The Reformation came to Britain and Ireland with King
Henry VIII of England's breach with the Roman Catholic Church in 1533. At this time there were only a limited number of Protestants among the general population, and these were mostly living in the towns of the South and the East of England. With the state-ordered break with the Pope in Rome, the Church in England, Wales and Ireland was placed under the rule of the King and Parliament. The first major changes to doctrine and practice took place under Vicar-General
Thomas Cromwell, and the newly appointed Protestant-leaning
Archbishop of Canterbury,
Thomas Cranmer. The first challenge to the institution of these reforms came from Ireland, where "Silken"
Thomas Fitzgerald cited the controversy to justify his armed uprising of 1534. The young Fitzgerald failed to gain much local support, however, and in October a 1,600-strong army of English and Welshmen arrived in Ireland, along with four modern siege guns. The following year Fitzgerald was blasted into submission, and in August he was induced to surrender. Shortly after this episode, local resistance to the reforms emerged in England. The
dissolution of the monasteries, which began in 1536, provoked a violent northern Catholic rebellion in the
Pilgrimage of Grace, which was eventually put down with much bloodshed. The reformation continued to be imposed on an often unwilling population with the aid of stern laws that made it treason, punishable by death, to oppose the King's actions with respect to religion. The next major armed resistance took place in the
Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549, which was an unsuccessful rising in western England against the enforced substitution of Cranmer's English language service for the Latin Catholic Mass. Following the restoration of Catholicism under Queen
Mary I of England in 1553, there was a brief unsuccessful Protestant rising in the south-east of England.
Scottish Reformation The Reformation in
Scotland began in conflict. Fiery Calvinist preacher
John Knox returned to Scotland in 1560, having been exiled for his part in the assassination of Cardinal Beaton. He proceeded to
Dundee where a large number of Protestant sympathisers and noblemen had gathered. Knox was declared an outlaw by the Queen Regent,
Mary of Guise, but the Protestants went at once to
Perth, a walled town that could be defended in case of a siege. At the church of St John the Baptist, Knox preached a fiery sermon that provoked an
iconoclastic riot. A mob poured into the church and it was entirely gutted. In the pattern of Calvinist riots in France and the Netherlands, the mob then attacked two friaries in the town, looting their gold and silver and smashing images. Mary of Guise gathered those nobles loyal to her and a small French army. With Protestant reinforcements arriving from neighbouring counties, the queen regent retreated to
Dunbar. By now, Calvinist mobs had overrun much of
central Scotland, destroying monasteries and Catholic churches as they went. On 30 June, the Protestants occupied
Edinburgh, though they were only able to hold it for a month. Even before their arrival, the mob had already sacked the churches and the friaries. On 1 July, Knox preached from the pulpit of
St Giles', the most influential in the capital. Knox negotiated by letter with
William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley,
Elizabeth's chief advisor, for English support. When additional French troops arrived in
Leith, Edinburgh's seaport, the Protestants responded by retaking Edinburgh. This time, on 24 October 1559, the Scottish nobility formally deposed Mary of Guise from the regency. Her secretary,
William Maitland of Lethington, defected to the Protestant side, bringing his administrative skills. For the final stage of the revolution, Maitland appealed to Scottish patriotism to fight French domination. Support from England finally arrived and by the end of March, a significant English army joined the Scottish Protestant forces. The sudden death of Mary of Guise in
Edinburgh Castle on 10 June 1560 paved the way for the signing of the
Treaty of Edinburgh, and the withdrawal of French and English troops from Scotland, leaving the Scottish Calvinists in control on the ground. Catholicism was forcibly suppressed. The return of
Mary, Queen of Scots, to Scotland in 1560, led to further tension between her and the Protestant
Lords of the Congregation. Mary claimed to favour religious toleration on the French model, however, the Protestant establishment feared a reestablishment of Catholicism, and sought English help to neutralise or depose Mary. Mary's marriage to a leading Catholic precipitated Mary's half-brother, the Earl of Moray, to join with other Protestant Lords in open rebellion. Mary set out for Stirling on 26 August 1565 to confront them. Moray and the rebellious lords were routed and fled into exile; the decisive military action became known as the
Chaseabout Raid. In 1567, Mary was captured by another rebellious force at the
Battle of Carberry Hill and imprisoned in
Loch Leven Castle, where she was forced to abdicate the Scottish throne in favour of her one-year-old son James. Mary escaped from
Loch Leven the following year, and once again managed to raise a small army. After her army's defeat at the
Battle of Langside on 13 May, she fled to England, where she was imprisoned by Queen
Elizabeth. Her son
James VI was raised as a Protestant, later becoming King of England as well as Scotland. The
Rising of the North from 1569 to 1570 was an unsuccessful attempt by Catholic nobles from
Northern England to depose Queen Elizabeth I and replace her with Mary, Queen of Scots.
