English Revolution

The English Revolution is a term that has been used to describe two separate events in English history. Prior to the 20th century, it was generally applied to the 1688 Glorious Revolution, when James II was deposed and a constitutional monarchy established under William III and Mary II.

However, Marxist historians began using it for the period covering the 1639–1653 Wars of the Three Kingdoms and the Interregnum that followed the Execution of Charles I in 1649, before the 1660 Stuart Restoration had returned Charles II to the throne. Writing in 1892, Friedrich Engels described this period as "the Great Rebellion" and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 as "comparatively puny", although he claimed that both were part of the same revolutionary movement.

Although Charles II was retroactively declared to have been the legal and rightful monarch since the death of his father in 1649, which resulted in a return to the status quo in many areas, a number of gains made under the Commonwealth remained in law.

Tensions regarding the English monarchy began well before the Revolution of 1688. When Charles I was executed in 1649 by the English Parliament, England entered into a republic, or Commonwealth, that lasted until Charles II was reestablished as king of England in 1660. The intermittent civil wars that lasted between 1649 and 1688 were a "constitutional struggle originating from the unresolved contradictions fostered by the Reformation". Debates amongst England's post-Reformation state and the constitutional basis for civil involvement in ecclesiastical and governmental issues continually converged together. During the Revolution of 1688, King James II was replaced by the monarchs William III and Mary II, and a constitutional monarchy was established that was described by Whig historians as the "English Revolution". That interpretation suggests that the "English Revolution" was the final act in the long process of reform and consolidation by Parliament to achieve a balanced constitutional monarchy in Britain, with laws made that pointed towards freedom.

The Marxist view of the English Revolution suggests that the events of 1640 to 1660 in Britain were a bourgeois revolution in which the final section of English feudalism (the state) was destroyed by a bourgeois class (and its supporters) and replaced with a state (and society), which reflected the wider establishment of agrarian (and later industrial) capitalism. Such an analysis sees the English Revolution as pivotal in the transition from feudalism to capitalism and from a feudal state to a capitalist state in Britain.

The phrase "English Revolution" was first used by Marx in the short text "England's 17th Century Revolution", a response to a pamphlet on the Glorious Revolution of 1688 by François Guizot. Oliver Cromwell and the English Civil War are also referred to multiple times in the work The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, but the event is not directly referred to by the name. By 1892, Engels was using the term "The Great Rebellion" for the conflict, and, while still recognising it as part of the same revolutionary event, dismissed the Glorious Revolution of 1688 as "comparatively puny".

According to the Marxist historian Christopher Hill:

The Civil War was a class war, in which the despotism of Charles I was defended by the reactionary forces of the established Church and conservative landlords, and on the other side stood the trading and industrial classes in town and countryside ... the yeomen and progressive gentry, and ... wider masses of the population whenever they were able by free discussion to understand what the struggle was really about.