Stuart Britain, 1600–1660

In 1600 Elizabeth had reigned for over forty years, childless and with no named heir. Her Irish war had already ruined her favourite: Essex had failed against O'Neill and come home against her orders, and she sent Lord Mountjoy to Ireland in his place.

Stripped of his offices, Essex led about two hundred armed followers into the City of London on 8 February 1601 against his enemies at court, Robert Cecil above all. The City did not rise. He was tried, with Francis Bacon among the lawyers prosecuting, and beheaded in the Tower on 25 February.

Secretary of State and younger son of Elizabeth's old minister Lord Burghley, Cecil now ran the queen's government without a rival. He corresponded in secret with James VI of Scotland, the likeliest heir, and was in a position to orchestrate a smooth succession when she died.

King of Scots since infancy, James was the great-grandson of Margaret Tudor, Henry VIII's sister. Elizabeth died on 24 March 1603 and he was proclaimed King of England and Ireland that day. In April he rode south from Edinburgh to rule three kingdoms that kept their own laws, parliaments and churches.

Sent as Lord Deputy in Essex's place, Mountjoy landed in February 1600. He ringed Ulster with garrisoned forts, at the Moyry Pass, Mountnorris and Armagh, and burned the rebels' corn to starve them out of their strongholds: a war of famine more than of set battles.

Earl of Tyrone and The O'Neill, Hugh O'Neill had led a confederacy of Ulster lords against the crown since 1593. With his son-in-law Red Hugh O'Donnell he looked to Catholic Spain for the army that might turn the war.

Inaugurated lord of Tyrconnell in 1592 after escaping from Dublin Castle, Red Hugh had beaten the English at the Curlew Pass. In 1600 he lost ground when his cousin Niall Garbh went over to the English. With O'Neill he waited on help from Spain.

Mountjoy besieged the Spaniards in Kinsale. O'Neill and O'Donnell marched the length of Ireland in winter, and on 24 December 1601 (3 January 1602 by the Spanish calendar) the English cavalry routed their army outside the town. Águila surrendered on honourable terms and was shipped home. O'Donnell sailed to Spain for more help and died at Simancas in August 1602.

On 30 March 1603 O'Neill submitted to Mountjoy at Mellifont, not told that Elizabeth had died six days earlier. The terms were mild: he kept his earldom and most of his lands. Mountjoy stayed on as James's Lord Lieutenant, and was made Earl of Devonshire.

King of Spain since 1598 and still at war with England, Philip sent a fleet of 33 ships from Lisbon on 2 September 1601 with troops, arms and money for the Ulster lords, to put pressure on Elizabeth through Ireland.

A veteran of Spain's wars in Brittany, the Netherlands and the Mediterranean, Águila landed at Kinsale in early October 1601, far from the Ulster lords' country, and fortified the town with some 3,000 to 4,000 men. After the defeat he faced bitter recriminations at home, and he died at A Coruña in August 1602.

Gilbert, physician to Elizabeth from 1601, had published De magnete in 1600, arguing from experiments with a small model globe that the Earth itself is a magnet, which is why a compass points north. James renewed his appointment; he died in November 1603.

James ruled all three kingdoms from London and went back to Scotland only once, in 1617. He ended the long war with Spain by the Treaty of London in August 1604, took the leading company of players into his own service, and at Hampton Court stood by his bishops against the Puritans.

Crowned with James at Westminster on 25 July 1603, Anne set up a household of her own and turned from Scottish faction to patronage of the arts, keeping one of the richest courts in Europe. For Twelfth Night 1605 she asked Ben Jonson for a masque in which she and her ladies would appear as Africans.

A playwright whose comedies the King's Men played at court, Jonson wrote The Masque of Blackness for the queen, performed in the Banqueting Hall at Whitehall on 6 January 1605 with Anne among the dancers. It was the first of about two dozen masques he wrote for James and Anne.

Jones designed the sets, costumes and effects for Blackness, including a raised stage on wheels and a sea of billowing cloth, and staged masques with Jonson for years, though the two quarrelled over whether poetry or spectacle mattered more. In 1613 he was made Surveyor of the King's Works.

Player, writer and sharer of the Lord Chamberlain's Men, Shakespeare was named second in the royal patent of 19 May 1603 that made his company the King's Men, the king's own players; its leading members became Grooms of the Chamber. Royal payments carried the company through the plague closures.

President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, Rainolds was the Puritans' chief spokesman when James met bishops and Puritans at Hampton Court in January 1604 to answer the Millenary Petition. James turned down nearly every Puritan request but agreed to Rainolds's call for a new translation of the Bible.

Bishop of London and a fierce enemy of the Puritans, Bancroft presided over Convocation after Archbishop Whitgift's death in 1604, presented it with a new book of canons, and became Archbishop of Canterbury at the end of the year. He was the 'chief overseer' of the new translation.

Dean of Westminster and first on the list of translators, Andrewes led the First Westminster Company, which translated Genesis to 2 Kings, and acted as a general editor for the whole Bible. James made him in turn Bishop of Chichester, Ely and Winchester.

A Catholic gentleman who had joined Essex's rising in 1601, Catesby found James less tolerant of Catholics than many had hoped. Early in 1604 he began recruiting a plot to blow up the king and the House of Lords at the opening of Parliament, as the signal for a Catholic rising.

A Yorkshireman who had fought for Spain in the Netherlands, Fawkes was put in charge of the gunpowder stored in an undercroft beneath the Lords. An anonymous letter to Lord Monteagle gave the plot away, and he was found with the barrels early on 5 November 1605. Catesby was shot dead at Holbeche House three days later.

Superior of the English Jesuits, Garnet learned of the plot through the confessional in July 1605 and, bound by its seal, could only plead with Catesby to give it up. The government made the Jesuits its authors: Garnet was convicted on 28 March 1606 and hanged on 3 May.

As Attorney General, Coke had already prosecuted Essex and, in November 1603, Walter Raleigh. At the plotters' trial in January 1606 he called the conspiracy the 'Jesuit Treason', and he mocked Garnet's equivocation as 'open and broad lying'. That June he was made Chief Justice of the Common Pleas.

A judge from a Catholic family, Seton had the infant Prince Charles in his care at Dunfermline and brought him south to England in August 1604. That year James made him Lord Chancellor of Scotland, at the head of the government left behind in Edinburgh, and in 1605 Earl of Dunfermline.

Principal of St Mary's College at St Andrews and long the leader of the presbyterian ministers, Melville protested in 1606 for the Kirk's right to free assemblies. James summoned him to London, where a Latin epigram against the royal chapel's ornaments put him in the Tower. Released in 1611, he left for a chair at Sedan.

