Restoration Politics, Religion and Culture

Britain and Ireland, 1660-1714

George Southcombe, Grant Tapsell

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781350307025
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This indispensable introductory guide offers students a number of highly focused chapters on key themes in Restoration history. Each addresses a core question relating to the period 1660-1714, and uses artistic and literary sources – as well as more traditional texts of political history – to illustrate and illuminate arguments. George Southcombe and Grant Tapsell provide clear analyses of different aspects of the era whilst maintaining an overall coherence based on three central propositions:
- 1660-1714 represents a political world fundamentally influenced by the civil wars and interregnum
- The period can best be understood by linking together types of evidence too often separated in conventional accounts
- The high politics of kings and their courts should be examined within broader social and geographical contexts Featuring chapters on the exclusion crisis, Charles II and James VII/II, as well as the British dimension, restoration culture, and politics out-of-doors, this is essential reading for anyone studying this fascinating period in British history.

Chapter 1:What was Restored in 1660?

In 1644, the poet and polemicist John Milton wrote of how he saw in his ‘mind a noble and puissant Nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks’.¹ The civil war had opened up opportunities for England to awaken and fulfil God’s purpose. Milton would later write defending the execution of Charles I, asserting the legitimacy of an act which removed the country from the bondage of tyranny. But in 1660, the hopes which had been raised to dizzying heights in 1644 lay broken, and Milton did not seek to conceal his contempt for most of the English people. Overtaken by a ‘deluge of . . . epidemic madness’ they threatened to bring England to ‘a precipice of destruction’. Even the few for whom he retained any hope seemed to be ‘chusing them a captain back for Egypt’.² He wrote these words in a pamphlet designed to propose a remedy, to halt a process which his own imagery suggested was inexorable. He failed. The captain he feared, Charles II, was restored to the thrones of England, Scotland, and Ireland soon after he published.

As Milton recognised few others would interpret these events as he did.Some did express their discontent, albeit rather less elegantly. On 1 May 1660, for example, one Thomas Blacklocke in the Red Lyon Inn, Southwark exclaimed that ‘if ever the Kinge come into England, He shold come in a Wheel-Barrow, and his Breach shold be stucke full of Nettles’.³ However, the very fact that a record of such statements now exists was normally the result of somebody loyal to the Crown being offended enough to report the speaker. For most the Restoration was a joyous occasion, monarchy the natural government of Britain and Ireland. The diarist John Evelyn like Milton viewed the situation through the lens provided by biblical history. But whereas Milton saw England being returned to bondage, Evelyn wrote that

it was the Lords doing, et mirabile in oculis nostris: for such a Restauration was never seene in the mention of any history, antient or modern, since the returne of the Babylonian Captivity, nor so joyfull a day, & so bright, ever seene in this nation: this hapning when to expect or effect it, was past all humane policy.⁴

Charles and his advisers, showing an awareness of the importance of public opinion which would continue throughout his reign, capitalised on the mood of celebration. Charles triumphantly entered London on 29 May 1660. His return had been postponed in order for it to coincide with his 30th birthday, which was to be metaphorically linked with his kingdoms being born again.⁵ As an Act for a Perpetuall Anniversary Thanksgiving on the nine and twentyeth date of May recorded this was: ‘the most memorable Birth day not onely of his Majesty both as a man and Prince but likewise as an actual King, and of this and other His Majesties Kingdomes all in a great measure borne and raised from the dead on this most joyfull day’.⁶ Charles’s way into the capital was paved with flowers, tapestries adorned the streets, and the fountains flowed with wine.⁷ What Milton regarded as a return to slavery was thus for many other observers a return from a period so dark that it could be likened to death itself.

