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The return of Charles II in May 1660 was greeted with an outpouring of relief so general that it could make the whole revolutionary interlude seem an aberration to be forgotten. Bells rang, fountains ran with wine, and the diarist John Evelyn watched the king ride into London "with a triumph of above 20,000 horse and foot... the ways strewed with flowers." Yet beneath the rejoicing, the Restoration settled remarkably little. It restored the forms of the old constitution — king, Lords, Commons, bishops — but left the substance of the great questions of 1640–42 unresolved: where the limits of the royal prerogative lay, what rights Parliament could claim, and what place, if any, religious dissent would have in a re-established Anglican order. The reign of Charles II is, in large part, the story of those buried questions working their way back to the surface — culminating in the Exclusion Crisis, the birth of party, and the looming problem of a Catholic heir.
The central interpretive issue is how to characterise the Restoration settlement and the reign that followed. Was it, as Ronald Hutton's work suggests, a pragmatic and broadly successful accommodation, the product of negotiation and compromise that gave England a quarter-century of relative stability? Or was it, as Tim Harris emphasises, a settlement built on unresolved tensions and enforced division (above all the persecution of Dissent) that made renewed crisis almost inevitable — a crisis that, in 1678–81, recalled the slide towards civil war with terrifying vividness? And how far should the reign be read not as a peaceful epilogue to the Revolution but as the prologue to a second one in 1688? Holding the "stability" and "instability" readings in tension is the analytical work of this lesson.
Key Question: Was the Restoration settlement a pragmatic and durable success that secured stability after two decades of upheaval, or a fudge built on unresolved constitutional and religious tensions — particularly over Dissent and the succession — that made the crises of 1678–88 likely?
Restoration was made politically possible by the Declaration of Breda, issued (on Edward Hyde's advice) before Charles returned. Its genius lay in deliberate vagueness: it promised much in principle and deferred the hard choices to "a free Parliament."
| Promise | Outcome |
|---|---|
| A general pardon for past actions | Broadly honoured through the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion (1660) — only the regicides were excepted; around 30 were tried and 13 executed (others, like the dead Cromwell, were posthumously "executed"). The amnesty was essential to reconciliation |
| Liberty to tender consciences (religious toleration) | Not honoured. The Cavalier Parliament, more royalist and more Anglican than the king, imposed a narrow conformity through the Clarendon Code |
| A settlement of disputed land | Crown and Church lands restored automatically; land sold by Royalists under duress had to be recovered through the courts, often unsuccessfully — leaving many Cavaliers feeling betrayed |
| Arrears of army pay | The dangerous New Model Army was paid off and disbanded — a vital act of demilitarisation, though Charles retained a small standing guard |
The constitutional settlement rested on a tacit and revealing principle: the reforms of 1641, which had passed with near-unanimous consent (the Triennial Act, the abolition of Star Chamber and High Commission, the outlawing of Ship Money), remained law; but everything enacted after the outbreak of war in 1642, when one side legislated without the king, was treated as void. The prerogative courts did not return; non-parliamentary taxation was not revived. Yet the deepest questions — could the king dispense with statutes? who controlled the militia and foreign policy? — were left unaddressed, to be fought over again. The Restoration, in this sense, restored the constitution of 1641, not that of 1640: a limited monarchy, but with the limits left dangerously undefined.
A modest but significant financial settlement granted Charles a peacetime revenue (from customs, excise and the hearth tax) intended to make him independent — but it was chronically under-yielding in the early years, keeping the king financially dependent and politically constrained, and driving him eventually into the secret subsidies of the Treaty of Dover.
Named (somewhat unfairly) after Charles's first minister, the Earl of Clarendon, this body of legislation was largely the work of the Anglican-Royalist Cavalier Parliament. It re-established a narrow Church of England and set out to crush the Dissent that had flourished under the republic.
| Act | Date | Provision |
|---|---|---|
| Corporation Act | 1661 | All municipal office-holders must take Anglican communion and renounce the Covenant — purging Dissenters from town government and the politically sensitive corporations |
| Act of Uniformity | 1662 | All clergy must use the Book of Common Prayer and be episcopally ordained; around 2,000 ministers who refused were ejected in the "Great Ejection," creating English Nonconformity as a permanent body outside the Church |
| Conventicle Act | 1664 | Forbade religious "conventicles" (Dissenting meetings) of more than five persons beyond a single household |
| Five Mile Act | 1665 | Ejected ministers forbidden to come within five miles of their former parishes or any corporate town, or to teach — an attempt to sever pastors from their flocks |
The Clarendon Code is pivotal. It permanently divided English Protestantism into conformist Anglicans and excluded Dissenters (Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists, Quakers) — a division that structured politics for generations and fed directly into the Whig–Tory split. By making religious nonconformity a civil disability, it ensured that religion and politics would remain fused.
