The Restoration

180 Pages·1991·16.805 MB·English

by  Paul Seaward (auth.)

THE RESTORATION, 1660-1688
British History in Perspective
General Editor: Jeremy Black
PUBLISHED TITLES
C. J. Bartlett British Foreign Policy in the Twentieth Century
J. Black Robert Walpole and the Nature of Politics in Early
Eighteenth-Century Britain
D. G. Boyce The Irish Question and British Politics, 1868-1986
John W. Derry British Politics in the Age of Fox, Pitt and Liverpool
Ronald Hutton The British Republic, 1649-1660
Diarmaid MacCulloch The Later Reformation in England, 1547-1603
Keith Perry British Politics and the American Revolution
Michael Prestwich English Politics in the Thirteenth Century
A. J. Pollard The Wars of the Roses
Robert Stewart Party and Politics, 1830-1852
FORTHCOMING TITLES
Anne Curry The Hundred Years War
John Davies British Politics, 1885--1931
David Dean Parliament and Politics in Elizabethan and Jacobean
England, 1558-1614
Brian Golding The Normans in England 1066-1100: Conquest and
Colonisation
Stephen Gunn Early Tudor Government, 1485--1558
Ann Hughes Causes of the English Civil War
THE RESTORATION
PAUL SEAWARD
M
MACMILLAN
© Paul Seaward 1991
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission
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Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to
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First published 1991
Published by
MACMILLAN EDUCATION LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS
and London
Companies and representatives
throughout the world
Typeset by LBJ Enterprises Ltd
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Seaward, Paul
The Restoration, 1660--1688. - (British history in
perspective, ISSN 0955-8322)
I. England, 1660--1688
I. Title II. Series
942.066
ISBN 978-0-333-48053-3 ISBN 978-1-349-21193-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-21193-7
Contents
Preface Vll
Introduction
2 Conflicts of Power 11
3 Conflicts of Conscience 40
4 Conflicts Abroad 70
5 From Conflict to Revolution: England in the 1680s 101
6 Conclusion 143
~~ 1~
Bibliography 159
Index 168
v
Preface
The following study is intended as a brief introduction to
some of the themes of Restoration politics. The limitations of
my knowledge and its space prevent it from being in any way
comprehensive. I have tried principally to give some sense of
the character of politics, the things that worried politicians,
and to discuss the sources of instability in post-revolution
England. I hope that the bibliography indicates where greater
enlightenment on issues that I have dealt with cursorily or not
at all may be found. I am grateful to Dr C.G.A. Clay and
Cambridge University Press, for permission to reproduce the
table on p. 74; to John Morrill, Jonathan Scott, John Spurr
and Colin Lee for reading and commenting on the text, and
for all of their suggestions; to Vanessa Graham, of Macmillan,
for her forbearance; and to Hilary, for her patience and much
else.
P.S.
Vll
1
INTRODUCTION
The death of Oliver Cromwell, in September 1658, put an end
to the delicate balance of legitimacy and naked force which his
rule had represented. In the following twenty months, the
complicated constitutions, the military might, the carefully
flaunted moderation by which both Commonwealth and
Protectorate had sought to preserve their power, all disinte
grated. By the winter of 1659, the restoration to power of the
Rump Parliament indicated the exhaustion of the constitu
tional imagination. Whatever he intended - whether to seize
power himself, or to engineer a royal restoration - the
intervention of General Monck, the conservative commander
of the army in Scotland, sealed the fate of England's
republican experiment. In the early months of 1660 Monck
forced the Rump to accede to popular pressure and readmit
those of its members who had been excluded in 1648; the
reunited body's decision to dissolve itself and call new
elections was then inevitable. Despite the formal exclusion of
royalists from candidacy, the new parliament, or Convention,
was royalist enough when it assembled on 25 April to begin
negotiations with Charles II, in exile across the Channel in
the Netherlands. On 29 April it voted to restore him, and a
month later he entered London for the first time since 1642, as
its people went jubilant with relief.
For the England to which the monarchy was restored
seemed to be suffused with royalist sentiment. The king, wrote
The Restoration 1660-1688
the London barber Thomas Rugg, was 'by a general vogue'
