Table Of ContentThe Reigns of Charles 11 and Ja mes VII & 11
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Houndmills. Basingstoke. Hampshire RG21 6XS. England
The Reigns of Charles II and
James VII & II
EDITED BY
LIONEL K.J. GLASSEY
Selection, Preface, Chapter 1 and Chapter 3 © L. K.J. Glassey, Chapter 2
© M. Goldie, Chapter 4 © R. Hutton, Chapter 5 © J. Spurr, Chapter 6
© T. Harris, Chapter 7 © J. M. Rosenheim, Chapter 8 © P. Borsay, Chapter 9
© J. M. Ellis, Chapter 10 © J. D. Davies 1997
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work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 1997 by
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ISBN 978-0-333-62501-9 ISBN 978-1-349-25432-3 (eBook)
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Contents
Preface vi
1 Introduction
LIONEL K. J. GLASSEY 1
2 Restoration Political Thought
MARK GOLDIE 12
3 Politics, Finance and Government
LIONEL K. J. GLASSEY 36
4 The Triple-crowned Islands
RONALD HUTTON 71
5 Religion in Restoration England
JOHN SPURR 90
6 The Parties and the Pcople: thc Press, thc Crowd and
Politics 'Out-of-doors' in Restoration England
TIM HARRIS 125
7 Landownership, the Aristocracy and the Country Gentry
JAMES M. ROSENHEIM 152
8 The Restoration Town
PETER BORSAY 171
9 Consumption and Wealth
J. M. EIUS 191
10 International Relations, War and the Armed Forces
J. D. DAVIES 211
List ofA bbreviations 235
Bibliography 236
Notes and References 252
Notes on Contributors 293
Index 295
v
Preface
The completion of this book has taken longer than it should have
done, and the fault is entirely mine. I should like to thank all the
contributors for the prompt production of their essays, and to
apologize to them for the tardy delivery of my own. I should also
like to thank Vanessa Graham and Simon Winder of Macmillan;
the former for suggesting the project and for offering much early
encouragement, and the laUer for his patience and understand
ing as the later stages were bedevilled by delay. I am grateful, too,
to Patricia Ferguson, Barbara Beggs, Chris Fildes and Beverley
Lynn for their much-appreciated secretarial help.
It proved oddly difficult to find a tide for the collection which
had not been used before and which reflected the intentions of
the contributors. In the end I setded, perhaps rather dimly, for
the names of two monarchs. Speaking as someone who teaches in
a School of History and Archaeology containing a Department of
Scottish History, I make no apology for including King James's
Scottish numeral. I hope, however, that the social historians who
are the authors of Chapters 7, 8 and 9 will forgive the implication
that periods of history are bounded by the restoration and deposi
tion of kings.
University 01 Glasgow LIONEL K.J. GLASSEY
vi
1. Introduction
LIONEL K.J. GlASSEY
Henry Fairfax, D. D., Dean of Norwich, died aged sixty-eight in
May 1702 and was buried in the south aisle of the nave of Norwich
Cathedral. His monument represents hirn as deposited in the
midst of a small stone library, although during his lifetime he had
been described by a hostile critic as a man who never looked into
a book and was 'good for nothing but his pipe and his pot'.! A
long Latin inscription refers to his defence of religion as one of
the deprived fellows of Magdalen College in Oxford during King
]ames's reign. It also mentions the circumstance that he was a
nephew of the victorious Parliamentarian general at Naseby, Sir
Thomas Fairfax, who had been (so the inscription goes) 'a wise
man whether one contemplates his actions or his counsels'. These
laudatory references to the Captain-General of the New Model
Army and arebel who had defeated his King, Charles I, in battle,
gave great offence in early eighteenth-century Norwich. An order
was given to scrape the words 'Naseby' and 'wise' off the marble
on which they were inscribed. A visitor to the south aisle of
Norwich Cathedral today can still see the gaps in the Latin text
where a Parliamentarian hero had once been celebrated.
I
This anecdote, dating from thirteen years after the end of the
period covered by this collection of essays, is perhaps faintly
absurd. It is he re related because it illustrates, in lapidary fashion,
a theme of great importance which runs through all the following
chapters. This is the enduring legacy of the Civil War of the 1640s,
still evidently capable of arousing strong passions sixty years later.
