thout a proper knowledge of the background
of English history, you cannot understand what you read in the
newspapers. And it is therefore necessary that you know how England
happened to develop a parliamentary form of government while the rest of
the European continent was still ruled by absolute monarchs.

THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION

HOW THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE "DIVINE RIGHT" OF KINGS AND THE LESS DIVINE
BUT MORE REASONABLE "RIGHT OF PARLIAMENT" ENDED DISASTROUSLY FOR KING
CHARLES II

CAESAR, the earliest explorer of north-western Europe, had crossed
the Channel in the year 55 B.C. and had conquered England. During four
centuries the country then remained a Roman province. But when the
Barbarians began to threaten Rome, the garrisons were called back from
the frontier that they might defend the home country and Britannia was
left without a government and without protection.

As soon as this became known among the hungry Saxon tribes of northern
Germany, they sailed across the North Sea and made themselves at home in
the prosperous island. They founded a number of independent Anglo-Saxon
kingdoms (so called after the original Angles or English and the Saxon
invaders) but these small states were for ever quarrelling with each
other and no King was strong enough to establish himself as the head
of a united country. For more than five hundred years, Mercia and
Northumbria and Wessex and Sussex and Kent and East Anglia, or whatever
their names, were exposed to attacks from various Scandinavian pirates.
Finally in the eleventh century, England, together with Norway and
northern Germany became part of the large Danish Empire of Canute the
Great and the last vestiges of independence disappeared.

The Danes, in the course of time, were driven away but no sooner was
England free, than it was conquered for the fourth time. The new enemies
were the descendants of another tribe of Norsemen who early in the
tenth century had invaded France and had founded the Duchy of Normandy.
William, Duke of Normandy, who for a long time had looked across the
water with an envious eye, crossed the Channel in October of the year
1066. At the battle of Hastings, on October the fourteenth of that
year, he destroyed the weak forces of Harold of Wessex, the last of
the Anglo-Saxon Kings and established himself as King of England. But
neither William nor his successors of the House of Anjou and Plantagenet
regarded England as their true home.