England's conquest of Wales Through internal struggles and dynastic marriage alliances, the Welsh became more united until
Owain Gwynedd (1100–1170) became the first Welsh ruler to use the title
princeps Wallensium (prince of the Welsh). After invading England, land-hungry
Normans started pushing into the relatively weak
Welsh Marches, setting up a number of lordships in the eastern part of the country and the border areas. In response, the usually fractious Welsh, who still retained control of the north and west of Wales, started to unite around leaders such as Owain Gwynedd's grandson
Llywelyn the Great (1173–1240), who is known to have described himself as "prince of all North Wales". Llywelyn wrestled concessions out of
Magna Carta in 1215 and received the
fealty of other Welsh lords in 1216 at the council at Aberdyfi, becoming the first
Prince of Wales. His grandson,
Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, also secured the recognition of the title
Prince of Wales from
Henry III with the
Treaty of Montgomery in 1267. However, a succession of disputes, including the imprisonment of Llywelyn's wife
Eleanor, daughter of
Simon de Montfort, culminated in the first invasion by
Edward I. Following a military defeat, the
Treaty of Aberconwy in 1277 reasserted Llywelyn's fealty to the King of England. In 1282, following another rebellion,
Edward I finally made a permanent conquest. With Llywelyn dead, the King took over his lands and dispossessed various other allied princes of northern and western Wales, and across that area Edward established the
counties of
Anglesey,
Caernarfonshire,
Flintshire,
Merionethshire,
Cardiganshire and
Carmarthenshire. The
Statute of Rhuddlan formally established Edward's rule over Wales two years later although Welsh law continued to be used. Remaining princes became
marcher lords. Edward's son (later
Edward II), who had been born in Wales, was made
Prince of Wales. The tradition of bestowing the title "Prince of Wales" on the heir of the British Monarch continues to the present day. To help maintain his dominance, Edward constructed a series of great stone
castles. Initially, the Crown had only indirect control over much of Wales because the marcher lords (ruling over independent lordships in most of the country) were independent from direct Crown control. The exception was the lands of the
Principality of Wales in the north and west of the country, which was held personally by the King (or the heir to the Crown) but was not incorporated into the Kingdom of England. However, between the 13th and 16th centuries the Crown gradually acquired most of the marcher lordships, usually through inheritance, until almost all of Wales came under Crown control. Nevertheless, the whole of Wales – that is, the Principality, marcher lordships held by the Crown and marcher lordships held by others – remained outside of the legal and constitutional structures of the Kingdom of England. There was no major uprising except that led by
Owain Glyndŵr a century later, against
Henry IV of England. In 1404 Glyndŵr was crowned Prince of Wales in the presence of emissaries from France, Spain, and Scotland; he went on to hold parliamentary assemblies at several Welsh towns, including
Machynlleth. The rebellion was ultimately to founder, however. Glyndŵr went into hiding in 1412, and peace was more or less restored in Wales by 1415. The power of the marcher lords was ended in 1535, when the political and administrative union of England and Wales was completed. The
Laws in Wales Act 1535 annexed Wales to England and extended English law to Wales, abolished the marcher lordships and partitioned their lands into the
counties of
Brecon,
Denbigh,
Monmouth,
Montgomery, and
Radnor while adding parts to
Gloucester,
Hereford, and
Salop. (Monmouthshire was wholly subsumed into the court structure of England and so omitted from the subsequent
Laws in Wales Act 1542, which led to ambiguity about its status as part of England or Wales.) The Act also extended the Law of England to both England and Wales and made English the only permissible language for official purposes. This had the effect of creating an English-speaking ruling class amongst the Welsh, at a time when Welsh was the language of the great majority. Wales was also now represented in Parliament at Westminster.
