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UK History - England
The country that we now call England emerged late in the first
millennium AD, as the Anglo-Saxon influence spread, following the
decline of the Roman Empire. The last successful invasion of England
was in 1066, when it was conquered by William of Normandy. The English
language evolved as a mixture of Norman French and Anglo-Saxon.
In the centuries that followed there was much political unrest
and revolt. In the sixteenth century, Henry VIII’s insistence
on divorcing his wife (a practice forbidden by the Catholic church)
contributed to the establishment of the Protestant Church of England.
Struggles for power between the state and the monarchy culminated
in the English Civil War in the mid-seventeenth century, which pitched
King Charles I and his followers (the ‘royalists’) against
Oliver Cromwell’s parliamentarians (the ‘roundheads’).
Cromwell’s victory brought eleven years of puritanical republican
rule, which was followed by the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.
In 1688 the Catholic Stuart monarch, James II, was defeated by his
Protestant son-in-law, William of Orange. By the end of the seventeenth
century Anglican Protestantism was firmly established as the state
religion.
In the eighteenth century, England (which now exerted control over
Scotland, Wales, and Ireland) was an increasingly secure, open,
and innovative society. Science and commerce developed together,
resulting in the Industrial Revolution. Meanwhile the British Empire
grew rapidly as a result of exploration, trading, conquest, and
settlement – gradually advancing into Canada, Australia, New
Zealand, the Indian subcontinent, other parts of Asia, and parts
of Africa. When Queen Victoria took the throne in 1837, Britain
had become the world’s strongest power, and by the beginning
of the twentieth century the British Empire covered almost a quarter
of the world’s land surface. However, its decline during the
twentieth century was rapid: by the middle of the century almost
all Britain’s colonies had become independent, and Britain
assumed a new role as a secondary power. The links created by the
British Empire partly account for the ethnic diversity of Britain
today.
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