vanquished the last Royalist army of the English Civil War at the Battle of Worcester, on 3 September 1651. It was the last and most decisive battle in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. Aftermath Having defeated all organised opposition, the Grandees of the Parliamentary New Model Army and their civilian supporters dominated the politics of all three nations for the next nine years (see Interregnum (1649–1660)). As for England, the Rump Parliament had already decreed it was a republic and a Commonwealth. Ireland and Scotland were now subjugated and ruled by military governors, and constituent representatives from both nations were seated in the Rump Parliament of the Protectorate, where they were dominated by Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector. When Cromwell died in 1658, control of the Commonwealth became unstable. In early 1660, General George Monck, commanding English occupation forces in Scotland, ordered his troops from the Coldstream barracks, marched them south into England, and seized control of London by February 1660. There he accumulated allies and agreements among the English and London establishments, including the newly constituted Convention Parliament, to which he was elected a member. Monck, first a Royalist campaigner, then a Parliamentary soldier, now contrived the Restoration of the monarchy. Monck arranged that the Convention Parliament would invite Charles II to return as king of the three realms—which was done by act of Parliament on 1 May 1660. The Wars of the Three Kingdoms prefigured many of the changes that ultimately would shape modern Britain but, in the short term, these conflicts in fact resolved little for the kingdoms and peoples. The English Commonwealth did achieve a notable compromise between the monarchy and republic which survived destabilising problems for nearly the next two hundred years. In practice, Oliver Cromwell exercised political power through his control over Parliament's military forces, but his legal position—and provisions for his succession—remained unclear, even after he became Lord Protector. None of the several constitutions proposed during this period was achieved. Thus the Commonwealth and Protectorate of the Parliamentarians—the wars' victors—left no significant new form of government in place after their time. Still, in the long term, two abiding legacies of British democracy were established during this period: after the execution of King Charles I for high treason, no future British monarch could expect that their subjects would tolerate perceived despotism—the "divine right of kings" no longer existed; the excesses of the New