English Conquest of Ireland By the 12th century,
Ireland was divided. Power was exercised by the heads of a few regional dynasties vying with each other for supremacy over the whole island. In 1155 Pope
Adrian IV issued the papal bull
Laudabiliter giving the Norman King
Henry II of England lordship over Ireland. The bull granted Henry the right to invade Ireland in order to reform Church practices. When the King of
Leinster Diarmuid MacMorroug was forcibly exiled from his kingdom by the new High King,
Ruaidri mac Tairrdelbach Ua Conchobair, he obtained permission from
Henry II of England to use
Norman forces to regain his kingdom. The
Normans landed in Ireland in 1169, and within a short time Leinster was reclaimed by Diarmait, who named his son-in-law,
Richard de Clare, heir to his kingdom. This caused consternation to
Henry, who feared the establishment of a rival Norman state in Ireland. With the authority of the papal bull Henry landed with a large fleet in 1171 and claimed sovereignty over the island. A peace treaty followed in 1175, with the Irish High King keeping lands outside Leinster, which had passed to Henry on the expected death of both Diarmait and de Clare. When the High King lost his authority Henry awarded his Irish territories to his younger son
John with the title
Dominus Hiberniae ("Lord of Ireland") in 1185. When John unexpectedly became King of England, the Lordship of Ireland fell directly under the English Crown. The title of Lord of Ireland and King of England fell into personal union. Throughout the 13th century the policy of the English Kings was to weaken the power of the
Norman Lords in Ireland. There was a resurgence of
Gaelic power as rebellious attacks stretched Norman resources. Politics and events in Gaelic Ireland also served to draw the settlers deeper into the orbit of the Irish. When the
Black Death arrived in Ireland in 1348 it hit the English and Norman inhabitants who lived in towns and villages far harder than it did the native Irish, who lived in more dispersed rural settlements. After it had passed, Gaelic Irish language and customs came to dominate the countryside again. The English-controlled area shrunk back to the
Pale, a fortified area around Dublin. Outside the Pale, the Hiberno-Norman lords adopted the Irish language and customs. Over the following centuries they sided with the indigenous Irish in political and military conflicts with England and generally stayed Catholic after the
Reformation. The authorities in the Pale grew so worried about the "Gaelicisation" of Ireland that they passed special legislation banning those of English descent from speaking the Irish language, wearing Irish clothes, or inter-marrying with the Irish. Since the government in Dublin had little real authority, however, the Statutes did not have much effect. By the end of the 15th century, the ruling English authority in Ireland had almost all disappeared. In 1532,
Henry VIII broke with
Papal authority. While the English, the Welsh, and the Scots accepted
Protestantism, the Irish remained Catholic. This affected Ireland's relationship with England for the next four hundred years since the English tried to re-conquer and colonise Ireland to prevent Ireland being a base for Catholic forces that were trying to overthrow the Protestant settlement in England. From 1536, Henry VIII decided to conquer Ireland and bring it under crown control so the island would not become a base for future rebellions or foreign invasions of England. In 1541, he upgraded Ireland from a lordship to a full kingdom. Henry was proclaimed
King of Ireland at a meeting of the Irish Parliament. With the institutions of government in place, the next step was to extend the control of the English Kingdom of Ireland over all of its claimed territory. The re-conquest was completed during the reigns of
Elizabeth and
James I, after several bloody conflicts. However, the English were not successful in converting the Catholic Irish to the Protestant religion, and the brutal methods used by Crown authority to pacify the country heightened resentment of English rule. From the mid-16th and into the early 17th century, Crown governments carried out a policy of
colonisation known as
Plantations. Scottish and English Protestants were sent as colonists to the provinces of
Munster,
Ulster, and the counties of
Laois and
Offaly. These settlers, who had a British Protestant identity, would form the ruling class of future British administrations in Ireland. A series of
Penal Laws discriminated against all faiths other than the established (
Anglican)
Church of Ireland.
