![]() THE CAROLINASĬharles II hoped to establish English control of the area between Virginia and Spanish Florida. All the Restoration colonies started as proprietary colonies, that is, the king gave each colony to a trusted individual, family, or group. His policies in the 1660s through the 1680s established and supported the Restoration colonies: the Carolinas, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. 1660–1665, soon after the new king gained the throne.Ĭharles II was committed to expanding England’s overseas possessions. This portrait by John Michael Wright was painted ca. As a result, the English people welcomed Charles II (b) back to the throne in 1660. Though Oliver Cromwell (a), shown here in a 1656 portrait by Samuel Cooper, appeared to offer England a better mode of government, he assumed broad powers for himself and disregarded cherished English liberties established under Magna Carta in 1215. The return of Charles II is known as the Restoration.įigure 4.3 The monarchy and Parliament fought for control of England during the seventeenth century. In 1660, they welcomed the son of the executed king Charles I back to the throne to resume the English monarchy and bring the interregnum to an end ( Figure 4.3). They had had enough and asked Charles II to be king. When he died in 1658 and control passed to his son Richard, who lacked the political skills of his father, a majority of the English people feared an alternate hereditary monarchy in the making. Though Cromwell enjoyed widespread popularity at first, over time he appeared to many in England to be taking on the powers of a military dictator. Oliver Cromwell headed the new English Commonwealth, and the period known as the English interregnum, or the time between kings, began. The monarchy was dissolved, and England became a republic: a state without a king. After years of fighting, the Parliamentary forces gained the upper hand, and in 1649, they charged Charles I with treason and beheaded him. The English Civil War lasted from 1642 to 1649 and pitted the king and his Royalist supporters against Oliver Cromwell and his Parliamentary forces. The ensuing struggle between the king and Parliament led to the outbreak of war. When Parliament tried to contest his edicts, including the king’s efforts to impose taxes without Parliament’s consent, Charles I suspended Parliament in 1629 and ruled without one for the next eleven years. The most outspoken Protestants, the Puritans, had a strong voice in Parliament in the 1620s, and they strongly opposed the king’s marriage and his ties to Catholicism. Charles I ascended the English throne in 1625 and soon married a French Catholic princess, Henrietta Maria, who was not well liked by English Protestants because she openly practiced Catholicism during her husband’s reign. The chronicle of Charles II begins with his father, Charles I. ![]() In order to reap the greatest economic benefit from England’s overseas possessions, Charles II enacted the mercantilist Navigation Acts, although many colonial merchants ignored them because enforcement remained lax. From the 1660s to the 1680s, Charles II added more possessions to England’s North American holdings by establishing the Restoration colonies of New York and New Jersey (taking these areas from the Dutch) as well as Pennsylvania and the Carolinas. Charles II lost little time in strengthening England’s global power. When Charles II ascended the throne in 1660, English subjects on both sides of the Atlantic celebrated the restoration of the English monarchy after a decade of living without a king as a result of the English Civil Wars.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |