Political Causes Of The English Revolution

The English Revolution is regarded as one of the major political landmarks that created the first bourgeois state and parliamentary government. Also known as a period of civil war, it went on from 1640 to 1660. The past twenty years have seen a large amount of scholarly interest in the war, its nature and causes. One way of understanding the causes is to see how different historians have explained this major event. R.G Usher rightly observed that the revolution was considered an enigma at that time, and is, even today.

Samuel Gardiner, in his History of England 1603-1656 analyzed the Revolution through a political narrative. Gardiner believed that the civil war was a Puritan revolution, in which the driving force behind all the controversies was religion and ideologies. Gardiner explained the outbreak of the revolution primarily on political terms. This political context is explained by Christopher Hill who believed that the conflict developed not only because of material interests, but also ideas and values. After the noble houses destroyed one another in the Wars of the Roses, the strength of the advancing and declining classes was in equilibrium for a short period, during which the function of the monarchy

According to Hill, the Reformation was an act of state and the Protestantism in England was a consequence and not a cause of the Reformation. The church lost its economic and political power during the rule of Henry. The removal of abbots from the House of Lords in the parliament reduced the clerical vote to a minority. The church also lost a large amount of wealth in the form of "first fruits" and 'tenths'. These developments led to short-term and long-term consequences in England. The fight to control the Church was also of fundamental importance; whoever controlled its doctrine and organization was in a position to determine the nature of