When did Britain abandon absolute monarchy and when did voting start there?

Question

I have seen many claims that they never had an absolute monarchy. But emperors like King William the Conqueror were absolute monarchies (Queen Elizabeth is his descendant). Was the Magna Carta the end of the absolute monarchy in Britain since which only titular monarchy exist? It is said to be a founder of democracy, but in my mind it just gave a group of barons more power over the King, i.e. aristocracy/oligarchy (just my thought, I don't know too much to give a conclusion). When did voting/elections by the general people of Britain exactly begin and was Magna Carta the true end of absolute monarchy?

Answer 1

Hi Krugen,

The short answer is ... it's complicated! But the key points are:

(1) The idea of an absolute monarch has been popular with rulers (and contested by others!) for thousands of years. In what is now England, there were for a long time seven widely-recognized "kingdoms" (Mercia, Wessex, etc.), some of them so small (Kent!) that if we went there we'd likely think of the leaders as "chieftans" rather than Kings / Queens. Even they did not have in reality the absolute power they may have craved.

(2) Aethelstan united these as England in the tenth century; then Wales got added; then Scotland in 1707; throughout this period, there is disagreement about how far the monarch's power extends.

(3) Magna Carta didn't introduce anything we'd recognize as democracy, but is important as one seed for the idea that the king had to cooperate with others and in a sense share power - or anyway use power only to the extent that some others accepted. (John was the exceptionally bad king with the hyper-authoritarian tendencies.)

(4) Henry VIII is a good example of a king who started with strong authority and made it much more absolute by detaching from the Roman Church and terrorizing most of those at home who might have opposed him; but even as late as 1603 (when his daughter Elizabeth died) we have ascending to the throne James VI of Scotland (James I of England) who felt the need to write several books arguing for the theory that monarchs ruled by "divine right" - they were (rather like the Pope today if you're a Catholic) literally God's representative on Earth. That implies a very near absolutist view of monarchy, but it was not widely agreed on and ...

(5) ... was one reason for the outbreak, under his son Charles I in 1642, of the English Civil War, which pitted absolutist Royalists against pro-democracy Parliamentarians. The Parliamentarians won, Charles got his head chopped off - and that was the point after which the "sovereign", in Britain anyway, was never again an individual but rather the constitutional fiction of "the monarch-in-parliament." (In the course of time, of course, the "monarch" part of that has become more and more ceremonial.)

Hope that helps! - Richard