But when they awoke, bleary eyed and hungover, on 30 May, Londoners might well have asked themselves what exactly they had been celebrating. The return of the king, certainly, but on what terms? What was restored in 1660? The answer to this question has two parts. First, and most obviously, an analysis of the political settlement as it was worked out between king and parliament in the early 1660s is required. But secondly a more conceptually sophisticated examination of why, despite the ways in which this settlement was relatively favourable to the monarchy, Charles II’s polities remained unsettled is necessary. This unsettled state was dramatically shaped by the impact of the Revolution. We trace this impact in three key areas – print and popular politics, constitutional debate, and religion. The themes introduced here are expanded upon in the chapters that follow and provide our book’s unifying argument.

Restoration

In constitutional terms England was to be returned to a point reached in 1641.⁸ This meant that the legislation passed in the early, heady days of the Long Parliament – where those who would become Parliamentarians and Royalists, Roundheads and Cavaliers, still often spoke with one voice on central issues – remained on the statute book. Charles I, albeit unwillingly, had given his assent to these measures which asserted that in theory no future king could rule with the admixture of blinkered authoritarianism and unchecked innovation which he had demonstrated from 1629–40. The fiscal expedients of the personal rule, based on a novel interpretation of age-old rights, all remained abolished. The prerogative courts of High Commission and Star Chamber which had convicted and brutally punished the puritan ‘martyrs’ Henry Burton, John Bastwick, and William Prynne were not resuscitated.⁹ The only key piece of legislation dating from this time which was substantially altered was the Triennial Act. The Cavalier Parliament’s Act (passed in 1664) retained the Long Parliament’s requirement that a parliament be called every three years but, unlike the earlier Act, it did not set out any mechanisms by which parliament could be called should the king fail in this duty.

The Restoration thus represented a moment of belated triumph for those who in 1640 and 1641 had wanted to clarify the boundaries of kingly power but who had not sought to capitalise on the king’s weakness in order to drive forward further reformation.¹⁰ But it was also, ostensibly at least, a triumph for the monarchy. None of the more radical legislation of the years of civil war and interregnum was kept on the statute books. Parliament finally resolved what Clarendon called the ‘great bone of contention during the late ware’ in passing measures which placed the militia under Charles’s sole control.¹¹ In addition, virtually all of the armed force on which power in the interregnum had rested was disbanded, and Charles was to be allowed a standing army with the important proviso that he had to pay for it.¹² The financial settlement, it is true, did not solve the problems of chronic underfunding to which early modern English monarchs had been subject. It was adjudged in September 1660 that government required £1,200,000 a year, and without its previous fiscal rights and given the inadequacy of income from land and customs, alternative funding had to be decided upon. The possibility of a land tax was discussed, but the first attempt at a solution which was pleasing to both the Crown and parliament – which, with much of its membership drawn from the gentry, had landed interests at its heart – was found in the grant of an excise on alcoholic beverages. When this failed to meet the necessary amount, a Hearth Tax was voted in 1662. Even then these measures did not at first provide the requisite amount for government, and the king was forced to rely on parliament for extra grants.¹³ But while this financial settlement set some limitations on monarchical power, if only because of the initial inadequacy of its provisions, it put Charles in no worse a position than his predecessors. Also, by relying on the excise rather than a land tax, it ironically created a system that would ultimately provide the Crown with a strong economic foundation from which to withstand the challenges of the late 1670s and early 1680s.

Thus at first the answer to what was restored in 1660 seems to be a relatively simple one: virtually everything that did not seem to the nobility and gentry represented in parliament to be related to Caroline arbitrary rule. It was to be as if the civil war and interregnum had never happened. The legislation that enshrined this, the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion, was passed in August 1660. The act declared that everybody – with some named exceptions – who had been involved in ‘all and all manner of treasons, misprisons of treasons, murthers, felonies, offences, crimes, contempts and misdemeanours’ in the name of the Royalist or Parliamentarian cause between 1 January 1638 and 24 June 1660 would be granted pardon and indemnity.¹⁴ The act also attempted to force the nation to participate in an act of collective amnesia, and to obviate the languages of political conflict that had developed. Any of those labels that had denoted different sides in the civil war were declared anathema, removed from the political lexicon of England.¹⁵ In a speech to parliament of September 1660, Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, Lord Chancellor and, apart from the king, the leading figure in politics from 1660–7 spoke with anger of those who sought to keep the memory of the civil wars alive in their labelling of others. He extended his opprobrium to those guilty of thought-crimes, who brewed evil thoughts within them, occasionally allowing their minds’ construction to be shown on their faces. Charles himself

