HST 264 - (268) The Stuart Wars 1603-1660

Course Units: 1

(Not offered in 2014-15) In 1603, James VI of Scotland became the first king to rule all of Britain and Ireland, when he added Elizabeth I’s crown to his own. This was the first in a series of remarkable revolutions examined in this course. James successfully consolidated this new Stuart imperium in England, Wales, and Scotland. The Protestant plantations in Ulster created the origins of the modern-day troubles in Northern Ireland. Settlements in the Americas inaugurated a British Atlantic Empire built on sugar and tobacco, slavery and a British diaspora. James passed to his successor Charles I a dangerous ideology of imperial kingship that asserted the crown’s unchallenged authority over all matters spiritual and temporal. When Charles attempted to make good on that ideology in his religiously and ethnically diverse kingdoms, the result was war, wars that eventually cost the king his head. For the first and only time, a British king was tried and executed for committing tyranny, the monarchy abolished, and a republic created. Inspired by the message of radical social justice in the Bible, English men and women demanded freedom and equality in these years. CC: LCC