Stuart Restoration

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Stuart Restoration was a political transformation that unfolded over just a few weeks in May 1660, ending more than a decade of republican rule in England, Scotland, and Ireland. Charles II had been living in exile on the continent, his father executed by Parliament in January 1649, his three kingdoms governed first by Oliver Cromwell and then briefly by Cromwell's son Richard. What brought the monarchy back was not a military conquest but something stranger: the collapse of the republican government from within, and the steady march of a single general named George Monck from Scotland toward London.

  Charles landed at Dover on the 25th of May 1660. He entered London four days later, on the 29th of May, which happened to be his thirtieth birthday. The streets that greeted him were not those of a nation reluctantly welcoming back a dynasty. Contemporaries described the event as a divinely ordained miracle. The question worth asking is how a republic with an army, a parliament, and years of institutional momentum simply gave way in a matter of months. And what happened, immediately after, to everyone who had made that republic possible?

• 2. The General Who Walked South

  ›

  George Monck had served the Cromwells as governor of Scotland, and on the 20th of October 1659 he began marching his army south toward London. His target was Charles Fleetwood and John Lambert, who had been dominating the government after Richard Cromwell ceded power to the Rump Parliament. Lambert's army dissolved around him as Monck approached; Lambert returned to London almost alone.

  On the 3rd of March 1660, Lambert was sent to the Tower of London. He escaped a month later and tried to rekindle armed resistance by calling supporters to rally at the old battlefield of Edgehill, invoking the "Good Old Cause." He was recaptured by Colonel Richard Ingoldsby, himself a participant in the regicide of Charles I who hoped to win a pardon by handing Lambert over. Ingoldsby was indeed pardoned. Lambert was imprisoned and died in custody in 1684.

  The Presbyterian members who had been expelled in Pride's Purge of 1648 were recalled to Parliament. On the 24th of December, the army restored the Long Parliament. Monck then organized a Convention Parliament, which met for the first time on the 25th of April 1660. On the 8th of May, that body proclaimed that Charles II had been the lawful monarch since the very moment his father was executed. Historian Timothy J. G. Harris described the constitutional logic bluntly: "It was as if the last nineteen years had never happened."

• 3. The Reckoning with the Regicides

  ›

  Thirty-one of the 59 commissioners who had signed Charles I's death warrant in 1649 were still alive at the Restoration. The Indemnity and Oblivion Act, which became law on the 29th of August 1660, pardoned most opponents of the Crown but specifically carved out those involved in the king's trial and execution. What followed was a systematic pursuit.

  Three regicides escaped to the American colonies. New Haven, Connecticut, secretly sheltered Edward Whalley, William Goffe, and John Dixwell. After American independence, streets were named after them in recognition of their role as forefathers of that revolution. Most of the others were not so fortunate.

  Thomas Harrison, a Fifth Monarchist who had been the seventeenth commissioner to sign the death warrant, was hanged, drawn, and quartered first, considered a live threat to the new order. In October 1660, ten men were publicly executed at Charing Cross and Tyburn. They included Harrison, John Jones, Adrian Scrope, John Carew, Thomas Scot, Gregory Clement, the preacher Hugh Peters, Francis Hacker, Daniel Axtell, and John Cooke, who had directed the prosecution of Charles I.

  The dead were not spared either. In January 1661, the exhumed bodies of Oliver Cromwell, Henry Ireton, and John Bradshaw were hanged in chains at Tyburn. A further 19 regicides were imprisoned for life. Henry Vane the Younger, who had served on the Council of State without approving the execution, was nonetheless exempted from the general pardon after debate in Parliament. He was beheaded on Tower Hill on the 14th of June 1662.

  One detail cuts across the violence: even as the executions proceeded, the idea of conditional monarchy quietly survived. The notion that a king should rule in accordance with law and the will of the people continued to circulate in political writing. Even Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon and Charles II's chief advisor, acknowledged the need for a balanced constitutional arrangement.

• 4. The Cavalier Parliament

  ›

  The Cavalier Parliament first convened on the 8th of May 1661 and would sit for over 17 years, finally dissolving on the 24th of January 1679. It was overwhelmingly royalist, and it is also called the Pensionary Parliament for the sheer number of pensions it granted to the King's supporters.

  Among those rewarded was Prince Rupert of the Rhine, who returned to English service, joined the privy council, and received an annuity. William Cavendish, Marquess of Newcastle, recovered much of his estates and was advanced to a dukedom on the 16th of March 1665. He was also invested with the Order of the Garter that same year, an honor that had originally been bestowed on him back in 1650.

  The Parliament oversaw the re-establishment of the Church of England through the Clarendon Code, a set of measures that included the Act of Uniformity 1662. The leading political figure at the start of this period was Edward Hyde himself, the 1st Earl of Clarendon, credited with having made the Restoration unconditional through his political skill. People reportedly danced around maypoles to taunt Presbyterians and Independents, and burned copies of the Solemn League and Covenant.

  A brief armed challenge came on the 6th of January 1661, when around 50 Fifth Monarchists led by a wine-cooper named Thomas Venner attempted to seize London in the name of "King Jesus." Most were killed or captured. On the 19th and the 21st of January, Venner and 10 others were hanged, drawn, and quartered for high treason. Within six months of the king's return, the threat of organized armed resistance had been extinguished.

• 5. Culture Unleashed

  ›

  The theatres had been closed under the Commonwealth. When they reopened after 1660, the shift in public life was described at the time as though the pendulum of England's morality swung from repression to licence more or less overnight. Bawdy comedy became a recognizable genre, and sexually explicit language was, by accounts of the period, actively encouraged by the king and by the style of his court.

  Historian George Norman Clark described the dramatists of this moment as men who did not criticize accepted morality or work out their own views of character, but simply mocked at all restraints. "Some were gross, others delicately improper," he wrote, adding that they "intended to glory in it and to shock those who did not like it."

  Two changes stood out. Women appeared on the public stage as professional performers for the first time in England. And this period produced the first professional female playwright in English history: Aphra Behn. The audiences for these productions were socially mixed, ranging from aristocrats and their servants to a substantial middle class, all drawn by topical writing, crowded plots, the new actresses, and the rise of the first celebrity actors.

  Elaborate theatrical spectacles also became a feature of the period, mounting ever more expensive scenic productions with moveable scenery, baroque illusionistic painting, trapdoor tricks, flying actors, and fireworks. Samuel Pepys, an enthusiastic theatregoer, recorded the power of spectacle and scenery to draw crowds. The costs of competing for these audiences drove the two main theatre companies into a cycle of enormous expenditure, with productions that could either leave a company in serious debt or carry it comfortably into profit for a long stretch of time.

• 6. Literature and Style

  ›

  Restoration literature ranged across an extraordinary span. It included Milton's Paradise Lost at one end and the Earl of Rochester's Sodom at the other. Between them came Locke's Treatises of Government, the founding of the Royal Society, the experiments and meditations of Robert Boyle, and the literary criticism of John Dryden and John Dennis.

  The period saw news become a commodity and the essay develop into a periodical art form. It also witnessed the beginnings of textual criticism and the moral instruction of John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress alongside the high-spirited comedy of William Wycherley's The Country Wife.

  In design and the decorative arts, the return of Charles and his court from years on the continent reshaped English taste. Puritan severity gave way to Dutch and French influences. Furniture began to feature floral marquetry, walnut replacing oak, twisted turned supports and legs, cane seats and backs, sumptuous tapestry and velvet upholstery, and ornate carved and gilded scrolling bases for cabinets.

  To mark the Restoration and consolidate their diplomatic ties, the Dutch Republic presented Charles with the Dutch Gift: a collection of old master paintings, classical sculptures, furniture, and a yacht. That gift was itself a signal of how closely the cultural and political recovery of the Stuart monarchy was tied to continental Europe, a connection that would eventually prove its undoing when a Dutch stadtholder crossed the Channel to end the very era his country had helped inaugurate.

• 7. The Colonies Under a Restored Crown

  ›

  Across the Atlantic, the Restoration produced very different responses depending on how each colony had aligned itself during the Interregnum. Virginia had been the most steadfastly loyal. The eighteenth-century historian Robert Beverley Jr. described it as "the last of all the King's Dominions that submitted to the Usurpation." William Berkeley, who had been governor until 1652, was re-elected by the House of Burgesses in 1660 and promptly declared for the king.

  New England, dominated by Puritan settlement, had backed the Commonwealth and the Protectorate. Rhode Island declared for the restoration in October 1660; Massachusetts held out until August 1661. The Colony of New Haven, which had sheltered regicides, was absorbed into Connecticut in 1662 by a royal charter obtained by John Winthrop, a former Connecticut governor. The charter annexed New Haven, a move widely interpreted as punishment for sheltering the king's enemies.

  In the Caribbean, Jamaica had been a conquest of Cromwell's, leaving Charles II's claim to the island legally ambiguous. He chose not to return it to Spain. In 1661 it was formally established as a British colony, with the planters asserting rights as Englishmen under the king's dominion.

  Bermuda's story was more complicated. The island had recognized Charles II as king back in 1649, making it the first colony to do so. Its dispute with the Somers Isles Company over the colony's governance was ultimately resolved by the restored Crown, which revoked the company's Royal Charter in 1684. From that point, the Crown appointed governors directly, and the local merchant class was freed to reshape the island's economy toward seafaring.

  In 1663, the Province of Carolina was created as a reward for supporters of the Restoration, named after Charles I, the king whose execution had made the Restoration necessary.

• 8. The Glorious Revolution Closes the Era

  ›

  In April 1688, James II reissued the Declaration of Indulgence and ordered Anglican clergymen to read it aloud to their congregations. Seven bishops, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, petitioned for reconsideration. They were arrested and tried for seditious libel. On the 30th of June 1688, seven Protestant nobles sent an invitation to William, Prince of Orange, to come to England with an army.

  William arrived on the 5th of November 1688. James lost his nerve and declined to fight the invading Dutch force. He fled toward France but was captured in Kent. William, not wanting to make James a martyr, allowed him to escape on the 23rd of December. James was received in France by his cousin Louis XIV, who provided him with a palace and a pension.

  A Convention Parliament assembled to resolve the succession. It declared that James, by fleeing to France, had effectively abdicated the throne. James's daughter Mary was declared queen; she would rule jointly with William, who became William III. The Bill of Rights 1689 followed, which denounced James for abusing his power, barred Roman Catholics from the English throne, and prohibited any English monarch from marrying a Roman Catholic.

  The charges against James included suspending the Test Acts, prosecuting the Seven Bishops for merely petitioning, establishing a standing army, and imposing cruel punishments. The Restoration era, which had begun with one king arriving at Dover, closed with another king escaping from Kent, accompanied by a constitutional settlement that would shape English governance for generations to come.