hath given us a noble and princely example, by opening and stretching His arms to all who are worthy to be His Subjects, worthy to be thought English men, by extending His heart with a pious and a grateful joy to finde all His Subjects at once in His arms, and himself in theirs: and shall we fold our arms towards one another, and contract our hearts with Envy and Malice to each other, by any sharp memory of what hath been unneighbourly or unkindely done heretofore? What is this but to rebel against the Person of the King, against the excellent Example and Verture of the King, against the known Law of the Land, this blessed Act of Oblivion?¹⁶

Remembering was figured as rebellion. In conjunction the legal fiction that Charles II’s reign had commenced immediately after his father’s in 1649 was set down, and the statutes of his reign are still numbered as if he had ruled from that moment. England had no longer been without a monarch for 11 years.

And yet, unsurprisingly, minds were not wiped blank. Indeed, some of the actions of the Restoration government were actually in conflict with any sustained attempt to erase the past. A number of individuals were excepted from the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion and 13 who had signed Charles I’s death warrant, or who had played a leading role in his trial, were executed at Charing-Cross.¹⁷ In the horrifying Grand Guignol theatre of an early modern execution for treason, the gathered crowds witnessed the hanging, disembowelling, and quartering of these men. Their senses were assailed: Evelyn who ‘saw not their execution’ nonetheless described how he ‘met their quarters mangld & cutt & reaking as they were brought from the Gallows in baskets on the hurdle’, whilst the inhabitants of Charing-Cross petitioned the king asking that there should be no further executions there because ‘the stench of their burnt bowels had so putrified the air’.¹⁸ The heads of the traitors were displayed prominently, their dead gazes cast over London reminding its inhabitants of the past in all too obvious a form. Even more strikingly than this, the phrase ‘digging up the past’ was literalised in a particularly grotesque way when it was ordered that the bodies of Oliver Cromwell, Henry Ireton, and John Bradshaw should be exhumed. In an act of symbolic revenge they were hanged, dressed in their winding sheets, on the anniversary of the regicide 30 January 1661. Their heads were then put on spikes outside Westminster Hall. For almost 20 years Oliver Cromwell’s head looked down upon London. Oblivion? Hardly. The chief statesman of the 11 years that officially did not exist was ever present during the 20 years in which all Londoners were meant to forget that he had ever been alive. But it was, of course, not only the actions of the Restoration government that kept the past at the forefront of people’s minds. The interregnum was unforgettable. The past indelibly affected the present: the major political issues; the political languages used; and the political and religious decisions taken; all of these things bore the marks of the experiences that had preceded 1660. Just as Cromwell’s head watched over Restoration London, so the Restoration as a period was watched over by the ghosts of the civil war and interregnum, and they were gho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Why Study Restoration History?
• Chapter 1: What was Restored in 1660?
• Chapter 2: Why were Dissenters a Problem?
• Chapter 3: What was at Stake in the Exclusion Crisis?
• Chapter 4: Was Charles II a Successful ‘Royal Politician’?
• Chapter 5: Why did James VII and II Lose his Thrones?
• Chapter 6: How Important was the ‘British’ Dimension to Restoration Political Life?
• Chapter 7: What was the Importance of Politics Out-of-Doors in this Period?
• Chapter 8: Why Study Restoration Culture?
• Chapter 9: What were the Main Forces for Change and Continuity in the Post-Revolutionary World, 1688–1714?
• Notes
• Further Reading
• Index