Personal Union: Union of the Crowns for
Great Britain, as used in the
Kingdom of England, from 1603 ,
Scotland,
Wales and
Ireland prior to unification|A 16th century map of
England,
Scotland,
Wales and
Ireland prior to unification In August 1503
James IV, King of Scots, married
Margaret Tudor, the eldest daughter of
Henry VII of England. Almost 100 years later, when
Elizabeth I was in the last decade of her reign, it was clear to all that
James VI of Scotland, the great-grandson of James IV and Margaret Tudor, was the only generally acceptable heir to the English throne. From 1601, Elizabeth I's chief minister
Sir Robert Cecil maintained a secret correspondence with James in order to prepare in advance for a smooth succession. Elizabeth died on 24 March 1603, and James was proclaimed king in London later the same day. Despite sharing a monarchy, Scotland and England continued as separate countries with separate parliaments for over one hundred more years. James had the idealistic ambition of building on the personal union of the crowns of Scotland and England so as to establish a permanent
Union of the Crowns under one monarch, one parliament, and one law. He insisted that English and Scots should "join and coalesce together in a sincere and perfect union, as two twins bred in one belly, to love one another as no more two but one estate". James's ambitions were greeted with very little enthusiasm, as one by one members of parliament rushed to defend the ancient name and realm of England. All sorts of legal objections were raised: all laws would have to be renewed and all treaties renegotiated. For James, whose experience of parliaments was limited to the stage-managed and semi-feudal Scottish variety, the self-assurance – and obduracy – of the English version, which had long experience of upsetting monarchs, was an obvious shock. The Scots were no more enthusiastic than the English because they feared being reduced to the status of Wales or Ireland. In October 1604, James assumed the title "King of Great Britain" by proclamation rather than statute, although
Sir Francis Bacon told him he could not use the title in "any legal proceeding, instrument or assurance". The two realms continued to maintain separate parliaments. The
Union of the Crowns had begun a process that would lead to the eventual unification of the two kingdoms. However, in the ensuing hundred years, strong religious and political differences continued to divide the kingdoms, and common royalty could not prevent occasions of internecine warfare. James did not create a
British Crown, but he did, in one sense at least, create the British as a distinct group of people. In 1607 large tracts of land in
Ulster fell to the crown. A new Plantation was started, made up of Protestant settlers from Scotland and England. Over the years the settlers, surrounded by the hostile Catholic Irish, gradually cast off their separate English and Scottish roots, becoming British in the process, as a means of emphasising their "otherness" from their
Gaelic neighbors. It was the one corner of the British Isles where Britishness became truly meaningful as a political and cultural identity in its own right, as opposed to a gloss on older and deeper national associations. Ruling over the diverse kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland proved difficult for James and his successor
Charles, particularly when they tried to impose religious uniformity on the Three Kingdoms. There were different religious conditions in each country.
Henry VIII had made himself head of the
Church of England, which was reformed under
Edward VI and became
Anglican under Elizabeth I. Protestantism became intimately associated with national identity in England. Roman Catholicism was seen as the national enemy, especially as embodied in France and Spain. However, Catholicism remained the religion of most people in Ireland and became a symbol of native resistance to the Tudor re-conquest of Ireland in the 16th century. Scotland had a national church, the
Presbyterian Church of Scotland, although much of the
highlands remained Catholic. With the support of the
Episcopalians, James reintroduced bishops into the Church of Scotland against the wishes of the presbyterian party. In 1625, James was succeeded by his son
Charles I, who in 1633, some years after his
coronation at
Westminster, was crowned in
St Giles' Cathedral,
Edinburgh, with full Anglican rites. Opposition to his attempts to enforce Anglican practices reached a flashpoint when he tried to introduce a
Book of Common Prayer. Charles's confrontation with the Scots came to a head in 1639, when he tried and failed to coerce Scotland by military means. In some respects, this revolt also represented Scottish resentment at being sidelined within the Stuart monarchy after James I's accession to the throne of England. It led to the
Bishops' Wars.
