STUART BRITAIN,A Very Short Introduction
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loginIntroductionThe Stuarts were one of England’s least successful dynasties. Charles Iwas put on public trial for treason and was publicly beheaded; James IIfled the country fearing a similar fate, and abandoned his kingdom andthrone. James I and Charles II died peacefully in their beds, but James Ilived to see all his hopes fade and ambitions thwarted, while Charles II,although he had the trappings of success, was a curiously unambitiousman, whose desire for a quiet life was not achieved until it was too latefor him to enjoy it. Towering above the Stuart age were the two decadesof civil war, revolution, and republican experiment, which ought to havechanged fundamentally the course of English history, but which didso, if at all, very elusively. Whilst kings and generals toiled and failed,however, a fundamental change was taking place in English economyand society, largely unheeded and certainly unfashioned by the will ofgovernment. In fact, the most obvious revolution in seventeenth-century England was the consequence of a decline in the birth-rate
