The Dutch Republic and England were the important exceptions to the the pattern of absolutism in Europe. The Dutch kept local government strong and the Stadtholder weak. In England, Civil War broke out between Parliament and King Charles I, who was trying act more like an absolute monarch. The Parliament won, and the king was executed. After Oliver Cromwell's death, the king's son, Charles II, was brought back to the throne. When Charles's brother, James II, came to the throne in 1685, there was more trouble and another revolution. A fews years later, in 1689, James and absolutism was finally defeated in the "Glorious Revolution." After sixty years of conflict, constitutionalism finally established itself both in theory and in political reality in Britain, setting the English-speaking world on a different political path from the rest of Europe.