Nominated Archbishop of Glasgow in 1603, Spottiswoode was one of the bishops through whom James meant to govern the Kirk. In 1610 he presided over the assembly that ended the supremacy of the presbyteries, and that October he was consecrated in London by English bishops.

After Kinsale Philip gave up hope of beating England by force. With Elizabeth dead, his envoys and James's made peace, probably at Somerset House: the Treaty of London, signed in August 1604, ended nineteen years of war.

Lord Deputy since 1605, Chichester meant to break the power of the Ulster lords under English law. With his attorney general, John Davies, he looked for grounds to charge O'Neill, whose lands were caught up in disputes; in 1607 O'Neill was summoned to London.

Expecting arrest, O'Neill sailed from Lough Swilly in September 1607 with about a hundred followers, the Earl of Tyrconnell among them. Storms drove them to France and on to Rome, and O'Neill never saw Ireland again; he died in Rome in 1616. Why he went is still argued over.

Red Hugh's younger brother, Rory had submitted to the crown and been made Earl of Tyrconnell in 1603. He sailed with O'Neill in the Flight of the Earls and died of fever in Rome in 1608, leaving his sister Nuala to speak for the family in exile.

O'Doherty had fought for the crown in the war and been knighted by Mountjoy, but he quarrelled with Chichester and with the governor of Derry, Sir George Paulet, who was said to have struck him. In 1608 he seized Derry and burned it. He was shot dead at Kilmacrennan on 5 July, and his rising collapsed.

Davies reported the Flight of the Earls to Cecil, laid indictments against the absent earls in their own country, then lobbied in London for a plantation. From 1609 six counties of Ulster were carved into estates for English and Scottish Protestant settlers. His Discoverie of the True Causes why Ireland was never entirely subdued (1612) argued the government's case.

Of the family of poets who served the O'Donnells, and author of a poem for Red Hugh himself, Mac an Bhaird made the exile into verse. His best-known poem pictures Nuala O'Donnell, remembered as the Lady of the Piercing Wail, mourning at her brothers' graves in Rome.

Earl of Salisbury since 1605 and Lord Treasurer as well as Secretary from 1608, Cecil tried to put the crown's money on a firm footing. His Great Contract of 1610 offered to give up wardship and purveyance for a grant of £200,000 a year. King and Commons both backed away, and he died on 24 May 1612.

A young Scot who caught James's eye when he broke his leg at a tilt, around 1607, Carr rose fast: Viscount Rochester in 1611 and a privy councillor. When Salisbury died James meant to be his own chief minister, and Carr handled much of the business as his secretary, guided by his friend Thomas Overbury.

Invested as Prince of Wales in 1610, Henry kept a household of his own that looked to a martial, Protestant future; he disliked Carr and wanted Raleigh freed from the Tower. On 6 November 1612 he died of typhoid fever, aged eighteen.

Charles, not yet twelve and long in his brother's shadow, became heir to the three crowns. He was created Prince of Wales in 1616, and his marriage became the main piece in James's European diplomacy.

The translation begun at Hampton Court was published in 1611. Its chief overseer, Bancroft, had died in November 1610, and Rainolds, who first proposed it, in May 1607, while still working on the Prophets with his group at Corpus.

One of the translators and a firm Calvinist, Abbot was made Archbishop of Canterbury in March 1611 in Bancroft's place. He pressed for a Protestant match for the king's daughter Elizabeth, opposed a Spanish bride for Charles, and was an old enemy of the rising churchman William Laud.

Carr fell in love with Frances Howard, wife of the young 3rd Earl of Essex, and drew close to her powerful Howard kin. His secretary and mentor Thomas Overbury opposed the affair from the start and told him so; Carr repeated his words to her.

The Howards had James offer Overbury an embassy to Russia, knowing he would refuse; when he did, the king took it as an insult and sent him to the Tower. He died there on 14 September 1613. Eleven days later the annulment of Frances's marriage went through, with the king's backing.

Frances married Carr, by then Earl of Somerset, on 26 December 1613. In 1615 an apothecary's assistant confessed to supplying her poisons, and the inquiry found Overbury had been poisoned in the Tower. Four accomplices were hanged; in 1616 she was convicted of murder and Somerset as an accessory. Both were spared.

Carr's enemies saw their chance when James noticed George Villiers at a hunt in August 1614. Archbishop Abbot and others pressed Queen Anne to back him, and in April 1615 James knighted him in her bedchamber. With Somerset ruined, Villiers became Master of the Horse in 1616 and Marquess of Buckingham in 1618.

Once Essex's client and then a prosecutor at his trial, Bacon advised James against his old rival Coke, who was dismissed as Chief Justice in November 1616. He became Lord Chancellor in 1618, while writing the Novum Organum (1620) on a new method for the natural sciences.

Moved from the Common Pleas to the King's Bench in 1613 on Bacon's advice, Coke went on ruling against royal claims, narrowing the law of treason and declaring a royal letter illegal. On 14 November 1616 James dismissed him from the bench. He would make his next career in the Commons.

James's daughter married Frederick V, Elector Palatine, in the chapel at Whitehall on 14 February 1613 and went with him to Heidelberg. Archbishop Abbot had pressed for the match, which tied the Stuarts to the Protestant princes of the Empire.

A Calvinist and head of the Protestant Union, Frederick ruled the Rhine Palatinate from Heidelberg as one of the electors who chose the emperor. Through his wife, any risk he took would become her father's problem.

Convicted of treason in 1603 at a trial Coke prosecuted, Raleigh spent thirteen years in the Tower, where he wrote The History of the World. In 1616 James let him out to sail for El Dorado on the Orinoco, on condition that he not attack the Spanish.

Spain's ambassador since 1613 and a confidant of the king, Gondomar had been shown the terms of Raleigh's voyage. When Raleigh's men attacked the Spanish post of San Thomé on the Orinoco, he demanded that the old death sentence be carried out, and James had Raleigh beheaded on 29 October 1618 to keep the peace with Spain.

Made Archbishop of St Andrews and primate in 1615, Spottiswoode led the bishops' drive to bring Scottish worship closer to England's. At the Perth assembly of 1618, where he preached, the Kirk reluctantly accepted the Five Articles: kneeling at communion, private baptism and communion, confirmation by bishops, and the keeping of Christmas and Easter.

Minister of Crailing, Calderwood had already been confined to his parish for defying a bishop. When James came to Scotland in 1617, he signed the ministers' protest against giving king and bishops power over the Kirk's affairs, and was banished. From Holland his Altare Damascenum attacked episcopacy.