English Civil War England,
Scotland and
Ireland, in personal union under the Stuart king,
James I & VI, continued Elizabeth I's policy of providing military support to European Protestants in the Netherlands and France. King
Charles I decided to send an expeditionary force to relieve the French
Huguenots whom Royal French forces held besieged in
La Rochelle. However, tax-raising authority for these wars was getting harder and harder to raise from parliament. In 1638 the Scottish
National Covenant was signed by aggrieved Presbyterian lords and commoners. A Scottish rebellion, known as the
Bishops War, soon followed, leading to the defeat of a weak royalist counter-force in 1640. The rebels went on to capture
Newcastle upon Tyne, further weakening King Charles' authority. In October 1641, a major rebellion broke out in Ireland. Charles soon needed to raise more money to suppress this
Irish Rebellion. Meanwhile, English
Puritans and Scottish
Calvinists intensely opposed the king's main religious policy of unifying the
Church of England and the
Church of Scotland under a form of
High Church Anglicanism. This, its opponents believed, was far too catholic in form, and based on the authority of
bishops. The English parliament refused to vote enough money for Charles to defeat the Scots without the King giving up much of his authority and reforming the English church along more Calvinist lines. The king refused, and deteriorating relations led to the outbreak of war in 1642. The first
pitched battle of the war, fought at
Edgehill on 23 October 1642, proved inconclusive, and both the Royalists and Parliamentarians claimed it as a victory. The second field action of the war was a stand-off at
Turnham Green, and Charles was forced to withdraw to
Oxford, which would serve as his base for the remainder of the war. In general, the early part of the war went well for the Royalists. The turning point came in the late summer and early autumn of 1643, when the Earl of Essex's army forced the king to raise the
siege of Gloucester and then brushed the Royalist army aside at the
First Battle of Newbury on 20 September 1643. In an attempt to gain an advantage in numbers, Charles negotiated a ceasefire with the Catholic rebels in Ireland, freeing up English troops to fight on the Royalist side in England. Simultaneously Parliament offered concessions to the Scots in return for their aid and assistance. With the help of the Scots, Parliament won at
Marston Moor (2 July 1644), gaining
York and much of the north of England.
Oliver Cromwell's conduct in this battle proved decisive, and demonstrated his leadership potential. In 1645 Parliament passed the
Self-denying Ordinance, by which all members of either House of Parliament laid down their commands, allowing the re-organization of its main forces into the
New Model Army. By 1646 Charles had been forced to surrender himself to the Scots, and the parliamentary forces were in control of England. Charles was executed in 1649, and the monarchy was not
restored until 1660. Even then, religious strife continued through the
Glorious Revolution and thereafter.
Ireland and the Irish Catholics were banished to the lands of
Connacht. The wars of religion in Ireland took place in the context of a country that had already rebelled frequently against English rule in the previous decades. In 1534,
Thomas Fitzgerald, known as Silken Thomas, led what was called the Silken Thomas Rebellion. In the province of
Ulster in the North of the country,
Shane O'Neill's Rebellion occurred from 1558 to 1567, and in the South of the Country, the
Desmond Rebellions occurred in 1569–1573 and 1579–1583 in the province of
Munster. Ireland entered into a continuous state of war with the
rebellion of 1641, with most of the island controlled by the
Irish Confederates. Increasingly threatened by the armies of the English Parliament after Charles I's arrest in 1648, the Confederates signed a treaty of alliance with the English Royalists. The joint Royalist and Confederate forces under
the Duke of Ormonde attempted to eliminate the Parliamentary army holding
Dublin, but their opponents routed them at the
Battle of Rathmines (2 August 1649). As the former Member of Parliament
Admiral Robert Blake blockaded Prince Rupert's fleet in
Kinsale, Oliver Cromwell could land at Dublin on 15 August 1649 with an army to quell the Royalist alliance in Ireland. Cromwell's suppression of the Royalists in Ireland during 1649 still has a strong resonance for many Irish people. The
siege of Drogheda and massacre of nearly 3,500 people—comprising around 2,700 Royalist soldiers and all the men in the town carrying arms, including civilians, prisoners, and Catholic priests—became one of the historical memories that has driven Irish-English and Catholic-Protestant strife during the last three centuries. However, the massacre has significance mainly as a symbol of the Irish perception of Cromwellian cruelty, as far more people died in the subsequent
guerrilla warfare and scorched-earth fighting in the country than at infamous massacres such as Drogheda and
Wexford. The
Parliamentarian conquest of Ireland ground on for another four years until 1653, when the last Irish Confederate and Royalist troops surrendered. Historians have estimated that up to 30% of Ireland's population either died or had gone into exile by the end of the wars. The victors confiscated almost all Irish Catholic-owned land in the wake of the conquest and distributed it to the Parliament's creditors, to the Parliamentary soldiers who served in Ireland, and to English people who had settled there before the war.
