ABSTRACT
The development of England during the three centuries we are studying can be summarised thus: After the Wars of the Roses there followed, in the sixteenth century, a period of peace and internal development under the despotism of the Tudors. The country became Protestant, and in the reign of the Virgin Queen Elizabeth entered on a period of rapid and splendid growth. In the seventeenth century, fighting at the same moment absolute monarchy and the renewed offensive of Catholicism, England became the revolutionary centre of Europe. Charles I was beheaded (1649), a Republic was proclaimed, and under Cromwell's dictatorship new advances were made. After a short-lived Restoration (1660) a second revolution took place, which gave the erown, in 1688, to a Protestant constitutional monarch. Throughout the eighteenth century the United Kingdom of Great Britain, as she had become after the union with Scotland, took the lead in economic progress and became the queen of the seas and the birthplace of modern industry, while politically she was the home of liberal ideas and the laboratory in which the Parliamentary system was worked out.
