Oliver Cromwell and the English Civil Wars

The past couple of days except for an AP test I have been studying Oliver Cromwell and the English Civil Wars. These are relevant to my study of political communication because the founders would have looked at Cromwell as an example of a leader in an attempt at democracy.  Cromwell fed up with the king for two reasons.  The first is that he married a Catholic and Cromwell saw this as betraying the church of England.  The second reason is that the king had dissolved parliament several times and only recalled them when he needed money to fight a war against Scotland.  After trying to restrain the king several times with new laws that gave parliament more power. Civil war eventually broke out in England. There were many battles here but eventually, Cromwell's new model army defeated the Royalists.  After capturing King Charles I he was put on trial and the put to death by parliament.  Several ineffective parliaments ruled for a short period of time before Cromwell took the title of Lord protector for 5 years. This was basically the position of King in everything but name. As Lord Protector, he waged war against the Catholics and committed genocide against the Irish along the way. After he died his son took power but, was overthrown by Charles II. He was Catholic this lead the Protestants to invite William of Orange (from the Netherlands) to invade England. After all of this William was eventually defeated. This is a very confusing chain of events and I recommend a couple videos that can help you make a little more sense out of everything.

Why would all of this be relevant to the founders of the United States? Great question.  First of all, this is an example of a powerful executive figure not listening to his legislative body.  It is also an example of populists like Cromwell being able to take control and subverting many laws.  These events are also characterized by complicated rules of succession.  Seeing as all these events were only 150 years old when the founders were writing the constitution these events were all kept in mind. They wanted to make sure there could sufficient checks on the power of the executive or king so they did not end up with problems like England.  That is part of the reason why they were so careful in crafting the office of the executive.  This also crafted their ideas about who should be able to declare wars.  Overall these events heavily influenced many of the founder's ideas about good ways to run their new government.  I'll be exploring more about the founders specifically later in the week. Here is a fun video to watch from Monty Python.