English Revolution

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The term "English Revolution" refers to 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 experiment in republicanism, the "Commonwealth", before monarchy was restored -- in the shape of Charles's son, Charles II, in 1660.

The French historian François Guizot was the first to use the term "English Revolution", in his book Histoire de la révolution d'Angleterre ..., begun in 1826. He sought to compare this epoch with the French Revolution (which began in 1789). In Karl Marx's historical schema, the English Revolution was a "bourgeois revolution", "prefiguring" the French "bourgeois revolution". Later Marxist historians, notably Christopher Hill, sought to develop this idea.

[edit] Popular gains

The English Revolution anticipates the French and later revolutions in the field of popular administrative and economic gains. The guild democracy movement of the period won its greatest successes among London's transport workers, most notably the Thames Watermen, who democratized their company in 1641-42. And with the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642, rural communities began to seize timber and other resources on the estates of royalists, catholics, the royal family and the church hierarchy. Some communities improved their conditions of tenure on such estates.

The old status quo began a retrenchment after the end of the main civil war in 1646, and more especially after the restoration of monarchy in 1660. But some gains were long-term. The democratic element introduced in the watermen's company in 1642, for example, survived, with vicissitudes, until 1827.^[1] ^[2]