Charles I's accession also marked the beginning of an intense schism between King and Parliament. Charles's adherence to the doctrine of the
divine right of kings, a doctrine foreign to the English mentality he had inherited from his father, fuelled a vicious battle for supremacy between King and Parliament. Therefore, when Charles approached the Parliament to pay for a campaign against the Scots, they refused, declared themselves to be permanently in session and put forward a long list of civil and religious grievances that Charles would have to remedy before they approved any new legislation. Meanwhile, in the Kingdom of Ireland, Charles I's Lord Deputy there,
Thomas Wentworth, had antagonised the native Irish Catholics by repeated initiatives to confiscate their lands and grant them to English colonists. He had also angered them by enforcing new taxes but denying Roman Catholics full rights as subjects. What made this situation explosive was his idea, in 1639, to offer Irish Catholics the reforms they had been looking for in return for them raising and paying for an Irish army to put down the Scottish rebellion. Although the army was to be officered by Protestants, the idea of an Irish Catholic army being used to enforce what was seen by many as tyrannical government horrified both the Scottish and the English Parliament, who in response threatened to invade Ireland. Alienated by British Protestant domination and frightened by the rhetoric of the English and Scottish Parliaments, a small group of Irish conspirators launched the
Irish Rebellion of 1641, ostensibly in support of the "King's Rights". The rising was marked by widespread assaults on the British Protestant communities in Ireland, sometimes culminating in massacres. Rumours spread in England and Scotland that the killings had the King's sanction and that this was a foretaste of what was in store for them if the King's Irish troops landed in Britain. As a result, the English Parliament refused to pay for a royal army to put down the rebellion in Ireland and instead raised its own armed forces. The King did likewise, rallying those
Royalists (some of them members of Parliament) who believed that loyalty to the legitimate King was the most important political principle. The
English Civil War broke out in 1642. The Scottish
Covenanters, as the Presbyterians called themselves, sided with the English Parliament, joined the war in 1643, and played a major role in the English Parliamentary victory. The King's forces were ground down by the efficiency of Parliament's
New Model Army – backed by the financial muscle of the
City of London. In 1646, Charles I surrendered. After failing to come to compromise with Parliament, he was arrested and executed in 1649. In Ireland, the rebel Irish Catholics formed their own government – Confederate Ireland with the intention of helping the Royalists in return for religious toleration and political autonomy. Troops from England and Scotland fought in Ireland, and Irish Confederate troops mounted an expedition to Scotland in 1644, sparking the
Scottish Civil War. In Scotland, the Royalists had a series of victories in 1644–45 but were crushed with the end of the first English Civil War and the return of the main Covenanter armies to Scotland. Following the end of the second English Civil War, the victorious Parliamentary forces, now commanded by
Oliver Cromwell, invaded Ireland and crushed the Royalist-Confederate alliance there in the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland in 1649. Their alliance with the Scottish Covenanters had also broken down, and the Scots crowned
Charles II as king. Cromwell therefore embarked on a conquest of Scotland in 1650–51. By the end of the wars, the Three Kingdoms were a unitary state called the
English Commonwealth, ostensibly a
republic but having many characteristics of a
military dictatorship. While the Wars of the Three Kingdoms pre-figured many of the changes that would shape modern Britain, in the short term it resolved little. The English Commonwealth did achieve a compromise (though a relatively unstable one) between a monarchy and a republic. In practise power was exercised by Oliver Cromwell because of his control over the Parliament's military forces, but his legal position was never clarified, even when he became
Lord Protector. While several constitutions were proposed, none were ever accepted. Thus the Commonwealth and
the Protectorate established by the victorious Parliamentarians left little behind it in the way of new forms of government. There were two important legacies from this period: the first was that in executing King Charles I for
high treason, no future British monarch could be under any illusion that perceived despotism would be tolerated, and the second was that the excesses of Army rule, particularly that of the Major-Generals, has left an abiding mistrust of military rule in the English speaking world. Ireland and Scotland were occupied by the New Model Army during the Interregnum. In Ireland, almost all lands belonging to Irish Catholics were confiscated as punishment for the rebellion of 1641; harsh
Penal Laws were also passed against this community. Thousands of Parliamentarian soldiers were settled in Ireland on confiscated lands. The Parliaments of Ireland and Scotland were abolished. In theory, they were represented in the English Parliament, but since this body was never given real powers, this was insignificant. When Cromwell died in 1658, the Commonwealth fell apart without major violence, and
Charles II was restored as King of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Under the
English Restoration, the political system returned to the constitutional position of before the wars: Scotland and Ireland were returned their Parliaments. When
Charles II died his Catholic brother
James inherited the throne as James II of England and VII of Scotland. When he had a son, the Parliament of England decided to depose him in the
Glorious Revolution of 1688. He was replaced not by his Roman Catholic son,
James Stuart, but by his Protestant daughter and son-in-law,
Mary II and
William III, who became joint rulers in 1689. James made one serious attempt to recover his crowns, which ended with defeat at the
Battle of the Boyne in 1690. ==Formation of the Union==