arrested 45 members, and excluded 186 more whom the army judged unlikely to support punishing the king. Another 86 left in protest. What remained, a "Rump" of barely 200 members, passed an "Act" on January 6, 1649, creating a court to try Charles for high treason, ignoring a negative vote by the few peers still sitting in the Lords.

Charles disputed the court's authority and refused to plead. Despite widespread opposition to the trial, a guilty verdict was pushed through. Even the number who signed the death warrant varies within Parliament's own pages: its overview says only 57 of the 159 commissioners originally named signed, while its page on the warrant itself, now in the Parliamentary Archives, counts 59 signatories. On January 30, 1649, Charles I was beheaded outside the Banqueting House on Whitehall. In March the Rump abolished the monarchy and the House of Lords, and in May it declared England a "Commonwealth and Free State."

Protector, collapse, and Restoration

The republic never settled into a stable form. Oliver Cromwell governed as Lord Protector, and when he died in September 1658 the office passed to his son Richard, who could manage neither the Parliament he summoned in January 1659 nor the army leaders he depended on. Richard resigned in May 1659, handing power back to the remnant of the Rump, and months of competing, failed regimes followed.

People had had enough of military rule, in the Parliament history's summary. General George Monck entered London with his troops in February 1660 and secured the return of the members excluded at Pride's Purge. These mostly moderate members dissolved the Long Parliament on March 16, 1660. The body elected that spring was called a Convention rather than a Parliament, because no hereditary monarch had summoned it. Reassured by the exiled Charles II's promise to submit any settlement to Parliament, it invited him back in May 1660.

Memories ran deep, though, and the Parliaments of Charles II and his brother James II soon proved as turbulent as their father's.

1688: invasion, flight, and a written settlement

Parliament's case against James II, set out in the 1689 Bill of Rights, opened by accusing him of trying to "subvert and extirpate the Protestant Religion" with the help of evil counselors. It went on to charge him with claiming a power to dispense with and suspend laws without Parliament's consent, of prosecuting "diverse Worthy Prelates" for petitioning to be excused from that power, of keeping a standing army in peacetime without consent, and of disarming Protestants while Catholics were armed.

In 1688 seven peers, later called the Immortal Seven, invited the Dutch ruler William of Orange to invade in order to preserve Protestantism, to investigate the true parentage of James's newborn son, and to call a "free" Parliament. William landed at Brixham on November 5, 1688, and marched on London. Shaken by the desertion of many officers and of his own daughters, James tried to flee to France, was caught and brought back, then left again and escaped, shortly before William reached London on December 18.

William did not claim the throne by conquest. He summoned a Convention of Lords and MPs, which met at Westminster in January 1689. The settlement it produced, the Bill of Rights, declared the suspending power illegal, declared levying money for the crown "by pretence of Prerogative" without Parliament's grant illegal, and set out principles that still sound familiar: "That Election of Members of Parlyament ought to be free," that "excessive Baile ought not to be required nor excessive Fines imposed nor cruell and unusuall Punishments inflicted," and that "Parlyaments ought to be held frequently." Expect to see two dates. The Act received royal assent on December 16, 1689, but legislation.gov.uk catalogs it as Bill of Rights [1688]. Its editorial note explains why: legislation.gov.uk dates that Parliament from February 13, 1689, which was still 1688 under the old calendar, whose year began on March 25, and Acts were then dated to the year their session began.

Where historians disagree

The UK Parliament's history describes the Civil War as one of the most controversial episodes in the country's history, and it sketches how interpretations have shifted:

The nineteenth-century "Whig view" saw a constitutional fight between an absolutist king and a reforming Parliament, with Cromwell as a hero of democracy; the same source faults it for imposing inevitable progress on the past.
From the 1940s, Marxist historians read an "English Revolution" as a class war in which merchant and commercial groups backed Parliament.
From the 1970s, revisionists rejected both, stressing local loyalties, Charles's own character and kingship, and the need to see a "British" crisis involving Scotland and Ireland as well as England.
Much recent work emphasizes religion, and many historians now see the conflicts as English or British wars of religion, part of a wider European pattern.

The Glorious Revolution has its own argument. For Whig historians such as Macaulay, it was "glorious" because it asserted parliamentary supremacy with little bloodshed in England, a view that, as the Parliament history points out, forgets how bloody the revolution became in Ireland and Scotland. Critics then and revisionists since have suggested William wanted the throne all along and that 1688 was something closer to a palace coup, with a compliant elite lending legitimacy. Even Parliament's own working relationship with the crown, the same source notes, changed over years after 1688 rather than in one moment.

A fair reading is that each school captures something. What the period settled is clearer than why it happened: after 1689, the law declared that the crown could not raise money or keep a peacetime army without Parliament's consent.

Key takeaways

Charles I's Personal Rule (1629 to 1640) combined disputed taxes such as ship money with religious changes that provoked a Scottish rising and forced him to recall Parliament.
The war that began in August 1642 grew out of a breakdown of trust in 1641 and 1642, sharpened by the Irish rising and the king's attempt to arrest five members.
Victory went to Parliament's New Model Army, but the army itself purged Parliament in 1648, tried the king, and created a republic in 1649.
The monarchy returned in 1660, yet the conflict revived under James II and ended with William's invasion in 1688 and the Bill of Rights.
Historians still debate whether this was a constitutional struggle, a class conflict, a British crisis of three kingdoms, or a war of religion.

Sources

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