A Scottish laird and mathematician, Napier published his Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio in 1614: tables of logarithms that made long calculations by hand far quicker.

Professor of geometry at Gresham College in London, Briggs proposed logarithms to base ten and twice travelled to Edinburgh to see Napier, first around 1615, who agreed to the change and left the new tables to him. Briggs published the first thousand in 1617 and his Arithmetica Logarithmica in 1624.

When the Protestant estates of Bohemia rose against their Habsburg king in 1618, they deposed him in August 1619 and offered the crown to Frederick. He accepted and was crowned at Prague in November 1619.

Ferdinand had been elected Holy Roman Emperor at Frankfurt on 28 August 1619, two days before the Bohemians deposed him as their king. He set about recovering Bohemia with his Catholic allies.

Duke of Bavaria and a founder of the Catholic League, Maximilian put the League's army at Ferdinand's service. The war won him Frederick's Upper Palatinate and, in 1623, Frederick's title of elector.

Tilly, a field marshal from the Spanish Netherlands, commanded the League's army. With the emperor's troops under Bucquoy he routed Frederick's army at the White Mountain outside Prague on 8 November 1620; Frederick fled, and he and Elizabeth became the Winter King and Queen. In 1622 Tilly took the Rhine Palatinate's towns.

A Genoese general in Spain's service, Spinola led Spanish troops into Frederick's Rhine lands in August 1620 while the League struck at Bohemia. James's son-in-law was now at war with Spain, the power James hoped to marry his son into.

Pressed by opinion at home, James let Frederick's envoy raise volunteers, and Vere led them to the Palatinate in 1620, splitting them among its three main strongholds. When Tilly closed in, Heidelberg fell in September 1622 and Vere, without money or supplies, gave up Mannheim.

Long James's ambassador in Madrid and made Earl of Bristol in 1622, Digby negotiated the marriage of Prince Charles to the Infanta Maria Anna. James saw the match as his one hope of getting the Palatinate back for his daughter without a war.

Tired of delays, Charles and Buckingham rode to Madrid in disguise as 'Thomas and John Smith' and arrived on 7 March 1623, to the surprise of both Digby and the Spanish king. They stayed for months but came home in October without a bride, and set on war with Spain.

King since his father's death in March 1621, Philip received Charles with honours but would not let his sister marry a Protestant unless James and Charles pledged to repeal England's laws against Catholics, a pledge they could not make good.

Philip's favourite and chief minister from 1621, Olivares had displaced Gondomar's party, which favoured the match. The Spanish drew out the talks: keeping England's soldiers out of the German war mattered more to them than the marriage.

Philip III's daughter, the Infanta was strongly averse to marrying a non-Catholic. A secret treaty was signed, but Charles left Spain without her. She later married her cousin, the future Emperor Ferdinand III.

Back in the Commons for the Parliament of 1621, called for money as the German war spread, Coke led the attack on monopolies and helped prepare the charges against his old rival, Bacon.

Charged with taking gifts from people with cases before him, Bacon was found guilty by the Lords in 1621, briefly imprisoned, and barred from office. Some historians think he was made a scapegoat for Buckingham's own dealings.

On 18 December 1621 the Commons, hostile to the Spanish match, declared that the urgent affairs of king, state and defence of the realm were proper matters for Parliament to debate. James tore the page from the Commons' journal, dissolved Parliament, and on 27 December sent Coke to the Tower for nine months.

Old and failing, James let Charles and Buckingham steer him into calling the 1624 Parliament and toward war with Spain, though he feared Parliament would vote for the war and not pay for it. He died at Theobalds on 27 March 1625.

Made a duke while in Spain, Buckingham came home with Charles bent on war. The Parliament of 1624 strongly urged war with Spain, a short-lived triumph for the prince and the favourite.

A London merchant who had risen as a reformer of royal finance, Cranfield became Lord Treasurer in 1621 and Earl of Middlesex in 1622. He opposed the war, and Charles and Buckingham turned on him: impeached by the Commons for corruption, he was convicted by the Lords in May 1624 and lost all his offices.

Charles became king on 27 March 1625, with Buckingham still at his side as Lord High Admiral and, in effect, foreign minister. In June, newly married to a Catholic French princess, he opened his first Parliament.

With the Spanish match dead, Charles's marriage was turned toward France, where Cardinal Richelieu became Louis XIII's chief minister in 1624. Louis agreed to marry his sister Henrietta Maria to the Prince of Wales.

Married to Charles by proxy on 1 May 1625, the fifteen-year-old Catholic princess met him at Canterbury on 13 June. She would not be crowned with him at Westminster in February 1626, a Protestant rite, which went down badly with the London crowds.

Lord High Admiral and the king's closest adviser, Buckingham planned a raid on Spain in the Elizabethan style: seize the Spanish treasure ships and strike at the great port of Cádiz.

A grandson of Lord Burghley and a veteran of the Dutch wars, Cecil, whom Buckingham had once put forward for the Palatinate command, led the fleet to Cádiz in October 1625. He so mismanaged the attack that the treasure ships slipped past, and the expedition came home in disgrace; he was still made Viscount Wimbledon that November.

A Cornish MP who owed his post as Vice-Admiral of Devon to Buckingham, Eliot blamed the duke for Cádiz. In May 1626 he helped carry Buckingham's impeachment to the Lords, comparing him to Sejanus, and was sent to the Tower. To save the duke, Charles dissolved Parliament in June.

Without a grant from Parliament, Charles demanded a 'loan' from his subjects and jailed more than seventy gentlemen who refused, among them Thomas Wentworth and Sir Edmund Hampden. When the judges declared the loan illegal, he dismissed the Chief Justice, Sir Ranulph Crewe.

Chief minister of Louis XIII since 1624, Richelieu set out to break the Huguenots' armed independence. In 1627 the royal army besieged their port of La Rochelle, with the cardinal commanding in person; Charles had declared war on France in the Huguenots' support.

In July 1627 Buckingham landed on the Île de Ré off La Rochelle and besieged the fort of Saint-Martin. It held out; at the end of October he withdrew, having lost more than five thousand of some seven thousand men. La Rochelle fell to Richelieu the next year.

A royal chaplain accused of Arminianism by Calvinist critics, Montagu answered them in Appello Caesarem (1625), printed after Archbishop Abbot refused to license it. The Commons took him up for dishonouring King James; Charles made him one of his own chaplains and, in 1628, Bishop of Chichester.

Bishop of St Davids since 1621 and a confidant of Buckingham, Laud openly backed Montagu. Charles made him Bishop of Bath and Wells and Dean of the Chapel Royal in 1626 and Bishop of London in July 1628, his chief adviser on the Church.

Abbot refused to license Robert Sibthorp's sermon of February 1627, which preached obedience to the Forced Loan. Charles took away his functions as primate and put them in commission. Abbot lived on in retirement until 1633, leaving Laud's party in command of the Church.

Five jailed loan-refusers sued for habeas corpus so that the king would have to say what law they had broken. Charles answered only that they were held by his 'special command', and in November 1627 the King's Bench refused them bail. The case bears Sir Thomas Darnell's name, though he withdrew.

Selden, counsel for Sir Edmund Hampden, a kinsman of John Hampden, argued that no man could lawfully be imprisoned without cause shown, even by the king. Elected to the 1628 Parliament, he helped draw up and carry the Petition of Right.

Now in his seventies, Coke chaired the committee that drafted the Petition of Right against taxes without Parliament's consent and imprisonment without cause shown, as well as the billeting of soldiers and martial law. Thomas Wentworth backed it too. Charles gave his assent on 7 June 1628.

A second fleet sent to relieve La Rochelle, under the Earl of Denbigh, came home without fighting. Buckingham went down to Portsmouth in August 1628 to organise a third expedition, this time under his own command.

A lieutenant who had served at Ré, owed £80 in back pay and passed over for promotion, Felton stabbed Buckingham to death at the Greyhound inn in Portsmouth on 23 August 1628. He was hanged at Tyburn on 29 November.

Speaker since 1628, Finch received the king's order to adjourn the Commons on 2 March 1629, before Eliot's resolutions against religious innovation and the collection of tonnage and poundage without a grant could be put. He tried to leave the chair.

Holles and Benjamin Valentine held Finch in his chair while the House passed the resolutions. Charles then dissolved Parliament and imprisoned nine of its leaders, Eliot, Holles, Selden and Valentine among them.

Eliot was kept in the Tower while Charles governed without Parliament. He died there on 27 November 1632, and the king called no Parliament for eleven years.

Lord Treasurer from 1628, Weston had opposed the wars with Spain and France and became the most influential of the king's ministers after Buckingham's death. He persuaded Charles to make peace with France in 1629 and with Spain in 1630, stopping the drain on the treasury that had driven him to Parliament.

Wentworth had refused the Forced Loan and pressed for the Petition, but once Charles accepted it he went over to the king: Baron Wentworth in July 1628, then Viscount and President of the Council of the North at York after Buckingham's death, and a privy councillor in November 1629.

Lord Deputy since 1622 through Buckingham's favour, Falkland bargained with the Irish nobility over money for the army in return for royal concessions, the 'Graces', on land titles and Catholics' disabilities. They were agreed at Whitehall in May 1628.

Archbishop of Armagh from 1625 and a chief author of the Irish Articles of 1615, Ussher called the Irish bishops to his house in November 1626 to declare that tolerating Catholic worship was 'a grievous sin'. Their judgement was read out in Dublin sermons against the Graces in April 1627.

Lord Chancellor of Ireland and at open war with Falkland since 1624, Loftus was accused by him of encouraging the nobility to refuse money, but Charles cleared him in 1628. When Falkland's case against the Byrnes of Wicklow, meant to clear land for a plantation, collapsed on false witnesses, Falkland was recalled in August 1629.

The richest of the planters, built on Munster plantation land, the Earl of Cork was made a Lord Justice with Loftus in October 1629 to govern in Falkland's place, and Lord Treasurer of Ireland in 1631. The Graces were left unenacted.

Physician extraordinary to James from 1618 and then to Charles, Harvey published De Motu Cordis at Frankfurt in 1628, dedicated to the new king: the full demonstration that the heart drives the blood round the body in a circuit. Other physicians scoffed, and his practice suffered for a while.

Ruling without Parliament, Charles raised money from customs, monopolies such as the one on soap, fines for encroaching on the old royal forests and, from 1635, ship money. In 1633 he went to Edinburgh to be crowned King of Scots by the Anglican rite, and made William Laud Archbishop of Canterbury.

After Buckingham's death the queen took his place as Charles's closest friend and adviser; their son, the future Charles II, was born in 1630. She kept a Catholic chapel and household, was a great patron of court masques, and in January 1633 acted with her ladies in a court play, The Shepherd's Paradise.

Archbishop of Canterbury from 1633, Laud pressed for ceremony and uniformity in worship, restricting nonconformist preachers, a programme he had begun years before at Gloucester by moving the communion table to the east end. He used the Star Chamber against his critics.

A Buckinghamshire squire and cousin of Oliver Cromwell, Hampden refused to pay ship money. In the test case of 1637–38 the judges found for the king by seven to five; Sir John Finch, now Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, presided and was chiefly responsible for the verdict. The narrow result made Hampden famous.

A Lincoln's Inn lawyer, Prynne published Histriomastix late in 1632, a thousand-page attack on the stage whose abuse of women who acted was taken as an insult to the queen. The Star Chamber sentenced him in February 1634 to life imprisonment, a £5,000 fine and the cropping of his ears. In 1637 he was sentenced again, for attacking a bishop.

Once clerk of the closet to Prince Charles, Burton had warned the new king in 1625 against the 'popish' tendencies of Laud and Neile, and was dismissed. From his London pulpit at St Matthew's, Friday Street, he preached against the bishops, and in 1637 he stood trial with Prynne and Bastwick.

A Colchester physician, Bastwick attacked the bishops in his Letany of 1637. He, Burton and Prynne were each sentenced to lose their ears in the pillory, pay £5,000 and stay in prison for life; Bastwick supplied his own scalpel.

A young apprentice, Lilburne was arrested on 11 December 1637 for printing and circulating unlicensed books, Prynne's News from Ipswich among them. Before the Star Chamber he refused the oath to answer questions, saying no man should be made to incriminate himself, and on 18 April 1638 he was whipped from the Fleet to Westminster and pilloried.

Appointed Lord Deputy in 1632, Wentworth reached Dublin in July 1633. He more than doubled the Irish customs, withheld the Graces, revived the crown's claims to land in Connacht for a new plantation, and took on the Earl of Cork, until every party in Ireland wanted him gone.

Cork became Wentworth's most famous enemy: the new deputy at first stripped him of much of his privilege and income. Loftus too fell out with Wentworth, and his treatment of Loftus became one of the charges at Wentworth's impeachment in 1641.

When the prayer book Charles and Laud imposed on Scotland was first read in St Giles' on 23 July 1637, the congregation rioted. Henderson, minister of Leuchars, turned protest into organisation: in February 1638 he and the young advocate Archibald Johnston drafted the National Covenant, binding its signers to resist any change to their religion.

An Edinburgh advocate of about twenty-seven, Johnston supplied the Covenant's legal case and was made procurator of the Kirk. He went on to help negotiate the Pacification of Berwick in 1639 and the Treaty of Ripon in 1640, and became a judge, Lord Wariston, in 1641.

Sent as the king's commissioner in 1638, the Marquess of Hamilton offered to withdraw the prayer book and canons, and opened the General Assembly in Glasgow Cathedral on 21 November. When it claimed authority over the bishops he dissolved it a week later; it sat on and abolished episcopacy.

Chief of the Campbells and the greatest magnate in the west, Argyll stayed on at Glasgow after Hamilton's dissolution and came over to the Covenanters. In the next Parliament he carried the motion that took the choice of the Lords of the Articles away from the crown.

A field marshal after some thirty years in the Swedish service, Leslie came home to command the Covenanters' army. The first Bishops' War of 1639 ended in the Pacification of Berwick without a pitched battle. In August 1640 he crossed the Tweed, routed the king's army at Newburn and took Newcastle.

Montrose signed the Covenant and marched with Leslie's army to Aberdeen in 1639. But he came to fear Argyll's power: in August 1640 he signed the Bond of Cumbernauld against the ambitions of 'a few', and in June 1641 Argyll's party had him imprisoned in Edinburgh Castle.

Recalled from Ireland in September 1639, Wentworth became the king's principal adviser and urged hard measures against the Scots. Made Earl of Strafford in January 1640, he went back to Dublin, where the Irish Parliament voted subsidies and an Irish army was to be raised for the war.

To pay for a second war Charles called his first Parliament in eleven years in April 1640, and dismissed it after three weeks when it put grievances before supply. After Newburn the Treaty of Ripon left him paying the Scots £850 a day, which only Parliament could raise. The Long Parliament met in November.

With Wentworth called away to the Scottish war in 1640, the Earl of Ormond, head of the Butlers and his ally, was made commander-in-chief of the forces in Ireland.

Pym led the new Commons against the men of the Personal Rule. Strafford was impeached and Laud sent to the Tower; the Lord Keeper, Finch, who had upheld ship money, was impeached too and fled to Holland. Pym helped draft the Grand Remonstrance, presented to the king on 1 December 1641.

The younger Vane found notes his father, the Secretary of State, had made of a council meeting, in which Strafford seemed to propose using the Irish army to subdue England, and passed them to Pym. The impeachment still failed on the evidence, and Pym turned to a bill of attainder.

Charles gave his assent to the attainder on 10 May 1641, and Strafford was beheaded on Tower Hill two days later. His treatment of Lord Loftus in Ireland had been among the charges against him.

A lawyer elected to the Long Parliament, Hyde had backed reform of the Personal Rule but opposed Strafford's execution and the attack on the bishops. After the Grand Remonstrance in November 1641 he began to advise the king informally.

Host of the Great Tew circle and Hyde's best friend, Falkland had voted for Strafford's attainder but would not abolish bishops. On 1 January 1642 the king offered him a secretaryship of state, and Hyde persuaded him to take it; he knew nothing of the plan to arrest five members of the Commons.

On 4 January 1642 Charles went to the Commons with soldiers to arrest Pym, Hampden, Holles and two others, and accused Lord Kimbolton in the Lords. They had fled. On 10 January he left London; Parliament claimed control of the militia, and on 22 August he raised his standard at Nottingham.

A Catholic landowner, Rory O'More planned a bloodless coup while the king was weak. At Loughross on 5 October 1641 he, Lord Maguire, the priest Heber MacMahon and Sir Phelim O'Neill agreed to seize Dublin Castle on 23 October while their allies took the forts of Ulster, and then offer their allegiance to Charles.

The Dublin plot was betrayed the day before, but in Ulster Phelim's men took forts and towns and overran most of the province. Thousands of settlers were killed or driven out, about four thousand dead by modern estimates, two hundred thousand in London pamphlets. Phelim claimed a commission from the king, now judged a forgery.

Commanding the royal army in Dublin, Ormond cleared the country around the capital, relieved besieged garrisons and beat a larger Confederate force at Kilrush on 15 April 1642. He was made a marquess in August. In England, Parliament would not trust the king to command the army needed to crush the rising.

The Winter Queen's son and Charles's nephew, Rupert was made the king's General of Horse in August 1642, aged twenty-two. At Edgehill on 23 October the first battle of the war ended undecided.

The queen went to the Dutch Republic to buy weapons for the king's armies, and in late February 1643 landed with an arms convoy at Bridlington in Yorkshire.

The king's Captain-General in the north, who paid for much of his army himself, Newcastle had fought through the winter to secure a landing place for the queen's arms. After his victory at Adwalton Moor in June 1643 he was made a marquess.

The queen's Master of the Horse and closest confidant, Jermyn landed with her at Bridlington as colonel of her bodyguard regiment and escorted her through Parliament's country to the king at Oxford. He was made Baron Jermyn in September 1643.

Son of the Essex beheaded in 1601 and once the husband of Frances Howard, the earl commanded Parliament's army from July 1642 and fought the king to a draw at Edgehill.

The peer Charles had accused with the five members succeeded as Earl of Manchester in November 1642. In August 1643 Parliament made him major-general of the Eastern Association, with Oliver Cromwell as his second in command.

MP for Cambridge and Hampden's cousin, Cromwell had raised a troop of horse in Cambridgeshire in 1642 and reached Edgehill too late to fight. The troop grew into a regiment over the winter, and he built the Eastern Association's cavalry.

With the royalists winning in 1643, Pym turned to the Scots for an army, in return for reforming the English church as the Scots wished. He died on 8 December 1643.

Vane went north to negotiate. He proposed calling the agreement the Solemn League and Covenant and slipped in the phrase 'the example of the best Reformed churches', which let the Scots expect Presbyterianism and the English read it their own way.

Earl of Leven since 1641, Leslie led the army of the Solemn League across the border in January 1644 and laid siege to Newcastle and then York.

Professor of divinity at St Andrews, confined to Aberdeen by the bishops in 1636, Rutherford was one of the four main Scottish commissioners to the Westminster Assembly from 1643 and stayed four years in London. His Lex, Rex (1644) defended the rule of law over kings and the lawfulness of defensive war.

In 1642 the Catholic clergy, lords and rebel leaders set up a government at Kilkenny, the Confederation, loyal in name to Charles. Its General Assembly first met in October 1642, and it came to hold up to two-thirds of Ireland.

A kinsman of the old Earl of Tyrone who had spent decades in Spain's army in Flanders, Owen Roe came home in 1642 and took command of the Confederate Ulster army, bringing some three hundred Irish officers from the Spanish service.

A veteran of the same Irish regiment in Spain's service, Preston was given the Confederates' Leinster army, the largest and best equipped. There was intense jealousy between him and Owen Roe from the start, and their armies seldom worked together.

A lawyer from the Pale who joined the rising in 1642, Bellings became secretary of the Supreme Council, the Confederation's executive. A royalist like most of its members, he worked for a settlement with the king's lieutenant, Ormond.

In September 1643, on the king's orders, Ormond agreed a ceasefire with the Confederates and sent about four thousand troops to fight for Charles in England. In January 1644 he was sworn in as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.

In June 1644 Rupert marched to relieve Newcastle, besieged in York by the Scots and two English armies. On 2 July he gave battle on Marston Moor, against Newcastle's advice, and lost the north.

After Marston Moor, a battle fought against his advice, Newcastle went into exile on the Continent, having spent, by his own reckoning, more than £1,000,000 on the king's cause.

With his main army destroyed at Naseby and his last forces failing, Charles gave himself up to the Scottish army at Southwell on 5 May 1646, leaving England with a captive king and no settlement.

Cromwell's horse broke the royalist cavalry at Marston Moor. When Manchester's lack of energy let the king's forces off in the autumn campaign, Cromwell laid his commander's failings before Parliament.

Under the Self-Denying Ordinance members of both Houses gave up their commands; Manchester and Essex resigned in April 1645. Sir Thomas Fairfax, a Yorkshire general, was made commander of the New Model Army, with Cromwell commanding its cavalry. At Naseby on 14 June 1645 they destroyed the king's main army.

Ireton led the New Model's left wing of horse at Naseby, where Rupert's charge broke it; he was wounded and taken, then freed when Cromwell's horse won the day. On 15 June 1646 he married Cromwell's eldest daughter, Bridget.

Held in the Tower since the Long Parliament's first months, Laud was tried in 1644; William Prynne, his old victim, hunted up the witnesses. The trial ended without a verdict, so Parliament passed an attainder, and he was beheaded on Tower Hill on 10 January 1645.

A Catholic MacDonnell lord whose kin had lost their Highland lands to the Campbells, Antrim offered the king Irish troops for Scotland. In 1644 he recommended his kinsman Alasdair Mac Colla to the Confederates to lead them, and in January 1645 Charles made him a marquess.

Mac Colla landed at Ardnamurchan in July 1644 with about 1,600 men, mostly Irish, raided the Campbell lands and in August joined Montrose, the king's lieutenant. Their army won at Tippermuir, Aberdeen, Inverlochy, where it crushed the Campbells, Auldearn, Alford and Kilsyth, and Montrose knighted him.

Made the king's lieutenant in Scotland and a marquess in 1644, Montrose seemed master of Scotland after Kilsyth on 15 August 1645. But Mac Colla, bent on recovering MacDonald lands from the Campbells, went west, and the Highlanders drifted home.

A veteran of the Swedish army whose cavalry charge had helped win Marston Moor, David Leslie was sent north and in September 1645 surprised Montrose's small remaining force at Philiphaugh. The Irish prisoners, promised quarter, were butchered, women and children with them. Montrose escaped and in 1646 sailed for Norway.

Archbishop of Fermo, sent by Pope Innocent X, Rinuccini landed at Kenmare in October 1645 with the Confederation's secretary Bellings, money and arms. He handed them out himself for projects of his choosing, and backed the clerical party and Owen Roe O'Neill.

Supplied by Rinuccini with muskets, ammunition and money to pay his men, Owen Roe destroyed Robert Monro's army of Scots and settlers at Benburb on 5 June 1646.

A veteran of Gustavus Adolphus's army, Monro had commanded the Scots sent to Ulster in 1642 to protect the settlers. Benburb ended Scottish hopes of conquering Ireland and imposing their own church there.

On 28 March 1646 Ormond had concluded a peace with the Confederates on the king's behalf. Rinuccini excommunicated its supporters and the General Assembly rejected it; the Confederates arrested those who had signed.

Handed by the Scots to Parliament in January 1647 and seized by the army in June, Charles bargained with every side. He escaped to the Isle of Wight in November, and on 26 December signed an Engagement with Scottish commissioners: a Scottish army for him, Presbyterianism in England for three years.

Leader of the 'Peace Party' that wanted a settlement with the king and saw the army's radicals as more dangerous than the royalists, Holles led the Presbyterian majority that ordered the army to disband in 1647. The army demanded his removal, and in June he was one of the Eleven Members suspended from the Commons.

After the army seized the king, Ireton, probably with John Lambert, drew up the Heads of the Proposals: Parliaments every two years, bishops kept but with reduced power, and the army's grievances settled. Charles preferred them to Parliament's terms, but in November he escaped from the army's keeping.

At the Putney debates of October and November 1647 Colonel Rainsborough, speaking for the Levellers, argued that 'the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he' and should have a voice in his government; Ireton held that the vote must go with property. Rainsborough was killed in October 1648.

A Yorkshire officer from Fairfax's northern army, Lambert held the north against the royalists in 1648 and fought delaying actions against Hamilton's invading Scots until Cromwell joined him. After the three days of fighting at Preston in August, Lambert captured Hamilton at Uttoxeter.

The army had lost patience with a Parliament still treating with the king. On 6 December 1648 Colonel Pride's soldiers kept members out of the Commons and arrested forty-five, William Prynne among them. The rest, the Rump, set up a court to try the king.

A lawyer, Bradshaw presided over the High Court of Justice. Charles refused to plead, denying that any court could try a king; he was condemned and beheaded outside the Banqueting House on 30 January 1649. In March Bradshaw became President of the Council of State, and condemned Hamilton to death.

Lilburne's Levellers turned on the new rulers. In May 1649 some four hundred Leveller-minded troopers set out from Banbury; Cromwell and Fairfax attacked them by night at Burford on 13 May, and on 17 May three of their leaders were shot in the churchyard. The Levellers' hold on the army was broken.

Hamilton led the Engagers, the Scots who took Charles's bargain, and in July 1648 invaded England with their army; Argyll and the strict Covenanters opposed the Engagement. After Preston he surrendered, and he was beheaded on 9 March 1649.

Argyll opposed the Engagement. After Preston he joined the Whiggamores at Edinburgh and, with Loudoun and Leven, set up a new government, which welcomed Cromwell to Edinburgh on 4 October 1648. Yet when the English beheaded Charles, the Scots proclaimed his son king.

Unable to hold Dublin against the Confederates, Ormond handed it over in the summer of 1647, with 3,000 royalist troops, to Parliament's commander Michael Jones, saying he 'preferred English rebels to Irish ones'. He sailed for England, and in 1648 joined the queen and the Prince of Wales in Paris.

A Protestant lawyer turned soldier, and a nephew of Archbishop Ussher, Jones was made governor of Dublin in June 1647. On 8 August he crushed Preston's Leinster army at Dungan's Hill.

Parliament's Protestant commander in Munster, Inchiquin burned the Confederate country so thoroughly in 1647 that he was called 'Murrough the Burner'. He sacked the Rock of Cashel and in November routed their Munster army at Knocknanuss, where Alasdair Mac Colla was killed. In 1648 he declared for the king and made a truce with the Confederates.

Rinuccini tried to overturn the Confederates' new deal with the royalists, but this time the clergy split. Despairing of the Catholic cause, he sailed from Galway on 23 February 1649 in the frigate that had brought him.

Ormond landed at Cork on 29 September 1648 and on 17 January 1649 concluded a second peace with the Confederates, on the basis of the free exercise of their religion. Royalists and Confederates now fought together, for Charles II.

Poet and pamphleteer, the author of Areopagitica (1644) against censorship, Milton argued in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649) that a people may hold its rulers to account. The Council of State made him Secretary for Foreign Tongues in March 1649.

When Ormond's royalist and Confederate army closed on Dublin, Jones routed it at Rathmines on 2 August 1649. Two weeks later Cromwell landed at Dublin unopposed; Blake had kept Rupert's royalist ships shut up in Kinsale. Jones served under Cromwell at Drogheda and Wexford and died of fever that December.

Cromwell's army stormed Drogheda in September 1649 and Wexford in October, killing most of each garrison and many townspeople. His chaplain, John Owen, came with him. In May 1650 he was recalled to face the Scots.

Owen Roe's nephew, born in Brussels to an exiled family, Hugh Dubh held Clonmel with 1,500 Ulster troops whom Ormond had put into the town. In May 1650 his garrison inflicted the heaviest losses the New Model ever suffered, then slipped away before the town surrendered.

Left in command with the powers of Lord Deputy, Ireton blockaded Waterford into surrender in 1650 and besieged Limerick, where Hugh Dubh again commanded. Starving and plague-ridden, Limerick surrendered in 1651; Ireton died of disease outside it in November. Resistance went on until 1653.

Facing Cromwell's invasion, Owen Roe agreed to join Ormond, with the promise of an earldom, but he died on 6 November 1649 before his army could fight.

Bishop of Clogher since 1643 and one of the planners of 1641, MacMahon took over the Ulster army after Owen Roe's death. Coote routed it at Scarrifholis, near Letterkenny, on 21 June 1650; MacMahon was captured a week later, hanged and beheaded at Enniskillen.

Parliament's commander in Connacht since 1645, Coote had held Derry in 1649 with help from Owen Roe himself. After Scarrifholis he opened the way across the Shannon and besieged Galway, which surrendered in April 1652.

Named the young king's lieutenant again, Montrose landed in Orkney in March 1650, but his small army was routed at Carbisdale on 27 April. Charles had meanwhile disowned him to come to terms with Argyll's Covenanters. Montrose was hanged in Edinburgh on 21 May.

Proclaimed king in Edinburgh, Charles took the Covenant and landed in Scotland in June 1650. Argyll set the crown on his head at Scone on 1 January 1651. That summer he marched into England with a Scottish army, which Cromwell destroyed at Worcester on 3 September; six weeks later he escaped to France.

Leslie, once Cromwell's ally at Marston Moor, kept Cromwell out of Edinburgh and trapped him near Dunbar, but under pressure from the Kirk's committee came down to fight and was routed on 3 September 1650. He commanded again at Worcester, where he was captured and sent to the Tower.

When the Scots took Charles II as their king, Fairfax would not lead an invasion of Scotland, Parliament's former ally, and resigned his command in June 1650.

Commissioned captain-general on 28 June 1650, Cromwell routed Leslie at Dunbar on 3 September and destroyed Charles's army at Worcester exactly a year later, ending the war in Britain.

Long tutor to the Cavendish family, and the author who had dedicated his Elements of Law to Newcastle, Hobbes taught the exiled Prince of Wales mathematics in Paris in 1647–48. His Leviathan (1651) argued for one undivided sovereign to end civil war; it angered the royalist exiles, and that winter he went home to London.

One of Henrietta Maria's attendants, Margaret Lucas followed the queen into exile in France and in 1645 married the widowed Newcastle. Her Poems and Fancies (1653) set out a natural philosophy of atoms and motion in verse.

A French classical scholar at Leiden, Salmasius wrote the Defensio Regia pro Carolo I, published by the exiled Charles II's party late in 1649: a Latin defence of the executed king for the learned of Europe.

By January 1650 the Council of State had ordered Milton to reply. His Latin Defensio pro Populo Anglicano (1651) made the republic's case to Europe's scholars and won him a European reputation.

Made a General at Sea in 1649 with little experience of the sea, Blake had bottled up Rupert's royalist squadron at Kinsale until it escaped to Lisbon. Then he turned on the Dutch: on 19 May 1652 his fleet met Maarten Tromp's off Dover, where Tromp would not strike his flag to the English.

Victor over the Spanish at the Downs in 1639, Tromp was escorting a convoy when he met Blake off Dover. The clash began the First Anglo-Dutch War, fought over trade, with England's Navigation Act of 1651 among the causes. Tromp beat the English at Dungeness that winter but lost at the Gabbard in June 1653.

A former royalist officer who had fought for Cromwell in Scotland, Monck commanded the English fleet that blockaded the Dutch coast after the Gabbard. When Tromp attacked off Scheveningen on 31 July 1653 to break the blockade, he was killed by a sharpshooter on William Penn's ship.

Elected Grand Pensionary of Holland in 1653, De Witt negotiated peace with Cromwell. The Treaty of Westminster of April 1654 ended the war; a secret clause bound Holland to keep the House of Orange, the Stuarts' kin, out of its old offices.

The Rump ruled the three kingdoms as one Commonwealth but would not dissolve itself. On 20 April 1653 Cromwell came into the House with soldiers and turned the members out.

A Fifth Monarchist who had signed the king's death warrant, Harrison helped Cromwell end the Rump and sat in the Nominated Assembly of godly men, chosen by the officers, that met in July 1653. It split over reform, and in December its moderates handed their power back to Cromwell.

Lambert drafted the Instrument of Government, the first written constitution in England, and on 16 December 1653 Cromwell was installed as Lord Protector. Harrison, outraged, broke with him, and was imprisoned four times under the Protectorate.

As Lord Protector Cromwell quarrelled with his Parliaments, and from August 1655 to January 1657 England was ruled by Major-Generals. In 1657 Parliament offered him the crown; he refused it on 8 May but accepted a new constitution that let him name his successor. He died on 3 September 1658.

A secretary of state from 1652 and head of intelligence from 1653, Thurloe built a network of spies at home and abroad and, as Postmaster General from 1655, had suspect letters opened. He broke the royalist Sealed Knot and exposed Edward Sexby's 1657 plot to kill Cromwell.

Lambert opposed giving Cromwell the crown, and when he refused the oath to the Protector under the new constitution in 1657 he lost his commands.

Owen had preached to Parliament the day after the king's execution, and Cromwell took him to Ireland and Scotland as his chaplain. He made him Dean of Christ Church in 1651 and Vice-Chancellor of Oxford in 1652. In 1657 Owen drew up a petition against Cromwell taking the crown.

Warden of Wadham College from 1648, Wilkins gathered a club of experimenters at Oxford, the young Christopher Wren among them, and kept the peace between men of every party. In 1656 he married Cromwell's youngest sister, Robina.

The Earl of Cork's fourteenth child, Boyle left Ireland for Oxford in 1654 to pursue his experiments and joined Wilkins's circle. Reading in 1657 of Otto von Guericke's air pump, he set out to build a better one.

A poor scholar who reached Christ Church in 1653, Hooke was working for Boyle by 1658 and built the air pump, finished in 1659, with which Boyle began his experiments on the properties of air.

Fleetwood married Ireton's widow, Cromwell's daughter Bridget, in 1652 and took command in Ireland, as Lord Deputy from 1652 to 1655. He carried out the Act of Settlement: Catholic landowners lost their land to soldiers and creditors and were offered poorer land in Connacht or Clare, though in practice most stayed on as tenants.

Sent to Ireland in 1654, Henry Cromwell judged Fleetwood too close to the Anabaptist officers, and Fleetwood was recalled. Henry governed with the backing of the old Protestant settlers, first as Fleetwood's deputy and from November 1657 as Lord Lieutenant.

An admiral of the Dutch war, Penn took command of the fleet for Cromwell's Western Design against Spain's Caribbean colonies at the end of 1654, though earlier that year he had offered to carry the fleet over to Charles II.

Venables commanded the troops, and he and Penn distrusted each other from the start. Their landing near Santo Domingo on Hispaniola in April 1655 failed with heavy loss, and in May they took Jamaica instead. Both were sent to the Tower on their return.

Philip IV was now at war with the Protectorate, and in April 1656, by the Treaty of Brussels, signed for the royalists by Ormond, Spain took Charles II into alliance.

Chief minister of France since 1642, Mazarin had already made the exiled Charles leave France in 1655. By the Treaty of Paris in March 1657 he allied France with Cromwell: 6,000 English troops and the fleet against Spain's Flemish coast, with Dunkirk and Mardyck to go to England.

Marshal of France and his country's foremost general, Turenne besieged Dunkirk with French and English troops, and on 14 June 1658 routed the Spanish relief army in the Battle of the Dunes.

A Scot married to Cromwell's niece, Lockhart was the Protector's ambassador in Paris, helped negotiate the 1657 treaty, commanded the Commonwealth's troops at the Dunes, and then governed Dunkirk for England.

Made to leave France, Charles moved his small court to Aix and Cologne, and after the Spanish alliance his exiles joined Spain's army in Flanders. Spain paid for only five regiments of them, far short of an army able to invade England.

James, Duke of York, had learned soldiering under Turenne in the French army and become a lieutenant-general. When France allied with Cromwell he was expelled, quarrelled with his brother over it, and joined the Spanish in Flanders; at the Dunes he led British volunteers against his old comrades.

Named by his dying father, Richard succeeded as Lord Protector on 3 September 1658, backed by the existing administration but with no army record of his own, which the officers held against him.

Fleetwood, at first loyal, let the officers of the Wallingford House party petition for the army's independence, and with them forced Richard to dissolve his Parliament in April 1659. They recalled the Rump on 6 May, and Richard gave up the Protectorate.

Back in command, Lambert routed Sir George Booth's royalist rising at Winnington Bridge in August 1659. When the Rump tried to curb the officers he shut it out on 13 October, and he and Fleetwood governed through a Committee of Safety.

Commander in Scotland since 1655, Monck declared for Parliament against Lambert's coup. Lambert's army melted away and the Rump sat again in December. On 1 January 1660 Monck crossed the Tweed at Coldstream; in London he readmitted the members purged in 1648 and opened contact with the king.

Fairfax had refused to sit in judgement on the king and resigned rather than invade Scotland. In 1660 he came out of retirement to back Monck's campaign, which ended in the restoration of the monarchy.

A Presbyterian MP for Cheshire who had fought for Parliament, Booth took a commission from Charles II and rose in August 1659 for a free Parliament, taking Chester. Lambert routed his men; Booth fled disguised as a woman and was caught at Newport Pagnell while having a shave.

Lord Chancellor to the exiled king since January 1658, Hyde helped draft the Declaration of Breda of April 1660: a pardon for all but those Parliament excepted, liberty for tender consciences, the soldiers' back pay, and disputed lands left to Parliament.

The new Convention Parliament, meeting from 25 April, proclaimed him king on 8 May. He landed at Dover on 25 May and on 29 May 1660, his thirtieth birthday, rode into London.

Harrison would not flee. Tried as a regicide, he was hanged, drawn and quartered on 13 October 1660, with a courage Samuel Pepys recorded. Argyll, who had crowned Charles at Scone, was arrested and beheaded the next year; Milton hid, was briefly arrested, and survived.

Henry backed his brother, but when Richard fell he would not use the Irish army for his family's ends. On 15 June 1659 he sent in his submission to the restored Rump's government.

In December 1659 Coote and other officers seized Dublin Castle; in February 1660 he sent an agent to Charles II inviting him to try for Ireland. After the Restoration he was made Earl of Mountrath.

Cromwell had arranged, and Richard confirmed, Wilkins's appointment as Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became patron of the young Isaac Barrow. The Restoration took the post from him in 1660.

In 1660 Boyle published New Experiments Physico-Mechanical, Touching the Spring of the Air, the record of his work with Hooke's pump. At the Restoration he was well received at court.

Professor of astronomy at Gresham College since 1657, Wren lectured there to the Oxford men now in London. After his lecture on 28 November 1660 twelve of them, Wren, Boyle and Wilkins among them, agreed to found a college for experimental learning: the Royal Society. Hooke, not among the twelve, became its curator of experiments in 1662.