In 1215, a group of English noblemen had rebelled against King John. The conflict was resolved when the Archbishop of Canterbury drafted the Magna Carta, which placed certain restrictions on the king's power and guaranteed certain rights for the nobles. One of the most important of these rights was that the king could not levy a tax without the consent of a "Parliament," or gathering of nobles who represented the country.
King Charles I, who came to the throne in 1625, did not have a wonderful relationship with his Parliaments. To oversimplify, Charles wanted Parliament to do whatever he told them, and the members of Parliament wanted Charles to do whatever they told him. To avoid this conflict, from 1629 until 1640, Charles simply never called a Parliament. Of course, any taxes he levied during this period were therefore illegal. Charles might have gotten away with this, but he was also perceived as a Catholic sympathizer, which made him very unpopular among the Protestants who dominated England and Scotland. He married the Catholic princess Henrietta Maria (who in English was called "Queen Mary"), he failed to support the Protestant countries in the Thirty Years' War, and he tried to impose "high church" Anglicanism (which is outwardly very similar to Catholicism) on the Church of Scotland. This final move led to the Bishops' Wars between England and Scotland.
At the end of the Bishops' Wars, Charles was out of money and finally had to call a Parliament, which immediately started making all kinds of demands. Eventually, both the king and Parliament raised separate armies, officially to deal with rebellions in Scotland and Ireland, but they just started fighting each other. Over the next nine years, England divided into "Roundheads," who supported Parliament, and "Cavaliers," who supported the king. Eventually, however, Charles was defeated by Scottish forces, handed over to Parliament, and executed for treason in 1649. His son (also named Charles) fled to Europe.
Parliament then proclaimed a republic called the Commonwealth of England. Four years later, in 1653, the Commonwealth was reorganized under a member of Parliament named Oliver Cromwell, who adopted the title "Lord Protector." Although the "Protectorate" was legally a democracy, for all intents and purposes, Cromwell was a military dictator.
The Protectorate collapsed into internal strife after Cromwell's death and in 1660, Charles II returned to England and restored the monarchy. He ordered all official documents dated to indicate that he had become king immediately upon his father's death in 1649, and also had Oliver Cromwell (who had now been dead for three years) exhumed, put on trial, convicted of treason, hanged, drawn, and quartered. His head was put on a pike outside of London until a storm blew it away some time later.
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