Titles and styles

• 19 June 1566 – 24 July 1567: The Duke of Rothesay

• 10 February – 24 July 1567: The Duke of Albany

• 24 July 1567 – 20 October 1604: His Grace The King of Scotland

• 24 March 1603 – 27 March 1625: His Majesty The King of England

• 20 October 1604 – 27 March 1625: King of Great Britain

In Scotland, James was "James the sixth, King of Scotland", until 1604. He was proclaimed "James the first, King of England, France and Ireland, defender of the faith in London on 24 March 1603.On 20 October 1604, James issued a proclamation at Westminster changing his style to "King of Great Britain, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, etc." The style was not used on English statutes, but was used on proclamations, coinage, letters, treaties, and in Scotland. James, in line with other monarchs of England between 1340 and 1800, styled himself "King of France", although he did not actually rule France.

English Civil War

The English Civil War (1642–1651) was a series of armed conflicts and political machinations between Parliamentarians (Roundheads) andRoyalists (Cavaliers). The first (1642–46) and second (1648–49) civil wars pitted the supporters of King Charles I against the supporters of theLong Parliament, while the third war (1649–51) saw fighting between supporters of King Charles II and supporters of the Rump Parliament. The Civil War ended with the Parliamentary victory at the Battle of Worcester on 3 September 1651.

The Civil War led to the trial and execution of Charles I, the exile of his son, Charles II, and replacement of English monarchy with first, theCommonwealth of England (1649–53), and then with a Protectorate (1653–59), under Oliver Cromwell's personal rule. The monopoly of theChurch of England on Christian worship in England ended with the victors consolidating the established Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland. Constitutionally, the wars established the precedent that an English monarch cannot govern without Parliament's consent, although this concept was legally established only with the Glorious Revolution later in the century.

War broke out less than forty years after the death of Elizabeth I in 1603. At the accession of Charles I in 1625, England and Scotland had both experienced relative peace, both internally and in their relations with each other, for as long as anyone could remember. Charles hoped to unite the kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland into a new single kingdom, fulfilling the dream of his father, James VI of Scotland and I of England. Many English Parliamentarians had suspicions regarding such a move, because they feared that setting up a new kingdom might destroy the old English traditions which had bound the English monarchy. As Charles shared his father's position on the power of the crown (James had described kings as "little Gods on Earth", chosen by God to rule in accordance with the doctrine of the "Divine Right of Kings"), the suspicions of the Parliamentarians had some justification

One of the first events to raise concerns over Charles's reign was his marriage to a French Roman Catholic princess, Henrietta-Marie de Bourbon, in 1625, directly after ascending to the throne. Charles's marriage raised the possibility that his children, including the heir to the throne, might grow up Catholic, an alarming prospect to officially Protestant England, where the Church of England is led by the Supreme Governor, investing the Head of Church in the same person as the Head of State, in this instance the King.

Charles set his sights on taking part in the conflicts which Europe was undergoing in the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648). Foreign wars necessitated heavy expenditures, and the Crown could raise taxes only through Parliamentary consent (described above). Charles experienced further financial difficulty when his first Parliament refused to assign him the traditional right to collect customs duties for his entire reign, deciding instead to grant it only on a provisional basis.

Charles, meanwhile, pressed ahead with his European wars, deciding to send an expeditionary force to relieve the French Huguenots whom Royal French forces held besieged in La Rochelle. Military support for Protestants on the Continent was, in itself, popular both in Parliament and with the Protestant majority in general, and it had the potential to alleviate concerns brought about by the King's Catholic marriage. However, Charles's insistence on having his unpopular royal favourite George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham assume command of the English force undermined that support. Unfortunately for Charles and Buckingham, the relief expedition proved a fiasco (1627), and Parliament, already hostile to Buckingham for his monopoly on royal patronage, opened impeachmentproceedings against him. Charles responded by dissolving Parliament. This move, while saving Buckingham, reinforced the impression that Charles wanted to avoid Parliamentary scrutiny of his ministers.

Having dissolved Parliament and unable to raise money without it, the king assembled a new one in 1628. (The elected members included Oliver Cromwell.) The new Parliament drew up the Petition of Right, and Charles accepted it as a concession in order to obtain his subsidy. Amongst other things, the Petition referred to Magna Carta.

In early January 1642, a few days after his failure to capture five members of the House of Commons, fearing for his own personal safety and for that of his family and retinue, Charles left the London area. Further negotiations by frequent correspondence between the King and the Long Parliament through to early summer proved fruitless. As the summer progressed, cities and towns declared their sympathies for one faction or the other: for example, the garrison of Portsmouth under the command of Sir George Goring declared for the King, but when Charles tried to acquire arms for his cause from Kingston upon Hull, the depository for the weapons used in the previous Scottish campaigns, Sir John Hotham, the military governor appointed by Parliament in January, initially refused to let Charles enter Hull, and when Charles returned with more men, drove them off.^] Charles issued a warrant for Hotham to be arrested as a traitor but was powerless to enforce it. Throughout the summer months, tensions rose and there was brawling in a number of places, with the first death of the conflict taking place in Manchester.

At the outset of the conflict, much of the country remained neutral, though the Royal Navy and most English cities favoured Parliament, while the King found considerable support in rural communities. Historians estimate that between them, both sides had only about 15,000 men^{[citation needed]}. However, the war quickly spread and eventually involved every level of society. Many areas attempted to remain neutral, some formed bands of Clubmen to protect their localities against the worst excesses of the armies of both sides, but most found it impossible to withstand both the King and Parliament. On one side, the King and his supporters thought that they fought for traditional government in Church and state. On the other, most supporters of the Parliamentary cause initially took up arms to defend what they thought of as the traditional balance of government in Church and state, which the bad advice the King had received from his advisers had undermined before and during the "Eleven Years' Tyranny". The views of the Members of Parliament ranged from unquestioning support of the King – at one point during the First Civil War, more members of the Commons and Lords gathered in the King's Oxford Parliament than at Westminster– through to radicals, who wanted major reforms in favour of religious independence and the redistribution of power at the national level.^{[citation needed]}However, even the most radical supporters of the Parliamentarian cause still favoured the retention of Charles on the throne.

After the debacle at Hull, Charles moved on to Nottingham, where on 22 August 1642, he raised the royal standard. When he raised his standard, Charles had with him about 2,000 cavalry and a small number of Yorkshire infantry-men, and using the archaic system of a Commission of Array, Charles' supporters started to build a larger army around the standard. Charles moved in a south-westerly direction, first to Stafford, and then on to Shrewsbury, because the support for his cause seemed particularly strong in the Severn valley area and in North Wales.^] While passing throughWellington, in what became known as the "Wellington Declaration", he declared that he would uphold the "Protestant religion, the laws of England, and the liberty of Parliament".

The Parliamentarians who opposed the King had not remained passive during this pre-war period. As in the case of Kingston upon Hull they had taken measures to secure strategic towns and cities, by appointing men sympathetic to their cause, and on 9 June they had voted to raise an army of 10,000 volunteers, appointing Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of Essex commander three days later. He received orders "to rescue His Majesty's person, and the persons of the Prince [of Wales] and the Duke of York out of the hands of those desperate persons who were about them". The Lords Lieutenant, whom Parliament appointed, used the Militia Ordinance to order the militia to join Essex's army.

Two weeks after the King had raised his standard at Nottingham, Essex led his army north towards Northampton, picking up support along the way (including a detachment of Cambridgeshire cavalry raised and commanded by Oliver Cromwell). By the middle of September Essex's forces had grown to 21,000 infantry and 4200 cavalry and dragoons. On 14 September he moved his army to Coventry and then to the north of the Cotswolds, a strategy which placed his army between the Royalists and London. With the size of both armies now in the tens of thousands, and only Worcestershire between them, it was inevitable that cavalry reconnaissance units would sooner or later meet. This happened in the first major skirmish of the Civil War, when a cavalry troop of about 1,000 Royalists commanded by Prince Rupert, a German nephew of the King and one of the outstanding cavalry commanders of the war, defeated a Parliamentary cavalry detachment under the command of Colonel John Brown in the Battle of Powick Bridge, at a bridge across the River Teme close to Worcester.

Rupert withdrew to Shrewsbury, where a council-of-war discussed two courses of action: whether to advance towards Essex's new position near Worcester, or to march along the now opened road towards London. The Council decided to take the London route, but not to avoid a battle, for the Royalist generals wanted to fight Essex before he grew too strong, and the temper of both sides made it impossible to postpone the decision. In the Earl of Clarendon's words: "it was considered more counsellable to march towards London, it being morally sure that Essex would put himself in their way". Accordingly, the army left Shrewsbury on 12 October, gaining two days' start on the enemy, and moved south-east. This had the desired effect, as it forced Essex to move to intercept them.

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.^[57]The second field action of the war, the stand-off at Turnham Green, saw Charles forced to withdraw to Oxford. This city would serve as his base for the remainder of the war.

In 1643 the Royalist forces won at Adwalton Moor, and gained control of most of Yorkshire. In the Midlands, a Parliamentary force under Sir John Gell, 1st Baronetbesieged and captured the cathedral city of Lichfield, after the death of the original commander, Lord Brooke.^[61] This group subsequently joined forces with Sir John Brereton to fight the inconclusive Battle of Hopton Heath (19 March 1643), where the Royalist commander, the Earl of Northampton, was killed.^[61] Subsequent battles in the west of England at Lansdowne and at Roundway Down also went to the Royalists. Prince Rupert could then take Bristol. In the same year, Oliver Cromwell formed his troop of "Ironsides", a disciplined unit that demonstrated his military leadership ability. With their assistance, he won a victory at the Battle of Gainsboroughin July.

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^[64] and then brushed the Royalist army aside at the First Battle of Newbury (20 September 1643),^[65] in order to return triumphantly to London. Other Parliamentarian forces won the Battle of Winceby, giving them control of Lincoln. Political manoeuvering to gain an advantage in numbers led Charles to negotiate a ceasefire in Ireland, freeing up English troops to fight on the Royalist side in England, while Parliament offered concessions to the Scots in return for aid and assistance.

With the help of the Scots, Parliament won at Marston Moor (2 July 1644),  gaining York and the north of England. Cromwell's conduct in this battle proved decisive, and demonstrated his potential as both a political and an important military leader. The defeat at the Battle of Lostwithiel in Cornwall, however, marked a serious reverse for Parliament in the south-west of England. Subsequent fighting around Newbury (27 October 1644), though tactically indecisive, strategically gave another check to Parliament.

In 1645 Parliament reaffirmed its determination to fight the war to a finish. It passed the Self-denying Ordinance, by which all members of either House of Parliament laid down their commands, and re-organized its main forces into the New Model Army ("Army"), under the command of Sir Thomas Fairfax, with Cromwell as his second-in-command and Lieutenant-Generl of Horse. In two decisive engagements—the Battle of Naseby on 14 June and the Battle of Langport on 10 July—the Parliamentarians effectively destroyed Charles' armies.

In the remains of his English realm Charles attempted to recover a stable base of support by consolidating the Midlands. He began to form an axis between Oxford and Newark on Trent in Nottinghamshire. Those towns had become fortresses and showed more reliable loyalty to him than to others. He took Leicester, which lies between them, but found his resources exhausted. Having little opportunity to replenish them, in May 1646 he sought shelter with a Presbyterian Scottish army atSouthwell in Nottinghamshire. Charles was eventually handed over to the English Parliament by the Scots and was imprisoned. This marked the end of the First English Civil War.

"Mother bides at home, she is troubled with bad breath, and is sair weak in her body from early labour. I am wrought with sister and brother, it is very sore work; cannot say how many rakes or journeys I make from pit's bottom to wall face and back, thinks about 30 or 25 on the average; the distance varies from 100 to 250 fathom. I carry about 1 cwt. and a quarter on my back; have to stoop much and creep through water, which is frequently up to the calves of my legs." (Isabella Read, 12 years old, coal-bearer, testimony gathered by Ashley's Mines Commission 1842)

"My father has been dead about a year; my mother is living and has ten children, five lads and five lasses; the oldest is about thirty, the youngest is four; three lasses go to mill; all the lads are colliers, two getters and three hurriers; one lives at home and does nothing; mother does nought but look after home. All my sisters have been hurriers, but three went to the mill. Alice went because her legs swelled from hurrying in cold water when she was hot. I never went to day-school; I go to Sunday-school, but I cannot read or write; I go to pit at five o'clock in the morning and come out at five in the evening; I get my breakfast of porridge and milk first; I take my dinner with me, a cake, and eat it as I go; I do not stop or rest any time for the purpose; I get nothing else until I get home, and then have potatoes and meat, not every day meat. I hurry in the clothes I have now got on, trousers and ragged jacket; the bald place upon my head is made by thrusting the corves; my legs have never swelled, but sisters' did when they went to mill; I hurry the corves a mile and more under ground and back; they weigh 300 cwt.; I hurry 11 a-day; I wear a belt and chain at the workings, to get the corves out;" (Patience Kershaw, 17 years old, coal-bearer, testimony gathered by Ashley's Mines Commission 1842)

Children as young as four were put to work. In coal mines children began work at the age of 5 and generally died before the age of 25. Many children (and adults) worked 16 hour days. As early as 1802 and 1819, Factory Acts were passed to limit the working hours of workhouse children in factories and cotton mills to 12 hours per day. These acts were largely ineffective and after radical agitation, by for example the "Short Time Committees" in 1831, a Royal Commission recommended in 1833 that children aged 11–18 should work a maximum of 12 hours per day, children aged 9–11 a maximum of eight hours, and children under the age of nine should no longer be permitted to work. This act, however, only applied to the textile industry, and further agitation led to another act in 1847 limiting both adults and children to 10 hour working days.

George V (George Frederick Ernest Albert; 3 June 1865 – 20 January 1936) was King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions, and Emperor of India, from 6 May 1910 through the First World War (1914–1918) until his death in 1936.

George was a grandson of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert and the first cousin of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany. From 1877 to 1891, he served in the Royal Navy. On the death of Victoria in 1901, George's father became King Edward VII, and George was made Prince of Wales. On his father's death in 1910, he succeeded as King-Emperor of the British Empire. He was the only Emperor of India to be present at his own Delhi Durbar.

As a result of the First World War, other empires in Europe fell while his expanded to its greatest extent. In 1917, he became the first monarch of the House of Windsor, which he renamed from the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha as a result of anti-German public sentiment. His reign saw the rise of socialism, communism, fascism, Irish republicanism, and the Indian independence movement, all of which radically changed the political landscape. The Parliament Act 1911 established the supremacy of the elected House of Commons of the United Kingdom over the unelected House of Lords. He appointed the first Labour ministry in 1924 and in 1931, the Statute of Westminster recognised the dominions of the Empire as separate, independent kingdoms within the Commonwealth of Nations. He was plagued by illness throughout much of his later reign and at his death was succeeded by his eldest son, Edward VIII.