invited back; 'the people', reminisced the lord chancellor, the
Earl of Clarendon, were 'admirably disposed and prepared to
pay all the subjection, duty and obedience, that a just and
prudent king could expect from them'.1 Yet Clarendon was
deeply aware that the Restoration was only the beginning of a
long process of political recovery. Its central questions were to
preoccupy him and his successors for years to come: what
were the lasting effects on the position of the monarchy and
the Church of parliamentary power, the execution of the king,
religious toleration? Was there any prospect of restoring the
unity of a nation so divided by the partisan hatreds and
private interests that had been thrown up by twenty years of
disputed rule? Was it possible to recreate peace and prosperity
in what was still, for all the rejoicing at the Restoration, a
bitterly divided and politically unconfident country?
Restoration England was a state on probation. To a country
which had been accustomed to thinking of itself as God's
chosen nation, a modern protestant Israel, the dismal history
of the past twenty years had seemed to be evidence of the
withdrawal of his favour. For a considerable majority, the
Restoration appeared to show that he had relented: but it was
clear that Englishmen could no longer take their deliverance
for granted. Her neighbours were equally sceptical of the
permanence of England's restored stability: it was a country
which had in the last half-century changed from one of the
more peaceful and successful of monarchies to the sick man of
Europe, a country which, as the French bishop and theologian
Bossuet said in his sermon at the funeral of Charles I's queen,
had been plagued by a disrespect for authority and a
continual itch for change.2 In their mood of pessimistic
conservatism, many English writers agreed. Thomas Otway's
play of 1681, Venice Preserv'd, conveyed a common belief in
England's turbulence: 'You are an Englishman' one of its
characters was told: 'when treason's hatching/ One might
have thought you'd not have been far behind hand'.3 A
passion for change, a hatred for stability, seemed to be the
country's vice and its downfall. The sense of impermanence,
and the desire for permanence, pervaded English politics.
2
Introduction
The immanence of political violence added to the feeling of
uncertainty. Throughout the 1660s, 1670s and 16 80s the
country was periodically terrorised by rumours of conspiracy,
invasion, assassination and rebellion. Little violence actually
occurred - a small, if terrifying, rising of religious radicals
convulsed London for almost a week in January 1661, and
there were real, if ineffective, rebellions in Yorkshire and in
Ireland in 1663 - but throughout the period networks of
dedicated opponents of the regime, republicans and religious
radicals, were working in one way or another for its
destruction. Underlying Restoration politics was the fear that
these subterranean rumblings might erupt with volcanic
violence, blowing apart the weak crust of society and
hierarchy. If government was shaken, Sir John Holland told
parliament in the early 1660s, 'we must unavoidably fall into
the hands of unreasonable men, into the hands of an insolent,
violent, merciless, frantic, fanatic generation of people, who in
hatred to monarchy, magistracy and ministry, would soon
destroy all the nobility, gentry, persons of interest and quality
throughout the nation'.4 The shadow of 1641 fell across every
crisis, major or minor; the reaction to political events, even in
the volume of land sales, indicated a keen anxiety about
political stability.s Each new frisson emphasised that what
England needed, above all, was peace and stability, a
reassurance against the tyranny and oppression of the Protec
torate and the chaos and anarchy of the years since its demise.
The threat of violence seemed only a symptom, however, of
the central uncertainty of Restoration politics. The heretical
view that England's ancient constitution was itself the cause of
instability was horribly shocking to those who had been
brought up to regard it as the very perfection of political
systems. But James Harrington was by no means the only
person to argue (as he did in his Oceana of 1656) that the
distribution of political power - principally in the hands of the
king and nobility - no longer reflected the balance of
economic strength and that sooner or later the disjunction
would have to be reflected in a change of political structure.6
Thomas Hobbes, too, in his Leviathan of 1651, cast doubt on
3