Scotland The execution of
Charles I altered the dynamics of the
Civil War in Scotland, which had raged between Royalists and
Covenanters since 1644. By 1649, the struggle had left the Royalists there in disarray, and their erstwhile leader, the
Marquess of Montrose, had gone into exile. However, Montrose, who had raised a
mercenary force in Norway, later returned but did not succeed in raising many Highland clans, and the Covenanters defeated his army at the
Battle of Carbisdale in
Ross-shire on 27 April 1650. The victors captured Montrose shortly afterwards and took him to
Edinburgh. On 20 May, the Scottish Parliament sentenced him to death and had him hanged the next day. '', by
Andrew Carrick Gow Charles II landed in Scotland at
Garmouth in
Moray on 23 June 1650 and signed the 1638
National Covenant and the 1643
Solemn League and Covenant immediately after coming ashore. With his original Scottish Royalist followers and his new Covenanter allies, King Charles II became the greatest threat facing the new English republic. In response to the threat, Cromwell left some of his lieutenants in Ireland to continue the suppression of the Irish Royalists and returned to England. Cromwell arrived in Scotland on 22 July 1650 and proceeded to lay siege to Edinburgh. By the end of August disease and a shortage of supplies had reduced his army, and he had to order a retreat towards his base at Dunbar. A Scottish army, assembled under the command of
David Leslie, tried to block the retreat, but Cromwell defeated them at the
Battle of Dunbar on 3 September. Cromwell's army then took Edinburgh, and by the end of the year, his army had occupied much of southern Scotland. In July 1651, Cromwell's forces crossed the
Firth of Forth into
Fife and defeated the Scots at the
Battle of Inverkeithing (20 July 1651). The New Model Army advanced towards
Perth, which allowed Charles, at the head of the Scottish army, to move south into England. Cromwell followed Charles into England, leaving
George Monck to finish the campaign in Scotland. Monck took
Stirling on 14 August and
Dundee on 1 September. In 1652, the army finished off the remnants of Royalist resistance, under the terms of the "
Tender of Union". In late 1688,
William of Orange successfully invaded England. After the
Convention of Estates deposed the Catholic king
James VII on 11 April 1689, they offered the royal title to William and his wife
Mary (the Protestant daughter of James), which they accepted on 11 May 1689. During the subsequent
Jacobite rising of 1689, instigated by James' Roman Catholic and Anglican Tory supporters, the Calvinist forces in the south and lowlands of Scotland triumphed. Despite this defeat, many
Scottish Highland clans remained either Catholic or Episcopalian in sympathy. The Catholic
Clan MacDonald was subject to the 1691
Glencoe Massacre for being late in pledging loyalty to the new Protestant king William II. Highland clans also rallied to the support of Catholic claimants to the British throne in later, failed
Jacobite risings of the erstwhile Stuart
King James III in 1715 and
Charles Edward Stuart in 1745.
Other • The
Pilgrimage of Grace was a
popular rising in
Yorkshire in 1536–37 against
Henry VIII's break with the
Roman Catholic Church. •
Bigod's rebellion was an armed
rebellion by
English Roman Catholics in
Cumberland and
Westmorland against
King Henry VIII of
England and the
English Parliament. •
Prayer Book Rebellion (1549) •
Rising of the North (1569–1570) •
Desmond Rebellions (1569–1573, 1579–1583) == Death tolls ==