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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 crowds lined the roads. 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. This lesson examines the Restoration Settlement of the decade or so after 1660 — the constitutional, financial and religious terms on which monarchy returned — and it is the opening of the settlement theme that runs through the second half of the breadth study to 1701.
The settlement is best understood as a set of deliberate compromises and deliberate silences. The Declaration of Breda promised much in principle and deferred the hard choices to "a free Parliament". The constitutional settlement restored the reforms of 1641 while voiding everything enacted in the war, but left the prerogative dangerously undefined. The financial settlement tried, and failed, to make the king independent. And the religious settlement — the Clarendon Code — abandoned the promise of toleration and imposed a narrow Anglican conformity that created permanent Dissent. The central interpretative question is how to characterise all this. Was the Restoration settlement a pragmatic and broadly successful accommodation, the product of negotiation and compromise that gave England a generation of relative stability? Or was it a fudge built on unresolved tensions — above all over Dissent and the prerogative — that made renewed crisis likely? Holding the "stability" and "instability" readings in tension is the analytical work of this lesson, and doing so prepares the ground for the crises of Charles II's later reign and of 1688, which later lessons examine.
Key enquiry: Was the Restoration Settlement of the 1660s a pragmatic and durable success that secured stability after two decades of upheaval, or a compromise built on unresolved constitutional and religious tensions — particularly the undefined prerogative and the persecution of Dissent — that stored up future conflict?
Restoration was made politically possible by the Declaration of Breda, issued on the advice of Edward Hyde (later Earl of Clarendon) before Charles returned. Its genius lay in deliberate vagueness: it promised much in principle and deferred the hard, divisive 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 himself, imposed a narrow conformity through the Clarendon Code. |
| A settlement of disputed land | Crown and Church lands were 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 disbandment of the New Model Army deserves emphasis, because it addressed the deepest fear of the age. The army that had purged Parliament, executed a king and imposed the Major-Generals was dissolved by agreement, and with it the immediate threat of military government. For the breadth study, this is a genuine achievement of the settlement — the demilitarisation of politics — even as the memory of the standing army left a permanent anxiety that would shape the Bill of Rights three decades later.
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.
This is one of the most important points in the whole breadth study, because it defines exactly how much constitutional change the upheavals had produced. The Restoration restored the constitution of 1641, not that of 1640: a limited monarchy, shorn of the machinery of the Personal Rule, but with the deepest questions — could the king dispense with statutes? who controlled the militia and foreign policy? — left unaddressed, to be fought over again. The monarchy came back stronger in prestige than in 1640 (buoyed by the martyr cult and the fear of renewed chaos), but weaker in the fiscal and prerogative machinery that had sustained the Personal Rule. The settlement was therefore a genuine, if unacknowledged, constitutional shift — but an incomplete one, whose silences guaranteed future conflict.
Two further features of the constitutional settlement are worth noting, because both illustrate its selective character. First, the militia: the Militia Acts of 1661 and 1662 declared the command of the armed forces to lie with the king, appearing to hand him the very control that Parliament had fought to seize in 1642. Yet in practice the Crown had no standing army to command beyond a small guard, so the concession was more symbolic than real — an ambiguity typical of the whole settlement, granting the king a right on paper that circumstances denied him in fact. Second, the office of the monarchy was restored without any formal statement of its limits: there was no charter of rights, no enumeration of what the prerogative could and could not do, nothing resembling the conditions that would be imposed on William and Mary in 1689. The contrast between 1660 and 1689 is one of the most instructive in the whole option. In 1660 the political nation, exhausted and fearful, restored the monarchy on trust and left its powers undefined; in 1689, having learned from the intervening crises what an untrustworthy king could do with an undefined prerogative, it restored the monarchy only on explicit and binding conditions. The distance between the two settlements is a precise measure of the constitutional education the century administered.
Alongside the central constitutional settlement went the restoration of the traditional structures of local and ecclesiastical government that the republic had disrupted. The bishops returned to the House of Lords and to their dioceses; the Church courts, abolished in the 1640s, were revived (though the hated High Commission was not); and the traditional gentry resumed their command of the commissions of the peace and the county benches. This restoration of the localities to their customary rulers was as important, in its quiet way, as the return of the king. The county committees and the army officers who had governed under the republic were swept away, and power returned to the landed gentry who had always regarded local government as their birthright. For much of the political nation, this reversal — the end of rule by upstart committee-men and soldiers — was the most tangible and welcome benefit of the Restoration, and it helps explain why a settlement so ambiguous at the centre commanded such broad support in the country.
A modest but significant financial settlement granted Charles a peacetime revenue — from customs, excise and the new hearth tax — intended to make him independent, notionally around £1.2 million a year. But it was chronically under-yielding in the early years, keeping the king financially dependent and politically constrained. This fiscal weakness is a thread worth following: it drove Charles eventually into the secret French subsidies of the Treaty of Dover, and it illustrates the recurring early-modern problem — the mismatch between the cost of government and the ordinary revenue of the Crown — that is only finally solved by the financial revolution after 1689.
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, and its significance for the whole breadth study can hardly be overstated. 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 later 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 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 the 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 the Whig cause and to William of Orange in 1688. 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.
The settlement was quickly tested by disaster. The mid-1660s brought a run of calamities that damaged the Crown's prestige and exposed how much the "stability" of the Restoration depended on events and on the king's own management.
| Event | Date | Significance |
|---|---|---|
| The Great Plague | 1665 | Killed perhaps a fifth of London's population; widely read as a divine judgement. |
| The Great Fire | 1666 | Destroyed much of the City of London; deepened the sense of a nation under God's displeasure and stoked anti-Catholic rumour (Catholics were baselessly blamed). |
| The Second Anglo-Dutch War | 1665–67 | A humiliating failure, ending with the Dutch burning English ships in the Medway in 1667 — a national disgrace that brought down the ministry. |
| The fall of Clarendon | 1667 | The king's first minister was dismissed and impeached, and fled abroad; he was replaced by the faction-ridden ministry nicknamed the Cabal. |
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