1600-1620

1603: Elizabeth I of England dies and is succeeded by her cousin King James VI of Scotland,
uniting the crowns of Scotland and England.

James I ended the long war with Spain in 1604.

1607: Jamestown, Virginia, is settled as what would become the first permanent English colony in
North America. This was the beginning of colonialism by England in North America. Many English
settled then in North America for religious or economic reasons.

James I was also responsible for a new translation of the Bible, the King James Version, which was
published in 1611.

However James came into conflict with parliament. Parliament was in a strong position.

The situation was complicated by disagreements over religion. Many MPs were puritans. They
wished to 'purify' the Church of England of its remaining Catholic elements.

1616: English poet and playwright William Shakespeare dies.


1621 to 1640

James I died in 1625. His son Charles followed him. At the beginning of his reign Charles I married
a French Roman Catholic princess, Henrietta Maria. However marrying a Catholic was very
unpopular move with the Puritans.

1625: Charles sent an expedition to Cadiz, which ended in failure. Parliament strongly criticized his
policies and refused to raise extra taxes to pay for the Spanish war. Charles angrily dissolved
parliament and raised money by levying forced loans. He imprisoned, without trial, anyone who
refused to pay.

1627: an expedition was sent to La Rochelle in France. It was led by the king's favorite the Duke of
Buckingham and it ended in failure.

1628: the cost of wars meant Charles was desperate for money and he was forced to call parliament.

1629: William Laud was Bishop of London. He was strongly opposed to the Puritans and Charles
supported him wholeheartedly.

1633: Laud was made Archbishop of Canterbury. Laud was determined to suppress the Puritans and
he sent commissioners into almost every parish to make sure the local churches came into line. For
11 years Charles ruled without parliament. This period was called the eleven years tyranny.

1637: Charles and Laud enraged the Scots by proposing religious changes in Scotland. Laud and
Charles tried to introduce a new prayer book in Scotland. There were riots in Edinburgh. I

1638: Scottish nobles and ministers signed a document called the National Covenant.



16391651: Wars of the Three Kingdoms, civil wars throughout Scotland, Ireland, and England.

1640: Charles dissolved parliament.

The Second Bishops War followed in 1640. In August 1640 the Scots invaded England and they
captured Newcastle. Charles was forced to make peace with the Scots. By the treaty they occupied
Durham and Northumberland. Charles was forced to pay their army's costs.



Literature during this periods:

Elizabeth I died in 1603. James VI of Scotland succeeded her. Writers jubilantly noted that the new
ruler had literary inclinations. Yet both in his literary works and on the throne James expounded
authoritarian theories of kingship that seemed incompatible with the English tradition of "mixed"
government. Kings, James believed, derived their power from God rather than from the people.
James was notorious for his financial heedlessness, and his disturbing tendency to bestow high
office on good-looking male favorites. The period had complex attitudes to same-sex relationships,
and Jamess susceptibility to lovely, expensive youths was seen as more a political than a moral
calamity. Yet James was successful in keeping England out of European wars, and encouraging
colonial projects in the New World and economic growth at home. The most important religious
event of Jamess reign was a newly commissioned translation of the Bible.

Political and religious tensions intensified under Jamess son, Charles I, who succeeded to the
throne in 1625. Between 1629 and 1638, Charles attempted to rule without Parliament. Charles
married the French princess Henrietta Maria, who promoted a conversion back to Catholicism. The
appointment of William Laud as the archbishop of Canterbury further alienated Puritans, as Laud
aligned the doctrine and ceremonies of the English church with Roman Catholicism. In 1642 a
Civil War broke out between the kings forces and armies loyal to the House of Commons. The
conflict ended with Charless defeat and beheading in 1649. In the 1650s, as Lord Protector,
Oliver Cromwell wielded power nearly as autocratically as Charles had done. In 1660, Parliament
invited the old kings son, Charles II, home from exile. Yet the twenty-year period between 1640
and 1660 had seen the emergence of concepts that would remain central to bourgeois thought for
centuries to come: religious toleration, separation of church and state, freedom from press
censorship, and popular sovereignty. Among the more radical voices to emerge in the period were
those of Roger Williams, who advocated religious toleration, the Leveller, John Lilburne, who
advocated universal male suffrage, and the Digger, Gerrard Winstanley, who advocated Christian
communism.

Early seventeenth-century writers such as John Donne, Ben Jonson, and Robert Burton inherited a
system of knowledge founded on analogy, order, and hierarchy. In this system, a monarch was like
God, the ruler of the universe, and also like a father, the head of the family. Yet this conceptual
system was beginning to crumble in the face of the scientific and empirical approach to knowledge
advocated by Francis Bacon. William Harveys discovery of the circulation of blood and Galileos
demonstration that the earth revolved around the sun disrupted long-held certainties. As ideas
changed, so did the conditions of their dissemination. Although elite poets like John Donne often
preferred to circulate their works in manuscript, the printing of all kinds of literary works was
becoming more common. Printers and acting companies were obliged to submit works to the
censor before public presentation, and those who flouted the censorship laws were subject to heavy
punishment. Since overt criticism or satire of the great was dangerous, political writing before the
Civil War was apt to be oblique and allegorical.

In the early seventeenth century, John Donne, Ben Jonson, and George Herbert led the shift towards
new poetic genres. These included classical elegy and satire, epigram, verse epistle, meditative
religious lyric, and the country-house poem. Jonson distinguished himself as an acute observer of
urban manners. He mentored a group of younger poets, including Herrick and Carew, known as the
Tribe or Sons of Ben. Donnes poetry concerns itself not with a crowded social panorama, but with
a dyadthe speaker and either a woman, or God. Donne delights in making the overlap between
sexual and religious love seem new and shocking, and he has been regarded as a founder of
Metaphysical poetry. Among the Metaphysical poets Herbert, with his complex religious
sensibility wedded to great artistic sensibility, had a profound influence on younger poets like
Crashaw and Vaughan. The reigns of the first two Stuart kings also marked the entry of women in
some numbers into authorship and publication.
The Civil War was disastrous for the English theater, with the closure of the playhouses in 1642.
Many leading poets were staunch royalists, or Cavaliers, who suffered heavily in the war years. Yet
two of the best writers of the period, John Milton and Andrew Marvell, sided with the republic.
Marvells conflictual world-view is unmistakably a product of the Civil War decades. Miltons
loyalty to the revolution remained unwavering despite his disillusion when it failed to realize his
ideals. The revolutionary era also gave new impetus to womens writing on both sides of the
political divide.