"English Revolution" has been used to describe two different events in English history. The first to be so called—by Whig historians—was the Glorious Revolution of 1688, whereby James II was replaced by William III and Mary II as monarch and a constitutional monarchy was established.
In the twentieth-century, however, Marxist historians introduced the use of the term "English Revolution" to describe the period of the English Civil Wars and Commonwealth period (1640–1660), in which Parliament challenged King Charles I's authority, engaged in civil conflict against his forces, and executed him in 1649. This was followed by a ten-year period of bourgeois republican government, the "Commonwealth", before monarchy was restored in the shape of Charles' son, Charles II in 1660.
Read more about English Revolution: Whig Theory, Marxist Theory
Famous quotes containing the words english and/or revolution:
“This seems a long while ago, and yet it happened since Milton wrote his Paradise Lost. But its antiquity is not the less great for that, for we do not regulate our historical time by the English standard, nor did the English by the Roman, nor the Roman by the Greek.... From this September afternoon, and from between these now cultivated shores, those times seemed more remote than the dark ages.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Years were not required for a revolution of public opinion; days, nay hours, produced marked changes in this case.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)