It is important to grasp what the Code changed. Before 1662, many of the "Puritans" had been a wing within the national Church, hoping to reform it from inside; the Act of Uniformity forced them out, creating for the first time a permanent body of organised Dissent outside the establishment. This was a momentous, and arguably self-defeating, decision. By excluding rather than accommodating the moderate Presbyterians — many of whom had actually welcomed the Restoration and might have been retained within a broader Church — the Cavalier Parliament hardened a temporary division into a lasting one, and converted the godly from a faction to be managed into a persecuted minority with every reason to oppose the regime. The persecution itself was real and often harsh: thousands of Quakers were imprisoned, and figures such as John Bunyan wrote from gaol (The Pilgrim's Progress was begun during his long imprisonment for unlicensed preaching). Yet persecution did not destroy Dissent; it entrenched it. The survival of a substantial Nonconformist community — concentrated in towns and the "middling sort" — is one of the most important long-term consequences of the Restoration, and it is the constituency that would rally to Exclusion, to William in 1688, and to the Whig cause thereafter. The Code thus illustrates a recurring lesson of the century: that the attempt to enforce religious uniformity by law tended to create the very opposition it sought to suppress.
Historiographical Debate: John Spurr has argued the Code reflected a genuine Anglican conviction that uniformity was essential to social and political stability — the lesson the gentry drew from the chaos of the 1640s and 1650s. Mark Goldie has emphasised its political edge: it targeted not merely religious error but the Dissenting networks that had sustained the republic, functioning as an instrument of political control. Tim Harris has shown that enforcement varied enormously — fierce in some places and years, lax in others — so that the lived experience of Dissent depended heavily on local magistrates and the swings of national politics.
The mid-1660s tested the regime: the Great Plague (1665) killed perhaps a fifth of London's population; the Great Fire (1666) destroyed much of the City; and the humiliating Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665–67) ended with the Dutch burning English ships in the Medway. These disasters were widely read as divine judgements and damaged the Crown's prestige; Clarendon fell in 1667, replaced by the faction-ridden ministry nicknamed the Cabal.
In the secret Treaty of Dover (1670), Charles allied with Louis XIV against the Dutch and — in clauses concealed from all but a few — accepted French subsidies and undertook to declare himself Catholic "when the welfare of his kingdom shall permit." Whether Charles was sincere or simply mercenary is debated, but the treaty reveals his willingness to pursue Catholic-friendly, pro-French policy by covert means. In 1672, on the eve of the Third Anglo-Dutch War, Charles issued a Declaration of Indulgence suspending the penal laws against both Dissenters and Catholics by royal prerogative.
Parliament's response was decisive and constitutionally momentous: it denied that the king could suspend statutes by prerogative, forced him to withdraw the Declaration (1673), and passed the Test Act (1673), requiring all office-holders to take Anglican communion and to deny transubstantiation — flushing out Catholics from public life. The Test Act's most sensational casualty was the king's own brother and heir, James, Duke of York, who resigned as Lord High Admiral rather than take the test, thereby publicly confirming that the heir to the throne was a Catholic. The constitutional principle — that the prerogative could not override religious legislation — pointed straight towards the confrontations of 1685–88.
In 1678 Titus Oates, a serial liar and renegade, fabricated an elaborate "Popish Plot" — a supposed Jesuit conspiracy to murder Charles, massacre Protestants, and place the Catholic James on the throne. The plot was entirely fictitious, but it detonated in a political atmosphere already primed by fear of Catholicism and France. The mysterious death of the magistrate Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, who had taken Oates's depositions, seemed to confirm the worst. Mass hysteria followed; perhaps 35 Catholics (including the Jesuit provincial and, in 1681, Archbishop Oliver Plunkett) were executed on perjured evidence. The Plot's true significance was as the spark for a sustained campaign to exclude James from the succession.
The struggle over three Exclusion Bills (1679–81) crystallised the first recognisably modern political parties — the labels themselves originating as terms of abuse ("Whig" from Scottish Covenanter rebels; "Tory" from Irish Catholic bandits).
| Whigs | Tories |
|---|---|
| Supported Exclusion — Parliament could alter the succession to bar a Catholic | Opposed Exclusion — the hereditary line was divinely ordained and inviolable |
| Drew support from Dissenters, City merchants, and anti-Catholic, anti-French opinion | Drew support from Anglican clergy and gentry, and from the dread of "1641 again" |
| Emphasised parliamentary right, contract, and the Protestant interest; organised through the Green Ribbon Club and a flood of print | Emphasised divine right, hereditary succession, and passive obedience; rallied to Church and Crown |
The crisis was managed by the Whig leader the Earl of Shaftesbury, who orchestrated petitions, pope-burning processions, and a torrent of pamphlets. Charles, however, outmanoeuvred him: he prorogued and dissolved successive Parliaments, exploited a Tory reaction fuelled by fear of renewed civil war, secured fresh French subsidies that freed him from Parliament, and in 1681 dissolved the brief Oxford Parliament and ruled the last four years of his reign without one. Shaftesbury fled and the Whigs were broken; the discovery of the Rye House Plot (1683) to assassinate the royal brothers allowed a further crackdown, and James's succession was secured.
Historiographical Debate: Jonathan Scott argued that contemporaries experienced the Exclusion Crisis as a terrifying re-run of the early 1640s — the same fears of popery, arbitrary government and civil war — so that the period must be read through the memory of the Revolution rather than as the dawn of modern party politics. Mark Knights emphasised the explosion of print, petitioning and public argument — the emergence of an embryonic "public sphere" and of organised partisan persuasion. Tim Harris (Restoration, 2005) provided the fullest recent account, insisting the crisis be understood across all three kingdoms and "from below," as a popular as well as a parliamentary phenomenon.
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