The war had not been a romantic affair. It had been fought, at
least in some areas, with great brutality, and it had led to much
human suffering and much material destruction.2 Every man and
1
2 INTRODUCTION
woman who lived through the reigns of Charles 11 andJames VII
& 11, and had reaehed the age of, say, fifty in 1689, would have
had some personal memory either of aetual violenee or of the
inseeurity and fear of their ehildhood or adoleseent experienee.
While the war eontinued, no-one eould tell how long it would last.
Mter it seemed to have ended in England in 1646, it was renewed
in 1648 and again in 1651, and eampaigns eontinued intermit
tently in Seotland and Ireland through the late 1640s into the
1650s.
When the war had finally ground to a halt, the sueeession of
republiean, theoeratic and military regimes whieh followed the
exeeution of the King in 1649 broke down one after the other.
Oliver Cromwell's Proteetorate gave some promise of perma
nenee, but it did not long survive his death in September 1658. A
year after Cromwell's death, a workable politieal settlement
eapable of providing peaee and stability seemed further off than
ever as the eommanders of regiments of the army sparred with
eaeh other. Soeiety never quite disintegrated; loeal government,
eeonomic life and the administration of the law eontinued after a
fashion. It has been argued that 'anarehy' is too strong a word to
apply to eonditions in the British Isles in the winter of 1659-60,
exeept perhaps for the last weeks of Deeember 1659.3 To those
who lived through that winter, however, 'anarehy' eannot have
seemed very far away.
It is too simple to say that the Restoration in the spring of 1660
was welcomed beeause it offered areturn from all this inseeurity
to normality. The reasons for the Restoration of the Stuart monar
ehy, and the motives of those who aeeomplished it, were eomplex.
One kind of normality, eertainly, was the presenee on the throne
of the legitimate heir of Charles I. But how was the political,
sodal, eeonomic and religious 'normality', over which Charles 11
would preside, to be defined? There eould be no return to the
1630s, a~ though the intervening period had never been. Those
who aeeepted the Restoration in May 1660 were far from united
in their expeetations. Some believed that the Restoration offered
the best opportunity of aehieving the ideologieal and religious
aspirations which had led them to draw the sword against Charles
I in 1642. Charles 11, they thought, would have learnt wisdom
from the mistakes of his father and would be willing to make eon
eessions, as indeed seemed to be promised in the manifesto, the
Declaration of Breda, that he issued as a basis for his return.
Some believed that the Restoration of Charles 11 provided a
LIONEL K. J. GlASSEY 3
chance for revenge against those who were perceived to have
started the war, carried it on and profi ted from it. Some had a
more mundane objective in view: to recover, or to retain, the land
or office or local power that they had lost, or acquired, during
and after the war.
There were those, to~, who did not welcome the Restoration
at all. Many men and women had c1utched at avision of a
promised land at some point during the previous two decades: a
virtuous republic of free citizens; a godly Puritan common
wealth; a community of neighbourhoods released from the
oppression of kings, bishops and land lords. These utopias had
been successively snatched away from those who had been
captivated by them. There was still room for hope that the
opportunity to re-enter them might yet recur. In Chapter 2,
Mark Goldie makes it dear that much intellectual debate after
1660 had its origins in the 1640s and 1650s and turned on the
attempt to reassert, or to refute, ideologies and principles that
had been advanced during the conflicts of the middle of the
century.
The task of Charles 11 and his advisers in 1660 was not so much
to restore 'normality' as to find some method of encompassing
the different hopes of those who had acquiesced in the revival of
the Stuart monarchy in some harmonious settlement that all
could accept. At the same time, it was necessary to try to reconcile
those who were still c1inging to the ideal of a commonwealth
without a king; or, if this turned out not to be possible, at least to
limit the power of republicans and radicals to do damage. The
process was often summed up in the phrase 'healing and settling'.
The preamble to the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion passed by the
Convention in 1660 prodaimed the King's 'hearty and pious
desire ... to bury aIl seeds of future discords and re membran ce of
the former, as weIl in his own breast as in the breasts of his sub
jects one towards another' . A later dause in the Act made it a civil
offence, for which damages were recoverable, to reproach any
person in a manner 'tending to revive the late differences or the
occasion thereof.4 To owners of property, and especially of
landed property, this appeal to reconciliation was attractive.
'Future discords' were not, of course, avoided. However, as James
M. Rosenheim shows in Chapter 7, the common interests of
landowners as landowners were becoming at least as powerful a
determinant of their attitudes and behaviour as their differences
in politics and religion.
